faderift | CLOSED | She said, "Where'd you wanna go? How much you wanna risk?"

"I know I don't."

Because as unsettled and complicated as they have made this part of their relationship, Derrica knows that Ellie didn't come here with any expectation. She came because Derrica is safe, someone trusted. If Derrica asked her to leave, she would.

That matters.

Her fingers skim lightly over Ellie's cheek before she gets up to retrieve the water jug from where it had been set on the windowsill, the strips of white linen that will make due in the moment to clear the blood from Ellie's face.

"I can take care of this too," Derrica tells her. "I just want to be able to get a better feel for what's hurt here."

Whether all this swelling on Ellie's face means something's broken, or just badly bruised.

Ellie manages a nod, eases herself back on her bed. Her shoulder still aches, but it's well-blunted, and it won't be an issue unless she strains it again.

"Thanks."

Slowly, she tucks her feet up, lets all of the air out of her lungs. Her nose had stopped bleeding, but she genuinely can't tell if it was broken or not. Two brewing back eyes, a badly split lip, jaw and cheekbone aching and swollen, a bad knot on the back of her head where Abby laid her flat.

"I think it's mostly just the bruises. I felt something snap but. I'm not sure where."

"You're going to have to go easy for a few days," Derrica cautions.

They are brutal with each other, Ellie and Abby. Derrica can understand why, but there is something to be said for two people who know just how to hurt each other this way.

She can only hope Abby has found her way to the infirmary. Or to someone who can tend to her too. There is a twinge of guilt for that, of being unable to be in both places at once, minister to each of them. She is choosing, she knows. Choosing to stay the night with Ellie, and waiting until morning to find her way to Abby.

Derrica breathes out, applies the damp cloth to the crusted blood around Ellie's nose.

"Are you going to be able to sleep?"

Edited (late night tagging consequences) 2022-10-17 06:10 (UTC)

Ellie nods. She thinks of promising to be gentle, but in all honesty it's not something that she's going to be able to keep. She knows herself. There will always been something that she decides is more important.

(It was like this with her goddamn foot, too. It's a wonder that Derrica puts up with her.)

"I'll try," she settles on, exhales through her mouth as Derrica puts gentle pressure on her nose. Fuck, but that hurts. Her brow pinches, then relaxes at the coolness of it. Even if it hurts, it does feel good.

"On both counts. It's better when I'm not alone, mostly." She opens her eyes looks up at Derrica, manages not to wince at the cleaning. She's aware that Derrica's chosen to stay, knows how thin she's stretched. Even if she found Abby now she might not be able to help much other than talking.

It hits again, the aftershocks. Would Abby even let her? Would she let anyone?

"Are you? Going to be able to sleep?"

"I think so," she answers, then clarifies, "I sleep better with other people around me too."

Which sounds better than alongside someone else. She is aware of her own reputation, how it skews the meaning.

She was raised in Dairsmuid in rooms full of apprentices, then rooms full of mages and Enchanters. She traveled in the holds of ships, her hammock strung alongside dozens of others. The Gallows is the first and only place she's ever been where she can close a door between herself and others.

She is probably one of the very few who appreciated the nights spent piled into the main rooms altogether, or stranded in the jungle. Having community so close had been a balm.

Her fingers skim lightly along Ellie's jaw, tip her head towards the candlelight. It would be better if they had ice, but Derrica doesn't want to leave to get it.

"So it suits us both," she tells Ellie. Perhaps aware of that thread of worry, that its obligation keeping Derrica here. "And we'll have better choices now that we've eased the pain for you."

Ellie opens her mouth, but her thoughts are a mess, and anything she can think to say feels all twisted up in the back of her throat. For the moment, she listens instead, desperate to get out of her own head.

Maybe it's maladaptive in the long run, but in the moment it comes down to survival.

The soft touches hurt but Ellie leans into them anyway. Lets it all fall away.

"Were you alone?" Ellie asks, her voice quiet. "Before Diarsmuid?"

"No," Derrica answers. "I don't remember it very well, but I know where I was raised."

She had been smaller than most, given over early to the Enchanters at Dairsmuid. This had been part of the story she'd been told too.

Ellie had been alone. Derrica remembers that.

"I had people who looked after me. But they weren't prepared to raise a toddler who could make lightening."

Her thumb is so, so gentle as it passes along Ellie's chin. This is a brief pause to examine the damage. Judge what might swell. Cleared more or less entirely of blood, Derrica considers what might be left until the morning.

"You weren't with your parents?" Ellie asks, her voice softer. It's not that she disbelieves it, it's that it's one more piece of Derrica. That makes it important.

The bruises on Ellie's face are stark and darkening. In the morning she'll be a mess, but thankfully it's mostly bruising. The parts she winces at are her left cheekbone (a hairline fracture that blacked her eye) and another crack in the bridge of her nose.

In truth, all of it might be left until morning. Nothing is an emergency, and Ellie's slept with far worse.

At the Conclave, Kostos had asked something similar. Unearthed this piece of information, while they'd been miserably tucked together in a hallway.

The wet cloth is lowered, though Derrica's hand remains at Ellie's cheek for the moment. All these bruises, splotched across her face, dulled where Derrica had applied her attention at Ellie's shoulders and chest. She breathes out. Once, twice. Centering herself to drum up some last reserves so she might lay her hand at Ellie's cheekbone, fingers splayed across her temple, and knit the fracture.

It might lighten the bruise, but it is only settling the break. The rest will have to wait.

"I never knew them," Derrica tells her. "My father was some kind of sailor, I think. My mother died in childbirth."

A sad story, theoretically. Derrica's voice doesn't waver as she relates it.

Derrica's magic is comforting for what it is and who it comes from, not for how it feels. It's cold and shivers through her accordingly, leaves her teeth wanting to chatter, her skin breaking out in goosebumps.

Her closed eyelids shiver, and she blinks them open, re-focusing. The pain's down from a scream to a dull roar. She smiles with one side of her mouth, shifts gingerly back and offers her bloody-knuckled hand, on the lookout for any signs of Derrica feeling faint.

"That's more than I know," Ellie admits- it's that same unmoored feeling. Not sad, but sometimes it gives itself over to wonderings.

"Did you... find some people, then? Once you moved?"

A pause, while Derrica searches Ellie's face. The meaning is understood. And she has the answer to the question, only defers it for a more pressing necessity. When Derrica says, "You should lay down first," it isn't a denial, or an attempt to slip away from the query. The question is only paused, set aside by the gentling catch of her hands over Ellie's bloody ones.

Ellie is cold, and her body has been through a great deal. Even with Derrica's magic to heal the worst of it and blunt the rest, the after effects are the same.

"Where do you keep the things you sleep in?"

"Um, top drawer."

Most of the time Ellie sleeps in her clothes, just removes more of them depending on how hot it is. If it's been a bad week she only takes her boots off, leaves them laced. It feels safest knowing she can jump out of bed and shove her feet into her shoes and be ready.

Sometimes, she relaxes enough for actual pajamas or what passes as them for her. She wears them rarely because she doesn't want to wear them out. But tonight's as good a reason as any.

They're simple. A somewhat threadbare henly and shorts that probably started out life as drawstring pants here in Thedas.

"The arms stretch easy," she adds. She won't have to fuck up her shoulder to put it on.

Some minor testing of the fabric's give occurs before Derrica steps back from Ellie's dresser. She's toed off her boots in the process; the laces had been left undone, in her hurry to depart her own room for Ellie's.

"Tell me how your arm feels," is an invitation to take stock of all other hurts, decide whether anything else is painful enough to make sleep impossible.

Derrica is thinking about shock, about all the ways a body responds to injury. Whether the limitations of her own ability might require them to find Richard, wherever he has landed this evening.

She puts the clothes into Ellie's lap. Draws one bare foot up beneath her as she sits across from her on the bed. Not declining to help, but waiting to be asked if Ellie needs her.

Ellie nods, balls the henly up with one hand along the sleeve to make a ring, and starts with the injured hand, guiding it up to the elbow and then her shoulder. Every movement is methodical, practiced once she starts it, like it's something she knows how to do but it's a little rusty because she hasn't done it in a while. One shoulder, then head. She manages to get her good arm up through the arm-hole and then down through the sleeve.

Finally she reaches up, drags the cloth down across her chest and stomach.

"Could you get the back?" she asks, faintly embarrassed about needing the help. (Which is stupid, considering how often Ellie braided Derrica's hair for her once she taught her how.)

Speaking of. Ellie breathes it, lets the breath out again.

"... and maybe put my hair up? Please?"

"Of course," in answer to both requests. Ellie has managed so far without seeming to hurt herself, or worsen the pain she must still be in. That she asks is a little bit of a relief. There are so many people in Riftwatch who might have muscled through regardless, even when it's such a small thing they might avoid.

Derrica moves rather than bid Ellie to turn for her. She eases the fabric down Ellie's back. Then runs her hand down Ellie's back a second time, smoothing the fabric, soothing any lingering tension as best she can.

"You should keep potions in your room," isn't an answer to Ellie's question. Not yet. "For emergencies."

Her fingers slip into Ellie's hair as she speaks, draw through the locks to fan them out properly. Consider how she might begin to braid Ellie's hair into something loose and manageable and easily shed in the morning if she's so inclined.

Ellie hasn't forgotten her question, but she's also set it down for the time being. It might be a hard one to answer, and if Derrica does decide not to answer it won't be something she presses.

It might be a hurt, it might not, but. Well.

Ellie half-turns one shoulder at the rub down her back, putting a knee up onto her bed so Derrica doesn't have so far to move, and lets her eyes fall shut as Derrica eases her fingers into her hair. It draws out a tension she hadn't realized she was carrying. Though she still has trouble accepting help, she's starting to find the rhythm of it. The easy give and take that isn't really a take when it comes down to it.

"Feels good," she mumbles, and sighs the air out of her lungs.

"Good idea. I usually keep them in my pack when I leave the Gallows, but."

Well. There are times when the Gallows can get dangerous, too.

Eventually, Derrica will begin braiding. For the moment, she is just running fingers through Ellie's hair, breaking to gently scrape nails along Ellie's scalp.

"We'll get you some extra. Some for your pack, and some for your room."

Light, throwaway statements. Yes, they'll gather up enough supplies for both. Hopefully Ellie will never need to reach for a healing potion stashed in this room again. If it gathers dust here, Derrica would be more than content.

There's a few beats of quiet, Derrica's fingers drawing over and over through Ellie's hair. Eventually—

"There were people for me, after Dairsmuid. A captain who took me onto his ship when he didn't have to, and sailors who taught me what I needed to know. Some of them ask for me when they come into Kirkwall."

An answer. Or the beginning of an answer.

Ellie settles into that touch, drawing her legs up despite the fact that it hurts, puts pressure on her chest. She can breathe through it, and it won't hurt anything worse.

Instead of braiding, Derrica touches her. Ellie shuts her eyes when she realizes it, just... breathes. Lets it be what it is. All of her words, all of her touches. It feels like care, and it is, and if she doesn't think too hard it won't hurt.

Ellie doesn't ask questions. She just listens, her arms draped loosely around her shins, letting Derrica go where she will. Tell her the parts she wants to say aloud.

This position is permitted, for a few moments more. Derrica's fingers draw through Ellie's hair, observe the way she's drawn her legs up. She doesn't need to be told; Derrica has seen these injuries before, knows it won't be strictly comfortable.

But she doesn't disrupt her just yet. Derrica's fingers twirl a lock of Ellie's hair, lets her palm rest at the nape of her neck. Thinking on what might be more comfortable.

"It wasn't the same as Riftwatch, sailing with those crews," she murmurs. "But I don't think anywhere else is."

This surely doesn't need to be said. Riftwatch is a collection of oddities, even without Rifters.

"I'm going to braid your hair, and then put you to bed," Derrica tells her, just as softly. "And I'll stay, tonight."

Derrica's palm there feels good. Ellie keeps her eyes shut, just concentrates on the next breath. Her mind's a place of half-whispers, of things she can't bring herself to voice aloud.

Tonight's bad, and Abby's will be worse.

Put you to bed, Derrica says, and Ellie swallows the taste in the back of her throat.

"Is it better?" Ellie asks, after Derrica's reassurance. "Here, in Riftwatch?"

It shouldn't be a difficult question. Derrica still takes a moment to feel her way to the answer, thinking of the bag she still keeps packed beneath her bed. Her fingers exert very gentle pressure, guiding Ellie down to the pillow in that quiet space after the question.

"It's different," is what Derrica has settled on. "I think it would be harder to leave the people here."

Crews were transitory by nature. People came and went. They returned months, years later. It wasn't such a wrenching thing to see them go, because the ties were looser, meant to stretch and lapse.

Derrica still feels Holden's absence so deeply, all these months later.

"I don't know if it's better. I know I've been changed because I chose to stay here. I think that it's been good for me."

Ellie shuts her eyes harder at the pressure, and it takes a second for her to unwind herself and come along. Laying on her back is the least painful, so she takes the place nearest the wall.

She seems to think on that answer, watching the flickering light of the vaulted stone ceiling.

"Do you think you could ever go back to that life, now that you've lived here?"

This too is something Derrica has thought of, without coming to a decision.

Only moments ago, she had promised to braid Ellie's hair. As Ellie settles, Derrica's fingers find her jaw, tip her head so Derrica might comb her hair to the side and begin plaiting it as she speaks.

"I told Matthias if anything happens. If there is war again and we lose, then I will take him and anyone else to the nearest ship and we would sail away."

The names come to her: Matthias. Kostos. Marcus and Petra and Julius. Loxley and Richard.

Ellie.

The tangle of Rifters and mages she has grown close to, all who would be a squabbling nightmare in close quarters, but Derrica could never bear to leave behind.

"I love the sea. I do," she murmurs, fingers soft at Ellie's temple. "But it would be lonely, if I went back to it as I left off."

Ellie turns, and the gentle tugs seem to work at her frayed ends. She feels less tight, and less together. She lets herself be tugged apart and rebraided.

Tonight's a night of heightened emotion, of fog, of old hurts and old traumas come back to catch her in their teeth. She's hungry for anything outside of that, for truths triumphs and pains and memories. Her life is a thousand dusty rooms with shattered glass on the floor, filled with ghosts.

It's a strange thing not to count herself among them.

"Joel used to say you could never outrun it."

"The past?" Derrica asks. The motion of her fingers doesn't stop, but it slows. Perhaps to acclimate the angle, the loose plait Derrica is fashioning, or because she wants to make space for Ellie's tone. Let the gravity of what Ellie is speaking of have space to fall into.

CLOSED | She said, "Where'd you wanna go? How much you wanna risk?"

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comedy of her posture in this picture

chilly la creatura

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