faderift | [OPEN] You were my direction and my roots.

Entry tags:

[OPEN] You were my direction and my roots.

WHO: (open) Myr and everyone; (closed) Myr, Vandelin, and Kit
WHAT: Some days in the life of a busy blind mage as he settles in.
WHEN: First part of August
WHERE: All around the Gallows.
NOTES: no one here but us elves

i.

Myrobalan had hardly put his request in to Casoferrazza before the harried seneschal had given him his approval and chased him off again. The man's haste to get the mage out of his hair had been a little alarming, but Myr isn't about to question what small blessings the Maker dealt out to him.

He places the first of his glyphs on the door to his double room and builds outward, weaving a network of sound and magic he can follow like a spider does the strands of its web. One glyph by every room he needs to know, a matching pair at the end of every major hallway. They're only active when he's close, glowing green and chiming softly in an assortment of different tones; otherwise, they fade to near-transparency and fall silent.

Still, they're a fairly obvious indicator of where he's been and where he hasn't in the three days it takes him to map the length and breadth of the Gallows, measuring his steps and marking what he needs to find again.

[OOC: Myr will be everywhere but the inside of the templar quarters and the upper levels of the mage quarters; feel free to encounter him anywhere but the dungeon.]

ii.

It's been no more than two weeks since the Hasmal contingent arrived and Myr's already out of sync with the waking life of the Gallows.

It isn't something that troubles him much any longer. His gutted Circle had grown used to him being awake all hours of the night and asleep much of the day, or elsewise--he contributed as much as they all did to their survival, so what of it?--so there had been little reason try and repair his schedule.

Besides, it's afforded him certain opportunities for peace and quiet he couldn't have otherwise. He'd marked how some of the more dedicated templars (and at least one knight-enchanter) were up well before dawn to attend to their own conditioning in the courtyard; how it rang with blades or hurried activity at all other hours of the day and into the torchlit evening.

The second hour after midnight, however, sees it standing empty, and Myr slips out into the darkness as gladly as a man going to meet a lover. He takes a moment to stand without the door of the mage tower, muting the glyph there so he can enjoy the velvet silence of the night. Then he begins to pace the courtyard in a regular grid, marking obstructions as he finds them. It isn't so hard like that to locate the space others have cleared for their own practice and bound it in his mind.

Only once he's sure it will be large enough for his own needs does he strip to the waist, folding up his light robe and laying it aside outside one corner of the practice area. Then he retreats back across cleared space, staff in-hand, counting his steps to the center where he stops and crisply salutes an imaginary opponent. The ritual gesture flows easily into the first of the forms, the patterns of attack graven into his muscle-memory.

Out here, unwatched, in the predawn darkness, he becomes for a little while the creature he was meant to be.

iii. (closed)

While they're harder to notice when Myr's not nearby, the locator glyphs aren't invisible at rest. They won't be so hard to follow back to their source at his room in the mage tower, where the glyph on the door gleams faintly in mute indication of the mage's presence.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

There's no response to the first knock for nearly a minute.

Then a muted thump, a muffled noise that might be a yawn, and a sleepy, "Coming. One minute."

It's actually somewhat more than a minute by the time Myr gets to the door and opens it, clad in that breed of generally shapeless clothing most suited to sleep. His hair's more disheveled than usual, and he looks tired beneath the blindfold.

Not quite so tired he can't manage to be pleasant, though. "Can I help you?"

There does appear to be something a little bit off about Vandelin's demeanor during their walk from the library, but Kit has decided that if Vandelin wanted to discuss whatever is eating at him, he would have brought it up by now. Kit knows when to leave well enough alone, and suspects that this is one of those times.

At the lengthy silence that follows his knock, however, he glances back at Vandelin with a dubious look on his face. "Maybe he's out?"

But then: "Coming. One minute."

And, after rather a longer wait than a minute, the door opens to reveal Myr, sleep-mussed and a little bit groggy, but nonetheless doing his best to put on a kind face for the guests he can't see.

"I hope so, salroka," he replies, smiling, and hopes Myr can recognize his voice. He gestures back to Vandelin, then adds, "Your cousin said I could come talk to you about, um, healing magic."

Myr was never given to napping in the middle of the day before, in all the years they lived together in close Circle quarters, and it's just one more off-kilter thing that makes Van feel like something is very, very wrong. If he'd known they would be disturbing Myr from sleep, he would have suggested another time, or maybe bitten the bullet and made plans ahead, but how could he have known?

He hasn't laid eyes on his cousin in three years, not since the day they'd found themselves on opposite sides of the uprising, and his stomach churns at the sight of the blindfold. It's one thing to know in the abstract how he came to be blinded; worlds different to see the evidence of it, the scarring just visible under the edges of the fabric, forcing him to think of the physical detail of the act, to wonder how Myr did it--

He can't trust himself to keep his voice steady if he says anything, and when Vandelin can't trust that, he stays silent as the grave. He stands statue-still and impassive just outside the door and makes a valiant attempt to collect himself.

Edited 2017-08-02 21:42 (UTC)

There's no mistaking Kit's voice for anything else, and Myr brightens visibly to hear it. It's one thing to be pulled out of bed for strangers; another for the firmest friend he's so far made here in the Gallows. He opens his mouth to invite the dwarf--and whoever it is standing over there being so quiet behind him--in, when Kit clarifies exactly who sent him. "...Oh," is all he manages at first. And, "Is that him with you?"

There's a certain trepidation in his tone that he'd've been able to hide, to swallow, if he weren't so sleep-fogged. Van's conspicuous silence--if it is Van back there--isn't helping it any; it makes him feel a little like he's opened his door to find an ambush waiting. (It's both irritating and heartening to learn that Van's already on good terms with Kit besides.) Though--and here the machinery of his mind finally clicks into motion--it's damned unlikely that Van would have told Kit anything about the state of things between them, which means Kit--dear sweet creature he is--had no idea the sort of potential disaster he was engineering by bringing Van along.

That still leaves the mystery of why Vandelin would have come along at all only to play statue. It doesn't fit well into what Myr knows of his cousin--but then they're in uncharted territory between them now, aren't they?

Seconds tick past as all this considering goes on, and Myr's own instincts for politeness take over the instant his pause has gone on long enough to be really rude. "--Though if it is, I'm glad to hear you two are getting along that well. Come in, the both of you, and tell me what it is you need to know about healing magic."

He steps back from the door, gesturing them inside. There's his chair by the desk and his absent roommate's chair, and his bed unmade and rumpled from restless sleep. Enough for all of them to find somewhere to sit.

That initial pause, coupled with Vandelin's ashen-faced silence, communicates much, and Kit feels like he's just stumbled right into the midst of something he has no right to be involved in. He shoots Vandelin a questioning look; why, why did he offer this, if this was clearly the last place in Thedas he wanted to be?

"Yeah, he is," he answers Myr, and tries to keep his tone light for the benefit of everyone, but it's kind of a hollow attempt. The nug is out of the bag now, as the saying goes.

"Come in, the both of you, and tell me what it is you need to know about healing magic."

He hesitates before following, glancing back at Vandelin one more time, but Myr has already gestured them both into his room. Kit presses his lips into a thin line and limps across the threshold, and seats himself in one of the vacant chairs. "It's, uh," he begins again, almost having forgotten the reason for their visit. "It's about my leg."

This was all a terrible miscalculation. He'd weighed his options and thought it would be preferable to be here to defend himself against whatever side of the story Myr might want to advance, though Van would be on the defensive and at a disadvantage either way--but he hadn't accounted for how it would actually feel to see him again.

He's got to snap out of it. He'd been trying to put Kit at ease, damn it, and he might as well have tied him up and tossed him into the captive magister's cell for all the chance he's got of that now. He clears his throat, pulling his usual air of nonchalance around him like a cloak, and focuses on the wall over Myr's shoulder in the hopes that it'll appear to Kit as if he can actually look at him.

"I should have asked ahead of time, I know," he says, in a tone that implies that he simply forgot to, or some such. "And I didn't mean to wake you up, I'm sorry. I just thought that if Kit wanted an alternative to spirit healing, you'd be the best one to ask. I know it's not exactly your specialty, but he doesn't need much--just a little boost to the mending."

"So the limp's recent," Myr notes aloud, closing the door and returning to his bed to settle on the edge of it. He'd certainly heard Kit's uneven gait, but had assumed it an old injury not worth remarking upon.

He's about to ask after the nature of the wound--aaaand there's Van jumping into the breach to take up the burden of the explanation. Myr turns his face toward his cousin to show he's listening, schooling his own expression into something faintly cheerful. This...is the Vandelin he knows, for all the world as if the years apart haven't changed a thing about his cousin. So they're playing it this way--though of course they would, before company--and acting as if neither of them hesitated on being confronted with the other. As he has so many times in the past, Myr defers to Van on this one.

...Mostly. "It's fine," he replies, lightly. "You wouldn't've known I'm sleeping odd hours lately." He hasn't had a chance to get his temporal bearings yet, but it can't be so late in the day either of them would reasonably have thought he'd been asleep. On that thought, he runs a hand through his tousled hair, trying to restore it to a semblance of order.

"And I can likely manage that, though how much I can do depends on the nature of the injury." He considers pursuing that odd little thread about needing an alternative, but thinks better of it; now is not the time to be digging into anything anyone finds better left unsaid. (Even if it would satisfy a small vindictive part of him to hear there's a downside to spirit healing; he'd heard its praises sung enough to get sick of it back in Hasmal, along with the spirit healers' subtle condescension that creation magic wasn't as good as what they did because it didn't heal so effortlessly.)

He dismisses all that maundering with a shake of his head, turning to address Kit. "So. Tell me a little more about what happened to your leg, and I'll see what can be done to fix it."

Edited 2017-08-03 03:40 (UTC)

It wouldn't be quite right to describe Kit's posture or demeanor as surly; there's not enough irritation or anger in his expression to make that word fit. But he's very quiet and still while Vandelin and Myr exchange their words with each other, and he looks between them as though he's trying to figure out a puzzle with most of the pieces missing.

There's still some affection there between them, at least, but sometimes that can just make things worse.

"So. Tell me a little more about what happened to your leg, and I'll see what can be done to fix it."

"Got gored by an ogre in the Deep Roads," he says, his tone weirdly light considering the subject matter. He starts to roll up his pants leg, hitching it up just past the mid-point of his thigh to where the bandages are secured around the injury. There's plenty of other scar tissue there to be seen by Vandelin, though Myr wouldn't be able to; a life spent in the Legion is a life spent courting death daily, and it's so commonplace to Kit now that he doesn't think to find anything about his collection of battle scars unusual. "The physickers stitched it up, and I've been keeping poultices on it the last few weeks. I'm good to get around for most tasks, but I'm going down to the Kocari Wilds with that arcane advisor and the last thing I need is to get caught in combat unable to move my leg."

He glances quickly at Vandelin, and then away. ...Yeah, maybe he should've mentioned that to his friend. Oops.

Myr knows too well what a light touch it takes to chasten Vandelin--or provoke him, either way. In this case, it does something of both. He sets his jaw in a way his cousin can't see anyway and lets the subtle jab go without outward comment, though it's enough to make him seethe inside with a so that's how you want it to be, then.

But Kit gets the privilege of explicit displeasure. Vandelin looks sharply over at that admission, tempering his initial dismay quickly, but far from pleased with this development nonetheless. "So apparently this is a time-sensitive thing after all," he says, all silky sarcasm. "Good to know. I didn't realize there was a risk of getting pinned down by whatever makes the Korcari Wilds infamous, but I understand that being on a strictly need-to-know basis."

It's easier to round on Kit and take it out on him than confront his cousin. In a way, he's grateful for the excuse and the distraction.

It takes a specific combination of entitlement and bad attitude to get under Kit's skin enough to the point where he'll lash out. Vandelin isn't there yet by a long shot--and Kit knows he's not at his best given the palpable tension in the room already--but that comment earns him a look from the dwarf that is sharp, difficult to read. (Approximating it, it's somewhere along the lines of, 'I don't owe you shit, man,' and also, 'wait, maybe I want to owe you shit.' ...It's a complicated look.)

He presses his lips together and says nothing, then drops his gaze down to the top of his crutch.

"Vandelin." Myr can't know it, but there's something of his father in his tone, a hint of the elder Shivana's quiet firm way of rebuking his fractious son. "Save criticizing his timing for after I've healed him. I'd like to give him the best chance I can of coming back alive."

He's no natural talent at healing and it doesn't come easy to him--not so easy that he likes his odds of pulling off an effective repair with Van expressing his worry the voluble way he always does. (He knows better by now than to try speaking to that anxiety as he would anyone else's; trying to pin his cousin on how he's actually feeling is like trying to nail jelly to a tree.) Truly, he doesn't like his odds anyway, compared to an actual healer, but there's surely a reason Van directed Kit to him rather than one of those.

So he'll simply have to do his best and pray it's good enough.

Carefully, Myr rises from where he's perched on his bed and pads across the room to where Kit's sitting, one hand outstretched to fend against running straight into his friend. Once he judges himself close enough (and he nearly is; he's not so bad at this, after three years), he holds that hand out in the dwarf's direction. "Guide me to the wound, if you would. I'd like to use a small spell to see how much it's closed up on its own, before I cast anything else."

That tone brings back layers of uncomfortable deja vu, from childhood to adolescence onward. Whenever he tries to remember his uncle, the voice gets mixed up in his head with Myr's, lecturing him on some moral quandary as if Vandelin weren't the elder of them.

It might be enough to make him combative, under other circumstances, though it's familiar enough by now that he can usually brush it off. It's just the chill settling in the pit of his stomach from that look of Kit's that keeps Vandelin stonily quiet now in response. Why had he said that? It's none of his damn business whether some guy he barely knows runs off on an injured leg to get mauled by a bear; he shouldn't be pretending it is at all, let alone sounding more invested than he is just because Kit's easygoing enough to make a convenient punching bag for his frustrations. Let everyone he likes go sally forth and get themselves killed for totally preventable reasons. See if he cares.

He holds up his hands as if to pacify them both, though the gesture has no small hint of insolence to it, and he knows damn well Myr can't see it anyway. "His timing is his own business. I'm just saying."

Edited 2017-08-04 09:34 (UTC)

Maybe under other circumstances, he'd be annoyed at being discussed in the third person like he wasn't even present. Y'know, under other circumstances in which he isn't faced with the sudden reality of having a spell cast on him.

Once Myr is close enough to need a little extra assistance, Kit reaches out to take hold of his hand and guide it towards the bandage on his leg. It might or might not be imperceptible to Vandelin, but Kit can't mask the subtle trembling in his hands as he does this, or the way the color yet again begins to drain from his face, leaving him ashen-looking as stone. He swallows, clenching his jaw tight.

"Here," he says to Myr, voice a little tight, and unties the bandage around his leg. The wound itself is quite long, stitched, and healing well, but is undoubtedly causing him a fair amount of pain given his refusal to remain laid up in bed for any extended period of time.

The trembling is palpable as Kit takes Myr's hand, and the elf's heart clenches in his chest at the realization his friend isn't just nervous, he's afraid. That's the missing piece he needs to slot all the disjointed parts of this strange encounter into a coherent whole. Oh, Kit. Of course he'd limp around in constant pain while it healed on its own.

Of course he wouldn't seek a mage's help until he had no time for another option.

That Kit first sought out Vandelin for that help says much about their friendship. And that Van would think to bring someone this frightened of magic to Myr for help both flatters and terrifies him. To say healing isn't his specialty is to grossly understate just how little he's done with it and how inadequate he feels to the task--especially when his success might make the difference in Kit's survival in the Wilds. Maker guide my hand and my magic that I might do through You what I cannot of myself; Andraste, in Your mercy, intercede through me on his behalf, he prays silently as Kit uncovers the wound for his inspection.

Then he dismisses his own anxieties and sets to work. His exploration of the wound is gentle, his fingers light on the proud flesh that's grown up around the edges, wary as he is of causing Kit any unnecessary pain. Ordinarily, he'd want to speak a word or two of the diagnostic spell, or make a gesture to remind himself the shape it needs to twist in the Fade to work, but it seems prudent here to cast it silently and it's simple enough he can just manage that without stopping his physical inspection of the injury's dimensions. What he gets from it is heartening: No infection, no unusual inflammation or twisting of the healing tissue; it's just as inflamed and sore and weak as might reasonably be expected from the healing process. At this stage, it really is something within his capabilities to fix.

Now that he's got an idea of his objective in mind, Myr can put a little energy into his bedside manner instead, breaking his focused silence for a casual remark: "I take it this means we'll be postponing our trip up the coast until after your mission. When will you be back?" His tone is light, even; the question is meant as a distraction as he works out the contours of the spell he needs in his head. He can't cast this one without the words--the same Maker-damned limitation that's always tripped him up--and have a hope of getting it right, so better that Kit's thinking about something else when Myr mutters the string of spell specifications under his breath and turns it all loose.

Creation magic is subtle when it heals; Van was precisely right to describe it as encouraging growth, though in this case with a wound three-quarters healed there's not so much growing that's left to do. Rather the leaf-green glow that creeps from Myr's outstretched fingers brings with it a comfortable warm lassitude as it sinks into Kit's flesh, strengthening the new-grown muscle even as it clears away the last of the bruising and inflammation causing Kit's pain.

In all his rather self-absorbed misery about the dealings with his cousin, Vandelin has lost sight, as he tends to do, of the reason why he'd brought Kit to Myr in the first place. All he'd wanted, before things went off the rails, was to find a method of magical healing that wouldn't make poor Kit look like--well. Like that. Like he'd looked back in the Deep Roads at the prospect of Vandelin touching him (and been right to look, if Van's honest with himself. That soft, inviting glow of health and life and strength is nothing like the entropic perversion of growth he would have been capable of there, run dry on mana and fueled by nothing but the power those darkspawn corpses could provide in death, antithetical to new life or real healing.)

He couldn't have brought himself to inflict that on a good man who'd saved their lives, even for the purpose of trying to save Kit in turn. And he can't hold a grudge when a friend is in pain, even if he were in the right. He feels like a prick.

"And do we get souvenirs?" It's a stupid joke, but Vandelin's not much good at peace offerings. He tries.

And with the healing comes a small measure of pain, but pain that is associated with mending, new growth. Kit sucks in a quick breath of air when Myr's fingers explore the sutures along his wound, but then he's quiet, turning his eyes away from the procedure when he feels the tendrils of magic touching his leg.

This is what he wants, what he needs. That doesn't mean he's all right to watch it happen.

"Yeah," he answers Myr with a weak laugh, and catches Vandelin's eye. He can read the expression on his face easily enough and offers him a small smile; it's all he can muster up under the circumstances, but there's sincerity and gratitude, and something maybe like an apology in his eyes.

"Sure," he answers Vandelin, "what do you want? Dunno if the Chasind do fancy souvenir hats, but I'll keep an eye out." Hah.

That went better than expected.

Myr remains where he is with his hand outstretched over the wound as the spell resolves, waiting to feel the last wisps of it taken up by the healing tissue. Then he straightens and gives Kit a fond pat on the knee, knowing better than to say anything as inane as "you did well"--but still, Kit did, and Myr can only imagine the fortitude that took.

Certainly he'd have fled his own room in terror if it had been Van working an entropy spell anywhere near him. "You'll want to get the stitches checked and removed, at the physiker's discretion," he advises, then startles himself out of saying anything more with a yawn. Mmph. Right.

He pads back over to the bed to perch on it again, laughing a little at the thought of Chasind novelty hats. "Don't think they're selling tourists 'I went to the Korcari Wilds and all I got was this stupid hat and bitten by bears' swag? I would.

"Speaking of bears, if they've got them and you have to kill a dozen," because that's what you do out in the wilderness, right? Murder all the hostile wildlife? "Bring me back a pelt. It's summer and it's colder than Maferath's heart in here at night." Somebody is a delicate northern flower.

Then he pauses, weighing his words a moment before adding in a softer tone, "Though I think we'll both be happy just to have you back in one piece." There. He'll be the sentimental one; he's good for it.

Edited 2017-08-05 17:34 (UTC)

In spite of himself, he laughs at that, the way he'd have laughed at one of Myr's jokes back in Hasmal, as if for three seconds here nothing's changed or happened between them. There's nothing audible to indicate the speed with which the smile drops off his face when reality taps him on the shoulder again, but Van's not the only one in the room who can see.

But at least Kit's allowed him to smooth things over, and that's a triumph worth internally celebrating. And more of a relief than he's expected it to be, if he's honest with himself.

"Bring two," he says, because he's silently grateful not to be the only one who misses the desert heat. "Only if you're fighting them anyway, otherwise it's just a waste of perfectly good bears. But the south is a miserable place." He can think, unbidden, of a couple other nice ways to keep warm that he wouldn't mind Kit providing, but none of that is getting said aloud in front of his cousin. Or in front of Kit himself. Best keep those little daydreams altogether private.

But he does wish, just for a moment, that he could make sentimentality sound that natural.

Edited 2017-08-08 22:02 (UTC)

Kit is a good Legionnaire--he rarely fails a spot check. He marks the way Vandelin's laugh lights up his face like sunshine on a cloudy day--and how quickly it fades, his eyes growing guarded and pained; joy tempered by some reality that Kit can't see. That, coupled with the gentleness and surety of Myr's tone as he speaks for himself as well as his cousin, sparks a long troublesome instinct in Kit that he frankly should know better than to indulge by now. For a moment, his eyes shift between the two elves, the gears in his mind turning.

"Bring two. Only if you're fighting them anyway, otherwise it's just a waste of perfectly good bears. But the south is a miserable place."

"It's got plenty of blue sky," Kit answers him wryly, his smile lingering. "For a guy like me, that's paradise."

He looks down to his leg and gives it a tentative flex, his eyebrows immediately leaping up towards where his hairline would be if he, y'know, had any. Then he shoots a look at Myr, startled and clearly impressed. "...man, you know your shit, don't you? I can barely feel any pain now--ow." Spoke too soon. He hisses, grimacing, and touches those sutures. ...Yeah, he definitely needs to get those out.

For the space of a breath, with the tension in the room briefly banished like fog by the sun, Myr lets himself relax. Everything else in the world might be upset from its proper place, but within this little part of it he can call his own, there's peace. That's enough. (But with Vandelin here that isn't likely to last for long--don't, he stops the thought. Let it be for now. Let it be.)

He laces his hands together in his lap, breathes in, breathes out--and smiles to hear Kit's optimistic take on the miseries of the south. "Is it really blue that often here?" he asks. "Not overcast? It's clammy enough I'm not ever sure when there's clouds out." It wasn't as hard to tell back home in Hasmal, where it was most often storms that shuttered the sky, bringing with them the scent of rain and winds heavy with moisture.

Thinking of that tempts him to talk about it, offer up the idea of a trip north after all this is over and there's still a Thedas left to travel, Maker-willing-- And Kit's praise, earned as it might be, catches him in the middle of his deliberations and leaves him completely taken aback. It's so rare that he heals anyone other than himself that he's truly not used to having his meager skill in the area remarked upon. "--Easy," he admonishes, guilty and grateful at once he can buy himself time to process all that by responding to Kit's pain instead. "...Given the walk you've got to make back I may not have done you any favors there, telling you to wait to see a physiker. Those have to come out."

Or they're just going to undo some of what he's done, and he hates the thought of subjecting Kit to further magic if it's not necessary. "Either of you got a knife on you?"

We didn't see the sky that often in Hasmal either, he could say, if he wanted to be needlessly antagonistic again, but it would serve no useful purpose, and it's not so true that it wouldn't trivialize Kit's feelings into the bargain. Hasmal's tower had a courtyard, at least. It's far from the same thing as being trapped underground, in the Deep Roads or otherwise.

He hadn't thought that many dwarves would necessarily think of their underground home as an unhappy place next to which blue skies and open air would feel like paradise--but then, if one only talks to people like Myr, one might not think a mage would ever want to leave the Circle, either. His independent library research on dwarven custom tells him Kit wouldn't be allowed back into Orzammar if he wanted to go, but the rest is all still rather shrouded in mystery to him, and he's still not willing to reveal his own imperfect understanding by actually asking. Perhaps in time.

He's very pleased indeed that the healing has been a success, and there's that genuine smile again, but it melts rapidly into a wince when Kit's sutures prove to be a problem. "Here," he says, quickly rummaging through his robes, "Not that I'd mind being a shoulder to lean on again, but I've got one somewhere, give me a moment--" It's a last-resort kind of a thing, well-concealed, but every mage on the Hinterlands trail had taken to carrying a backup knife for those occasions when the roving templars could both silence and disarm.

"I've got one," Kit answers them both, and then suddenly it's in his hand. Hard to say what pocket it came from, exactly, but it's a mean-looking and serviceable knife that looks as though it has seen a number of varied uses throughout its lifetime. Need a fish gutted? This knife probably can do the trick. Got a bandit to shank? It'll work for that, too. The tip is just fine and neat enough to do this work, though it's definitely not something an amateur should attempt on his own.

Thankfully, Kit has spent over a decade accumulating experience in stitching up his own injuries--and then removing them, too.

Stretching out his leg as far as he's able, he squints down at his own wound, and begins the systematic process of delicately snicking each stitch. "Don't suppose," he mumbles to Myr as he works, "you've got any tweezers handy?"

He gets the sneaking suspicion that there's some kind of subtext--and at least one neat knife-trick--that he's missing in all of this. And it gnaws at him, a little, that he's left out of so much of the life around him, but he's had three years to get used to the feeling and besides, it isn't anyone's fault. Simply a fact of life now.

Besides, what he can pick up with the senses remaining him is interesting enough to work over. It's pleasant to sit out of the conversational loop for the moment and simply listen to the other two talk, to not have to trouble himself with what kind of veiled meaning might be lurking behind anything Van says. ...And he might also be drifting off a little sitting up, something he quickly snaps out of as Kit speaks to him.

"Yeah. First aid kit on my desk has one; it's the canvas bundle, top left corner, second in the stack." Since he isn't going to be using that desk for any writing or reading, it seemed prudent to turn it into a convenient storage space.

"Van, if you could?" You're closer to it than he is, and able to get the tweezers out without fumbling through the entire thing besides.

It's a shame that the deft knifework is lost on Myr, but Vandelin is glad to have at least looked up from his search in time to admire it. He's momentarily concerned, trying to hide his squeamishness--it's one thing to be afraid of darkspawn blood, but quite another to be distressed by that of a person, even if he has seen more of it lately than he ever wanted to--but when no blood is forthcoming, he relaxes, watching with admiration he can't quite hide. He can only begin to aspire to the kind of casual badassery that involves digging sutures out of one's own flesh without a single flinch or twitch.

As such, he doesn't notice his poor cousin beginning to nod off after his rudely-interrupted nap, though he snaps to attention and tears his eyes away from Kit once addressed. It's a politer request than he might perhaps have expected Myr to make, as tone and phrasing go, and he's not sure whether it's heartening or not, but he doesn't hesitate to go along with it. (It's not because Myr would have an easy time finding the tweezers himself if it weren't for Van. It's not.) "Of course."

He produces them in short order and hands them to Kit with a flourish. "I'd ask if you wanted help, but--you certainly don't look like you need it."

"I'd ask if you wanted help, but--you certainly don't look like you need it."

Kit laughs a little. "No," he says, "this is the easy part."

He takes the tweezers as Vandelin offers them out and sets to work. The task doesn't feel that badass to Kit; thanks to Myr's healing, the wound itself is hardly tender, and the stitches themselves don't draw any blood as they're tugged loose from his flesh. The sight of it is possibly a little unsettling for someone with a weaker stomach, or someone with a particular dread surrounding things protruding through skin. Kit got over those revulsions decades ago; this is nothing.

He puts the stray bits of stitching directly into his pocket so it won't litter the ground of Myr's bedroom, then reaches out a hand to brace himself on Vandelin's shoulder as he pushes himself up to his feet. (Possibly he didn't need to do this, and he doesn't really lean on his friend for support over much. His touch does linger just a hair longer than necessary before he pulls his hand away.)

Once upright, he gives his leg a tentative stretch and flex, examining the mean-looking scar cutting across his thigh as he does so. There's a little bit of tugging and pressure, but no pain; it should be fine. "That really is something," he muses out loud, and glances gratefully towards Myr as he does so--only to grimace guiltily over how exhausted he looks. "Ancestors," he sighs, almost under his breath, then adds, "We should get out of your hair."

[OPEN] You were my direction and my roots.

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