Note: hey lovely readers! Again, thank you to everyone who left a review and followed! I'm playing around with medical knowledge in this chapter and future chapters, so if you have any questions please do not hesitate to leave a review or shoot me a DM with your question/comment. Otherwise, please R&R =)

Also, Cullen will be making an appearance soon. Not saying when, just... soon. =)

A big thank you to my fanfiction writing group! You're all amazing!

Warnings: blood, violence, attempted murder

Chapter 2: Alienage Reality Check

Eve tried to focus and shake off the grip of sleep, her bones leaden with exhaustion. If only things would stop smearing into hazes of color; orange light gilded everything with a hypnotic blaze, like that ear covered in black warts that was strangely looming closer and closer...

A sharp flick on the point of her own ear made her lurch back with a yelp. Maker's pustulated gronk, that hurt! Eve ground down on her reflexes, her body remembering that she held a scalpel in her hand even if her mind was asleep. She caught the side-eyed glare from Nessa, her profile fiery in the evening sun streaming in from the third storey window. The bedroom was cramped, only barely accommodating a straw mattress on the floor and a chair. A ratty rug did little to hide the rough slats that made the floor, through which Eve could see the rooms of the floor below. Eve shuddered away from the reminder that they were three storeys up in one of the most rickity buildings in the alienage and refocused on her task.

"...and I wake up drenched at night, coughing my head off worse than my mother," the patient complained between rattling breaths. " I... I hope it is just a stubborn cold. It's been going around in the district. I have to get back to the shem's estate gardens and start work again tomorrow."

Eve got back to work as Nessa nodded, her eyes bright above the muslin mask swaddled over her mouth and nose. "Well, that may be out of the question for now," she said gently, "you are barely able to get out of bed and your lungs are much too wet. Your husband can take care of things for a few days."

"No, they are short of work at the farm at least for the next week and we are beggaring ourselves as it is," the patient said, wincing as Eve delicately cut off a wart. "We have three children. I must get back on my feet soon. Are you sure this isn't just a cold?" she asked hopefully.

"Well, your symptoms are very general-"

The diagnosis popped out of Eve's mouth without thought. "Consumption."

The patient jumped a little under Eve's hand at her statement and too late, Eve caught Nessa's warning look. "Con- consumption?" the patient asked, a touch of dread in her voice.

Eve grimaced at Nessa's pointed look. Too late to take it back now. "Yes, serah," Eve said warily, holding her bloody scalpel still, "you have consumption. It's not uncommon for it to travel through crowded places, especially in the alienage-"

"Consumption," the patient repeated in a determinedly calm voice. "Like... what my mother had?"

Nessa was glaring at Eve now. "Most likely," Nessa said, gentling her tone while addressing the patient. Eldrina, Eve's tired brain belatedly remembered, mother of three who has an elderly mother with consumption that she and Nessa visited every month. Maker, as if having these warts that would spread if left unchecked weren't bad enough... "It is easy for it to pass to others who share the same space often," Nessa said, taking Eldrina's trembling hand in her own, "but you know that it is livable. Your mother has had it for years and she manages with the coughing and fever draughts when it recurs. It need not be dire."

"How can you be sure?" Eldrina demanded, voice rising between hacking coughs. Gobs of spit and mucus landed on Nessa's oiled leather work tunic. "It's just a little coughing! It killed our neighbor - I need more proof before you sentence me to a slow death!"

This time, Eve bit her tongue without having to meet Nessa's glare. As much as she believed that everyone should know the truth, especially about their own health, giving the news now wouldn't help Eldrina accept it. And Nessa's glare promised consequences, so she kept her mouth shut.

Never mind that the truth was right there, waiting to be seen. Recently, Eve had discovered that all she had to do was close her eyes, find the singing thread that lived inside her and flex it a certain way, and open her eyes to see things in other people. Like the cluster of what looked like boggy, soft eggshells beginning to crust the bottom of Eldrina's lungs - every single person who had consumption had lungs that looked like that, on top of the night sweats and common cold symptoms. But Eldrina didn't seem ready to hear it.

Instead, she said, "I may be mistaken, serah Eldrina. I am but an apprentice and still learning."

Eldrina finally stopped fretting in her seat. "You are young. Only thirteen, if I am not mistaken," she said stiffly. "There is much for you to learn. But, I have heard of your... keen awareness, from others. Nessa must be teaching you well."

"She is a thorough teacher," Eve said quietly, resolving to keep her mouth shut for the rest of the home visit so she didn't spook the nervous mother. "Please keep still, I am almost finished here." With sure deftness, her scalpel darted quickly, cutting the last of the black warts dotting Eldrina's left ear, warts that had tripled in size since their last visit. She was so focused that she didn't notice the queer look Nessa gave her.

"Well, I have your cough draughts here Eldrina," Nessa said smoothly, fishing corked bottles of green liquid out of her work satchel and lining them up on the floor next to the meager straw mattress. "And some extra for your mother. I'd like to check her over before we leave since it's been a month since we last saw her and I'd like to listen to her lungs again-"

"Oh, no that's not necessary," Eldrina interrupted hurriedly, pressing a grey rag to her ear to staunch the bleeding. Interestingly, the un-pocked parts were blushing a bright red. "She is dead - er, she died. Last week. Of- of consumption."

Both Nessa and Eve stilled. Eve remembered that they hadn't seen the kind, doughy grandmother in a couple months. "My deepest condolences," Nessa said softly.

Eldrina nodded, her greying hair swinging forward to hide her lined face. "Thank you," she said curtly, "it... it was her time."

There wasn't much to say after that and Eldrina didn't seem to relish prolonging the home visit, so Eve wrapped up her tools in her satchel quickly as Nessa started tallying the total for their services.

"My husband should have your coin, Nessa. He'll be down by the entrance waiting for word from the farms."

Nessa thanked her and gave Eve a telling look on her way out the bedroom. Eve nodded - she knew what her duties were by now, after three years of seriously undertaking surgeries and responsibilities at Nessa's clinic.

"Ser, I'll help you to your bed," Eve offered. After she'd helped Eldrina into her bed with a little struggle - Eve was still rather small and slight at thirteen years old - she slipped out of the bedroom onto the landing.

Leaning against the wall, Eve sighed and rested her eyes, mindful not to fall down the long flight of stairs leading down to the second floor. Muffled domestic sounds and the smell of home cooking floated through thin walls, attesting to the numerous families living cheek-by-jowl in this grey building, little better than a lean-to that had shot up with each family forced to its door. Maker, she felt little more than overwhelming pity every time she stepped foot in the Banal'ras district with Nessa, the district holding the poorest elves in Denerim who had nowhere else to go.

Eve wished she and Nessa were home already. Maker, it had been a long day - this was the fourth day where they had got up to work before dawn to help the people in the Banal'ras and Vunen'vallas district with a sickness that was sweeping through the alienage. Most patients had a cold or a stomach bug, thank the Maker, but here and there had been more serious things and Nessa had kept her working and practicing her skills until her eyes felt like crossing from the fatigue-

"-don't see how you're charging so much for picking skin off," a rough voice complained in a rare lull in the building.

Eve could hear tension in Nessa's voice as she answered. "Serah, if left alone those lesions would have multiplied and grown roots deep in her skin then turned raw-"

"Then if it were so bloody serious, why have the kid do the work-"

"-the kid is my apprentice and has completed one hundred and three surgeries in the last three years-"

"-then I'd like an apprentice-discount-"

That was her cue to hurry to Nessa and subtly encourage the irate husband to pay so they could leave. Eve had learned long ago that the least pleasant interaction between surgeon and patient was not the assorted sights and smells of sickness or getting puked on, but negotiating payment for important supplies or procedures that the family suddenly deemed trivial and certainly not worth their hard-earned coin. Eve always had to bite her tongue from pointing out that the amount would be far higher without the discount that Nessa handed out indiscriminately to the point where they barely turned a profit.

Keeping her eyes on her boots, Eve carefully climbed down to the second floor landing and was about to climb down to the first floor when something tugged at her inner thread.

Instead of climbing down, Eve turned left tightly on the landing and peered down the hallway leading to someone else's quarters. No, the tugging didn't come from there… it came from…

There was a small door under the stairs. Unlatching it, she blinked at the gloom inside the cupboard then almost gagged at the sour smell. Swallowing a retch, she almost backed away until she spotted a pair of wizened feet curled in the dark, then heard a thin moan.

"H-hello? Ser?" Eve asked uncertainly. Why was this person hiding here? Maybe this was someone's very cheap living quarters - was she intruding? But the latch was on the outside…

Pushing the disturbing thought aside, she waited a breath for a reply, and when none came she crouched low and poked a foot. Still nothing. "Ser, I'm coming in," Eve announced quietly, "I just want to make sure you're alright." Eve carefully sidled into the cupboard without jostling the person. Maker, it was dark - but she could just make out a slight elf curled on her side, white hair disheveled over her wrinkly face, skin sagging where flesh should have filled it out.

She knew that face. "Gertrude?" Eve said, laying her hand gently on Eldrina's mother's shoulder, "what are you doing under here?"

Gertrude shivered, her shoulder little more than bone under Eve's hand and moaned again. Splotches of something dark - mud? - smeared her seamed skin except it smelled like rust when she tried to clean it off-

Eve froze, then swore and twisted her vision. Cracks like starbursts etched Gertrude's skull, the neck of her thigh bone was broken clean through, blood was slowly pumping out from torn arteries and veins from swollen tissue and cut skin-

"Eve! Maker, what's taking you so long, girl?"

A second later, Nessa's harried face and curly hair was framed by the cupboard door. "You just left me with the nattering- Maker, what did I tell you about poking your nose into things-?"

"Nessa, it's Gertrude, Eldrina's mother," Eve whispered quickly even though Gertrude didn't seem able to hear anything, "she's badly hurt. Left skull fracture with moderate bleeding, femur broken with some swelling in her pelvis - I think her nerve is damaged; her heart and breaths are slow. She's unconscious, can't get a response from her. I think she fell down the stairs but I don't know how she got in here with these injuries."

Nessa's silhouette stilled, then she swore under her breath. "I didn't - I'd hoped that they hadn't - sweet Maker. Get out, I'll stay with her while you get the guard-"

The city guard? Eve wondered. Why would they need-?

Nessa yelped as a larger silhouette pushed her over. "You'll do no such thing," a man's voice said softly while Eve scrambled to get out of the cupboard. "Just forget you saw this, alright?"

Eve stepped out onto the landing just as Nessa found her feet and shoved Eve behind her. "How could you?" Nessa squawked, outraged, "your own mother in law! You wait til Eldrina hears of this-"

A mirthless grin crossed the man's face, who Eve recognized to be Eldrina's farm-working husband. "You think she'd be bothered by it?" he asked, keeping his voice low with a glance down the hall. "Her mother, coughing every other night and spitting up blood and demanding this and that every week with coin we don't got? Having to pay you cutthroat shams every month even though the potions never fixed her? Eldrina will breathe easier when she won't have to worry about that hole in our purse anymore."

"You can't just kill family when they can't work any longer," Nessa spat as Eve' blood ran ice-cold. "She raised your wife and did the same for your little ones while you were working. If you were having trouble with payments, you could have appealed to Cyrion-"

"Cyrion," he snorted, "with his 'united People', then forgetting about us the second a shem gives him a sob story, then he sends help their way and where are we now? Didn't throw a copper my way last time-"

"He isn't a fool like you," Nessa snapped, "maybe if you'd spent coin on your family instead of at the gambling den he would have helped you again-"

The slap echoed in the landing and Eve squeaked as Nessa was knocked sideways into the wall then slumped to the floor. The man was no longer smiling; his tired face was suddenly a paroxysm of rage.

"I've had enough of you quacks," the farmhand spat, raising a booted foot to stamp down on Nessa's ribs, "better to rid the world of useless leeches like you and Gertrude, bleeding us dry-"

The farmhand fell down the stairs with a shout when Eve shoved him before his boot could stamp down. Feeling equally triumphant and scared, Eve hurried to Nessa's side and tried to ignore the pounding in her head. The crashing roused Nessa as a bar of light pierced the gloomy landing.

"Ser! Help us," Eve beseeched the woman peering through the hall door, heart pounding in her ears as she tried to help Nessa to her feet. Nessa groaned and shook her head of greying curls and Eve was struck with the realization that Nessa wasn't as young as she used to be, and her heart tightened with fear. "He pushed his mother in law down the stairs and we need someone to call the guard-"

The door closed with a snap, then rattled as if something were shoved under the handle to reinforce it. For a second, Eve was speechless. "How could they-? They're just going to ignore us?" she exclaimed, indignant.

Nessa winced, rubbing her reddened cheek as she swayed on her feet. "Never underestimate a fool's fear," she muttered to Eve as she grabbed her apprentice's cloak and pulled her to the stairs. "They're scared of getting involved and somehow blamed. No one wants to get on the bad side of the city guard, and those neighbors had an old uncle fall down the stairs and die three months ago."

"Was it - did they kill him?"

"It's not rare when money is tight and the family can't work anymore," Nessa said bitterly as they hurried down the narrow staircase. She gave Eve a sympathetic look when she saw her shock. "They'd rather pay a one-time undertaker fee rather than send for a surgeon every month. Remember the patient with the faulty heart in the Vened'has district? His head was definitely hit, but probably not on a table end like his granddaughter claims-"

Eve blanched and almost stumbled on the creaking steps. People - her people - just killed each other? Over the pittances that Nessa charged? Disbelief gave way to hot anger as she remembered Eldrina's peculiar comment and realized that the wife was in on it too. She couldn't fathom pushing Nessa down the stairs when she eventually got too old to hold a scalpel anymore, not to the woman who had taken her in and taught her everything she knew and more. The pounding in Eve's head was building into a roiling storm, mixing everything up inside her with a roar, even the singing thread-

They rounded a corner - the door leading to the alley was right there - when a shadow blocked their way. The farmhand was winding his arm back for another punch and Eve darted under the arm Nessa had thrown out to protect her; there was no room for fear around the need to hurt him back and suddenly he was flying through the gloom from her punch, dust showering him as he hit the wall with a crack. Eve didn't bother to see if he was hurt, she grabbed Nessa and hustled her out into the alley.

The sun had set behind the grey thunderheads hanging low in the dark sky, bellies swollen with rain. Eve followed Nessa, cloaks flapping behind them as they cut through the thick humid air to the end of the alley and Eve was the first to leap through one of the large gaps in the fence. The dirt road lined with the burnt skeletons of old buildings and makeshift tents was surprisingly quiet, and the hurricane of voices in her head quieted at the familiar sight of the ex-templar district; she was back in familiar territory, territory that was usually filled with roving raving human patients, but familiar nonetheless. She knew where each nook and hidey hole was, knew that the guard tower was on the other side of the district and it'd only take them a few minutes at a flat run to reach it-

A sharp cry froze her in her tracks. Panting, she wheeled around and saw two figures by the fence - Nessa was yelling and trying to squirm out from the farmhand's grip on her hair.

"I can't let you get the guard," the farmhand shouted over Nessa's enraged screeches. "The shems won't care about an old elf who fell down the stairs. I'll let you go if you promise not to get them-"

"You tried to kill your mother in law!" Nessa yelled, trying to claw at his face. "That's murder-"

"Doesn't matter, she's dead by now," he grunted as he caught one of her flailing fists, "if the shems find out, I won't be allowed back on their farm and then who'll work-"

He cried out as Eve slipped up behind him and broke his grip on Nessa with all the strength she had in her fist. He backed up to the fence with a bellow of pain and bewilderment, cradling his left forearm which was now clearly bent the wrong way and bleeding from four long lacerations. How had she done that?

"They'll listen to us when we tell them what we saw," Eve said, her voice steady even as the storm pitched and raged inside her head. "We'll tell them about the skull and femur fracture, about the bleeding, even about the two older fractures - you tried to kill her before, didn't you? In the last month after our last visit - she was in agony, you monster, they didn't heal right and that rib was piercing her lung for weeks-"

Color was draining from the farmhand's tanned face as he gaped down at her, but it was Nessa who spoke. "Eve," she said quietly as she nudged Eve away from the farmhand, "how could you know?"

"Don't - don't you know?" Eve asked, confused but letting Nessa shove her further up the street. "You can see if a bone is broken or if it healed crooked-"

Nessa shook her head, her curly hair glimmering in the distant flashes of lightning. "It takes years of practice, da'len. It's hard to find old breaks if they healed, even crookedly, and rib fractures can be very deceptive-"

"What does it matter?" Eve interrupted impatiently, never taking her eyes off the farmhand, "there are people like him who do that to their own family-"

"And how do you expect us to feed our families, our children, if we have to keep paying surgeons for family that don't bring coin in?" the farmhand spat, jerking away from the fence. "We barely have enough to get by, we're already in debt and I'll be damned if I have to turn my family out on the streets for potions that don't fix things for good. Your head's crammed up Andraste's blessed arse if you think there's a perfect solution to everything - what we did is normal! Normal in the alienage!"

"That doesn't make it right," Eve spat, trying to get around Nessa's arm to try and hurt him as much as he deserved, "and if it's so normal, will you do the same for your wife when she can't work anymore?"

"What do you mean?" the farmhand asked, looming closer but for the first time he sounded nervous.

Eve hesitated. She'd never broken news about a patient's health with vengeance in her heart - with the intent of hurting someone else with it. But then she remembered Gertrude, broken and alone, curled under the staircase and Nessa crumpled on the landing as the boot came down and her anger rallied.

"Your wife has consumption," Eve jeered over Nessa's attempts to shush her, and she felt a thrill of savage satisfaction at the farmhand's shock at the karmic revelation, "she'll need regular checkups too, and-"

Suddenly, Nessa's curls obscured her vision just as the farmhand swung his fist. A crack reverberated through the bones of her skull as the back of Nessa's head collided with Eve' nose. Tears of pain sprung into her eyes as she toppled backwards into the squelching mud, squeaking out a breathless yelp when Nessa landed on top of her.

Something was wrong. Wriggling out from under the dead weight (that wasn't right), Eve peered blearily down at Nessa's empty eyes (something's wrong), blankly reflecting a flash of lightning. She was so pale and still in the mud (wrongwrongwrong).

"Nessa? Nessa!" Eve squeaked through aching ribs. She scrambled to her knees and clumsily smoothed a curl away from Nessa's pale face and her hand came away black with hot blood.

No.

Someone - the farmhand, she realized - boxed both her ears. Eve yelped in eye-watering pain and confusion, dazed as she was roughly hauled to her feet by her hair, made all the more painful as she squirmed, trying to get back to Nessa to make sure she was alright, that she was just knocked breathless from the fall and nothing more serious until a muscled arm wrapped around her neck and unrelentingly pressed against her throat.

"You're lying, you little lying shit," the farmhand growled between pants, "lying's what you do, isn't it? Lying to winkle us out of more money to treat imaginary sicknesses and giving us potions and teas that don't work to bleed us dry, that's what you do to honest folk; be doing us all a favor, getting rid of your kind-"

The world was dimming as Eve struggled wildly, trying to focus even as her head spun as she fought to choke in a gasp of air. A cool side of her brain noted that she was experiencing the effects of air deprivation, that she will use up all the air in her struggles and become light headed enough to not notice when she slipped into unconsciousness and died with a swollen throat ringed with blue bruises when her body was found. Another side of her brain was only focused on getting to Nessa,insisting on making sure she was alright and only shocked by the fall and that she must be getting back on her feet by now but needed to see it for herself. The loudest part of herself was screaming, yelling at her to do something more than weakly flail at the dimming sky. That part found the singing thread in the mental maelstrom, seized it as a fork of lightning seared the sky and demanded that it do something-

The sky cracked and white light burned the world and singed her vision. Pain roared fleetingly and then her mind was empty, empty of anything but searing agony, almost empty of all sense, but the shadows were pressing in again, the whiteness flickering until it slowly vanished.

Eve opened her eyes and wondered if she was blind. She slowly realized that she was staring up at the dark underbellies of the clouds as rain silently prickled her skin. Could she move? Her muscles spasmed as she shuddered in racking gasps and she found that she painfully could.

She'd been lying on something. With trouble, she peered down at it until her mind recoiled; that couldn't be a charred mouth frozen in a silent scream, but the ivory glint of teeth proved her otherwise. She flung herself away from the body smoking gently in the rain, scraping her hands on the scorched furrows of mud dried around her and retched, trying to get the sticky smell of burnt flesh out from the back of her swollen throat.

She'd scrambled far enough away from the charred remains of the farmhand that she bumped into something else. Nessa's vacant face was chalk-pale against the churned mud darkened by the halo of blood, black in the lightning flashes. She didn't so much as twitch when Eve pinched the pressure point by her neck. Slowly, Eve realized that it wasn't her vision, her mind or the cold rain that was hiding Nessa's breaths and her pulse - she had none.

"Nessa?" she asked dumbly. She didn't know what to do. Vaguely she remembered that when a patient stopped breathing, she and Nessa would usually try to force a few breaths down the throat and then inevitably sent a street urchin for the undertaker. But this was Nessa.

Eve reached for her - somehow she had to touch her, hold her - perhaps it would bring her back, erase everything that happened that night - and noticed too late that the white flickering wasn't her vision, but thin streaks of lightning arcing around her arms. She heard herself yell in fear and flinched back when Nessa twisted upwards after Eve' palms touched her torso. And then her chest rose. And again. And again. Her breaths were hoarse and shallow, shallower with each gasp.

Curiously, Eve knew what to do. (She was so far beyond disbelief at the turn of events of that night; perhaps this was a hallucination from the lack of sleep these past four days; perhaps she was dreaming). Confidently, she found that keening song just outside of her hearing, felt for it - then opened it like a curtain.

A glowing ball of light shimmered into being, shedding deep blue light on Nessa's unnaturally still body. Eve commanded the spirit to mend her, to mend them both but to leave the woodcutter to his fate and with her inner vision, fractures mended and the bleeding stopped as arteries knit themselves together. Nessa's frazzled, uncoordinated heart began to pump slowly and in unison.

Nessa sat up with rosy cheeks, brown eyes bright and vibrant, smile radiating warmth and beaming with pride because she'd done it, she was the best surgeon, she was the best in the alienage-

"This is all as sweet as Andraste's fuzzy dimpled peach, but I'd rather you stop before I vomit."