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Her wings connect to her back in four separate places, two paired; that broken-glass shimmer spidering across the skin nearest where they do, fading to nothing, to the ordinary and familiar texture of her body. Under his hand they twitch and flutter, firm with the scale required to fit a human body, but flexible, light, translucent. Shades of the stained glass she favoured all through this boat,

her hand wraps around the base of his cock and she murmurs, “Well, you don’t feel off-put,” very archly.

The light, exploratory touch is … distracting. Slowly learning this is different to the cacophony of sensations, early, that had mostly been pain, or the way hauling a heavy robe over her shoulders had a largely dulling effect, trapping her wings where mostly what she could feel has been herself. It’s different, allowing herself to expand into this space, and under his hands— the very purposeful way she touches him is almost an exercise in grounding. A point to focus on outside of herself as she is newly mapped.

Despite the appearance of impatience, as soon as the spirit knife is actually in Stephen's hand Ness settles, watching him in silence. Disturbing a professional at work is a fool's errand, and she's more than willing to believe Stephen is making calculations of pressure and angle that she doesn't have the knowledge to even consider.

Patience wears thin, though, when the knife finally touches her skin. She doesn't feel the cut, but then, would she have? Even without the cuff, she doubts it. It must be his tremor that concerns him, and that's easily accommodated for: Ness pushes her chair back so she can better stand and lean over the table, inspecting the precise angle at which Stephen holds the knife, the exact placement of his fingers to guide its movement.

Satisfied with her observation, and without a word or barely a thought spared for permission or instruction, she lifts the knife from his hand and pulls her numbed arm back toward herself. Her angle is precise, the placement of her fingers a passable if inexact mirror for his as she sets the blade to the shallow cut he made and deepens it severely with a swift slice.

"Oh," she breathes, watching her own blood start to well in an unfeeling wound. Her mind races, adrenaline and fascination and a little horror drowning out any objections Stephen may be trying to voice. "Not even an itch! How do they make these?"

A thought occurs, fevered, and she raises the knife again.

"You know anatomy, yes? You can tell me if my bones look right inside."

It’s an effective redirect, immediately wrenching loose a hitch of breath, a strangled noise into her neck. “I’m definitely not not interested, if you must ask,” Stephen says, but there’s that thread of humour in it, just as warm, just as teasing. He runs his hand down that strip of bare skin between the wings (her wings, her, yes, they’re a part of her), following the dip of her spine and lower back and down, gauging a sense for the space they take up.

And if she wanted to regain some control over him and thus her environment, this is indubitably a good way to do it: Stephen’s head tips against Gwenaëlle’s, teeth grazing the skin of her neck, instantly lost in that familiar feeling of her hand around him. While he curls one arm low around her back — he knows she likes that feeling of being held, encircled — his free hand moves to mirror her, with the slide of his fingers between her legs.

“I’ve missed you,” he admits into her skin. “I know I never lost you. But, still—”

"Qun has less trouble with this," For reasons he might guess (others he might not). The saarebaas are closely-watched. Their chemists are skilled. "But harder, off mainland."

Anywhere the Imperium has touched. She tucks that streak of white back behind an ear, and doesn't blink for the old lance of pain.

"Microscope comes through Rift, yes?"

But, still. But even as she hasn’t been much further than his arm’s reach for weeks, she’s been remote in a way that he’s almost never known her to be— she’d been an almost aggressively open book from that first day, coming out swinging, loosing an arrow from the balcony adjoining what is now their bedroom. The small ways she’s held him, too, at a distance lately have been a gulf between them and it’s a physical relief to relax into him, to murmur,

“I know,” because she knows exactly what he’s talking about. Because she’s missed him, too, and saying so felt more selfish for being — her doing. (Sarrux’s doing. But no one responsible for that place is left to care; wouldn’t, if they were. And it feels like her responsibility, like things settled on her shoulders or beneath her shoulder-blades tend to.) “I know,” softer, a hitched breath where his fingers find her wetter than she’d realised, the slow build of heat between them winding taut inside her. The feel of his arm around her is different, her wings newly sensitive to the heat of his body and even where the lower set catches the scrape of the hair on his arm. They’re deceptive in their size, the length of about half her torso, seeming bigger when spread out but folding low; folded down, they rest just at the crest of her ass.

Everything feels heightened by the newness of touching this new part of her, by the raw sense of reconnection, and she leans back to chase his mouth with her own, one hand gripping the outside of his thigh and the other working the grip she has on his cock in a way that could reasonably be described as emphatically. The flutter of her wings over his arm is as strange as the way her hips shift to encourage his fingers inside her is familiar—

“I still need you,” she murmurs, and she means more than this, but: this, too.

“Oh my god, Ennaris—”

The sorcerer gives a yelp, fully horrified now; even as there is a small part of him busily paying attention in the back of his mind, noting that did work like a charm actually, she didn’t react at all despite the deeper cut,

and he instantly interjects his hands in the way of the blade, preventing her from any more ill-advised slicing. If Ness won’t stop for herself, he’s certain she’ll stop for his own precious busted hands.

Once that movement is stilled, he knows he could try to wrestle her for the blade, but the easier solution is this: he severs his connection to the Fade. And the knife simply vanishes from her hand, winking out of existence, before he tugs on the magic again and it re-appears in his own hand while blood still wells up from the cut, rising like a tide, starting to spill over and drip down her arm.

Thanks to his initial placement, it’s well-situated enough that she didn’t nick an artery or vein, but it’s deep. Too deep. His movements quick, now launching back into a different autopilot, Strange slices through the white sleeve of his shirt and rips a whole strip loose, now reaching forward and starting to wind it around the girl’s forearm to try to stem the bleeding.

“You can’t feel a thing,” he chides, “which is not exactly the time to start carving a knife into yourself—”

“You still have me,” Stephen murmurs back, voice ragged with each quicker touch. He had beaten his hands bloody against the door to get back to her. Eventually blown the doors down. Ripped apart those mutated enemies with raw magic and fury; angrier than he’s ever been in Thedas, more outright terrified than he’s ever been in Thedas. They’d brought down the cavern that had done this to her.

But he had not rescued her. He’d been too late to stop this from happening to her.

And yet he’s still here. He’s here, mouth crashing against Gwenaëlle’s, thumb finding and circling her clit in that familiar cant of her hips. The wings remain a new variable; when he crooks his fingers a particular way, he finds that the wings flicker with movement, a shiver that starts in her spine and roils out to that dragonfly-buzzing. Reactive.

And they’ve already had to work around his limitations for a while, adjusting position and avoiding putting too much direct weight on his hands, but now there’s a faint thoughtful crease between his brow, working the problem and realising there’s a new consideration:

“This might be uncomfortable with you on your back,” he points out. He’d learned to carry his weight on his forearms when she wanted him above her and to fuck her into the mattress, and it had brought their bodies even closer— but now, if they did that, those delicate wings would be pinned beneath her, crushed.

But they’re adaptable; they’ll continue to find a way to make it work for both of them. He just wants to still be touching her.

Edited (typo spotting) 2024-12-14 04:42 (UTC)

"You barely cut me, you were too worried!" because of course she feels no shame over what she's done, but she doesn't make his new task any harder, either—she holds her arm still for his attentions, watching her own blood soak into the white of his shirt. She can't see the wound quite as well anymore, but she wants to look, wants to wipe the blood away and see for herself—

"Do I look right? My tissue, the meat of me, is it—am I still—"

She huffs in frustration, stymied by the inaccuracy of all the language available to her.

"Trade doesn't have a good word for half-elven. This is very frustrating."

Almost absentmindedly: “They call it elfblooded, here, although the distinction seems biologically moot—”

Strange tears out another strip and cinches it tighter, another layer, wrapping it as tidily as he ever did any bandages. His shirt’s a mess, his own forearms clumsily bared. He looks down, assessing until the bloodloss eventually staunches and slows down and the outside of the makeshift bandage isn’t wet anymore, before he finally looks up at her face.

His concern from earlier has sharpened. Why does she want to examine her meat?

“You’re half-elven? And your tissue looks fine, Ennaris. Why wouldn’t it be?”

"I am aware of my biological distinction here, Doctor, thank you—"

Are you humansplaining elfiness to her—

"Three-quarters, technically." Not that it matters here. The hand Ness can still feel raises toward her ear, but she drops it before she can touch the rounded cartilage. "My father was an elf. Mother was half. But an elf and and elfblooded human still just make an elfblood, here."

And she's been dealing with that fine, thanks. Better recently, anyway, and better than she's been dealing with... some other things. Her fingers twitch toward the bandage, but she knows better than to actually try to lift it.

"I keep seeing grey patches on my skin, like in the Pass." She's not looking at Stephen, but it's not out of shame, really. Thinking about it, the waxy grey she keeps finding everywhere—her hand itches, and she raises it to her face to inspect it. "Around my nails, up my arms. I wake up sometimes and I feel like my fingers look too long, or... it looks right? Normal?"

It could not be more obvious from the way that the open mouthed gasp of her breath becomes a pout— she hadn’t considered that yet, and for a moment, her very real dismay is almost comical. The wheels turning as she tries to come up with a way that that isn’t problem — but there’s a difference, plainly, between the way she’s been binding them securely beneath her clothes and the prospect of crushing them beneath her body weight and his, and the

inevitable friction involved.

It’s hard to maintain petulant displeasure when he crooks his fingers like that and she can’t, breathing in deep in a way that seems to roll out through the shiver of her wings. Her thighs spread wider across his lap and she lets her frown go, her chin tipping up as she makes herself relax again, relax into this moment and not fuss over what was or won’t be.

“I could,” she starts, thinks, sighs— “I could roll over,” on her knees, or the both of them stretched on their sides; how much of the rest of her life is going to be finding somewhere for her limbs? probably all of it. Probably some of it, until that becomes natural and familiar, and she is a new person, again, again, again.

“Yes. So it’s our only one, and precious to us; don’t even think of absconding with it.” It doesn’t sound much like the man’s genuinely worried about her doing that, but he has to mention it: old reflexive paranoia, considered contingencies, all rearing their heads. Doctor Strange continues at an amiable patter; it doesn’t take much to get him started, animated by the simple enjoyment of talking to someone who asks questions about the right things.

“We’re trying to negotiate contracts with some glassmakers in Serrault to build more lenses and some craftspeople to to retro-fit the technology — the principle’s similar enough to telescopes, just the opposite, and you need to compound the lenses further — but it’s slow-going. Trade’s expensive these days.”

This feels like a safe enough thing to admit to a Qun agent, right? … Right?

Were this any other context, he might have chased down that topic a little longer — so Ness is elfblooded, like Gwenaëlle, who has her own complicated feelings about that very topic too — but her next words sweep it aside. So for now, the detail about the girl’s parentage is filed away, jotted down in that ever-growing mental dossier titled Ennaris Tavane.

(Some weeks from now, when he next reaches for that collection of studiously memorised details, it’ll be empty.)

But for now, Strange scoots his chair closer. The cuff’s still on, and active. The wound’s going to ache like hell once she removes it. “I’m going to prescribe you a potion, to heal that faster,” he says, first, nodding to the stained makeshift bandage and focusing on the most pressing logistics. And then —

“Can I see your hands?”

He won’t dismiss Ness’ fears right off the bat. All the rifters’ mutations had faded so much sooner, but the sample size of their group was small enough that it’s still worth verifying with his own eyes, just in case; he shares a bed with someone with faerie wings, after all.

"Is it prescribing if I can just grab one from the stores myself?"

She is the Quartermaster, after all, responsible for outfitting the organization. If anyone has access to their potions and tinctures, it's her.

Her hand is held out for his inspection almost before he's finished asking, though she still flexes and clenches her fingers, trying to alleviate the itch that's begun plaguing them. She hasn't moved her cuffed arm, but she was holding it out anyway, since he was working on the bandage. Both hands show evidence of irritation and skin picking, and some of the injuries are worse than others—she's torn strips of skin from the cuticle down to the knuckle on more than one finger, and at least one is recent enough to still be tender if he touches it, inflamed and angry.

Ness, up to this point un-self-conscious about her hands, suddenly feels... uncomfortable to have them under such scrutiny, and she shifts in her seat, unaccountably nervous.

It’s a process. You remake yourself and are remade, over and over and over.

“All of the above,” Stephen says, warmly, his free hand tracing her jawline. A promise for the future. “We have time. We’ll try it all, eventually.”

But for right now— That practiced twist of her Gwenaëlle’s hand is simply too effective, they can’t be over before they’ve begun, so Stephen regretfully breaks contact and stills her movement in order to reach for the edges of his shirt and tug it off, throwing it somewhere in the room. Considering the options. On their sides feels like it could be intimate, languorous; a way to slowly ease awake on another morning, maybe, sprawled over each other with the languid press of him inside her,

but he’s a little hungrier than that, this particular morning. Their weeks apart stoking this starvation.

So he kisses her again, a decision taking shape. “Roll over,” he says (commands; he’s learned, too, that she likes it when he does that), and then there’s movement and readjustment in the bed. Gwenaëlle tipping back off his lap, the shimmy to kick his trousers further loose, his wet fingers against her hip, his cock hard and straining as he kneels behind her.

He remembers, all too well, what that had been like himself. He’d had entire teams of strangers working on and looking at his hands, for weeks and months; even after all the surgeries were over, the uncomfortable intimacy of a physical therapist holding them, examining them, massaging them.

So Strange tries to keep it as clinical as possible. His face is neutral as he looks them over: a medical assessment, an examination. When he pushes up her sleeve on the other arm, he finds a dime-sized picking injury on the back of one wrist. Skin flayed and torn and picked-over, still. Compulsive tendencies, says a voice in the back of his head. Dermatillomania.

Because it’s normal skin. Not waxy gray, not patchy, not—

(turning into an illithid)

and it’s almost so apparent that he’s annoyed at himself for not having caught this sooner, for having been so self-absorbed that he didn’t notice. His mouth sets, and he lowers her hand back to the table.

“Ennaris, you’re fine. I don’t see anything like how you looked at the Pass. Your hands are fine.”

Except for the places where they are decidedly not fine. He weighs over how to phrase it, before settling for simply asking: “Ennaris, how are you doing?” And before she can wave it off with quick platitude, he presses, “Sincerely. Genuinely. How are you doing. You don’t seem well.”

We have time is more soothing from a man who rewound it to buy her more than it might otherwise be — he’s a rifter, this war never ends, her ex-husband doesn’t even remember their relationship. How much fucking time do they have?

He says they do and she believes him.

She lets herself believe him, lets herself do that without unromantically picking it apart, just taking it as read and rolling over when he tells her to, her elbows and knees finding purchase in the bedding, the latter sliding apart as her hips rise, exhaling when she feels him against the back of her thigh. Her wings shift as she spreads them out, fluttering in her own peripheral vision in a way that hasn’t stopped being a little disorienting yet, and they flex in tandem with the way her cunt clenches around nothing, impatient.

The way her shoulders shift, he almost certainly knows what she’s doing before her hand is visible between her legs, a thing it had taken approximately thirty seconds the first time they’d ever done this to figure out he enjoys—

“We haven’t got to be anywhere today, right?” is probably not actually as true as she’d like it to be, but right now it feels impossible anything else could be as important.

“It’s a holiday,” Stephen says, and it is in fact the first holiday here he’s ever been able to savour, or had any reason whatsoever to care about the fact that work can wait and he doesn’t need to be anywhere and the infirmary can stay closed today. Come hell or high water.

“I’ll throw a fireball at anyone who fucking disturbs us—”

Compared to Gwenaëlle’s usual foul mouth, he doesn’t often curse to the same extent, which is how you know he means business.

His hips rock, slicking his cock with her; his thighs pressed against hers, knees spread and wings spread, hands braced against her hips; before he slowly sinks himself into her and plunges in to the hilt, re-accustomising to the sensation, the hot heat and pressure, the small ragged noise that wrenches out of him, the wanting, before he eventually starts to move.

His fireball threat makes her laugh, a sound that becomes something else and breathier as he sinks inside her; she grips the bedding underneath and presses her forehead into her arm, half-aware of the way her wings flick and flutter in simultaneous response. Reactive, as noted, alike to the way her toes curl against the outside of his calves or the particular arch of her back. That shuddering shiver runs through every part of her as he rocks in and out of her,

“That feels,” a little unsteadily, “I can feel—”

Just this once, she may not be talking about his cock.

It’s sort of strange, like— the way it feels to have magic used close to her. Or those very particular, pricey enchanted toys she’d always sort of thought were a bit overrated, all things considered, but the way that they might be made to vibrate, her efforts to keep her wings spread and out of the way are complicated by the way she can feel herself reflexively … something. That more insectoid buzzing, where often she keeps herself still, or bound, or slow when she’s conscious of it.

Stephen hits just that right, perfect spot inside of her and she doesn’t mean to slap him in the face—

Docteur Strange, might I ask a moment of your time? Monsieur Isaac ( these mages refuse surnames to spite her, perhaps, ) has brought a matter to my attention I believe will be of relevance to yourself, also.

The way your toes might involuntarily curl, your leg might quiver and cramp, the way your fingers press hard enough to bruise: a reflexive spasm, muscles seizing with pleasure, as Stephen snaps his hips against hers in growing urgency but then the wings thrash and flail and whack him in the face and he’s spluttering, one arm rising to try to ward his face, jerking in surprise. That ramming movement simply makes them flutter more, buzzing,

and instead of the extremely enjoyable sight of the curve of Gwenaëlle’s spine and ass, now he just has a whole faceful of her wings unfolding to their full uncontrolled breadth, all glittering and green.

It throws off his entire rhythm, grinding to a halt still buried inside her, gasping “Jesus christ”, and trying to gently bat them out of the way without hurting her.

( Strange feels her pain. He keeps itching for a surname whenever he’s talking to Isaac. )

Y’know, ( contemplatively, ) I think I’m starting to develop a healthy fear of you reaching out to me. A relevant matter?

As unexpectedly lovely as Gwenaëlle-made-dragonfly might have turned out to be, it’s difficult to appreciate the beauty of nature when it’s smacking you repeatedly in the face. The bright early morning light catches just at the perfect angle to prism a rainbow, opalescent, through that gleaming wing in the same moment, adding an exciting element of half-blinding him to boot—

“Is— fucking hell, is, are you alright—?”

Wrangling that sentence together takes some real effort, levering herself up from where she’d sunk onto her elbows and making a concerted effort as he stills to do the same, flattening her wings to her back almost chastened, edgy little flickers at the outside like it’s some strain to keep them there. And— it is. It’s reflexes and muscles that she hasn’t really been learning to use, that haven’t existed for longer than the matter of weeks they’ve not been doing this, it’s trying to figure out what the sensations through her back are actually telling her at the same time as she’s tightening around him,

they’re not exactly the sensations she’s most focused on. She flattens her hands on the bed, lifting up enough to look back over her shoulder, catching her breath, arousal mingling with abashed embarrassment and some genuine concern.

( there’s a very small sound on the other end of the crystal that might have been a laugh if they were that sort of acquaintances, and her answer is coloured by that amusement, )

Yes, I think so. He has proposed that it would be wise to experience the effects of magebane under safely controlled circumstances— to be better prepared, should it occur elsewhere. I thought it would be appropriate that such circumstances be under your supervision, as it seems within your purview both as our head healer and a researcher of some voraciousness,

( she’s standing by that description, )

and, further, it may be wise for you, also, to do the same.

It's good that Stephen pre-empts her; her kneejerk I'm fine gets swallowed by his pressing, and it gives her time to acknowledge: fine people probably don't tear and pick at their skin until it bleeds. Fine people probably don't cut their arms open and then immediately try to do it again, only deeper this time, so they can examine their own bones. That's not the behavior of someone who is, by any stretch of the imagination, well.

Knowing that doesn't make it any easier to know what to say though, and she flounders, unsure.

"I'm... completing all my work?" is her first offering, but before she even looks at his face she knows Stephen's going to be making that exasperated expression he gets when someone is wasting his time. He asked a sincere question, and he expects a sincere answer. She has to do better.

"I thought I was alright," that's a start, and it's true, "but I... I'm increasingly preoccupied with making sure I haven't begun mutating again, or... feeling like I never stopped? My eyes, my, my hands—"

She digs a knuckle into her eye, distracted by an itch there. Replays what she said as her hand falls back to the table.

"I'm completing all my work," she repeats, this time with a distinct note of pleading as she sits back down across from him.

faderift inbox.

when it’s been nsfw for a minute,

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cw self-harm, sort of

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crystal. gently backdated before forgetti spaghetti.

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