“No,” is the automatic answer, without even having to stop to think about it, almost smiling in the response. Stephen hasn’t mentioned the girl much to anyone in detail, besides marvelling at America’s abilities and their implications, what it might mean to be able to open your own personal rifts in Thedas or be able to go home, but— there’s still a fondness in his voice when he speaks of her.
“Dark hair, dark eyes, dark skin, the two of you don’t look at all alike. And in personality, she’s… well, ruder. Impatient. Punchy, literally and figuratively. But in other ways…”
He trails off, trying to figure out what drew the line between them besides the fact that they’re his mentees. There had to be something else which didn’t have anything to do with him.
In the end, he settles on: “She was initially afraid of her powers, too. And she’s curious and determined and independent. So, in some ways, I suppose you’re alike.”
Rude, impatient, punchy–Stephen is right, Ness certainly isn't any of those things. It occurs to her to ask which he prefers, to offer to be more "punchy", if he would like that better–
She closes her mouth before the question is even fully formed in her own mind.
"You're nothing like Vazeiros," she offers in return, "physically, of course, but also..."
Ness trails off, brow furrowed and gaze turned inward, considering. She's never described her father to anyone in any sort of depth; either the Avowed in Candlekeep knew him and thus required no description, or a stranger wasn't interested in what kind of person he was. It's difficult to put words to the observations she made over a decade and a half, the traits and preferences she noted in an effort to make sense of the man who made her, and it takes her a moment to find a place to begin.
"He has no taste for excess," she tests the sentence–and immediately shakes her head, no, that's not quite it– "No, not excess–not material excess. Waste."
That she lets sit a moment, then nods.
"He can see the straight line from action to result, and will always choose the most economic route between the two. Energy and effort are finite resources, which must not be expended beyond what is required; to do otherwise would be wasteful. And the result is what matters, all other considerations are tertiary."
If the calculus is beautiful, that is irrelevant. It is.
"It's how he survived Menzoberranzan," she concludes, "but it made him cold. Have you missed America?"
Once upon a time, perhaps he’d have skittishly backed off from admitting that he had any sentimental attachments back home, but he’s loosened up over the course of his time in Thedas. So: “Of course,” he says, “but at least I’ve no end of people here to kick me down a few pegs. I didn’t actually know her that well yet, so maybe I’m missing more— what could have been. I’ve already known you longer.”
And then Stephen absentmindedly drums his fingers against his knee, considering that description of Vazeiros. “I think I’m fairly results-driven,” he points out, mulling it over.
"They're sometimes worse, I think," she says, quietly wistful, "the could-have-beens."
The apprentice America could have been, the father Vazeiros could have—one never really stops worrying at the possibilities, much as one might try. Like a loose tooth, you keep pushing at it with your tongue, just to feel it wiggle.
The silence between them draws out, interrupted only by the drumming of Stephen's fingers while Ness nearly falls into melancholy next to him. She hums in agreement when he speaks, distracted—he is very results-driven, she's thought so herself—
and then stops.
"What, you mean like Vazeiros? That's entirely different."
Obviously. But then, perhaps it's not quite as obvious to someone who's only met a facsimile of the real elf. Ness shifts in her seat, facing Stephen more full-on.
"The results you pursue are always about people. Not individuals, necessarily, but as a collective—how can you benefit the most people, what will do the most good with the least cost. And you're not cold at all, not really. You do a good impression when you need to, but that's not who you are. You don't have to hug people all the time to be warm."
You don’t have to hug people all the time to be warm, Ness says, and there’s something so mortifying in having it so aptly called out and recognised for what it is. It blindsides him a little, when his own image of himself was so deceptively off-the-mark. Stephen blinks, surprised.
Perhaps a version of him had been that once upon a time, a cold and arrogant neurosurgeon who’d fucked up the relationships in his life, a cautionary tale and its own road not taken— but it has been a while since then. Meeting Sinister Strange had been another caution, a big blaring warning sign to swerve him back onto another path. Do better. Be better.
“So if my calculation is about what benefits the most people, what results was Vazeiros after?” he asks, a little wary of what the answer will be.
She does Stephen the courtesy of looking away from his mortification, turning her eyes instead to her remaining hand. Her nails have grown long, she notes. She'll have to come up with a way to cut them herself, no one's going to want to help her with that.
"He wasn't concerned with morals or personal advancement," she says, distant. "He wasn't evil, or cruel, which is more than can be said of most drow. He wanted comfort. Control, too, he wanted to choose where he went, what he did, who he spoke to. Everything was about what would be the least unpleasant for him, and afford him the most control of his situation."
That's the thing about cruelty: it's an investment of its own kind. A horrible one, of course, but an investment. Without investment, without care, one can't be cruel.
"The architecture may appear the same on a surface level," Ness says, voice steady, pressing the nail of her index finger down with the pad of her thumb, trying to find a weak point to force a break, "but the foundations are entirely different. I could never mistake you for him."
Even the lack of personal advancement off that list throws him for a loop. What’s life without personal advancement? Ness can see from that second momentary pause that Stephen is, briefly, baffled. His entire life had been personal advancement, for better and ill. There had been so many well-established orderly rungs to climb, moving his way up the ladder of a medical career. Even clambering up the hierarchy of the Masters of the Mystic Arts had been tidy and orderly and sequential: you went from a novice in white robes, to an apprentice in crimson, to a disciple in blue, then a master with your own customised outfit, then he’d made the ill-timed leap to Sorcerer Supreme.
Advancement. Self-betterment.
“So. Comfort, control, and… independence? These were the things he was after, for himself?” Stephen asks.
He’s still working through something, chewing over it, piecing together a picture of the drow— and finding himself flabbergasted, too, that that created the girl in front of him.
This second pause draws her attention from her nails and back to Stephen. Ness tilts her head at his expression, quizzical, baffled by his bafflement.
It's not the first time that she's realized she and Stephen are not as similar as they sometimes seem. For all their shared curiosity, their enthusiasm for discovery, their dogged dedication to being of service—even in these commonalities, their motives, their expressions, differ. Which is hardly a surprise, of course; she's a half-elf at the beginning of her life, while he's a middle-aged human with a wealth of experience and ambition behind him, to say nothing of the fact that they're not even from the same plane of existence.
This may be their biggest difference, though.
"Yes," slowly, "I think because he was a slave. He lacked all three, and so they became the driving motivators of his life. Knowledge, too, he loved books. I think it was the only form of power he truly believed in, he had such contempt for—"
She cuts herself off, taking a breath. She's said so much about Vazeiros, but that's not really what Stephen's asking about. It's just the prism he's looking at himself through now, how Ness could take that refracted light and in a time of fevered weakness see him in it.
"You are not like him," she says gently. "You are kinder and warmer than he could ever even think to be. If I called you osu it's because..." It's her turn to be mortified, but it's an equivalent exchange, so she won't look away, even as her cheeks flame with embarrassment and she can feel her whole body going hot. "Because you're what I wish he would have been, to me, not because you're what he was."
“I mean, in a way, that motivation’s understandable,” Stephen says, vaguely, because it’s not like he can properly empathise with the plight of growing up enslaved. What that might do to you, the rewiring of your priorities. He might’ve been poor, but he had other luxuries and privileges to hand.
But her other confession comes as a surprise and makes him pleasantly, awfully abashed. He’d never particularly wanted to be a father. He’d aimed for Cool Uncle Stephen, but perhaps that’s close enough to where he’s now accidentally landed.
And what do you say to that? Is thank you weird? That’s probably weird.
In the end: “I appreciate that,” he says, just as gentle. “And, I don’t know. It’s less about my potential similarities with him and rather that I’m now trying to wrap my head around… I mean, the two of you seem— very different.”
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
“Dark hair, dark eyes, dark skin, the two of you don’t look at all alike. And in personality, she’s… well, ruder. Impatient. Punchy, literally and figuratively. But in other ways…”
He trails off, trying to figure out what drew the line between them besides the fact that they’re his mentees. There had to be something else which didn’t have anything to do with him.
In the end, he settles on: “She was initially afraid of her powers, too. And she’s curious and determined and independent. So, in some ways, I suppose you’re alike.”
no subject
She closes her mouth before the question is even fully formed in her own mind.
"You're nothing like Vazeiros," she offers in return, "physically, of course, but also..."
Ness trails off, brow furrowed and gaze turned inward, considering. She's never described her father to anyone in any sort of depth; either the Avowed in Candlekeep knew him and thus required no description, or a stranger wasn't interested in what kind of person he was. It's difficult to put words to the observations she made over a decade and a half, the traits and preferences she noted in an effort to make sense of the man who made her, and it takes her a moment to find a place to begin.
"He has no taste for excess," she tests the sentence–and immediately shakes her head, no, that's not quite it– "No, not excess–not material excess. Waste."
That she lets sit a moment, then nods.
"He can see the straight line from action to result, and will always choose the most economic route between the two. Energy and effort are finite resources, which must not be expended beyond what is required; to do otherwise would be wasteful. And the result is what matters, all other considerations are tertiary."
If the calculus is beautiful, that is irrelevant. It is.
"It's how he survived Menzoberranzan," she concludes, "but it made him cold. Have you missed America?"
no subject
And then Stephen absentmindedly drums his fingers against his knee, considering that description of Vazeiros. “I think I’m fairly results-driven,” he points out, mulling it over.
no subject
The apprentice America could have been, the father Vazeiros could have—one never really stops worrying at the possibilities, much as one might try. Like a loose tooth, you keep pushing at it with your tongue, just to feel it wiggle.
The silence between them draws out, interrupted only by the drumming of Stephen's fingers while Ness nearly falls into melancholy next to him. She hums in agreement when he speaks, distracted—he is very results-driven, she's thought so herself—
and then stops.
"What, you mean like Vazeiros? That's entirely different."
Obviously. But then, perhaps it's not quite as obvious to someone who's only met a facsimile of the real elf. Ness shifts in her seat, facing Stephen more full-on.
"The results you pursue are always about people. Not individuals, necessarily, but as a collective—how can you benefit the most people, what will do the most good with the least cost. And you're not cold at all, not really. You do a good impression when you need to, but that's not who you are. You don't have to hug people all the time to be warm."
no subject
Perhaps a version of him had been that once upon a time, a cold and arrogant neurosurgeon who’d fucked up the relationships in his life, a cautionary tale and its own road not taken— but it has been a while since then. Meeting Sinister Strange had been another caution, a big blaring warning sign to swerve him back onto another path. Do better. Be better.
“So if my calculation is about what benefits the most people, what results was Vazeiros after?” he asks, a little wary of what the answer will be.
no subject
"He wasn't concerned with morals or personal advancement," she says, distant. "He wasn't evil, or cruel, which is more than can be said of most drow. He wanted comfort. Control, too, he wanted to choose where he went, what he did, who he spoke to. Everything was about what would be the least unpleasant for him, and afford him the most control of his situation."
That's the thing about cruelty: it's an investment of its own kind. A horrible one, of course, but an investment. Without investment, without care, one can't be cruel.
"The architecture may appear the same on a surface level," Ness says, voice steady, pressing the nail of her index finger down with the pad of her thumb, trying to find a weak point to force a break, "but the foundations are entirely different. I could never mistake you for him."
no subject
Advancement. Self-betterment.
“So. Comfort, control, and… independence? These were the things he was after, for himself?” Stephen asks.
He’s still working through something, chewing over it, piecing together a picture of the drow— and finding himself flabbergasted, too, that that created the girl in front of him.
no subject
It's not the first time that she's realized she and Stephen are not as similar as they sometimes seem. For all their shared curiosity, their enthusiasm for discovery, their dogged dedication to being of service—even in these commonalities, their motives, their expressions, differ. Which is hardly a surprise, of course; she's a half-elf at the beginning of her life, while he's a middle-aged human with a wealth of experience and ambition behind him, to say nothing of the fact that they're not even from the same plane of existence.
This may be their biggest difference, though.
"Yes," slowly, "I think because he was a slave. He lacked all three, and so they became the driving motivators of his life. Knowledge, too, he loved books. I think it was the only form of power he truly believed in, he had such contempt for—"
She cuts herself off, taking a breath. She's said so much about Vazeiros, but that's not really what Stephen's asking about. It's just the prism he's looking at himself through now, how Ness could take that refracted light and in a time of fevered weakness see him in it.
"You are not like him," she says gently. "You are kinder and warmer than he could ever even think to be. If I called you osu it's because..." It's her turn to be mortified, but it's an equivalent exchange, so she won't look away, even as her cheeks flame with embarrassment and she can feel her whole body going hot. "Because you're what I wish he would have been, to me, not because you're what he was."
no subject
But her other confession comes as a surprise and makes him pleasantly, awfully abashed. He’d never particularly wanted to be a father. He’d aimed for Cool Uncle Stephen, but perhaps that’s close enough to where he’s now accidentally landed.
And what do you say to that? Is thank you weird? That’s probably weird.
In the end: “I appreciate that,” he says, just as gentle. “And, I don’t know. It’s less about my potential similarities with him and rather that I’m now trying to wrap my head around… I mean, the two of you seem— very different.”
Which is putting it mildly.