Chapter Text
She spends about as much time awake as asleep these days. Its a marked improvement, and soon she is subjected to guests. Most of them do not cringe away from the bandaging and scars, so she knows they must have come to see her before and been prepared. No one has yet brought her a mirror but in the dim reflection of The Iron Bulls buckle she can make out a monster in red and white. She doesn’t look any closer.
“They wanted to bleed you.” He tells her, and she shudders at the idea. “Humorism is all the rage around here- Stitches threw the entire vat of leeches into the fire and now he has an enemy for life.”
“My hero.”
On her third ‘good day’ she learns that the background smell of the healers tower, the brackish,, herby odor she had attributed to the worse off patience on the lower floors, is actually coming from herself. Its a nasty realization, when the healer peels away her bandages, to see that they have been stuffed full of a black paste, half dried out from the heat of her skin, half moist from her sweat.
They tell her it was to help reduce the swelling and colour, that her wounds had been terribly swollen when she arrived, but the pain of the removal and the hot, damp smell has her screaming and shouting until the human woman is ushered away by the qunari that is stationed at her door.
A qunari healer comes instead, and he is not gentle with her but she finds it much easier to grit her teeth and bear the pain as he washes the paste from her skin with a frigid wet cloth. Pain is proof that she is still alive, has more fight left in her, and she will not let herself regret that. He seems to understand this and treats her efficiently and without doubting her ability to handle it. They wrap her in so much gauze that she feels stiff as an old corpse, but something about the pressure relieves the pain and more good days follow.
Lavellan returns and sits at her bedside, teaching her a simple game with rocks that is apparently popular with the dalish. He beats her twice, and when she concentrates she loses track of her pain entirely. He lets her win the third time and she is fairly certain she earned her win in the fourth round, but can’t be sure.
“Lets go again.” She says.
“This always happens-- I show someone the game and then never win again.” Lavellan laughs but sets the stones up again with a smile. “Strategy has never been my strong suit. I’m lucky to have my advisors or the Inquisition would have fallen months ago, having accomplished nothing.”
“I'm more Good Luck and Good Judge of Character than strategic, myself.” Tabris admits, looking hard at the pebbles and then Lavellan before making her first move. “Surrounding yourself with people whose opinion you trust is… good.”
“Is that what you did?”
“Yes.” She loses a stone and moves the next one, intent. “Leliana, Sten and Morrigan. Balancing their strengths and weaknesses, trusting their intuition. Trusting myself to make the final decision and live with the consequences.”
“Well I've got two out of three at my side, now.” he smiled, taking his turn and laughing when Tabris stole his stone. “But wait-What about Alistair?”
“He was more… moral support.”
Tabris wins the game and practices it on Krem until she is sick of it. Their wins and losses are roughly even, but Krem always manages to pull just ahead.
He is a terribly smug winner, and if not for their long friendship she would probably smack the smirk off his face. “Its because you sleep better than I do.” she decides. “How can I think clearly when I can’t sleep, and how can i sleep when I spend all my time in bed?”
There are attempts to remove her from the bed, once she has been deemed well enough to not need constant looking after. The problem, though, is her leg. While before it had been lopped off neatly above the ankle with most of the support for her dragons foot coming from steel wrappings around the knee, the fire and subsequent heat melted it into he flesh. They had to take off more of her leg, up to the mid thigh, and it was a messier job than the first one had been. While the loss of her foot had never much troubled her, the knee was apparently too much, what was left of the leg prone to sudden flaring pains. While Tabris could endure these lying down or sitting, the first attempts to give her a crutch to lean on sent her sprawling.
There is talk of taking more off now that is has healed badly but Tabris refuses.
Her personal invitation to the ball at Halamshiral just further pressure to perform. Multiple times she tries, either leaning on Sten or his attendants, once even holding Iron Bulls hands, but each time it is the same. Only the qunari truly believe in her, dont look half afraid that she will fall apart, but as time goes on their expectations seem to wane into resignation. They begin offering to take her out of the medical ward themselves, so she can recover with more privacy in Stens room, or even Bulls above the bar, where she can easily be found by those that want to see her. They tell her there is no shame in an injury, in needing help, in treating her body kindly.
She hates it, and does not accept it for herself.
“No one would think less of you, Kadan.” Sten told her, to which she immediately scoffed. “You are the Hero of Fereldan. Just surviving at all is being considered a miracle amongst the Andrastens.”
“And what better way to take the stars from their eyes than to see me carried around like a child? They would lose respect for me.”
“The people of Fereldan don’t respect you-- they love you. It would not lose you that.”
Its a distant feeling, and though Tabris has learned to accept herself as the person she once was, rather than only the one she has become, that person seems separate from the one in the bed. That person is one she doesnt feel like she knows yet, and is unwilling to accept. “Just a few more days and I’ll walk out of here on my own two feet.”
It isn’t possible, though, try as she might. Even with a newly built leg (disappointingly normal in shape, though its makings is superb) she can not stay upright long enough to let her leave the medical tower, let alone go to Halamshiral. She sends a note to Lavellan’s political advisor, Josephine, asking her to decline the invitation for her.
Apparently it is intercepted, though, by who Tabris doesnt know, because there is a sudden influx of mage visitors to her bedside, none of which she has ever met before. Its always a brief meeting, an introduction, thanks for whatever they have heard she had done during the Blight, and then an attempt to use healing energy on her leg.
They dont work-- of course they dont, because none of them are trained healers. The trained ones have already done their part, but the buzzy hum of energy is soothing as it travels up the bone, calming tightened muscles she had otherwise grown used to.
None of them help the pain permanently, but the number of faces that now have names make the idea of leaving her bed less dreadful than she had been willing to admit.
In the end it is not a mage that comes up with a solution, but the horsemaster.
When Tabris initially hears this she imagines a saddle being strapped to someone's shoulders and pulls a face, pretending to be offended by her own idea, but the realty is much more elegant.
She thinks, when he first brings it up the stairs, that it is a wheelbarrow, but when the light catches it correctly it is clearly a simple wooden chair with great wheels at the side. There are handles at the back and a foot rest on the bottom, and someone has etched the symbol of the grey wardens into the back.
Tabris has never seen any such thing before and she has to bite down on her lip to keep from tearing up.
“Its nothing fancy.” Says Master Dennet, and he is looking away, giving her time to process it. “And I didnt invent the idea. But if you wanna go to that ball, we’ll call this a working prototype.”
When Sten lifts her out of the bed and places her into the chair she isnt embarrassed at all.
Its a wonderful chair.
Not perfect, by any means. The improvements start at lining it with pillows and will later go on to include additional smaller wheels at the front and back to help it keep its balance. Eventually she will get a version of it that she can move herself, and a lightweight one that can more easily handle stairs.
But the first time around the castle, pushed steadily by one of Stens retainers while Sten himself walks beside her, love and pride obvious in his eyes, is the moment when Tabris knows for certain that she will be okay.