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

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.

"Yeah," Ellie says softly.

He'd been looking at a picture of his daughter as he said it. At her smiling face caught in a creased, sun-faded photograph. A man he'd been more than twenty years ago, all pride and warmth and easy love.

"But I don't think he was talking about just the bad things."

"The good things stay too," Derrica agrees. Her touch is very light as she ties off the plait.

There is a pause as she arranges herself alongside Ellie, mindful of jostling her with all those residual aches and pains. She curls on her side, hand tucked up beneath the pillow, watchful.

"I didn't learn that until I came here."

Maybe she wouldn't have been able to ever look at the best parts of her past otherwise. It had hurt so much for so long. It still hurts. But she knows better how precious the good pieces are. How tightly she should hold to them, instead of trying to keep them at a distance.

"I think I'm still learning that," Ellie admits, turning her head despite the ache in her neck.

She's quiet a moment, reaches out to brush the edge of one curl from Derrica's face with her forefinger, tension in her brow subsiding, though her jaw stays tight.

"Maybe you never stop learning this stuff."

"I don't think so," Derrica agrees. Even in the time they've known each other, they've both changed and changed. Every person they meet teaches them something new, for better or for worse. Derrica has seen Ellie processing, has listened to her just tonight express what she has resolved.

Derrica reaches up to catch Ellie's hand, bring it to her lips to kiss her bruised knuckles.

That tension in her face hasn't gone unnoticed. Derrica doesn't know how she might ease it without aggravating all the other lingering hurts.

"I hope you have room for the good things. That we've helped you find a place for them."

Ellie stills at the kiss, all mixed feelings. She welcomes the comfort and closeness, but it stings too. Another day, she'd pick up and examine those feelings. Tonight, she's exhausted, so emotionally raw that she doesn't have the energy to hold it in her mind.

She'll let herself have this.

"You have," she whispers. "And I thought I was doing better." And really, that's part of what has her so heartsick. She'd thought she was beyond this.

In the morning, she'll recognize the differences. Once the dust settles and she has room to think, once the old hurts stop clamoring for her attention.

"But for a minute there..."

Not so much.

"I know."

It's not exactly the same, their respective losses, the parts of them that are hurt and broken. But Derrica understands what it is when all that pain comes back. It is hard to anticipate. It can be overwhelming.

It is hard to weather it.

Maybe she has been unfair. But it is hard to observe Ellie break apart, see all the ways she's hurt herself and consider how she has hurt someone else.

"Close your eyes," Derrica tells her, lacing their fingers together in the space between them. "I'm here. I promise."

Ellie shifts, getting more comfortable on her good shoulder, silently dreading whatever nightmare's gonna leak into her brain tonight. She hopes she won't dream. She hopes she's not breaking open Derrica's old wounds, either.

Derrica's hand is steady on hers, though. And maybe it's just from remembering the hall where they'd fallen asleep like this once, but she does feel beyond exhausted. Her body's crashing in response to the hurt followed by the safety.

"Thank you, Derrica."

She shuts her eyes.

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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