“The new rifter, Tav. Just what it says on the tin. But it’s impressive: he can take elfroot from a seedling to a fully-grown plant in mere minutes. I’ve given him responsibility over the herb garden, but told him not to overdo it. I’m assuming the soil still needs time to recover and can’t, y’know, churn them out endlessly.”
There’s a familiar kind of absentminded busywork to the way he moves around the infirmary, knowing where everything is, at home and chatty in his surroundings. It’s been a process over the last few months, getting more accustomed to working with and around Abby, although today she seems terse…r.
Strange has come even closer and materialised in front of her, setting a mortar and pestle on a nearby bed. “At least this way we’ll have more potions for a while.” Then he looks at her staring at the door, following her gaze to nothing, and his brow crinkles. “—You good? You have somewhere to be?”
"No," Abby says quickly, taking up the bag so that she doesn't have to crouch down and be near it — it can go on this table over here, the one with very little already on it. Strange has put a mortar and pestle on the nearest bed for her; for now she picks through the contents of the sackcloth and sifts dirt through the spaces between fingers, starting to make a pile. At least the work is easy, methodical.
Her and Strange, they don't talk much. They've even had some pretty awkward conversations before this point and today she has Gwen's little happy voice stuck in her head, reminding her of unhelpful snippets from last night's conversation.
She clears her throat. Hopefully it's not weird to say, "How've you been?"
It instantly felt a little weird. He shoots her another questioning look.
But it could just as well be his own slight awkwardness around the younger set of Riftwatch, the way he doesn’t entirely know how to carry a conversation with Abby or Clarisse when there isn’t an emergency at hand — it had in fact felt easier in Seattle — and so Strange concludes she’s just trying to be friendly. He moves back to the row of glass bottles, prepping some of the other ingredients which will need to join the elfroot for brewing the potions.
“Good,” he says, after a pause. “I’ve been… really good, actually.” There’s a faint smile on his face, an annoyingly besotted glow she’ll know the cause of, although he tries to pivot a second later: “But, well, busy. This month’s already hit the ground running work-wise. On the bright side, I think Jayce made some friends in Halamshiral, so Research ought to have a better budget this year, we might be able to get some of our new initiatives through.”
Abby certainly doesn't help herself out by scoffing right after Strange says he's been really good, entirely without realising. Yeah, bet it's been good ha ha, and she keeps sifting through elfroot, automatically plucking off any little shriveled bits she comes across and neatening the haul. She says, "Oh cool," about Jayce, the new (rich?) friend-making. Maybe if she gets bored doing this and wants something to listen to while she works she'll ask him to talk about the initiatives.
She's starting to grind up the first lot, appreciating the chance to help out in a way that's physical. Kinda like a work out, maybe she'll switch hands every five minutes. "I'm fine. Um, I—" fuck, what has she been doing lately that's actually interesting? Uhhhhh.
Oh, "Clarisse and Ellie and I are gonna start a flip cup tournament."
Sure.
Edited (whyd i say good fifty times in one tag) 2024-03-26 02:28 (UTC)
Another suspicious squint at the scoff; half-wondering what he might be missing.
Still, “Flip cup. That gives me flashbacks to college,” Strange says, wry. “Is this like your strength competition thing the other day? Time for a dexterity competition and Riftwatch Olympics?”
(He might rarely chime in when Riftwatch is shooting the shit on the crystals, but he does idly listen in to some of it, for the sake of completionism. Who knows, maybe someone was gonna rip a tendon and suddenly require the Head Healer.)
"Yeah," she says, raising her voice over the scrape of mortar and pestle, "We don't have plastic cups so we were thinking of doing it with wooden ones, to make it more challenging. So yeah, I guess it is kinda like the competition stuff..."
And including it in that may not be a bad idea, even very fun. She will make note of this. She chuckles and says, "What kind of event would you want to do if we made that happen? I don't think everybody wants to try their hand at the wood edition of flip cup."
He’s now leaning his weight back against the edge of the desk; three quarters of his attention watching the burners for the water to boil, the last quarter on Abby as he considers her question with almost solemn gravity.
“Presumably this should be accessible to everyone in Riftwatch, so anything to do with magic’s right out,” Strange muses aloud.
Then: “Something with dexterity and not requiring a lot of physical strength. Footwork, nothing to do with grip. In my time, there was this reality TV show called American Ninja Warrior? It was ridiculous, but I’m thinking of some of those physical challenges. There are these Dancing Stones: wobbly unstable platforms with padded tops, and you have to jump from platform-to-platform to get to the other side. Padded flooring on the ground for when you inevitably fall off. Or water, if you want it to be funnier.”
Scrutinising her, he adds, “You would’ve loved the show, I think.”
"'American Ninja Warrior'?" Abby mumbles, amused, a tiny interruption that seems to go unnoticed. She's immediately making a mental note to ask Clarisse about it because it sounds like something she's probably heard of before and has opinions about.
"Yeah, something like that. That sounds good, I wonder — if we could make some..."
She's thinking, the pestle still for a moment. Maybe put it out over the river between Kirkwall and the Gallows? You know, to be funny, but also because swimming could be a part of the whole thing, if this is actually turning into a thing.
Maybe it should. It sounds really fun and god knows they need as much fun around here as they can get.
When she looks back at him she's grinning, keen. "Probably. I used to live in this old stadium back home, down in Seattle, the SoundView. And we had a really good gym in there because it was the Seahawks homebase before everything went to shit, obviously, and we uh, had these competitions all the time on the weekends outside of training, to see who could do all sorts of dumb shit the fastest, or while drunk, or blindfolded, whatever."
Strange doesn’t recognise the SoundView, but he does recognise the Seahawks. It’s always funny, how the multiverse works: it’s like one of those spot-five-differences pictures.
But at least Abby warming up is a somewhat less intimidating sight, and part of him seems to finally relax a little, no longer waiting for inevitable mortification. “I could see that. Which one were you best at?”
And his thoughts seem to be ticking along the same lines as hers — Riftwatch could use some fun, some innocent pick-me-ups — so he adds, the corners of his eyes crinkling into a smile: “You ever considered picking up the Morale Officer gig? You could arrange exactly this, even temporarily. Get the nerds to hit each other with big padded sticks, it’ll make everyone feel better.”
Before Abby can answer this question, Strange barrels ahead and says that; she chuckles as she loads another lot of elfroot into the mortar, squishing it down impatiently with her palm to make more of it fit in there. It means she gets a bit of elfroot goop on her when she pushes the pestle firmly down on it, but whatever. "I'll arrange the stick-hitting, but I'm not gonna be the Morale Officer."
She's not some dork, Stephen.
Rolling her eyes she says, "I was the best at carrying the most of our squadron."
Adds, "Literally. Like, on my back. I was kinda drunk, we were pretending the floor was — clickers. I threw up on Anjali's carpet."
“We’d do the floor is lava back home, as kids,” Strange muses. “Which, probably a lot less viscerally terrifying than clickers. I’d never even seen lava back then.”
After Abby finishes the first batch, he brings over an empty flask and carefully scrapes the elfroot goop into it, emptying out her mortar so he can start the distillation and she can start on the next round. He hands her a small cloth, too, for cleaning herself off afterward, their hands accidentally brushing.
As he works: “So if anyone in Riftwatch needs a piggyback ride, sounds like we know who to send them to.”
Abby scrunches her nose, amused. "Lava? Didn't know that was such a problem in your world."
Like. Is it everywhere? That sucks. Must have been hot.
They do this change over in silence, her passing over the mortar, him scraping it carefully out into a flask. Abby holds it so he doesn't have to balance the weight of both things at the same time and when they touch she feels a sudden flash of embarrassment and ducks her head. Awkward. She takes the cloth. Hopefully he didn't notice.
"Yeah. How... do you think you'll do? In Riftwatch Ninja Warrior."
Strange considers the question, giving it proper weight. Maybe more than it deserves, for them simply aimlessly shooting the shit, but:
“Better than some in Research,” he says. “Being a sorcerer in my and Tony’s Earth meant running around battling aliens and demons. I do yoga, I spar, I stay in shape. But likely nowhere near as well as others in Forces or Scouting. Younger, more spry. And, well, you know.”
He holds up a hand, indicating those gnarled fingers, the ever-present tremor inevitably holding him back in something like a Riftwatch Ninja Warrior.
Abby goes mmm like she knows but actually she has no idea at all. In the process of bringing pestle back to mortar, grinding up a new batch of elfroot she says, "What happened?"
To her, it doesn't seem rude. Back home, asking about other people's injuries or scars was pretty normal. Most of the time you were asking just so that you didn't repeat some stupid mistake later down the line, so; it's self-preservation, really. Tell me what happened so I can make sure it never happens to me.
There’s the brief flicker of surprise, realising: oh, have I not mentioned it already?
Stephen Strange is incorrigibly tight-lipped and private and secretive about many things in his life (see: that whole new burgeoning relationship with Gwenaëlle), but he’s fairly open about this one. It had consumed his life for so many years that it didn’t seem worth trying to keep secret. It was written all over him, and he’d had to get accustomed to doctors and nurses flocking in and out of his room, re-wrapping his bandages, physical therapists massaging his hands.
How did it happen? he’d asked Ellie, about her missing fingers. What happened? Ellie had asked, about his hands. The question’s a straightforward one.
“Car crash,” Strange says, a twist at his mouth, trying to keep his tone as light as possible. He remembers there were some still-working cars and trucks in Abby’s Seattle, so he doesn’t have to contextualise that part. “Making me a walking talking cautionary tale about the dangers of reckless driving. Considering I lived in a world with alien invasions, it’s pretty underwhelming.”
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wheezes
There’s a familiar kind of absentminded busywork to the way he moves around the infirmary, knowing where everything is, at home and chatty in his surroundings. It’s been a process over the last few months, getting more accustomed to working with and around Abby, although today she seems terse…r.
Strange has come even closer and materialised in front of her, setting a mortar and pestle on a nearby bed. “At least this way we’ll have more potions for a while.” Then he looks at her staring at the door, following her gaze to nothing, and his brow crinkles. “—You good? You have somewhere to be?”
no subject
Her and Strange, they don't talk much. They've even had some pretty awkward conversations before this point and today she has Gwen's little happy voice stuck in her head, reminding her of unhelpful snippets from last night's conversation.
She clears her throat. Hopefully it's not weird to say, "How've you been?"
no subject
But it could just as well be his own slight awkwardness around the younger set of Riftwatch, the way he doesn’t entirely know how to carry a conversation with Abby or Clarisse when there isn’t an emergency at hand — it had in fact felt easier in Seattle — and so Strange concludes she’s just trying to be friendly. He moves back to the row of glass bottles, prepping some of the other ingredients which will need to join the elfroot for brewing the potions.
“Good,” he says, after a pause. “I’ve been… really good, actually.” There’s a faint smile on his face, an annoyingly besotted glow she’ll know the cause of, although he tries to pivot a second later: “But, well, busy. This month’s already hit the ground running work-wise. On the bright side, I think Jayce made some friends in Halamshiral, so Research ought to have a better budget this year, we might be able to get some of our new initiatives through.”
The budget is not why he’s so pleased, but—
“How, uh, how about you?”
no subject
She's starting to grind up the first lot, appreciating the chance to help out in a way that's physical. Kinda like a work out, maybe she'll switch hands every five minutes. "I'm fine. Um, I—" fuck, what has she been doing lately that's actually interesting? Uhhhhh.
Oh, "Clarisse and Ellie and I are gonna start a flip cup tournament."
Sure.
no subject
Still, “Flip cup. That gives me flashbacks to college,” Strange says, wry. “Is this like your strength competition thing the other day? Time for a dexterity competition and Riftwatch Olympics?”
(He might rarely chime in when Riftwatch is shooting the shit on the crystals, but he does idly listen in to some of it, for the sake of completionism. Who knows, maybe someone was gonna rip a tendon and suddenly require the Head Healer.)
no subject
And including it in that may not be a bad idea, even very fun. She will make note of this. She chuckles and says, "What kind of event would you want to do if we made that happen? I don't think everybody wants to try their hand at the wood edition of flip cup."
no subject
“Presumably this should be accessible to everyone in Riftwatch, so anything to do with magic’s right out,” Strange muses aloud.
Then: “Something with dexterity and not requiring a lot of physical strength. Footwork, nothing to do with grip. In my time, there was this reality TV show called American Ninja Warrior? It was ridiculous, but I’m thinking of some of those physical challenges. There are these Dancing Stones: wobbly unstable platforms with padded tops, and you have to jump from platform-to-platform to get to the other side. Padded flooring on the ground for when you inevitably fall off. Or water, if you want it to be funnier.”
Scrutinising her, he adds, “You would’ve loved the show, I think.”
no subject
"Yeah, something like that. That sounds good, I wonder — if we could make some..."
She's thinking, the pestle still for a moment. Maybe put it out over the river between Kirkwall and the Gallows? You know, to be funny, but also because swimming could be a part of the whole thing, if this is actually turning into a thing.
Maybe it should. It sounds really fun and god knows they need as much fun around here as they can get.
When she looks back at him she's grinning, keen. "Probably. I used to live in this old stadium back home, down in Seattle, the SoundView. And we had a really good gym in there because it was the Seahawks homebase before everything went to shit, obviously, and we uh, had these competitions all the time on the weekends outside of training, to see who could do all sorts of dumb shit the fastest, or while drunk, or blindfolded, whatever."
no subject
But at least Abby warming up is a somewhat less intimidating sight, and part of him seems to finally relax a little, no longer waiting for inevitable mortification. “I could see that. Which one were you best at?”
And his thoughts seem to be ticking along the same lines as hers — Riftwatch could use some fun, some innocent pick-me-ups — so he adds, the corners of his eyes crinkling into a smile: “You ever considered picking up the Morale Officer gig? You could arrange exactly this, even temporarily. Get the nerds to hit each other with big padded sticks, it’ll make everyone feel better.”
no subject
She's not some dork, Stephen.
Rolling her eyes she says, "I was the best at carrying the most of our squadron."
Adds, "Literally. Like, on my back. I was kinda drunk, we were pretending the floor was — clickers. I threw up on Anjali's carpet."
no subject
After Abby finishes the first batch, he brings over an empty flask and carefully scrapes the elfroot goop into it, emptying out her mortar so he can start the distillation and she can start on the next round. He hands her a small cloth, too, for cleaning herself off afterward, their hands accidentally brushing.
As he works: “So if anyone in Riftwatch needs a piggyback ride, sounds like we know who to send them to.”
no subject
Like. Is it everywhere? That sucks. Must have been hot.
They do this change over in silence, her passing over the mortar, him scraping it carefully out into a flask. Abby holds it so he doesn't have to balance the weight of both things at the same time and when they touch she feels a sudden flash of embarrassment and ducks her head. Awkward. She takes the cloth. Hopefully he didn't notice.
"Yeah. How... do you think you'll do? In Riftwatch Ninja Warrior."
no subject
“Better than some in Research,” he says. “Being a sorcerer in my and Tony’s Earth meant running around battling aliens and demons. I do yoga, I spar, I stay in shape. But likely nowhere near as well as others in Forces or Scouting. Younger, more spry. And, well, you know.”
He holds up a hand, indicating those gnarled fingers, the ever-present tremor inevitably holding him back in something like a Riftwatch Ninja Warrior.
no subject
To her, it doesn't seem rude. Back home, asking about other people's injuries or scars was pretty normal. Most of the time you were asking just so that you didn't repeat some stupid mistake later down the line, so; it's self-preservation, really. Tell me what happened so I can make sure it never happens to me.
no subject
Stephen Strange is incorrigibly tight-lipped and private and secretive about many things in his life (see: that whole new burgeoning relationship with Gwenaëlle), but he’s fairly open about this one. It had consumed his life for so many years that it didn’t seem worth trying to keep secret. It was written all over him, and he’d had to get accustomed to doctors and nurses flocking in and out of his room, re-wrapping his bandages, physical therapists massaging his hands.
How did it happen? he’d asked Ellie, about her missing fingers. What happened? Ellie had asked, about his hands. The question’s a straightforward one.
“Car crash,” Strange says, a twist at his mouth, trying to keep his tone as light as possible. He remembers there were some still-working cars and trucks in Abby’s Seattle, so he doesn’t have to contextualise that part. “Making me a walking talking cautionary tale about the dangers of reckless driving. Considering I lived in a world with alien invasions, it’s pretty underwhelming.”