Isaac isn't back long. The morning finds him dozing by the fire, teapot in arms; still wearing sleep and yesterday's shirtsleeves when Felix knocks.
(He is Felix. There are privileges one forfeits for a cock in the mouth — others, that fear need assert. Certain servants arrive unannounced only to poor ends. A second location, a story that is mostly holes; it's a brief conversation. He's Felix.
So no one dies.)
Stairs creak. Rain drums the boards, and several flights up he's still dripping on the floor. Isaac stoops close, turns damp hands to her chin. The bag over his shoulder will see to most usual emergencies, but if that was all, they'd be ashore; and more than one eye in her head. Merci.
"Oh, don't speak," Cannot be the first or last time that Gwenaëlle Baudin been asked to shut up, "You'll make that worse. Chalk and board,"
To Guilfoyle. Doubtless, there's something else to write with in this enormous fucking desk, but he'd sooner she not dump an inkwell on them both. Once supplied,
"Tell me what's happened," She's long enough in the Infirmary to have some idea, fond enough it may distract. "And what you've taken. I'm going to look at you,"
Tipping her less swollen cheek. Strange will have seen to the routine questions, if she were dribbling fluid or blazing fever, there'd be no clawing him from her side. Still, he mislikes the cling of mystery about this, dreamlike under grey sky. As though at any moment now, he'll spy the edges of maze.
Felix lingers, probably in case there’s anything else needful in the immediate future more than any other reason; he has grown too accustomed to being on the wrong side of a closed door to get precious about the idea of leaving them alone for reasons beyond pragmatism. Gwenaëlle manages not to flinch when Isaac’s hands come near, but it’s a near thing and she doesn’t hold out against the wince when his fingers connect,
“My own mixture,” she says, “the one Anders told me to stop using because it’d kill a horse.”
She keeps a little on hand in case of emergencies; she’s usually thinking of someone else’s emergency when she mixes it. Stephen, maybe, his hands. Nikos Averesch when he was still around. Jude. But it won’t be the first time she’s used it herself.
“I was— thrown. Hit a stone edge with my face. Something feels broken, not— severely, but broken. Most of everything else is superficial.” Most of. “I had to take my eye out because it got shoved and it hurt, but my face is too tender to wear the patch, so,”
"Good. That was clever of you," Anders was a lot of things, but he knew healing. It's some measure of how badly this must ache. "Never supposed I'd call gold the practical solution,"
But picking crushed glass from socket would ask a touch more than heavy draughts. A blessing they needn't fret for her vision, one which he declines to voice: You might have lost the eye now, so you're quite ahead of schedule,
Very clever indeed. It's broken, and it might be worse, doesn't shove far from place. Left to its own devices, this would heal. Unpleasantly, and asymmetrically, but she'd move and speak without much pain. More than one mask disguises a war wound, else a servant's troubles — there are stones everywhere. Tender faces, too.
"We'll reduce the swelling, and stabilize the bone," Thinking aloud, a steady drone to grip for. If it should keep her getting a word in, all the better. "I'll need to go slowly."
So this doesn't ossify into gnarl. Urging the body to its own shape is a short step from overgrowth, and he's no notion how they'd grind the thing back down. An eye over his shoulder. Felix, fetch:
"Any portraits," He isn't a sculptor, Leander would have been better for this. He'd not allow Leander anywhere near. "So many angles as you have."
Gwenaëlle’s gaze cuts to Felix, too, and he straightens, a brief nod to acknowledge her wordless reinforcement of request—
“There is one of her portraits remaining here,” he says, “and one of her mother. I believe I may also be able to put hands upon the sketches provided to the publisher of the Inquisition papers. If you will excuse me.”
They will; he excuses himself before someone can agree or disagree that it's worth getting down Guenievre’s portrait, too, and in the absence that he leaves she says, “I haven't shown him the other thing yet.” A testament to whatever string ties him here so strongly that she hadn’t needed to, sending him haring off bring Isaac back here on the strength of her huge, imploring eyes.
“I don’t think there's anything you could do, I just want to be sure that it’s stopped— in Sarrux— some old fucking elvhenan bullshit was twisting people into...changing them. I need to take my robe off, it's not to show you my tits.”
Which are on their way with that portrait, anyway.
He breathes out. There is a measure of management inherent to any troubled man with a knife, however thorough your faith in their restraint. Isaac doesn't think it worth retrieving Guenievere's portrait — he less thinks it being fetched for their sake. If it keeps him out of the room,
Clammy skin releases hers.
"Changing them," He prompts, still thinking of Leander; thinking of antlers. "Into what?"
He turns to wedge a chair into door. It won't hold for any length of time, but even toting frames, Felix is altogether too quiet for this discussion. She hasn't shown him this other thing, and there are vanishingly few reasons to show Isaac instead. He expects runes, the aftermath of some ugly, carved ritual. Perhaps a gleam of Anchor, or lyrium; the curl of Fade-touched flame. She disrobes, he waits.
(For the best he hasn't yet shoved a hand in her mouth.)
Beneath the robe, she is still wearing a thin slip— more a gesture to courtesy than to modesty, and even from the front it’s apparent that it’s been torn in the back. The why of that is almost immediately apparent as she shivers her shoulders and wings flare out from where they had been pressed close to her skin instead, no larger than her torso, insect-like, shimmering like the stained glass that features in some windows of La Souveraineté. Prism-like, the thin morning light refracts through them and shatters colours across the walls and floor of the room, shifting inconsistently with the anxious flutter of their motion.
The rest of her doesn't move.
“The rifters with us were changed worse, different, but — temporarily.” Mostly if not entirely gone by the time they had returned to Kirkwall. Not so, these. “Theirs started to come away on the road back. After we cleaned my back up,” the slow way she’s talking around not jostling the bones in her face makes it stilted, strange, as if this wasn’t already, “it’s like they just. Healed in place. Everyone but us this happened to is dead.”
It’s vanishingly rare for Gwenaëlle to look at him so— straightforwardly. A calm that she’s holding with her nails. The absence of edge, no roll of her remaining eye,
Colours burst. At any moment now, the walls will crumble to Fade; the spirit in this skin will bandy its pitch. Doesn't he know that the way out is up?
But she doesn't rise. But magic springs between her shoulders, swollen with stretched light, and Gwenaëlle sits a dead thing before it. Slit open a dragonfly and you'll spy three tiny hearts. Her own, perilously human, must pound for the strain of dispassion. That it can't still the wings —
Isaac steps aside, to better regard the place where chitin slips into skin. New lines of muscle bunch, transposed strange, too-small. Us, comes the distant register. Everyone but us,
Later, he'll have names.
"I didn't see them yesterday," I just want to be sure that it’s stopped. "But if you allow me to touch your back, I might confirm."
His own words hang dull. Hand hovers. Granitefell does, and if she turns him down he might simply walk away. This is the sort of thing that people get killed for. Assessment swallows dread, traces the wide branch of membrane, rendered vascular by human scale. Removal would be complex, blood loss a certainty.
But the body ever winds to shape. If this truly healed in place, it will do so again.
Hand hovers and wing flicks away from it, of a piece with the downturn of her mouth. Her mouth which sets in stubbornness a moment later as she fans her wings out and flattens them down so he can more easily reach the base of them,
she is thinking of Granitefell, too. At first, she’d thought, I’m dying, as if time might have unbroken itself and the death she’d escaped had come grasping after her again. Every time she feels a hand on her back and not pain is proof otherwise, except that now she isn’t sure she hasn’t just traded one for another, worse and slower. She looks up at him, steeled to offer vulnerability where she feels certain it doesn’t belong and isn’t wise,
“Please,” she says, quietly.
(She can feel the way they flutter. She can feel the way that it’s her, doing it. She has bathed and changed and her armour taken to be cleaned and she can still smell— the salt. The death.)
i kept typing mascles and being like why is it red underlining this
Fingers pad into skin, blunt nails scraping beneath shoulderblade. A familiar heat. Something tugs at the edge of perception. Energy, life, questing out. Swollen vessels smooth, locked muscles ease. Innervation. Indiscriminate. He doesn't dare any more, when she looks up at him with bones still half-smashed —
He doesn't need to. Strength swivels from wing to joint, flexes along the massed lines of tendon, anchored more solidly than even Viktor's strange apparatus. That spell had wanted to draw his brace inward, bury metal beneath flesh. This, altogether different. Already woven whole.
"It's done," Or Isaac expects that he would have made it much worse. She doesn't need that particular detail. "I don't know how we undo it, but it's done."
Near as he can tell. Isaac knows the difference between abomination and abnormality, and this falls altogether outside. It reminds of Minrathous, of Seere, mutations beyond mortal scale.
Warmth ebbs. His palm lifts. He thinks to linger and thinks better of it; instead pulls the robe up, arranged careful about her neck, around the wide lift of wings. It's a cold morning. This is the sort of thing that people get killed for, and,
Her fingers twist in the thick burgundy fabric that she pulls tighter and she is so, so still; it looks like calm, except that her knuckles are white and the breath she releases comes out slow. Hard to say if what she's feeling is relief or not; done, good, but done, beyond the ready undoing. What’s she going to do, get a second opinion?
From who? Done. She looks down at her hands.
“I can bind them under clothing,” she says, “it doesn't hurt. They hurt at first, but it’s ... lessened.”
(Growing pains.)
She looks at the floorboards where a rainbow had been, a moment ago, too polished to call dull but ordinary, again. “Can you fix my face.”
It is entirely possible that the maintenance of this calm depends heavily upon his answer.
"Yes," If this asks a touch more precision than he's put into mending soldiers' split faces, "I'm very good at this."
Arrogant and true, and fishing for reaction: For a glance up from that ponderous floor, and the harbor somewhere below. (He is very good at this, and he hasn't a notion how it's undone.)
"Kept me five years out of the Circle," They toss corpses at sea. He would like her to look up. "When your man's back with the references —"
It is finally that last thing that makes her look up at him, difficult to read in part because of the mess Sarrux made of her face and in part the way she is when she’s troubled, when the answer to what’s going through her head isn’t altogether more obvious to her, either. She is thinking: he is good at this. He has had practise at this, or similar enough. He’s a skilled healer; that’s why it had been him she’d asked for in the first place. She is thinking about how few people he has attended are likely to have had portraiture references to show him where their fucking bones go. She is thinking about the years that they’ve known each other, and what that’s looked like.
She is thinking, that is more than he has to do. She is thinking, suddenly, humiliatingly, that she can’t burst into tears because she might make his job harder,
tears are streaking slowly, silently down her face when she finally looks up.
Guilfoyle chooses that moment to return, purposefully heavy footfall announcing him moments before the door opens, two portraits and a sheaf of paper tucked under his arm.
He's reaching for a handkerchief when boots fall, chair scrapes, and palm closes upon page. A relief to turn his own gaze aside. She's aged since these were sketched: The scrape of years between twenty and thirty are terribly shallow until one need study them. The lift of baby fat, the sink of flesh and socket. All the time they've known each other. How has it looked?
"I'll need to reach into your mouth, by the gums," He hooks a thumb under his own lip, pulls a crude reference. Easy now to spy a missing tooth. "My other hand will sit over your browbone."
Frame the pieces. Mend the break. Don't fuck it up –
"Lean back, and brace your head on the chair. This will hurt," Better if she were asleep. But they were both in Qarinus, and he doesn't care to see her so terribly still. "Not so badly as the break. Whenever you're ready."
Guilfoyle props the portraits along a wall in Isaac’s own eyeline— one familiar, Guenievre greeting every visitor to the boat since her daughter had decided one of her own nudes might be too confronting, the other ... confronting. Almost not helpful: it is a view from the back, the most recent image of her rendered in oil still predating Skyhold by a matter of months. The scars from the rage demon had been added, but not the wyvern's teeth or the matter of her eye,
but it is at least the correct side of her face that is rendered in mostly-profile, turned just enough toward the viewer as she gazes back over her shoulder with an eye that the woman depicted no longer possesses. For a time it had hung in the library at the de Coucy manor, but it had come down to the boat with her and hadn’t been difficult for Guilfoyle to put hands upon when it seemed needful. He remains, taking up a habitual sentry position, and Gwenaëlle does as she’s bid.
She isn’t half bad at that, but there’s usually more commentary. Her gaze catches on his hand, his mouth; she swallows, sets her resolve, and:
“I’m ready,” when she’s as much that way as she’s going to get.
"If you take off my finger, I'll tell everyone it was a dragon."
He won't tell anyone. Must presume Strange knows, must hope she will impress the importance of not committing tonight to record. If Isaac keeps his own,
Frame the pieces, mend the break.
Strange could walk her through this. Heat blazes against gum. Tiny vessels burst, pool, clot; calling bodies. Osteocytes, and t-cells, and neutrophils, and so many other unseen spirits. Deep, drawn from pulsing marrow, they hear it. They come.
Strange could tell her that story. Explain the abstractions that guide his hand, the metaphor of his understanding. All magic requires one –
Isaac's threads another shape, a familiar wheel. Wind death about and you'll unspool life. Around, and around, into growing callus; cartilage beginning to string for the days' journey. This would heal, without him. Not quickly enough. Not nicely enough. His thumb braces, shoves. It's quick. It isn't nice.
Pressure intensifies, magic probing past the reach of than stubby nails. He is trying to focus. He is trying not to think of the wide things folded at her back, blood pumping along eager new vein. Her body wants its own shape. By excruciating degree, it finds one.
Scar knits. Bone bridges bone. Teeming cables draw taut, and at once, the spell smears away. Isaac sinks back, and wipes the saliva from his hand. A moment to find his breath, heart too hard and fast in his chest.
(Energy need travel somewhere. Couldn't chance it sending it out through her skin.)
She looks herself. She will look herself, given rest and time. Only Gwenaelle might ever notice a difference, and she'd be hard-pressed to put a finger upon it, save to put her fingers upon it: A bump of tissue, worn away over the slow-coming year. Pull upon life and you'll find death, too; the body eats its own bones, a steady erosion of osteocytes.
Putting her fingers upon it is almost the first thing she does—
which hurts enough to make her sorry for doing it. Of course: magic isn’t a limitless resource. The work he’s being asked to do is already delicate, difficult, complex. The same way no one’s chugging an entire healing potion for a bruise— the break is what matters, what needs fixing. The bruising, the tenderness, time will heal those things the way it would’ve without his intervention. Or: not exactly as it would have. Specifically.
That she can touch it and only hiss, though. That it feels like it’s healing, not...
She feels sort of ill, but that probably has more to do with how little she’s been managing to eat. How much she’s immediately going to be able to keep down is another story entirely. And with her head pounding and her stomach roiling and the disconcerting awareness of what Isaac’s fingers taste like,
“I think we can safely say,” more clearly than before, “that I fucking owe you, Isaac.”
A secret never comes free. But the years stretch, and he's kept worse than this. Hand curls into handkerchief. Gareth, Ilias, John. Charlotte. Leander, Derrica, even that list he handed Holden —
Secrets. He keeps them more often than not, a grisly little collection. People keep killing him insects, as though Isaac should want them skewered, arranged in neat rows. Under the belly of this boat, termites squirm unseen. Squalid and free.
"You don't," It's natural she shouldn't trust that. "Just don't get us both killed."
Gwen brings a hand to bruise. Isaac sets the cloth aside, and stands again, unsteady. It'll pass.
"Water, rest. More water than you think," The wings to support. "I'd advise bland food, but we are in Kirkwall."
"If you need call on me again, ask a delivery for Strange." Less like than an escort to draw attention. He thinks of offering some comfort, considers the hollow taste of it. Bland food. "I'll take myself back."
It’s not that she doesn’t listen to everything else he says — she does. Nods along, more water, bland food. (It will be some time before she keeps anything down anything like reliably, but no one is going to be surprised by that, least of all Gwenaëlle.) It’s just that he gets to the end of it, standing, and she reaches out,
her hand curling around his wrist, clammy with sweat, a firm grip. She says,
“I do,” quietly, like it means something that she is placing in his hand. And: “I’ll be alright. He and I can manage.”
Stephen, not Guilfoyle, who had stirred at her sudden motion, and moves no further.
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no subject
(He is Felix. There are privileges one forfeits for a cock in the mouth — others, that fear need assert. Certain servants arrive unannounced only to poor ends. A second location, a story that is mostly holes; it's a brief conversation. He's Felix.
So no one dies.)
Stairs creak. Rain drums the boards, and several flights up he's still dripping on the floor. Isaac stoops close, turns damp hands to her chin. The bag over his shoulder will see to most usual emergencies, but if that was all, they'd be ashore; and more than one eye in her head. Merci.
"Oh, don't speak," Cannot be the first or last time that Gwenaëlle Baudin been asked to shut up, "You'll make that worse. Chalk and board,"
To Guilfoyle. Doubtless, there's something else to write with in this enormous fucking desk, but he'd sooner she not dump an inkwell on them both. Once supplied,
"Tell me what's happened," She's long enough in the Infirmary to have some idea, fond enough it may distract. "And what you've taken. I'm going to look at you,"
Tipping her less swollen cheek. Strange will have seen to the routine questions, if she were dribbling fluid or blazing fever, there'd be no clawing him from her side. Still, he mislikes the cling of mystery about this, dreamlike under grey sky. As though at any moment now, he'll spy the edges of maze.
no subject
“My own mixture,” she says, “the one Anders told me to stop using because it’d kill a horse.”
She keeps a little on hand in case of emergencies; she’s usually thinking of someone else’s emergency when she mixes it. Stephen, maybe, his hands. Nikos Averesch when he was still around. Jude. But it won’t be the first time she’s used it herself.
“I was— thrown. Hit a stone edge with my face. Something feels broken, not— severely, but broken. Most of everything else is superficial.” Most of. “I had to take my eye out because it got shoved and it hurt, but my face is too tender to wear the patch, so,”
sorry about her eye socket.
“It doesn't feel as bad. And there wasn’t blood.”
no subject
But picking crushed glass from socket would ask a touch more than heavy draughts. A blessing they needn't fret for her vision, one which he declines to voice: You might have lost the eye now, so you're quite ahead of schedule,
Very clever indeed. It's broken, and it might be worse, doesn't shove far from place. Left to its own devices, this would heal. Unpleasantly, and asymmetrically, but she'd move and speak without much pain. More than one mask disguises a war wound, else a servant's troubles — there are stones everywhere. Tender faces, too.
"We'll reduce the swelling, and stabilize the bone," Thinking aloud, a steady drone to grip for. If it should keep her getting a word in, all the better. "I'll need to go slowly."
So this doesn't ossify into gnarl. Urging the body to its own shape is a short step from overgrowth, and he's no notion how they'd grind the thing back down. An eye over his shoulder. Felix, fetch:
"Any portraits," He isn't a sculptor, Leander would have been better for this. He'd not allow Leander anywhere near. "So many angles as you have."
no subject
“There is one of her portraits remaining here,” he says, “and one of her mother. I believe I may also be able to put hands upon the sketches provided to the publisher of the Inquisition papers. If you will excuse me.”
They will; he excuses himself before someone can agree or disagree that it's worth getting down Guenievre’s portrait, too, and in the absence that he leaves she says, “I haven't shown him the other thing yet.” A testament to whatever string ties him here so strongly that she hadn’t needed to, sending him haring off bring Isaac back here on the strength of her huge, imploring eyes.
“I don’t think there's anything you could do, I just want to be sure that it’s stopped— in Sarrux— some old fucking elvhenan bullshit was twisting people into...changing them. I need to take my robe off, it's not to show you my tits.”
Which are on their way with that portrait, anyway.
no subject
Clammy skin releases hers.
"Changing them," He prompts, still thinking of Leander; thinking of antlers. "Into what?"
He turns to wedge a chair into door. It won't hold for any length of time, but even toting frames, Felix is altogether too quiet for this discussion. She hasn't shown him this other thing, and there are vanishingly few reasons to show Isaac instead. He expects runes, the aftermath of some ugly, carved ritual. Perhaps a gleam of Anchor, or lyrium; the curl of Fade-touched flame. She disrobes, he waits.
(For the best he hasn't yet shoved a hand in her mouth.)
no subject
The rest of her doesn't move.
“The rifters with us were changed worse, different, but — temporarily.” Mostly if not entirely gone by the time they had returned to Kirkwall. Not so, these. “Theirs started to come away on the road back. After we cleaned my back up,” the slow way she’s talking around not jostling the bones in her face makes it stilted, strange, as if this wasn’t already, “it’s like they just. Healed in place. Everyone but us this happened to is dead.”
It’s vanishingly rare for Gwenaëlle to look at him so— straightforwardly. A calm that she’s holding with her nails. The absence of edge, no roll of her remaining eye,
it doesn’t make this less unsettling.
no subject
But she doesn't rise. But magic springs between her shoulders, swollen with stretched light, and Gwenaëlle sits a dead thing before it. Slit open a dragonfly and you'll spy three tiny hearts. Her own, perilously human, must pound for the strain of dispassion. That it can't still the wings —
Isaac steps aside, to better regard the place where chitin slips into skin. New lines of muscle bunch, transposed strange, too-small. Us, comes the distant register. Everyone but us,
Later, he'll have names.
"I didn't see them yesterday," I just want to be sure that it’s stopped. "But if you allow me to touch your back, I might confirm."
His own words hang dull. Hand hovers. Granitefell does, and if she turns him down he might simply walk away. This is the sort of thing that people get killed for. Assessment swallows dread, traces the wide branch of membrane, rendered vascular by human scale. Removal would be complex, blood loss a certainty.
But the body ever winds to shape. If this truly healed in place, it will do so again.
no subject
she is thinking of Granitefell, too. At first, she’d thought, I’m dying, as if time might have unbroken itself and the death she’d escaped had come grasping after her again. Every time she feels a hand on her back and not pain is proof otherwise, except that now she isn’t sure she hasn’t just traded one for another, worse and slower. She looks up at him, steeled to offer vulnerability where she feels certain it doesn’t belong and isn’t wise,
“Please,” she says, quietly.
(She can feel the way they flutter. She can feel the way that it’s her, doing it. She has bathed and changed and her armour taken to be cleaned and she can still smell— the salt. The death.)
i kept typing mascles and being like why is it red underlining this
He doesn't need to. Strength swivels from wing to joint, flexes along the massed lines of tendon, anchored more solidly than even Viktor's strange apparatus. That spell had wanted to draw his brace inward, bury metal beneath flesh. This, altogether different. Already woven whole.
"It's done," Or Isaac expects that he would have made it much worse. She doesn't need that particular detail. "I don't know how we undo it, but it's done."
Near as he can tell. Isaac knows the difference between abomination and abnormality, and this falls altogether outside. It reminds of Minrathous, of Seere, mutations beyond mortal scale.
Warmth ebbs. His palm lifts. He thinks to linger and thinks better of it; instead pulls the robe up, arranged careful about her neck, around the wide lift of wings. It's a cold morning. This is the sort of thing that people get killed for, and,
And no one dies. Not yet.
no subject
From who? Done. She looks down at her hands.
“I can bind them under clothing,” she says, “it doesn't hurt. They hurt at first, but it’s ... lessened.”
(Growing pains.)
She looks at the floorboards where a rainbow had been, a moment ago, too polished to call dull but ordinary, again. “Can you fix my face.”
It is entirely possible that the maintenance of this calm depends heavily upon his answer.
no subject
Arrogant and true, and fishing for reaction: For a glance up from that ponderous floor, and the harbor somewhere below. (He is very good at this, and he hasn't a notion how it's undone.)
"Kept me five years out of the Circle," They toss corpses at sea. He would like her to look up. "When your man's back with the references —"
Which must be any minute now.
no subject
She is thinking, that is more than he has to do. She is thinking, suddenly, humiliatingly, that she can’t burst into tears because she might make his job harder,
tears are streaking slowly, silently down her face when she finally looks up.
Guilfoyle chooses that moment to return, purposefully heavy footfall announcing him moments before the door opens, two portraits and a sheaf of paper tucked under his arm.
no subject
He's reaching for a handkerchief when boots fall, chair scrapes, and palm closes upon page. A relief to turn his own gaze aside. She's aged since these were sketched: The scrape of years between twenty and thirty are terribly shallow until one need study them. The lift of baby fat, the sink of flesh and socket. All the time they've known each other. How has it looked?
"I'll need to reach into your mouth, by the gums," He hooks a thumb under his own lip, pulls a crude reference. Easy now to spy a missing tooth. "My other hand will sit over your browbone."
Frame the pieces. Mend the break. Don't fuck it up –
"Lean back, and brace your head on the chair. This will hurt," Better if she were asleep. But they were both in Qarinus, and he doesn't care to see her so terribly still. "Not so badly as the break. Whenever you're ready."
no subject
but it is at least the correct side of her face that is rendered in mostly-profile, turned just enough toward the viewer as she gazes back over her shoulder with an eye that the woman depicted no longer possesses. For a time it had hung in the library at the de Coucy manor, but it had come down to the boat with her and hadn’t been difficult for Guilfoyle to put hands upon when it seemed needful. He remains, taking up a habitual sentry position, and Gwenaëlle does as she’s bid.
She isn’t half bad at that, but there’s usually more commentary. Her gaze catches on his hand, his mouth; she swallows, sets her resolve, and:
“I’m ready,” when she’s as much that way as she’s going to get.
no subject
He won't tell anyone. Must presume Strange knows, must hope she will impress the importance of not committing tonight to record. If Isaac keeps his own,
Frame the pieces, mend the break.
Strange could walk her through this. Heat blazes against gum. Tiny vessels burst, pool, clot; calling bodies. Osteocytes, and t-cells, and neutrophils, and so many other unseen spirits. Deep, drawn from pulsing marrow, they hear it. They come.
Strange could tell her that story. Explain the abstractions that guide his hand, the metaphor of his understanding. All magic requires one –
Isaac's threads another shape, a familiar wheel. Wind death about and you'll unspool life. Around, and around, into growing callus; cartilage beginning to string for the days' journey. This would heal, without him. Not quickly enough. Not nicely enough. His thumb braces, shoves. It's quick. It isn't nice.
Pressure intensifies, magic probing past the reach of than stubby nails. He is trying to focus. He is trying not to think of the wide things folded at her back, blood pumping along eager new vein. Her body wants its own shape. By excruciating degree, it finds one.
Scar knits. Bone bridges bone. Teeming cables draw taut, and at once, the spell smears away. Isaac sinks back, and wipes the saliva from his hand. A moment to find his breath, heart too hard and fast in his chest.
(Energy need travel somewhere. Couldn't chance it sending it out through her skin.)
She looks herself. She will look herself, given rest and time. Only Gwenaelle might ever notice a difference, and she'd be hard-pressed to put a finger upon it, save to put her fingers upon it: A bump of tissue, worn away over the slow-coming year. Pull upon life and you'll find death, too; the body eats its own bones, a steady erosion of osteocytes.
Of the wheel, turning.
no subject
which hurts enough to make her sorry for doing it. Of course: magic isn’t a limitless resource. The work he’s being asked to do is already delicate, difficult, complex. The same way no one’s chugging an entire healing potion for a bruise— the break is what matters, what needs fixing. The bruising, the tenderness, time will heal those things the way it would’ve without his intervention. Or: not exactly as it would have. Specifically.
That she can touch it and only hiss, though. That it feels like it’s healing, not...
She feels sort of ill, but that probably has more to do with how little she’s been managing to eat. How much she’s immediately going to be able to keep down is another story entirely. And with her head pounding and her stomach roiling and the disconcerting awareness of what Isaac’s fingers taste like,
“I think we can safely say,” more clearly than before, “that I fucking owe you, Isaac.”
no subject
A secret never comes free. But the years stretch, and he's kept worse than this. Hand curls into handkerchief. Gareth, Ilias, John. Charlotte. Leander, Derrica, even that list he handed Holden —
Secrets. He keeps them more often than not, a grisly little collection. People keep killing him insects, as though Isaac should want them skewered, arranged in neat rows. Under the belly of this boat, termites squirm unseen. Squalid and free.
"You don't," It's natural she shouldn't trust that. "Just don't get us both killed."
Gwen brings a hand to bruise. Isaac sets the cloth aside, and stands again, unsteady. It'll pass.
"Water, rest. More water than you think," The wings to support. "I'd advise bland food, but we are in Kirkwall."
"If you need call on me again, ask a delivery for Strange." Less like than an escort to draw attention. He thinks of offering some comfort, considers the hollow taste of it. Bland food. "I'll take myself back."
no subject
her hand curling around his wrist, clammy with sweat, a firm grip. She says,
“I do,” quietly, like it means something that she is placing in his hand. And: “I’ll be alright. He and I can manage.”
Stephen, not Guilfoyle, who had stirred at her sudden motion, and moves no further.
“Thank you.”
She remembers to let go.