Work Text:
Her phone rang almost as soon as she emerged from the bathroom, her hair wrapped up in a towel and her body enveloped in a fluffy white terrycloth robe. Asseylum picked it up from the counter and checked the caller ID as she walked over to her writing desk, an organized chaos of sticky notes, plot outlines, world-building details, and phone numbers.
She perked up at the name displayed in neat white letters. Sliding the icon over to "talk", she went ahead and put the call on speaker, setting the phone down on her desk as she sat in the chair.
"Slaine!" she greeted with a chipper tone. "How are you this evening?"
"Very well, Miss Allusia," came his formal and polite reply. His voice took on that reserved playful note that she loved so much. "I take it you can already tell what this call is about?"
"You finished reading through my second draft?" gasped Asseylum excitedly. "Already? But I only sent it to you this morning!"
"It's hard to put your manuscripts down, Miss Allusia."
Asseylum rubbed an edge of the towel into her ear, blushing demurely. "So… what did you think?" she asked, eager to hear.
Slaine hesitated. "Well…" he said.
She deflated in disappointment. "You didn't love it?"
"There were parts I loved. Let's just say it needs some work."
"Of course." Chinning up, she grabbed a notebook and ripped out a page to start taking more notes. "So what about it didn't work, this time?"
Papers shuffled on the other end of the line. "You changed the knight's personality from the first draft, made him gentler and less hot-headed, right?"
"Yes?"
"But he still gets into that bar brawl in Chapter 14 and kills everyone in a fit of rage?"
Asseylum frowned, not recalling the scene in question. She opened up her manuscript on the computer and scrolled down until she found it. "Oh!" She shifted in her seat and wrote down the first of her notes. "I suppose I will have to fix that. It wouldn't be in-character for him anymore, right?"
"Right."
"Anything else?" she asked, unwrapping the towel and letting her hair down.
"Where did the horse go in Chapter 4?" Slaine flipped through more papers, sounding very confused. "I don't see a mention of it anywhere after the skirmish with the highwaymen."
This time Asseylum banged her head on the desk with a loud thunk! "I had meant for him to find it after the battle and scold it for running off without him, before setting it free. I had the dialogue written out and everything. It was meant to be funny."
Slaine chuckled, a wonderful sound. "Did you forget to write it in again or did you write it and delete it out of secondhand embarrassment, like with the love scene in Chapter 18?"
Asseylum straightened, shuffling anxiously through her papers. "It's here somewhere… Oh…" she moaned, shifting around the seemingly endless stacks. "Oh dear, I must have misplaced it."
"You really need an assistant, Miss Allusia."
She laughed sheepishly, pushing a wet strand of hair out of her face. "How… how did you like the romance between the knight and the princess?" she asked. "It wasn't too cheesy, was it?"
"Absolutely not, Miss Allusia!" Slaine gushed. There was a warm affection in his voice as he said, "They were engaging and genuinely charming the whole way through. Your audience will love it!"
She almost squealed from how happy the compliment made her. Raising her chin professionally, she scribbled another note down furiously on her pad.
"Next?" she said.
And so, over the next two hours, they hashed out her ideas, smoothed over plot wrinkles, and–occasionally–he teased her about her typos and writing habits.
It was a phone call she never wanted to end.