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

“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.

Edited 2023-10-07 08:54 (UTC)

“Yes,” Stephen says, after only the slightest pause. It had come up with Ellie a bit, but he’d been as safely flippant as he could be in answering (why not both?). It had felt important at the time to project calm competence and an unflappable demeanour, as if he had no reservations about taking the role. He was filling capable shoes; he needed to look and sound the part, particularly when making the public announcement.

But here, in Gwenaëlle’s parlour with the cat purring at her feet and the lanterns a warm glow, he can be a little more honest:

“It feels like going backward, a little, and knowing that I’m lesser than I was. I’d been unshakeable, once. Aiming a straight shot to become head of neurosurgery, hitting all the milestones at an accelerated pace, knowing I was the best — frankly, yes, one of the best — in my field. Which isn’t arrogance, it’s just fact. It was a small specialty, you knew where you stood. Now—”

Now he requires others like Gwenaëlle and Derrica to be his hands for him. To take over where he can’t.

“Now, I have to adapt. Figure out how I can still be of use when I can’t do the things which are traditionally part of the profession.”

It’d be easy to continue pretend-busying himself with the paperwork, but he’s sifted through as much of it as he can. So his gaze drifts to her face instead, and that golden eye. “I need to practice,” he says, echoing her words a year ago, “accommodating the blind spot.”

They’re both very good at adapting, and rolling with the punches.

What a jolt, twice: to hear her words echoed back to her and realise how long ago they were, and again, to think of how long it's been since she had two eyes. A thing she'd never even thought about having or not having, really, until—

well, then.

“Well,”

philosophically,

“you're probably the best neurosurgeon in Thedas,” is only funny because it's true, probably. “And,” more sincerely, “I've found it becomes more natural, in time.”

Not the same as it was; not as easy, not something she doesn't have to think about and allow for more than she ever did before. That doesn't — won't, she's sure — go away. But ... the face in the mirror doesn't startle her any more.

That had taken time, too. She imagines it like that, a bit.

“And, also, you’ll have to do all the really hard work for me. So really, who am I to complain.” That ghost of wry humour: Stephen can’t help it, nor that twitch of a smile at the corner of his mouth. It makes all of it a little easier to bear: slowly coming to terms with how his capabilities are different now, and how being Head Healer looks so very different from being head of neurosurgery or even Sorcerer Supreme.

In this contemplative mood there’s also some barely-articulated thought he’s been stewing on, like gristle caught in his teeth. The lyrium experiments trying to understand the nature of his impermanent self, as a rifter. And then the other half of that thought surfacing unbidden, somewhere between airing out the Head Healer’s offices and starting to make it more his own, putting up that sign on the door, trying to leave his personal stamp on the place. Some mark, some sign that he was here.

“—I have you to thank, I think,” he adds a moment later. Thoughtful. “Indirectly. For my finally getting around to putting in the application with the Seneschal. I’d been somewhat against the concept of holding any responsibility in case I disappear, but someone reminded me that that can happen to anyone, and that it’s better to try in the meantime.”

Years ago, the same warm flush had suffused her at the news — news she had been so excited to share with Thranduil, who then had indulged her — that it had been her own words to decide Lord Luthor upon the course of joining the Inquisition. She'd felt meaningful, powerful, and—

it had come apart, of course. Luthor, the Inquisition. Thranduil.

She's still here. And he says someone, arch as you like, echoing back to her the thing that she has reforged herself around, and it strikes her that she doesn't feel wrongfooted in the moment. He catches her off-guard, but not...

it is comfortable, here in her parlour, with her cat and his company, and she looks back at him and for a moment doesn't know what to do with comfort.

She thinks about leaning over and giving him a shove. It passes.

“It only seems wasteful not to,” she says, eventually. “And fucking dull, besides, which hardly seems you at all.”

Stephen half-smiles. “In any case, ’not fucking dull’ is the exact bar I aim to clear,” he says, dry understatement as ever. Until he follows that train of thought to its next stop, the next thing the two of them are going to be tackling together as part of their eclectic work for Riftwatch: “Case in point, these lyrium experiments.”

It’s a little safer of a topic, rather than ruminating too-long on Gwenaëlle Baudin’s outsize personal influence on him in particular.

“On a scale of 1-10, how insane is this endeavour, d’you think?”

Not said with any tone of judgment or censure; after all, she had been standing right next to him, putting his name to paper so he could sign up.

“Anything involving Poppell de Fonce,” a designation that she applies to Wysteria mostly to distinguish her as the superior of the de Fonces, deserving of discernment that doesn't easily mistake her with her husband, “is easily a ten, I expect. She was game when I was experimenting with phylacteries, so—”

Good and useful; possibly not indicative of someone with a healthy amount of self-preservation instinct practically and, as these things always are here, politically. But if that experiment hadn't achieved all she'd hoped it would, then not for lack of trying or lack of skilled hands.

“Everything's been mad, though, I half think if an idea doesn't sound sort of crazy it's probably not going to go far enough to be of use.”

“Fair point. Nobody ever got anywhere by backing off right when it started getting interesting.”

Which is a dangerous mindset, maybe, and Stephen could do with a bit more reining in and caution, but he’s never been good at that part. Then again, he never could’ve saved the Earth and rewound time in Thedas without that particular trait, so.

He straightens up the papers and notebooks he’d been reading, reassembling them into some form of their original order, as he casts his mind back across any mention of phylacteries. He’s an obsessive reader, has been poring through Research’s archives with the same stubborn scholarly determination which once tore through all of Kamar-Taj’s library. And it doesn’t ring a bell — since, well, it was classified.

“How did that go? The phylactery experiments. I don’t think I’ve read a report on it.”

“You wouldn't have done, although I did write one. Stark let me do it somewhat conditionally,” including their mutual agreement that it would be the height of fucking stupidity to announce that it was being done at all. “For a multitude of reasons, starting with they want us brought to heel anyway and building up to we might need an edge in the next conflict if we live through this one, the last thing we needed at any point was the Chantry getting wind of it.”

The second point is not unrelated to why the experiments happened at all.

“It was established several years ago that rifters can be subject to phylacteries the same as a mage can, but I wanted ... to understand that better. To know more about what that meant, and how it interacted with the anchor-shards themselves. What I really need,” contemplatively, “is a rifter with no magic to their name besides existing as a rifter in Thedas, who removes their anchor-shard,”

probably via the entire hand, a la Wysteria,

“and then to see if it's still possible to create a phylactery or if it would fail the way you can't make one for a Thedosian who's no sort of mage, either. Which is what I thought I was getting, but someone didn't fully disclose her status and the experiments were not useless but not as helpful as they might have been. And we did establish that it'd be difficult to craft one for a Thedosian shard-bearer, but close enough to possible that someone determined could likely pull it off. We likely could have with more effort, but it's specifically tied to the anchor itself. That's what I want to know about rifters, if it would be in your case or not. Well, not your case. 'Sorcerer'.”

Someone had been less-than-forthcoming about her status with him, too, and it’s been a source of mild harmless consternation ever since. The corner of his mouth twitches; halfway to a smile.

“Alas, I’m useless to you,” Stephen agrees, tongue-in-cheek. “And that sort of person does seem in short supply. It seems like every rifter I know is exceptional in some way. I think— well, for example, Abby doesn’t have any magic or powers that I know of, but I can’t see her being enthused about the prospect of lopping off her hand either.”

The shard is usually located in such a crucial place, and Riftwatch work puts them all in the frontlines so often. A risk. A sacrifice and a trade-off, and not one everyone’s willing to make.

Dry as a desert, continuing, “It’s not like I went to the literal ends of the earth and bankrupted myself and learned magic to keep my hands, or anything. But that is frustrating. Not having the right circumstances or right sample population to be able to find out more.”

“The other problem, of course, is only the nature of a phylactery in and of itself. Thranduil's was made by a loyalist mage I can't put my hands on any more, and who almost certainly wouldn't approve of the nature of the experimentation—”

or, well, the purpose thereof. For some reason, she can't imagine selling Myrobalan on we need an edge on the Chantry. He'd grow his eyes back just to look at her incredulously, probably.

“It's blood magic. It's blood magic that the Chantry practises. Ergo, the number of mages who might know how to create one and who might be willing to participate is vanishingly small.” It's at this point that she'd very much like to make a joke about how she'd consider it a personal favour if he were to prioritise, as head healer, keeping Julius the fuck alive in case she needs him later— but he'd been the most squeamish and least keen, and the least likely to thank her for carelessly tying his name to what she and Wysteria had been up to.

A time might yet come, but not now.

Stephen straightens, his scrutiny sharpening. He’s realising his reading must have omitted a particular detail. It’s not like the Chantry shouts all of its private practices from the rafters, but between this and the templars’ lyrium —

“I thought it was a mere magical scrying thing,” he admits, the furrow of a frown deepening between his brows. “I used to be able to scry someone’s location using only a single strand of hair. I wasn’t aware that the Chantry’s version involved actual literal blood magic.”

There’s a withering disdain in his voice which he can’t quite tamp back as he continues: “Good lord, it’s just like back home. Are all organised religions this hypocritical?”

After a moment of honest consideration, and recognising that she knows so little of organised religions outside of the flock of Andraste and — of course — everything she's learned against her will about the ancient elvhenan, she finally settles on:

“Probably,” because they've set a bad example and rifters never seem surprised enough to argue compellingly against a confident yeah, I reckon. “It's not ... I don't know what mere magical scrying entails, but a phylactery isn't.” She tips her hand, “Your thing sounds like,” stop her if she's getting it wrong, “you want to know where someone is, you do a new thing to find them. A phylactery is bound by blood to an individual and through that connection knows their location always. It also removes the... it's done in advance. A phylactery is created for a mage as soon as possible, right? Insurance against any attempts to escape. So you're dealing with a little child who's a stranger and the mage tasked with creating them has earned a certain amount of trust, presumably, in order to be let in on all this at all. So they've got buy in. They're protecting this stranger child. This is a good thing. Whereas if you were asked with a bit of hair to help la limier and her equally heavily armed colleagues hunt down an escapee you've spent twenty years living and studying alongside and developed rapport and familiarity and sympathy and you know what happens when they find them—”

A shrug.

“A phylactery has no heartstrings to pull.”

Edited 2023-12-23 23:00 (UTC)

“No heartstrings, and no conscience,” Stephen says, and it sounds like agreement. His mouth has been thinning as Gwenaëlle described the issue further, as he listens and then examines it from all angles and considers the implications. (And the fact that phylacteries apparently work on rifters too. He oddly likes being considered a mage alongside the native mages, but this is a bit much.)

“But yeah. A sorcerer could choose whether or not to cast the spell. A sorcerer could put their foot down and say no, if they truly needed to. I chose to help Thor and Loki find their father. Whereas here— Can anyone can do that bit of bloodhound-tracking with the phylactery, so long as they hold it? They don’t have to be a mage themselves to,” that crinkle in his brow deepens, “to track and follow that bond, so to speak?”

Gwenaëlle's look is — not quite pitying, if only because it seems unlikely that pity is something that she's readily capable of feeling for anyone. More like a kinder version of impatience with a student continuously looking at the problem backwards, instead of the solution forwards:

“Why would the system for controlling mages require mage consent? Stephen, we're talking about Templars hunting runaways, not checking whether or not the apprentices all really went to bed when they said they did.”

Maybe it was naive of him—

Except, no, it’s not exactly that. Stephen’s rarely naive. But he can be short-sighted. Self-centered, in assuming things always work the way they did back home. So he presses his fingers against one of his temples, staving off the sort of existential headache which sinks in its claws whenever he hears the words system for controlling mages, as he admits, “I’m just so accustomed to feats like that requiring some arcane ability to work. Even using a magical artifact often requires honing that skill; I was garbage at using a sling ring for weeks, and I’m a quick study.”

But you’re not in Kansas anymore, doctor. The rules are different here.

So he relents, a tip of the head, acknowledging the lapse. Asks instead: “All of our own mages. Here, at Riftwatch. Does the Chantry still have their phylacteries?”

“It isn't that there's nothing like that, just—” a shrug. The thing that makes mages controllable is not going to be one of the things that relies on a mage to utilize, even if a mage is involved at some point in the process. “I don't think it's common knowledge that that's how they're made, either, for what it's worth. As for those phylacteries—”

She frowns, slightly.

“Definitely not all of them. When Riftwatch was just a satellite, a lot of them were found, and I think they were here for a bit? The Inquisition was going to turn them over to the Chantry, I think. There was a great big to do about it, and I think it's partly why we're our own thing— one of the division heads at the time kicked off, and then the mages kicked off, and then the Chantry got dragged to the negotiating table and they've almost certainly been sore about it ever since.”

“That makes things,” Stephen muses, “a little delicate and uncomfortable for whatever happens if-when this war actually ends, then.”

What happens to the mages? What happens to the rifters? Does the Chantry scoop them all back up? He’s been aware, in a distant sort of way, that it’s a dilemma looming over all of their heads in the abstract, while they currently enjoy this temporary limbo of freedom and autonomy. The bill will come due someday, but —

“Although I suppose I’m fine kicking that issue down the road for our Future Selves to deal with instead. One problem at a time. Considering we haven’t exactly solved our current one.”

“By agreement in those negotiations, rifters and mages are effectively one— which has been more and less vexing for mages,” depending on the nature (and volume) of the rifters their political and personal fates are now inextricably bound from, but although it's effectively an answer to his unasked question, she has a point of her own to make: “but not every rifter is a mage. And not every shard-bearer is either of those things, complicating the fact that some of us can now perform limited feats of what is essentially a form of magic.”

Like, for instance, the abilities Gwenaëlle has at her disposal. What guarantee that the war takes those away? A self-solving problem, given what the anchor might do to them all in time, but maybe not fast enough, and maybe complicating other, knottier problems—

“One problem at a time, ouais,” she allows, “but I think it's worth being prepared for the future where we can be. The Chantry's not going to have no plan.”

“If you ever do hear some whispers during book club about the division heads having some secret plan of, I don’t know, blowing up the phylacteries come the end of the war— do pass on the gossip. I’m invested and on board for rabble-rousing.”

Heretical and blasphemous to suggest even as a joke, maybe, but he’s less guarded around Gwenaëlle these days.

And invested is an admission, an understatement. It’s his very existence on the line. It had taken a full calendar year before Stephen Strange finally took this last step and threw his hat in the ring and accepted the mantle of responsibility again; like carving off that vestigial hope which had kept him from committing at first. One metaphorical foot out the door, always halfway expecting to find some way home, even when years of rifter history said otherwise. Even when Gwenaëlle said otherwise.

He’d finally listened. Accepted that for better or worse, his future lay here now.

Gwenaëlle—

doesn't laugh. She looks thoughtful, doing the math on the current line up in the central tower: a rifter, a politically active mage, a pirate with known aligning interests, and the wildcard who keeps her opinions to herself. Yseult could join the Inquisition if she felt so strongly about the Chantry, on the one hand; on the other, there were a lot of reasons not to join them that didn't necessarily mean she'd endorse every grievance. Still, a greater majority than they'd had when the negotiations had gone forward— those heads had hardly been united behind the mages. Or the rifters, for that matter, although that had been.

More complicated.

The calm stillness about her is, perhaps, more unsettling than agitation might have been.

“That's why I proposed the experiments,” she says, steadily. “I want to know what resources they'll have, and what sort of edge we might.”

It’s perhaps even more alarming whenever she takes him seriously, and when Gwenaëlle’s quiet, and he can practically see those calculations go on behind her eyes. Where others might (and had) shrunk away from these boundary-pushing scientific tests in fear and wariness, she was there, still willing to do the frightening and practical thing.

These are some of the moments when he likes her best.

So Stephen takes it seriously, that edge of humour straightening out in his voice. “You really do have a mind for Research, you know,” he says; the stacks of notebooks around him are a testament to that, still.

“In general, that’s why I’m on board with the lyrium experiments, too. As a doctor, I learned how the human body works: how it ticks, how it functions, how the blood and nerves fit together, what the brain does, what effects different drugs have. But with the shards, with rifter bodies, with lyrium— I just don’t know enough. We’re better-armed the more we know.”

The argument for knowing more is always, ultimately, that then we know more. Gwenaëlle fires off in one direction and then another, scattershot, incurably curious but idiosyncratic in what she latches onto and gnaws at. If only she'd been willing to take more of an interest in the affairs of long-dead elves,

but even still. She's found other angles to pursue, and follows those doggedly, smiling crooked when he speaks to her mind.

“I thought it'd have been inappropriate to be in Research, but Stark was bonking one of his, so I don't know why I cared so much.” Self-evidently, it had not been an issue for anyone else. “And Rutyer and Alexandrie. Is Yseult's husband in Scouting? Amsel was Diplomacy, so Niehaus would be in the clear—”

She's also dangerously prone to tangents, and refocuses.

“Not the point. Lyrium experiments. Poppell de Fonce has the grace and sensitivity of a war nug, which can be an issue when every other thing we do is going to be politically sensitive even within our own ranks, but she's got the right idea. And being ignorant is no protection—” which sounds a little like something she's said before, the echo of a previous argument. Maybe one she hadn't always been on the right or same side of, every time, but —

“I was so angry,” she says, finally. “When Thranduil had his phylactery made. I was so afraid for him I wanted to smash the stupid thing in his stupid face. And if he'd given it to me I would have done. But we had to know.”

(The worst part was always being left out of that process.)

Edited 2023-12-26 10:48 (UTC)

“Well, I respect your commitment to ethics in the workplace,” said lightly, amused, before he lets her snip off that tangent and then plough onwards.

Gwenaëlle’s always so open with information about herself, handing it out like it’s nothing, sprinkling lore in her wake. It’s always interesting, peeling back the layers and learning more and more by the week: like many small pictures assembled into the whole, a fractal image seen from multiple angles. It’s been a year and he’s still trying to see the whole of her.

At that particular piece of information, though, a crinkled brow:

“Didn’t he have it destroyed afterward? Why leave a dangling thread which could be used against him in future? Was it, what, some magical Find My Husband insurance in case he got lost?” She might not have used the Find My Friends feature while they were in New York, or maybe she had, but presumably the reference makes enough sense by itself.

“I don't know what happened to it,” she admits, odd from the outside but less disorienting than the terrible, quiet realisation that she didn't know when he had quietly unraveled into the Fade. “I would have destroyed it, but I don't think that was his plan for it, and I never got my hands on the thing. When we made one that nearly worked for me, we broke it right after. But I had to find a different mage and—”

She gestures.

“I think he still had it. When I asked him who'd made his, he asked if someone needed it.”

He'd said good when she agreed she intended to destroy hers, were they successful, had sounded sincere. It is, she realises, the last conversation she ever had with him.

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

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