#venli x leshwi

[gal-palanaeum]

Voice by aluminumoxynitride

Rated General, 1500 words, Venli/Leshwi Venli and Leshwi have a heartfelt conversation before reaching the Listener camp.

It was the night before they were set to reach the Listener camp, and Venli couldn't sleep.

Timbre pulsed calming rhythms inside her, hoping to smooth her tangled thoughts, but it was a lost cause.  By the time Honor's moon rose Venli had had enough.  She mumbled an apology to her spren, then thrashed her way out of her bedroll and made her way to the cookfire.  It was the middle of the night; surely no one else would bother her there. 

The flames had burned down to embers, but Venli could see well enough in the blue moonlight.  A tall figure sat by the fire-- one of the other shanay-im.

No, she realized, attuning Surprise.  It was Leshwi.

Venli had rarely seen her Lady sit-- for the barber, and that was all-- and she'd never seen her sit like this, curled into herself like a rockbud in the sun, shoulders sloped and limbs held loose.  She was holding a bottle; Venli saw it glimmer in the dying firelight as she took a long pull.  She backed away, moving as silently as she could to Embarrassment's beat.

Not silently enough.  Leshwi glanced up.   For a moment Venli attuned Anxiety, waiting to be reprimanded, but the Fused merely waved her over.

May as well, Venli thought, and settled next to her on the stones.

"I keep wanting to burn it off," Leshwi said to Derision-- towards herself, Venli realized with a start as her powers translated each nuance of her voice and rhythm.  Leshwi's self-assurance was one of the few constants in Venli's life.  In a lot of ways, she'd built herself upon that rock.  Seeing Leshwi like this was unnerving.  Why did she have to do this now, the night before Venli's reckoning?

Timbre pulsed admonishment.  I know, Venli thought to Reconciliation.  She tugged awkwardly at a crease in her robe.  "The wine?"

Leshwi hummed to Mourning.  "It's instinct.  Seven thousand years of instinct.  Eventually I'll slip up.  I'll heal a scrape without thinking about it, or my body will fight off an illness on its own, or any number of little things, and one day I'll wake up and find I've lost the skies."

Venli attuned Mourning, humming with her.  Voidlight came directly from Odium, and Leshwi was almost certainly cut off.  What would it be like to have something for millennia and then lose it?  "We could find some way to get you more.  You'd only need a little bit."

She leaned back in her seat-- by the songs, it was strange to see her move like that, liquid and slow-- and drank again.  "Don't," she said to Command, but so, so tired.  "Not interested."

Venli felt her face grow warm, her pulse thrumming to Abashment.  "Sorry," she said, and stood to leave.

Leshwi held a hand out.  "Wait," she said to Reconciliation.  "Didn't mean it like that.  You just wanted to be helpful.  I put you on my staff to be helpful.  That's your whole…" she waved a hand vaguely.

"You wouldn't call me that if you were sober," Venli muttered, but she sat back down.

Leshwi hummed Derision in that self-deprecating way.  "'On my staff'?  I know I don't have a staff anymore, Venli, I'm not that drunk."

"I mean helpful," Venli said, the words bitter in her throat.  She saw listener warbands limping back from battle with a fraction of their numbers.  She saw a gemstone shattering on rain-soaked rock, and the change it brought.  She saw Demid's twisted corpse puppeted by a Fused, and her mother staring at her unseeing, and her own hands prying the Shardplate from Eshonai's broken body.  "I'm not.  That isn't me."

Leshwi considered this for a moment, then wordlessly passed her the bottle.

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[gal-palanaeum]

Hypnotic, takin over me by Hazekiller16

Rated General, 350 words, Venli/Leshwi Venli is in love and very afraid of that fact.

Venli follows Leshwi through the city, wondering how she can look so calm after a battle. She barely made it through the battle of Thaylen Field and she had not even been fighting! And yet here Leshwi is, moments after a battle, looking perfect. Perfectly fine, she means! She would never call one of the Gods perfect!

Leshwi stops and stares at her, waiting for some kind of response. “Did you not hear me, Voice?” Leshwi asks.

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