faderift | open | with the sound of my heart

"There were others, too," she says as she copies the way he wants her to hold her arm. "They'd been...stuffed."

There's no way to keep the disgust off her face, even with the distance of everything that happened. Even with the numbness.

That gets Colin's face to turn grey, his hands faltering briefly as he folds her arm in the sling. It takes two deep breaths before he can continue, tying the cloth behind her neck. Two more breaths later, he starts to pin it closed at the elbow.

"Wh-who would...who did that?"

Athessa shakes her head, visibly struggling to keep numb, to not feel the cresting wave of everything she's had to compartmentalize thus far. Easy, girl. Just breathe.

"A m-monster," she says, her voice failing her and sounding small and hoarse and frail. She tries again, clearing her throat and deciding that Medrod is likely a more common sort of man than not. No need to spare the rest from his classification. "A man named Medrod. He — I don't know why he would—"

Athessa can't explain it. She can't even try to put logic behind any of what happened at the Silver Lamp Inn, and the more she tries, the shallower her breathing and the harder it is to speak at all. She presses the back of her hand to her mouth and stares at the floor some distance away, forcing herself to take deep breaths through her nose to steady herself. She doesn't want to break down, not here.

Colin makes a quick dash for a table and brings back two things: a bucket, and an herb that fights nausea. He holds out the bucket in case she needs it.

"Breathe," he says quietly when it's secure, hand reaching out to stroke her hair soothingly.

She doesn't vomit, but one awful sob escapes from her attempts to compose herself while she sets the bucket aside. Her head hurts from trying to hold it all back, the flood she knows will happen as soon as she closes her bedroom door behind her.

"I can't, I can't—" She stammers, gritting her teeth against another sob that, blessedly, doesn't make a sound. One arm already crossed over herself, she crosses the other atop it to hug herself and shakes her head again. "I can't— I have to—I have to leave—"

"Come with me." He reaches for her good elbow so he can quickly lead her away from the infirmary and into the apothecary. No one's in there; he shuts the door and locks it.

Bless Colin and his expeditious locking of that door. Athessa is barely in the room before she crumples, a slow-motion descent to her knees and subsequent crawl to lean against the wall. Her whole body shakes with her sobbing, gasping for air between them and unable to articulate anything more about why she's so upset.

"H-he— Th-they were— C-could've been—" A valiant attempt, but ultimately unhelpful in conveying meaning. It feels as if there's a rope tied to something inside her and something is pulling and trying as hard as it can to turn her inside out.

His own fingers shake slightly as he picks up a potion and cloth and kneels before her, wetting the cloth and beginning to wipe the blood from her hands, hers or not.

"Breathe," he repeats, eyes darting from her hands to her face and back several times until he can be sure whether her hands are injured. "In through your nose. You're home. You're safe. Look."

He taps the tattoo on her wrist.

It turns out that some of the blood is hers, after all. Not much, not enough to be truly concerned over, but there's a dotted-line of a cut along her knuckles where a knife grazed her in the heat of things. Most everything else amounts to simple scrapes and bruises, and a mixture of Barrow, Edgard, and Holden's blood (though obviously Colin won't be able to tell what blood belongs to whom).

Looking at her tattoo doesn't bring the calm that it would, were she worrying for her own sake or fearing a place she'd been. They burned the murderhaus to the ground, she knows it can't hurt anyone else ever again.

Those forget-me-nots remind her of her family, of seeing those faces superimposed by her own grief upon the faces of the Dalish elves they found. Glassy eyes staring out unseeing from leathery faces. She swallows thickly, breathing in through her nose, out through her mouth.

"The lady's son, Gawen—" They found parts of him in the room with Mhavos and Leander. Parts. Always parts. What a life you lead. "He eloped with a Dalish woman. He'd—"

This isn't going to happen to you. We'll avenge them.

"Medrod turned her into a p-puppet. And there were others— And I kept thinking: does her clan know? Do they know? Is she just missing? What if these aren't the only ones? What if—"

What if.

He starts to feel light--not quite upset, not yet, but a bit dazed. Some part of him knows what she's feeling, and he refuses to think about that. It's not about her being safe. It's about what she's seen. Things that eyes aren't meant to see because they aren't meant to be, and yet are.

The healing potion stings at first before gently numbing the small wounds on her hands even as it sanitizes. He swallows.

"Blood mage?"

"No. I don't know. Maybe," There'd been some dark, alchemical ramblings in those books they retrieved, but it wasn't like the time Athessa herself was puppeted by a blood mage. Magic hadn't had a hand in preserving those bodies. "No. I don't think so. He was just a...just a man and he...he cut them open and—"

The corners of her mouth tug down, her lips quivering, her throat tightening around more tears and grief and horror, and she has to focus on her breath again. In through the nose, out through her mouth.

"Gods, but their faces," she whispers, "their eyes, s-staring. And I couldn't— I couldn't look at them without s-seeing—"

Had one of them actually looked like her mother, or had she imagined it? Even in the light of dawn, burying the bodies with the help of her companions, she had to look away every now and then.

With her hands clean, he folds the cloth and dips it in a nearby basin of water. Not even a word is needed to chill it to coolness and press it against her forehead, the back of her neck, while he draws a handkerchief from his pocket and holds it out to her.

He's not sure if he'd hoped for a blood mage. Demon influence might have explained it. It's almost worse, if it was just a truly monstrous person. It is worse.

What is she supposed to do with all of this in her head now? She already doesn't sleep well, already can't parse the menagerie of emotions that she feels and has no words for without having to add the horror of seeing taxidermized elves when she closes her eyes.

"H-he was smiling," she sobs, barely able to see the handkerchief through her tears. "Every time we saw him in that awful place."

She reaches, not for the handkerchief but for the hand that's holding it. It's hardly a vice grip, her fingers trembling and the flow of tears and the throbbing in her head and the dull ache in her shoulder and her stomach where she was kicked and the lack of sleep and everything sapping her strength to the point where she's just making contact, reaching for something safe and familiar, for someone who feels like home.

He reaches out to wrap her tightly in his arms.

She buries her face in his shoulder, crying it into a sodden mess that she'll feel guilty about after the fact, but for now she's not thinking in words or thinking about what she'll feel in the next few minutes. She just feels and weeps and feebly hooks her good arm around him.

"Their lives mean something," he says quietly. "You restored that to them. They went to their rest as people and not..."

He doesn't want to say any of the words she's used.

That gets a nod, and not a lot else by way of acknowledgment. She knows, logically, that she gave those elves the best care that she could; she buried them, gave them rites as well as she was able, but...

But what? She didn't even know their names, or what clan they're from. All she knows is the gods they'd dedicated themselves to. Mythal, Sylaise, Andruil, June, and Falon'din.

After a time, when the exhaustion of everything settles in and outweighs the tears she might shed, her breathing steadies and she quiets. Pulling away, she utters a soft "sorry."

For crying on him. For telling him about such awful things. For needing to be held.

"I'm sorry."

"You never have to apologize to me," he says gently, offering his handkerchief again. "All I care about right now is you."

She tries to offer a smile, but all she really manages is a grimace, and she leans forward again, her head thudding against his chest.

"I love you," she says. Whines, more like. A sweet, pitiful sound.

"I...should probably drink water. My head hurts."

"Good call." He offers her a hand up. "I love you, too. Let's get you some water. I want you to let that shoulder rest completely for at least a week. I know longer than that in your line of work might not be feasible."

She sniffles and wipes at her face with his handkerchief before the order of rest sinks in.

"A week?!" The incredulity has enough momentum to it to make her sway on her feet, but she stays upright. Miserable, but standing. What's she supposed to do for a week without the use of her shoulder?

"And I want to see you once a day. Just pop in and I'll give you a bit more healing and maybe if you're very, very good, you won't need the full week. You're lucky. Without magic, you'd be laid up six at least."

"Maybe that ought to be how we persuade people to get healed by mages. You can either be laid up for six weeks, or one."

The words are there, but the feeling is absent for the joke to land proper. She sighs and nods, resigned.

"What time should I pop in?"

"Whenever you have time. It can even just be at the apartment, so long as it's sometime."

Another nod, and as if the contact serves as better proof that she's acknowledging her orders, she reaches out and touches his arm, just a slight grasp of fingers for one moment before her hand drops again.

"I will."

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