Residual limb freed, skin bared to breathe, Ness carefully flexes her bicep, gently rolls out her shoulder and lifts her arm. She has to be careful not to tense them too much, not to stretch too far—she's still liable to set her healing back weeks if she overexerts herself—but it feels good to move, even this little. As Stephen reads, she does the few stretches he's allowed her, then begins gently massaging the skin near the end of her stump.
"I know every little thing matters," she says, eyes on her work, "even if it seems irrelevant to me. I tried very hard not to fall into that trap, you know, like you warned me. The body is an interconnected system."
Anything significant enough that affects one part could have seemingly-unrelated effects elsewhere. There's referred pain, and the effects of an overtaxed immune system, and so many other things she doesn't fully understand, but Stephen warned her, and she listened.
"Is there anything you'd like to see the next time we do this? I tried to catch everything I could think of."
Everything except her emotional state. That couldn't be important, certainly, who cares how she feels about the thing she did to herself, or the stress of everyone's opinions on it, whether anyone believed the lie, the friendships she may have lost—that's all for her to worry about, irrelevant to her physical recovery.
And he’s not strictly speaking the best person to assess this particular element: Stephen always defaults to the bare logistics, physical symptoms and measurable effects.
But he’s been around here long enough to think, Riftwatch probably needs a therapist. Just, y’know, not for him. So he hesitates, a crooked finger pressed to the page to save his spot in the middle of the the meticulous documentation of everything except her emotional state.
“And how are you feeling?” he asks, hammering right on it. Because he remembers the bleak statistics: “Over thirty percent of amputees experience depression. It’s a common after-effect.”
then closes it again. Her hand stills in its massage, and she frowns, unfocused, at the floor. It's a question she hadn't anticipated, and didn't prepare for. What comes out of her mouth, then, is unrehearsed, and truer for it.
"I'm alright. Not depressed, anyway. It was—by itself, it's a choice I'm happy to have made. That you trusted me enough to let me make it, and... to have some measure of ownership over my body, my appearance, again. I didn't choose my ears or my eyes or my skin, but I chose this."
It hasn't been easy to adjust to her new state, certainly, but she's had practice accepting changes to her appearance ever since arriving in Thedas. In some ways, it's easier to look in a mirror now than it has ever been in the months since her arrival: this body is hers, now, not a loan or a figment or something done to her. She chose it, and she molded it into the form she wanted. The round ears are hers, the peachy hue is hers, the blue eyes are hers—just as much as the stump of her arm is.
No choice happens in a vacuum, of course. There's more to her feelings than that. But it is true, and she looks up to catches Stephen's eyes and smile, to share it with him.
He listens and nods, a little reassured. It was the same sort of reasoning he’d propped up alongside this whole affair. Everyone ought to have the choice to do what they wanted with their own body; unless it was every single shard-bearer in Riftwatch, in which case, they shouldn’t.
Complicated. The whole thing was complicated.
But Ness smiles at him, and therefore Stephen manages to muster up a faint matching smile in turn, glad of it.
“Good,” he says. “It’s… I mean, the physical recovery is important, of course, and your notes are exhaustive on that point, I can’t think of any room for improvement there. But your psychological state does matter too. This was a large, permanent decision and I’m aware it didn’t go exactly the way we planned.”
"I—yes, I know," she averts her eyes again, chagrined, "and I'm sorry for it, Doctor. I'm trying very hard to make sure I don't fail you again. I'm following all your rules and instructions this time—which I was already doing, I wasn't being lax, I swear—"
Hang on, deep breath. She's talking too much, it's making her look worse. Ness sighs and reins herself in.
"I'm being very careful now, Doctor. I don't know what I did that ruined everything before, but it won't happen again. I'm sorry I let you down."
He arches an eyebrow, surprised, setting the notebook down against his knee. There were still other things needing doing with the arm, checklists to mark off, but this question is suddenly more important as he catches on her words —
“’Ruined’? You didn’t ruin anything, Ennaris. These things happen.”
"Well, yes," because it's not as though she thinks Stephen is infallible, obviously, he's the smartest person she knows and the most competent but he's still only human, but, "but this is done regularly where you're from, isn't it? And it goes well more often than it doesn't. And you know what you're doing. So if it failed, it was something I did."
Obviously. Stephen couldn't have done anything wrong, this is his area of expertise. This is what he does. Not the amputation itself, of course, but the medicine, knowing how to keep wounds clean and safe from infection. He couldn't have fucked it up.
"I feel—I really feel awful I made you turn to magic, truly. I'm sorry, Doctor. I know I'm apologizing a lot. I'm sorry for that too."
There’s so much to address and tackle here that it takes him a moment, arranging all his thoughts in order before he responds, methodical and point-by-point as they tend to.
“I turned to magic about five years ago, Ennaris,” Stephen says, cracking into a faint smile, an attempt at assurance. “I’m not some anti-mage bigot; it’s hardly a thing I’m opposed to. I love magic. Like, famously.”
(Did it sting with envy, however, that it had been Isaac wielding the surgical precision of his healing abilities to carve the infection out of his patient? Yes. Always. Still—)
“This is done regularly where I’m from because modern-day first-world Earth has more sterile hospital conditions, better antibiotics to fight infection, better tools to handle the surgical procedure to begin with,” he says, patiently. “The fact that this went badly reflects more on the world that we’re in, rather than anything else.”
And, the thing that he doesn’t speak aloud: his own lenience in letting them do it this particular way, perhaps. A traumatic amputation over crushed bone was so much riskier than a clean, straight amputation on a healthy limb. (He thought he would be able to handle it. Too arrogant as ever, Doctor.)
Turning to magic from choice is different to being forced into it by circumstance and they both know it—I'd take preference for the doctor, she'd said, and then she'd put him in a position to swallow his pride and ask for help with the thing that should be his area of expertise. Of all his talents and interests, medicine has seemed the thing in Thedas most truly his, the thing Stephen alone could provide insight and expertise on, and she'd forced him into a corner: relinquish his table or lose an agent.
Ness narrows her eyes, head tilted consideringly to the side. The face she wears is familiar to Stephen by now: it's her rolling for insight face.
"You don't believe that any more than I do," she says after a moment, "not really. It's just the right thing to say when someone's failed this badly."
It's the kind thing, the thing a friend would do—but ever since the operation Stephen has been her doctor, not her friend. Playing the role he doesn't want to fill anymore because she cost him something valuable, something vital. Wouldn't she hate it, were she in his shoes? Wouldn't she disdain the person who wounded her identity that much?
Ness huffs, tossing her hair away from her face and looking Stephen in the eye. Her hand balls into a fist on her lap, anxiously crushing a handful of her apron.
"I don't need coddling. I did this wrong. It almost failed, and it was my fault. I would prefer we acknowledged that than this... distance." What started as a firm admonishment tapers into a self-conscious murmur, her eyes turning from flinty and determined to searching— "I miss my friend."
Stephen hesitates. He’s still holding some of the clean new bandages, not even having gotten far enough to the point of re-wrapping, trapped in this part of the conversation instead. This was supposed to have been a quick methodical checkup, in-and-out —
And perhaps that’s all part of it, the way he instinctively retreats into his professional shell, a common defense mechanism. It hadn’t been a conscious choice for him to withdraw and pull away from her — the man occasionally had blind sides the size of Nebraska — but it’s there nonetheless, Ness pressing squarely on that wound and calling it as it is.
“What if we compromise,” he says softly, that faint smile still there at half-mast, “and agree that it is both our faults?”
She holds his eyes still, searching, lips softly pursed. It feels no more true than saying it's all his fault—but she'd allow him the lie if it brought him back close enough for them to actually talk.
"If I say yes, can I pass time in your office again? Can we re-start our lessons?"
“If,” Stephen says, as stubborn as a dog with a bone, “you can also admit that you didn’t ruin anything. These things happen. I’m… alright, yes, I’m feeling sore that I failed you, but it’s not about the turn to magic. Magic’s great. We need more magical healers, honestly. But it’s that I, personally, did not have the skills nor the magic to save you when I needed to.”
Dryly, “And for someone with a saviour complex, that rankles. But it is not your fault. And— well.”
He folds his hands around the roll of clean bandage. Admitting it feels like peeling his skin off, but he forces himself to do it, words pressed through a breath, a sigh: “Besides, I miss having you in my office, too.”
They're just as stubborn as each other, a match for pig-headedness as much as curiosity and intellect—but whatever objection she might have to his demand is cut off by the one-two punch of the dryness on saviour complex and his unexpectedly sincere admission. She blinks, once, twice, eyes wide on his, and her lip wobbles for a moment—
Ness looks down, breathes deeply through her nose.
"Alright. I didn't ruin anything."
Harder to believe than to say, but saying it is the first step, or so she's read. She raises her stump to him for wrapping, heroically avoiding sniffling or hugging him or anything that could possibly make this any harder for him.
The work is a welcome distraction, a chance to catch their breath and let him focus on the task. Stephen unravels the bandages around her stump, sets the fabric aside, and then carefully examines the elbow-turned-stump; more meticulous than usual, more on edge about any signs of this going wrong again. He looks for any inflammation or thready red veins. Tests some of her sensitivity, a gentle touch against the skin to feel if it’s hot to the touch.
He delays a moment to let Ness examine her own wound (with a strict warning to not press too hard, remembering experiments with a particular cuff), letting her indulge whatever clinical curiosity she has, getting to map the progress of the healing.
Once they’re both satisfied, he starts to replace it with clean bandages, concluding, “It’s looking good. No signs of infection, and healing well.”
"Am I still on track to be able to wear a prosthetic in a few months?"
Ness looks at her elbow-stump, craning her neck to try to see the skin more clearly. It's easier to poke and prod and learn about it that way than to try to see it, but that's not stopping her—and hey, you know what—
"Can I—" she wiggles her fingers at Stephen, and gives his mind a polite little psychic knock. She can't see her stump clearly, but he can!
He hesitates a little too long. Reading his mind and what he broadly chooses to think on the surface, it’s a different game entirely from letting her use his actual physical senses, peering out through his eyes like a mask. A more thorough puppeteering. A surrendering of control.
But they’re trying to get back to normal, back to these psychic exercises and the trust they imply, and so Stephen eventually nods, and Ness feels the metaphorical door open.
He hesitates, and so she hesitates too, her smile slowly slipping as she realizes she's overstepped. Even after he nods and opens the door for her, it takes a moment for her to decide what to do. When Ness finally does slip into his thoughts, it's more gentle than usual, a polite and unobtrusive slink into the back of the room.
She's not puppeteering him—though she could, maybe, for a few minutes at least. There's a lot she could do, she thinks, levers she could pull and switches she could press—but that's not what she's here for. Seeing through Stephen's eyes isn't quite the right way to describe it—she's not hijacking his senses, more seeing what he sees like it's a moving portrait, filtered by his thoughts and impressions and focus.
Her stump through his eyes is... well, it's about as unsightly as it had seemed from her less than ideal vantage point. The scar is only just starting to settle in, raised and intense as the skin knits back together—not inflamed, though, not swollen or miscoloured. As far as she can interpret, it looks as healthy as they could hope for, and Stephen doesn't seem to see anything he didn't expect.
"Can you," she speaks out loud, it seeming more polite, then pauses, pulling her thoughts together. "Can you think more... purposefully? About what you see, from your professional perspective."
“You’re sure you don’t just want me to say it aloud? Seems like it’d be easier,” Stephen says, bemused, but then gamely swivels in his chair and focuses more on the stump rather than her face. Directs all his attention back to it, thinking more purposefully, a conscious internal narration rather than vague background murmur.
A lot of the train of thought defaults back to clean, clinical medical jargon, dense and impenetrable; but seen through his mind, she can glimpse the real meaning of it. It’s healing well. Scarification and wound sealing and limb shrinkage all within normal parameters. Still not ready for the prosthetic, but on track —
(and most importantly, not plummeting her straight to death’s doorstep anymore)
It makes sense to assume a verbal explanation would be easier to follow, and Ness doesn't know how to explain to Stephen that it's not, necessarily. Yes, the medical jargon is opaque, and it's strange to see herself as a collection of medical data and not a person–but seeing it through the filter of his thoughts and understanding offers comprehension she's never had the education to attain for herself. He thinks the words and she knows what they mean because he knows, which is fascinating and cool and Ness doesn't want to retreat–
But the spell only lasts so long before she'd have to cast it again, and Stephen was hesitant enough to allow her in to begin with; she won't overstay her welcome. Her eyes re-focus as their violet glow fades, and she offers an excited smile.
"That was fascinating–I understood it all when I was reading your thoughts, but now that I'm out I only know as much as I did before, I just know that you thought it looked alright. The implications–"
Hang on–Ness trails off, smile fading as she thinks better of the commentary. Perhaps by reading his mind she could help with procedures, treatments where Stephen could use a third hand... but perhaps also it could be strange to have his knowledge co-opted so completely in that way. Besides, her remaining hand won't be much more effective than his own, no matter how adept she's forced to get with it.
So. A different topic, then.
"What happened to me?" It's no less fraught a subject, but in light of what he thought about death's door, it's the one that's most top-of-mind. "That is, I know that the site became infected. Was it that? An infection that grew out of control? I can't remember much after I first returned to the infirmary."
It’s nice seeing her smile again, bright and excitable. It makes his own expression soften, in both fondness and relief.
Stephen scoots back a little so he’s not quite so close, no longer all up in her business for the examination. “It was, yes,” he says. “If only Volante had finished his experiments, the penicilin would have helped a great deal. But without any actual antibiotics yet… we’ve nothing to combat an infection effectively.”
He hesitates over the next point. He doesn’t want her to feel to blame any more than she already does.
“I suspect your bones being crushed by the bookcase also complicated matters. It wasn’t as clean of an amputation as it could’ve been otherwise, in a fully-controlled environment. Your body was worn out, undertaking the recovery and regrowing tissue and fighting the infection alike. Sometimes it’s just too much.”
Any further blame she feels compelled to ascribe to herself is locked away behind pursed lips, furrowed brow—she'd thought it an elegant solution to concerns about inspiring others to follow in her footsteps, but maybe it was unnecessary, after all. If Stephen had pushed back even slightly—
But he didn't, and they can't change anything about how it went now. Whatever regrets either of them might have, they'll have to live with them.
"Was he—I hope he didn't feel... responsible, in any way. He's no more at fault than either of us," if Stephen is insistent that she shouldn't blame herself, and she insists that Stephen shouldn't blame himself, certainly Volante is even less a part of that conversation than they are. More quietly, an aside to herself, "I'll have to check in with him."
She tries to think to what she does remember of that long, hazy period: snippets and snatches of conversation, fogged apparitions and a heavy blanket of confusion over all. What did she say? Nothing coherent, likely, and she has no secrets that she's afraid of having divulged, but—
"I, we, conversed sometimes, didn't we? I remember that I spoke to you, I can't imagine it was anything that could be described as lucid, but—"
“We did. At the start you were fine, mostly wanting work to keep yourself busy, but towards the end I can’t say it was very coherent. You weren’t always aware where you were; I think you were mixed up with Candlekeep a few times. Your magic went a little haywire, but nothing serious; not beyond what any other rifter might do when trying to grasp their powers.”
All of it is delivered like a brisk after-action report, because he, too, would have wanted to know what he did when he was out of it. But then Stephen hesitates. “You called me… Osu, I believe. Is that someone you knew back home?”
The unfamiliar word had sounded significant: a proper noun, perhaps someone’s name.
Ennaris has no secrets—but that does not mean there's nothing she could be embarrassed by.
"I called you—what?"
She stares at Stephen, wide-eyed, embarrassment rising red-hot in her cheeks. She's barely called Vazeiros osu, he never liked it when she did, it's not a normal part of her vocabulary. This is unbelievable, ridiculous—a hideous betrayal of her subconscious, even if she was hallucinating—
Not important. He asked for an explanation—but gods, how could she? She's supposed to look Stephen in the eyes and tell him— This is so mortifying.
"It... is someone i knew in Faerûn, yes," she hedges at first, not meeting his eyes, but sighs after a moment and looks at Stephen full-on, rueful. "It means father, but affectionate. Like papa, or dad."
Which certainly says some things about how her subconscious sees Stephen, doesn't it. It's not such a surprise, of course, she knows herself enough to understand what she gets out of their relationship and why his approval means so much to her. But that it's so concrete, such a formed feeling...
"I must have been hallucinating Vazeiros. That happens with fevers, doesn't it?"
(with a constitution score of 16, she's never been sick enough before to find out firsthand.)
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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"I know every little thing matters," she says, eyes on her work, "even if it seems irrelevant to me. I tried very hard not to fall into that trap, you know, like you warned me. The body is an interconnected system."
Anything significant enough that affects one part could have seemingly-unrelated effects elsewhere. There's referred pain, and the effects of an overtaxed immune system, and so many other things she doesn't fully understand, but Stephen warned her, and she listened.
"Is there anything you'd like to see the next time we do this? I tried to catch everything I could think of."
Everything except her emotional state. That couldn't be important, certainly, who cares how she feels about the thing she did to herself, or the stress of everyone's opinions on it, whether anyone believed the lie, the friendships she may have lost—that's all for her to worry about, irrelevant to her physical recovery.
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But he’s been around here long enough to think, Riftwatch probably needs a therapist. Just, y’know, not for him. So he hesitates, a crooked finger pressed to the page to save his spot in the middle of the the meticulous documentation of everything except her emotional state.
“And how are you feeling?” he asks, hammering right on it. Because he remembers the bleak statistics: “Over thirty percent of amputees experience depression. It’s a common after-effect.”
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then closes it again. Her hand stills in its massage, and she frowns, unfocused, at the floor. It's a question she hadn't anticipated, and didn't prepare for. What comes out of her mouth, then, is unrehearsed, and truer for it.
"I'm alright. Not depressed, anyway. It was—by itself, it's a choice I'm happy to have made. That you trusted me enough to let me make it, and... to have some measure of ownership over my body, my appearance, again. I didn't choose my ears or my eyes or my skin, but I chose this."
It hasn't been easy to adjust to her new state, certainly, but she's had practice accepting changes to her appearance ever since arriving in Thedas. In some ways, it's easier to look in a mirror now than it has ever been in the months since her arrival: this body is hers, now, not a loan or a figment or something done to her. She chose it, and she molded it into the form she wanted. The round ears are hers, the peachy hue is hers, the blue eyes are hers—just as much as the stump of her arm is.
No choice happens in a vacuum, of course. There's more to her feelings than that. But it is true, and she looks up to catches Stephen's eyes and smile, to share it with him.
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Complicated. The whole thing was complicated.
But Ness smiles at him, and therefore Stephen manages to muster up a faint matching smile in turn, glad of it.
“Good,” he says. “It’s… I mean, the physical recovery is important, of course, and your notes are exhaustive on that point, I can’t think of any room for improvement there. But your psychological state does matter too. This was a large, permanent decision and I’m aware it didn’t go exactly the way we planned.”
So.
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Hang on, deep breath. She's talking too much, it's making her look worse. Ness sighs and reins herself in.
"I'm being very careful now, Doctor. I don't know what I did that ruined everything before, but it won't happen again. I'm sorry I let you down."
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“’Ruined’? You didn’t ruin anything, Ennaris. These things happen.”
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Obviously. Stephen couldn't have done anything wrong, this is his area of expertise. This is what he does. Not the amputation itself, of course, but the medicine, knowing how to keep wounds clean and safe from infection. He couldn't have fucked it up.
"I feel—I really feel awful I made you turn to magic, truly. I'm sorry, Doctor. I know I'm apologizing a lot. I'm sorry for that too."
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“I turned to magic about five years ago, Ennaris,” Stephen says, cracking into a faint smile, an attempt at assurance. “I’m not some anti-mage bigot; it’s hardly a thing I’m opposed to. I love magic. Like, famously.”
(Did it sting with envy, however, that it had been Isaac wielding the surgical precision of his healing abilities to carve the infection out of his patient? Yes. Always. Still—)
“This is done regularly where I’m from because modern-day first-world Earth has more sterile hospital conditions, better antibiotics to fight infection, better tools to handle the surgical procedure to begin with,” he says, patiently. “The fact that this went badly reflects more on the world that we’re in, rather than anything else.”
And, the thing that he doesn’t speak aloud: his own lenience in letting them do it this particular way, perhaps. A traumatic amputation over crushed bone was so much riskier than a clean, straight amputation on a healthy limb. (He thought he would be able to handle it. Too arrogant as ever, Doctor.)
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Ness narrows her eyes, head tilted consideringly to the side. The face she wears is familiar to Stephen by now: it's her rolling for insight face.
"You don't believe that any more than I do," she says after a moment, "not really. It's just the right thing to say when someone's failed this badly."
It's the kind thing, the thing a friend would do—but ever since the operation Stephen has been her doctor, not her friend. Playing the role he doesn't want to fill anymore because she cost him something valuable, something vital. Wouldn't she hate it, were she in his shoes? Wouldn't she disdain the person who wounded her identity that much?
Ness huffs, tossing her hair away from her face and looking Stephen in the eye. Her hand balls into a fist on her lap, anxiously crushing a handful of her apron.
"I don't need coddling. I did this wrong. It almost failed, and it was my fault. I would prefer we acknowledged that than this... distance." What started as a firm admonishment tapers into a self-conscious murmur, her eyes turning from flinty and determined to searching— "I miss my friend."
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And perhaps that’s all part of it, the way he instinctively retreats into his professional shell, a common defense mechanism. It hadn’t been a conscious choice for him to withdraw and pull away from her — the man occasionally had blind sides the size of Nebraska — but it’s there nonetheless, Ness pressing squarely on that wound and calling it as it is.
“What if we compromise,” he says softly, that faint smile still there at half-mast, “and agree that it is both our faults?”
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"If I say yes, can I pass time in your office again? Can we re-start our lessons?"
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Dryly, “And for someone with a saviour complex, that rankles. But it is not your fault. And— well.”
He folds his hands around the roll of clean bandage. Admitting it feels like peeling his skin off, but he forces himself to do it, words pressed through a breath, a sigh: “Besides, I miss having you in my office, too.”
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Ness looks down, breathes deeply through her nose.
"Alright. I didn't ruin anything."
Harder to believe than to say, but saying it is the first step, or so she's read. She raises her stump to him for wrapping, heroically avoiding sniffling or hugging him or anything that could possibly make this any harder for him.
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He delays a moment to let Ness examine her own wound (with a strict warning to not press too hard, remembering experiments with a particular cuff), letting her indulge whatever clinical curiosity she has, getting to map the progress of the healing.
Once they’re both satisfied, he starts to replace it with clean bandages, concluding, “It’s looking good. No signs of infection, and healing well.”
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Ness looks at her elbow-stump, craning her neck to try to see the skin more clearly. It's easier to poke and prod and learn about it that way than to try to see it, but that's not stopping her—and hey, you know what—
"Can I—" she wiggles her fingers at Stephen, and gives his mind a polite little psychic knock. She can't see her stump clearly, but he can!
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But they’re trying to get back to normal, back to these psychic exercises and the trust they imply, and so Stephen eventually nods, and Ness feels the metaphorical door open.
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She's not puppeteering him—though she could, maybe, for a few minutes at least. There's a lot she could do, she thinks, levers she could pull and switches she could press—but that's not what she's here for. Seeing through Stephen's eyes isn't quite the right way to describe it—she's not hijacking his senses, more seeing what he sees like it's a moving portrait, filtered by his thoughts and impressions and focus.
Her stump through his eyes is... well, it's about as unsightly as it had seemed from her less than ideal vantage point. The scar is only just starting to settle in, raised and intense as the skin knits back together—not inflamed, though, not swollen or miscoloured. As far as she can interpret, it looks as healthy as they could hope for, and Stephen doesn't seem to see anything he didn't expect.
"Can you," she speaks out loud, it seeming more polite, then pauses, pulling her thoughts together. "Can you think more... purposefully? About what you see, from your professional perspective."
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A lot of the train of thought defaults back to clean, clinical medical jargon, dense and impenetrable; but seen through his mind, she can glimpse the real meaning of it. It’s healing well. Scarification and wound sealing and limb shrinkage all within normal parameters. Still not ready for the prosthetic, but on track —
(and most importantly, not plummeting her straight to death’s doorstep anymore)
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But the spell only lasts so long before she'd have to cast it again, and Stephen was hesitant enough to allow her in to begin with; she won't overstay her welcome. Her eyes re-focus as their violet glow fades, and she offers an excited smile.
"That was fascinating–I understood it all when I was reading your thoughts, but now that I'm out I only know as much as I did before, I just know that you thought it looked alright. The implications–"
Hang on–Ness trails off, smile fading as she thinks better of the commentary. Perhaps by reading his mind she could help with procedures, treatments where Stephen could use a third hand... but perhaps also it could be strange to have his knowledge co-opted so completely in that way. Besides, her remaining hand won't be much more effective than his own, no matter how adept she's forced to get with it.
So. A different topic, then.
"What happened to me?" It's no less fraught a subject, but in light of what he thought about death's door, it's the one that's most top-of-mind. "That is, I know that the site became infected. Was it that? An infection that grew out of control? I can't remember much after I first returned to the infirmary."
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Stephen scoots back a little so he’s not quite so close, no longer all up in her business for the examination. “It was, yes,” he says. “If only Volante had finished his experiments, the penicilin would have helped a great deal. But without any actual antibiotics yet… we’ve nothing to combat an infection effectively.”
He hesitates over the next point. He doesn’t want her to feel to blame any more than she already does.
“I suspect your bones being crushed by the bookcase also complicated matters. It wasn’t as clean of an amputation as it could’ve been otherwise, in a fully-controlled environment. Your body was worn out, undertaking the recovery and regrowing tissue and fighting the infection alike. Sometimes it’s just too much.”
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But he didn't, and they can't change anything about how it went now. Whatever regrets either of them might have, they'll have to live with them.
"Was he—I hope he didn't feel... responsible, in any way. He's no more at fault than either of us," if Stephen is insistent that she shouldn't blame herself, and she insists that Stephen shouldn't blame himself, certainly Volante is even less a part of that conversation than they are. More quietly, an aside to herself, "I'll have to check in with him."
She tries to think to what she does remember of that long, hazy period: snippets and snatches of conversation, fogged apparitions and a heavy blanket of confusion over all. What did she say? Nothing coherent, likely, and she has no secrets that she's afraid of having divulged, but—
"I, we, conversed sometimes, didn't we? I remember that I spoke to you, I can't imagine it was anything that could be described as lucid, but—"
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All of it is delivered like a brisk after-action report, because he, too, would have wanted to know what he did when he was out of it. But then Stephen hesitates. “You called me… Osu, I believe. Is that someone you knew back home?”
The unfamiliar word had sounded significant: a proper noun, perhaps someone’s name.
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"I called you—what?"
She stares at Stephen, wide-eyed, embarrassment rising red-hot in her cheeks. She's barely called Vazeiros osu, he never liked it when she did, it's not a normal part of her vocabulary. This is unbelievable, ridiculous—a hideous betrayal of her subconscious, even if she was hallucinating—
Not important. He asked for an explanation—but gods, how could she? She's supposed to look Stephen in the eyes and tell him— This is so mortifying.
"It... is someone i knew in Faerûn, yes," she hedges at first, not meeting his eyes, but sighs after a moment and looks at Stephen full-on, rueful. "It means father, but affectionate. Like papa, or dad."
Which certainly says some things about how her subconscious sees Stephen, doesn't it. It's not such a surprise, of course, she knows herself enough to understand what she gets out of their relationship and why his approval means so much to her. But that it's so concrete, such a formed feeling...
"I must have been hallucinating Vazeiros. That happens with fevers, doesn't it?"
(with a constitution score of 16, she's never been sick enough before to find out firsthand.)