faderift | (Open) They'll steal your patents for the sun

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(Open) They'll steal your patents for the sun

WHO: Cosima and YOU
WHAT: Open post/catchall
WHEN: Kingsway
WHERE: Gallows and environs
NOTES: Prose or brackets are fine. If you want to talk about another scenario/your wildcard ideas before diving in, DM me or hit me up on plurk/discord. All comers welcome!

I. Infirmary

It's almost easy to forget that she's not in good health, sometimes, which Cosima supposes does credit to spirit healing. But she also never misses her twice-monthly appointments, too conscious of the potential consequences. Since she's here anyway, she brings a few goodies from the kitchen for people well enough to have them but not well enough to fetch them on their own. She's conscious of people who seem to want to be left alone and people who could use a friendly word. And of course, by now she knows the regulars, staff and otherwise.

II. Cosima's lab, the Gallows

Damn, Cosima, back at it again with the microscope. Ever since the phylactery negotiations -- and arguably, since Tevinter, though Cosima wasn't even there herself -- she's thrown herself into her work, harder than ever. They still have so much to learn, and it feels like the conflict is multiplying faster than they can keep up sometimes. She's doing her best, and frustrated she can't do more, though she keeps the latter sentiment to herself.

III. Docks

There's nearly always activity at the docks, so it takes some doing to find a spot that isn't in anyone's way. But Cosima has managed it, and is using her find to watch the water. She's alert enough to her surroundings, since it never pays to let your guard down out and about in Kirkwall, especially as a rifter. But the water makes her feel better. Not like home. It demonstrably isn't home. But as if it's a place that at least makes sense to her.

IV. Wildcard

[Choose your own adventure.]

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"I think I was too manic at first," Cosima says, quietly frank. "By the time I could worry about it, it was clear it was more widespread. After all, Church was obviously affected and he wasn't with us. But I can see how you would."

A pause, then: "I see the healers a few times a month, because I'm sick, and was before I came here. They can't cure it, but they can keep me feeling OK, mostly. But they don't ever ask me about the side effects from what happened to us anymore. Guess it's been long enough we're clear? But sometimes I wonder. I look at lyrium under my microscope and I think about it, sometimes."

It was hard not to.

"I mean, the entire world's in the middle of a fight for survival, it's triage, right? We're not getting worse, we're not posing a risk." So. Minimal if any hand-holding.

"I was on my own in the office, I couldn't do that in front of people." Pretend it isn't happening or do what you can to make sure no one sees it, limit the witnesses to your horrible breakdown when it might be happening again until someone comes to collect you because no it's not just you, you have to come along with me now. "It was real, you know, it's always the thing that happened. And the more I say it, the more real it is. That yes it did happen to all of us who were there.

"I asked Bruce about magic and healing and lyrium after because everyone wanted to give me potions or use spells and I couldn't. I couldn't do it." Her voice climbs too sharply for her liking, enough for her to take a shaking breath to try to reel it back in again, an inhale through the nose, a quick huff out. "He said to think of the lyrium the same way as wine; too much and you have a hangover but they've always had it, haven't they? All the way back. It's in the Chant, if it's in that then it's so normal to them and their way of life that it stops becoming a question at some point."

If it ever was. If it's in the Chant, dominant religion that's survived for ages and centuries now is even the red lyrium going to sway minds?

There's an indelicate snort; if it were someone else, she'd dredge up the arguments. Instead: "If we were hesitate or do something someone calls foolish at the wrong moment because suddenly you're back there again remembering then they might call that a risk. But I have no idea if they have people for that. Even spirit healing is for the body. Not deeper."

"Right. Therapy is kind of thin on the ground here." She realizes Araceli might not have that exact word for it, so she adds, "At home, they've got a few different ways to treat problems of the mind. Not perfect, by any means, and some work better than others, but there's like... a framework. A way to talk about it."

She takes a sip of her drink, once it arrives.

"One of the treatments is talking about it with someone trained to know how to guide you through it. That's the simplest explanation of therapy. It's... yeah. I don't know."

A longer pause.

"It's, um. Also harder with rumors going around about Rifters. Our origin. I don't know which ones you've heard, but it can be hard for me to stay centered when I'm not even sure if I'm real in the same way that Herian is. On the other hand, what does real even mean in this context? Or am I just worrying about it because I'm still unbalanced from... from what they did. Deep down where I'm not conscious of it."

"Depending on the sort of hurt you go to a doctor and talk through it, maybe they can give you something I don't know I never had a hurt like that before the worst things were broken bones or a time or two I was shot but I know some people who did. Other times you go to someone like my mother, a Bride of the Sea and it's...the embrace of the sea. Spiritual. It doesn't fix everything but it's something you can go to them for and be held, pour it out to them because they won't judge, they listen, they have years of advice and training to offer. They'd probably tell someone to go get more help when it's beyond them." Some people only need someone to listen and hold them, often times people need far more so she thinks she understands, or they have things approaching that though Cosima's home would be far more advanced from what they've spoken of before.

She has no idea what a doctor would even give her at home for something like this, it's startling to realise that there are parts of home that she knows nothing about at all.

"I...I spoke to someone about that. Before Skyhold." If they're being honest here then Cosima can be trusted with it, and Araceli cares about Herian too, then there's Cosima and Herian, the way that Araceli has Korrin. "About our nature since a spirit isn't capable of creating of its own accord but once a spirit has flesh they become something-- something more. What was that part of the Chant again...shit-- nothing-- nothing He-- Nothing He has wrought shall be lost, that was it! It was about the possibility for spirits to grow beyond the limitations they had without possession, and if we were that possibility. I was trying to posit the argument of rifters as we existed being some basis of magic serving man and wanted to understand us. We are real, what happened to us…"

Araceli has to stop and swallow painfully, that first admission to Thranduil she hadn't wanted to make to herself let alone someone the better part of a stranger. "What happened to us with the lyrium and then to so many of us with the plague proves that we're real. That this self is real. And we can decide what we do with that now."

"I agree that we're real. I mean, most of the time, when I'm not dealing with..." She shrugs. "But it also means...it might mean we're different from the selves we remember being back home. That the reason Sarah doesn't remember me leaving is that I didn't. Her Cosima didn't? Fuck, I am not cut out for metaphysics at all, I didn't even believe in god at home." She tugs at her earlobe, absently. It's something she's never let herself talk about before, really.

"I see these new rifters come in and some of them are treating this like it doesn't matter. Like it's less real than the places they came from. But if the theories are right, the people we are here, this is the life we get. This is it. And like, there's great stuff here. People I care about. People I love. But it means things like what happened to you and me -- that's real, and maybe we're not ever going to go back to another life where it didn't happen to us one day."

"I can't imagine how that is, having people from home who aren't as you remember, and you not being the you they remember, I wonder why they make that decision. The ones that are watching, dreaming, deciding." The sea guides us where we are meant to go, that's how it is for my people. To the places we must be, takes us to the people we must meet. The words catch in the back of her throat, under her tongue, not to be said today, not right now. "We woke up twice. We woke up here on one side, then at home. We wake up. Our lives go on. The stream diverges and continues to flow." Unconsciously her hands move, parting, and there's a longing for a map that she would've had in an office but this played out in the Gallows before, didn't it? Her and Myrobalan talking it through, and Thranduil posing a question where the key slid in the lock.

Another person and Araceli might keep her mouth from pursing, keep out the wrinkle of annoyance at new rifters but Cosima was at the negotiations, she'll know Araceli's opinions intimately by now. "Sometimes there's no way to make them see, you could tell them the truth of everything from the minute they arrive and they'll still think it's less important. Or that trying to bend it all to suit them is how it works. Soon it'll be three years here, there are things I've spent time doing longer than I did at home, things that are more real to this me than the person going about living my life there. Korrin and I have been together longer than I've been with anyone else in my whole life so I think it's making peace with it. Finding the things that matter, realising there are investments you have to make that will come good in time because this is it; other people can see it or sense it, we've been here long enough that they're planning our futures too, and all of us will be lumped in together."

Resentment comes easier with that knowledge but she's been here a long time, doing her best, and people who do treat it as some sort of pageantry where they can piss and moan and do as they please as if no one is watching them all and seeing them as rifters, all of them thrown together in the same scale? It won't ever get out from under her skin. Draining her glass burns less than thinking about it.

"I know it's tougher for some people than others," Cosima says, muted. "My sister, Sarah -- she has a kid. And even if a different Sarah is there with her, this Sarah might have to deal with the idea of never seeing her again. That sucks, straight up. But people having lost things they care about isn't an excuse to act like Thedas isn't real life. Natives have lost things and people they care about too, and it doesn't take a long time to notice that."

She takes a small drink of wine. "Three years, though. I've been here a little over two, and it seems like I've already got more in common with some of the natives than with the new arrivals. I want to... I wish I could help them see it more clearly."

For their own sakes, yes; Cosima's naturally compassionate. But also she can see how little some of the most eager to agitate are putting the entire group of them in a precarious position. She remembers Herian coming to blows with a couple of men in a tavern, all because Cosima wasn't better at blending in, no matter how she feels about Thedas.

"I have a girlfriend - that's never the same as a child I just can't even picture myself with one - at home. And when I realised I'm not going to see her again unless she ever appears here was--" Well it was, that's what this conversation is, isn't it? It happened, she threw out all her old letters into the sea, maybe if there's a rift they haven't found on the water or if the maps don't know where the waters end they'll have made it somewhere she doesn't know. "You know we only had one war where I came from? Just one. Here they've had and still have so many and that's in, what, fifteen or twenty years? The whole time I would've been alive. Most of the people we know just accept it. This world runs on war. It oils the gears, the world doesn't know how to turn without a war on the horizon."

They're talking about peace, about what comes after, but Thedas lurches for the next one, and the next, and the next, so that in the discouraging moments that's all she can see: everything that's left after to sort through until she's done, until the spirit stops dreaming or she dies, works herself down to the bone. "When I've spoken to people that are angry and wanted things to change I've said to get involved in the projects, to be part of the change. They'll get to see what's going on around them, be there in the world more than just our bubble. It's not always a pleasant bubble but Kirkwall and the Gallows aren't the real world either. But if they won't join then maybe that's it. You have to just leave them to fuck up and build your own life, see who throws who into the scales when it comes time for checks and balances."

The future is a looming thing, towers, circles, mages as bitter about it as rifters who'll cut their noses off to spite their face then wonder why they don't have a nose, who cut it off, where is the healer?

Cosima can't help thinking (briefly, guiltily) of Delphine. They were sort of... what had they been? It was complicated, though future-Delphine had suggested it certainly got more intense. But for Cosima's, that's a might-have-been. Less real, now, than Herian in many ways.

"One war," she says, instead. "That's... wow. I mean, I'd never been directly touched by a war at all, at home, but they were always happening. I was just lucky enough not to be in those places. Granted, nothing on the scale of Corypheus, not in my lifetime, but..." She shrugs. "Of all the things that are strange to me about this world, sad to say the conflict isn't it. What the conflict's about, yeah, that's new, but now the actual fact of it."

"I agree with you, though. The best thing for people is finding a way to get involved that works for them. Even my sisters have joined a division, and neither of them are really, uh, joiners by temperament. I think just sitting around seeing what's wrong isn't good for anybody, native or Rifter. The difference is, for now, the rifters can't just leave."

Maybe one day. Maybe never. Still to be determined.

"Ours swept over every nation but one, we still feel the ripples now in little ways so it's hard to say if those stop." Maybe when people keep leaving those who started it and lost, maybe that's when the jaws unclench but the treaties are carefully, painstakingly written; she should know, she had to study them. "It only makes me sad sometimes that this is going to end and they'll have a new reason. Border disputes. Trade deals we negotiated. Alliances of convenience that aren't that. It's deeper than the Abyssal Rift here."

Her plan for after is sailing. Off the edge of the map. Take a ship and go with her arm cut off as much as she must if it aches with the miles.

"If enough left they could. Maybe." Cosima might understand that idea more, and Araceli certainly looks to her for some sort of confirmation of if a mass walkout might be sustainable.

"Maybe," she says, unsure. "The mages got a seat at a table with a boycott, but they also occupy a different position than we do. They're splintered, but not as splintered. And if you mean just setting out on their own, indefinitely... I don't know if any of us have figured out how big a group you'd need before that was even logistically possible at length." Quieter: "I saw what happened to Sina. I bet you did too. I don't want to just wander off away from the most information anyone has about the anchors, and I wouldn't have even if I hadn't chosen to join the Inquisition for real."

"They've enough time and a more solid foundation to argue their place better than us: they all have a stake and a place here, this is their home, it always has been, the longer people are here who knows where their loyalties will lead them from whatever fraternity they were part of before. We could be a deciding factor in pushing more of them together when they finally have to make that decision. It wasn't popular and that's just the people we heard it from."

Whatever was said-- and then there's Sina and she can't swallow, can't breathe, there's Sina and being there when she died after the final weeks. What came after. Being cracked open.

"Sina had been ill a long time." It's a struggle to get that much out as if to justify it, to dance around the reality of what happened but Araceli knows she doesn't have all the details. "Her anchor had already almost killed her once before and that was in the early stages, whatever happened-- Groups of us can leave on missions for a while. I was in Rivain. Alone. For several days and it hurt but nothing untoward happened. If push came to shove, there are people who'd think to test the limits, everyone knows the kind who'd cut off their nose to spite their face."

Cosima's demeanor is sympathetic, quietly compassionate, but not apologetic. She didn't bring up Sina lightly or carelessly. "I know. I know that, and I didn't mean to suggest otherwise. My point is I don't want people getting hurt because they don't know how serious this can be. Or because they think it's somehow not real. I just... I don't know how to talk to people who seem determined to think that those of us who have allied with the Inquisition didn't give it serious thought before we did."

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(Open) They'll steal your patents for the sun

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