Occasionally, the ways in which her background bleeds through have less to do with her ongoing battle against mononyms or unwillingness to be seen in trousers and, instead, her inability not to be delighted by a horse race or a particularly well trained dog — or a hunting lodge, familiar surrounds as it is. It’s dreadful, and her appreciation of it is absolutely sincere.
A moment, and a breath, and she doesn’t so much think about reaching for her tobacco pouch as it happens naturally as consequence of stepping into the smoke of his. (This is Thedas; that doesn’t rule out his initial suspicions.)
Petrana sits on a low sofa, fastidiously arranging her plain skirts, and she says,
“Mademoiselle Tavane’s accident brought into sharp relief how long I have delayed acting upon Madame de Fonce’s urgent advice to me.”
They've sharper tools. The chair creaks as he turns — at last — to survey her. He'd been pleased to learn of Wysteria's decision, to glean answers of it. But for all her skill, he's never held Poppell (de Fonce) in personal regard, and more to the point he'd been,
Away. Unimpeachably absent, should anyone take an interest in why Riftwatch is lopping off so many pretty, girlish limbs. That must be why they're having this conversation, and Isaac's as grateful for the consideration as he rankles of it. How continually exhausting to be known.
"It's been a year," At least. He can't imagine she held her tongue to the point of departure. "What's changed?
“Little,” she says, honestly. “In practical terms. Madame de Fonce’s arguments were persuasive then and they are persuasive now; I have not now become more persuaded of them than I was. I have simply—”
She folds her hands in her lap, quiet and still, and breathes smoke out through her nose.
“Allow me to be plain, within the limitations of my ability,” she says, a wintry smile quirking the edge of her bow-shaped mouth. “I am vain, Isaac, and I do not relish the prospect of what I have determined to do. For my vanity, and my comfort, I have been reluctant to act upon the knowledge I have long had. But I shall be the third and not the second, and Monsieur Viktor’s work is proven, and I do,”
she gazes past him,
“find that I fear death, the further I walk away from the death experienced by that woman in whose image I was made. It was a great comfort to me to know that in her death, I could never be returned to her life. It is no longer sufficient comfort. And— whilst I am being clear, it is not lost on me that I will rely on you a great deal, as well as l’Docteur and Monsieur Viktor, in pursuing this course. After all that we have seen of one another, I did not think it right to expect Docteur Strange to broach this on my behalf, nor to sit in our discussion of it.”
If she relished it, he'd be a deal more concerned —
Obvious, the way that quip finds his mouth, and discards itself. He is concerned. Once, it would have been easy to refuse: Isaac has ever been clear that he does not fuck with surgery. Let that blade find some bolder neck.
But it isn't really that simple. Sidony and her studies, John and his stump; and Isaac is vain, and he is so often afraid, and she's seen it all. You do stupid things for love, he'd said. Maybe he'd meant, for understanding.
At last,
"There are names I could provide you," As she well knows. "They are discreet."
This is not refusal. It isn't yet agreement. Whatever assurances she could offer matter little, when the whole affair invites scrutiny. If the Chantry comes knocking, Isaac knows whose door they'll find.
“I’m sure. In the event of misadventure, of course, if I should be made unable to avail myself of discretion—”
Mlle Tavane’s recovery had gone swimmingly until, she heard, it had not.
“—I think that you and I know the likelihood of Docteur Strange preferring those names to your own, in his urgency.” In a word: low. (Somewhere, Marcus feels a bloom of exasperated affection; this is what she considers frank and direct.) “And I, in my bias, can only think it better that you should be familiar from the beginning. Against the possibility of such an outcome.”
It’s neither assurance nor threat; he knows her to be more than capable to couch this in purposeful manipulation, even a talent of hers, but here and now she is clear-eyed and matter of fact. The facts, as she understands them, are not fair.
It is rarely otherwise.
Edited (repetition, also just fully the wrong word) 2025-05-07 09:18 (UTC)
He should pack his bag, and see himself gone — but there were a dozen places that Isaac might have run upon leaving Riftwatch; and cleverer places to return. It wasn't logic that chose Val Revin, and it wasn't reason that drew him back to Kirkwall. Despite all efforts, his head's seldom the one in charge.
(He still recalls the hunted look of her in dreams. If she wielded that debt now he'd balk, and she hasn't; and maybe that's what tips it.)
"There are no guarantees," She knows. He isn't always sure that Strange does: Rifters often consider magic a cure-all. Isaac is very good at this, and he has limits. "I've lost men to infection before."
Blood poisoning is a different matter between battlefield triage, and a stocked infirmary. Even so,
"I don't intend to frighten, but if this is what you need to — sever yourself, from that woman," Impossible as cutting out one's shadow. "See to it that her affairs are in order. I rather think she's earned it."
She knows. Maybe it matters to make it plain that she does—
“I birthed two children,” she says, “so I know a little of blood and luck. The most powerful mage that I ever knew in that first lifetime could not will the first to live when illness weakened her past her ability to recover it. And I have known all of these years that I might go to their grave at a moment’s notice, so — while I do not care to linger on such things,”
Marcus’s confident assumption that she had long since considered what Wysteria was proposing, and Petrana’s naked admission that in her abhorrence of the topic at all she had not,
“it would have been remiss of me in the extreme to have—”
She gathers herself. Finally: “I have always had preparations for the event of my death. From the first that a rifter I knew had gone.”
That it took — Charlotte, really, before he'd deign to half-plan —
"I don't have anything." He admits. Remiss, maybe, but everyone scrapes their different way past death. Smoke puffs from nose. He doesn't want to speak of sick children, doesn't trust himself not to ask whether she feels that distance; whether she regrets it. "It's my hope we've no reason to enact your will,"
Despite herself, it pulls a smile from the corner of her mouth, a breath of amusement that forestalls what of a certainty would have been a gentle haranguing that he should really consider formalising his own wishes, particularly with regard to the thorough records she has known him to keep—
She thinks of Holden, then, and feels that pang of loss anew. That Riftwatch cannot rely on him any longer; that she cannot know his thoughts on her course. It feels like a conversation they might have had late by crystal, and the gap in her knowledge of him that leaves what he might have had to say obscured feels particularly unfair.
“I must make a note that he ought to wear a deep blue, instead.” She splays the fingers of a hand she’s made her mind up to lose, studying them as if to commit to memory, “He and Marcus—” so this is an informal conversation indeed, “—assured me, first this came to discussion, that they would support whichever path I chose. I suppose that it came to discussion at all was the beginning of a decision.”
Would he do it, were they set against it? Maybe. Marcus is a backstop he'll invoke when required, but Isaac's aware of where that protection ends; long before either lover's.
"I can't think them happy of it," That it would be wrong of to protest — that means altogether little in these matters. "But I suppose we've all trialed loss enough to choose a lesser pain."
“The beginning of it, at least,” a bleak bit of humour on the matter of planning one’s recovery, and all the myriad things that might complicate it between now and then. Or then and further, still. “I’ve made arrangements to begin the work of my prosthesis with Mssr Viktor, and to make preparations for the surgery itself in the infirmary. That, of course — I wished to speak with you before anything could be finalised.”
Items on a list, methodically done; each piece in play and in place. It’s soothing, and not less so for knowing that control to be illusory.
(She did not become deaf, so it is a choice not to remark upon how her nearest feel about her firm decision.)
“Assuming a best case scenario and making allowances for one that is not, I will wish to provide that timeline to the Ambassador and our scouting mistress to manage expectations for my work. I presume that our head healer will appraise the Provost.”
"Oh, probably. They're always trying to send me back and forth." Has he asked the Head Healer? Has he asked the Provost? As though he'd not contact whoever he intended — "They've a device that numbs the limb. I've concerns of it,"
Hurt is a signal. Easier to miss a painless infection, or that more ephemeral change in feeling which presages trouble.
"But you'll want it for the early days, and that asks Tavane be weaned, if she isn't already."
How good, she thinks, to have never been in an urgent rush to lose a limb. The thought feels absurd enough to nearly laugh,
but she suspects a hysteria at the edge of that that she ought not indulge. Says, instead, “A greater lead time can only be of benefit to Mssr Viktor’s work. Some, he has indicated, can only be done once the amputation itself is dealt with, but not all.”
For a moment, she lingers in a thought, pensive. Finally,
“Madame de Fonce had offered me her own, the first that she pressed me with these matters. I have never more strongly regretted foolish words spoken in haste than to have spoken to her of my own vanity on the matter. I’ve often fancied myself above it, you know; I have never been a devotee of fashion. I imagined,”
while they are being uncomfortably frank with one another,
“that you might understand how it is to be challenged in one’s self-perception.”
No, he doesn't imagine that went well. His head tips back, eye languid over shoulder, and from that angle it's easy to imagine: A time when wry looks might have cast some rakish charm.
But everyone grows up.
"I trust you've had it before." Birth changes the body, and while he knows little of the husband, he knows enough to guess at control. "Some will leap to it, keen to remind you how beautiful you are,"
(She is that.)
"Despite it all." A mark of power, however thoughtlessly exchanged, and their work doesn't draw the thoughtless. They'll use it. Call it vanity, or safety — "I don't think it a failing to wish to recognize oneself."
Only an impossibility. There's scant alike between age and the prospect before her, Isaac doesn't scar or stand a wound. Can't grow his teeth back either, or will hair and wrinkle to bend; returns time and again to the shape of a different man.
So she has fancied herself above it. She is not the woman who died so long ago. She's this one, and this one may cop to an affection of her limbs.
I expect her, still, in the mirror, she doesn’t say. In the light of day, those memories had and had not felt like her own— the lines blur, where she draws the separation. Birthed two children. A body that remembers only one. A body that is her own, to do with as she will, to live as she will,
to alter as she will. Well, and small wonder that she should have for so long found the idea of binding one’s sense of self to being a rifter distasteful. What, one might as well ask, exactly sense of self is that?
“I know myself in the thought that there will be halls in which it plays well for me,” she says, a touch more wry. “The ego, you understand,” he understands, “of the lengths to which I will go to have what is had here.”
All the ways in which she is underestimated and it terrifies her to risk making any of them real, but of course, it isn’t even difficult to envision the ways she can make this work for her if she wishes to. Only if she thinks on it, as she has done, beyond that first moment, where entirely unlike herself she had spoken wholly without thinking at all.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Occasionally, the ways in which her background bleeds through have less to do with her ongoing battle against mononyms or unwillingness to be seen in trousers and, instead, her inability not to be delighted by a horse race or a particularly well trained dog — or a hunting lodge, familiar surrounds as it is. It’s dreadful, and her appreciation of it is absolutely sincere.
A moment, and a breath, and she doesn’t so much think about reaching for her tobacco pouch as it happens naturally as consequence of stepping into the smoke of his. (This is Thedas; that doesn’t rule out his initial suspicions.)
Petrana sits on a low sofa, fastidiously arranging her plain skirts, and she says,
“Mademoiselle Tavane’s accident brought into sharp relief how long I have delayed acting upon Madame de Fonce’s urgent advice to me.”
no subject
They've sharper tools. The chair creaks as he turns — at last — to survey her. He'd been pleased to learn of Wysteria's decision, to glean answers of it. But for all her skill, he's never held Poppell (de Fonce) in personal regard, and more to the point he'd been,
Away. Unimpeachably absent, should anyone take an interest in why Riftwatch is lopping off so many pretty, girlish limbs. That must be why they're having this conversation, and Isaac's as grateful for the consideration as he rankles of it. How continually exhausting to be known.
"It's been a year," At least. He can't imagine she held her tongue to the point of departure. "What's changed?
no subject
She folds her hands in her lap, quiet and still, and breathes smoke out through her nose.
“Allow me to be plain, within the limitations of my ability,” she says, a wintry smile quirking the edge of her bow-shaped mouth. “I am vain, Isaac, and I do not relish the prospect of what I have determined to do. For my vanity, and my comfort, I have been reluctant to act upon the knowledge I have long had. But I shall be the third and not the second, and Monsieur Viktor’s work is proven, and I do,”
she gazes past him,
“find that I fear death, the further I walk away from the death experienced by that woman in whose image I was made. It was a great comfort to me to know that in her death, I could never be returned to her life. It is no longer sufficient comfort. And— whilst I am being clear, it is not lost on me that I will rely on you a great deal, as well as l’Docteur and Monsieur Viktor, in pursuing this course. After all that we have seen of one another, I did not think it right to expect Docteur Strange to broach this on my behalf, nor to sit in our discussion of it.”
no subject
Obvious, the way that quip finds his mouth, and discards itself. He is concerned. Once, it would have been easy to refuse: Isaac has ever been clear that he does not fuck with surgery. Let that blade find some bolder neck.
But it isn't really that simple. Sidony and her studies, John and his stump; and Isaac is vain, and he is so often afraid, and she's seen it all. You do stupid things for love, he'd said. Maybe he'd meant, for understanding.
At last,
"There are names I could provide you," As she well knows. "They are discreet."
This is not refusal. It isn't yet agreement. Whatever assurances she could offer matter little, when the whole affair invites scrutiny. If the Chantry comes knocking, Isaac knows whose door they'll find.
no subject
Mlle Tavane’s recovery had gone swimmingly until, she heard, it had not.
“—I think that you and I know the likelihood of Docteur Strange preferring those names to your own, in his urgency.” In a word: low. (Somewhere, Marcus feels a bloom of exasperated affection; this is what she considers frank and direct.) “And I, in my bias, can only think it better that you should be familiar from the beginning. Against the possibility of such an outcome.”
It’s neither assurance nor threat; he knows her to be more than capable to couch this in purposeful manipulation, even a talent of hers, but here and now she is clear-eyed and matter of fact. The facts, as she understands them, are not fair.
It is rarely otherwise.
no subject
He should pack his bag, and see himself gone — but there were a dozen places that Isaac might have run upon leaving Riftwatch; and cleverer places to return. It wasn't logic that chose Val Revin, and it wasn't reason that drew him back to Kirkwall. Despite all efforts, his head's seldom the one in charge.
(He still recalls the hunted look of her in dreams. If she wielded that debt now he'd balk, and she hasn't; and maybe that's what tips it.)
"There are no guarantees," She knows. He isn't always sure that Strange does: Rifters often consider magic a cure-all. Isaac is very good at this, and he has limits. "I've lost men to infection before."
Blood poisoning is a different matter between battlefield triage, and a stocked infirmary. Even so,
"I don't intend to frighten, but if this is what you need to — sever yourself, from that woman," Impossible as cutting out one's shadow. "See to it that her affairs are in order. I rather think she's earned it."
no subject
“I birthed two children,” she says, “so I know a little of blood and luck. The most powerful mage that I ever knew in that first lifetime could not will the first to live when illness weakened her past her ability to recover it. And I have known all of these years that I might go to their grave at a moment’s notice, so — while I do not care to linger on such things,”
Marcus’s confident assumption that she had long since considered what Wysteria was proposing, and Petrana’s naked admission that in her abhorrence of the topic at all she had not,
“it would have been remiss of me in the extreme to have—”
She gathers herself. Finally: “I have always had preparations for the event of my death. From the first that a rifter I knew had gone.”
no subject
"I don't have anything." He admits. Remiss, maybe, but everyone scrapes their different way past death. Smoke puffs from nose. He doesn't want to speak of sick children, doesn't trust himself not to ask whether she feels that distance; whether she regrets it. "It's my hope we've no reason to enact your will,"
Sincerity. That can't stand itself:
"Black washes Julius out."
no subject
She thinks of Holden, then, and feels that pang of loss anew. That Riftwatch cannot rely on him any longer; that she cannot know his thoughts on her course. It feels like a conversation they might have had late by crystal, and the gap in her knowledge of him that leaves what he might have had to say obscured feels particularly unfair.
“I must make a note that he ought to wear a deep blue, instead.” She splays the fingers of a hand she’s made her mind up to lose, studying them as if to commit to memory, “He and Marcus—” so this is an informal conversation indeed, “—assured me, first this came to discussion, that they would support whichever path I chose. I suppose that it came to discussion at all was the beginning of a decision.”
no subject
"I can't think them happy of it," That it would be wrong of to protest — that means altogether little in these matters. "But I suppose we've all trialed loss enough to choose a lesser pain."
"Had you a timeline in mind?"
no subject
Items on a list, methodically done; each piece in play and in place. It’s soothing, and not less so for knowing that control to be illusory.
(She did not become deaf, so it is a choice not to remark upon how her nearest feel about her firm decision.)
“Assuming a best case scenario and making allowances for one that is not, I will wish to provide that timeline to the Ambassador and our scouting mistress to manage expectations for my work. I presume that our head healer will appraise the Provost.”
no subject
Hurt is a signal. Easier to miss a painless infection, or that more ephemeral change in feeling which presages trouble.
"But you'll want it for the early days, and that asks Tavane be weaned, if she isn't already."
John's stump still ached, years on.
no subject
but she suspects a hysteria at the edge of that that she ought not indulge. Says, instead, “A greater lead time can only be of benefit to Mssr Viktor’s work. Some, he has indicated, can only be done once the amputation itself is dealt with, but not all.”
For a moment, she lingers in a thought, pensive. Finally,
“Madame de Fonce had offered me her own, the first that she pressed me with these matters. I have never more strongly regretted foolish words spoken in haste than to have spoken to her of my own vanity on the matter. I’ve often fancied myself above it, you know; I have never been a devotee of fashion. I imagined,”
while they are being uncomfortably frank with one another,
“that you might understand how it is to be challenged in one’s self-perception.”
no subject
But everyone grows up.
"I trust you've had it before." Birth changes the body, and while he knows little of the husband, he knows enough to guess at control. "Some will leap to it, keen to remind you how beautiful you are,"
(She is that.)
"Despite it all." A mark of power, however thoughtlessly exchanged, and their work doesn't draw the thoughtless. They'll use it. Call it vanity, or safety — "I don't think it a failing to wish to recognize oneself."
Only an impossibility. There's scant alike between age and the prospect before her, Isaac doesn't scar or stand a wound. Can't grow his teeth back either, or will hair and wrinkle to bend; returns time and again to the shape of a different man.
So she has fancied herself above it. She is not the woman who died so long ago. She's this one, and this one may cop to an affection of her limbs.
no subject
to alter as she will. Well, and small wonder that she should have for so long found the idea of binding one’s sense of self to being a rifter distasteful. What, one might as well ask, exactly sense of self is that?
“I know myself in the thought that there will be halls in which it plays well for me,” she says, a touch more wry. “The ego, you understand,” he understands, “of the lengths to which I will go to have what is had here.”
All the ways in which she is underestimated and it terrifies her to risk making any of them real, but of course, it isn’t even difficult to envision the ways she can make this work for her if she wishes to. Only if she thinks on it, as she has done, beyond that first moment, where entirely unlike herself she had spoken wholly without thinking at all.