word count: 2100
08/17

“You have to have a favorite color,” she protested. “Everyone has a favorite color.”

He looked at her with what was probably skepticism, and she snapped the whip just to avoid his having an excuse to derail the conversation by claiming that she wasn’t focusing. And then, for good measure, she snapped it again, taking a flower off its stem with precision. The wisp, which had been hovering nearby in a jealous bid for her attention, vanished somewhere into her mantle as if scared off by the sound.

“I have never considered it,” he said, but he folded his arms behind himself and made no comment about her form, which was a kind of victory.

“Well, consider it now. Only don’t say green,” she added, wrinkling her nose. “Too much baggage.”

“How am I to understand the question?”

She made a frustrated noise. “I don’t know. How do you understand the idea of your favorite anything? Which one do you like looking at?”

“Unless it is green.”

“Yes.”

“What is yours?”

“Blue,” she said promptly. “But light blue.” And catching the expression approaching his face, she took another shot at her makeshift targets, slightly less accurately.

He was silent for a long time, forcing her to continue going through her usual round of practice motions with the whip and patiently wait for him to either decide he was going to abandon the conversation or come up with a reply.

“Red,” he said at last, and she snorted.

“You’re just saying that because you’re looking at something red. Obvious.”

“Lady, if I am not to say red nor green, perhaps you may also tell me what options are proscribed for me,” he suggested mildly.

“Gold, white, and black, because they’re not real colors,” she said, but she stuck out her tongue when she said it. “But fine, go with red, if you like.”

“I would have thought red was favored by you,” he said.

“I didn’t pick the weapon. You know that as well as I do.”

“Your hands,” he said.

She paused, dropping her eyes to her nails. “I don’t pick those either,” she said. “I mean - not really. It’s one of those things for work. Like the blonde hair. It’s just - it’s kind of the sales pitch. You know?”

“I do not know,” he answered, and although it was grave it was a mock sort of gravity. It was the closest he usually came to playfulness, and for a moment she almost shied away from it, to turn the conversation into some other, safer channel.

But denial had brought her nothing. She could rant and storm at herself all she wanted for this inward weakness, but that had done nothing to stamp it out of herself. She might, instead, indulge it, and see if she could simply run through all the fuel it had and be done with it.

And it would be pleasant, she thought wistfully, to - well, to have a conversation that wasn’t a fight of some kind - but also, pleasant in itself.

That was the danger, though, wasn’t it? That it would be pleasant.

Still.

“There’s a certain - cachet I suppose - that is attached to a woman who has blonde hair and red fingernails. She fits into an archetype. It’s hard to describe. It’s a cultural thing.”

“And were there not a requirement that you have such a cachet, you would look differently?”

“Maybe. I’m not sure, actually. But I’d probably have blue nails sometimes. I’d get rid of the hair, though. I’m actually going tomorrow to have it done,” she added, wrinkling her nose in an expression of disgust. “And I dread it every time.”

“Done?”

“Yes.” She gestured with the hand not occupied with the whip at her roots. “They’ll bleach these out so everyone can pretend my hair comes out of my head like this - and it’s expensive and it smells bad and it’s boring as hell. And then I go spend too much on a tea or a coffee afterwards and wander around the stores smelling scented candles that I never burn faster than I buy them.” As usual of late, she expected him to catch at least the gist of what she said, when she spoke of what life was like a thousand years beyond his own and beyond the Garde. He had - the benefits of being exposed to a cosmic melting pot - often evinced very strange moments of awareness, and generally got the rest from the context.

She glanced at him over another snap of the whip, trying and failing to come at her target from the side rather than the front. It was always harder to do that, wasn’t it? “If you spent a week tagging along with me in my everyday routine I think you’d despise me,” she said lightly.

“I might, perhaps, despise the routine,” he said mildly, “but I do not imagine that I could despise you.”

It was disgusting, the way she felt a suffusing sense of warm pleasure at those words. She hated it, and as a consequence her next lash was a little too violent, and as a consequence in turn - as he had often warned her - it meandered out of her control. “If it’s really green,” she said after a pause, hoping that any sudden flush might be attributed to her exercising in the broad sunlight of the courtyard or even to embarrassment about her bad form, “you can say it. It’s not your baggage.”

“It might also be my baggage,” he said. “But it is not my favorite.” A moment passed in silence. “Are the tattoos, also, part of the cachet?”

“Yes and no,” she said. “For some men, yes. For others, they hate them - sometimes they ask if I can cover them up.”

“And do you?”

“No.” She hesitated, despising herself a little but unable to resist asking, with what she hoped was airy unconcern so dishonest that it bordered on being a lie in itself: “Do you hate them?”

“I do not believe that it is my place to have such an opinion.” He was startled; she could hear it in his voice.

“Good answer.” She couldn’t help it: it came out in that tone of purring indulgence that she so often instinctively had when a man did something self-effacing. “No, it’s not. But I’m telling you to have one anyway. But maybe you’ll just pick the easiest option, like you did when I asked your favorite color.”

“Many accusations of dishonesty of late,” he said, but it was not an invitation to revisit the fight of the week before. It was, if anything, a nonchalant acknowledgement that they had moved beyond it for the time being. “If you will treat me with that unkindness, then perhaps I should at least choose the one that is most flattering to you, to soften you against my lies.”

“Cuts both ways,” she said. “If you pick the nicer one I might just be more inclined to berate you for being a bullshitter.”

There was a long, long pause, and she let the whip fall, but did not look at him, instead pretending to be absorbed in the observation of a lizard scrambling over the bailey wall. There was a sense of dangerous currents being tested, and perhaps of boundaries being sought for.

“As I am in a position where no victory is possible to me,” he said at last, with a certain tension in his voice, “I will concede the truth: that I found them startling at first, and now cannot imagine you without them - which is - is the same as saying that I do not despise them.”

“Fence sitter,” she said accusingly, because it was easier to fall back on it than to swallow down that awful nauseating pleasure at his reply, especially because the pleasure was being diluted with a large quantity of inward panic.

“Am I? I did not think that I was refusing to stake a position when I said that I could not imagine you without them. How could I be?” And there was, then, a certain uneasy quiet that was almost a break in his voice, after which the words tumbled out with uncertainty, falling over themselves. “You must believe that I imagine you without -”

This was no longer bearable. “Without pleasure?” she finished flippantly, pretending that she thought nothing of the phrase and thinking wretchedly that a week before she had had the temerity to reproach him for saying only half the truth and lying by omission. “You know I’m too arrogant for that. I figure you’ve gotten used to me by now enough that what with me agreeing to apply myself to my duty and honor and all that s**t - and greasing the wheels by bribing you with musical instruments or whatever - that you can’t possibly hate me anymore even if you used to.” And then, with that same forced nonchalance: “You did say that you loved the sound of my voice. You can’t tell someone like me something like that and expect me to forget it.”

“No,” he said, and he was too quiet, too gentle. “I know that I cannot. Nor do I retract,” he added, and she sensed that he, too, was attempting to blindly feel his way back to a safe ground of playfulness, “even when you are cruel to me.”

It was for their own mutual good, of course, that she pretended that she was not frantically running her fingers through that reply of his, trying to find some evidence that it had not meant what she in her weakness wanted it to mean, and panicking when she came up empty-handed.

This was the awful truth of this constant and necessary self-denial: she had no practice in shutting down a man who wanted to praise her, especially when it was a man she wanted praise from to begin with on more than the general level of universal expectation. And so she wanted to bait him into telling her that he looked at her with pleasure - wanted to be able to hear it without trying to turn it away as a meaningless little expression of empty gallantry, or even of simple friendship.

It was truly cruel to want that. It was cruel to want him to feel it, even in some fleeting, casual way. The lizard was basking in silence, its attention fixed on a butterfly that fanned its wings nearby.

“Am I that cruel to you?” she asked, and she imagined that it was in answer to him, and not to her own frantic thoughts. “I thought I was getting better about that, but maybe I’m overestimating my own progress.”

“Lady,” he said after a pause, his voice coming in fits and starts, “if - you are cruel to me - I endure those stings because I know that this is your way of -”

“Of speaking to men?” she said, desperate to prevent him from saying anything else. “Yes. True.”

She could not quite kill the idea that when he answered, it was with the resignation of a man who had taken a hint. “Yes,” he said quietly, and she felt that this was, actually, a moment when she might have accused him with accuracy of being just slightly dishonest. But it was a dishonesty she had invited, and so she said nothing, glad that her back was almost to him as she watched the lizard, abandoned by the butterfly, vanish into a patch of ivy.

“I’ll practice not being so cruel, though,” she said. “More diligently than I practice with the ******** whip,” she added grimly.

“If you think it best to do so,” he said, and she tried to tell herself that she imagined the regret in his voice.

She was silent. Perhaps they were, in fact, only having one conversation right now, and it was her own traitorous wishful thought that read a second one into their words. But the same answer would do, either way. “I do think it’s best,” she said.

She swung the whip again, neatly removing another flower from its stem with a serpentine lash from the side.

“Good,” he said quietly, gently. “If you lack discipline, you have willpower,” he added, in the same tone. And then, after a quiet period of watching her efforts: “Shall I get the lute, or would you rather enjoy the silence?”

“Get it,” she said at last, and she felt neither discipline nor willpower in her but a succumbing to gentle temptation as she added: “It’s hot. I’m going to swim. Sit on the rocks, and play for me.”

It was not, probably, discipline or willpower in him either, that he obeyed her without another word.