player plot | when my time comes around, pt 2

[cozen]

WHO: Anyone who didn't die here.
WHAT: A sad week.
WHEN: Approx Solas 21-30
WHERE: Granitefell, the Gallows, wherever else you want.
NOTES: A second log for this plot. Additional posts/logs will cover the time travel/fix-it components—this one is for the time period where no one knows that's a possibility.

Those who fly out to Granitefell arrive a few hours after dawn to find a smoldering gravesite and fewer than twenty living souls, Riftwatch's five included. The survivors have done what they can in the intervening hours, but there's still work to be done to tend to wounds, move the bodies—especially the delicate ones—and help the remaining villagers, mostly children, build pyres to see to their own dead before they're relocated somewhere safer. Somewhere with roofs that aren't collapsed or still lightly burning.

Carts to carry Riftwatch's dead won't arrive for some time afterward, and bringing them back takes just as long. It's a few days before they're returned to the Gallows, preserved from decay as best everyone could manage but nonetheless in poor shape from the battle. Pyres are an Andrastian tradition for a reason—to prevent possession—but burials and mummification aren't so unheard of that anyone will be barred from seeing to their loved ones as they see fit.

Before, during, and after any funerary rites, there are absences. Empty beds, empty offices, voices missing from the crystals, pancakes missing from Sundays. Belongings that need to be sorted and letters that need to be written. And, perhaps most pressingly, work that still needs to be done, including the work left behind by those who can no longer follow through on their own projects or tie up their own loose ends, as the world and its war keep moving steadily onward as if nothing happened at all.

Comments

viewing and visitation ota.

[tender]

The majority of the work to cleanse the worst of the battle's brutality from those who return toted by
wagons happens in the infirmary, halved between Stephen Strange and Derrica. It is quietly rendered, done to the best of both their ability.

And when they have done what they can, the last care they can bestow, between them they transport the dead from the silence of the infirmary to the hall set aside for those they have been tending.

Stephen and Derrica shroud them in white linen. Derrica draws the cold runes, careful sweeps of her fingers locking the magic into place before Stephen lays the dead down to rest, to be claimed and farewelled by those closest to them. They lay candles beside each of the fallen, so no one need linger in the dark.

It doesn't happen all at once. But by and by, all those escorted back to the Gallows from the devastation of Granitefell are returned to their colleagues, to be taken to pyre or burial, or whatever form of resting place they might have desired.

[ OOC / Consider this a general setting prompt open to everyone to use as a catch-all space. Please feel free to use it as a starter space for solo, contemplative threads, for threads with Derrica or Strange or both of them, as a space for starters for other characters, or whatever other content your heart so desires. ]

solo contemplative thread (sct)

[cozen]

Bastien visits the body out of necessity. To make sure he wouldn't be embarrassed by how he looks on such an important occasion. To tuck a thin envelope into his burial shroud, just in case there is some magic in a pyre that carries things into the Fade. To let Whiskey sniff the linen in hopes it makes her understand and stop searching for him. Through all of this he avoids touching the skin—not out of squeamishness around the dead, but because he has a good memory, and his fingers would never forget the cold.

And because this isn’t Byerly. The sliver of visible eyes are vacant, with none of the misery or merriment that marked By in turns. The mouth has nothing glib nor shockingly raw to say anymore. His posture where he lies is not elegant like By was when awake or ungainly and sprawling like when he was asleep.

It’s a shed skin. It would be like caressing a clipped toenail.

Bastien does fix his hair. Or unfixes it, more accurately, to add a rakish tousle over his forehead. His hair feels the same in a way his skin would not.

When he talks, standing beside this husk of what he loved and a bewildered, bereft dog, it isn’t to the body. It’s to the air, where he imagines the Veil to be. Where a loosed soul might be pressed against the other side to try to tell him it’s alright, or he’s terribly sorry, or a dozen other things Bastien would not want to hear right now.

"That’s it? You make me believe it is all possible and then you take off? Fuck you."

It’s the kind of conversational fuck you that might answer a low blow of a joke or a particularly unexpected win at cards. He’s only a little angry. Angry enough to refuse, from behind the shutters that slammed shut as soon as Byerly's name was left off the list of survivors, to make a scene crying over the body. But no more than that.

"You promised to jump the fence for me when I get there. Remember. If you get distracted by His radiance and make me sneak in after you, I’ll be really cross about it, so—don’t forget."

That’s all. They left so little unsaid, after all, once they'd warmed up to saying it.

Whiskey, stubborn and lazy even when she isn’t confused and whining beside her unmoving unbreathing wrong-smelling master, does not want to follow him out. In the end, a little too desperate to escape the room to be patient about it, he has to crouch and heft up all eighty of her pounds and carry her.

visitation. closed to stephen strange.

[propulsion]

Loitering about the entrance of the hall that's been set aside for viewing, Tony thinks about how—the air smells weird. Not like you'd expect. Candle wax, something like fresh snow, something sharp and herbal.

He's not a wreck, to look at him. Neatly dressed, neatly groomed, sunglasses hanging off his collar rather than disguising his eyes, which do not in fact need it—bright, sharp. His energy is restless even while standing in place, a shift of his weight between his feet, hands in jacket pockets, a roving casting around of a look that absorbs the sight of sixteen shrouded bodies, and then flicks to where he spies Stephen Strange.

Incongruous, he hails him with a raised hand. When Stephen gets nearer—

"Some party."

[portalling]

“Yep.” Stephen looks more wan than usual, frayed around the edges, tired. He has not cried. He’s not the type, and it doesn’t feel like he has the right.

He’s been haunting the edges of the great hall, watchful and silent, but steps quietly to Tony’s side once summoned. He’s never seen Riftwatch this hushed and muted and diminished; there’s a somber mood permeating the hall which feels achingly familiar, a memory pressing against his skull with the stubborn insistence of a headache, dull and throbbing.

“The last time I went to something like this,” he says, careful, “it was your funeral.”

Tony, Natasha, and Vision. Three dead. Technically a pittance, to be traded against trillions. A pittance, against sixteen.

It doesn’t really matter anymore, but it’s where his thoughts keep drifting to. Dark clothes, serious expressions, and that muted quiet.

[propulsion]

"Like this? That sucks."

There's an extended joke, here; didn't Pepper catch that Word document he'd left, specifying an Ironettes reunion tour, some fireworks, a fondue fountain in the style of the Bellagio, to keep people on their toes? But his capacity for humour is, let's say, a little diminished, reduced to quietly muttered (for Stephen's hearing only) sardonic asides rather than full world-building.

A quirk up of the corner of his mouth, and he says, "It doesn't. Thanks for doing this." Up close, there's more signs of wear, but here they are, two men who don't cry much, a little scuffed at the edges. "You wanna..."

Tony darts a look out into the hall.

"Did you make any friends?"

And there's something to that, where 'friends' isn't about the muppets you tolerate, or make life more bearable by having a pleasant rapport, or play-act at camaraderie while you wait to go home. He starts moving, slow steps, with the expectation Strange will follow.

[portalling]

For an inane moment his mind interprets it as a parent asking their kid, Stephen did you make any friends at school today, but he knows the spirit in which it’s meant.

He falls in line, walking shoulder-to-shoulder with the other man, hands folded into his robes and mustering together those scraps of composure and trying to look like the stately sorcerer he’s supposed to be. Does he have friends amongst the fallen? This should be an easy question for anyone to answer, and yet he hesitates.

“Gwenaëlle,” is the very first name which comes to mind, a jagged line across the list. “Cosima. Ellis, or I was starting to. But not like you.”

Tony has been here three years — probably closer to four now — and Stephen can’t even imagine. He’s held himself at a remove by comparison. He’d been letting down his walls and getting there slowly and graduating beyond pleasant colleague at the office, but. Now.

All Stephen Strange has lost was an almost. A possibility.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and the word sounds paltry on his tongue as they walk into the hall. He is not very good at this. “For your loss.”

[propulsion]

Tony's mouth twitches, wanders a look aside that turns his face from Strange entirely as they move. Stops. Squints at nothing.

"Thanks," he says, on that delay. No, he's good. Looks back to the other man, considering that list, and how it is roughly the people he'd intended to check in on. "Same."

Grief is an irritant. Gets in the lungs, stings the eyes. Irritated is a natural response.

But visibly not at Stephen himself, who gets that quick study, a restless shift in Tony's posture like he's thinking of extracting a hand from a pocket to execute a shoulder touch, but ultimately doesn't. "They grow on you," he adds. "They'd probably put it the other way around, but, you know."

His eyes snag. Drifts that way. Strange will know, better than him, that he's zeroing in on Niehaus.

[portalling]

Echoes of each other, in so many ways. They have good taste.

Stephen sees the way Tony’s leaning towards that side of the room, like a comet arcing towards its inevitable destination, and says, “She’s just over here.”

They approach. Shoulders squared against the sight, and Stephen finally finds himself looking at Cosima properly, where he’s avoided it before. Derrica did good work with the gut wound, and she’s dressed again so you can’t even tell. He truly isn’t accustomed to this part of death; there hadn’t been a viewing at Tony’s, they’d just put his first arc reactor out on the lake, at the cabin where he’d lived with his wife and kid.

Now, it’s Tony’s assistant, his platonic Pepper, The relationship must have been close. Stephen doesn’t glance over at his friend’s expression (he’s bad at these definitions, but pretty sure he might be able to finally claim that title here), gives Tony privacy in the reaction, stares at Cosima himself instead.

And she looks indefinably wrong somehow. He hasn’t exactly made a habit of gazing at his Riftwatch comrades in repose normally, but it’s not just the pale skin and slack unmoving face, there’s something unfamiliar about her features besides —

The realisation of what’s missing hits him a second later. Ah, fuck.

[propulsion]

Tony's reaction, unseen, is quizzical. Head tipped as he regards her pale face above the shroud, neither comfortable nor uncomfortable within but insensible to the shared silence as they both look at her.

"—glasses?" is what he breaks the silence with, like the spoken half of a thought.

A glance to confirm Strange is thinking the same. Damn.

He moves a little nearer, more alongside than at the foot of the bed. No heebie-jeebies seem like they're gonna come get him, so he can do this, observe her, visit, and stand there in the rising guilt like allowing a tide to come in and wash the stone out from under him. Eventually;

"She'd come in and disappeared again before I got here," offered, back to Stephen. "Hashtag just rifter things. Left behind a stack of research, explanatory stuff. The microscope. So I was a fan, first. And then she got here and was also a cool dude. No one mentioned that part."

Her anger at him in his office. Her twist of elfroot, while they went in circles about Circles in Cumberland. Morning coffee. He flicks his focus back up at the stone wall.

[portalling]

“We should start putting that into the reports. Who is and isn’t a cool dude.”

It’s only the faintest touch of humour; they’re both running on empty for it. But as they’re standing there, Stephen can feel it settling in: this part seems important. The monks at Kamar-Taj had often talked about the philosophy of it, people not being fully gone so long as others were left to remember them. So. Perhaps they ought to remember her. Them.

“We talked about that. Coming-and-going in a world. We had that in common,” he offers back. An unusual foundation for a burgeoning friendship, but the uniqueness of it was what made it stand out.

“When I was in quarantine, neck-deep in research, I came across a lot of her notes too. Smart cookie. And I don’t really know if this makes sense, but she feels—” verb tenses, Stephen, “felt like she could’ve been from our world. Like, she wouldn’t have been out-of-place at a biotech division at Stark Industries. I keep thinking: we might’ve gotten along, even outside of this place.”

Translation: Cosima Niehaus was likeable even beyond the forced friendship of convenience; not just politely putting up with the people you’re trapped in the Gallows with, lest your anchor-shard eats you alive.

[propulsion]

Faint humour gets a faint smile, the tight and crooked kind. Not insincere; sincere for how little he feels like it and does it anyway.

Ticks his gaze back down from the wall to her face again. "Yeah," Tony says. "Her world was pretty close. Less awesome, but close." A hand finally emerges from a pocket, touching somewhere on the linen, near her shoulder. Just enough to register that material shape of her. That she is cold beneath the shroud doesn't matter when the air in this room is freezing.

"Tough break, Berkeley," is quieter, almost a sigh.

And the work is going to suck. That he lacks an assistant is insubstantial compared to what she might have accomplished, out from under the weight of war. That thing they were starting to achieve. This, he doesn't say out loud, just lifts his hand and tucks it back into his pocket, shoulders hiking up to shake off the chill in the air.

"We can share the iPhone. Division exclusive, plus exceptions. She probably wouldn't care but we could arrange a burial. Do you think?"

[portalling]

That touch is confirmation, a tactile reinforcement, realising the truth of it firsthand. These bodies have been close enough to feel their flesh beneath your hands and to know: this was no trick. No case of mistaken identity, no bodies falsely burned in a pyre far away, no names missing and presumed dead. There was no chance of these people walking back into their own memorial, laughing and relieved. (Gwen was so fond of mentioning she’d crashed her own funeral.)

The question of burial logistics, however, twists his mouth.

“I think so,” Stephen says contemplatively. “I mean, that’s customary back home. I wish I knew what everyone’s preferences were. Who’s Jewish, who wants to be cremated, who wants to be scattered out at sea, whatever. I’m thinking I’ll do a survey. Later. So it’s on record, in the infirmary.”

Logistics and practicalities are how he keeps going: hanging grimly onto what he can do, how he can be of use, in the wake of so much helplessness.

“Is there anyone else who needs contacting? She mentioned she used to have a fiancee.”

[favoriteanalyst]

[fully ota through the three prompts and in between; hit me up with something more bespoke or wildcard if you got an idea]

Barrow is pockmarked and burned enough that it should look awful, but he looks at rest otherwise. Put down the burdens, let go of the pains, and finally gets to rest.

Mobius is no stranger to death, of people around him, of people he cares about. But this feels almost like a test. Set down one duty to pick up another, for a righteous cause, and get struck down all the same, viciously and violently. What's the point? But he knows what the point is. Victory, a better world, a safer one. The death might be senseless, but the cause is just. It's the risk they all carried when they first took up their oaths, got that first experience with lyrium.

"You still owe me a drink," he reminds the corpse quietly, a smile straining under his moustache. It was never debts with them, but congenial friendship, recognition of their own kind, a helping hand.

He touches a shoulder, bows his head. "I have faced armies with You as my shield, and though I bear scars beyond counting, nothing can break me except Your absence." It isn't much, is far from any kind of last rites that could be given, but he knows he has to say something before Barrow is brought to ashes. "Rest well, brother."


Abby is harder, for some reason. Maybe because of her youth. Maybe for being a Rifter, too, fighting a fight that was never hers to begin with. Even harder still is the state in which she's been left in. Cleaned up as best as can be, of course, but the thing that stands out most as Abby is--

How silly it seems to choke up over a braid.

She took a lot of torment before she fell, that much is clear. It says a lot about her endurance, but it says a lot more about her enemies and they way they took her time in butchering her. He scrubs his face, runs a hand through his hair, blows out a heavy sigh to try and center himself. "You're not supposed to be a soldier. You're supposed to be a kid. A brave young woman doing--anything else but be here dying for a cause you didn't sign up for. You saw New York, right? That's where you should be. Reading every book you can get your hand on, petting every passing dog." He misses that place dearly. The parts that felt real. "I'm sorry. That you grew up in a world where you had to be a soldier. Sorry that you got shoved into a world where, sure, there aren't mushroom monsters who aren't people anymore, but red lyrium dragons and acid-spitting dracolisks aren't exactly easier to fight."

Everything in him seems to deflate. "Ellie's got a lotta people watching out for her. I think, in spite of everything, you'd be happy to know that." He bends briefly, placing a light kiss on the sheet where her forehead rests, before uttering a prayer. "When I have lost all else, when my eyes fail me and the taste of blood fills my mouth, then in the pounding of my heart I hear the glory of creation."


He keeps a distance, initially, from Jude. As though he's afraid of the corpse of a friend, as though he's waiting still for the resilient and fast-healing shifter to pop back up.

Jude is outrageously still.

The hesitation leads to instead making some rounds, uttering some more prayers whether they are of the faith or not (because it can't hurt, and he recognizes they're really more for the living than the dead), and circles back around, still with that distance, letting others have their time and their say, until he can't hold it off any longer. It's wrong. It's all wrong. A lot of his figure is ruined to such a point that it's little wonder he finally fell, but it's still Jude. Was still Jude. What happens to Rifters when they die instead of leave? He supposes the same that happens to anyone else, but maybe instead of the Maker's side, they dissolve into Fade stuff from whence they came. Erik had asked--about afterlife beliefs, and...

"I never asked what you wanted done with yourself. If this happened. You kinda defaulted to burial when talking about it, but I don't want to assume." Jude had explained, at least that in his world, spirits don't really care what happens to the body after. That's not the important part, only a matter of faith and personal preference.

But the more we're remembered, the more we stick around. Like we're circling what mattered.

Mobius is no longer a psychic in a world full of shifters, cannot see the departed unless spirits linger in all the bad ways he'd tried to explain. He's going to remember Jude. Remember how much he felt like an ocean. Calm and inviting, making things a little quieter. He'll remember pancakes and anxious conversations and a wolf tucked over him. Remember all the care the man has--had--for every single person around him. How beautiful and alive he looked when surrounded by his people. The sound of his laugh and the flash of his smile.

The easy touches. Maker. Oh Maker, this isn't how it's supposed to go. His chest feels like it lurches, breath escaping and everything clenching shut. He takes all these people who don't even know Him, but He doesn't take an old fool who's served his time? He takes and He takes and He takes, every time Mobius thinks he's found something (someone) that could be home. His brotherhood dispersed to the winds. Starkhaven was taken, and then it was gone. Ostwick still stands but has suffered heavy losses. Loki's gone.

Trembling, he reaches under the shroud to tug Jude's hand out. The dead don't care how hard he holds with his unfeeling hands. "Either the sky falls or it doesn't." The words break into pieces in his throat. "You didn't disappear on me. At least I won't wonder."

Small mercies. But it doesn't feel that way when he's choked with pain.

"Are you gonna stay here if I remember you?" It's a childish wish. Hoping he's around. Every day. Mobius lifts the hand to his cheek, death and magic chilled and stiff and no longer quite Jude anymore. He can feel the tears welling, falling. "You should go back home. I'm not always gonna remember. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, I'm gonna forget you someday if I live that long. I just hope I remember how you made me feel."

It whisper-sobs out of him, the prayer, the few appropriate lines he plucks from memory. Because he has to say something. He has to say something. "Here lies the abyss, the well of all souls. From these emerald waters doth life begin anew."

(sct)

[notathreat]

Abby.

Derrica had told Ellie which shroud was Abby's. Ellie expects that she should be harder to recognize but in the end, she's not. Even with her shape altered, so much is still the same.

Ellie both does and doesn't want to draw Abby's shroud back. If she were still whole she would, but she's under there with a crushed fucking face.

Instead she sits with her in the silence in the dim light of the hall, and she doesn't touch her. She holds her real face in her mind instead, grasps with numb fingers at the details that are rapidly slipping away.

There is always too much to say, and not enough. She has a coin in the pocket of Clarisse's hoodie, both stolen from their room. She takes it out, letting it slip through her fingers again and again, squeezing it until it bites into her hands, until the welling in her throat chokes her. She leans her back against the wall, shoulders hunched, the hood pulled up over her hair.

"Fuck you," she whispers to the girl in the sheet. Like she can still hear. She dips her head and rubs her tongue over the scar in her upper lip, where Abby once broke it open against her knuckles. There's so many like it, scars inflicted by Abby's hands. Stitched by them. If Ellie listed them she's sure she'd forget more than one.

"It wasn't supposed to happen like this."

She lets it hang in the air, like she's speaking to a ghost. Maybe she is. She doesn't know anymore. Half the time nothing feels real. She never thought she'd be mourning the source of her nightmares, but here they are. Abby wrapped up in a sheet and Ellie feeling like she wants to rip her skin off just to touch something, anything.

There was supposed to be more.

She puts the coin to her mouth, letting it click against her bottom teeth. Lets the taste of it pool against the tip of her tongue.

She tastes tears, but can't feel them. There was supposed to be more.


Clarisse.

Clarisse is shrouded in plain white linen, left purposefully untucked. They remembered, and Ellie is very, very relieved that she won't have to clumsily unwrap her. Like she's resting and Ellie might wake her.

The thought makes her eyes burn. Clarisse is in constant movement even in her sleep. Twitches of her fingers, her eyelids, her breathing heavy and regular, radiating heat. Sprawled out and tangled and taking up space. She is not this straight, orderly line, folded up just so.

Ellie pulls down the shroud, takes it fully off, and her eyes are drawn to her face. They cleaned her up, pulled her hair neatly back. She looks beautiful, peaceful. Utterly unlike herself.

Ellie reaches out to mess up her ponytail.

Letting the linen fall to the ground in a sad heap, Ellie unfolds the shroud she brought, which is blood-spotted and smudged and edged in chariots, griffons. It's a tradition Ellie hated when Clarisse told her about it and she hates it more now -- funeral shrouds, made for demigods even before their deaths. Made by other kids, just in case they don't come home alive. It's morbid as fuck and Ellie told her so, but she made it all the same. She can't bear to see her go in a plain shroud because her brothers aren't here to make one for her.

She's earned it.

She draws the shroud up to her waist like she's covering her up, and settles Maimer next to her. It really should go to someone else in the war, not the funeral pyre, but it's hers. Ellie picked it up on the battlefield for her, brought it all the way back.

Those things settled, Ellie finally allows herself to look at Clarisse's face again, and once again it pulls at her, wrong. Clarisse is always making faces, scowling and grinning and fierce, teasing and smiling softer than anyone would ever believe. Ellie cups her cheek, cold and awful, and her stomach drops as her thumb follows that familiar path along her cheekbone without her meaning to.

The tears lurch over her suddenly, hot and skipping down her face, because Clarisse doesn't lean into it.

It catches in her throat, lodges there, the three words she never found the right moment to say when she was alive. Ellie should tell her now. Just to do it. Just to speak them aloud, just to make sure doesn't leave forever without them--

But she can't. She just can't.

Clarisse is already gone.

There's this quote, Clarisse had said, washed in sunset. It's Latin, it's astra inclinant, sed non obligant—it means 'the stars incline us, they do not bind us.' When the Fates weave the thread of your life, they include every possibility. Every decision, and every possible consequence. You still get to make choices.

If that's how fate actually works, Ellie's memory answers, Then I can work with that.

(As long as I can choose you, too.)

The scream builds and builds behind her throat, but nothing comes out.

closed visitation;

[grindset]

A wet sniff, an open exhale. Another. Head bent, hands in his lap, cleaning a broken stone with the tail of his own untucked shirt. Viktor is aware of the salt drying tight on his cheeks and how loud he sounds breathing through his mouth in this silent space.

He should have a private room. Not a small room—nothing there was ever small—but reserved for him. There would be windows. There would be warm slanting light and flowers cascading all around him. The stage would be draped in white and gold and red, banners would fly the sigil of his house, and everyone would come—everyone, everyone. The whole city would mourn. (Half the city.)

His mother. Caitlyn. Sky. Councillor Medarda—had she met his family? Really met them, not only in that chamber, but as people—had they ever taken that step?

(Viktor would be there, somewhere. A footnote.)

Amid sharp pain and quivering muscle, he stands from the chair and, with great tenderness, reaffixes warm-worn leather to the fragile reconstruction of a wrist, the crystal facing inward, as it should be. What he intends is to do this, draw the shroud back into place, and collect himself to leave. What happens is, as he tucks Jayce's hand in, another juddering breath threatens to unravel the whole thing. Taut, his head bowed, he holds just so until—

Until he sits, actually, and crumples forward until his forehead touches knuckles, ratchets shallow spasms and intervals of frozen depletion and long breaths carefully sucked back in, all crushed down to silence.

After some time, he pulls the aching shell of his body upright. A wet sniff, an open exhale that ruptures into chest-deep coughs. As soon as he's able, he draws the shroud back into place and collects himself.

He's been here a long time. He's already looked, seen the too-tranquil face—Jayce, whose face is always honest, whose passion moves his whole body when he speaks, has never looked so plain, so inanimate, even in sleep. He's seen the remnant marks of violence to his neck that they couldn't hide, though they did well in trying. He's already sat here, sick with disgust for the war that killed him, furious for the way he died.

Now he reaches up along the too-still body to find the broad shape of Jayce's shoulder, grasps it firmly, holds it until he clears the slab. It's a trifling weight compared to that which anchored him for so long—a woefully inadequate exchange.

On his way out, a stormy glare, aimed at no one and meant for all, wards off the well-meaning.

visitation; closed to stephen strange

[sprent]

Gela visits the corridor of the hall more than once. She never makes it all the way in to where they're keeping the bodies shrouded. She doesn't know if she wants to look at them, thinks she prefers the warmer, happier mental images of her friends as they were, alive and well. Spins on a dime hours later, returning, pacing there, wondering—

The problem is that it doesn't feel real. Doesn't feel right that she saw Jude so recently, confided deeply in him, and now he is gone. Or that she spoke with Clarisse over breakfast a few days ago and shared a pot of tea with her, it just doesn't make sense. Space that was once occupied, people she used to see around the Gallows and say hello to, all erased. She's been feeding Barrow's cats as if he's coming back for them.

She doesn't know what to do.

The sound of approaching footsteps draws her attention away from the problem momentarily, which is something of a mercy.

"Oh," she says in a breath, relieved. It's actually very good timing. "Hello, there. I was hoping I might run into you."

[portalling]

“Me?” Strange asks, caught off-guard mid-step; he considers himself less- and less-relevant as the day has worn on, a vestigial limb, mostly. Held apart and aside from most of the turbulent emotions happening in the hall. But he has been involved in the logistics. (A preemptive weariness occurs to him: who is she looking for? Who was she close to? Which shrouded figure is he gonna have to lead Gela to?)

But he keeps his expression neutral, professional. All day, he’s been wearing the same practiced mask he’d used whenever needing to handle delicate news with his patients. (I’m afraid the prognosis isn’t good—)

“Of course. How can I help?”

[sprent]

"You," she confirms, worrying the inside of her cheek with her teeth. She is nervous but not for the reason he's assuming; Gela can't think of how to word the question that she wants to ask. This usually isn't a problem for her, but it is getting increasingly harder to be diplomatic about grief.

Eventually, she finds a few words. "What are you doing with the bodies? How are they being treated, after the visitation period is over?"

[portalling]

Ah. Yes. Those logistics.

He catches his missed step, then guides them both off to the side, to one of those little decorative vestibules in the hallway. It gets them out of the way, spares them a little privacy in case other visitors walk past while they’re discussing this.

“I wouldn’t want to presume,” Strange says. “I’ve heard the common practice in Thedas is a pyre, but— not everyone was from Thedas.”

Almost a full third of the deceased were rifters, and he has no idea what their preferences were. (More gears turning in the back of his head, always chewing over efficiencies: for the future, he should poll the remaining population on medical treatment requirements and burial preferences. Later. Once this is less raw. Find out any cultural practices, religious beliefs, whatever they might need to know, in case there isn’t anyone left who knew them to advise.)

“The hope is that their closest loved ones might know which practices to follow. The bodies will be remanded into their care, and the treatment will be individual.”

It’s a fairly steady recitation, a good approximation of his old Hospital Voice.

[sprent]

It does, happily, keep Gela from seeing inside the visitation room at all, which she prefers at this stage. She looks raw-edged and tired, but so does everybody. Her upset isn't special, but Strange may notice her flinching ever so slightly at the word 'pyre'.

What he says does make sense (letting loved ones decide, make that choice). It does, it should.

She says, quietly, "And when will you do the treatment?"

Because she doesn't want to look at it or even think about it, and she'll leave the Gallows for that day. The thought of them burning the bodies of her friends makes her feel sick. She can't get by it.

[portalling]

Strange’s own expression goes a little blank, a little distant, as he tries to do that math of the situation: how long is socially appropriate for these visitations to last? He has no idea. He doesn’t know this part. He had avoided the occasion and the ritual when it was his own family at stake; hadn’t gone home for it.

“Maybe a couple days,” he says. “We want people to have enough time, but—”

But the time which had already elapsed. But that long carriage ride back from Granitefell. But the heat. The cold runes are labouring away, but they’re not industrial-strength freezers and there are limits.

“And I gather,” slowly, carefully, “that demonic possession is a worry in this land, so we don’t want to delay too long.”

He’s looking at Gela’s face, trying to read whatever complicated cocktail of emotions are present, and landing in the wrong place: “So there should still be time, if you… y’know, want to sit with them.”

[sprent]

Gela doesn't look at him. Her attention has gone back to that scant glimpse of the hall from where they're standing, and a shrouded, indistinct shape that features most prominently in it. She can't tell who it is from here, a small mercy. She helped to lift most of them and put them on the carriages out at Granitefell; she found that her arms and shoulders ached through all of the next day.

Then he says that, and at last, she looks.

"... I don't think I do." She sounds a little distant, tired. "Is that odd?"

[portalling]

Strange pauses too long over his answer and this next admission. When it finally comes, his exhaustion seems to mirror her own: “Not at all,” he says, firmly enough that there’s no question.

“For all that I’m a doctor, I’m not comfortable with this aspect of it. Death generally meant I’d failed at my job, and I’m usually very good at not failing at my job.” He hasn’t been sneaking glances at the bodies unless it was necessary. His walkabout with Tony, and that was it. He’d seen enough of them earlier.

“My parents,” he starts, then stops, then starts again. He’s unaccustomed to doling out any information about his family; he’s free and open about his own life, but this has remained such a locked box. It’s relevant, though:

“They were elderly and ill, and I didn’t go home when they passed. Others were furious at me for it, but it seemed a pointless gesture. It wasn’t them any longer. I preferred to remember them living.”

[sprent]

Gela listens. When he pauses shortly, she puts a hand on his arm for a few moments and squeezes warmly before she lets go. Family is so difficult. It would be impossible to tell him that she wasn't with her mother when she died either and that she regrets it; she wouldn't want to, either. "I'm sorry."

She tells him, "I am Nevarran; I should want to go inside and see them, especially if they won't be staying here. If this is the last bit of time that I have, but I..."

There is a lump in her throat, painful, undeniable. She has to pause and join her hands together, fighting for a bit of calm before she continues. "I feel the same as you. I want to remember them alive and smiling."

[portalling]

It’s just meat in there would accurately encapsulate Doctor Strange’s opinion on the whole matter, but that feels perhaps a step too far; a cruel detail to drop in front of a woman who’s already striving to pin herself together. These days he knows there’s something beyond death, of course, he’s seen and exorcised too many ghosts, but in terms of what’s lying on the slabs in that entrance hall —

Strange hauls his attention to something else instead. Latching onto the slightly safer part of what Gela had said.

“I’ve read widely in the libraries here, but mostly on the Fade and magic and spirits. In turn, my cultural understanding is… lacking,” he admits, and that’s truly understating it. No recruit for Diplomacy, he. “What’s the relevance of being Nevarran?”