Chapter 4: Query

Chapter 4: Chapter 4: Query

"Why," she said, and it wasn’t quite a challenge, more like an honest question she hadn’t expected to need to ask. "Why would you decide that. You don’t know me. We met this morning."

Jason considered several answers. He considered the practical one, the one about shared circumstances and mutual understanding and the strategic sense of building something functional out of a situation neither of them had chosen.

He considered the deflecting one, something dry enough to turn the whole moment into a joke and let them both off the hook.

He went with the honest one instead.

"Because I want to," he said simply.

Novaria stared at him.

He watched her try to find the catch in it, the angle, the part of the sentence that was actually a setup for something else, some quiet expectation dressed up as generosity, and he watched her fail to find one, and he watched that failure bother her more than an actual catch would have.

"That’s not an answer," she said finally, and there was an edge in her voice now, thin, careful, the sound of someone testing weight on ice they didn’t trust yet. "People don’t just decide to take care of a stranger because they ’want to’. There’s always a reason, something they’re getting out of it."

"Sometimes," Jason agreed. "Not always."

"You expect me to believe that."

"I expect you to believe whatever you need to believe until I’ve earned something better." He said it without any heat behind it, just plain and even, and straightened back up. "I’m not asking you to trust me today. I’m telling you where I stand, so that when I actually follow through on it, you’ll at least remember I said it first."

She didn’t answer that immediately. She looked at him instead, something complicated moving behind her eyes that he couldn’t fully read yet, though he suspected that with enough time, he would eventually get good at reading it. For now he let the silence sit.

By the time they’d made their way through the rest of the house, checking rooms, working out where things were and weren’t, the light outside had gone soft and orange, sliding toward evening faster than either of them had apparently noticed while they talked.

Jason caught the way Novaria’s shoulders had started to drop, just slightly, the careful posture she’d been holding all day finally starting to slip under the weight of what had clearly been an exhausting stretch of hours for her.

"You’re tired," he said. Not a question.

"I’m fine."

"You’re allowed to just be tired, you know. It’s not a weakness. It’s evening, and you’ve had a genuinely long day, and I’d be more concerned if you weren’t tired."

He rolled her chair to a stop near the hallway that led toward the bedroom, and crouched again, meeting her eyes properly. "I’m going to carry you to the room. Is that alright?"

Novaria’s jaw tightened, some old instinct flaring, the particular reflexive stubbornness of someone who’d spent six months relearning, painfully, exactly how much of her independence had been taken from her and exactly how much she resented anyone reminding her of it.

"I can manage," she said.

"I know you can," Jason said, gently, and meant it, because he did know it, he’d already seen enough of her in one day to know that managing wasn’t the issue.

"That’s not what I asked. I asked if it’s alright. If you’d rather handle it yourself tonight, that’s fine too. I just don’t want you exhausting yourself on our first night here trying to prove something to me you don’t actually need to prove."

She was quiet for a moment, studying him again, that same careful weighing expression from before.

"You already came here once," she said finally, seemingly out of nowhere, and it took him a second to realize she wasn’t changing the subject, she was circling back to something she’d noticed and filed away without commenting on it. "Before today. You knew where the kitchen appliances were before you looked."

’Sharp,’ he thought, something like approval settling in his chest despite himself. ’Very sharp.’

"I did," he admitted, no point denying it. "After the letter came, before the wedding. I came out to look the place over. Wanted to know what we were actually walking into, instead of just trusting whatever description the clans sent along."

"Why didn’t you mention it?"

"Didn’t come up. Also," he added, and allowed himself the smallest edge of dry humor, "I was mildly worried you’d find it presumptuous. Inspecting the house before either of us had agreed to anything."

"It is presumptuous."

"Extremely," he agreed easily. "Also practical. Both things can be true."

That, finally, pulled something like a real smile out of her, small and reluctant, but real.

"Fine," she said, and the word carried more weight than its size suggested, a small surrender wrapped in the shape of a single syllable. "Carry me to the room, then. Since apparently you’ve already scouted the route."

"I have," Jason said, and carefully, gently, gathered her up out of the chair, mindful of her legs, mindful of the way her whole body went momentarily rigid with the automatic bracing of someone used to being handled carelessly, before she let herself relax, just slightly, into the movement.

’She braced for it,’ he noted quietly, carrying her down the hall, ’like she expected it to hurt. Or expected me to be clumsy about it.’

He filed that away too, next to the earlier thought about how carefully she guarded whatever she wasn’t at peace with, and said nothing about it, because he understood, somewhere in the part of his mind that had spent sixteen years learning exactly how much people didn’t want their wounds pointed at directly, that noticing was enough for tonight.