The pieces Stephen Strange gives to her of what his healing was, the role he played in it, are of such interest to her. Normally, she would like to have this new piece that illustrates a kind of collaboration, of healers moving in tandem, passing all parts of their duty between them.
But that information, like the bloodless description of loss that follows, cannot fit into that kind of discussion or examination today.
Sitting alongside him, Derrica pulls one ankle up beneath her thigh. Turns over the event he is describing in his mind. Feels how it chimes against her recollection of Dairsmuid, what was done there.
In the slip of space between them on those front steps, Derrica reaches for his hand.
"Were you ash?" she asks, because she knows that sometimes, Rifters come to them this way too. Dead, passed from their own worlds already.
There’s a faint, almost imperceptible jolt at that encroaching touch, like a startled cat twitching in surprise at the physical contact. His gaze snaps down to her hand.
One gets the impression that this man is unaccustomed to friendly contact. Some instinct for it has atrophied over the years, as the sorcerer retreated into himself and magic, bricking up all the walls behind him. But Derrica is a crack in the armour, is water patiently eroding a barrier, slipping through all the nooks and crannies, and so his hackles settle and he eases. Catches her palm, gives it a reassuring squeeze of his own. Taking what comfort she can give, and offering it in return.
“Yes,” Stephen says. Then, words which sound on the surface like his usual gallows’ humour but it’s lacking any of the spark, it just sounds tired: “But I got better. They brought me back five years later.”
(Somewhere, in the back of his head, that thought and that possibility is going to worm deeper and start to gestate, slowly, as the days track onward and he starts to emerge from this numb fog. But not yet.)
“It must have been difficult. Being the only healer.”
They ease into this link, this small contact between them. Derrica runs her thumb along the edge of his palm.
If the work has strained his hands, he hasn't said. And Derrica is careful in her own asking, mindful of plucking at another painful thing when they are both weathering so much.
She chooses, in this moment, to take the strangeness of those words as they are. His latter statement is a kind of appeal, and if she pursued her own flicker of confused curiosity, maybe that appeal would slip away.
But she understands this: he had been gone, turned to ash and dust, and someone, whoever they might be, brought him back.
"I wasn't always the only one. There were more of us once. But even then, I was sometimes the only one who had seen..."
A trailing pause. Finding words. Rifters did not always know the history of Thedas, and Derrica doesn't wish to invoke the full weight of it now.
"Casualties," is what she settles on. "Many of us are prepared to see a natural death, but it isn't the same when it's violent, like this."
A life cut brutally short, is what she means.
just slaps a permanent medical cw over this whole thread
He had thought himself inured to it. Because he was, in fact, inured to a certain kind of planned violence: gloves reaching into viscera, all wet gleaming tissue, slippery nerves and cerebral cortexes and scalpels peeling through layers of flesh. He’d rotated through different specialties, learned at others’ doctors’ sides, seen horrors. And a childhood on the farm: animals slaughtered, animals giving birth, an axe to the head of a dying pig to put it out of its misery. Practical. Solid. A strong stomach. Stephen had always prided himself on his strong stomach, his steady nerves, his chilly and unaffected demeanour.
“I’m not,” he starts, then stops. Head still tipped back against the stone wall, looking out into the sky over the Gallows rather than at Derrica’s face; but he can feel her presence in that warmth by his side, the hand in his. “It was impersonal. Before. I know that’s the simplest goddamned thing to say, but it wasn’t even living on a ship and treating my crewmates. My patients were all strangers, before.”
Christine had always tried to recruit him for her trauma ward, insisting that on-the-ground emergency work was how you did the most good, and he had always demurred, and —
Impersonal is a foreign approach for Derrica, but she knows it is not the same for every healer. And even if it is not impersonal for her, she knows some part of what he is describing is present in her too. There is a necessary level of detachment. A withholding of herself, a stepping back to think clinically rather than let emotion drive every part of her work, choose how she spends her spells.
She folds her hands both over his. Turns in just so, facing him even as Stephen Strange directs his eyes upwards.
"It's harder," she tells him, acknowledging and admitting all at once. "When it's people you've known and cared for needing your skills."
In which skills becomes a broad stretch of a word, encompassing so much of what they are and have been called upon to do. Encompassing the bodies laid out in the room behind them, still wearing all the wreckage of their death.
"But I think it's a comfort for them, knowing us. I think it would be comforting for them if they knew we were the ones tending to them."
Not strangers. Or worse, not a mass pyre on a field far from familiar faces.
It had been a topic of discussion. The efficient thing would have been a mass pyre at Granitefell, moving on before their enemies had a change to return and plough into the reinforcements, but sentimentality had stopped their hand. Had laden the wagons with cold runes for their long journey home. In the end, it was probably better for morale — and believing in what had happened.
Still, that usual science versus spirituality wars within him at Derrica’s point, because there is still that little voice saying: They’re dead, it doesn’t matter to them any longer,
but he’d once spoken with a dying woman in a moment trapped between heartbeats. He walked the astral plane. He had heard the spirits of the dead, screaming. The universe was so much bigger than he once thought it was. So, who the fuck knows. Maybe, somewhere, it matters to them.
“I’d like to think that,” Stephen says. “We try. Even if I knew them but didn’t know them too well.”
Which is a sticking point. Here she is, comforting him, her hands folding over his when he would stubbornly like to insist that he doesn’t need it (he does), so Stephen tilts his head to finally meet Derrica’s eye again and look at her.
“Were you particularly close? With any of them.”
He’s trying to parse where her own wounds are, what fractures she’s been papering over throughout the day.
Around Stephen's hands, Derrica's own fingers go briefly still. Tighten and loosen, almost in time with the breath she draws in and releases in the wake of the question.
It is comfortable to hold her own grief at arm's length. There is so much to do. People are in such pain. She can let it sit at her elbow, grow accustomed to how it makes space there.
It is hard when Stephen's question invites it suddenly, overwhelmingly, close.
"I knew most all of them," cannot be a surprise to him. She has spent years in this tower. Of course she has grown familiar with the people here. "Some of them I counted as friends."
But close is a little different, as much as she had enjoyed Abby's company, admired Jude, appreciated Clarisse, Gwenaëlle and Cosima. If they are to account who was close, they might think on who she had sat beside in the dirt on that scorched field for long moments before seeing him lifted into the wagon.
"Enchanter Rowntree was always especially kind to me," she says, softer, steady even as she feels grief twist in her chest. "We were—good friends."
Had she ever spoken that word aloud to Marcus? She can't recall.
"I'll miss him," is an understatement, woefully inadequate.
The safer, more impersonal thing would have been to not ask at all. Don’t disrupt this fragile equilibrium, don’t kick up the soil, and then you’ll never have to pretend that your colleague was personally affected by this loss. You can just try to do your job. Continue to keep it aloof, distant.
But it turns out that Stephen wants to know — because it feels a disservice, suddenly, to have gone through hell with Derrica and to know he could trust her with his life and that she is kind and patient, and yet know so little of her actual existence and the shape of it.
So. Enchanter Rowntree.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “For your loss. For everyone’s. I know one of his partners a bit— Julius.”
Ah fuck, is Julius okay? Probably not. Even if he has Petrana with him, presumably that doesn’t soothe the loss much: that’s just two people grieving.
Morale is going to be such a problem: how do they even limp on from this, with a third of their number cleaved away? He can’t wrap his head around it, and so he’s not trying. That’s a problem for tomorrow and later. Today: there is just the work, and knuckling his way through the work with Derrica by his side.
It is a loss. That is such a foregone conclusion, an easy thing to say aloud. But it is so much more difficult to think of their absences in particulars, consider what specifically has been wrenched away from them.
Derrica chokes on it, silent for a long moment as her grip tightens around his hand. Breathes in unsteadily, swallows hard.
"Julius and Madame de Cedoux," she murmurs. "They had a scare last year, where Julius was injured and Marcus was taken from them. I think...I think it must be terrible for them to try to survive having lost him now."
It is a quiet sort of deflection, thinking of what this grief will be to everyone else. Holding it in check, to keep the full weight of it from overwhelming her while she focuses outward.
“It’s going to be terrible anytime,” he says. “There’s really no good way. Besides old age and in your bed, probably.”
It’s not a consolation to say or even think something like at least they died as heroes. People would presumably want them cowardly and alive rather than brave and dead. Nothing is a consolation besides the fact that they were here, they were known, they were loved, and they are still loved.
Stephen sighs, a tense exhale. Just as quick as he’d cracked open the seal on this conversation, there’s the immediate regret: what does he say now. What do they do with all of this. Despite broaching it, he knows he is so terrible at this part; his bedside manner hadn’t been his strong suit, this man of the stellar case history, a near-perfect record, no accidents. Death crawls along his spine, hammers on his nerves. His whole professional life has been spent trying to keep it at bay. He’s not good at looking at it head-on.
What he settles on, in the end:
“I’m glad you’re here with me. For this part. And in general.”
Having cradled his hand in both of hers, Derrica has to lift one of her own away to dash quickly at the tears gathering in her eyes.
There will be some point, when they have finished their work and life has settled back into something near to routine, when she will break apart. She isn't certain of what that kind of fracture will look like, only that it will come to her and she will have to survive it.
She's done it once before, and she will do it again. If she must.
But here and now, she takes up his hand in both of hers. Holds fast.
"I'm grateful," she murmurs. "I know you had doubts about whether this was the place for you. If you had decided otherwise..."
It would have been Derrica here, alone. Not just in this moment, but all other moments going forward. One healer for the whole of Riftwatch, and what would have happened if she'd fallen short?
“Even if I’d decided otherwise,” Stephen says without missing a beat, picking up her trailing sentence, “I’d have done a 180 and joined you here regardless. The work is the work.”
Recruitment and rebuilding feels like a bitter topic when they’re still sitting here in the ashes, but he finds his thoughts still ping-ponging in that direction, adding: “Nina. The new rifter. She says she’s good at healing. I’ll be seeing how much she might want to pitch in. Not— not this right now, I mean, but regular healer work.”
They won’t be alone forever, is the point.
But when he tries to imagine what the future of this little corner of Riftwatch looks like, he finds his thoughts whiting out into static. He had had so many plans: tidy, orderly, putting it all into a to-do list, and yet it seems so insufferably difficult to envision now. Not because his own personal world has shattered, but because everyone else’s has: the others reeling, shambling, and he can’t see how they’ll recover from this. It feels like something irreparable has broken, some fracture which might not grow back. Or if it does, perhaps it’ll be in the wrong shape: twisted and gnarled and never able to carry the same weight it once did.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
But that information, like the bloodless description of loss that follows, cannot fit into that kind of discussion or examination today.
Sitting alongside him, Derrica pulls one ankle up beneath her thigh. Turns over the event he is describing in his mind. Feels how it chimes against her recollection of Dairsmuid, what was done there.
In the slip of space between them on those front steps, Derrica reaches for his hand.
"Were you ash?" she asks, because she knows that sometimes, Rifters come to them this way too. Dead, passed from their own worlds already.
no subject
One gets the impression that this man is unaccustomed to friendly contact. Some instinct for it has atrophied over the years, as the sorcerer retreated into himself and magic, bricking up all the walls behind him. But Derrica is a crack in the armour, is water patiently eroding a barrier, slipping through all the nooks and crannies, and so his hackles settle and he eases. Catches her palm, gives it a reassuring squeeze of his own. Taking what comfort she can give, and offering it in return.
“Yes,” Stephen says. Then, words which sound on the surface like his usual gallows’ humour but it’s lacking any of the spark, it just sounds tired: “But I got better. They brought me back five years later.”
(Somewhere, in the back of his head, that thought and that possibility is going to worm deeper and start to gestate, slowly, as the days track onward and he starts to emerge from this numb fog. But not yet.)
“It must have been difficult. Being the only healer.”
no subject
If the work has strained his hands, he hasn't said. And Derrica is careful in her own asking, mindful of plucking at another painful thing when they are both weathering so much.
She chooses, in this moment, to take the strangeness of those words as they are. His latter statement is a kind of appeal, and if she pursued her own flicker of confused curiosity, maybe that appeal would slip away.
But she understands this: he had been gone, turned to ash and dust, and someone, whoever they might be, brought him back.
"I wasn't always the only one. There were more of us once. But even then, I was sometimes the only one who had seen..."
A trailing pause. Finding words. Rifters did not always know the history of Thedas, and Derrica doesn't wish to invoke the full weight of it now.
"Casualties," is what she settles on. "Many of us are prepared to see a natural death, but it isn't the same when it's violent, like this."
A life cut brutally short, is what she means.
just slaps a permanent medical cw over this whole thread
He had thought himself inured to it. Because he was, in fact, inured to a certain kind of planned violence: gloves reaching into viscera, all wet gleaming tissue, slippery nerves and cerebral cortexes and scalpels peeling through layers of flesh. He’d rotated through different specialties, learned at others’ doctors’ sides, seen horrors. And a childhood on the farm: animals slaughtered, animals giving birth, an axe to the head of a dying pig to put it out of its misery. Practical. Solid. A strong stomach. Stephen had always prided himself on his strong stomach, his steady nerves, his chilly and unaffected demeanour.
“I’m not,” he starts, then stops. Head still tipped back against the stone wall, looking out into the sky over the Gallows rather than at Derrica’s face; but he can feel her presence in that warmth by his side, the hand in his. “It was impersonal. Before. I know that’s the simplest goddamned thing to say, but it wasn’t even living on a ship and treating my crewmates. My patients were all strangers, before.”
Christine had always tried to recruit him for her trauma ward, insisting that on-the-ground emergency work was how you did the most good, and he had always demurred, and —
Now here he is. Funny, how that works out.
good move
She folds her hands both over his. Turns in just so, facing him even as Stephen Strange directs his eyes upwards.
"It's harder," she tells him, acknowledging and admitting all at once. "When it's people you've known and cared for needing your skills."
In which skills becomes a broad stretch of a word, encompassing so much of what they are and have been called upon to do. Encompassing the bodies laid out in the room behind them, still wearing all the wreckage of their death.
"But I think it's a comfort for them, knowing us. I think it would be comforting for them if they knew we were the ones tending to them."
Not strangers. Or worse, not a mass pyre on a field far from familiar faces.
no subject
Still, that usual science versus spirituality wars within him at Derrica’s point, because there is still that little voice saying: They’re dead, it doesn’t matter to them any longer,
but he’d once spoken with a dying woman in a moment trapped between heartbeats. He walked the astral plane. He had heard the spirits of the dead, screaming. The universe was so much bigger than he once thought it was. So, who the fuck knows. Maybe, somewhere, it matters to them.
“I’d like to think that,” Stephen says. “We try. Even if I knew them but didn’t know them too well.”
Which is a sticking point. Here she is, comforting him, her hands folding over his when he would stubbornly like to insist that he doesn’t need it (he does), so Stephen tilts his head to finally meet Derrica’s eye again and look at her.
“Were you particularly close? With any of them.”
He’s trying to parse where her own wounds are, what fractures she’s been papering over throughout the day.
no subject
It is comfortable to hold her own grief at arm's length. There is so much to do. People are in such pain. She can let it sit at her elbow, grow accustomed to how it makes space there.
It is hard when Stephen's question invites it suddenly, overwhelmingly, close.
"I knew most all of them," cannot be a surprise to him. She has spent years in this tower. Of course she has grown familiar with the people here. "Some of them I counted as friends."
But close is a little different, as much as she had enjoyed Abby's company, admired Jude, appreciated Clarisse, Gwenaëlle and Cosima. If they are to account who was close, they might think on who she had sat beside in the dirt on that scorched field for long moments before seeing him lifted into the wagon.
"Enchanter Rowntree was always especially kind to me," she says, softer, steady even as she feels grief twist in her chest. "We were—good friends."
Had she ever spoken that word aloud to Marcus? She can't recall.
"I'll miss him," is an understatement, woefully inadequate.
no subject
But it turns out that Stephen wants to know — because it feels a disservice, suddenly, to have gone through hell with Derrica and to know he could trust her with his life and that she is kind and patient, and yet know so little of her actual existence and the shape of it.
So. Enchanter Rowntree.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “For your loss. For everyone’s. I know one of his partners a bit— Julius.”
Ah fuck, is Julius okay? Probably not. Even if he has Petrana with him, presumably that doesn’t soothe the loss much: that’s just two people grieving.
Morale is going to be such a problem: how do they even limp on from this, with a third of their number cleaved away? He can’t wrap his head around it, and so he’s not trying. That’s a problem for tomorrow and later. Today: there is just the work, and knuckling his way through the work with Derrica by his side.
no subject
Derrica chokes on it, silent for a long moment as her grip tightens around his hand. Breathes in unsteadily, swallows hard.
"Julius and Madame de Cedoux," she murmurs. "They had a scare last year, where Julius was injured and Marcus was taken from them. I think...I think it must be terrible for them to try to survive having lost him now."
It is a quiet sort of deflection, thinking of what this grief will be to everyone else. Holding it in check, to keep the full weight of it from overwhelming her while she focuses outward.
no subject
It’s not a consolation to say or even think something like at least they died as heroes. People would presumably want them cowardly and alive rather than brave and dead. Nothing is a consolation besides the fact that they were here, they were known, they were loved, and they are still loved.
Stephen sighs, a tense exhale. Just as quick as he’d cracked open the seal on this conversation, there’s the immediate regret: what does he say now. What do they do with all of this. Despite broaching it, he knows he is so terrible at this part; his bedside manner hadn’t been his strong suit, this man of the stellar case history, a near-perfect record, no accidents. Death crawls along his spine, hammers on his nerves. His whole professional life has been spent trying to keep it at bay. He’s not good at looking at it head-on.
What he settles on, in the end:
“I’m glad you’re here with me. For this part. And in general.”
no subject
There will be some point, when they have finished their work and life has settled back into something near to routine, when she will break apart. She isn't certain of what that kind of fracture will look like, only that it will come to her and she will have to survive it.
She's done it once before, and she will do it again. If she must.
But here and now, she takes up his hand in both of hers. Holds fast.
"I'm grateful," she murmurs. "I know you had doubts about whether this was the place for you. If you had decided otherwise..."
It would have been Derrica here, alone. Not just in this moment, but all other moments going forward. One healer for the whole of Riftwatch, and what would have happened if she'd fallen short?
no subject
Recruitment and rebuilding feels like a bitter topic when they’re still sitting here in the ashes, but he finds his thoughts still ping-ponging in that direction, adding: “Nina. The new rifter. She says she’s good at healing. I’ll be seeing how much she might want to pitch in. Not— not this right now, I mean, but regular healer work.”
They won’t be alone forever, is the point.
But when he tries to imagine what the future of this little corner of Riftwatch looks like, he finds his thoughts whiting out into static. He had had so many plans: tidy, orderly, putting it all into a to-do list, and yet it seems so insufferably difficult to envision now. Not because his own personal world has shattered, but because everyone else’s has: the others reeling, shambling, and he can’t see how they’ll recover from this. It feels like something irreparable has broken, some fracture which might not grow back. Or if it does, perhaps it’ll be in the wrong shape: twisted and gnarled and never able to carry the same weight it once did.