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

[altusimperius]

[while this is occurring]

The chatter from the crystal has become deafening and nonsensical, enough to make Benedict flee the office entirely, hurry downstairs and find something, anything that he can do to occupy his mind: in this case it's making coffee, which he does with his thoughts millions of miles away, and it's only when he returns to the Diplomacy office door that he realizes with a heart-shuddering jolt that he's made two cups.
But the recipient isn't here. Won't ever be here. Unless there's been a mistake? They'll all turn up still, surely.

Rather than go all the way back downstairs to dump it out, he shoulders his way back into the office and pauses, his heart skipping a full beat at the sight of a dark-haired, mustachioed figure sitting on the floor with Whiskey.
"Fuck," he gasps, coffee sloshing from both mugs onto the stone floor, and then he falls entirely silent, staring at Bastien with a lost expression.

[cozen]

Conversation with Julius concluded, Bastien is considering how to approach the monumental task of getting up from the floor when Benedict enters.

His eyebrows raise incrementally, at the curse and the spill. Otherwise his face could be made of stone.

Whiskey is less immobile, if only just. It’s late—no, early now, the sky turning grey to hint at an eventual sunrise—and she should be sound asleep on two to four feet, at this hour. But she turns her head toward Benedict with some interest and sniffs the air, perhaps to see if what he’s spilled is something she would enjoy lapping up.

[altusimperius]

No, Whiskey, this is toxic to you.

Benedict stands there, still and awkward, his mind racing with millions of things that he could or should say, if only he could make sense of what's happening. Working in Diplomacy hasn't cured him of his foot-in-mouth disease, but if nothing else, it has taught him that sometimes silence is as valid an option as any.

Bastien looks so small and strange sitting there. And Whiskey, how will they tell Whiskey-- he can't think about it right now. It's too early. It's too new.

"Coffee?" he asks shakily, holding up one of the mugs, as if it was always his intention to make one for someone he didn't know would be here. It's just the way Byerly likes it.

[cozen]

Bastien looks at Benedict's uncertain face, looks at the coffee, and settles after some thought on, "Non, merci."

He twists his legs and shifts his weight to get them beneath him, unfolds up from the floor with more grace than he looks like he should have. Whiskey lolls over onto her side to keep an eye on him.

Benedict's Orlesian is fluent. Fluent enough? It doesn't matter. Bastien carries on in Orlesian and assumes he can keep up. "We need to alert our contacts in the region that the dragon has been sighted. Ours and Scouting's, if—"

Yseult is indisposed. Ellie, Loxley, and the new girl are going to Granitefell. Fifi is a secret—even from him—and Xiomara is dead.

"—if Tsenka Abendroth has access. I'll talk to her after I confirm with Flint and Stark that they don't see a downside to alerting those we can."

[altusimperius]

The only hitch in Benedict's Orlesian comprehension is that he wasn't expecting it, but with a few rapid blinks he nods and manages to catch up. He has an accent in it where he doesn't in Common when he answers, "the region-- Granitefell is..."
He moves rapidly to the wall beside his desk, setting the coffee cups down without a second thought, and runs a hand over the map he keeps on the wall with various colored pins to indicate different missions. Drawing a line with his index finger from Starkhaven down, he lands ever so slightly closer to Kirkwall than before, and visibly pauses as his mind proceeds to shut out every implication of that encroachment. There's no room for it today.

"I'll," he stammers, realizes Bastien has already said he'll do most of it, and turns to face him with that same lost look as before.
"...what should I do?" The day's usual tasks seem pointless, now.

[cozen]

Bastien almost never looks impatient with anyone. He only very occasionally feels impatient with anyone, either, even secretly. But he does right now, for just a second. His expression flickers frustrated. Flickers how dare you look at me like that right now, as if deciding what he should do, himself, isn't taking everything he has.

Then it is as smooth as a morning pond, so quickly that that frustration might have been a trick of the firelight.

"Diplomacy's contacts. You can make a list. You can draft what we will tell them. Once Flint and Stark give the go-ahead you can send it out."

[altusimperius]

A task. He can do this, it’ll tide him over until,

until… something. He nods, dropping his gaze, and is turning back to sit at his desk when the words almost leave his mouth unbidden: “do you think—-”

He stops himself before he can finish and looks down again, hunching his shoulders. It’s not a ruse. People wouldn’t have sounded like that if it were.

[cozen]

There are at least dozen people in the Gallows who feel the way Bastien feels right now.

Or: the way he would feel, if not for the distance between him and himself, from which he is only observing and cataloging sensations, like how his chest is not quite allowing full breaths.

Still. There are at least a dozen who feel that way, but there's only one other person who might even approach feeling the same way about Byerly. Who might say something genuine and specific—the sort of thing that comes from actually knowing the man, actually understanding him—that will land like a pickaxe.

So Bastien very much needs to leave. He is leaving.

"No," he says on his way past Benedict's desk, to whatever it is he isn't saying.

[altusimperius]

Accepting the answer without complaint, Benedict nods silently to himself and drops his gaze to the desk, which he continues to stare at for the next ten or so minutes before he finally sinks to his chair and gets to work.