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

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.

“I’d hate having that sitting around somewhere, something which can be used against me. A loose end dangling, too tempting for someone else to haul on if you lose track of it. There could be some useful applications,” Stephen muses, thinking aloud, “for finding people, but at that rate I would think a locator rune of some sort instead. Something you purposefully carry, and someone else can ping to find their way to you. Maybe even embedding it in our sending crystals. I could see Riftwatch’s work in the field having use of something like that.”

This is beside the point. He, too, has a tendency to vanish into tangents.

Anyway— “Point being, I doubt it’ll ever come up, but if you ever hear of someone having co-opted my blood and made a phylactery out of it, please blow it up at your first convenience.”

His tangent could so easily lead into another — she's nearly starting it, we'd absolutely fucking never sell that to the mages — but he startles her into a laugh with at your first convenience and she flops backwards into the nearest pile of cushions in her conversation pit, pushing a hand through her hair.

“Ouais, sure, ” she says, gazing up at the ceiling and the finish on it that she'd spent several hours of her life going over the fine details of with the best that ducal money could buy. “I don't know if my uncle's was with all the others the Inquisition found, but he was missing for so long, probably not? Maybe?”

She squints her good eye.

“He showed up about when it was all kicking off. You'll have some of his records— Gervais Vauquelin.”

(Somewhere, there's a form he'd prepared for consenting to the study of a removed anchor limb.)

“I wasn't in the thick of it with mages, then.”

Edited 2024-01-02 07:27 (UTC)

Stephen’s already dived back in and started rustling through the papers after her mention of records, his photographic memory having remembered the shape of the signature and the firm, solid print more than anything else. GERVAIS V.

“He and Wysteria would’ve gotten along. No wonder you two do,” he says, moreso thinking aloud, as he flips through the papers again. The copies of related records are an especial treat: four years old, and yet Tony’s voice rings through it as if the words were penned only yesterday. The sorcerer can’t help the ghost of a smile which flickers across his face.

He hadn’t meant to ask this particular question, but those tangents—

He looks back up, from her uncle’s writing to the angle of Gwenaëlle’s cheek, her gaze turned skyward. “Would you ever chop it off? Your anchor. You have one of the oldest, as you’ve mentioned, and as is exhaustively documented here.”

Gwenaëlle doesn't immediately move from where she's lain in cushions; doesn't immediately answer, so he could imagine that she hasn't heard him, or simply doesn't wish to. She's thinking of — we didn't always, you know, or any of the many other ceilings she's looked up at since her life changed, or all of those who came and went in the meanwhile. Not the rifters, but Thedosians— joined this cause and then left it, for whatever reason, to whatever end. Watching their retreating backs, or not, only hearing of it after the fact; all of them who could leave when she cannot.

“In the first year or so,” she says, eventually, “I wondered if Solas didn't already know how to remove the anchor without an axe.” A theory she has, over the years, largely kept to herself; it was a long time before she entirely let it go. (Now, she thinks: if he could have claimed that power for himself before he left, he would have done it.) “I thought— well, from the beginning, removing the anchor was never the most pressing goal of the Inquisition. When Trevelyan held the whole thing, alone, it was just. Hers to bear.”

Necessary.

“I thought in his position, I wouldn't tell anyone, either. Even now. What happens if everyone does that? My shard is one of the few strong enough to close most rifts alone. That hasn't become less pressing in the interim. It'd be...” She screws up her face, shaking her head though at this angle the gesture means little. “If it's the only option when we don't need them any longer— a conversation for then. It's one thing to allow that as an option for those who don't use them in the field.”

By her tone, more troubled than censorious, she's still not completely at ease with the idea of allowing that, voluntarily, though she adds conscientiously: “If it could have been cut out of that elf it killed, it should have been. And I'd rather have Poppell de Fonce down an arm than have us be down her, obviously.”

It just seems to her that perhaps those should be the only circumstances—

To Stephen’s irritation with himself, he realises he hadn’t actually been considering that angle. He’d instinctively been thinking about it in medical terms: the shard as cancerous tumour to be excised, to be cut out before it advanced too far and devoured too much of the body. Remembering Wysteria’s reasoning in cutting off her own arm: The anchor had become dangerous. They do that. They are quite capable of destroying the body they’ve been embedded in.

And what a dreadful shame it would be, if Mademoiselle Baudin were destroyed through it.

But in terms of a war: what does that do to their scrappy organisation, if they ever learn (if he ever learns) how to remove it safely without amputation? Both good and ill. It would remove the literal anchor keeping people here, and remove their only way of closing up rifts and holding their steadily-fraying world together at the seams. Like preventing incursions, and he thinks for the first time: perhaps that’s the difference between Thedas and the world a Stephen Strange had carelessly broken. Here are anchor-bearers, patching up the holes.

And this is what Gwenaëlle’s like: the sort of choice she makes, day after day, over and over, regardless of the cost. He gazes at her a little too long. Then he pushes through it, recapturing that thoughtful cast to his voice instead:

“I was thinking about it from the Head Healer standpoint, the how about we don’t get devoured by our own shards someday angle,” he says, “but, true. For now, we still need it faster than it’s slowly killing us. It remains a grim necessity.”

A beat, then adding: “But if the day ever comes that it does start going necrotic, please do let me know. Rather an eye or an arm than a life, as you say.”

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

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