Hairless Heart

As ever, the battered cobbles outside Mymoma set the scene. The day was gray but rainless, the sky shivery but so nearly blooming with the promise of color just beyond the cast. Niall Ardanach, draped in a Gormotti cloak, and Nia of no currently recognizable last name, clad up in the same, stood nervously at the door, suddenly dreading the exposition that would surely have to come next.

The young emperor had traded out his slippers and short pants for sturdier shoes and more practical slacks, but he felt out of place all the same.

"You're sure this is sensible, Nia?"

You're sure? Stupid question. Everyone knew Nia, second-guesser extraordinaire, was never sure of anything except the love she held for those around. She batted distractedly at his hand before raising her own to knock, and then...

Coughing. Mark one, two, three...and faded away. Not so close to the door, then.

"Cripes," muttered Nia. "Hope he's not in too much of a state today."

Raising an indigo eyebrow, Niall queried again: "Do you come here often?"

Well, what was the answer? Not as often as she'd like, she supposed? If there were qualms to be laid about spending time with people her own age, then yes, Nia should be very glad that she had such a grand quest to go on, such a self-acceptance sublimation laid to hand, such a diverse yet tightly-packed array of, generally, youths, with much older souls accompanying to guide.

But she did miss Cole, and she did worry about him, and she did at times find his company much more like what one would call easy than forcing banter with Mòrag, or even Mythra. It was important, to look after the old man, sure, if he even needed that, but it wasn't...tense, all-important, nebulous. Both easier and harder to tell someone about, she found.

It was just a girl and her adopted grandpa, the former of whom was a professional at being adopted, by now, and the latter of whom was a professional at adopting, many times and years over. Wasn't that normal? Or shouldn't it be? If you loved someone.

"Yeah," Nia answered at last. "I do. I guess that's the way of the non-ruling class, huh? Your family's everywhere and nowhere, right there with you or scattered to the winds." What on Alrest was she so worried about? She had to commit to it, or she'd be just as jittery and out of place as she was even thinking about broaching Hardhaigh. "This is important to me."

With his imperial finishing set firmly in place probably no less than two years prior, Niall didn't need any advanced age to stop him from blinking owlishly at Nia and her querulous - halfway accusatory - sudden-ditch confession. He simply smiled, offered a minute dip of his chin, and said, "I understand."

Nia knocked again. Perhaps for the first time; she'd lost track, and supposed herself thankful for it. Cole, she knew, was someone who hated insistent knockers as much as he hated having to quell their impatience with calls of "Coming, coming..." as he shuffled up the hall. After all, kitschy opening lines were corny, weren't they? If it was a good entrance, you needed no introduction.

What was corny, truly, was old man Cole's attachment to analogies - metaphors, sorry - like that, but Nia never made it her first priority to tell him so. The opportunity'd surely come up later in the conversation. He seemed to like to listen to her talk.

Oh, speakin' of listenin' to folks talk - was Iona...market today? School? No way Cole was her teacher. If only because he believed in public education and the power of someone who wasn't your sole appointed guardian telling you what they thought about how things should be.

"You ever been to see one of 'is plays, Niall- er, Your Majesty?"

"Niall," he said, "and I have not. I hope to, someday. When tensions are less high."

Oh. Right. You're sure this is sensible?

"S'pose you come to Gormott and we put one on for you."

"We?"

Nia waved a hand as if she were the lady of Echell - no, a proper duchess! "People. I'd find some."

"Playcasting's no easy feat, you know. Takes me years, sometimes."

If there was one thing Nia had going for her in this moment, it was the way her fangs hung in her mouth, preventing her tongue, barbs and all, from falling full on display. "I- er-- Hi."

"Hi," Cole agreed, affable but cool. Probably because of present company, Nia chided herself. Sensible, much? "Might I have the pleasure?"

Considering that it was Niall stood beside her, and very much not the sitting Emperor of Mor Ardain (have you eyes? of course it's not), Nia forwent politeness.

"What, did you forget who this is?" she snickered. Along with the playful, sardonic question, her voice took on what Cole had once described to her as a (quite compelling) diagonal quality - not flat and certainly not nervous, though some could get diagonal when nervous. Not pointed nor pointy, per se, but full of artful elisions. No, this was Nia in her element. "Should I be worried about you?"

"Should I be worried about him?"

Ah. Alright, then. So the friend of informers for half a millennium did know about the emperor's fragile health. Sure. Whatever. Make me look like a right sod.

"Whatever. Let's just get inside - and obviously he knows who you are."

Niall, who hadn't spoken a word throughout the entirety of the circus just unfolded before him, nodded his assent. "I am honored to make your acquaintance, Sir Cole."

"Sir?" Cole's left eyebrow lifted with obvious exertion, automatic though the reaction was. "The last emperor I knew never called me 'Sir'. Well, whatever. No Aegaeon? No Dromarch? Architect, you kids sure do get around, these days."

Nia coughed, now as politely as possible, to signal to Cole that Aegaeon was...most definitely indisposed far past the point of accompanying his former liege for simple dilly-dally trips, but he only raised the other eyebrow to signal his intent to table the conversation.

"Well, anyway." Two transitions, jammed together in such a short span, didn't make things any less awkward, unfortunately. "What can I do for you?"

It was with a blessed minimum of undue fussing and, of course, shuffling that Nia and Niall escorted themselves into the playhouse; Nia knew that Cole would prefer to be a good host and lead the way, but she'd be damned if she'd let him force a straining gait just to accomodate a couple of basically-except-not-so teenagers. She led them into the kitchen.

"We're just visiting," she said when they got there. "Since I figured Niall doesn't get to do things like this too often."

Cole gave ample time for Niall to interject before offering his thoughts on the matter. "Depends how you define getting. Kid like you could convince anyone to do anything so long as you yourself really wanted to go, and I'm no wicked old man, but I haven't heard Niall here say ten words, yet."

He paused again.

"Quiet type, huh?"

Reserved and quiet were different. Definitely so. Still, Cole had a way of tempting people to allow him to describe them, like a caricature artist so winsome and trustworthy you wouldn't dare pass them by.

One of the most widely caricatured faces in Alrest had indeed, here, been hooked.

"In comparison to Nia, yes."

"Oh-ho! So it's mischief the little emperor wants, in his off hours."

Niall swallowed, bottle-blue. In some sense, it was a game strategy: strike right for the nerve, and avoid wasting anyone's time. A visit, or an interview, is of course two-sided.

For his fifteenth word, he offered, "Little?"

It seemed the playwright's enthusiastic endorsement of Nia's own persuasive qualities had also been a personal admission, because he didn't shy away, instead bolstering himself in her boldness. "Slight, diminutive, miniature, pint-size."

Now Niall blinked. Here lay the inflection point of the wicked old man and the kind young man; whether or not they would, could, should tolerate each other. They certainly weren't going to sit around and talk politics while Nia fretted at the moldy dumpling soup in the icebox.

Still. Cole blinked back, once. "Ah, I see."

Here we go, Nia thought, you've engaged the long-winded beast. Watch for the verbal tank march.

"Let me illustrate: picture a young emperor, just such as yourself, whose older brother was tall and grim but whose brother in state was tall and gregarious. It was a friendship for the ages."

Of course he'd bring up Addam. Of course.

"Now picture," he drew himself up to the magnificent impression of seventy-six spirited inches, "yours truly, before the back pain and the whooping cough."

"Tall," Niall agreed, "but not quite grim and not quite gregarious."

"And the little emperor," Cole said seriously, "was very serious indeed. Except when he was smiling."

Niall shot Nia a look, but she just shrugged. Old men would apply relevance to anything and everything. Couldn't stop 'em. Maybe didn't want to.

Cole, meanwhile, was stroking his chin and collecting his thoughts.

"That's an interesting scar you've got there," he said mildly, thinking of Hugo and how he'd been so stout and stately even as a fresh corpse (one suspected the Special Inquisitor of the time had, in addition to retrieving the Core Crystals, made his best effort to powder up the imperial visage, so that the key takeaway was "heroic sacrifice" and not "radiation burns").

Nia didn't cough this time, but only because Cole sent her a meaningful look of his own before she had the chance.

Niall made to adjust the hems of his shorts before remembering that he was, indeed, wearing slacks, and he was perched too far forward on the kitchen chair to have wrinkled the knees in any meaningful way. He cleared his throat, debating how best to respond to such an observation.

"You can just tell him he's full of it, you know," Nia pointed out helpfully. "Because he is."

"He's full of something, yes."

"Hot air?" Cole guessed. His crafty gaze illustrated clearer than any word picture, any bit of repetition, any spun symbolism towered upon tropes, that this was the most fun he'd had in a while. Come to think of it, Nia wasn't even sure she'd heard him cough once since the door to the playhouse had yet been shut.

Maybe he just liked to listen to himself talk.

Whatever the case, Niall looked the shrunken form of a self-professed classically moody tall glass of water over for only three seconds more before inquiring, "Do you have a deck of cards?"

"More than I know what to do with. I'm sure you don't need pocket money, or such toys as one could buy with the same?"

"You've never offered me pocket money!" Nia nearly yelped.

Niall ignored her, if lovingly. "Gamble with an Urayan? Perish the thought."

"How about Tornans?" Or Indoline, or Spessian-Coeian, or something else entirely.

"I'd avoid saying that out loud."

Cole grumbled. Easy, even cheap, joke. It was true, though. The fallen Titan had a new crest presiding atop its name, nowadays.

Hugo would have played, once upon a time, with his brother along the rope, or whatever it was he had said.

"You're that set on shutting me up?"

Clumsily, Niall began shuffling, receptive to Nia's occasional pokes in to flip a card or discard a joker. "It's not often I have the chance to do so with a parlor game."

"See!?" Nia crowed, checking for Cole's marked indgulgence and triumphantly receiving it. "He's not just some pushover."

If the little emperor was feeling prideful, he did well not to show it. Supposedly.

Cole grinned, sweeping his cards into his hand (and sleeve...) so deftly they disappeared. "And? Neither am I."