faderift | open | with the sound of my heart

"I'd been picking up a few things from a the others in the troupe, mostly stage choreography, but all you need is a slight adjustment from that to make it real. I also learned a few tricks from people I'd take to bed with me."

Athessa closes her eyes as well, managing with enough focus to keep unpleasantness at bay. She conjures instead:

"There was a fighter, Mastani, who taught me a lot of the leg-holds I use now. The last one she taught me involved wrapping my legs around her neck."

So ya know. Her life was going alright.

He makes a low, impressed noise at the thought of it. "Well, no wonder you've legs like you do," he says, and drops a hand through the water to give one of said thighs a fond pat. A second later he realizes he's dropped the wrong hand, the one attached to a bandaged arm. The bandages are quite thoroughly soaked.

"Oh. Shit." He sighs at himself and returns the arm, a little uselessly, to its drape along the edge.

Athessa tsks at him, shaking her head. "I told ya."

Luckily she has clean bandages and healing salve in her room; she can dress it for him.

Somewhat along those lines, she sits upright to reach with her left arm for the soap. They have to actually wash sometime.

"You did," he says dutifully, "And I'll never doubt you again."

He sits up a few beats after Athessa, and requests the soap with an open palm out expectantly. Since he is, apparently, back to the use of two arms again, with one of them pointless to try and keep out of the water anymore, and two arms do beat one.

It's true that two arms beat one in this odd version of rock paper scissors called one arm, two arms, legs. So Athessa relinquishes the soap into his hand and pulls her hair off of her back and over one shoulder, baring her spine.

"Have you always slept better alone?"

He sets to work methodically, sudsy hands gliding over her skin, and pauses only briefly for her question. That's hardly fair, is it? How can she go noticing things that happen while she's sleeping?

"No," he says regardless. And then, "Do I ... keep you up?"

She shakes her head, no. It was partially a guess, now confirmed, but also a bit of her training paying off.

"You sound different when you've been sleeping," she explains. She's heard the husky quality of his voice when she called him and woke him up, and he rarely (if ever) sounds like that when she wakes alongside him.

It's a small relief, at least. It leaves him with a wry smile, begrudgingly appreciative of the detective work.

"I've never needed much sleep," he says, by way of explanation, which probably isn't much of one. But then, after a thought, "I hope that isn't untoward. I don't believe anyone ever wrote an etiquette handbook on staying up alongside a sleeping lover."

"I wouldn't know," she shrugs slightly, only the left shoulder this time, to spare the right. "I get around but the only people I've actually slept with can be counted on one hand."

Ciara, Derrica, Loxley, and him.

"I just don't want you to lose sleep because of me."

"It would be well worth it, if I did," he says, and sluices water over one of her shoulders to clear it for a light kiss. And he does, really, but it's never been an issue. It's a simple matter to catch up later. A little more helpfully, he adds, "And, you know, they say naps are good for one's constitution."

It's not a particularly heartening answer, complimentary as it may be. It makes her feel selfish, even if he doesn't think of it that way.

A soft breath, huffed out through her nose.

"I haven't heard that about naps. Maybe I should take more of them."

"There is a slim chance I've made that up," he muses thoughtfully. "Perhaps a line I tried on my parents after some accusation of laziness, one day."

He winces a little after he says it. Not the topic of parents and family in general, it would be silly to think that was off limits, but ... to flaunt his casual disregard for them. It seems tasteless.

He moves along quickly. "Actually, some elves of my world don't sleep at all. We can get by with merely a few hours spent in a trance, if need be."

"A trance?"

Athessa turns slightly to look at Vanadi over her shoulder, curiosity piqued. Not least of all because of the stories she's heard of uthenera, the trance-like state elves used to go into when they were immortal.

"Just what it sounds like — a sort of meditation, I suppose," he offers with a shrug. It's an unremarkable subject to him, without much need of explanation. Thoughtfully, he adds, "I don't think I can do that anymore."

Just another of the strange, generally small changes he's seen in himself.

He certainly takes a lot of things in stride, doesn't he? She appreciates that about him.

But perhaps uthenera wouldn't interest him, as similar as the concepts seem on the surface. He likely wouldn't want to venture into the Fade, find the gods, and come back enlightened. Knowing what she does, he might find that endeavor rather unpleasant.

"I wish I'd been clever enough to use the line about naps with my parents," she says instead, backtracking a step. Just in case. "Maybe shirking my duties would've gone better for me."

Ah, back to this again. Perhaps he'd read it wrong, but the guilt of squandered parents remains regardless.

"If it's any consolation," he says, "I don't believe they took it well. Here, turn around, I'd say this back is very well washed."

"Well," she starts, though the word is somewhat absorbed into a sound of effort as she uses one hand on the edge of the tub to leverage herself around to face him. "Mine took it pretty well, but I think they would've appreciated the wit. As it was, my father played a nasty trick on me and got a stern talking to from...everyone in the clan, just about."

He washes her front just as he had her back, his touch still gentle but without heat behind it. Even now he thinks of sex, of course, he always does, but it's distant and easily hushed. Her story gets a cocked brow, amused.

"How embarrassing. What was it?"

Well, when she doesn't have to mind her arm and when there's no chance of flash images of dead people getting in the way, they'll have to take a sexy bath.

"I was...oh, six or seven, I think, maybe younger. He showed me a deer that had just started to shed its velvet," She's telling this story, but...she's thinking about sex a bit, too. Eyes trailing over his chest and lower out of habit.

"You've seen antlers when the velvet is shedding, right?"

Please, this city boy is lucky he even knows what a deer is. He leans in to catch her eyes again (because if she gets the notion, there will be no hope for Vanadi to divert his mind at all), and shakes his head slightly.

"It's news to me that deer have velvet at all."

"Deer don't just have chunks of bare bone sticking out of their skulls," she explains, amused. "When the antlers are growing, they're covered in soft fuzz, and then in the winter, they shed their antlers, but the soft fuzz goes first. And the skin that the fuzz is growing out of.

"It looks really gruesome, but to the deer it's mostly itchy. Anyway, I didn't know that about deer at that point, and when I refused to do my chores around the camp one winter day, my dad found a deer shedding its velvet and showed it to me. I asked, what's happening to it? And he said that's what happens when you don't do your chores."

She chuckles softly, sitting up a little straighter to aid in his washing efforts, lifting one arm, then the other with a slight wince. The smile at the memory is stronger than the momentary flicker of pain, though, and stays after.

The thought startles a laugh out of him, but the smile that lingers after it is more for her than the idea of a deer and the little girl it scared. He lifts a hand to her cheek, looks ready to say something, but then kisses her gently instead.

When he leans back, this feels safer to say than whatever he might have intended, "Well, did your chores get done?"

And then onto the arms with the soap and washing cloth, taking particular care around that bruised shoulder.

That doesn't seem like what he was about to say...

"I did and I cried the whole time. Mum saw me and asked why I was crying all over the washing. When I told her what dad said, I thought she was gonna shoot fire out of her eyes, she was incensed."

When he's done with her arms, she hooks his hand with her fingers, just holding it for a moment before she brings his knuckles to her lips. Smooch.

He surrenders the hand happily enough, washing temporarily on pause as his hand is captured. "But the chores did get done. One must admit it was effective. Worth the social stigma of terrorizing your daughter, even."

Carefully, Athessa manipulates his hand in both of hers, splaying his fingers and tracing the lines of his palm. Then she lifts it, and puts his palm over the center of her face. Face-hugger style.

"Very effective."

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