faderift | open | if every constellation above us has a counterpart below.

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open | if every constellation above us has a counterpart below.

WHO: Stephen Strange & you
WHAT: yet another new rifter arrival
WHEN: nowish and throughout his quarantine period
WHERE: Around the Gallows
NOTES: Catch-all spot for the month and to continue TDM arrival threads; feel free to tag in tho!

arrival (a variety of prompts).

It begins as an anxiety dream.

He’s experienced no end of nightmares about no end of trauma, but this time the stakes are banal: Doctor Strange is dressed sharply in a formal suit with a scarlet pocket square, giving a speech at a medical conference, standing at a podium staring at the hundreds of faces staring back at him, and finding that his iron-trap memory has suddenly failed and he’s forgotten his entire damned speech. It’s almost a relief when the enormous tentacled eyeball monster barges into the conference center, sending people screaming and scattering, and just as the Cloak of Levitation reappears around his shoulders, Strange finds himself —

somewhere else —

What ensues is a disorienting battle on the outskirts of Orlais, with a rifter appearing in anachronistic formalwear and a red cloak gone inanimate, with a conference lanyard hanging around his neck and a little adhesive nametag (‘DR. STEPHEN STRANGE, MD, PHD, NEW YORK METRO-GENERAL HOSPITAL’ now rendered in Thedan script). And in the fight, Strange realises that almost none of his magic behaves as he expects it to. It’s not the first time he’s found himself unexpectedly dumped in another universe, but this is the first time his own capabilities have failed him. Even after the battle ends, wraiths banished and his dream-monster killed, he keeps trying to light a spark of fire between his hands and finding it more difficult than it ought to be. On the carriage ride back to Kirkwall, with both him and the Riftwatch agents covered in horrid black ichor and gore from the eyeball monster’s innards, at least Strange has the decency to look a little sheepish while the other agents scrutinise him.

“Done this sort of reception a lot?” he asks, lightly, while he keeps unconsciously kneading at his left palm. His hand aches. This is normal. What isn’t normal is the green shard embedded in it like some kind of ethereal splinter, and it makes the usual pain in his scarred hands even worse.

Afterwards, during his quarantine, he can be found in the library at all hours, surrounded by stacks of books, devouring them even late into the night – he’s an avaricious student, and wants to learn everything about his new circumstances. He breaks the polite silence when a glob of hot wax from a candle lands on his wrist, and he curses with a sudden sharp “Oh, what the fuck.”

Strange goes for long walks around the Gallows. You might literally run into him where he’s crouched in a hallway in the lower levels, examining the cleansing runes embedded in the floor which prevent the growth of red lyrium, puzzling over the clearly-magical symbols, feeling that faint hum of magic in the back of his teeth. “Do you happen to know what these do?”

He also inevitably winds up poking his head into the infirmary, morbidly curious; one might walk in on him peering through the bottles of potions and jars of dried herbs, and surveying the surgical tools with a thoughtful little hm in the back of his throat.

wildcard.

feel free to toss me anything (late-night insomnia wandering the halls? new dorm roommates? mealtime in the dining hall?) and i’ll roll with it! or hmu @ quadrille to confab. i’ll match prose or brackets.

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“Sweated out would be more accurate, the way I remember it. Templars had it the worst of the natives who took ill — they're lyrium-addled at the best of times — and for them it was mostly the burning out mania. Feverish. But I shared quarters with a rifter, and there were times I'd turn my back and then not know why I was there for a moment.”

Harder to forget someone she was in a room with,

not impossible. At least it had always cleared quickly.

It is merciless but not truly unkind when she says, “The sooner you reckon with whatever you have to reckon with, the less likely it is to kneecap you in six months time at the worst moment.”

“Ah,” he says, with faux wistfulness, “if only we could just speed-run all of our emotional processing on a planned timeline. Much more convenient.”

Much like her: the words aren’t cruel, not spiteful. Simply gently barbed by way of there being some personal setting cranked to sarcastic and Stephen Strange still hasn’t learned how to turn it off; never knew how. So he shakes his head, the thoughts obviously still stewing somewhere in the back of his mind (tucked away for later inevitable examination), and then holds the bow out to her.

“Could you demonstrate a shot? —although not in here, presumably, it can’t be good for the art.”

Edited 2022-10-05 03:01 (UTC)

Probably the reason this conversation is going so well has something to do with the way her mouth quirks sideways, unwillingly charmed, by the sarcasm.

“Not in here,” she agrees, considering for a moment, tipping her head back to look at the ceiling —

oh, obviously. When she straightens to her feet, it happens so quickly that Small Yngvi is spilled unceremoniously from her skirts with an offended series of trilling cat mouth sounds, a thing that must be ordinary given that Gwenaëlle herself barely spares him a look and the swipe at her ankle seems half-hearted, more for form's sake than anything else.

“Alright, come with me.”

It's sort of a lot like her sharply tangential conversation, the way she takes the bow and gathers her skirts in one hand to very abruptly and without seeing the need to explain herself lead him — up. As luxuriously appointed as the interiors are, the staircases can't be described as rickety but they are certainly winding, most of them spiraling to save space, offering Stephen brief glimpses of other living spaces within but she is hurrying ahead,

it is nearly the top of the boat that they reach. It isn't immediately obvious that the spacious room that takes up the entirety of the uppermost floor is her bedroom — full length curtains hide her alcove bed from casual view — but it is clearly an intimate space, spread out, a bear-skin (with bear head, ready to make uncomfortable eye contact) and cushions on the floor in front of a low chaise, a writing desk and vanity filling a corner where the best natural light falls, cushioned glass-fronted cabinets covering one full wall filled with curios and keepsakes (and, in one central section, a wider variety of glass eyes and eye-patches, bookended by two beautifully ornate Orlesian masks on blank wooden heads where two tiaras rest, as well) and an open door into not a wardrobe but a separate dressing room. There is one more spiraling staircase that finally leads out to the salt air of the highest balcony.

Gwenaëlle disappears into the dressing room and returns with an arrow, which is probably nothing to broadly worry about where she keeps her weapons and how close to her bed.

And just like that, he’s abruptly and unceremoniously whisked along, and so he follows her up the stairs (and thinks, not for the first nor the last time, how much he misses his portals— god, he’d really gotten too comfortable and too lazy with that magic, hadn’t he? perhaps all of this for the best).

Strange catches only fleeting glimpses of the other rooms, but gets a good look on the last one. As he stands on the landing, shoulder propped against the wall as she goes to fetch the arrow, his gaze drifts. Takes in the surroundings. Lingers on all those glass cabinets and keepsakes and the masks, and he wonders, vaguely, how many more of them are magical. Obviously Gwenaëlle’s bedroom isn’t the Sanctum Sanctorum’s loft, his own storage area for occult artifacts— but considering those display cabinets, it’s not not like it.

He seems less struck by the woman brandishing an arrow than by the climb itself, though, glancing at the window, the stairs leading even further up. “Surely I’m not the first person to mention this place looks like some fairytale witch’s tower disguised as a boat, right? It’s quite the setup. There’s more storeys here than in my townhouse back home. Nice square footage.”

The look she casts him is amused, and the explanation for that immediately follows: “You are, but probably someone else would have in time if it weren't so new. Mostly they've been saying are you truly living in that fucking awful thing with their eyes and not seeing this far.”

But she's doing a poor job of tamping down how pleased she is by fairytale witch's tower, and she thinks Morrigan and Kieran would have to love it — will love it, when she sees them again, as she's sure she will. Maybe Kieran still has his articulated dragon; it would make for an excellent display piece, now that at nearly Matthias's age he's probably much too grown and serious to play with it.

“But she suits me,” patting the banister of the last spiral staircase, “and I think she's beautiful. Up here.”

From the uppermost point of La Souveraineté, they can see clear across the harbor to the city of chains, to Flint's Walrus docked on the other side, up to Hightown, high above. Gwenaëlle nocks an arrow and sights along it, and there's no— moment. She doesn't hesitate, doesn't seem to think about it, just lifts her bow and the moment she needs there to be a string to pull there just is, shimmering and unreal and requiring all the draw power of anything more mundane. Ice magic glitters and cools the air, and when she looses the bow — aimed directly into the sea, where it's unlikely to do more harm than give a fish a bad day — that same magic streaks behind it, leaves a patch of ice in the water. At this distance and with the precision of the shot knifing beneath the surface it's nearly the only way to tell where it's gone.

Critically, “I need to practise accommodating the blind spot, still.”

He likes a vantage point.

Doctor Strange is accustomed to being able to fly over a landscape, scouting and taking it all in from above, and it’s been frustrating without his levitation: diminished to walking around, face pressed to the ground like an ant. And one of his most common haunts used to be the top floor of the Sanctum, looking pensively through the loft window at the streets below (and how discomfiting, to realise that his gnarled and twisted other self in another universe had done the same, peering out at him like some gaunt wizard in a tower, and they truly weren’t so different after all).

So as they emerge into that crisp sea-breeze, he takes in the view, a better look at the harbour and fortress and Kirkwall town sitting just out of reach. And before he can say anything or quip anything, then Gwenaëlle’s already moving into fluid, graceful movement, pulling that impossible bowstring back. That spark of frost in the air, tasting like a winter morning on the tongue — the arrow soaring through the sky in a clean shot, and Strange finds himself unconsciously leaning forward with his hands against the balcony banister, wholly absorbed in the sight even after the arrow vanishes into the sea. He exhales, impressed, while not wanting to give away exactly how impressed he is.

He had been intrigued before, of course. But the demonstration of the magic in motion sparks something else, presses all his buttons. Makes him want a goddamned magic bow of his own. Shifting slightly, leaning in with forearms now propped comfortably against the railing, he looks over at her. There’s a wry smile on his face; his first smile of the day. And he gestures a hand vaguely at her face: the aforementioned blind spot, the exaggeratedly golden eye.

“So that’s a new development?”

How strange it feels—

ha, ha

—that he has to ask. Her fingertips drift to her cheekbone, splay against the skin beneath where her eye used to be, and her mouth pulls in a little, thinning, her gaze cutting away and her head straightening where she had been tilted, ever so slightly, to keep him centered in her field of vision.

He's a stranger. He's never seen her other than this. Something feels thick in her throat that she doesn't trust, so it takes her a moment to swallow it before she says, “Yeah, I don't recommend bargaining with ancient elvhen spirits, if you can possibly avoid it,” like it's a thing about which she can already be flippant.

“Some of us, we were in this ruin that the Venatori wanted access to, to get at the Gates. And to get through it we all had to give something up. They asked for a life, initially, and Loxley and I volunteered and he won the coin toss so— but when he said he would do it, they were just pleased we understood the stakes. That we respected it. And they gave us an alternative sacrifice.” A smile flickers, determinedly summoned but not successfully held, “What's another scar, right? I had two eyes, I could spare one. I knew a one-eyed archer, and he won the Grand Tourney very handily. And he was handsome.”

And then he broke her heart at the battle of Ghislain, but that is neither here nor there.

It's stupid to care if people still think she's beautiful.

"It's very striking. The gold's a lovely colour." It's a careful, purposeful choice of words: Strange doesn't flirt much from the get-go these days, not until he's more comfortable in an environment and assured that he's not about to be dropped into the ocean for shoving his foot in his mouth. But it still bore mentioning. Striking. Of course she's beautiful; that uncanny molten colour simply heightens it.

"I'm also vaguely acquainted with a one-eyed god," he adds, thoughtful. "It doesn't seem to hold him back much, either. If you still have your dominant eye, then I imagine you ought to get by just fine with the archery."

His fingers flex and relax against the banister, an unconscious tic. One makes do with what one has.

"Is this a common occurrence for Riftwatch? Bargaining with ancient elvhen spirits who unexpectedly change the bargain?"

“More common than for your average citizen,” she says, “who does it probably never. There's nothing in this world some ancient elf didn't stick his dick in at some point and we're constantly trudging around the ruins of all their previous fuck ups because the Venatori are still picking at their bones for new and exciting ways to dick the rest of us.”

She's so beautiful, truly, and then she opens her mouth and talks.

(The accent, a Halamshiral High Quarter princess through and through even now, makes it all the more jarring — though her voice has a pleasant weight to it, lower than she looks like it'll be.)

“I'm right-handed,” after a moment, “so the left isn't ideal. But I've had to become sort of ambidextrous,” gesturing with her left hand, and the anchor-shard that gleams dully in it, “and I'm hoping that'll make up the difference, if there's difference to make. There's not much else for it but getting on, anyway.”

She's still alive. She's still on her feet. There's still work to do.

"We do our best with the resources we have available. And at the very least, it seems like you have many resources," Strange says, lightly.

Does he mean the money? The houseboat and the majordomo? The propaganda and the connections? Or the fuck-all frost-glinting magical bow? (Yes.)

"You said you were Forces, although you seem like a bit of a jack of all trades. Is it mainly archery or knives? When you do get into combat?"

He's still teetering on the edge of a decision himself, trying to decide which side of himself to carve out and offer up to Riftwatch, and what would be the most useful to them — the man can get involved in flat-out battle, or he could turn his mind back to research. But then that would mean reporting to Tony. So. Decisions!

“I would describe myself as violently curious,” she says, dryly, “but I joined Forces before I was combat trained because my aunt commanded it at the time and I knew if she hadn't throttled me to death for half the things I'd said to her by then she wasn't going to send me out unprepared for someone else to take all the remaining joy out of her life.”

After a moment, “The thing that was obvious then is the same thing, now. We're a paramilitary organisation to whom both of those words apply only loosely.” Paramilitary. 'Organised'. “There are less than a hundred people in the Gallows, and fewer than that agents of Riftwatch once you discount the menial staff and clerks. Everyone has to be flexible, half the people doing any given job aren't doing it because they're the best for it. They're doing it because they're the bodies available.”

In this, she very much includes herself.

“It's whichever weapon is going to solve the immediate problem that I have, and it's — a lot of problems. Forces might attach to a larger group if we're cooperating with another, or we might be sent to protect a research project, or partner with another division for a retrieval. Or we might just go along on something because it's probably going to be dangerous, no matter who's designated responsibility the thing actually is. I occasionally ask Stark for his sanction or oversight on projects I think will be useful, which is separate, but I still answer to Commander Flint and I get into combat mostly when he tells me to or something goes tits up and now we're fighting.”

It’s a lovely day by the ocean, with the sky sprawling above them. Strange is quiet for a long moment, contemplative as he takes in those words and everything that they imply.

“This is different,” he finally says, still thoughtful. “Your war, I mean. The one I was in lasted, oh, a day. I went to space and died and came back and fought again, but it was still mostly a two-battle affair. A big blowout with… hundreds, absolutely hundreds of soldiers and mages and gods coming to help. Not this— years-long desperate guerrilla thing.”

He doesn’t have experience with the latter. And it’s been easy to be frivolous as he always is — that innate instinct to undercut everything with humour, sarcasm — but then every so often he comes up short with a chilling reminder of how serious the situation is. How harried. How very long these people have been in these particular trenches, long before Stephen Strange arrived on the scene. He wants to joke, but this thoughtful turn to his mood has brought seriousness along with it, piercing his usual innocent curiosity.

“Alright. Since you seem to be extraordinarily well-informed here, tell me the truth. How is the war going? Is it in a holding pattern? Occasional victories? Mostly losses?”

What, in short and in god’s name, has he signed up for? Been conscripted for, after the universe dragged him here?

By the breath she takes, and the way she exhales it, he is probably expecting the answer by the time she says, “Badly,” because it feels the only honest place to begin.

Gwenaëlle leans her hip against the balustrade, pursing her lips as she considers the best way to elaborate. She isn't the person who teaches rifters the important things, at the beginning, for a lot of reasons — not least of which being the decided lack of delicacy with which she does most everything — and presented with the opportunity she isn't unwilling, only uncertain.

How does a fish describe water to an axolotl?

“The war isn't one conflict, with one side. Corypheus is a clear threat to everyone, and some conflicts have been set aside — temporarily — in the wake of that. But it's all still politics and trade agreements and how much of someone's own blood has to be spilled before they care. It's still every other conflict in Thedas having to be navigated to get any fucking thing done. We've gained ground, but so has he. And Riftwatch has specific...we will never fight a battle like you described. The Inquisition might. Orlais has already had to defend encroachment into its territory and Starkhaven's been under siege a year, now. I suppose we're trying to lean a finger on the scales, really. And we're the only ones able to close the rifts you come through. But nothing's happened fast, there's been no heroic moment out of a ballad where every nation in Thedas rises up together. We had to persuade Antiva not to trade with Tevinter any more.”

Her lip curls. “And if the gods of old come, they won't be fighting on our side.”

That sounds awfully awfully personal for what she's talking about.

For the most part, Strange prefers the direct approach. Hard facts, diagnoses, no sugarcoating. People had tried handling him with kid gloves after his accident and he had torn into them for it. The truth could be brutal, but at least it’s the truth.

And so he listens to Gwenaëlle’s more detailed rundown. And he laughs, and it’s small and short and curt and bleak, but there’s a rueful kind of humour in his voice as he responds: “Funny, how much you can take that heroic moment from the ballads for granted. Never realised how spoiled we were until now.”

For all that the Battle for Earth had been terrible, at least they had not faced it alone. When Earth’s Mightiest put out the call, they’d been practically overflowing with plucky do-gooder heroes who didn’t hesitate to throw themselves into the meatgrinder alongside them. Handy, that. They hadn’t had to execute trade agreements and nebulous politics and pulling strings from the shadows just to convince people to join the fight or serve as reinforcements.

He shakes his head. Letting the reality of the situation sink in, like ducking his head under cold water; letting it settle and testing the weight of that new knowledge, the one he’s been slowly coming to accept. You’re here. You’re not, actually, going home. You’re in a different kind of war now. Congratulations, doctor.

“This sort of fight isn’t my forté,” he says, “but I suppose it’s never too late to pick up new skills. I’ve pivoted before, I can pivot again. Thank you for being honest.”

The sound she makes is indistinct; she had rather never be anything but honest, where it's up to her. (If that isn't always as true as she believes it to be— she believes it, and that counts for something.) After a moment, absently tapping her fingers against recently refinished wood,

“Five years ago I'd never lifted a weapon,” she offers, in further honesty. “Ten years ago I had never left Orlais. I don't know if I'll recognise who I'll become, if I get another fifteen.”

Her shrug is elegant, better suited to the courts and drawing rooms she'd once been expected only to haunt, “What are we meant to do, except get on with what's in front of us? I think it's mad, anything else.”

“It’s a good approach,” Strange admits. “Practical.”

And broadly the same as the rifter philosophy Ellie had handed him, from his very first hours in Thedas: If we’re here, we might as well get something done.

It’s sinking in. And he can’t abide not being useful, even stranded in this situation as he is. So he echoes Gwenaëlle’s own phrasing, still contemplative: “A lot can change on a dime. Five years ago, I was the Sorcerer Supreme of my entire world, and then I lost the position. Ten years ago, I was a surgeon, and then I lost it. Now I’ll be… god, I don’t even know. Slinging fireballs in Forces or holing myself up with the mysteries of the universe in Research, I suppose, if Stark and I can get along.”

“Mmm, we've got mages and Templars serving alongside one another in Riftwatch and odds are good that war's back on the second this one ends, so don't feel like not getting along with someone is too much of a dealbreaker,”

the humour in that is fucking bleak, which is also probably why she's rarely the go-to person for this sort of detailed breakdown. Is it appropriate for her, who is neither, to make that joke? Probably not. Too late, though.

“You know him, then? Stark.”

The curiosity is casual, not pressing; if he demurs rather than elaborate on the shared history, she doesn't seem like the disappointment will warrant dwelling on. Still, it's just as clear that she makes a note — that she'll remember it. That she is paying attention, too, to what he says in turn.

Bleak is realistic. He’s fine with it. And he doesn’t hesitate long over Gwenaëlle’s question, innocent as it is. Because this is— not fully safe territory, really, but it doesn’t set off the immediate klaxons or the defensive evasiveness yet. This part is fine. Basic getting-to-know-you stuff.

“I do,” he says. Explanatory. “He’s the only person I know here, actually. We come from the same universe. We fought together in that war.”

And Stephen had walked Tony right into his self-sacrificial heroic death.

(Okay. That part, he won’t touch.)

“There've been others,” she notes, “but I think it's only the two of you, now. Loki, who bore a resemblance to a Tevene Altus of the same name, he—”

Mmm. She considers how to put this, though in all likelihood Stephen knows more about what Loki is known for in his world than she can claim to; the war that he's talking about, now, is beyond the scope of what Tony had shared with her, the history they'd talked about mostly in the context of his wariness about what Loki might be capable of, with all these terribly sympathetic types being terribly sympathetic to him.

And Alexandrie, shagging the arse off a man that looked like her husband and didn't treat her half so badly.

“We talked about what Loki did in New York,” she says, finally, “but I don't know a great deal about his life.” That there had been a woman he loved in it, when he had been reckoning with the possibility of loving a woman here, too, but that seems a little personal to casually reference in this conversation with Stephen might-not-get-on-with-him Strange.

Edited ("off" and "of" really change the meaning of that sentence) 2022-10-25 09:50 (UTC)

Strange’s eyebrows arch and his face settles into an expression of surprise, with a little bit of disbelief.

“Loki was here?” He’d already namedropped him elsewhere; thank god he hadn’t blathered it to someone who’d also known Loki in Thedas. “Not that I knew him that well. We met only the once, and I trapped him in a portal loop above a canyon to keep him out of the way and then stashed him in a toilet. It pays to keep gods humble.”

He can be an incredibly spiteful person when he’s in the mood for it. They might have that in common.

“Anyway, I can’t say Tony and I knew each other all that well, either. We may have saved the world together, but it was brief.” A beat. There’s too much baggage there, and too much that he doesn’t want to blab to a near-stranger. And he’s too-aware of the fact that the other man has been here far longer; has deep-wrought connections in this place; has worked his way up to a position of responsibility. So he simply adds, “I respect him, though.”

Enough that her mouth quirks again, clearly trying to decipher exactly what a portal loop might be and whatever she's picturing is probably both pretty close and really funny.

“I'm not risking having you repeat it back to Stark that I said the same,” she says, blithely, “so I'm not going to.”

But she does. Considers him a friend, even, after a fashion; a bit avuncular, a bit too much alike to her, but someone upon whom she could probably rely, if she needed to. His irritating insistence on calling her a good person aside,

(she's not as bad as all that)

she likes the man, as well as respects him.

“Loki called me terrifying,” she adds, after a moment, “when no one could lie to each other. I don't think much of the gods I've met, to be perfectly honest with you.”

Strange is never particularly nervous in a conversation or a first meeting — he always just barrels straight into it with the same flippant nonchalance, as if he’s known the other person for ages, and sometimes this is a good thing and sometimes it’s terrible — but Gwenaëlle is, somehow, particularly easy to talk to. Possibly because she’s even more at ease and straightforward and in her element; doesn’t mind answering his questions, doesn’t seem to mind him prying.

So, elbows still propped comfortably against that banister, he shoots her another sidelong look. What kind of woman could terrify a god who’d once tried to subjugate an entire planet?

Food for thought. He has a few. But he lets that description sidle past, notes it for later, and says instead: “I was getting that impression, from your saying they wouldn’t be on our side. I haven’t covered all of Comparative Religion 101 in my Theodosian studies yet — would they really throw in for Corypheus?”

“I think that's a false dichotomy,” she says, frank. “Standing with us or standing with him— if you've enough power to be called a god, are those your only options? They don't have to throw in with Corypheus to be indifferent to what happens to the rest of us. If you've two problems, and one problem deals with the other without your lifting a finger, well, now your troubles have been effortlessly halved.”

A shrug,

“The witch, Flemeth, she's what's left of the goddess Mythal. And she's been out there, for centuries, harboring her own agenda and her own grudges and not giving an iota of a fuck about what happens to those who still worship her. Self-absorbed indifference is an option, too. Plenty of people who aren't gods choose it every day.”

“Fair point. It’s not like I’ve really known any gods to swoop in and bother to intervene and do the heroic thing besides Thor.” Strange considers, his mouth pressed into a thin line.

There are still so many questions he wants to ask her, but perhaps he shouldn’t treat this meeting as an ongoing interrogation, mining Gwenaëlle for everything she can tell him about this world. There’ll be time in future for more of that, he thinks.

“Thank you for the information. And the demonstration.” He tips his head toward the bow, that crisp bite of frost in the air. Lightly: “If I wind up dredging any swamps, I’ll let you know. Maybe there’s more treasures in the bog somewhere.”

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