It’s not so very different from his many late nights at the Gallows library himself, staving off sleep, for the first year-and-a-bit before he got an office of his own. And he’s already restless tonight, so it’s an easy thing for Strange to accept her invitation, get dressed for the brisk autumnal air, cross over to the tower, and climb those familiar stairs.
He’s wearing a new dark-red coat, a nighttime chill clinging to its fabric, but he unbuttons it as he enters the library, warming from the climb. Once he finds Ness’ nest at the back of the library, he pulls up a chair to join her and deposits said enchanted cuff on the table: stylish, inlaid with runes, of Tevene make.
“I’m not sleeping well anyway,” he says, skipping right past the cursory hellos, “so I don’t mind the distraction.”
Hellos are for people who don't have better things to do—Ness reaches across the table and scoops up the cuff, looking it over with bright, curious eyes. She traces her fingers over the runes, turns it this way and that to see each side of it, holds it up to one of the bottles she's set in front of her candle for better light.
"Damn if the Tevene don't know how to enchant things, hm?"
Shame about all the slavery and imperialism and such.
Ness hands the cuff back over to Stephen and rolls up her sleeve with quick, precise movements, holding her bare wrist out to him over the library table. Her curiosity and excitement mean that she's not self-conscious at all about the state of her hands, ravaged as they've been by her compulsive skin picking in the wake of Sarrux.
“I can’t really admit this to a local, but if we could just have all of Tevinter’s enchantments and knowledge without, y’know, everything else—”
The corner of his mouth tugs into a smile as she lays her arm out for access. It’s the sort of thing they’ve bonded over: their willingness to do the work, to make the sacrifices, to test the magic even if it’s risky. There’s nothing better for learning how this cuff works than to simply try it on yourself.
But as Strange’s gaze drifts down to Ness’ hands, there’s a passing cloud over his expression, before he manages to smooth it out. The skin of her hands is broken, ripped and scabbed with impressions of her nails. First warning sign.
Still. He wordlessly reaches out and affixes the cuff, sealing it around her wrist.
And as he does so, there’s something else: the more carefully clinical physician’s mask sliding into place as he sizes her up, looking at her not as a mentor or a friend, but as a doctor. Ness is raccoon-eyed from lack of sleep, which could be normal enough, except that her eyes are even more reddened and bruised than one would expect; her hair dull, skin a little waxy. Her hands are clean beneath his, but desperately picked-over. He’s not a good judge, but she looks notably skinnier than a few months ago, cheekbones a little sharper.
Strange knows what lack of self-care looks like. (His own hair and beard gone unkempt and scraggly in the year after the accident, wild-eyed, clothes in tatters.) But he doesn’t say anything just yet —
He activates the rune instead. Her entire arm from shoulder to fingertips goes nearly completely numb, all sensation and pain fading into nothing, nerves magically dulled. (How does it work? God, how he wishes he knew. Again: shame about Tevinter.)
She notices the change in him but can't place it; while she puzzles over it he turns the cuff on and she is immediately distracted.
"Oh," she almost yelps, startled, eyes snapping from his face to the cuff. "Knots, that's strange."
She flexes her fingers and feels nothing, has to watch her hand to know she'd moved at all. A number of thoughts occur to her all at once—how deep does the numbing go, could she break bone and not feel it, how does it work—and she starts pinching and jabbing at her arm, harder and harder the more she does and feels nothing.
"Do you have a knife? We should test how effective it is."
The saner reaction, perhaps, would be an outright no Ennaris that’s an absurd suggestion, but, again. Their willingness to do the work. Strange can’t say he didn’t do something very similar when he was first testing the workings of the cuff too; it doesn’t have to be a deep cut, after all.
What he does point out first, though, dryly: “You do remember I’m not a real healer? I can’t magically fix you after.”
"Then don't cut in the wrong direction," obviously. She shakes her wrist at him a little, hey, come on, let's go, and then makes a face at how bizarre it is to be gesturing around with a limb she can't even feel.
Strange rolls his eyes at her, fondly beleaguered, and then summons up a small spirit-blade, approximately the size of a letter opener.
Once he’s holding it, however, he realises the flaw in the plan.
Combat is one thing. Utilitarian cutting through rope or bandages is one thing. But he’s remembering he hasn’t held a surgeon’s scalpel in a few years now. It feels— hopelessly familiar, horribly uncomfortable, with a sickening swoop in his stomach. He knows precisely the amount of weight and pressure to break through exactly how many layers of skin and epidermis; but his nerves don’t behave the way they should. Signals misfiring, messages not received, precision lost. That jarring tremor which might (will) send that sharp blade skittering out-of-control, deeper than it ought to, harder than he planned to.
“Hm,” Strange says, thoughtful, scrutinising the canvas of Ness’ pale arm. But he can’t let her do it either, because her senses are even more off. (Maybe this is a bad idea?) But whatever tiny voice of reason piped up just then, it soon vanishes — he has potions, they’ll manage, this isn’t actual surgery — and so he presses that sharp edge to her forearm.
He’s more hesitant than she might expect, however. The touch too delicate, afraid of losing control and pressing too deep into the skin.
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."
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 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?"
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.
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.”
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.
Life had been easier, in a way, when he didn’t care; he could ghost through his days flippant and frivolous, never stopping to worry or fret or show concern for other people. For the longest time, he’d experienced Thedas at a remove: only one foot in the world, the other holding himself at a distance in case he up and vanished someday. Now that he’s all in, however —
Stephen has to admit that something twists, sharp, in his chest at the sight of her distress. He worries. Some of it, at the start, had been because he remembered another teenaged girl who had been under his wing, in need of his assistance, but that’s about where the similarities end. Ness is very much not America. New problems, different problems.
He folds his hands on the table, and simply looks at her. Steady, patient.
“Speaking as someone who’s something of an expert in not being fine,” he starts, “and as someone who’s a consummate workaholic himself— completing all your work isn’t, actually, the most important part. Believe it or not.”
Her expression twists with disagreement she doesn't voice, looking down at her hands. The left, numbed and limp, rests on the table; the right, itching and restless, curls against the wood. Both are, she realizes now, mangled, covered in injuries of her own infliction. Shadows cast from her candle render them alien and bizarre, and she can see a spot that, were she not having this conversation, she might feel compelled to set her nails to.
But the work is the most important part. She's sure of that. There's a war on, and not one over something as petty as land or a butt in a chair. This is a war for the future of the world, it matters. Far more than her hands, at any rate.
"What," she starts, and then reconsiders, and shuts her mouth. Tries harder to puzzle through what Stephen could possibly mean by that,
and comes up with an answer she visibly hates, sitting up straighter in her seat.
"But I'm good at it! I can stop worrying about my hands, I won't pay attention to the itching any more. I—I worked—"
Ness trails off, self-conscious, and slowly slumps in her seat. If Stephen thinks she shouldn't be Quartermaster if she's unwell, no one in their right mind would listen to her instead of him. Riftwatch got by without a Quartermaster for a while, it could do so again—and anyway, it's not as though she has any unique qualification for the job.
But she'd earned this post. She'd applied, and interviewed, and thrown herself into it as hard as she could, trying to earn her keep.
Sadly, defeated: "I know anyone could do it, but I thought I was good at it."
Edited (typos and phrasing!!) 2024-12-18 05:07 (UTC)
“You are very good at it, Ennaris,” Stephen says. Against all his instincts — a comforting gesture rare and alien from him — he reaches out and lays his own scarred hand over hers. A reassuring squeeze of the hand she can still feel. He’ll undo the cuff eventually, but not just yet; he can’t have Ness distracted from this conversation by that pain in the arm once it resurfaces.
“I’m the biggest fucking hypocrite,” the swearing is a sign that he’s letting some more of the formality fall away, he is speaking to her as a teacher and a mentor and the Head Healer and perhaps, finally, as a friend, “but if there is one thing I know professionally, it’s that the body is a machine like any other. Your brain quite literally deteriorates with sleep deprivation. The body requires maintenance, and it can wholly break down if you push it, yourself, too hard without rest and healing.”
It’s very do as I say and not as I do, but still. It’s worth an attempt.
And then, awkwardly feeling his way through the conversation, away from the familiar territory of medical advice and over to something even more delicate: “And Sarrux was… it was a lot, for one of your first combat missions. Needing to take some time to recover doesn’t make you bad at your job.”
If his goal was to avoid distracting her from the conversation, he's failed miserably: the second his hand touches hers, Ness's eyes snap to it, and a buzzing sound starts in her ears, low at first but growing. The last time she'd been touched by anyone as more than an introduction, or a bit of glancing contact—was it Cedric, a few weeks ago in the Quartermaster's office? Did that count? If it didn't count, it was Gwenaëlle, throwing herself into her lap in a fit of dramatics. And if that didn't count, it was Cedric again, months ago, when she was new to Thedas and still afraid of her magic. People don't touch her, they never have.
Stephen's hand is warm. She can feel the scars on his palm, the rough and damaged skin. It trembles overtop of hers, just a little, but he still squeezes so gently and hasn't let go. She's counted seconds, certain he'll pull away eventually, but second after second passes and his hand is still there. Eventually she has to actually engage with the conversation they're having, which necessitates navigating back through everything he said while she was desperately occupied.
"If I don't push myself through it—I'm only worth what I bring to the organization, Doctor. No one will care for me, about me, if I'm not delivering some kind of results."
The thing is, Ness knows how it sounds, even as she says it. Her face scrunches with a distaste for melodrama, for irrationally emotional thinking, but—it feels true, also, in a way most of her more melodramatic thoughts don't once she's said them out loud.
"Sarrux was..." she trails off, far away, before she abruptly forces herself back into the conversation again. "I can stop thinking about it. I'll ignore it. I want to keep my job, please."
Stephen pauses. Squeezes her hand one more time before letting go and leaning back, straightening up in his seat. The look he gives her is— not incredulous or pitying, exactly, but there’s a question mark in his gaze. This isn’t territory he’s particularly good at wrangling, the emotional delicacies of it, but:
“Ennaris,” he says, going straight for the practicalities, “I’m not the seneschal. You’re not losing your job.”
Ness has enough self-control—enough shame—that when Stephen lets go of her hand, she doesn't pout, or try to catch his again to keep holding on. Her lips thin, though, and she looks away from him. She gets the distinct impression she hasn't understood the point of this conversation, and she hates that feeling, the squirming inadequacy and wrong-footed anxiety that roils through her stomach while she tries to figure out what she's supposed to be saying.
"I don't understand." It's an admission that feels as difficult as pulling teeth, offered quietly. "You said I'm performing poorly because I'm unwell. You're not going to tell the Seneschal?"
That's irresponsible, and frankly nothing like the man Ness has come to know. If he thinks she's inadequate to the task—any task—Stephen wouldn't let whatever small affection he might feel for her keep him from doing what was right for Riftwatch and Thedas.
He has enough self-awareness, thankfully, to not roll his eyes, because this is clearly a level of self-loathing anxiety he wasn’t quite prepared to finesse. The sheer inconvenience that Riftwatch needs a therapist but all it has is him; he’s not particularly great at it —
“I’m telling you, as a medical professional, that you need to rest,” Stephen says, “as any and all of us need to rest we’ve been through a traumatic event, and/or when we’ve been pushing too hard.”
And because he knows he’s not exactly innocent of that himself, what with the frenzied research spree Ness hadn’t been privy to, he’s compelled to add: “Nothing is currently on fire. We’re at the end of the year, and Kirkwall is slowing down for the holidays, for that period between Satinalia and Firstday. The war’s still on but that’s always on. I promise that you can slow down, too, in order to do your best work going forward. It doesn’t mean you need to lose your job over it.”
You'd think he'd asked her to move to the Fallow Mire, with the anxious way her face twists, teeth set to chewing on her lower lip. Her thoughts are such a tangle it feels impossible to tug anything useful out of them, a mess of anxiety and intellectualizing and compulsion, and the longer she makes Stephen wait for a response, the worse it gets. This is a conversation, she has to do something, he's going to figure out she's not worth spending the time on—
"Did you—"
Ness cuts herself off, grimacing, face red and eyes on the table. She intended to agree, and leave it at that, and steer them to a new conversation topic. Back to the runes on the cuff, maybe, or showing him how she can prestidigitate stains out of fabric. She still could, probably, if she thought about it enough.
But gods, she wants to know.
"Did you mean it?" She looks up to meet Stephen's eyes, then back to the table, and then, slowly, back to his eyes, searching. Desperately, stupidly hopeful, embarrassing, juvenile, selfish.
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portalling) wrote2022-04-02 01:17 pm
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no subject
Well, if you've tried, I must. Come to the library?
[ ...it's almost midnight and she's in the library and that's fine and normal. he doesn't have to come if he's tired. ]
action;
He’s wearing a new dark-red coat, a nighttime chill clinging to its fabric, but he unbuttons it as he enters the library, warming from the climb. Once he finds Ness’ nest at the back of the library, he pulls up a chair to join her and deposits said enchanted cuff on the table: stylish, inlaid with runes, of Tevene make.
“I’m not sleeping well anyway,” he says, skipping right past the cursory hellos, “so I don’t mind the distraction.”
no subject
"Damn if the Tevene don't know how to enchant things, hm?"
Shame about all the slavery and imperialism and such.
Ness hands the cuff back over to Stephen and rolls up her sleeve with quick, precise movements, holding her bare wrist out to him over the library table. Her curiosity and excitement mean that she's not self-conscious at all about the state of her hands, ravaged as they've been by her compulsive skin picking in the wake of Sarrux.
no subject
The corner of his mouth tugs into a smile as she lays her arm out for access. It’s the sort of thing they’ve bonded over: their willingness to do the work, to make the sacrifices, to test the magic even if it’s risky. There’s nothing better for learning how this cuff works than to simply try it on yourself.
But as Strange’s gaze drifts down to Ness’ hands, there’s a passing cloud over his expression, before he manages to smooth it out. The skin of her hands is broken, ripped and scabbed with impressions of her nails. First warning sign.
Still. He wordlessly reaches out and affixes the cuff, sealing it around her wrist.
And as he does so, there’s something else: the more carefully clinical physician’s mask sliding into place as he sizes her up, looking at her not as a mentor or a friend, but as a doctor. Ness is raccoon-eyed from lack of sleep, which could be normal enough, except that her eyes are even more reddened and bruised than one would expect; her hair dull, skin a little waxy. Her hands are clean beneath his, but desperately picked-over. He’s not a good judge, but she looks notably skinnier than a few months ago, cheekbones a little sharper.
Strange knows what lack of self-care looks like. (His own hair and beard gone unkempt and scraggly in the year after the accident, wild-eyed, clothes in tatters.) But he doesn’t say anything just yet —
He activates the rune instead. Her entire arm from shoulder to fingertips goes nearly completely numb, all sensation and pain fading into nothing, nerves magically dulled. (How does it work? God, how he wishes he knew. Again: shame about Tevinter.)
no subject
"Oh," she almost yelps, startled, eyes snapping from his face to the cuff. "Knots, that's strange."
She flexes her fingers and feels nothing, has to watch her hand to know she'd moved at all. A number of thoughts occur to her all at once—how deep does the numbing go, could she break bone and not feel it, how does it work—and she starts pinching and jabbing at her arm, harder and harder the more she does and feels nothing.
"Do you have a knife? We should test how effective it is."
no subject
What he does point out first, though, dryly: “You do remember I’m not a real healer? I can’t magically fix you after.”
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no subject
Once he’s holding it, however, he realises the flaw in the plan.
Combat is one thing. Utilitarian cutting through rope or bandages is one thing. But he’s remembering he hasn’t held a surgeon’s scalpel in a few years now. It feels— hopelessly familiar, horribly uncomfortable, with a sickening swoop in his stomach. He knows precisely the amount of weight and pressure to break through exactly how many layers of skin and epidermis; but his nerves don’t behave the way they should. Signals misfiring, messages not received, precision lost. That jarring tremor which might (will) send that sharp blade skittering out-of-control, deeper than it ought to, harder than he planned to.
“Hm,” Strange says, thoughtful, scrutinising the canvas of Ness’ pale arm. But he can’t let her do it either, because her senses are even more off. (Maybe this is a bad idea?) But whatever tiny voice of reason piped up just then, it soon vanishes — he has potions, they’ll manage, this isn’t actual surgery — and so he presses that sharp edge to her forearm.
He’s more hesitant than she might expect, however. The touch too delicate, afraid of losing control and pressing too deep into the skin.
no subject
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."
cw self-harm, sort of
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—”
no subject
"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."
no subject
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?”
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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?"
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(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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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Life had been easier, in a way, when he didn’t care; he could ghost through his days flippant and frivolous, never stopping to worry or fret or show concern for other people. For the longest time, he’d experienced Thedas at a remove: only one foot in the world, the other holding himself at a distance in case he up and vanished someday. Now that he’s all in, however —
Stephen has to admit that something twists, sharp, in his chest at the sight of her distress. He worries. Some of it, at the start, had been because he remembered another teenaged girl who had been under his wing, in need of his assistance, but that’s about where the similarities end. Ness is very much not America. New problems, different problems.
He folds his hands on the table, and simply looks at her. Steady, patient.
“Speaking as someone who’s something of an expert in not being fine,” he starts, “and as someone who’s a consummate workaholic himself— completing all your work isn’t, actually, the most important part. Believe it or not.”
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But the work is the most important part. She's sure of that. There's a war on, and not one over something as petty as land or a butt in a chair. This is a war for the future of the world, it matters. Far more than her hands, at any rate.
"What," she starts, and then reconsiders, and shuts her mouth. Tries harder to puzzle through what Stephen could possibly mean by that,
and comes up with an answer she visibly hates, sitting up straighter in her seat.
"But I'm good at it! I can stop worrying about my hands, I won't pay attention to the itching any more. I—I worked—"
Ness trails off, self-conscious, and slowly slumps in her seat. If Stephen thinks she shouldn't be Quartermaster if she's unwell, no one in their right mind would listen to her instead of him. Riftwatch got by without a Quartermaster for a while, it could do so again—and anyway, it's not as though she has any unique qualification for the job.
But she'd earned this post. She'd applied, and interviewed, and thrown herself into it as hard as she could, trying to earn her keep.
Sadly, defeated: "I know anyone could do it, but I thought I was good at it."
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“I’m the biggest fucking hypocrite,” the swearing is a sign that he’s letting some more of the formality fall away, he is speaking to her as a teacher and a mentor and the Head Healer and perhaps, finally, as a friend, “but if there is one thing I know professionally, it’s that the body is a machine like any other. Your brain quite literally deteriorates with sleep deprivation. The body requires maintenance, and it can wholly break down if you push it, yourself, too hard without rest and healing.”
It’s very do as I say and not as I do, but still. It’s worth an attempt.
And then, awkwardly feeling his way through the conversation, away from the familiar territory of medical advice and over to something even more delicate: “And Sarrux was… it was a lot, for one of your first combat missions. Needing to take some time to recover doesn’t make you bad at your job.”
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Stephen's hand is warm. She can feel the scars on his palm, the rough and damaged skin. It trembles overtop of hers, just a little, but he still squeezes so gently and hasn't let go. She's counted seconds, certain he'll pull away eventually, but second after second passes and his hand is still there. Eventually she has to actually engage with the conversation they're having, which necessitates navigating back through everything he said while she was desperately occupied.
"If I don't push myself through it—I'm only worth what I bring to the organization, Doctor. No one will care for me, about me, if I'm not delivering some kind of results."
The thing is, Ness knows how it sounds, even as she says it. Her face scrunches with a distaste for melodrama, for irrationally emotional thinking, but—it feels true, also, in a way most of her more melodramatic thoughts don't once she's said them out loud.
"Sarrux was..." she trails off, far away, before she abruptly forces herself back into the conversation again. "I can stop thinking about it. I'll ignore it. I want to keep my job, please."
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“Ennaris,” he says, going straight for the practicalities, “I’m not the seneschal. You’re not losing your job.”
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"I don't understand." It's an admission that feels as difficult as pulling teeth, offered quietly. "You said I'm performing poorly because I'm unwell. You're not going to tell the Seneschal?"
That's irresponsible, and frankly nothing like the man Ness has come to know. If he thinks she's inadequate to the task—any task—Stephen wouldn't let whatever small affection he might feel for her keep him from doing what was right for Riftwatch and Thedas.
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“I’m telling you, as a medical professional, that you need to rest,” Stephen says, “as any and all of us need to rest we’ve been through a traumatic event, and/or when we’ve been pushing too hard.”
And because he knows he’s not exactly innocent of that himself, what with the frenzied research spree Ness hadn’t been privy to, he’s compelled to add: “Nothing is currently on fire. We’re at the end of the year, and Kirkwall is slowing down for the holidays, for that period between Satinalia and Firstday. The war’s still on but that’s always on. I promise that you can slow down, too, in order to do your best work going forward. It doesn’t mean you need to lose your job over it.”
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"Did you—"
Ness cuts herself off, grimacing, face red and eyes on the table. She intended to agree, and leave it at that, and steer them to a new conversation topic. Back to the runes on the cuff, maybe, or showing him how she can prestidigitate stains out of fabric. She still could, probably, if she thought about it enough.
But gods, she wants to know.
"Did you mean it?" She looks up to meet Stephen's eyes, then back to the table, and then, slowly, back to his eyes, searching. Desperately, stupidly hopeful, embarrassing, juvenile, selfish.
"That I'm good at it. You mean it?"
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