open: "accidents" will happen.

[aberratic]

WHO: Ness Tavane (aberratic)
WHAT: An "accident" and an amputation
WHEN: Backdated-ish to mid-March
WHERE: The Gallows/Infirmary
NOTES: CW for amputation of a limb, illness from infection in said limb, confusion and disorientation as a result of fever. Lmk if you need any other cws and I'll add them!

It's early morning one balmy day in the middle of Drakonis, and the central tower of the Gallows is quiet. A few early risers have already made their ways to their offices, not to mention those who fell asleep in their offices—or those who never slept in the first place—but most of Riftwatch is still asleep, or at least milling about the dining hall. Coffee and tea are still brewing, breakfast is still being served, the work of the day is still at least an hour away for most.

This is purposeful; it means there's no one near the Quartermaster's office to see what happens. There is only silence, and then a sudden cacophonous crash to break it, and a high, sharp scream.

Comments

for stephen & isaac, @portalling & @wythersake

[aberratic]

It's quiet when Ness wakes up, dry lips parting to drag a beleaguered breath into starved lungs. She tore open her stitches and had to come back to the infirmary less than a week ago—not that she knows that. She knows it's getting hard to breathe. Her arm is completely numb, she knows that too, but the rest of her body has begun to hurt. Pulling her thoughts together feels as exhausting as swimming through molasses, and her throat is so dry. It feels like her whole body is pulsing with some unnatural heat. She doesn't know why she feels like this, but she's not worried. Why isn't she worried?

The answer feels like it takes hours to reach her—time is fuzzy right now—but it makes perfect sense when it does: Stephen. Stephen will help her, he always does. Even when he didn't remember her he helped. He'll know what to do.

Ness reaches out with her left hand, the only hand she has left, searching uncoordinatedly for her nightstand and the sending crystal she keeps atop it when she sleeps—and hits something cool, flesh-textured. She frowns, distantly puzzled.

"Stephen?" Her voice is little more than a croak. "'m hot, 'm—am I in the infirmary? I don't remember..."

[portalling]

What he wouldn’t fucking give for Luc-Mercier Volante to have gotten the penicillin working already.

But the infection worsens, and worsens. Doctor Strange keeps the wound clean, rinses and changes her dressings, applies an embrium salve, keeps her well-hydrated, follows all the right steps, wishes for fucking antibiotics, wishes for proper healing magic of his own. But Ness has still been getting worse and worse, and despite himself he remembers, not too long ago, hovering in this infirmary helplessly watching another patient cratering in critical condition.

Think all our doctors been murderers.

The words echo in his ears, unpleasant, galling. He sizes up the girl’s drawn pale face, her croak of a voice. Presses a cool wrist to her forehead and feels the heat blazing.

“You’re in the infirmary,” he confirms, as crisp and professional as he can make it. Rather than try to carry on an extended conversation, he reaches for his own crystal. Speaks into it: “Healer Isaac?”

Any other time, this message might have contained some friendly grousing about the man’s surname and lack thereof, how the doctor’s paperwork is all fucked without it, he needs a better way to refer to his colleague. This time, it’s simply to-the-point.

[wythersake]

Enchanter,

"J'arrive."

Muddled by sleep. The slumped sound of someone shoving upright, hammering hand to eye against the crack of daylight. Enchanter. But he's said healer, which may as well be a knock at the door; the turn of a key. Isaac's pulling on sleeves before he finds the sense to ask:

"Tell me what's happened."

Can't guess what he's walking into — back a day, perhaps two; not long enough to catch up to the business of business. Hinges creak. Footsteps, steadier for a few, gathering balance along the open line. A couple minutes downstairs, a couple more to navigate the yard. He's coming.

[portalling]

Strange turns his head and takes a few steps aside, voice lowered to be audible on the crystal but not speaking quite so directly over the girl’s body. No need to openly discuss her within earshot and potentially cause alarm. He rattles off the details in business-like patter:

“Ennaris Tavane. Twenty-year-old female patient. Amputated forearm, now infected wound and fever. Her recovery was on pace, until she tore her stitches and took a turn for the worse. I’d hoped to handle this on my own, but now that you’re back—” A clipped beat in that neat and tidy recitation, a hesitation. “I’m afraid I’m at the limit of what I can accomplish without magic.”

[aberratic]

Ness is more or less content to stay silent while Stephen talks—she's become accustomed to his it's time to get serious voice and what it means, and with a head currently made of rapidly melting candy fluff talking seems less than useful anyway—but something he says makes her frown, and she reaches out again, flailing her arm toward him. Her hand smacks into his elbow, and she grips weakly onto his sleeve.

She waits for him to stop speaking into his crystal and look at her before she corrects him.

"Twenty-one. Twenty-one-year-old female patient."

That's the most important part of everything he just said, obviously.

[wythersake]

Amputated forearm, and of course, he's had those discussions. A thread to tug later. Another in Strange's stuttered momentum.

"Magebane," The girl's spoken of tenuous control. "Lyrium for me."

Clear steps. A problem to search and solve for, and maybe that's kinder than telling him it'll be alright. They're both professionals. They know that'd be a lie. Blood poisoning is chancy under the best circumstances, enough to set aside for a likelier recovery. They aren't in battle. They needn't triage. These are the best circumstances,

But magic has limits, too.

When he arrives, it's in yesterday's shirt and a pilfered jacket, hangdog about the shoulders. The look he trades Stephen flattens before it reaches her. Schooled careful-still, even and dull as brick. He's made a habit this past year of studying Amsel's face. The particular difference between a slackness of expression, and its absence, imitation.

When he looks at her, he looks like he always does, like he looked over the crushed shoulder of a knight; the fester in a hunter's burn. Steady. Empty as the work. Isaac draws close, voice pitched for clarity:

"I need to undo the dressing. I'm going to touch your arm,"

And unavoidably, it's going to hurt.

[portalling]

And the Head Healer gives way, fading into the background.

It’s not a position he’s accustomed to, handing over responsibility. But Strange is the assistant now, handing Isaac whatever he needs: the man obediently vanishes to the cabinets to fetch magebane, lyrium, passes it over as well as a bowl of water and towels as needed for cleaning hands, but otherwise he hovers just out-of-reach, watchful and waiting.

The worry doesn’t show on his face. His expression’s settled into that same stiff neutrality as the other healer’s; a professional commonality, not betraying how bad the situation is.

(It’s bad.)

[aberratic]

Oh, Isaac is here. That strikes her, vaguely, as significant... but she doesn't know why, and thinking about it just makes her head hurt, so she lets the spark pass. The disquiet she feels around him is less vague, even if the why of it is as fuzzy as everything else, and the closer he gets to her the further Ness shifts herself toward the edge of the bed. Unsurprisingly, she runs out of space before he does, and when he stops at her right side, she only frowns at him, unfocused.

The air around her is stale and smells of sweat. Her hair, limp and lank, sticks to her forehead in wet clumps. She's due a change of clothes, the plain shift she wears near sweat through and barely a shade lighter than her skin—save where inflammation peeks out from under the dressing on her residual limb, furious red and burning hot to the touch. As Isaac begins the process of unwrapping it, braced as he may be for her to recoil or scream from the pain, Ness...

doesn't even wince. She barely does more than frown, and a glance above the bandages reveals why: the anaesthetic cuff Stephen acquired in Tevinter wraps around the top of her bicep, rendering what remains of her arm below it wholly numb. Without the cuff, merely touching her infected limb would cause her excruciating pain; with it, she feels nothing at all.

Whatever energy she had for speech has left her. Ness only watches, dull and mute, while Isaac reveals the sickly wound that ends her arm.

im not typing then he uses tonys hand sanitizer but assume he did or whatever

[wythersake]

A nod to Strange — thank you —

He's seen a tourniquet before, a piece of any amputation, but they aren't kept so long. Kills the flesh by inches. Isaac slips clean fingertip beneath the top edge of cuff. Numbness radiates down nail, and the pinch of his brow can wait. What matters is that the band's loose enough to stay.

Linen clings with purulence, red radiating out from stump along the telltale track of infection. Maker willing, she won't need debridement, but sickness travels beyond the site of a wound. If it's gone this far, it's in the rest of her.

(He is looking for more than dead tissue, swollen sutures. He is looking for a thread of green.)

"You'll sleep," Ordinarily, he offers patients a choice. The choice, as it stands is to do, or to die. "Several hours, maybe longer. You'll wake here."

He's read the emergency forms, he hasn't memorized them. So while she's present enough to recoil, it's worth asking:

"Who do you want with you?"

To watch, or to hold her hand, or whatever petty comfort might suffice. This will be easier if she doesn't fight it.

[aberratic]

It takes a long moment for her to even understand the question; it becomes clear quickly that she's frowning less out of unhappiness and more out of confusion. Even when she understands the question, she doesn't really—how is she going to sleep? Why is she going to sleep? If she's going to sleep and will be unaware, why would she want anyone with her? It won't matter who's there while she's unconscious, and who has the time to be bothered standing around uselessly? How can she express any of this when her brain feels like it's sizzling like a cooked egg?

She can't. Not with any sort of coherence, anyway, so she just shakes her head.

(Bad idea, now everything is swimming—)

"Bad question. Doesn't matter."

She came into Thedas alone, if she leaves it alone, that's alright.

[wythersake]

"Mm-hm," Very well. Vial drips into cup. "Drink this."

Water laced with the familiar taste of magebane. He props the cup at her lips, fishes a rag for the spill.

He waits until it's done. Fingers lift — here I am, look and see — before lowering to forehead. Air tenses. The strings of something almost real wrap about spindled hand, and he reaches to draw the Veil over her eyes.

It's a little like sleeping. To Stephen's eye, it's nearer torpor. Consciousness recedes. Awareness does, gone heavy beneath the blanketing weight of stasis. Breath slows. Vessels narrow. The sparks between nerve and neuron jump less, ask less, demand less.

Maybe she finds the Fade, maybe she doesn't.

It finds her. Isaac's gaze drifts, searching a sense without proper name. This first part is the easiest. He doesn't own the words: Homeostasis, hypothalamus, pyrogen; can't describe the place where defense curls about to bite. Spells are shaped by understanding, and his is this — she's too warm. Flesh cuts a smothering weave, drawn too tight, without room to breathe. Without room to work. He digs a nail into the invisible space between. He pulls.

As he sets toward the infection, her temperature begins to drop.