open + closed;

[grindset]

WHO: Viktor + Abby + Bastien + Edgard + Ellis + Mobius + Richard + Stephen + Tony
WHAT: catch-all for November
WHEN: now, kind of, but also whenever
WHERE: around the Gallows, particularly the library and Research division workroom
NOTES: Open to all/any, wildcards and tweaks welcome. Will match tag format. Content warning for terminal illness in some threads; will avoid on request. Also!! Hit me up if you want to share a job.

Nighttime cracks an eye to gloaming dawn, to a fog moving at a steady crawl between the Gallows and Kirkwall proper, like it's a huge vessel passing by, like it's going somewhere. Fleeing the sun, maybe. A futile effort.

Viktor likewise cracks an eye, two eyes, squints through a fog receding. He raises his head, wipes his mouth, drags a little reading glass on a chain into the gutter and shuts the book around it. On Astrariums, the cover says. Has he ever put his head down 'just to rest' and not ended up warping at least one page with biological humidity?


Since no one's kicked him out of it—or at least had any success to date, should they have tried—this single side room on the lowest floor of the library has fully evolved into a combination office and living space. From it Viktor emerges with crazy hair and an armful of other books, squinting and snuffling and stiff, taps over to the return cart stationed nearby, and adds them to his prior deposits. He then leaves with the cart; his crutch, leaned out of the way, stays behind.

From there he moves slowly between aisles, stopping here and there to slide a book into place, or to leave it out conspicuously so someone who climbs ladders can put it back where it lives. Once in a while he'll pause with a hand on the shelf to yield to a coughing fit, or else to wait for some other silent thing to pass, before moving on.

No one asks him to do this, he just does it.

Other times, he may be found on any library floor, or back in his ('his') little side room, either busy at the table, or asleep on the settee. (Or asleep at the table. Again.) The door is often open, sometimes left unlatched and open a crack.

On rare occasions he may be found on the library's stone balcony, either sitting alone on a bench (also stone), or leaning on the balustrade (is anything not made of stone here) to look out over the sea, nursing some private melancholy.


Later, when the tower begins to sound like it's waking up, Viktor makes the climb to the seventh floor and assumes his spot in the Research workroom. Settles his bony backside on the stool. Spins a dry pen around his thumb while he thinks.

It looks like he's pondering some deep mystery; what he's thinking, really, is that it's annoying that no one exists here who can check his work on this page or the pages beneath it. (Annoying, upsetting, a constant low ache.) No one needs to check that half of his work. It's fine. He knows it's fine. Still—

Should any be present, he might ask of someone he knows has worked with local runes,

"Can I run something past you?"

Or, of a rifter, or else anyone he's hardly spoken to,

"How well versed are you in the native runic system?"

Or it's any other day and he's just toiling away in here like anyone else might be. Coworkers will have found he tends to respond at least lukewarmly to working chatter, and that if he doesn't want to be interrupted, they won't have to guess—they'll know.


The sound of coughing follows him everywhere: a herald of his arrival, a sign of his otherwise quiet presence, a dry barking down the hall.

Comments

[nonvenomous]

“I’m not accustomed to bartering with visitors to the infirmary for the privilege of treating them,” remarked matter-of-fact and a little offhand, Richard has lifted the nug from its perch and tucked it into the crook of his arm to clear the table of the tray, tweezers rattling between blood-sticky quills.

There’s no real prickle in Dickerson’s reserve.

Viktor is a nerd. He is polite.

He has a touch of Wysteria’s volatility in the direct line from curiosity to question.

“In my home plane, I’m simply a conduit for a higher power. Most of my magic is borrowed in exchange for my service as a cleric of Oghma.” The nug’s ankles are crossed over behind the crack of his armpit, the little beast along for the ride as he sorts quills out onto a cloth to dry. A wide-mouthed beaker sizzles when he drops the tweezers in. “Here I channel mana raw from its source as a matter of second nature.”

Perhaps if he keeps himself busy for long enough, Viktor will settle himself and confess his illnesses on his own.

[grindset]

A higher power? An arcane energy source personified? Sounds like the Fade simply filtered out a particular psychological construct.

—is what Viktor does not say, being neither here nor anywhere, particularly, at any time, for theological debate. This summation, though, is encouraging—not that he really thinks Riftwatch would entrust infirmary operations to someone still wrestling his talents into a less-than-intuitive shape, but he wants to hear it nonetheless.

He is a nerd. He's interested.

He's looking at nug feet as he says, "I'm trying to determine if runic systems are similarly compatible—if the source will recognize a foreign conduit and interact with it predictably."

What is he talking about right now. Stop. This isn't a brainstorming session.

"Do you... detect... issues? To target? Or... how does it work." Does he have to say it out loud.

[nonvenomous]

How does it work?

Ask a snake how it moves without legs and it will say it slithers. Another beat of pause in Richard’s work denotes confusion in a similar vein. He turns back with his nug before answering.

“Healing is accelerated. The most grievous damage is targeted first, with a diminishing effect on other peripheral injuries.”

There’s room in his second (quick) study of Viktor head to toe for his specificity to settle.

“I’ve had some success in drawing out toxins but haven’t attempted to treat a chronic illness.”

[grindset]

Viktor allows his gaze to soften toward thought, his head to bob with the fading echo of a nod. That aligns with what he's read, and maybe he should be disappointed by the implications, but he isn't. Getting bent out of shape about extrapolated results is for other people; as a rule, he declines to be governed by assumptions, including his own. It's right there in his ear: the attempt has yet to be made. If they try, and it doesn't work, he'll try something else.

Guts thus mustered, he says,

"Then you're in luck."

Now—at last—he slips his narrow hips around front of the stool, seats himself stiffly, and sags into a posture that seems to meet an artificial end short of its true slouching potential. He does not sigh, and it happens anyway: a tickle, a twitch, an instantaneous eruption of coughs that rattles him bodily. After first clutching the stool's edge to enforce balance, he lets it go to roll a gesture that is equal parts See, this is what I mean and Yeah, you're a cough, we get it.

He doesn't cover his mouth, either, but aims at the space between his knees.
More or less.

[nonvenomous]

Man and nug look on while Viktor is racked -- the former with the still, fixed interest of a buzzard on a post. The nug is sleepier, a drowsy startle quickly given back over into a droop that sees Richard crossing to place it carefully back down onto the table.

It’s natural enough for him to saddle a free hand warm across Viktor’s back, to provide stability and to gauge the poke of bones beneath cloth.

This is a serious cough.

“How long has it been like this?”

He waits until the worst of it has receded to ask.

[grindset]

Beneath Richard's hand, warm across Viktor's back: two knobs too hard, too round, to be vertebral; a strap running from his left shoulder; the leading edge of some hard, overlapping plates, which shift together in cooperation with the convulsion of his body, their features softened to vague bumps beneath the layers of his clothing. Any palpation finds wrought edges, indicates through symmetry a column that follows his spine.

He finishes with the flavour of iron in his mouth, knows at once it isn't much and so swallows it out of relevance before he answers, thickly, "Months." He clears his throat. "Since before I arrived."

After one more cough, like final punctuation, a bead of bright blood crawls from one nostril, slow, dragging its trail. Its warmth is so close to that of his skin that he hasn't noticed.

"You aren't the first medic I've seen," seems prudent to admit, "but... you're the first healer."

Maybe it makes a difference.

[nonvenomous]

“Hmm.”

Hmm. It’s not impolite, the way he pauses at the distinction between metal and bone, the way he doubles his touch back to retrace his initial impression of Something in there as the coughing eases. It is impersonal.

“We’ll see how well spellwork takes.” As opposed to…? “Who was present when you arrived?”

Just curious, as he breaks contact to produce a black handkerchief from a pocket. He offers it out as a matter of course, surely a trick of clogged senses that it has a coppery tang to it even before it’s touched under Viktor’s nose.

[grindset]

Neither Hmm nor its tactile extension inspire any particular urge in him to pull away. It chafes at his privacy, sidles right up close to it, but isn't any more unwelcome than it is impolite. He doesn't become tense beneath it because he already was.

He's just begun waving away the offer when a tickle arrives at his lip. Up comes the hand, reflexive, comes away smeared red, grasps for the handkerchief of dubious history. A stormy frown gathers above it as he shakes his head. His answer is partly muffled.

"Not sure. I wasn't," briefly choking up, coughing twice, clearing his throat, resuming like it's nothing, "wasn't alert through much of it. Slept in the carriage. Maybe hit my head, I don't know." It's not as though he gave anyone an opportunity to examine him thoroughly. He's refolding the black square to a clean (or at least not immediately wet) spot. "Why?"

[nonvenomous]

Blood in the sinuses stirred by a cough has to come from somewhere in the soft coral network of sacs and tubes that comprise the lungs. Dickerson thinks on this while he watches Viktor fold.

“Spies find their way into our ranks every now and again,” he says.

Most factions, he suspects, would not be above sending along a sick little lad with a glowing thorn in his paw.

“Do you taste blood when you cough?”

Evidently subterfuge is not enough of a concern for him to dwell on the subject; he’s already setting his left hand light back along Viktor’s spine. Something to do with him having fooled around with one for a year or two, perhaps.

[grindset]

"Only when I'm spying. Makes it more convincing."

And for his next trick, Viktor wipes his nose. He considers espionage while he does this—not as a career shift, but what that might look like for him, by his approximate understanding. Briefly works his grip on the crutch as he thinks of the blockaded bridge, the hollowed handle, the phial inside. How clumsy a liar he always was and how smoothly he did it then.

Enough of his upper back is unbraced to suit the length of a hand.

"I've been discussing the lyrium trials with Wysteria de Foncé," he says, speaking of that phial. "So if you want to prevent me running away with your research, now's your chance."

Should he stay on topic, probably, but coming here at all was hard enough—if he wants to dilute his own mortifying ordeal of being known with quippy shop talk, he will do so. (And if Dickerson wants to know precisely what it is he's feeling up, Viktor decides, he can ask.)

[nonvenomous]

“Much of our understanding comes from the first person accounts of Rifters the Venatori tortured with lyrium.”

So this research has already done some running.

Richard closes his eyes.

He breathes in.

The hiss of his exhale is sibilant with prayer, recognizable for its rhythm, barely given voice and in a language only he knows. Warmth radiates from his touch, buzzy, numb, smoothing some of the crunch out of chapped lungs. It’s subtle, a rise and ebb.

“What did she tell you?”

[grindset]

That little nugget of information doesn't appear to disturb him. No, he knew. And there are more immediate concerns deserving of his excitement, the flicking of his widening eyes, the way his jaw goes slack behind his lips. Wait is an absurd thing to want to say, but he didn't know they'd started. Hardly any visible preparation, just a long whisper, and—

"Sh- she,"

The heat now blooming into his body softens his thoughts, pulls the rest of that sentence apart in a long taffy string. His focus is dancing somewhere in the middle distance; if he could turn his gaze physically inward and watch it move through him, he would.

"Everything," is soft with the care he's taking not to move overmuch—even his lungs, which push and pull in stuttering puffs in spite of the strange, subtle crackling that urges him to fill them deeply. In case it matters. "She told me everything, I've read everything."

[nonvenomous]

Everything.

Pat pat. The flat of Richard’s hand echoes the thud of Viktor’s heart for just a beat, reassurance well-timed to follow healing he had to have felt taking hold.

“I can push further if you like.”

It’s been a quiet day. It’s been a quiet week. Dickerson's been healing nugs. The odds of him needing a reserve for an unforeseen assault seem low.

“If nothing else, relieving your symptoms will give you an opportunity to rebuild your strength while we assess the rate of their return.”

props this thread up in a beach chair with sunglasses on

[grindset]

That Dickerson's been healing nugs might excuse him for patting his patient like a small creature. One does take on reflective habits.

Too caught up to register something so petty, Viktor nearly treads on the explanation with his answer:

"Yes." Restrained, then—if hardly less breathless— "As far as you can."

Not as far as comfort would dictate, or experience, or reason. This is what he was working for. It stole sleep from him, it steadily shrunk his life, condensed the entire world down to a single room, a single workbench, a single faceted construct. In his mind he sees the shape of it, the moving facets, the gentle bobbing, calm as a swimmer on the sea, throwing wispy streams of light. In a silent room he can hear its chiming and whispering, its soft axial clicks.

As his aches ease, as his joints seem to swell with warmth and then bleed relief, his knuckles grow white on the crutch and the stool's edge. His heart is hammering. He's seized in the sense of building, rising, in increasingly urgent anticipation of a fall—even after witnessing the little miracle minutes ago, he's attended the cycle of bloom and wither too many times to shed that fear entirely.

And yet, if this were being meted to him in sips, he would snatch it from the healer's hand and drink it all.