[Right. Well. He asked for penance and the Inquisitor took her time and selected a punishment for his sins that hurt so badly he'd rather face a hive tyrant, naked, with a combat knife.
[But penance is penance. The great news? EVERYONE gets to suffer. The Inquisitor somehow thinks this is team building. [At least as text he can just...not have to say anything.]
[ Felassan is the kind of asshole who would, under normal circumstances, absolutely try to puzzle out the punchline and ruin it. But these are not normal circumstances. This is Gadriel. It does not occur to Felassan that he could possibly be telling a joke. ]
[Hmmm, Maybe he selected the wrong joke. He will have to consult his text. Maybe he should have listened to the Inquisitor and stuck with those 'knock knock' jokes? ]
It comes to pass that if you invite a dreamwalker into your life, that you might one day soon come to dream of him. So it is with Solas and Felassan, on this night. It was not a conversation he approached without trepidation, nor difficulty: for one thing, simply calling for Felassan via the little birds felt... impersonal. And he still could not be sure that they would not be listened to. It was right that the petitioner go to the one of whom they asked, not that Felassan be summoned before him. Even now, the long shadow of Arlathan's tight fist still falls over his mind.
And of course, some things are still easier in the Fade.
"Felassan," He calls, from the edge of the dream. It is a green dream, a dream of forest glades and golden dust-motes. Solas hopes it will be a good one, "I would speak with you. Are you willing?"
"Maybe," Felassan calls back from beyond the trees.
He is no architect and never was. No painter — though film, if they'd had it, might have appealed. The clearing here is reproduction and collage, the golden slant of the light mismatched with the clarity of the stars overhead to create a time of day that never physically exists, the trees growing and dying in a time lapse that might fit a century into the hour, flowers spreading and receding like slow breaths. It smells like wood ash and petrichor.
He peers around a trunk to give Solas a once-over. That maybe was only a joke. He would be invited in no matter what Felassan found looking at him. But it's nice to see him here, like this, looking self-possessed and still himself. Felassan jerks his head to invite him further in.
"You were right," he says. "It's awfully empty here. You are my first visitor. Not even a wisp."
Solas would, ordinarily, regard this with the exasperated expression of someone for whom all courtesy is mere illusion, Felassan more brother than friend, and would you knock that off please as common a word of their vocabulary as breath itself. But something of that east distance, and lack of distance, died when Felassan did, and...
...and what replaced it was not father, nor less intense, but it was different. And the seed of it had grown until Solas simply bears the once-over with a lift of his chin, and a slight cant of shoulder and hip. He knows he must look acceptable, because Felassan seems pleased.
It is very different to their last meeting, in the Fade.
"Then it is my pleasure to be the first," He says, stepping forward. The grass brightens under his feet, briefly flourishing, only to die as each step lifts away. Even here, the fade greets him like an affectionate cat, "I had a very interesting conversation with Beleth, recently, and it gave me cause to seek your out. Do not doubt that I have questions... But I am all too aware of our shared history."
It is a rehearsed speech, of course. He had pondered for a long time on what to say, how to say it. How to broach the topic without backing his friend into a desperate corner.
"Tell me that you wish only a quiet visit from a friend, and I will not speak. But if you would hear what I have to say..."
Felassan huffs a single, quiet ha, when Solas says he's had an interesting conversation, walking a half-step ahead of him. She did say she would speak to him, and Felassan hadn't doubted her. It's only Solas's calm, practiced speech that makes it funny now. Even funnier: the offer not to speak. Felassan laughs for real at that, a quick bark, pivoting in the clearing to grin at him. Solas is perfectly capable of prolonged, contemplative silences, yes, but once he'd decided he had something to say, how many people would have done a blood sacrifice for the ability to tell him to leave it alone?
It's a trait Felassan is very fond of, actually. His laugh and grin are both more affectionate than sharp, and he hums, perhaps genuinely tempted by the option to make Solas stand there and suffer in silence for a while — but no. If Solas goes too deep into his own head, one of these days he might never climb back out of it.
"I didn't want to lie to her," he says.
Because this place seems to revel in lowering guards and revealing secrets. Because to dance around the truth while taking advantage of their hospitality and then be revealed might make him seem a snake, a schemer — a slow arrow, sure. Because he simply did not want to lie to her, lying there under the sky, after she'd been so kind and wonderful.
And because he's reckless, too, in a way he has not been since he was very young, or perhaps even then. Everything on Felassan's list of worst case scenarios — except dying in bondage, the very worst of them — has already come and gone, one of the last checked off when his words cut short in the last Fade-forest clearing they shared, and here they still are. Even with all the conclusions Felassan has already drawn and the apologies he expects he may be required to make, this conversation could not possibly be as bad as a thousand things that have already happened.
"It's nothing you should worry about, my friend. Everything is fine, and I would never..." Too laughable to even say. They're happy. They're good for each other. What small part of this has ever hurt is better now, not worse. He shakes his head, still smiling. "No, I'm sorry. You have a speech. Let's hear it."
[He thinks you will know for what question, Felassan, but one can never be completely certain. Still, Solas does not elaborate.]
That day, by the river. With the red berries. I told you a truth I had never deliberately shared with anyone else, and you attempted to lie, to spare me pain. It was only a moment, but— it is a suitable-enough answer, I think.
[ A warm rumble of a quip. Of course he doesn’t mean it. Solas isn’t a mark, and wanting to know how to engineer the feeling was not why Felassan asked. The lying must have been incidental, anyway, though the impulse behind it — to keep his hands gentle around the edges of an ancient wound, to think of Solas as someone who perhaps couldn’t endure rough handling, or deserve it — might have mattered. ]
[Solas's voice is soft, the shape of a word rather than any real intent to speak. He's quiet for a moment, contemplating that reality: that it would be easier, and better, if Felassan could permit himself less honesty, perhaps, and that he too is a vulnerable creature, at his heart. That even he, Mighty Dread Wolf that so many claim him to be, should be weak and desire tenderness. But then, hadn't he known that already?]
I wonder... Do you know what it was Beleth first said to me, when our acquaintance was new, and I only knew her as Lavellan? [He pauses a moment, to allow Felassan to say he knows, to fill in the gap, or to wait for the answer.] It was a promise.
I was, at the time, posing as nothing more than a solitary apostate, surrounded as we were by Chantry forces and in the middle of a mage rebellion. We had only just met, and she already seemed to believe without question I would stay, that I would do whatever I could to help her, and to heal the breach.
She vowed to protect me, whatever it took. [And if Felassan has heard Beleth speak thus, himself, he knows how completely convincing it would have been. She is so often accommodating, and generally selfless, but when Beleth Lavellan decides something will be so, there is no power in all the world that can deny the strength of her indomitable will.] I was at a loss for words.
[ Felassan does know. Beleth told him while Solas was gone, while they searched for his consciousness in Caldera's Fade, with Felassan trying to lead her through thoughts of him like a ritual to summon him back to them — a devastatingly familiar activity, for Felassan, made not so bad as before by her hand in his. But he'll never decline to hear them repeat themselves or each other. Different angles, different nuances, and even if they echoed word for word it would still be a chance to listen to their voices for a spell. ]
I love her,
[ is not much louder than Solas's yes.
Old news, though he only says it rarely, but he means it differently right now. Even if he didn't love her — if he thought her eyes were too bright and lively and her freckles unsightly, if her laugh grated against his nerves instead of seizing him by the heart every time, if he considered her a foolish tool in over her head instead of someone who might shape the world with her bare hands, even if he were excluded and pining and jealous of the way Solas's attention winds ceaselessly after her like a river toward the sea — he would love her for this. For what she sees in Solas, and the way she looks at him, and the things she allows him to be with her, and his simple certainty from the day he first saw them together that Solas would never be alone again.
Whether it's Felassan that has sought Loki out, or vice versa, they meet in dreams on the night of the first killing frost of the season. This is the time of year where Loki's spirits, and his power, hit their high-water-mark. Winter has its own brief spring, where frostflowers burst into bloom at the base of sleeping trees and dying grasses, scattering petals of white rime across the landscape of the waking world.
Loki's dreamscape is all but singing with the anticipation of the season. There is a sound of wind, sleet, the creak and snap and jingle of ice rolling across ocean waves. The ground is white, the sky blue-back and scored with flashes of aurora. And Loki...
Loki is a hare. An arctic hare, small and white and very round, sitting on top of a hillock of snow and watching the colors shift overhead, rose red giving way to the unearthly green that marks his own seidr.
In the way of dreams, Felassan is not there, then is. First as the dim shape of an owl in the dark sky, searching in narrowing circles for the small thing that is a little more true here than everything else, and second quite abruptly as himself, more or less, cross-legged in the snow and underdressed for cold.
"Lethallin," he says in greeting to the hare, in a tone that suggests a meaning like cousin and his tongue partly in his cheek. For their ears, the humans called them rabbits. An insult, in intent, but not one that ever fazed Felassan. Felt more like being called stupid-head by a pack of scabby, snotty children.
In more ways than one, he is not Solas. The salient way, at the moment, is how little the landscape reacts to his presence. He isn't so strong, and this isn't his dream. But it's what his magic is made of — what he was made of, once or always — so when he reaches a hand to catch the wind, it works as easily as breathing, and a globe of air and ice and snow spins above his palm.
"Memory or invention," he says, contemplative and not quite a question. No doubt it's within the realm of possibility, but perhaps Loki doesn't want to be a talking hare. "Not that there is always a difference."
A hare should be worried about an owl overhead. If he were in the waking wild, Loki would probably duck and cover--he may be sturdy to the point of near-immortality, but he's not a fan of getting picked up in talons and flung around, either. He can sense the presence of Felassan, though, and while he can't remember whether meeting him tonight was his idea or not, he's content to welcome his company.
He owes him a story, and while the one that unspools tonight may be a tale of horror rather than escapades, Loki is made, at least in part, of stories. He has to love them; it's who he is.
The owl lands, changes, asks a question, which is not really a question, and the hare sits up, grooming his face with his paws, and speaks in Loki's voice. "Neither. Both. A memory of the future. The Wheel turns, and this time and place always appears and reappears, sooner or later, and I appear within it."
"I've been a hare, and a wolf, a fox and a horse, a spider and a serpent, but I'm always Loki. Do you know what I mean?" The same, he thinks, is true of Solas. It's hard to be everything you are, all at once, but you can be a little piece of it, each piece in turn and each piece sharing space with all the other aspects.
"Do you not feel the cold?" A secondary thought, and a rather welcome one, all things considered. He doesn't want to chill this visitor to the bone.
"I can," Felassan says, like an offer, like Loki's concern here might be that he is not fully and authentically immersing himself in this scene. And he does let it in, then, experimentally. Just enough for the bare parts of his arms to goose-pimple while he thinks.
Does he know what Loki means?
"Maybe," is the best he can decide, "but I suspect I'm a much simpler creature than you."
It's almost certainly true, but even if it weren't it would suit him to say so. The whirl of wind and ice crystals in his hand smooths and turns translucent as a bubble, then shrinks down and down until it's not much bigger than a marble, and just as solid. Looking through it — which he does, first at the aurora, then at the god beside him — turns everything upside down.
"Time hasn't circled back on me yet, that I know of."
[ The nonchalant thing to do would be to write back of course, coolly, and amble his way back. Make some stops. Take some detours. Arrive with straight shoulders and a crooked smile, as unbothered as the day he died. If he was certain she was done with him, that is how he would do it. The certainty would make him calm. He’d hold his dignity like a shield and walk into it.
He’s been worried, even though Solas said she would forgive him, and Solas is certainly in the position to know what Beleth will forgive. But he hasn't been certain. He's even further from certain now, looking at the little bird he'd been fidgeting with like a worry stone for the last few days, where Beleth hasn't written come by. She wrote please come home.
Felassan does not write back anything at all, then. Just goes. He hadn't wandered too much afield; between flight and fade step he’s there within the hour. It's not until he's at the tree line around the house's little clearing that he hesitates, then steps back. He scans the windows he can see. He picks a brittle winter twig out from where the rush got it stuck in his hair. He worries anew. He thinks she deserves time to put her armor on — metaphorically — rather than have him appear upon her suddenly, when she might have expected a day or two more, so he takes the bird out and answers: ]
I'm not far.
[ It's not a lie. Just maybe too true. Regardless, he sinks deeper into the trees to measure out another half hour in hopeful, wary pacing, before he goes to seek her out inside. ]
[ It's not odd, for Felassan to take some time to actually get back to the house. He ranges far, and magical teleportation can only do so much -- though Caldera had some kind of odd magic... but whatever the case, when she's requested his presence for other, less emotionally fraught situations, he's taken a certain amount of time, which always feels like Too Long.
It feels even worse, now, in the hour that she waits for a reply. Maybe he's tired of her and her theatrics. No -- she tries to wrest the anxious worries from the spiral they try to descend. She ought to trust him. She had that worry with Solas, hadn't she? That she was the idiot patiently waiting, while he hadn't worried at all? And look how that had gone. The moment he'd seen her face, he had been unable to deny the feelings she'd been unsure existed.
And then he texts back, so there's that, at least.
Still. She worries. She sets up tea leaves, gets the water on the stove, then busies herself. A mortar and pestle make for a good way to use her hands, grinding various herbs into fine powders that will be made into various concoctions. They are only set aside when she hears his footsteps at the entryway. ]
I'm in here.
[ Then she rises to greet him, and decides first thing first -- as soon as she sees him, she reaches to touch his face, hands gentle. ]
[ Felassan doesn't smile, and he doesn't exactly relax. He steadies, though — a dozen barely perceptible shifts in posture and expression that make the difference, to someone good enough at reading people, between might crack and can handle this. He puts his hand over one of hers to hold it in place as he turns to press his mouth into her palm, nose full of the herbs she was handling, eyes searching her face. ]
I missed you.
[ He did. And it's strange to have missed her, especially so much. Five days is nothing. Even here. He's gone longer all the time. But it's a different kind of gone, when he might pick up the bird and let her know the moment the terrible joke occurs to him, or meander into a shared dream to say hello, or come back whenever he likes and know she won't mind seeing him.
The press of his mouth against her hand turns into a kiss, finally, and he loosens his grip so she might have her hand back, if she wants it, while he nods toward her work. ]
Can I help?
[ They do need to talk. Which means he, too, could use something to do with his hands, before holding hers segues inevitably into trying to wind around her like a vine. ]
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I AM SO SORRY Text @gadriel
[But penance is penance. The great news? EVERYONE gets to suffer. The Inquisitor somehow thinks this is team building.
[At least as text he can just...not have to say anything.]
What kind of streets do ghosts haunt
???
B)
Ghosts?
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[Hmmm, Maybe he selected the wrong joke. He will have to consult his text. Maybe he should have listened to the Inquisitor and stuck with those 'knock knock' jokes? ]
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Are there ghosts here?
How
In the cemetery, there are.
According to the Medicine Selle---
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--that is not the point.
You are to answer the question.
how what??
how is this all going so badly for him XD
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In Person, for a certain definition of "in person"
And of course, some things are still easier in the Fade.
"Felassan," He calls, from the edge of the dream. It is a green dream, a dream of forest glades and golden dust-motes. Solas hopes it will be a good one, "I would speak with you. Are you willing?"
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He is no architect and never was. No painter — though film, if they'd had it, might have appealed. The clearing here is reproduction and collage, the golden slant of the light mismatched with the clarity of the stars overhead to create a time of day that never physically exists, the trees growing and dying in a time lapse that might fit a century into the hour, flowers spreading and receding like slow breaths. It smells like wood ash and petrichor.
He peers around a trunk to give Solas a once-over. That maybe was only a joke. He would be invited in no matter what Felassan found looking at him. But it's nice to see him here, like this, looking self-possessed and still himself. Felassan jerks his head to invite him further in.
"You were right," he says. "It's awfully empty here. You are my first visitor. Not even a wisp."
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...and what replaced it was not father, nor less intense, but it was different. And the seed of it had grown until Solas simply bears the once-over with a lift of his chin, and a slight cant of shoulder and hip. He knows he must look acceptable, because Felassan seems pleased.
It is very different to their last meeting, in the Fade.
"Then it is my pleasure to be the first," He says, stepping forward. The grass brightens under his feet, briefly flourishing, only to die as each step lifts away. Even here, the fade greets him like an affectionate cat, "I had a very interesting conversation with Beleth, recently, and it gave me cause to seek your out. Do not doubt that I have questions... But I am all too aware of our shared history."
It is a rehearsed speech, of course. He had pondered for a long time on what to say, how to say it. How to broach the topic without backing his friend into a desperate corner.
"Tell me that you wish only a quiet visit from a friend, and I will not speak. But if you would hear what I have to say..."
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It's a trait Felassan is very fond of, actually. His laugh and grin are both more affectionate than sharp, and he hums, perhaps genuinely tempted by the option to make Solas stand there and suffer in silence for a while — but no. If Solas goes too deep into his own head, one of these days he might never climb back out of it.
"I didn't want to lie to her," he says.
Because this place seems to revel in lowering guards and revealing secrets. Because to dance around the truth while taking advantage of their hospitality and then be revealed might make him seem a snake, a schemer — a slow arrow, sure. Because he simply did not want to lie to her, lying there under the sky, after she'd been so kind and wonderful.
And because he's reckless, too, in a way he has not been since he was very young, or perhaps even then. Everything on Felassan's list of worst case scenarios — except dying in bondage, the very worst of them — has already come and gone, one of the last checked off when his words cut short in the last Fade-forest clearing they shared, and here they still are. Even with all the conclusions Felassan has already drawn and the apologies he expects he may be required to make, this conversation could not possibly be as bad as a thousand things that have already happened.
"It's nothing you should worry about, my friend. Everything is fine, and I would never..." Too laughable to even say. They're happy. They're good for each other. What small part of this has ever hurt is better now, not worse. He shakes his head, still smiling. "No, I'm sorry. You have a speech. Let's hear it."
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nsfw
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mea maxima culpa
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[He thinks you will know for what question, Felassan, but one can never be completely certain. Still, Solas does not elaborate.]
That day, by the river. With the red berries. I told you a truth I had never deliberately shared with anyone else, and you attempted to lie, to spare me pain. It was only a moment, but— it is a suitable-enough answer, I think.
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[ A warm rumble of a quip. Of course he doesn’t mean it. Solas isn’t a mark, and wanting to know how to engineer the feeling was not why Felassan asked. The lying must have been incidental, anyway, though the impulse behind it — to keep his hands gentle around the edges of an ancient wound, to think of Solas as someone who perhaps couldn’t endure rough handling, or deserve it — might have mattered. ]
That was a good day.
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[Solas's voice is soft, the shape of a word rather than any real intent to speak. He's quiet for a moment, contemplating that reality: that it would be easier, and better, if Felassan could permit himself less honesty, perhaps, and that he too is a vulnerable creature, at his heart. That even he, Mighty Dread Wolf that so many claim him to be, should be weak and desire tenderness. But then, hadn't he known that already?]
I wonder... Do you know what it was Beleth first said to me, when our acquaintance was new, and I only knew her as Lavellan? [He pauses a moment, to allow Felassan to say he knows, to fill in the gap, or to wait for the answer.] It was a promise.
I was, at the time, posing as nothing more than a solitary apostate, surrounded as we were by Chantry forces and in the middle of a mage rebellion. We had only just met, and she already seemed to believe without question I would stay, that I would do whatever I could to help her, and to heal the breach.
She vowed to protect me, whatever it took. [And if Felassan has heard Beleth speak thus, himself, he knows how completely convincing it would have been. She is so often accommodating, and generally selfless, but when Beleth Lavellan decides something will be so, there is no power in all the world that can deny the strength of her indomitable will.] I was at a loss for words.
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I love her,
[ is not much louder than Solas's yes.
Old news, though he only says it rarely, but he means it differently right now. Even if he didn't love her — if he thought her eyes were too bright and lively and her freckles unsightly, if her laugh grated against his nerves instead of seizing him by the heart every time, if he considered her a foolish tool in over her head instead of someone who might shape the world with her bare hands, even if he were excluded and pining and jealous of the way Solas's attention winds ceaselessly after her like a river toward the sea — he would love her for this. For what she sees in Solas, and the way she looks at him, and the things she allows him to be with her, and his simple certainty from the day he first saw them together that Solas would never be alone again.
Less softly: ]
Is that when it started?
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action
Loki's dreamscape is all but singing with the anticipation of the season. There is a sound of wind, sleet, the creak and snap and jingle of ice rolling across ocean waves. The ground is white, the sky blue-back and scored with flashes of aurora. And Loki...
Loki is a hare. An arctic hare, small and white and very round, sitting on top of a hillock of snow and watching the colors shift overhead, rose red giving way to the unearthly green that marks his own seidr.
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"Lethallin," he says in greeting to the hare, in a tone that suggests a meaning like cousin and his tongue partly in his cheek. For their ears, the humans called them rabbits. An insult, in intent, but not one that ever fazed Felassan. Felt more like being called stupid-head by a pack of scabby, snotty children.
In more ways than one, he is not Solas. The salient way, at the moment, is how little the landscape reacts to his presence. He isn't so strong, and this isn't his dream. But it's what his magic is made of — what he was made of, once or always — so when he reaches a hand to catch the wind, it works as easily as breathing, and a globe of air and ice and snow spins above his palm.
"Memory or invention," he says, contemplative and not quite a question. No doubt it's within the realm of possibility, but perhaps Loki doesn't want to be a talking hare. "Not that there is always a difference."
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He owes him a story, and while the one that unspools tonight may be a tale of horror rather than escapades, Loki is made, at least in part, of stories. He has to love them; it's who he is.
The owl lands, changes, asks a question, which is not really a question, and the hare sits up, grooming his face with his paws, and speaks in Loki's voice. "Neither. Both. A memory of the future. The Wheel turns, and this time and place always appears and reappears, sooner or later, and I appear within it."
"I've been a hare, and a wolf, a fox and a horse, a spider and a serpent, but I'm always Loki. Do you know what I mean?" The same, he thinks, is true of Solas. It's hard to be everything you are, all at once, but you can be a little piece of it, each piece in turn and each piece sharing space with all the other aspects.
"Do you not feel the cold?" A secondary thought, and a rather welcome one, all things considered. He doesn't want to chill this visitor to the bone.
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Does he know what Loki means?
"Maybe," is the best he can decide, "but I suspect I'm a much simpler creature than you."
It's almost certainly true, but even if it weren't it would suit him to say so. The whirl of wind and ice crystals in his hand smooths and turns translucent as a bubble, then shrinks down and down until it's not much bigger than a marble, and just as solid. Looking through it — which he does, first at the aurora, then at the god beside him — turns everything upside down.
"Time hasn't circled back on me yet, that I know of."
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[Ergo:]
What did you do?
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I told her Clan Virnehn is dead, and how.
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[text]
Please come home, when you get the chance.
action text.
He’s been worried, even though Solas said she would forgive him, and Solas is certainly in the position to know what Beleth will forgive. But he hasn't been certain. He's even further from certain now, looking at the little bird he'd been fidgeting with like a worry stone for the last few days, where Beleth hasn't written come by. She wrote please come home.
Felassan does not write back anything at all, then. Just goes. He hadn't wandered too much afield; between flight and fade step he’s there within the hour. It's not until he's at the tree line around the house's little clearing that he hesitates, then steps back. He scans the windows he can see. He picks a brittle winter twig out from where the rush got it stuck in his hair. He worries anew. He thinks she deserves time to put her armor on — metaphorically — rather than have him appear upon her suddenly, when she might have expected a day or two more, so he takes the bird out and answers: ]
I'm not far.
[ It's not a lie. Just maybe too true. Regardless, he sinks deeper into the trees to measure out another half hour in hopeful, wary pacing, before he goes to seek her out inside. ]
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It feels even worse, now, in the hour that she waits for a reply. Maybe he's tired of her and her theatrics. No -- she tries to wrest the anxious worries from the spiral they try to descend. She ought to trust him. She had that worry with Solas, hadn't she? That she was the idiot patiently waiting, while he hadn't worried at all? And look how that had gone. The moment he'd seen her face, he had been unable to deny the feelings she'd been unsure existed.
And then he texts back, so there's that, at least.
Still. She worries. She sets up tea leaves, gets the water on the stove, then busies herself. A mortar and pestle make for a good way to use her hands, grinding various herbs into fine powders that will be made into various concoctions. They are only set aside when she hears his footsteps at the entryway. ]
I'm in here.
[ Then she rises to greet him, and decides first thing first -- as soon as she sees him, she reaches to touch his face, hands gentle. ]
Aneth ara, ma lath.
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I missed you.
[ He did. And it's strange to have missed her, especially so much. Five days is nothing. Even here. He's gone longer all the time. But it's a different kind of gone, when he might pick up the bird and let her know the moment the terrible joke occurs to him, or meander into a shared dream to say hello, or come back whenever he likes and know she won't mind seeing him.
The press of his mouth against her hand turns into a kiss, finally, and he loosens his grip so she might have her hand back, if she wants it, while he nods toward her work. ]
Can I help?
[ They do need to talk. Which means he, too, could use something to do with his hands, before holding hers segues inevitably into trying to wind around her like a vine. ]
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