Standing outside of a chamber waiting to be given permission to enter was an alien feeling to one of royal blood and family. A woman whom most would love to have in their rooms and in their company (even though who were antagonistic towards her and her House) the idea that she required permission to be with a room - any room - and that said allowance may not be given was a disorientating notion. It reminded her of times when she had had to wait for her father's permission to enter his rooms. And suddenly she was a little girl of six years old, nervously awaiting her call of admittance.

But this was what she would need to become accustomed to. As Queen of Athenia, she would have been the highest rank in the kingdom. Even Iason, while he would have been her husband and, in most unions (and by law) it would make her subservient to him, it had always been clear from the outset of their relationship that Iason had seen himself as a regent role - the husband to the Queen rather than his personal title of King being the most significant of the two of them. Back hone, had she remained Queen, she would have been forced to adhere to social norms by no-one. She could have gone where she wanted, talked how she wanted and entered any room she might wish without permission or retribution.

Now, the world had changed. Now, Persephone would occupy the role of baroness. One that a great many people in the world would adore to call a title of their own but still a significant downgrade from her previously held rank. In this world and reality, she would support Iason. She would play wife to his husband and help him to ensure the running of a province that was not her home.

Persephone wondered for a moment if this strange sense of foreignness was something her mother had felt in travelling from Taengea to Athenia. Lucille had always appeared so strong and comfortable in her role as Queen, Persephone had never considered the fact that, upon becoming one, Lucille became ruler of a people who were not her countryman. It was the same arrangement Iason had been willing to make. Perhaps Taengeans, Persephone considered, were a more hardy stock when it came to adapting to new kingdoms.

Then again... Persephone was half Taengean...

Her musings and anxiety driven mental ramblings (thank the Gods her tutoring kept such emotions and difficulties off of her face) were cut short when the door before her opened and a young servant permitted her entry to Iason's bedchamber.

Whilst Persephone had never been in Iason's room before, it was hardly the waist high wooden panelling over the walls the large postered bed not the set of doors beyond it that appeared to lead to a balcony that Persephone noticed first.

It was the smell and feel of the room.

Sick people, or at least the rooms they inhabited while ill, seemed to all have that same toxic and cloying feel to the air. It seemed to permeate the room with a feeling of lethargy and stuffiness. Whether the patient themselves were simply suffering from a cold or dying with near imminent effect, the rooms always felt the same; an identical atmospheric finger print that claimed the immediate environment. Whether it was an actual element to the air she breathed or the instinctive nature of a healthy person to stay clear of those in the grips of malady, Persephone neither knew nor cared. She simply steeled her resolved as she stepped into the chamber. She had been in rooms far worse in their atmosphere than this.

Another fear she swallowed down as hard as she could were the memories of her eleven year old self. Her mother had passed away in less than a week of her being told the woman was ill. A little cold and a cough, she had been told. Then her mother was dead. He had never braved to ask her father whether it had been a more serious sickness to claim her mothers life, or if it had truly just been complications from a flu that had left her too weak to survive. Over the years she had forgotten to ask. And now her father wasn't here to answer. She wondered if there was anyone still at the palace old enough to remember and willing enough to tell.

Dragging her thoughts away from the past and into the present, with a firm and final shut to that door - Iason was not going to die and she needed to not be distracted now by such fearful folly - Persephone looked around the room properly, but was distracted when Iason witnessed her entrance and moved to get up.

In truth, the man looked a little disgusting with cold. As she had expected. Her heart immediately went out to him as he was clearly very ill and likely feeling rotten to boot. She had already known that Iason was the sort of man who would not rescind on plans unless truly inhibited by such a thing as a cough. Which this did not appear to be. It looked more like the flu or some sort of feverish demon. Having looked after her sister in bouts of illness growing up, Persephone knew the difference.

Athenia's capitol was directly on the coast. All the fog from the sea had to do was creep a little closer through the city and suddenly everyone was ill with dampness in their chests. The Princess Emilia had not been immune and, guilty that Persephone had had the healing care of their mother and her younger sister did not, Persephone had filled that roll. If the reverse happened, however, and Perse had fallen foul of a demon... She had done as Iason had done and hidden away under some pretence of busyness so as not to worry her father and sister. And handling the illness alone had been lonely and retched.

She wondered if Iason had ever allowed his father to take care of him sick after his mother had passed or if, like herself, this was how he had done it since young...?

Well, that would not be the case today.

Persephone was dressed in another gown from Dorothea. This one was a deep purple that was fastened tight around her chest and torso. A second layer was then a fixed over it in a shade only slightly lighter. Whilst the gown itself was strapless and cut across her chest, the second looped over one shoulder, but both kept her arms bare and free. Which was going to be helpful in looking after her betrothed. She did not need swathes of delicate, floaty fabric getting in her way as she tried to tend to him.

She wore no jewellery, as had been her way since arriving in Taengea. Only her father's marriage band on the thumb of her right hand. The matching peer that she always had on her ring find of that hand was missing as she had been unable to find it before the funeral. It was still in the palace somewhere. The one possession Persephone so desperately wished she hadn't left behind.

But despite the borrowed gown, her braided hair fixed up and around her head in a way she had been assured was very popular with ladies in Taengea these days, and her lack if jewellery and gold or silver... Iason still called her "your majesty".

Hiding her wince at the title, Persephone strode across the room in four quick strides and placed a her hand on Iason's shoulder to still him in his attempts to - what? Get up and bow to her?

Hearing his voice and then the coughs that wracked his chest as he tried to speak, Persephone looked to the servant who had allowed her entry to the room and was clearly about to leave and, despite her lack of royal title now, spoke to him with all the dignity and authority of a ruler.

"Alight the fire." She told him, despite it being a welcoming and warm day. "Then go to the kitchens and fetch a cauldron of water, some honey and lemons."

Having assured herself that Iason's coughing was distracting him from getting up at least for now, Persephone walked around the bed, directly to the doors beyond and opened them wide, letting in light and air. They would need the room hot for Iason to burn off his fever, but initially she wanted to clear the stodgy air of someone who had coughed the night through.

For she knew Iason had a fever. She might have been trying to avert her eyes from his naked chest but her hand had felt the unnatural heat of his shoulder and and the sweaty clinging of his skin. Iason was not the sort to make a big deal over nothing. He was truly ill.

Which could only have happened as they had been at sea. Perhaps her vomiting on the boat had made her purge any evils before they could take hold. And they wouldnt have even been at sea if it wasn't for all of her political mess that Iason had been caught up in. Which meant that this was all her fault in the first place.

As the room became to feel clearer, Persephone left the doors that did indeed lead to a balcony, open wide whilst the servant in the room lit the fire. It wasn't until he had left, the flames were starting to nip and eat at the wooden stocks and the ladies maid she had instructed in the hallway had arrived with a large pile if items - the towels and water etc that she had demanded of her - that Persephone closed the doors firmly and addressed the supplies to the foot of the bed.

"A meal is being prepared for the Master upon your instructions, my Lady." The woman reported. Persephone felt a blooming of trust and pride that the maid had obeyed her despite her having no official rank within the household. She smiled.

"Thank you." She offered, in a tone if genuine gratitude that seemed to surprise the woman. Persephone wondered how bad the reputation of Athenia was that simple thanks were considered odd.

Allowing the woman to leave and carry on about her own duties, Persephone turned to the pile at the foot of Iason's bed and selected a smaller wash cloth and the bowl that held warm water over the one of cold.

Carrying both to the head of Iason's bed she placed them on the side bureau, her eyes noting the cup of water as the only contingency in the room for the man's illness.

"You need to sweat out the fever." She told her betrothed, busying herself with dunking the cloth into the warm water and squeezing free the excess. A trickling noise permeated the room. "But sweat on your skin will make you only sicker." It was a delicate dance, her mother had always said. You had to burn out the demon, but when sweat dried on the skin, it cooled, decreasing the body's temperature. Sweat and clean was the repeated process of becoming healthy. Or so, Lucille had always said.

Persephone turned to Iason and hesitated. Cleaning the skin of her little sister was one thing. Washing the man who would be, but was not yet, her husband was entirely different. She swallowed, her tone remaining confident, somehow.

"Can you sit up?" She asked. "I need to wash you."

The first protestations, Persephone took as simple male pride and not wishing for her to see him in his physically weakened state. Men were, after all, the strength of any family or union; their anatomy, muscles and physical prowess as important to them as a woman's grace and elegance was to she. Perhaps he was simply embarrassed to have that diminished before her. Her father had been in the same way and had refused - even in his last moments - to show a lack of effort. Even if it was simply to raise his head without aid or to reach out to touch her hand instead of having her come to him. He was utterly bent on proving his defiance, even in some small way.

By the time they got to the second refusals and encouragement to leave, however, Persephone felt her confidence knocked a little. Was it just her specifically that he didn't want tending to him? Did he just, flat out, not like to be looked after? Or did he feel like she was overstepping her bounds in offering him the care that a wife was supposed to show her husband? After all, they had not yet married...

At this notion, Persephone felt a bubble of irritation boil in the bottom of her chest. For, whether they had been unified before the Gods yet or not, Iason has asked her to be his wife. He had made it clear that he wanted her to marry him, regardless of her rank or status now. He couldn't now decide he didn't want her around...

In a flare of feminine pique and the determination to hold him to his word, Persephone obviously and deliberately ignored everything that came out of Iason's mouth and, instead, placed a hand to his shoulder and aided him in sitting forwards, with a calm and determined instruction of - "Sit Up." The expanse of his naked chest - rounded, defined muscles; a sprinkling of dark hair that taped down into a fine line beneath his navel; and the sheen to each rise and fall from his overheated skin was causing the same effect on her bloodstream that it had done a few nights before when they had almost been intimate together. Which was an entirely bizarre reaction given that he was so ill and she was there to look after him, not for desirous purposes.

To distract herself from it, Persephone encouraged Iason to sit up fully, her hand aiding him where strength failed so that he was sitting upright, his legs tangled in the sheets and his back within her reach. She tried to ignore the way the muscles in his abdomen clenched to draw his torso up and then stacked as he found a position upright.

Turning her focus to his back was almost as bad but easier as her features were now hidden from his own gaze. Taking the dampened cloth in hand, Persephone moved a little to reach his back properly and applied fabric to skin. Given that his muscles were probably sore and achy from sickness, she started gentle and moved the warm cloth over the curves of his shoulder blades and down the dip and ridges of his spine. She worked in circles moving from large sweeps to smaller loops over his skin and back. She moved the cloth over the tops of his shoulders and the backs of his biceps, and felt something clench in her lower belly when they seemed to flinch and tighten at her touch. Working her way down his back, Persephone wiped at his sides as she went and graduated down towards where she could see the curve and crease of his buttocks. Realising he was naked beneath the sheets, Persephone felt heat some into her cheekbones but she kept her touch soft, applying only enough pressure to relieve (she hoped) some of the tension on his frame and the ache in his muscles. Unable to go any closer than a few inches from the top of his rear, Persephone moved her process back up to his shoulders and then pushed him back with her fingertips.

The sheets of the bed weren't moist, nor did they need changing and she suspected that the damp tunic on the floor had something to do with that. Either way she was just glad that she wasn't going to have to disrupt the man by trying to change his bed clothes.

Hoping she was slightly more desensitised to Iason's naked form now, she supported him in laying back down, moving the cloth up and over one of his shoulders in order to draw it to the front of his torso. Where her progression hesitated.

Realising that, instead the cloth, her hand was shaking a little, she chastised herself mentally. This is the man you have agreed to marry. You need to be able to deal with him being naked.

With renewed vigour, Persephone's attentions continued and she steeled herself against the thickening in her through and a strange tugging sensation that flickered at her from somewhere very intimate. Ignoring it, she progressed with cleaning the man's collarbone, moved the white cloth across the upper half of his chest, across his pectorals and nipples before moving lower to swipe at each divot and dip in his lower belly. Again, she stopped several inches short of the blankets and wasn't confident that she could go further before she brought the circular motions back up to his shoulders and neck.

Here, her gestures slowed and her gaze met his for the first time since she had started to wash him. Embarrassment had made eye contact near impossible but now, with the wash cloth at the side of his neck and Persephone wiping gently at the line of his jaw, she met his stare and offered a tentative smile. She brushed his hair back from his brow.

He had groomed himself and lost the beard and the longer ruffian-looking hair. Whilst she found herself - surprisingly - forlorn at the loss of the rugged look, she found that Iason clean shaven and looking more like a member of the Taengean royal nobility that he was, was no less appealing than the wilderness wandering wildman he had become on their voyage from Athenia.

"Now..." Persephone began with a swallow and a tone that suggested that that was enough with all the protests and hold ups. "We need to make you as hot as possible, to burn off that fever, yes?" She confirmed with him, her mind too distracted with cleaning his face and how pretty his eyes were (why had she not noticed that before?), to realise the innuendo in her words...

Persephone caught Iason smiling at her and paused as he stopped to press a kiss to the soft inner curve of her palm. Apart from a rough bump on a particular finger of her right hand from the hours she had spent putting stylus to clay or parchment, her hands were infinitely soft - free of the ravages of manual labour that she had never had to partake in and regularly oiled, along with the rest of her to maintain the supple, silken softness of her skin. She had never really thought of the difference of her own touch and that of other women until she and Iason had started to become close - for why would the thought enter her mind if not for what she felt like to someone else?

As his lips pressed to her hand gently, she felt the smoothness of his jawline and the lack of roughness around his lips. It was like being kissed by someone entirely different and new at first, but the movement of his mouth was the same. She found herself smiling with each new discovery she made of what it meant to be physically close to another.

As she finished cleaning his face and chest and stepped back from her patient, the man in question commented on her being a healer. She offered a soft little smile that was made all the sweeter by self-chagrin and a humbleness she wasn't used to showing.

"Hardly..." She told him, as she rinsed out the cloth, re-saturated it with the warm water, and then drained it once more to refresh its use. "Takes no more skill than a washer woman to clean someone down." She said, a blush creeping over her cheeks and her attentions focused on the job at hand.

She handed over the cloth, unable to offer him any further aid in the task.

"You'll have to clean yourself below the er..." She gestured awkwardly to the sheet that covered his legs and waist. "I don't think it would be appropriate for myself." She smiled nervously and then placed the damp cloth into Iason's hands before moving away.

Offering him a little privacy - both for the nudity he was trying to work with and for any signs of weakness he might show in his task, Persephone moved around the bed and headed back towards the balcony doors, drawing them closed once more. She then focused on ensuring that the fire was well laid and burning brightly. The room needed to heat up, allowing Iason to sweat out the fever, undoing everything Persephone had just worked to clean and then requiring her to repeat the practice.

Trying to keep her back to him and ignoring the shifts and struggles of his efforts, Persephone was distracted by his coughing momentarily, turning to look. The movement and the stabbing of the fireplace poker into the wooden blocks had her hand slipping, the inner edge of her first finger sliding down the metal pole towards its hotter end.

Startled, Persephone dropped the prong with a loud clatter. Ash flew and the room was disturbed by a sharp cry and a hiss through Persephone's clenched teeth, as she brought her finger close to her chest. The burn wasn't bad but it had surprised her and moving her hand from where she had clutched it to her breast, she saw an angry red strip along the underside of her finger.

Persephone winced at the pain in her finger - partially because it smarted like the depths of Hades and partially because she wasn't a child, nor person, to injure themselves with any regularity. In fact, she had injured herself exactly once growing up after a trip and fall. The rest of the time, it had been a cluster of paper cuts and little else. Her mind was clearly so unused to dealing with her body's signals for "pain" that this one seemed particularly startling. In truth, however, she could easily see that the burn was not a bad one. There was no curdling of skin, no issuing heat. Only a red mark that would soon pass in time, she suspected.

Iason, however, was not to know this and behaved in a protective manner that was excessive for the situation at hand. Leaping from his bed - she heard his feet hit the floor and some unsteady steps on the wooden slats - and then hurrying over to help.

”Are you alright?”

He asked her with a tone of concern and compassion that only served to bristle her frustrations at him. He didn't need to be leaping to her defence and causing further damage to his own health! She hadn't looked around in the few heartbeats it had taken for him to stumble over to her, but she knew he would be few from cold and fever.

"I'm perfectly fine, Iason." She told the man, shaking out her hot finger and hoping he would take the hint to get back into bed so that she wouldn't have to turn around and face her betrothed who was surely naked.

But her words didn't seem to be enough for him because, as she rose to her feet, her knees firm and steady and her thighs supporting her weight so that she could bring herself to standing with grace and strength, Iason was reaching out to take hold of her wrist in order to assess the damage done to her hand.

Suddenly, a temper that Persephone wasn't used to possessing spiked and she snatched the limb from Iason's hold in a slight but forceful jerk.

"I said, I'm fine, Iason." Her tone didn't rise in volume but there was a definite timbre of anger behind it. Fuelled still further by the awkwardness of now being confronted with his nudity, Persephone felt her cheeks flare hot and her eyes spark as she pulled off her epiblema and pushed it towards his middle, forcing him to catch it in a manner that kept his modesty. Her manhandling didn't stop as she pushed at his shoulder and forced him back towards the bed he had jumped out of, so ready to help her, and refused to give in until he was back beneath the sheets. Persephone restrained herself enough not to voice her thoughts into words but was unable to stop the noises of frustration and anger as she huffed and grit her teeth at having to instil him back into bed.

As soon as he was at least sitting on the edge of the mattress, her shawl across his lap, Persephone spun away from him, her hands reaching for the dish of cold water this time. Taking up another of the small towelling clothes and dunking the white fabric into the water, she felt the coolness over her hot finger and the throbbing in the digit as Poseidon's waters cooled the inflammation.

Frustration, anger and a self-loathing at her own lack of control in that moment, had Persephone biting at her lower lip and her eyes start to shine in a manner that hinted at tears...

”My apologies, I shouldn’t have yelled.” She stated, despite not having actually raised her voice. She had, however, snapped at him in a way that was no doubt hurtful. When all he had been doing was trying to lend her a little consideration and care.

She couldn’t look at him as she kept dunking, dousing and then straining the cloth of its water, over and again…

When Iason offered that she would likely find his family's definition of the word "yelling" different from her own, Persephone felt a flicker of humour that didn't quite reach her face, for - regardless of whether or not they defined her change in tone as equal to a change in volume - Persephone still felt bad for having snapped at him. She felt... elevated. Her chest felt higher, her throat a little harder to breathe through, her skin was becoming hot. It was like she was walking on the tips of her toes, or managing to walk a tightrope, her fear in her mouth and her heart in her throat.

In some ways, it was similar to what she had felt a few nights previous when her whole mind had shut down and sent her on a walk that her reputation was still trying to recover from. The symptoms she was feeling, she knew, to be stresses on her body from high levels of emotion. The only difference now was that, instead of shutting down and going into some form of coma only to be woken to find that she was in a forest in a storm, her mind was - this time - engaging with the emotion. It was using it as fuel to hurry along her thoughts, feelings and tongue as she panicked and snapped in ways she neither wanted nor tolerated.

And yet, she seemed to have no control over them, for the second Iason offered that she didn't have to be in the room - that she could leave - she snapped at him again.

"Stop saying that!" She insisted, her next dousing of the cloth into the water sending little streams of it over the rim and down onto the bureau. Her lack of composure only made her madder. "Just... stop trying to look after me! That's not your job! I'm not some-" She cut herself off from going too far in her angry ramblings, her mind finishing off what her lips wouldn't conclude:

I'm not some helpless thing that you need to look after because she can't do anything right.

By this point, tears had started to seriously threaten and as she brought her hands to a stop, pressed against the bottom of the bowl, the water up to her wrists, Persephone watched as drops fell from her eyes onto the surface of the water and caused expanding ripples. She swallowed and tried to calm her breathing so that she wouldn't snap at the man who was just trying to be kind. Her attempts at speaking calming though only served to turn her timbre quiet and a little fragile. The exact opposite of what she was going for.

"I'm supposed to look after you." She insisted in a low voice that might not have been meant for him to hear, she wasn't sure. "I'm to be your wife. That's what you want me to be. That's all I have now. And a wife looks after her husband. She doesn't... she doesn't sit there useless. You have to tell me when you're ill, you have to let me care for you. You have to let me prove-" She cut herself off again, biting at her lip and keeping her gaze down so that sheets of raven black hair hid the profile of her face.

You have to let me prove I can be of use. Her mind finished for her.

Persephone was immediately contrite. Her feelings had been exasperated before by her guilt that she was angry at the man for purely being kind but now those same feelings seemed to be extinguishing the fire that had burnt too hot for her to contain. Now she just felt... dejected. Not with Iason (okay, perhaps a little with Iason, given that he seemed so intent on ejecting her from the room, for her own sake or otherwise) but mostly with herself and her manner of handling things. This - her going to check on him, look after him and ensure he had the best care in his sickness - was supposed to have been about her proving herself to him as a capable woman who could stand beside him as his wife. It all seemed to have totally failed, in that regard.

Trying to keep ahold of her feeling, Persephone noted quickly that Iason was shivering and how he bundled in under the covers. Removing her hands from the dish of cold water she had never yet used, Persephone dried off her fingers and then moved towards the pile of blankets that she had instructed be brought to the room. Quickly, she busied herself with hefting their lengths and throwing them across the bed, quickly providing Iason with three more layers of warmth.

She then returned to the dish of cold water, finally strained out the cloth she had been tormenting within it and then offered to place it over Iason's forehead and head. It was important that he be heated throughout his body and encouraged to sweat out the fever demon, but the head had to remain cool to avoid headaches.

Once he accepted the cloth, she moved to the hearth in order to throw another log onto it, moving with great awkwardness for she had never laid nor seen to her own fire before.

By the time that was done, there was a soft knock at the door and Persephone opened it to accept a maid with a dray of fruits, warm porridge and some pieces of honey bread. Persephone thanked the woman but didn't allow her inside and made her way to the opposite side of Iason's bed, pleased to note that the room had started to heat up exponentially now that the doors to the balcony had been closed and the hearth was once more roaring.

Sitting herself down onto the empty side of the bed, atop the linens, Persephone spotted the shape that could only be Iason's hand beneath the blankets and reached out, to place her own over the top.

"I am sorry." She told the man in a soft voice, setting the tray down between the two of them so that he could reach for and eat whatever he desired of the array. She swallowed. "If you wish me to leave you, I will."