[open]

[heirring]

WHO: Wysteria & YOU
WHAT: Anchor-related adventures and/or drama in fantasy September.
WHEN: Kingsway
WHERE: Various
NOTES: Some anchor and rift-related peril; open stuff is in the comments, but may use this as a catch-all. If an open prompt doesn't suit you, feel free to wildcard me or hit me up and I can write something bespoke. Prose or brackets is a-okay.

Comments

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[heorte]

They fall into something of a routine, despite all Ellis' hopes.

Wysteria remains in the infirmary. Ellis comes and goes, pulled away by the rhythms of Riftwatch duties and returned when his shifts have lapsed. In the course of these comings and goings, the things Wysteria might speak wistfully of wanting on hand begin accompanying him, fetched from the Hightown house in spite of the confused fury of it's ghostly occupant.

The sun's set by the time Ellis has wound his way back to the infirmary. Divesting himself first of tray bearing a bowl of warm soup, set across her lap on the bed, then of his satchel, before he settles back into the chair slanted alongside Wysteria's bed. He has to lean forward to nudge a hardbound book onto the edge of the tray, before leaning back in the chair and working carefully at the topmost fastening of his gambeson.

"I've the new one," he tells her. "The new installment. As far as I can tell, we're to find out what's become of Síofra and that mysterious lad from Bann Teigue's clan."

[heirring]

To say that Wysteria seems much improved wouldn't be fully the truth. Yes, the fever and infection has certainly reduced. One assumes that would be the hoped for effect for severing any infectious limb. But the nominal good humor (so long as one counts spirited complaining and gossiping as such), which had persisted almost all the way up to the very hour in which the arm had been amputated, has evaporated in the days following the cut. The pain of the healing wound is different from the pain of the anchor as it had chewed through the length of her arm. The pulse of it wakes her in the night, and so she is tired and aches, and most of all she dreads winter and all the long sleeved things she will have to wear and which will require sorting how to pin up the one side. And how she will do her hair and tie the ribbons on her favorite boots. Or how she is meant to teach anyone to use the great long gun that she worked so hard on and which she told Tony she would do.

(It should be a relief to simply be present; that cutting the anchor away didn't simply unravel her tenuous hold on Thedas. But she had been so concerned with its possibility that she'd given very little consideration to what might happen otherwise. It had been a very stupid oversight.)

But she is certainly sitting upright in bed, which is more than one might have said a week ago. And someone has done her the courtesy of braiding her hair, and her face is newly scrubbed and she only looks tired rather than very exhausted. She also seems quite relieved to put aside the papers in her lap when Ellis appears.

"Oh, how good. It seems as if they've been on the run from the evil blackhaller for ages now."

[heorte]

You look well is only true because she has spent so much time looking very awful, and Ellis knows better than to say as much. She is alert and upright and more like herself than she has been apart from—

Well.

There is some hesitancy over what should be said. If anything should be said. So it all remains very silent, apart for one thing that come directly after and Ellis is uncertain whether or not she'd heard him at all at the time. (I am so glad to see you, raw with relief. They had all spent so much time worried that she would be gone once the surgery had done that for Wysteria to have come through it and remained solid and present, had knocked the wind out of him.) In the present moment, he is quiet, working free two more fastenings before his attention returns fully to her.

"I wouldn't count the blackhaller out," he says, resettling. "If it turns out the lad is her old sweetheart in disguise some other thing will need to go wrong in the last chapter."

Because there's fourteen promised installments, and no one can be happy before book fourteen is sent to the printing press.

"We can read a few chapters, after you've eaten."

Meaning Ellis will read until she falls asleep. This does not need to be said in so many words.

[heirring]

To say I'm not very hungry would be a very childish thing to claim even if it's true. It hasn't worked on either the Orlesian doctor or the stern Brother Gideon before now, and she doubts very much that it will be very effective with Ellis either. Yet there is the impulse to make the attempt anyway. Everything smells like liniment and the soft cotton of bandages, and like the stinging gelatin certain Rifters have insisted the wound be cleaned with; how is she meant to have an appetite?

"He can't be her old sweetheart. He died tragically in that land dispute. Unless— I suppose it's possible it was his twin whose body they burned, but you would think that Síofra would have recognized the difference. She observed the corpse before it was committed."

There is a spoon lain there on the tray. Picking it up, Wysteria slowly stirs the contents of the bowl.

[heorte]

No, it would not be an effective objection. Though perhaps Ellis anticipates some form of it, because though he reaches to reclaim the book and leave her more room on her tray, he doesn't yet open it. Instead, his attention remains on her entirely.

It would be reassuring, were she well enough to leave this infirmary before Ellis leaves Kirkwall.

"If they covered the birthmark, there wouldn't be much else to distinguish them," Ellis points out. "And she was grieving his death."

And it's the sort of book where anything might happen, so long as it is dramatic enough. Ellis refrains from submitting this as a valid argument.

[heirring]

"Those both seem like very poor excuses. I'm fully confident I would recognize the different between your body and your twins, or Mister Stark's and a look alike, and I have only seen Mister Stark with his shirt mostly open as opposed to—"

Well.

Síofra has surely been more familiar with her sweetheart than that.

"In any case," she says, fetching up the first spoonful of soup. See, look. She is doing her part. "Surely you would do the same. Have we considered the possibility that our heroine may have poor eyesight? It might explain some of her clumsiness."

[heorte]

Well.

Ellis does not volunteer any contribution to fit into that abrupt pause. Instead, he considers the clink of spoon against china. If there is some minor flex of emotion in his face over it, then surely it is not worth commenting on.

Instead—

"It must come and go," Ellis suggests, dry over the theory. "For she was able to sight the fuse on the blackhaller's trap from twenty paces or so in the first book."

The first book, which Ellis had left on the counter for her without any expectation that they might become a particular topic of conversation.

[heirring]

"Perhaps it's an allegory for Andraste's attempts to intercede on behalf of the living world. We are but bumbling creatures, occasionally blessed by her grace—and so on."

From anyone else, the suggestion might be the height of winking comedy. But Wysteria poses the theory quite seriously between one thin spoonful of soup and the next.

"It's hardly as if we can take the story only by its surface. Not when the contents is so divorced from reality."

Here, a pause. Then—

"I assume."

[heorte]

"Only so divorced from reality."

So deadpan that it's hard to tell to what extent Ellis is joking.

There is no further elaboration, only a minor huff of exertion as Ellis leans forward to reclaim the book. The lovingly rendered portrait on the cover of a strapping, red-haired man, tunic rakishly undone for the benefit of the heroine's palm to rest directly against bare skin, is only momentarily visible before Ellis opens the book wide to wear some of the new-bound stiffness from the spine.