#surgery where you have no tools and also can't see what you're doing relying on anatomical knowledge and a kind of echolocation type sense.

[everybodyknows-everybodydies]

The world is white.

The world is always some degree of white in Winterhold, some degree of pale monochrome, but this silence is… wrong. It takes Mirabelle a moment to realize the un-silence is the ringing in her ears muffling everything else.

An unfocused dark shadow interrupts the sea of white. Mirabelle blinks, once, twice; slowly, slowly, her vision clears a little; a hazy Faralda is leaning over her, wild curls haloed around her tight face. Saying something. Something important, surely; Faralda has never wasted a word.

“What? What is it?” Mirabelle tries to say, but can’t work her jaw, can’t hear either of them over the loud echo of nothing in her ears and some awful taste in her mouth and a heat—somehow both familiar and unfamiliar—that has caught her right hand. She tries to spit out whatever is in her mouth and is illogically self-conscious that she nearly chokes on it instead.

She can’t move. Why can’t she move? The warm tell-tale glow of restoration magic at her chest, where it feels like a mammoth has sat down. Ah—she recognizes, or remembers, or it only starts now that everything hurts. Pain clenches through every muscle. There, at least: sound beginning to seep faintly, barely, back in. “…going to need at least another three hours of this,” Colette is saying, her reedy voice on edge as ever, but with a sincere and tearful panic Mirabelle is unused to hearing from her. Take deep breaths, she wants to remind her, but her tongue is heavy in her mouth and tastes of metal. She can’t take a deep breath. “It’s too much. It’s too much. I haven’t got enough magicka to last that long.”

“Use mine. Take mine.” Faralda sounds utterly grim. That isn’t what she’s supposed to sound like, Mirabelle thinks vaguely as the world fades out again. Where has her eternal wry humor gone?

 ---

This is already much longer than she should have been able to go. The light keeps sputtering out in her hands, her magicka taut and ragged and wispy as a fraying thread on the verge of snapping. “I can’t,” Colette chokes. “I need both hands here. I can’t do it. I can’t do it.”

Poor Savos was already dead before any of them could reach him. It will be much worse, she imagines, a little distant from herself, to have Mirabelle die like this, under her own ineffective shivering fingertips.

There’s too much to knit together where she can’t see, too much displaced, misaligned; she’d straightened out the spine first to try to help get everything else closer to where it belongs, but Mirabelle had only opened her eyes to spit out a horribly solid chunk of something bloody with an awful gurgling sound and gasp, frighteningly shallow. Lungs. Ribs. The heart at least seems fine for now, and thank Mara for small miracles, but the abdominal cavity, which is disorganized on a good day—she thinks with a sudden fierce passion that she has always hated the abdominal cavity—

Faralda’s mouth is a grim line across from her. “You have to,” she says, never looking up. “You have to. This isn’t—it’s not—”

A shadow. A hand on her shoulder. She prepares to snap that she has told everyone to stay well away to let them make their futile attempt in isolation, terrified at the thought of the whole College audience to her impending certain failure, but it dies in her throat. Uncharacteristically pale and unsmiling, Kharish kneels beside her. “The thing in Labyrinthian,” she says, quieter than Colette has ever heard her, “knew how to siphon. I hadn’t…” She shifts her jaw. “I know what it feels like, now. I can try to—to replicate it, in reverse. To help. So you can cast uninterrupted.”

“You won’t last long enough either,” Faralda says, voice hard and glinting. She thrusts out a hand, palm upwards, long fingers rigidly straight. “I said use mine and I meant it. You can’t let her—” She snaps her teeth together suddenly and doesn’t finish the thought, as if biting off the word could prevent its happening, as if it isn’t already hanging in the air ready to outlast all their scrabbling efforts. “You will not,” she says at last, with a terrible finality, and says no more.

“I’m sorry I’m not very good,” Kharish admits, an embarrassed little tremor to her voice, “at dual casting.” She takes Faralda’s outstretched hand.

The rush of foreign magicka blazes so hot and so sudden that for half a second Colette is convinced there will be a print on her shoulder forever, and the end of a curl that has fallen into her eyes briefly catches fire—but it’s there.

Lungs first. She pulls the ribs straight, smooths out the tissue, moving with the airflow. Follow a breath in and out: less ragged, less wet. Good. Again. Again.

Again.

---

It is much later than she would have expected when it shifts and the wild heat burns out at last, replaced by something else, soft in the way of freshly-sanded wood. Faralda huffs out a breath, shivering—Colette has never seen Faralda shiver before—and says, hoarse, “I’ve got it. I can keep on.” She has not let go of Mirabelle’s hand. They will be here all night, and Faralda will not let go of her hand. The way her mouth is set, she looks as though she might never let go again.

“Take a moment to recover,” Colette says through gritted teeth, concentrating on the way the liver fits into place. “She and I can manage just fine until then.”

“How—how much longer do you think…” Kharish wets her lips. Her grip on Colette’s shoulder tightens for a moment.

She’s afraid to look, Colette thinks. “She’s breathing fine now,” she tells her, which does not really answer the question but is all she can do for now. And that is good. She sets after the tangle of the abdominal cavity, which she has decided lamentingly is her archnemesis. It does not seem nearly so insurmountable as it had when the sun was still up, though, and holding fast to the thought that whatever else she manages, Mirabelle has time now, she presses on.

Kharish’s magicka runs dry much sooner than Faralda’s had. Colette has barely begun knitting the intestines back into shape when the wood-soft feeling splinters away, leaving only her own, unaugmented. Immediately Faralda is there again, scorching. “Sorry,” Kharish croaks out, alarmed, “I didn’t ask if you were ready—”

“Yes. Yes.” Faralda shakes her head once, hard, as if waking up. “Please.”

After a moment spent studying her haggard face, Colette says, “You are both keeping a reserve so I don’t have two more people to worry after, aren’t you? Aren’t you?”

“Ye-es,” winces Kharish, which is so painfully and clearly a lie that Colette would laugh if she didn’t also have much more concerning things at hand.

“Don’t worry about me,” says Faralda; “I will be as irresponsible about it as I need to be.”

This is not reassuring in the slightest, but it does get them through the abdomen.

---

The sky has begun to grey into dawn when Colette shakes Kharish’s hand off her shoulder and says, “Give me her hand, that’s all now.”

Faralda’s expression contorts about thirteen different ways in the span of half a second before she lets go. “That’s all,” she says, almost disbelieving.

Kharish opens her eyes. “We did it?”

“Well—it will be a few weeks before we should expect to see her in the halls, certainly, but,” she swallows and sits back on her heels, rubbing her palms on her thighs where they’ve gone numb from the constant channeling, “yes.”

Faralda laughs, far higher than usual, and then says suddenly, “Oh. I’ve got to sit down.”

“You are sitting down,” Colette says, exasperated. “I told you to hold back a reserve—”

“I’m not sitting down. I’ll go to tell—to tell everyone.” A stupid giddy smile on her face, Kharish pauses halfway to her feet, swaying dangerously, like a drunkard. “Oh,” she says. “Hang on. I’ve got a really good one to celebrate. Do you know the difference between a joke and a rhetorical question?”

“This is not the time for your nonsense,” Colette begins to bark, and then with a whuff Kharish pitches backwards into the snow. Mouth agape, Colette stares for a moment, then whips her head around to Faralda, who has only prevented her own collapse by propping herself up against the stone wall of the bridge first. “Really!” She stands, knees wobbling most unfortunately, and sends up the flimsiest magelight that possibly ever was cast. It does the job, at least—a shout, and a handful of dark shapes come running from town. “I have to do everything myself!”

---

Mirabelle opens her eyes to the soft glow of candlelight. Colette freezes in the doorway. “Oh, your timing is awful.” She hurries to amend, “That is—I am very glad to see you awake. But I’ve just gotten her to leave—are you really awake this time? Say something, and I’ll tell her you said hello or—whatever it is you like!” And then she’s sniffling violently, which is alarming, and says with startling intensity, “None of you are ever scaring me like this again! Promise me, Mirabelle!”

Mirabelle, bewildered, tries to sit up and finds she has been buried under what appears to be every blanket in the building. She opens her mouth—there was a foul taste, or something, she recalls, but it isn’t there now. “I think,” she manages around the dryness of her tongue, “I need some water, and then you can explain what exactly… happened.” She licks at her lips, thoughtfully flexing the fingers of her right hand. Something warm there, too, she remembers, and something tingles at the back of her neck. “And if it’s alright,” she pushes at the mountain of blankets, “I think I would rather a fire.”