Chapter Text
When Neve awoke surrounded by the stark white walls of a hospital room, it was with a profound sense of loss. She could tell right away that she’d lost a large block of time. It would take a few hours, fading in and out of consciousness, before she realized what else she’d lost.
It was a surreal grief, heavy like a lead blanket. For all the times in her life when it felt like she left a piece of herself behind after a job, it had never been literal before.
Calpernia was by her side when she came to, rigid and wan. As much as Neve felt disturbed to be seen like that—vulnerable, weak, in pain—she was glad it was Calpernia. Anyone else may have tried to sugarcoat it or stall. Even though it’d been some time since they split, both romantically and ideologically, nobody else knew her like Calpernia did, and would understand that she needed to find grounding in the knowing.
She already knew what happened to her foot, without being told. Breaking the rune like that—it was like stepping on a buried gaatlok mine. It was a miracle the blast hadn’t taken more of her. What she needed to know was if it was worth it.
It was. They won. Calpernia capitalized on the chaos and confusion and killed the Venatori, then destroyed the temple so the ritual site could never be used again. One of the would-be sacrifices got caught in the crossfire, but the rest made it out alive. That, at least, took a little of the weight off Neve’s chest.
It was Templars Savas and Brom who got Neve to the hospital in time. Pulled her off the rune, fed her all the healing potions they had, tied a tourniquet below her knee, carried her up the ladders and chutes all the way back into the city. Neve felt both mortified and guilty. All the times she’d thought poorly of them, Savas—Rana—and Brom, only to be saved by them in her eleventh hour.
Mortified and guilty would be Neve’s prevailing feelings along the long road to recovery.
The hardest part was the first few days awake. The pain, the constant stream of physician-mages and nurses prodding at her, chantry sisters offering to pray. Potions, dressing changes, revising stitches, sponge-baths. Being confined to a small bed in a small white room.
She’d say she resented the visitors. She certainly wasn’t the one to summon them, and didn’t want to be seen so low, but… when the visiting hours were up for the day, and she found herself alone and hurting, she couldn’t truthfully say she didn’t look forward to the next day.
There was Calpernia, of course, nearly every day. Uncle Omar, as often as he could make it from the countryside. Several women from her apartment building took up a rotation and brought notes from other neighbors. Elek the Thread, once. Halos the fish-peddler and a few other merchants. Brom and Jahvis, here and there. Even Livvy, the little girl whose runaway dog Neve found for her last summer; her thank-you note was still in the tattered remains of Neve’s jacket.
And there was Templar Rana, outed immediately by a too-cheerful nurse as having visited every day while she was out cold. Rana had the good grace to look embarrassed, but continued to visit every day after her shift ended. They had little to talk about; Rana never lingered, but always showed. Sometimes with Brom or Jahvis or both, but usually alone. Neve didn’t quite have the energy to be bothered by it.
Calpernia visited for the last time on the first day Neve was permitted to get out of bed. She arrived as Rana was leaving, and evidently, they’d drummed up some tension while Neve was lights-out. Neve didn’t ask—she didn’t want to know.
Calpernia came to say goodbye. She regretted that her dogmatic pursuit of her goals had led to all this, and decided to seek a fresh start elsewhere in Tevinter. She would leave Minrathous to Neve, and take up the mantle of freeing slaves elsewhere. But she would leave the mantle of renewing Tevinter’s glory behind, buried in the catacombs where it belonged. The goodbye was bittersweet. Neve never hated Calpernia, and could never blame her. She was there because she wanted to be, and she knew better than to touch the rune but did it anyway.
It had never quite occurred to Neve, until then, that a job could ‘get’ her. A folly of youth perhaps—thinking that she could run off into danger day in and out and never have it cost anything but a night’s sleep.
But that part of her life was over, anyway. No point in agonizing over it.
She’d never be able to afford a quality prosthesis, and one she could afford would likely cause her more problems than it’d be worth. Most people of her economic standing went without.
She could use magic to get around, but the sustained focus and mana that would require would drain her out and leave her high and dry if she needed to fight; and she couldn’t get around the way she needed to on crutches.
It was over.
Her detective work, her freeing slaves. Her ability to help her neighbors. Gone into thin air.
She’d failed. She did something stupid she couldn’t take back, and Dock Town had one fewer of very few to look after it.
After she left the hospital, Neve didn’t leave her apartment for weeks.
The ladies in her building forced their way in to clean and badger her into eating and washing, and she didn’t have the energy to turn them away. Everyone else who came knocking on her door was ignored until they left. Neve wallowed in bed and wished she didn’t recognize their voices. Rana, Brom. Livvy. Hal. Uncle Omar.
The turning point came one afternoon when she heard her lock being opened. It was Uncle Omar with a big bundle and Thread Elek, with his lockpicks.
Wrapped up in velvet, a finer fabric than that shoebox apartment had ever seen, was a cobra-shaped Dwarven brass lower leg prosthetic.
Elek knew a guy who knew a guy who knew a craftsman, and dozens of people in Dock Town pitched in for it. All Neve would need to do is go to the craftsman for a few adjustments, and it would fit her perfectly.
Neve never felt more overcome in her life.
The coin it’d have taken to buy such a thing would have kept half of Dock Town warm and dry for a year. To waste it all on one person, let alone her ?
She tried to refuse it. Raised her voice, and filled the space between herself and the men with a blizzard. Elek agreed to leave, but Uncle Omar stayed strong.
He reminded her: she spent her whole adult life helping her neighbors. She gave up a guaranteed life of comfort and luxury for them. Prioritized them over taking more lucrative jobs. Took up the mantle of protecting them from the cult, and breaking their chains. And then, she gave up a part of her own body for them.
So this gift was no different, he argued, than when they taught the children of Dock Town together, and the families kept their cupboards and closets full in return.
Uncle Omar left the bundle with her to think it over. It would take Neve a few more days to send a note to Elek, asking him to arrange a fitting with the craftsman.
The people of Dock Town still needed her.