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

Granitefell & The Gallows: OTA

[notathreat]

I. Granitefell

Ellie knows she should scout the area and make sure it's free of threats, but when Vanya offers to do it she sees it for the kindness that it is. She lets him.

She keeps going over the checklist in her mind during the approach, during the aftermath, making sure she's done everything she can, everything she was supposed to do.

Ellie disappears for a time into the ashes and wreckage of the village. When she comes back she's clutching Maimer in one hand, holding it like it might try to leap free of her fingers. In the other she's carrying Viktor's thaumoscope. There is dried blood all down her front and crusted on her hands, none of it hers, but she doesn't seem to notice.

With singleminded purpose, she tracks down each and every one of the fallen with an anchor shard, calling back through the crystals to report locations of bodies and too-familiar names. At some point she is joined by Ruadh, Ellis' red-coated Mabari, who follows her from horror to horror.

She keeps going, doggedly moving. Makes sure every one of those twenty-one names is accounted for. She helps move corpses, both strangers and the people she loves. Her eyes are dry, but Ellie's not exactly there.

II. Gallows

Back at the Gallows, Ellie throws herself singularly into her work. It's obsessive, and obviously so. She barely remembers to eat, definitely doesn't remember to sleep. She might if she's reminded, but only then.

Before the services, she throws open the door of her room to air out the smell of paint, and her room's a wreck too, everything left where it's fallen and undisturbed since then.

There's a blood-smeared funeral shroud in the works, minimal and messy embroidery because she can't sew worth shit. Her hands are good for stitching skin and not much else. Instead there are painted chariots ringing the edges. They are meticulous until they aren't, until the paint smears together in unrecognizable smudges.


III. Wildcard

II

[untiltheyarent]

Fifi's morning cleaning route has ended, rather more quickly than it used to, and she's descending the stairs just in time for the door to fly open and the sight of its young inhabitant to startle her further. But after the initial jolt of surprise, Fifi's eyes shift from Ellie's face to the messy cloth behind her, and the meaning of it lands.

"Would you like me to help you fold it," she asks quietly, formally, but with a flit of her gaze into Ellie's.

[notathreat]

Ellie freezes like a guilty child when she realizes she's been caught, all sleepless eyes and tousled, greasy hair.

She drops her hands and looks back at the shroud. The kindness is the hardest part to handle, always. People mean well, they always mean well.

The silence stretches, and there's a lump in her throat.

"... sure." She trudges into her room, kicking fallen clothes aside.

[untiltheyarent]

Making no comment on Ellie's appearance or the state of her room, Fifi dutifully follows her inside.

"Is there a way it's traditionally done?" she asks in the same gentle tone: one never knows what's significant, when it comes to Rifters.

[notathreat]

Ellie opens her mouth, closes it, and shakes her head.

"I don't know. I've never used a funeral shroud before. Clarisse just said- that it's what they used to do. Where she grew up."

Her throat threatens to close but she won't let herself. Instead she picks up the other end of the shroud, lifting it, preparing to fold it like a sheet.

It'll smear in places, but not worse than it already is.

[sprent]

Ellie's door has been shut for days and Gela notices. She's taken to walking through the Gallows to give herself something to do, checking on invisible things, tidying. The cruel thing is that there isn't really a lot to do. Riftwatch is reeling in the wake of such extreme loss and moves onward molasses-slow. It feels like, to Gela, she should be moving on, and this is the inevitable outcome of trying to stay and live as herself anywhere: things eventually fall to pieces. Go on, pack up. Try again. The idea lingers in the back of her mind, sad and soothing, a false promise.

She doesn't go anywhere; she walks around, and notices.

To Ellie's door she brings herself, and food too, and something she found that Ellie might like to look at, a book from the library, some collection of information about the anatomy of horses done alongside loose sketches of skeletons and muscle structure. She likes to draw, doesn't she?

It's not going to fix anything, but she's bad at showing up with nothing.

First, she knocks. Next, she says, "Ellie? It's Gela."

[notathreat]

[cw: needles/ouch]

It's earlier, and Ellie is still attempting to embroider. She stabs herself deeply with one of the needles as someone knocks on the door, hisses as she yanks it free of her hand, more blood spotting the shroud she's struggling with.

Her face is flushed and there are tears of frustration in her eyes, but she grits her teeth and blinks them free.

Gela. Gela. Yes. She can- Yes.

Ellie puts the blood-spotted shroud down on her bed and gets to her bare feet, heading to the door, kicking aside anything that gets in the way of her shuffling feet.

When she answers the door she's a surly wreck, and looks ten years older. Clarisse's hoodie is too big on her and definitely too hot to be wearing in this weather.

"Hey," she manages.

[sprent]

"Hello."

She's aware that it's awkward, that when she is grieving she needs company and Ellie is one of the few she would think to seek that from. The sad, crumpled sight of Ellie standing in the doorway hurts her heart instantly. She looks dull. She looks very little, in that oversized coat, hunched up inside of it defensively as if Gela might attack her at any moment. Her room is quite dark inside.

Gela hesitates before she asks.

"Can I come in a moment? I have some things for you."

[notathreat]

"Hi," she says again, realizing that she already said it and immediately forgot, and has a moment where she just stands there, struggling through the mental fog before she manages to open the door enough for Gela to come inside.

"Yeah. Sure."

It's messy in here. There are dirty clothes on the floor, crumpled pages even with paper so scarce and dear. There's a plate that's clearly been sitting there since the night before, a soup that looks barely touched and is now congealed. The bed is unmade, sheets rumpled, the shroud set aside.

Ellie sits there, because it was where she was a moment before, even if she looks down at her hands and can't remember how to start again. She puts her needle-poked finger into her mouth, bites down on the skin, makes herself do it lightly. The pressure distracts from the sting.

II

[wearyallalone]

Granitefell was horrific, but at least they'd both had things to do. The scouting, the cleanup, the organization of bringing back their people, alive or dead. He'd kept moving, and he'd seen Ellie do the same, for all the dry-eyed shock on her face. (Something in his chest tightens, seeing Ruadh in her wake.)

It's much the same when they first make it back to the Gallows. Logistics and suddenly all the work of the sixteen they'd lost to be reallocated, sorted through. Vanya is often at the front of the line to volunteer, to take on what he can. But he can't be working all the time. He spends time with the griffons, and occasionally in one of the chapels. At night, he wanders, mindful of not disturbing anyone. But if he sees a candle glowing, he'll look in on whoever else is up.

Ellie's been on his mind, but he isn't specifically looking for her, the night their paths cross.

[notathreat]

Ellie has thrown herself into the work left behind, almost grateful for the distraction. The stables and the aerie remain clean, the griffons brushed and raked and well-fed, but still fluttery and agitated, discontent. The paperwork at Scouting remains sorted, between Ellie and Yseult's near-obsessive diligence.

Ellie herself looks a wreck. Someone reminded her to wash yesterday, and she scraped her hair back into a ponytail, but there's very little behind her eyes, and what's there is nothing good.

Night is the hardest. There's little work she can do without disturbing the others, so she climbs the mage tower to watch the night sky, laying there in silence. She doesn't sleep but she drifts, taking refuge in a place where it is familiar to be alone. She sketches with charcoal by lantern-light when she needs something to do with her hands, and that is probably the light that draws Vanya to her.

She looks up as he approaches, doesn't try to smile, but nods like she's been expecting him, looks back down at her work.

"Hi."

[wearyallalone]

"Hello."

He comes more fully onto the tower roof from the ladder he'd climbed up.

"Will it bother you, to have a bit of company?" Just because neither of them can sleep, he doesn't assume she's as drawn to others as he is. But on the other hand, he'd just as soon stay if she'll let him. He doesn't feel he knows how to grieve what they've lost any more than anyone else does, but his instinct is just to keep those who are still alive in his line of sight.

[notathreat]

Ellie has to stop and think about it, a pause while she shivers in the cool night air. Even in the summer when it comes off the water, it can get cold.

"You can sit if you want."

She pauses with the piece of charcoal in her smudged up hands, the page in front of her. She's drawn what looks like a collection of doodles. Snapshots and impressions of things remembered. Abby's profile, the distinct shape of her nose. Hands that could be anyone's, really- clasped as a corpse's would, over a chest. A young man's shoulders as seen from behind, narrow with messy hair.

A chubby toddler with dark hair that sticks up. Baby fingers, baby lips and teeth.

ii-ish, iii-ish;

[grindset]

I'm sorry. Thank you. Sorry.

That's the last Ellie heard of his voice before her grim work began, before her team's return. If she returned the Thaumoscope, it might have been given to whoever else would haunt the Research workroom so soon after its depletion, or deposited wherever seemed appropriate to her—or she could just keep it until it's actively missed. Viktor hasn't come asking for it.

She immerses herself in work, ignores her body, like she's only a mind, and her mind is an engine forever moving—like she'll have known him to do from the first hour they met until the moment her crystal went dark. Since then, all industry has ceased. His desk is untouched, the rag and hammer still where he left them, as if he himself had been brought back beneath a sheet.

He's picked a clear night, he's snuffed the torches that might encroach on his view; now he drops a folded blanket behind him, and carefully sits himself down on the bare stone, laying his crutch beside. This is as close to climbing a tower as he can manage.

Flint sparks. He chokes explosively on first draw. While waiting out the burn in his lungs, he lowers his aching angles into repose. Feels around for the blanket, bunches it beneath his head. Spends a while moving the points of his body into acceptable discomfort. Tries again, then, coughing into his closed mouth while a tear crawls down the crease of his eye.

He's out there a good while,

but not nearly long enough that he might welcome the sound of the balcony door opening behind him. To dissuade a vitality check, he blows smoke straight up over his head, with a few coughs as punctuation, stifled thick. There: he's alive. Go away.

(Only, don't.)

[notathreat]

In all honesty, Ellie doesn't remember what she did with the Thaumoscope. By the time she came back her ears were full with the sound of breaking rictus to force limbs into shape, the sharp crack of arrows off Ellis' back so he could fit into the cart. Splintered into hands, rubbed raw.

She gave it back, of course. A perfectly correct check-in with materials, annotated for their records. Back to the Scouting office and transferred by a page, or maybe Ellie herself, on one of her rounds.

She doesn't remember half the shit she's done in the past few days, because none of it matters.

Viktor is a thought that crosses her mind more than once. They all are, the ones lost and the ones left behind. They're all hurting. She's not special or set apart in her grief, but there is a specific flavor of it she shares with him. She wonders if he's angry, too.

The telescope is up top on the tower, and Ellie's at her wanderings like a ghost, caught in a loop. Aimless circles, countless stairs. She smells elfroot outside the library, is surprised dully to find herself there at all. She follows it, not entirely bothering to ask herself why.

(She and Clarisse smoked once, on the top of the mage tower. Ellie lit the joint with the electric tip of Clarisse's spear and immediately burned her face on a spark.)

The door opens, and Viktor is there. Coughing, breathing, alive.

There is a long moment where Ellie stays in the doorway. In the end the buzzing tiredness in her heavy limbs wins out. She should sit. She does, right next to him, and mutely holds out her hand in a request. She sits hunched forward like a gargoyle, like she's caving in on herself.

[grindset]

That long moment, he hopes, will end with a door softly closing and nothing more than that. He hopes this because what he really wants to happen can never happen again. What happens instead: approaching footfalls, wrong rhythm, and a shape entering his periphery, too small. That it enters without asking is correct. That she sits right next to him, that's right, too.

She resolves into Ellie at last when she raises her hand. Viktor barely turns his head to look at it—bones too fine, skin too pale, again the scale is off—and takes a moment to consider it after. She doesn't incredulously ask him what he's doing or even try to play off her worry as some casual quip before getting earnest about it. Wrong.

To this spurious presence he hands off the twist of paper and leaf without a word. If she has even the slightest idea what she's doing, she'll throw it over the balcony to save him.

[notathreat]

Ellie heard him coughing, and she should probably get this away from him. Viktor's lungs are shit and it's painful to even listen to.

He's also a grown man. And she understands the impulse to be a little bit self destructive in the wake of this. He could do worse to himself.

Ellie holds the smoke in, parting her lips to let it swirl in her mouth for a second before she breathes it out into the summer night. She shuts her eyes and hands it back to him.

She doesn't say anything. For the moment, the silence is a refuge they both hold for each other.

ii/iii

[favoriteanalyst]

He's been rushing around the library with too much to learn and not enough time to learn it all, practically beating his head against the shelf every time he asks Abby for a hand. But he can't stay there reading up on every topic he feels like if he learns more of he might be able to prevent the next tragedy, like anything could have prevented this one. Wants to, but can't.

He hasn't seen Ellie in what feels like days. It's probably been days. And he knows she must be going through a lot, and maybe he needs to stop wallowing in his own despair and see if there's literally anything he can do for her.

But it's also a selfish visit, when he knocks an elbow on her door. He's got a bowl of stew in one hand, carefully balanced in a way that means he's not in any fear of inadvertently tipping it over or dropping it, and a little notebook and quill in the other. "Hi," he says lamely through the door. "Can you open up? Please? I've got some food even if you don't want to eat, because you should still eat anyway."

[notathreat]

Ellie, sitting at her desk with a low-burning candle and burning eyes, head pillows in her hand, opens her eyes at the knock but doesn't look up. The paper beneath her and the quill she's holding has bled a bit onto the missive she was writing.

She sets it down with a groan, reaches up to rub slowly at her eyes before she hears the knock again.

"Yeah," she says unsteadily, gets to her feet. She recognizes the voice. It takes a couple of tries to flip open the latch, and she pulls the door open. She hasn't been sleeping, and she looks like it. Mobius doesn't look much better.

"Hey. Come in."

The room's a wreck but at least Fifi made sure all the dishes were gone and the sheets changed. Now it's just the clutter instead of actually being dirty.

"Just put it on the desk or something." It smells good, but it's tying her stomach in knots.

[favoriteanalyst]

She looks like shit. Everyone does, but Ellie looks particularly wrecked, he thinks. He frowns, setting the bowl down where indicated. "Sorry, were you trying to keep yourself from sleeping?" Rather than trying to sleep. Obviously.

He should know what to say. He should think of something to say. What he wants to do is launch into the spiel, what he came here for besides the obvious checking in on her, but that seems uncouth. There's an awkward, quiet couple of moments where he looks very lost. A lot of that going around lately.

"Do you want a hug?"

[notathreat]

Mobius thankfully does not tell her just how awful she looks, but she can see it in his eyes, when he looks at her. She doesn't even smile at his small attempt at a joke. She just can't summon the will.

They are both so very, very lost.

The offer clogs her throat, aching, sitting in her and rolling out in waves. She feels like the lightest touch will crack her in half. Spill out all the oily, ugly things inside.

"Do you?" she finally manages. Because fuck, the second she looks at him, she sees it. He's never looked so very old.

ii, belatedly

[cozen]

He’d respect a closed door, the same way he’d want his own respected. But the door is open, so he comes to a stop there, shoulder against the frame, surveying her and the disaster of her surroundings over a few silent seconds.

Her radish, he remembers. Spicy and tough. And her—whatever Abby was to her.

They were not so terribly young, for Thedas. For this sort of thing in Thedas. Ellie is not so terribly young. But scrawny as she is, she looks even smaller, in the wreck of her room.

“Chariots?” is what he asks, in the end.

[notathreat]

Ellie is fanning the window with a discarded canvas -- it's half a watercolor with paint then spilled across it, blurring out anything that it previously was -- to try to get a crossbreeze going in the stifling heat.

To her it's stifling. Everything is stifling. She can't breathe, not really.

The last few days have been bad enough that when she sees a man in her doorway, dark hair, dark mustache, leaning like that, she almost wonders if it's Joel, somehow.

It happened once. Years ago. She did see him. There's always the possibility that it may happen again.

But Bastien resolves, and traitorously, Ellie is relieved.

Chariots, he says, and Bastien's voice doesn't sound at all like his own. There's no sparkle in his eyes, no hint of a smile even when he isn't. Bastien has always seemed so perpetually sunny to her. Like he's always finding something to laugh at or adore.

Now, he seems hollow.

Byerly. Throat ripped messily out, eyes wide and staring. The beat of silence stretches out before Ellie answers, and her voice is hollow, too.

"Chariots," she answers, and gestures vaguely, inviting him in. "... she raced them, growing up."

Ellie sinks down onto her rumpled bed, drawing a corner of the smudged shroud into her lap. Her desk chair is near, open.

[cozen]

“Really?”

There’s a glimmer of genuine interest there. He could be doing more to feign being fine; more appropriately strained smiles, more talking. He could go on the crystals and invite everyone to something like a wake. Even now, among strangers, he would. It’s kind of a compliment to the rest of Riftwatch—to years of proximity and/or friendship—that he is not bothering.

He steps around the debris of her grief to sit in the empty chair. He looks at the shroud, then at her face. Maybe the fact that she’s been through so much—even what little he knows qualifies as so much—means she’ll get through anything. Or maybe it means she is that much closer to not being able to do it anymore.

“The way she was dressed when she arrived,” he says, unrelated to the thought, “I assumed she was from one of the worlds with–with cars and computers and things.”

[notathreat]

"She was," Ellie says quietly, staring down at the shroud.

She was, past tense. It wells in her throat, but she finds that she wants to. She's determined that people other than her remember Clarisse, the isolated young woman who existed in a world that few people saw the reality of, and by design.

"... her father was Ares, the god of war," she says, pinching the shroud between her fingers. "And her mother was a mortal. She was born in a modern world, but had to grow up in Camp Half-Blood, away from the rest of the world, so monsters wouldn't try to kill her every waking moment."

The lump in her throat grows bigger, and she smooths the shroud over her lap.

"Every time one of them went on a quest for the gods... Clarisse said that their half-siblings would decorate a funeral shroud for them. Just in case they didn't come back. She had a lot of 'em made for her. She was the oldest one still living."

One more breath, and Ellie can't quite look up from it.

"If her half-brothers were here, they would've made one for her."

But they aren't.