#i accidentally contradicted a minor detail from the fic but shhh we can just pretend neal's an unreliable narrator

[theladyragnell]

oh my gosh as soon as I hit send I immediately thought of another tantalizing possibility if your spoons so permit - Z, for either Kel/Neal/Yuki or Kel/Neal? Any verse!

(This ended up being an alternate POV of a bit of playing out a lot of hypotheticals towards the end, so if you haven't read that one, this probably won't make much sense!)

The day before her Ordeal, Kel wrote a poem, and felt silly the whole time, her face flame-hot with a blush.

She didn’t think of herself as particularly brave. It was too much of a word for ballads and legends, when “stubborn” would do just as well. Still, sitting with scraps of paper half-covered in sums and half-covered in bad translations of bad Yamani, her heart pounded more than it ever had when she was getting ready to charge down a tilting lane. Neal would think it was funny and fitting that for her, poetry took more bravery than galloping full speed towards someone hoping to spear her with a large stick, but that thought didn’t help like it usually would. Neal was the reason it was hard.

It had been a jolt, late that summer, after everything, to receive a poem without a careful authorial attribution and, quite often, biographical information, something Neal had started providing when he’d realized she liked to know. He’d grown so good at finding poems that fit the two of them perfectly that it was the lack of attribution that had made her realize what it was, the gift he’d given her. She’d read the lines over and over again until she memorized them by accident, something she’d only realized when she woke in the morning thinking and more, until the paper covers my desk like snow.

She’d known, then. She’d thought maybe it was true before, but she knew then that Neal loved her, and that she loved him too. The way Dom talked, it sounded like Neal was a flirt, like he’d write poetry for anyone, like he’d been in love with every woman in the palace, and Kel had let herself believe it, but it wasn’t true. Whatever he wrote to those ladies, it wasn’t six lines that were a bit of an insult to the Yamani form they aped. It wasn’t an observation that spoke to years of friendship and care and the shaky excitement of something else added on.

So Kel was staring down her possible death, if the Chamber of the Ordeal took a dislike to her after all the years she’d spent daring it to do its worst, and the last thing she had to do was write a poem, and she couldn’t blame Neal for his poem being a bad version of the Yamani form because hers was going to be so much worse. She didn’t even have the excuse of not knowing Yamani.

One thing Neal had done right was to focus on one small image, her letters laid out on his desk, with a fresh one delivered to fill another gap. If the whole of a feeling was too much to express, sometimes a single image would do. Kel, who’d never been good at expressing her emotions, certainly couldn’t encompass everything she felt about Neal in six lines.

There were too many moments to choose between. Neal in the infirmary on the progress, arch and on the edge of flirting. Neal in a hallway in Persopolis, recommending her a poem in honest sympathy for a loss even her friends didn’t understand. A beach at Queenscove and a kiss she couldn’t in honor give him.

In the end, though, it came back to letters. To the way Neal listened to what she liked and sent better poems, and the way he gave her moments of lightness while she was with the Own, and the way he teased and teased but always seemed to know when to take her seriously. To the smiles Lord Raoul and Sir Graeme and Dom gave her in the days after a new letter arrived, and the way Lerant rolled his eyes when she smiled reflexively when he approached with a stack of papers, because the rustle sometimes meant a new letter was coming.

The last image was the one that caught her. She thought Yuki and Shinko would approve of the specificity of it, the way she noticed papers rustling behind her and didn’t care if they were letters or expense reports, because even the thought they might be letters was still a good one. They might also tease her a little for being prosaic even in poetry, but she didn’t mind that, especially since if she was lucky they would never know, and their opinions would remain theoretical.

Kel had hoped to spend her last day as a squire out in the forest with Peachblossom and Jump and the sparrows, to gain some solitude, but she ended up spending most of it at her desk, writing and rewriting the same six lines until they were good enough to go in the book beside Neal’s own poem, a response and a hope.

By spring, she would be back on the Scanran border. Horribly, Neal would likely be there too, if farther from the action. Whenever she thought of it, she had to avoid thinking about the last time she’d touched the Chamber door, before Third Company had gone north in the spring, about finding a field hospital sacked and raided, finding Neal speared through with no clever words left in him, just a mute appeal for help she couldn’t give him.

There was a winter first, though. Time enough to work through what they could be to each other, what promises they could make without courting heartbreak. Staring at the poems next to each other, his elegant handwriting next to her utilitarian script, the words different but the subjects the same, she couldn’t worry too much about the heartbreak. Everything else, maybe, but not that.

When the ink was dry, Kel gently shut the book where Neal had carefully written out all the poems she liked best, where there was still more room for another year of poems, but not much more than a year. They’d need a second volume, someday.

“Going out so close to time, Kel?” Raoul asked when he caught her in the corridor, book tucked under her arm.

Kel badly wanted to squirm. He’d been through the Ordeal once, though, and he’d seen her the morning of Joren’s. He had to know she would want to be prepared. “I know it’s last-minute. I just need to—leave this. With someone.”

His mouth quirked. He’d spotted the book, clearly, and it seemed like every member of Third Company had teased her about her ever-present poetry book in camp. She stored Neal’s letters between the pages, and had had to remove them so she didn’t give too much away. “With someone, of course,” he said. “Well, don’t let someone distract you for too long.”

Her face had to be flaming. She ducked her head. “I won’t, my lord. It’s just for safekeeping, that’s all.”

Raoul’s expression softened from teasing into concern. “You’ll get it back,” he said, more of a promise than he ought to be making.

“I just have to make sure he has it tonight,” said Kel, and went off down the hallway to be as brave as she possibly could.