even your own eyes don't know you

[misdirection_hex]

WHO: Vandelin and Myr
WHAT: Stress and cabin fever lead to foolish impulses.
WHEN: Early Wintermarch.
WHERE: The Gallows courtyard.
NOTES: None in particular.

It still hurts to step out onto ice or packed snow, like feet held to flames to extract a confession. It is not, as he'd fervently hoped, something he can train his damaged nerves out of with exposure. But he can brave the trip to the general store now, for as many pairs of thick socks as he can carry and a set of human-sized boots to stuff them into, and this small victory is humiliating in the fact that it is one.

His cousin, no less delicate a desert flower than Vandelin ever was, merrily traipses his way through the snowy city blindfolded on a daily basis, and Vandelin quails at the thought of going as far as Lowtown even when it's warm. Not a single other mage on the invite list to Anders' gathering would have thought for a second to worry about its location. What kind of helpless, shivering invalid has Kirkwall turned him into, and why?

Quiet, stewing in the potent juice of self-loathing, he makes his way back across the frozen courtyard. Not even his prodigious eyes are quick enough to catch the prankster just behind him, offended by his too-solemn look and thinking it would be best wiped off his face with a merry dunk in a snowbank--a rough grab to his collar, a laugh that rings mocking and cruel, a shove that lifts his powerlessly slight frame off its feet and sends him face-first into a drift nearly taller than he is.

Everything white in his vision turns red. The prankster is headed off on his cheerful way before Vandelin can struggle out of the wet and dirty snow--but it doesn't matter which one of the surrounding passersby did it; he doesn't need to have seen a face. He can paralyze a crowd.

Comments

[misdirection_hex]

The stalling itself tells him half of what he needs to know, the edge in Myr's voice and the long pause before it constituting almost answer enough.

Not actually, of course--no, he wants the who, and the how, and the why, more than anything. But he knows when Myr's will can be overcome with argument, and when it can't. Iron sharpens iron, Myr so often likes to say, but iron and iron are evenly matched. There's no escaping the question here without abandoning his own, no smart-assed loopholes Myr's going to accept with points for the effort. He knows how this dance goes.

"They nearly froze right off, the first time I had to contend with snow," he says. It's the simplest and most innocuous-sounding gloss he can possibly think of for the grotesque and literal actuality of it all. "Ever since then, the cold hurts them like hell. Nothing that doesn't go away after a little while--" He's still in pain on the stone floor, wishing it were possible somehow to stick his feet directly into the brazier. "But it's an inconvenience I could do without. Your turn. Who is he?" The underlying scent of pomade beneath the lyrium feels masculine.

[faithlikeaseed]

He'd intended to force nonchalance, drag the chair over while Van explained whatever-it-was, take a seat, and making inroads on his tea. He'd hoped for a longer explanation to allow it--

And a less painful one, one that didn't make his heart contract in his chest at the thought of his cousin out in the snow with feet frozen nearly off. There's no way that wasn't vastly more painful than Van makes it seem, not if he's still limping from the experience years later. He gets as far as pulling the chair around and seating himself on it before the question's put back to him.

"Ser Ashlock. Nothing's happened," except that handful of stolen moments he's not letting himself think about, the ones he's turned over to the Maker and His Bride for guidance on, the ones he hopes so keenly he can add more to--but what if the answer is no? --Don't think of it. "And nothing might.

"Let me see what I can do about the pain, will you?"

[misdirection_hex]

"...Well," he says, at length. "At least it's not Coupe." What more can he really say? It's not his explicit blessing to get involved with a templar--he couldn't give that, but Myr doesn't need it--but it's tacit acceptance, I'll leave it alone unless something goes wrong and hexes need to be thrown. Nothing's happened, after all. And nothing might, though if he knows his cousin, that's not the likeliest outcome.

There's no reason to think about that, though, except that it's preferable right now to the alternative. This is nothing he'd ever intended to share, not with Myr or anyone else, not with Kit when hiding the evidence under blankets was an option, not with anyone but Travis, who was there for it all, and even then, Vandelin had swiftly issued a moratorium on all discussion of the matter. But there is nothing quite so tempting right now as the promise of relief from the pain that's been clinging to him since the first frost.

"I'll be fine if you've got a little elfroot extract," he says, an obligatory last-ditch effort to distance himself from any offer of help. If elfroot worked at all, this would be a problem barely worth mentioning, and the faint unconscious note of don't pass this up yearning in his voice suggests as much.

[faithlikeaseed]

"At least it's not Ser Coupe." Myr knows well enough it's not an endorsement, well enough to not expect endorsement from anyone who finds out as much as Van had. But--it's heartening to know his cousin isn't scandalized, won't be among those trying to pry them apart of deriding Simon as an abuser.

Especially as Vandelin had been the one to explain, in exact detail and ruthless logic, why a mage and a templar might not be free to love each other within the confines of a Circle. Outside, though...

"I've heard she drops bookshelves on elves and don't fancy being flattened, personally," he continues, keeping his tone mild and light. He may not know why his cousin's so uncomfortable about the thought of magical aid for--whatever it is that's wrong with him--but it's clear there is something wrong, as Vandelin's so-transparent request reveals. "As it happens, I've a little, but I'd need to dig out my kit for it," with an idle gesture toward his neatly stacked desk, "and I'd not like to leave you suffering a moment longer than needed."

Knowing as he does the workings of his cousin's mind, he won't call the other man on why he wasn't dosing with elfroot already if that would fix the problem. Easier to find a truthful excuse for not producing a tincture on demand. He sets his tea carefully aside and out of the way on the end table, reaching out with both hands to find Vandelin's feet. To find--

An unexpected gap beneath his questing fingers, a skip in his pulse and a chill of horror in his blood. "Van," calmly, calmly, "what's happened to your toes?"

[misdirection_hex]

He would have laughed at that, would have taken the affectionate teasing there and run with it until it was something more than just a lighthearted distraction, if he didn't know what was coming. The thought strikes him only now that it's worse than he'd thought, that Myr's blindness might make it all worse rather than hiding the damage mercifully from view, because the mind always paints a far more gruesome picture than the eyes ever could. (Now Myr knows that firsthand, and Vandelin an excruciating secondhand.)

That forced calm shudders along his nerves like goosebumps, when he knows that tone well enough to hear the distress it belies. He should have refused. He should have taken the pain in stride and left his cousin be, rather than confirm everything now running through Myr's head and have to talk about it besides--

(But who else could help, and how could he expect his cousin who loves him to take no for an answer?)

"I thought," he says, with evenness to match, "that I already told you." A pause, because as badly as he wants it to be, he knows that isn't enough. "I don't...know if you know what happens to flesh when it freezes."

[faithlikeaseed]

It takes everything in Myr not to snatch his hands back in horror--or let them wander in prurient curiosity. How well he knows how much that hurt.

"I thought," and here his voice grows faint, iron control wavering at last now that he's been presented with evidence of harm, of maiming, "that was figurative."

He knew about frostbite--in theory, knew it could steal limbs and even lives, but in Hasmal no one who'd ever said she was freezing off her ass or tits or fingers or toes ever meant the named body part was in actual danger. It only meant you were cold beyond reasoning, not--

Not this. A low noise starts and dies in the back of Myr's throat, a species of grief and frustration given voice. Something had hurt his cousin--except this isn't anything he could shove into a wall or a sand dune, pin down and pummel for having the audacity to touch Vandelin. (Nor would he if he could; the temptation will always be with him but he's long learned it's not what the Maker would have him do.)

But even if he can't punish the bitter Fereldan winter for what it's done, there's something yet he can do for Van--that he'd volunteered to do, that he isn't doing sitting here awash in sudden anxious concern. He shakes his head sharply to snap himself out of the funk and begins the diagnostic spell sotto voce. Such are the emotions threatening to close his throat he's got to stop once and start again from the beginning--

And only once he's turned the magic loose does he answer Van's other question. "Only--only in theory. Maker's breath--who do I have to thank that you survived?"

[misdirection_hex]

He flinches ever so slightly--not at the touch, or the probing of cautious magic, but at that sound. Never in his life has he wanted to make Myr sound like that, and yet he seems to be provoking that kind of distress at every turn these days.

He doesn't have to go into detail, he tells himself--and with anyone else in the world, he wouldn't, but Myr asks for candor and he gives it as if it's been held back by a dam.

"Her name was Sarah," he murmurs. "She fancied herself a healer, and she was the closest thing a scraggly group like us was going to find, but she'd never so much as mended a scrape before she came to us. Spirit advice or no, it wasn't...an ideal situation to learn as one goes. But she'd had plenty of practice by the time she got to me." Van's little breath of laughter here is too raw to convey the studied bitterness he means to.

"There's no curing that kind of infection once it sets in. Not with magic. But she didn't know that. Our lookouts would have their toes turning black and swelling to five times their size and she'd try the kind of spells you use for muscle strains, because it was all she had. Herbs didn't work. Their veins would turn black and they'd die of boiling fevers. I don't know how I got lucky enough that it didn't happen to me until she'd learned to amputate first and ask questions later. That much, she could mostly heal."

[faithlikeaseed]

"Sarah," Myr echoes--because of all the things Vandelin says, all he describes, that's the single solitary bit of it that's safe to hold on to. Her name was Sarah--was, so there's no making good on his promise to thank her. Not in this life, at least. "I--I'll..."

Say a prayer for her, maybe, or light a candle in the Chantry, or lay flowers at Andraste's feet in silent gratitude to the deceased. Any of a number of things he can't articulate properly in the midst of his sympathetic horror at boiling fevers and blackened veins. That could have been Van--how easily that could have been Van, if Sarah hadn't learned to ply a knife to save her charges, if he'd gotten frostbitten any earlier. How little a difference in the world it would have taken, and Myr would never have learned what happened to his cousin, would have continued in heartsore ignorance while foreign winds scattered Van's ashes.

He ducks his head, drawing in a slow breath to steady himself. The calm he'd nearly forced before seems unreachable now; a good thing he's learned to exercise his meager healing skills without it. Nothing in the diagnostic spell begins to offer a clue of what the issue might be beyond here is pain, and there; nothing so simple as willing a wound closed through the Fade and coaxing new flesh to bind up the edges will mend whatever's wrong. Only--fittingly--a leaf from his cousin's own book might help: Snarl up the worldline where Vandelin isn't in pain, isn't suffering mysterious sequelae from the cold that stole his toes, and enforce it on this world with all he can muster. (Had he lyrium near to hand he'd use it; this isn't his usual kind of work, but where natural talent and practice are lacking, raw power could substitute.)

It comes on slow and subtle, less of a feeling and more the absence of a bone-deep ache. Myr's focus is all for that--for being an open channel for the light of Creation to flow through, altering the shape of reality--though it doesn't keep him from absently rubbing a thumb against the sole of Van's foot, heel to ball and back again. Where he can't find words, there is the language of touch to say you are family and you are loved, however rarely he might've made use of it inside the confines of the Circle.

Only when the magic has ebbed away, taking the worst edge of the pain with it, does he try his voice again. (There's a rough edge to it like unshed tears.) "I'm sorry. I wish to the Maker I could've thanked her in person. I wish--you'd not gone through that, that you'd not suffered this whole winter like this.

"Andraste's love, Van--I wish I could fix it." But this is the best he can do. He lets go but doesn't pull away entirely, not quite willing yet, hovering halfway toward an embrace.