he's keeping busy as he's bleeding stones, his machinations and his palindromes.

[portalling]

WHO: Stephen Strange & you
WHAT: A sorcerer returns to being a doctor, although he never really stopped.
WHEN: Harvestmere
WHERE: The Gallows
NOTES: Catch-all for the month and a spot to stash scenes; open prompt in the comments about his promotion to Head Healer, but feel free to toss wildcards or anything else in here, and hmu if you want something bespoke. ♥

Comments

office hours | ota.

[portalling]

Doctor Strange makes himself available.

He’s spent a year crammed into the Research division workrooms, sharing space with other nerds and only having a desk to himself, but now he finds himself airing out the Head Healer’s office in the Central Tower. Tidying up the paperwork, laying out the quills and ink even if he’s not likely to use them without assistance, setting everything neatly and precisely to his liking. Pride-of-place goes to a bronze dip pen with fine filigree, placed at right angles to a well-thumbed herbal reference compendium.

Tongue-in-cheek, he even gets someone to write a sign to hang outside the door: THE DOCTOR IS IN. He flips it to be visible.

Your chronic ailments, your lyrium addiction, your hayfever, your deathly peanut allergy, congratulations, commiserations? To his grudging acceptance, he’s here for all of it.

The infirmary was already put in order a few weeks back, but you could find him there as well: reorganising supplies, fussing with the design for a cartoonish illustration extolling the virtues of handwashing. The lopsided stick-figure sketch is wobbly and barely legible. This is why he needs an artist’s touch.

office hours

[sprent]

This has been a long time coming, but Strange is a different kind of healer than Gela is used to seeing and lying to. She's been putting it off for little reason... This could be a good thing. Maybe a rifter-doctor is the actual solution to this problem of hers. While she's gathering the courage to enter she amuses herself by flipping the little sign over to observe the back; it then informs her that: THE DOCTOR IS OUT. Very clever.

After that she has to knock, before she comes up with any more reasons to not do it.

She lets herself in after the fact, smiling brightly at the sight of him sitting importantly at his desk, in an office that, if not new, is at least new to him. Everything is very neat and tidy. The setting feels formal.

"He-llo," she says, trying her best to be cheerful, as if what she has to ask him doesn't matter at all. "I heard your missive over the crystal. Could I speak with you a moment?"

[portalling]

Out of all the people to come to him for a medical consult, somehow this was one of the last he’d expect.

Yet Strange isn’t even sure what he expected. Other templars with lyrium doses to administer, maybe? Viktor, most likely, because that is an unhealthy-looking man. But he supposes that was the whole point of this unpredictable exercise: toss out the open call, reel in the line, see what comes back.

And what comes back is Gela, floating in his doorway, looking oddly chipper.

“Oh!” he says, and jerks, almost knocks over the cup of pen and quill. It’s been literal years since he sat people down in his office back at MGH. This all feels very official.

“Yes, of course, come in.” He’s standing up, hands pressed against the table, then waving her in. “Congratulations, you’re my very first visitor. How can I help you?”

[sprent]

Gela says, "Oh!" and then hopes she didn't sound as dismayed as feels to know that. It's embarrassing to be the first, she doesn't want to seem eager. It does mean he'll be able to help her immediately though... and to think, maybe she could walk out of this room in twenty minutes time and be completely cured. Back to normal. Her old self, the Gela she buried on the way out of Cumberland.

Should she sit? She comes into the room fully at the very least and firmly closes the door behind her. Upon further reflection it would be strange not to sit across from him, so she does, with her hands perched in her lap like a nervous pair of birds.

She smiles. She can't help confirming that, "Everything that I say in here is confidential, isn't it?"

[portalling]

“Yes, of course. I’m not sure if there’s a similar concept in Thedas, but doctor-patient confidentiality was key in my training. Anything you say in here remains private, in my specific capacity as Riftwatch’s Head Healer.”

Strange hadn’t even realised he’d picked up the pen as he sat down, restlessly spinning it in his warped fingers. This whole interaction is surreal and feels like slipping on old shoes: settling into a familiar shape, stepping back onto an ancient road. He can’t even remember the last time he did this GP thing. Normally people had come to him sifted through layers of diagnosis and referral, with at least some hint of what was ailing them, something with the brain or nerves.

After a moment, though, he lets that mask of professionality settle more tightly in place, cinching it in at the metaphorical edges. He puts down the pen.

“I can’t promise I can fix everything, but I’ll take a crack at it. Where would you like to begin?”

[sprent]

Doctor-patient confidentiality... It was important enough to garner its own term. This is reassuring. She watches him spin his pen across his scarred and uneven fingers and unconsciously touches the scar on the back of her own hand in sympathy, wondering.

"Three years ago, now, I was very sick," is an easy place to start. This part never feels to Gela as if she's lying when what she's really doing is omitting truths (anything to hold the guilt off a little longer). "And I have recovered since, but I find I'm still affected by it. Not every day, but enough that it's difficult for me to deal with... I was hoping you could help with that. If you can."

Because many, many other people could not.

[portalling]

“I can at least try.” Strange finds himself reaching for a blank piece of paper on autopilot, then hesitates, realising that his notetaking is going to be terrible. Shit. These are the sorts of considerations he’s encountering facefirst, in realtime, this being his first consultation as Head Healer. He could ask Gela if she’s alright with a private crystal recording, perhaps, but that’s not exactly a reassuring experience, hoping it’s not accidentally broadcasting somewhere it shouldn’t —

Terrible notes it is. He takes the paper, writes ‘G.B. 3 yrs’ and it comes out jagged, shaky, the handwriting of a child. Good enough.

“Chronic illness isn’t exactly uncommon, one which persists with long-term lingering effects afterward, even long after the initial affliction is over. What kind of illness was it?”

[sprent]

Gela, who was definitely craning her neck to check what he's taking notes about, has nothing to say about his shivery script. She's more bothered by the idea of him writing any of this down at all, but concludes, to herself, that more people than herself will be seeing him, so he can't realistically be expected to remember everything.

"My mother had a chronic illness," she supplies, still watching his pen-nib and not him. It isn't relevant to anything going on with her, of course, but it will strengthen her case. "I don't know if I have the same as her. She didn't like to discuss the details of it."

But what I have makes it hard for me to sleep. And it gives me great stress, and it hurts me, sometimes, inside." She is gesturing at her chest. "And I find I don't remember many things, I have blank spots in my memory from when I was sick. Sometimes I think that I'm about to get sick again. It hasn't happened yet, but I know that it's coming."

[portalling]

There’s a pause, a slow blink as Strange tries to put those initial pieces together. This first description doesn’t exactly fit anything he’s aware of — but then again, doctor, you’re not in Kansas anymore.

“A lot of conditions are hereditary,” he says, mostly spinning a little to hedge the time while he thinks. When you're a brain surgeon, everything might look like a problem with the brain, but: “Lapses in memory could mean something neurological. We can give you things to help you sleep, it’s not like the Gallows is unaccustomed to sleep aids at the moment,” ha ha those worsening nightmares really haven’t gone away have they, “but longterm, it’d be better to treat the underlying cause. What sort of hurt is it? Chest pain? Trouble breathing?”

infirmary (lmk if you want any adjustments, I'm easy)

[youwonscience]

They've seen each other since the timeline adjustment. Of course they have; their work overlaps a significant amount, above and beyond the collaboration they'd discussed before everything briefly went to hell. But the experience of (experientially if not physically) returning from the dead visibly shook Cosima. In the weeks since, she's still been warm, but there's been a muted quality to her manner that's been hard to miss. She's ready enough to engage if someone reaches out, but on her own steam, she's been keeping to herself an unusual amount.

The main thing that helps at all, she finds, is keeping busy. And Strange's announcement, with the accompanying call for volunteers, gives her one more way to load her plate. She's pinch-hit in the infirmary before, so she knows her way around even beyond her familiarity from the long stretch when she was receiving regular care in it. Still, it's a more formal thing, when she shows up for a volunteer shift.

"Hey," she says, mustering something like a smile as she arrives. "You got any bandages for me to roll?"

handwaves the timing as happening post-tony, as discussed

[portalling]

Cosima swings by at an opportune time: Strange is seated at the big heavy desk in the back of the infirmary, a pile of meticulous notes in front of him, reading. A few open crates of supplies sit nearby: hard-won, considering all the trade disruptions in the area lately. Not all of the supplies have been packed away into the shelves and cabinets yet. He’s been going through paperwork instead, archiving patient files for people who aren’t here anymore; it’s tedious work, but necessary, and he’s only just now rewarded himself with digging into the reports Wysteria sent over.

They’re all tired. Cosima has come by less frequently lately, swamped in her own responsibilities picking through the remains of Tony’s paperwork and projects and reports, but Strange warms upon seeing her.

“Please do. There’s some stacks of linen in that crate over there,” he says, gesturing with a hand. In sync with his new role, there’s been a kind of determined frenetic energy to the doctor ever since he cracked time travel and assumed this new mantle; it’s good, having something to do. Keeping busy.

And perhaps he looks at her a little too sharply, remembering—

(her motionless body on that table in the middle of the entrance hall, too-pale, her missing glasses)

He doesn’t mention it. Instead: “Glad you could stop by. I know you’ve got— well. A lot of work yourself.”

[youwonscience]

"Work infinitely expands to fill the time you give it," Cosima says, frankly. "If I just wait for a slow time to take a break, I'd never take one." A small, wry smile. "That said, the promotion probably does mean I'll have to take fewer shifts going forward. Sorry about that."

He probably assumed as much without her telling him.

She moves to retrieve the linen he indicated. "How's it been going? Settling in to your gig. I know we're all trying to do a lot with a little."

[portalling]

“It’d be quite the feather in my cap, the Research Provost coming down here to spend their valuable time disinfecting surfaces. I can’t imagine Tony ever having done it. If anything, he’d design some ingenious factory contraption to automatically roll bandages for us. Recreate the industrial revolution.”  Strange sets his papers aside, moves to shift gears and join her at the stack of linen. It’s good, rote work you can do with your hands and turn off your brain: possibly a good break from whatever she’s been dealing with upstairs.

“It’s been… surprisingly quiet, actually? Knock on wood but we haven’t been deployed to something like a Starkhaven lately, so mostly I’m trying to ensure we’re ready for the next one. Having the supplies in order. Setting up posted rotations so people always have an available healer or medic to contact on the crystals, even if this room’s empty.”

A beat. There have been so many empty rooms lately —

“You’ve a heavier mantle to wear.”

[youwonscience]

The idea of Tony's theoretical bandage-rolling device gets a small smile from her, but it fades a bit as he continues. "We've been shrinking for a while," she says, after a short pause. "So in some ways heavier, in other ways ... I've just got to get really aggressive with prioritizing. I think once I settle in, I'll reach out to division members, see where their heads are at. It may not fully make the call for me, but worth knowing either way."

She looks down at what she's rolling so she can tuck in the ends in correctly. "I don't remember if I told you. The first time I came to Thedas I was sick. I was in the infirmary a lot. I think it means it's always a little more on my mind, I guess, than it would be for some people. We were still with the Inquisition then, things were different in a lot of ways."

[portalling]

“You hadn’t, no, but I read your notes on the blood plague, I was actually just refreshing my memory on that for rather obvious reasons—” The head healer glances back over his shoulder, to the desk and the stack of papers and reports he’s taken out on loan, but then pauses. Parses the particular way she’d phrased it; the way it had sounded like something specific to Cosima herself, and not something run rampant through the entire organisation, affecting templars and rifters alike.

“Unless— this was something separate.”

[youwonscience]

"No," she confirms. "Not blood plague, everyone got to enjoy that one together. This was." She exhales. "OK, do you want the long version, or the relevant-to-this-conversation version? I don't mind either, but I don't know how much of a side track you want to go down with me about it." It sounds like there's a substantial amount, but she's also fairly confident she can sum up the most critical bits.

[portalling]

Strange starts to wind a skein of bandages, automatically and thoughtlessly busying himself with his hands even as he mostly looks over at her, more of his attention riveted on Cosima herself.

“We’ve got time,” he says. “Also, I’m prone to side tracks, and I’m interested in medical things. Gimme the long version.”

gwenaëlle.

[portalling]

They’d signed up for Wysteria’s madcap experiments together, Stephen standing in front of the sheet and Gwenaëlle needing to be the one to write down his name for him, at which point she’d also mentioned offhand the extensive notes she’d taken on her anchor. Years’ worth of them(!)

Which is how he finds himself here: one full calendar year after she first gave him a tour of the houseboat, plus-or-minus some subjective weeks in the Fade, all come full circle and a little worse for wear, seated in the cushioned depression in the middle of Gwenaëlle’s parlour. There are concentric rings of papers and notebooks ranging out from his position like a constellation, and he’s been studiously reading through them, busily cross-referencing and adding annotations or questions through dictation to his sending crystal. He works his way through Gwenaëlle’s personal archive with all the delicacy of an archaeologist, peeling back the layers of her life in this very particular context: the anchor-shard pinned down for dissection and scrutiny, tracking its size and capabilities, days when the pain was more or less, the way it behaved after closing particularly sizeable rifts, and when it grew stronger.

It’s a good record. One remembers, sometimes, that she used to be a writer and once chronicled the Inquisition.

Occasionally Small Yngvi, possibly Stephen’s favourite denizen of this place, picks his way through the maze of paperwork and has to be shooed away from prickling his claws through the mistress’ notes.

Stephen loses track of time, which is what happens when he’s absorbed in his reading material. The hours crawl across the sky and the sun starts to set and his eyes start straining, until Gwenaëlle loops through almost unnoticed and starts lighting the lanterns. At which point— He finally realises how dark it’s gotten, then puts down the notes and sinks back against the cushions.

“You’re very thorough,” he says, rustling the papers.

It sounds like a compliment.

[elegiaque]

In joining him (it is easy enough to go mostly unnoticed), toward the darkening hours, Gwenaëlle's skirts spread out in another circle around her, one knee bent against the floor and one stretched enough that toes emerge very slightly from beneath; Small Yngvi, thusly scolded, mostly retreats to where he is like to be unnoticed until she tries to move, amongst the notebooks set aside and puddled fabric.

“I don't know what the point would have been if I weren't,” she says, matter of fact.

It's a history of herself as much as the anchor-shard, unintentional and unavoidable. The earliest, terse entries are doggedly detailed but terse and grudging in a way that doesn't stand out, initially, until he has later writings to contrast them against. There had been less outside stimuli of great note — less opportunity for the anchor-shard to be called upon for its purpose. Years had passed before she had had cause to comment on closing a rift, or using one of the abilities that she'd had from a surprisingly early time to do anything other than practise. The shield had come first, and the blast, later.

One entry, in Kingsway of the first year, says only: Takes too long to respond. Useless. and the next neatly dated record comes months later, without elaboration. The meticulous records don't much vary in those early months, when the anchor-shard was little more than a shackle — speaking of routine visits to an elven mage (S.) to receive pain relief that eventually stops, though she never speaks of the pain itself easing, in time. It is that same meticulousness that requires she make a periodic note: no change.

“I try to keep them secure, though. For obvious reasons.”

[portalling]

“Understandable,” Stephen says. “It’s a lot of information.” And it’s an inadvertent treasure trove, getting to look over such detailed commentary on — as he well-knows — one of the oldest shards, one of the longest-held anchors.

He automatically flexes the fingers in his left hand, an unconscious flicker of sympathetic instinct from her notes. He’s so accustomed to the nerve damage in his own fingers that he’d never really paid much attention to the pain from the shard: it’s just another litany to add to the chorus, another discordant note amongst the whole.

“Did you ever find something reliable to help with the pain?” he asks, attempting to sound offhand, but his attention kept snaring on those particular records. “Those trips to the mage. Although I imagine not much helps since, well, nothing much touches this,” he gives a gesture of his hand, flourishing his wrecked knuckles alongside that embedded green sliver. They both suck. It’s all bad.

[elegiaque]

Gwenaëlle can think of some very obvious reasons why this is only an offhand question in an excruciatingly pun-heavy sort of way—

“I've mostly just grown accustomed,” she admits, aware it isn't the most satisfactory answer she could give. “Sometimes it's more difficult than others; most of the time it feels like a sort of...background noise that I've learned to live with. An ache. I have more severe pain relief,” scrupulously thorough, as ever, “but it's not the sort of thing I'd use habitually. I mean,”

almost rueful,

“it's for habitual drinkers. Jude tried it, once, and it worked for him because his—” she makes a vague gesture that doesn't really convey anything but might convey: werewolves, I don't fucking know. “He has a higher threshold, you know, can't get drunk. Sort of the same opposite to a common drunk who just doesn't feel it the same way, any more. Anders, when he was still here, taught me how to mix potions that had less capacity to fell an ox — I don't think I'd ever seen the man look quite that shade, when he saw what I was making in the first place — but I've always...you never know, you know.”

So she keeps the dangerously strong stuff on hand, too. Just in case. It's not never useful.

[portalling]

Habit is a danger, and he’s a little too cautious and aware of it himself, knowing the capacity for misuse. There was a very different potential road after his car crash and his attempts to cope with the pain; one which looked like him climbing into the gutter and then just never getting back out.

But. It’s been years now and he, too, is accustomed to blocking out that background noise through sheer stubborn bloody-mindedness. They’ve got that surprisingly in common. You can get accustomed to anything. Pain’s an old friend. Except —

“Some nights,” Stephen says, delicately, “I might like to avail myself of what you can brew. On occasion. Not habitually.”

It’s a slight release of control, the barest glimmer of vulnerability and admitting that he is not, in fact, super-human and he might be interested in whatever concoctions Gwenaëlle’s got.

[elegiaque]

Gwenaëlle's gaze is thoughtful, measuring, but there's no objection in it, nor wariness; it's been a fuck of a year, frankly, and they've seen enough of each other that she's prepared to take his own assessment of suitability. It's not as if she hasn't any concept of the pain that he's in — it almost feels absurd to talk about the anchor's ache to him — and even if he's less long history with Thedosian methods, he's taken this head healer job for a reason.

So, no, that isn't the part she's studying him for.

“I don't keep enough on hand for it to be more than that,” she says, finally, which sounds like it might've been done purposefully and presumably not with him in mind. “But I'm a crystal away, on occasion. I think the mixes were taught to the servants for my lady mother — a mild elixir doesn't put a dent in chronic dying, either — and they taught them to me. I borrowed some books from Rutyer's wife, a Nevarran surgeon, and I've picked up this and that from spending too much time in the infirmary. I don't mix it with wine, any more.”

Absolutely she had done, out of a different sort of habit: easier to skip the argument altogether, and just slip it to the Comte without the conversation.

[portalling]

“There’s no such thing as too much time in the infirmary, all things considered. And I liked Venaras Rutyer. It was good having a surgical colleague, even if her training was understandably different from mine.” He finds himself glancing at Gwenaëlle’s palm as she smooths out her skirts. Steady hands, good at threading a needle and pinching an artery.

Somewhere over the past few months, this has started — finally — to feel like an actual life, with the comfortable byplay of everyday work and picking Gwenaëlle’s brain about most of it, the ebb-and-flow of his day-to-day rather than a temporary deployment to another universe. He doesn’t find himself thinking wistfully about America Chavez’s star-shaped portal punching its way into the dining hall anymore (or at least not too often). He can find his way through the dim stairwells at night, walking on autopilot between the library and his bedroom, no longer getting lost on his way to the Central Tower.

To that end —

“I hope you’re alright being commandeered for the infirmary again, by the by. It seems we’re both going full circle, career-wise.”

[elegiaque]

“The commandeering is a first,” she assures him, with a tilted smile. “But I suppose it's still a remnant of a different life.”

She always wants to be precise; the instinct is to correct him, that she was never really part of the infirmary, all of her assistance unofficial, voluntary, elbowing her way in to make herself useful when it suited her and occasionally thieve supplies. Nothing she'd call work — likely nothing anyone who was there, then, would call work either. If, and she doubted it, they had any particular memory of it at all.

Rolling bandages in a tent. Guenievre's hands, steady, at the edges of Asher's beard.

—but where had she learned to do that? It's not not coming around, it's only further back than that.

“Well,” after a moment, “I've never been paid for any of it before, so I don't know if I can use the word career. It'll be novel to care for people who might not die, at least. It must be stranger for you, to—” a little wiggle of her hands, “—bring it all together.”

Medicine, magic.