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

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?"

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?”

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?"

“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?”

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.

“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?”

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."

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?”

"'Neurological'?" She asks anxiously, but he keeps talking on and doesn't seem horrified to suggest this or at all afraid of her, so it can't be anything that terrible. No healer she has seen so far has been able to give her any sort of good verdict; none of them have ever seen right through her to the wolf inside, tucked nose to tail under her ribs. There's no reason to expect that he will, is there, but... he is a rifter! They know many things.

"Both," she supplies. "Not all the time, just in—quiet moments, sometimes before I go to bed. Or if I sit around thinking too much; is that neurological too?"

“It’s not that uncommon to have racing thoughts as you’re trying to go to sleep. God knows we have enough to worry us, these days.”

After a pause, Strange is almost on the verge of delivering a pithy Ma’am I think you might just have anxiety, but thankfully he bites it back. His bedside manner truly isn’t good, but he’s making a valiant effort.

His mouth purses; still thinking, still gathering information and symptoms. “Tell me more about the last time you were sick, and those lapses in memory. How long ago did it last happen?”

"Oh."

Yes, that makes sense... she sits and ponders this for a while longer, stalling for time. What she would usually do is quickly page through the little portfolio of lies she has tossed out over the years to explain every last thing about herself, but then she thinks of Jude's reaction to the truth and how he wasn't scared of her at all. And she is supposed to be telling Marcus, too. She is supposed to be trying.

Remember, Gela tells herself sternly: doctor-patient confidentiality.

"It happened nearly four years ago. And it lasted for three. Years, the memory lapses, I mean."

A beat, the slightest arch of an eyebrow before he presses down that faint concern. Poker face, doctor, work on your poker face.

“Three consecutive years? And these lapses, are they short-term blips or longer, as in you can’t remember most of those three years? Again, that can happen,” Strange adds quickly, an attempt at reassurance. “During periods of profound stress or trauma, we might not record as many memories. Stress can quite literally alter the brain structures involved in memory encoding, storage, and retrieval. And the mind is an astounding organ; this can also be its way of protecting you, disconnecting you from remembering an awful time. ”

At least he doesn’t start blathering on about cortisol, thank goodness.

"I can't remember most of them," she supplies, feeling anxious as she watches his expression like a hawk for any minute changes. Even when she does see them they don't really help. She doesn't know what an arched eyebrow means when it comes from him.

This all makes sense, though. It was a period of profound stress. She listens attentively, trying to understand what these big, new concepts mean, like memory encoding. Very cautiously, hands clasped in her lap, Gela takes a breath in.

"What about... curses?"

It’s like two versions of Stephen Strange suddenly do very brief internal psychic battle in this moment: the doctor who remembers sitting in a chair very much like this and wants to scoff no, of course not, there’s no such thing as curses, every malady has a perfectly natural cause and anything else is mere superstition,

and then, in the back of his mind, a voice reminding himself gently: To show you just how much you don’t know.

Anything is possible. He does magic, for fuck’s sake.

So he reels himself back in, remembering where he is now. How much bigger the world is now. “Okay. Yeah, in fairness, that can happen too. What makes you think of curses?”

Edited 2024-01-10 04:44 (UTC)

"Well," she hedges, knowing she might stumble over the words, because they're still so new to being spoken aloud, "I think of it because, a while ago now, somebody cast a spell on me against my will and it—uh, lead to the memory loss, so I... I wonder."

It can work like this, Gela peeling the story back layer by layer until they get to the raw, beating heart of the thing. She can do this.

She is quite still now, looking at the desk rather than him, like a child admitting to wrong-doing.

Strange blinks again.

And then, an exhale of breath: “Oh my god, Gela, you really could’ve led with that—”

He makes a few fervent strikeouts in his messy notes, pen scraping out some of his more outlandish theories. He doesn’t sound genuinely annoyed or exasperated, just bemused, but he consciously tries to gentle his tone a moment later. This is delicate territory, apparently, and he is at least trying not to trample all over it:

“That could very well do it. I’m not as familiar with Thedosian magic, but where I come from, there are hexes, curses, enchantments, all sorts of things which could leave a lasting effect.”

He’d levied more than a few at his enemies, too. Sometimes just people who’d gotten on his nerves.

“What else can you tell me about the spell?”

Gela offers an apology so tiny it's almost lost in the striking out, the paper shuffling. She looks a little stunned, a lot upset. "I've never led with it before."

This is the most she's said without being any shade of direct. It feels like her words are hanging in the air between them (also, he's just written them down).

What else can she tell him about the spell?

How will he react, right now, if she tells him the spell turned her into a monster? And that it will happen again, and she has no control over when? At the very least he would warn her division head; at worst, the Gallows.

Gela shakes her head.

Strange has finished scratching out his various theories, now replaced with just the one-word CURSE??, but he notices after a moment that Gela has been suspiciously quiet. He looks back up again at her, then: seeing her mute, head shaking, shutting down.

And, if he thinks about it, he can’t really blame her. He’s hardly forthcoming about some of his more sore personal details, either.

The pause drags on a little too long, as he figures out how to school his expression, keep his voice gentle but straightforward: “I’m sorry. I appreciate you telling me,” he says. “I know it might be… unpleasant. But if we’re to understand what happened to you— and how to help you— it’d be useful to hear as much as you can recall, Gela. I know we’re meeting in my capacity as a doctor, but as a sorcerer, I’m familiar with curses.”

Yes, he is a doctor and a mage; that's why she is here. He is a new sort of option, an avenue unexplored. Gela tells herself this firmly, speaking to herself as she would one of her younger brothers. Don't be cowardly. Say what you mean all at once.

"Okay," she says, prefacing it. The next words stick in her throat. While she works them loose again she rubs the back of her right hand, thumb working into the dip of a deep scar there.

"It made me into a wolf," hangs for a moment between her and Strange's desk. Soon it will be at his notes. Gela gulps a breath.

"It hurt. I couldn't remember things very well as a wolf; I was wild, and even when I turned back into myself that didn't fix it. I don't know much of what I did, only moments here and there. Nothing detailed."

All things told, Strange absorbs the factoid werewolves exist here with remarkable composure. (It helps, perhaps, that vampires and werewolves are a thing back home too, the mystical underbelly to the surface world everyone else knows.) So the pen doesn’t move. He sets it down; considers those implications. They actually make a hell of a lot more sense than the neurological issues, the mystery ailment.

“That… explains things,” he says. “So these memory lapses or fugues— they’re actually transformations? Does anything specific seem to trigger it, like,” oh, he has to say it, “the lunar cycles? The time of year, or your emotional state?”

"... It does?"

She wasn't looking at him for fear or some big reaction, an accusation; horror, anger, fright, anything. Something. When she looks up, she sees his pen sat to the side of his notes and the word CURSE taken down boldly on the paper, but nothing else underneath it. He is looking at her like he's been handed the final piece of a puzzle.

Gela clears her throat.

"The first one was." It feels too soon to be relieved but he must have heard of this happening before. If so, how terrible for that other case, how good for her. "But I don't know what brings it on, exactly. I haven't found out yet."

“With the requisite disclaimer that obviously our worlds aren’t identical and won’t line up exactly,” Strange starts, donning that explanatory tone of voice which goes so well with the title doctor, “Turning into a wolf is a well-known concept across history, where I come from. Or even just animal shifters in general, in folklore, mythology, oral stories. The most common idea is that it coincides with the full moon, a transformation once per month — although that’s additionally complicated by the fact that Thedas has two moons and I don’t know what that does to a lunar cycle.

“They’re usually believed to be fiction, but although I didn’t know any werewolves personally, I do know that there was truth to the stories back home. The Sanctum’s books made mention of it, that such a curse does exist. I don’t know precisely what the landscape is like here, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s similar— if some common concepts just recur across universes—”

Focus, doctor. He laces his fingers together, still looking at Gela now rather than his scattershot notes.

“Is there any similar lore or history about animal transformations here, that you’ve ever heard of?”

This is a lot of information to take in all at once; the moon feels like the sticking point, here. The lunar cycle, the transformation taking place at a known time—the same time, each month. Horrible, to think of it happening that often, but at least you would know and you could prepare.

If Gela knew that about herself she could leave before it ever happened and nobody would have to be in danger.

Maybe Strange will help her pinpoint that moment, wherever in the future it is.

"Yes. There are stories about werewolves, but—" they're stories. She can't exactly say something like that... She frowns at the desk in front of her, the scattering of notes. "Fereldens think they're only wolves, possessed by rage demons."

“Maybe they are. Although that doesn’t seem like it fits your circumstance— I feel like we’d know, by now, if you were possessed by a rage demon.”

Strange doesn’t sound accusatory, just: quizzical, and gathering information. Trying to find the rest of the pieces to fit this picture. Then, broaching that dangling mention: “What triggered the first transformation? And who cast this on you?”

It’s probably far too much to hope they could just send a polite letter asking them to reverse it —

"It isn't a rage demon," Gela agrees. She feels very little by way of anger, actually. Perhaps there are anxiety demons. Or guilt demons?

"The first time was brought on by the spell itself." She pauses nervously, her head turning so she can check over her shoulder. The door is firmly shut, as it has been this entire time. Looking back, swallowing, she continues. Her voice lowers to a little above a murmur. "It was—Marais, is the name. Ferrant Marais, I'll spell it for you, if you like... He is Mortalitasi. Or was, I don't..."

Memory issues impact the telling, but his name feels stamped on the inside of her eyelids and she cannot forget it. "I was travelling home from Nevarra city and he ambushed me on the road. It wasn't dark, but nobody else was there, nobody saw it—and there were others there too, we were all in the same cage together, but I don't know what happened to them or where they went afterwards. He turned us all and..."

She pauses, brow furrowing.

"I don't remember," she says finally. "There isn't anything there."

Only darkness, and the sense of big things moving in it.

When she says, "There was a child," her voice breaks.

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

office hours

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CW kidnapping, experimentation mentions

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poss yours to wrap? :>

slaps a bow on a week later