“I didn’t want to pressure anyone either,” Stephen points out, quick to back up the girl. It had seemed a good enough idea on the surface, even to him. Perhaps an object lesson in him often keeping things too close to his chest.
“I had already been contacted by someone else interested in amputation. So I don’t know; it’s such a delicate path to tread. I want permanence for our rifters, for obvious selfish reasons, and I don’t want people to be inevitably killed by the splinter of magic embedded in them, but the war’s not over. We still need ways to close rifts.”
The irritating thing about all this: he sees both Gwenaëlle and Ness’ reasons for and against, the man planted squarely in the middle and very stressed-out by it.
But when he looks at Cosima, he’s reminded that she’s been whisked away-and-back by the Fade: the only person he’s known personally to have done so, now that Loki’s gone again.
“How about you? Do you think you’d ever do it? I’m not asking as the Head Healer preparing his list of future limbs to chop off,” dryly, “but— I don’t know. As a friend. As a fellow rifter who’s been here a while.”
The question doesn't throw her, exactly, though it does divert her from her initial response to someone else is making concrete plans. She makes a note to circle back and then says:
"Of course I thought about it. Wysteria and I had a conversation, when she first shared her research and I've talked with the other division heads since. I know that my position means people look at me, so I've been kind of conservative in what I said publicly, though I'm planning to change that a bit after this." But to answer his actual question. "No, I'm not going to do it personally. For one thing, rifts are a very real problem and we don't know of any other way to close them. We've got a finite capacity of anchor shards, and the one person who I watched die of an anchor had her shard in her torso, not her hand."
Senna's death was still not a pleasant way to go, but Cosima's also aware that no rifter has yet stayed long enough for that to be the same concern it might be for a native Thedosian.
"Second, as I don't have to explain to you, surgery in Thedas has its own risks. Even if it goes great, losing an arm will create real disabilities, surmountable, sure, but there. And third ... I don't know. The thing that Ness is so afraid of already happened to me. I'm not eager for it to happen again and I hope it's not soon, but it doesn't existentially horrify me the way it seems to do for some people. Fuck, if we're counting Granitefell," sure, let's, "I've also died as well as disappeared. We're in the middle of a war. If our personal safety was the first priority, none of us would do what we do."
“Although I suppose it’s complicated by the fact that this is an element of personal safety that is within our control, technically. If you knew for certain that you had a tumor inside you, wouldn’t you want to slice it out? But… I don’t know, at the end of the day, I still fall on the fact that anchors are unique and uniquely needed. We have more than a few with us still, of course, but maybe we won’t always. And then you get into what people reported in Minrathous, those shard-bearers in Venatori colours? We can’t have that be the only other alternative for helping locals stitch this world back together rather than letting it rip apart at the seams—”
He’s rambling a bit; he tends to go on when he’s nervous, mouth running ahead of his mind, still processing everything out loud. He finally cuts himself off, exhaling, frustrated.
“Anyway. Point being. It’s a nuanced problem, and I don’t want everyone to lop their arms off, but I also don’t want to stand in the way of what someone very determinedly wants to do with their own body. No more cover stories, though.”
"OK, I will say first — we don't know for sure it works. It's a solid theory, well-researched, but we're a small sample size. Rifters have only existed at all for about a decade, as far as we know. I sympathize with people wanting to roll the dice on not disappearing, and there's some good reasons to think it'll work. But also." She takes a sip of her tea, not quite hesitating.
"Look, I'm saying this to you, and I probably won't say it to much of anyone else. I don't have any evidence for what I'm about to speculate, and I don't want to freak anyone out for no reason. But we also don't know, like ... If we succeed in the war and close every single rift, who knows what could happen? The Fade could like ... hard reset and we could all vanish, shards or not. We honestly just don't know. And I know that sucks, but it's the truth. It's not the same as having cancer back home, where there's decades of data and even then we're still learning more all the time."
There's a sympathetic tone to her voice that's not put on. Rifters are, as a group, a lot more knowledgeable about their existence than they were when Cosima first arrived. But there's still more blanks than data in what they know. It's an uncomfortable place to be and she gets that.
"All that said. I am 100% team bodily autonomy. Anyone with the information to make an informed decision has the right to choose for themself. But I should have pushed back harder on the bookshelf thing in advance. And I don't want anyone else taking unnecessary risks if they're going forward." Even if the bookshelf, technically, wasn't the part that had gone wrong, it was easy to picture how it could have been.
“We’re not going to find out more with a sample size of one, either. Much as I don’t want to do it myself, I’ll appreciate eventually having more data to draw on.”
And Cosima might be hedging and cautiously broaching her speculation, but he looks— unsurprised to hear it, actually, with just a rueful twist to his expression and a small tired smile. This must be part of why they get along so well, because: “I’d already considered that part, too. We came through rifts, so it seems— well, if all the rifts stop happening, then we might win the war and then be evaporated for our trouble.”
Evaporated for the second time in his life, but already having gone through it doesn’t make the prospect any less terrifying.
“But since we can’t cross that bridge until we get to it, I figure there’s no use speculating or worrying on… that particular existential horror.”
She can hear, likely, in the taut tension of Stephen’s voice how much he abhors that lack of control; that there’s very little the rifters can do to decide their own fates in this particular regard.
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portalling) wrote2022-04-02 01:17 pm
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no subject
“I had already been contacted by someone else interested in amputation. So I don’t know; it’s such a delicate path to tread. I want permanence for our rifters, for obvious selfish reasons, and I don’t want people to be inevitably killed by the splinter of magic embedded in them, but the war’s not over. We still need ways to close rifts.”
The irritating thing about all this: he sees both Gwenaëlle and Ness’ reasons for and against, the man planted squarely in the middle and very stressed-out by it.
But when he looks at Cosima, he’s reminded that she’s been whisked away-and-back by the Fade: the only person he’s known personally to have done so, now that Loki’s gone again.
“How about you? Do you think you’d ever do it? I’m not asking as the Head Healer preparing his list of future limbs to chop off,” dryly, “but— I don’t know. As a friend. As a fellow rifter who’s been here a while.”
no subject
"Of course I thought about it. Wysteria and I had a conversation, when she first shared her research and I've talked with the other division heads since. I know that my position means people look at me, so I've been kind of conservative in what I said publicly, though I'm planning to change that a bit after this." But to answer his actual question. "No, I'm not going to do it personally. For one thing, rifts are a very real problem and we don't know of any other way to close them. We've got a finite capacity of anchor shards, and the one person who I watched die of an anchor had her shard in her torso, not her hand."
Senna's death was still not a pleasant way to go, but Cosima's also aware that no rifter has yet stayed long enough for that to be the same concern it might be for a native Thedosian.
"Second, as I don't have to explain to you, surgery in Thedas has its own risks. Even if it goes great, losing an arm will create real disabilities, surmountable, sure, but there. And third ... I don't know. The thing that Ness is so afraid of already happened to me. I'm not eager for it to happen again and I hope it's not soon, but it doesn't existentially horrify me the way it seems to do for some people. Fuck, if we're counting Granitefell," sure, let's, "I've also died as well as disappeared. We're in the middle of a war. If our personal safety was the first priority, none of us would do what we do."
no subject
“Although I suppose it’s complicated by the fact that this is an element of personal safety that is within our control, technically. If you knew for certain that you had a tumor inside you, wouldn’t you want to slice it out? But… I don’t know, at the end of the day, I still fall on the fact that anchors are unique and uniquely needed. We have more than a few with us still, of course, but maybe we won’t always. And then you get into what people reported in Minrathous, those shard-bearers in Venatori colours? We can’t have that be the only other alternative for helping locals stitch this world back together rather than letting it rip apart at the seams—”
He’s rambling a bit; he tends to go on when he’s nervous, mouth running ahead of his mind, still processing everything out loud. He finally cuts himself off, exhaling, frustrated.
“Anyway. Point being. It’s a nuanced problem, and I don’t want everyone to lop their arms off, but I also don’t want to stand in the way of what someone very determinedly wants to do with their own body. No more cover stories, though.”
no subject
"Look, I'm saying this to you, and I probably won't say it to much of anyone else. I don't have any evidence for what I'm about to speculate, and I don't want to freak anyone out for no reason. But we also don't know, like ... If we succeed in the war and close every single rift, who knows what could happen? The Fade could like ... hard reset and we could all vanish, shards or not. We honestly just don't know. And I know that sucks, but it's the truth. It's not the same as having cancer back home, where there's decades of data and even then we're still learning more all the time."
There's a sympathetic tone to her voice that's not put on. Rifters are, as a group, a lot more knowledgeable about their existence than they were when Cosima first arrived. But there's still more blanks than data in what they know. It's an uncomfortable place to be and she gets that.
"All that said. I am 100% team bodily autonomy. Anyone with the information to make an informed decision has the right to choose for themself. But I should have pushed back harder on the bookshelf thing in advance. And I don't want anyone else taking unnecessary risks if they're going forward." Even if the bookshelf, technically, wasn't the part that had gone wrong, it was easy to picture how it could have been.
no subject
And Cosima might be hedging and cautiously broaching her speculation, but he looks— unsurprised to hear it, actually, with just a rueful twist to his expression and a small tired smile. This must be part of why they get along so well, because: “I’d already considered that part, too. We came through rifts, so it seems— well, if all the rifts stop happening, then we might win the war and then be evaporated for our trouble.”
Evaporated for the second time in his life, but already having gone through it doesn’t make the prospect any less terrifying.
“But since we can’t cross that bridge until we get to it, I figure there’s no use speculating or worrying on… that particular existential horror.”
She can hear, likely, in the taut tension of Stephen’s voice how much he abhors that lack of control; that there’s very little the rifters can do to decide their own fates in this particular regard.