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.”
That was very clearly not where Ness saw this going; she blinks at Stephen, attempting to adjust for this new trajectory—
"Well," slowly. She's never known how to respond to comments like this—Stephen's not the first to be bemused by the differences between her and her father, and she's never come up with what seems like an appropriate answer. "We're not entirely unalike. I get my love of books from him, and I also find the pursuit of power to be more trouble than it's worth. I have his cheekbones."
It's not a lot to have in common with one's father, but it's all Ness can think of. And it is—in a way, it's one of the only ways he was kind to her. He didn't try to shave off the parts of her that were not like him, didn't try to mold her to his own image. She was allowed to be herself, even as he found her needy and tiresome and naïve, and there were no lessons aimed to change her. She was as she was; he just didn't like her all that much.
"Perhaps he would have been more like me if he had been born outside Menzoberranzan," she reasons, "or perhaps I take more after my mother. I couldn't say, really."
“You’ve never talked about her much,” Stephen says, musing. “Your mother, I mean. Did you know her?”
It’s occurring to him now how little he knows about this part of Ness’ life: she gushes about Candlekeep, she brightens discussing the place she came from and their traditions and their rituals. She tiptoes a little more carefully around matters of her father, even if she does still go on about him, that pedestal potentially undeserved based on what Stephen’s seen of the man. But the mother hasn’t come up at all, in the entire year-plus he’s known her.
(Which is possibly a galling realisation. Is he really so terrible at asking others about themselves? Hm. Much to consider.)
As much as Stephen isn't inclined to ask questions, Ness isn't inclined to talk about herself. Candlekeep is easy to talk about, everything about it is beautiful and wondrous and perfect to her—she's more a product of the library than either of her parents in some ways, or at least she'd like to think so.
Certainly more than her mother.
"Her name was Keya," she says, carefully even, "she was a half-elf. I don't remember much about her, but I know she was beautiful. I think she had freckles? Her hair was long, I used to braid it."
She hasn't thought about that in years. It hardly feels like a memory, more like a hazy dream: her small toddler's fingers not dextrous enough for the intricate plaits her mother preferred, leaving more tangles than braids.
"She was restless, she wanted to be an adventurer. It would be too dangerous a life for a child, so she took me to Candlekeep to leave me with Vazeiros."
Ness' breath leaves her on a shaky exhale, and her shoulders droop. Her eyes won't meet Stephen's anymore. She forces herself to shrug, disaffected, because she knows it's nothing. It's not that tragic a story, in the grand scheme of things. There's no call to feel sorry for herself.
"He didn't want me either, but I suppose she must have convinced him to keep me because she left and I stayed. We never saw her again after that."
Every time his anger at this absent drow seems like it might’ve subsided, then he hears yet another thing —
“How do you know that he didn’t want you?” Stephen asks. Stiff and clipped and precise, it has almost the cadence of one of their theoretical exercises and practices: challenging the premise. Demanding proofs.
The clipped tone visibly jars her, and Ness takes a breath, straightens her shoulders. Stephen is right, no use feeling sorry for herself. Facts are facts. She can mope and sigh all she wants, but it won't change anything.
"He said so," she says, in a tone reminiscent of the one she used to persuade him to cut off her arm. "He told my mother Candlekeep is no place for a child and that he didn't care where I went. They argued it back and forth for I don't know how long, I went to find something to read after a while."
“Well,” Stephen says, and trails off. It’s frustrating, being so pissed-off at someone who isn’t even here to be yelled at. And he’s not sure how far he can get telling her point-blank I think your dad was kind of an asshole, actually.
“It’s not like I’m the expert on children, but that’s singularly—” he starts, then stops, then frowns at her. Plainly: “You deserved better, Ennaris.”
Ennaris blinks at Stephen, struck suddenly with a very strange thought, a sense she's never had before—what a naïve thing for such a smart person to say. He thinks she doesn't know.
"Of course," plainly, patiently, "but he is my father."
She was a child. She didn't ask to be born, or to be his, or to be anything at all. The least she deserved was a parent, even just one, who wanted her. But she had Keya and Vazeiros, and so that's not what she got. Deserving is a useless abstract, pointless to waste time on.
If the calculus is cruel, that is irrelevant. It is.
He shakes his head. This is the sort of problem he can’t just carve out with a knife; can’t just string together some reassuring words to fix it all in one go, and he already wasn’t the best at those inspirational speeches.
The issue of the stump, in fact, is simpler. Even with the medical complications, the trouble healing, the infection and near-sepsis, this is at least a physical problem that Doctor Strange knows how to solve. And it’s already been cleaned out and re-dressed, this checkup long-since technically finished, but —
“It’s healing nicely,” Stephen says, a quick pivot back into safer territory, even though it’s repeating what he’s already said and what she already knows. He readjusts the trailing end of the bandage, tucking it in tighter.
“So I think we’re about done here, Ennaris.” And then, in case that feels too much like potential dismissal, he offers her a quick smile along with: “And telepathy practice at the usual time tomorrow, if you’re feeling up for it?”
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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.
no subject
That was very clearly not where Ness saw this going; she blinks at Stephen, attempting to adjust for this new trajectory—
"Well," slowly. She's never known how to respond to comments like this—Stephen's not the first to be bemused by the differences between her and her father, and she's never come up with what seems like an appropriate answer. "We're not entirely unalike. I get my love of books from him, and I also find the pursuit of power to be more trouble than it's worth. I have his cheekbones."
It's not a lot to have in common with one's father, but it's all Ness can think of. And it is—in a way, it's one of the only ways he was kind to her. He didn't try to shave off the parts of her that were not like him, didn't try to mold her to his own image. She was allowed to be herself, even as he found her needy and tiresome and naïve, and there were no lessons aimed to change her. She was as she was; he just didn't like her all that much.
"Perhaps he would have been more like me if he had been born outside Menzoberranzan," she reasons, "or perhaps I take more after my mother. I couldn't say, really."
no subject
It’s occurring to him now how little he knows about this part of Ness’ life: she gushes about Candlekeep, she brightens discussing the place she came from and their traditions and their rituals. She tiptoes a little more carefully around matters of her father, even if she does still go on about him, that pedestal potentially undeserved based on what Stephen’s seen of the man. But the mother hasn’t come up at all, in the entire year-plus he’s known her.
(Which is possibly a galling realisation. Is he really so terrible at asking others about themselves? Hm. Much to consider.)
no subject
Certainly more than her mother.
"Her name was Keya," she says, carefully even, "she was a half-elf. I don't remember much about her, but I know she was beautiful. I think she had freckles? Her hair was long, I used to braid it."
She hasn't thought about that in years. It hardly feels like a memory, more like a hazy dream: her small toddler's fingers not dextrous enough for the intricate plaits her mother preferred, leaving more tangles than braids.
"She was restless, she wanted to be an adventurer. It would be too dangerous a life for a child, so she took me to Candlekeep to leave me with Vazeiros."
Ness' breath leaves her on a shaky exhale, and her shoulders droop. Her eyes won't meet Stephen's anymore. She forces herself to shrug, disaffected, because she knows it's nothing. It's not that tragic a story, in the grand scheme of things. There's no call to feel sorry for herself.
"He didn't want me either, but I suppose she must have convinced him to keep me because she left and I stayed. We never saw her again after that."
no subject
“How do you know that he didn’t want you?” Stephen asks. Stiff and clipped and precise, it has almost the cadence of one of their theoretical exercises and practices: challenging the premise. Demanding proofs.
no subject
"He said so," she says, in a tone reminiscent of the one she used to persuade him to cut off her arm. "He told my mother Candlekeep is no place for a child and that he didn't care where I went. They argued it back and forth for I don't know how long, I went to find something to read after a while."
no subject
“It’s not like I’m the expert on children, but that’s singularly—” he starts, then stops, then frowns at her. Plainly: “You deserved better, Ennaris.”
no subject
Ennaris blinks at Stephen, struck suddenly with a very strange thought, a sense she's never had before—what a naïve thing for such a smart person to say. He thinks she doesn't know.
"Of course," plainly, patiently, "but he is my father."
She was a child. She didn't ask to be born, or to be his, or to be anything at all. The least she deserved was a parent, even just one, who wanted her. But she had Keya and Vazeiros, and so that's not what she got. Deserving is a useless abstract, pointless to waste time on.
If the calculus is cruel, that is irrelevant. It is.
poss yrs to wrap?
The issue of the stump, in fact, is simpler. Even with the medical complications, the trouble healing, the infection and near-sepsis, this is at least a physical problem that Doctor Strange knows how to solve. And it’s already been cleaned out and re-dressed, this checkup long-since technically finished, but —
“It’s healing nicely,” Stephen says, a quick pivot back into safer territory, even though it’s repeating what he’s already said and what she already knows. He readjusts the trailing end of the bandage, tucking it in tighter.
“So I think we’re about done here, Ennaris.” And then, in case that feels too much like potential dismissal, he offers her a quick smile along with: “And telepathy practice at the usual time tomorrow, if you’re feeling up for it?”