faderift | player plot | when my time comes around, pt 2

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player plot | when my time comes around, pt 2

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.

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Please drink, Derrica had pleaded, very quietly, to Ellie in the village as she'd held out her own waterskin to her.

You need to stop, and wash the blood off your hands, Derrica had told her too, at the end of the longest day, moving bodies from where they'd fallen to the wagons.

Eat this, Derrica had said simply, tearing half her own bread in half and putting it into Ellie's hands before they mounted their griffons.

Grief wears on a person. Derrica knows this. Ellie won't be the only one ground down beneath the weight of it. Right now Ellie is a stonewall, unyielding and bristling, but experience tells Derrica one simple thing: that cannot, will not last forever.

And they have to carry this new reality forward with them now: sixteen of their people, gone. And two of them were so desperately important to Ellie, who has already lost so much.

It is unfair. So much of this is unfair and Derrica can only rage against it quietly, privately. (She had sat for a very long time beside Marcus Rowntree's unmoving body before helping Julius lift him from the scorched, ruin of the ground.) And through it all, the work goes on. It goes on while Gwenaëlle and Jude and Clarisse and Darras and Abby and Val de Fonce and so many others lie in their shrouds, unbearably silent.

Derrica could say it is the work that brings her to the herb garden she and Ellie had been assembling together. They certainly have need of it, and it certainly needs tending. She had promised Ellie it wouldn't fall to her, but they are abruptly short of hands and—

And it is a relief to find Ellie here. Derrica had intended to search the eyrie and the training yard next, had hoped not to scour Kirkwall proper. Ellie is here, crouched by the scaffolding they'd appropriated to make a support for their arbor blessing, should it sprout, and Derrica watches her, noting the tension in her body before crossing to kneel beside her.

"Can I help?"

Ellie still feels awful for snapping at Derrica.

It's not something she tries to dwell on. Had this been a normal day, a normal week, she would've apologized and let go of the guilt right away, secure in the fact that Derrica knows and cares about her and would never hold it against her.

Right now, she's a mess. Small things turn into guilt spirals, especially when she's pushing her body to the limit.

So she does as she's asked. Every single time. She doesn't protest; she knows that Derrica has her best interests at heart, even if that is intensely painful. Even as she feels like a walking black hole, there's a small voice inside her that whispers that she's done this before.

She's lost people before. A staggering amount of people, really -- though never this many all at once. She can identify her own expressions of grief, her own tendency to withdraw, to go numb. Sleep breeds nightmares. Food all tastes like ashes. And frankly, she forgets to give a fuck.

It feels like betrayal to enjoy anything. Frustratingly, Ellie knows that it isn't. She doesn't want to be this version of herself. Clarisse wouldn't want--

She runs out of work. Her fingers are raw and the stables have never been cleaner, the griffons more groomed. Artie actually nips her finger hard enough to really hurt, and she finally backs off, scouring her brain for something, anything that isn't laying in her bed and seeing Abby's crushed fucking face.

The herb garden could probably use checking. So she goes there.

There is very little to do. Derrica and Strange have taken good care of the place. Ellie crouches down anyway, finding the tiny whispers of what could become weeds, fishing them out with raw fingertips.

And Derrica appears. Ellie tenses, her whole body going tight as a bowstring, braced to be told to go and take the nap she's been dodging all afternoon. Instead, Derrica kneels next to her.

"There's nothing to do," Ellie says quietly. "Nothing but wait."

There's a lump in her throat, and she brushes her limp hair back from her face, following the projected line of the seedlings, shielded here from the summer sun.

Ellie should sleep.

Derrica could say that. If she asked, Ellie may very well ascend the stairs, lay down for an hour or so. The possibility weighs on Derrica, heavy at the back of her mouth.

Ellie's fingers are raw. She is tensed so tightly that when Derrica reaches for her hands she is afraid that Ellie will snap apart.

"Let me see," is so, so soft.

It has been such a long time since Derrica has sensed even a fraction of this pain in Ellie. Not even when Ellie had come to her room, when Derrica had patched her up after she and Abby had fought then.

Right now, she is not even certain if Ellie will let her hold her hands. Even this small thing feels tenuous.

It's not so much that Ellie doesn't want to be touched. But she flinches as Derrica reaches for her before she allows them, wordlessly, to be taken.

Ellie's hands feel even more raw this way, the tips of her fingers stinging, nails broken, angry red scrapes over even her healthy callouses where she's worked her hands too hard on the wooden handle of the shovel.

It's the kindness that's hardest to bear.

She wants Clarisse. She wants her hands, her arm around her shoulder, her voice in her ear. Take a nap, dumbass. Everybody'll still be here when you wake up.

She spent last night in Abby's bed, when she went to go get Wags from where he'd plopped himself down on the mattress and cried for her again after the pyres. She'd pulled on him, even yelled at him, and he just wouldn't fucking budge. She probably should have gone to Clarisse's bed, just feet away- but she'd figured, fuck it. Abby wouldn't care. She'd nearly collapsed, pulled Abby's sheets up over them both.

In the face of all of that, Ellie's hands don't feel important at all.

It is a small wound, really. Or it feels small, because Derrica has seen so much worse these past few days. (Gwenaëlle. Cosima. Abby's braid.) But it is not a small thing.

Derrica understands what it means that Ellie's hands have fallen into this state. She knows that this is a kind of harm, disrepair telegraphing an absence, something in Ellie fracturing. She recognizes it the way she recognizes Ellie's flinch.

Her own hands are very gentle as she examines Ellie. Stops with Ellie's fingers cupped loosely between her own hands, her eyes on Ellie's face.

"Will you let me? Please?"

The tremor in that word is so, so easy to miss. But in the midst of all this suffering, all this grief, it seems so painfully unfair for Ellie to lose all that she's gained alongside sixteen of their people.

The pinpricks from the embroidering needle have closed by now but they're still there, tender, aching. Derrica will have seen it; the shroud she painted for Clarisse, the one they burned her in.

Ellie's hands still in Derrica's grasp, her body still where she's crouched. She makes herself breathe, and nod, and breathe.

"I hate funerals," she whispers, hoarse. She'd been there, been there, standing like a wraith while they burned. Cosima without her glasses. Byerly, unsmiling.

"I know."

Her eyes are very intent on Ellie's face. Observing the nod, but observing her breath, the rictus of pain so close to the surface.

There had been no funerals for those slaughtered at Dairsmuid. They'd been burned to ash, certainly, and maybe the Chantry had called it rite and a laying to rest, but it had been a scouring. There is a difference.

They are lucky that they were able to give even this much to the people brought back from Granitefall.

When she looks away from Ellie, it's to bow her head, raise Ellie's fingers between cupped hands to her mouth. She blows, and it is a sensation like frost. It is a cooling sting against raw skin. Derrica's healing always comes like snowfall, like ice applied to a fever.

When Derrica heals her, it always feels good. A slackening of muscles, a soothing of pain and aches. She breathes easier.

This time, she doesn't. Her hands are inert, and there is a look on her face that speaks of something roiling, hurting, this side of explosive and disgusting and awful.

"We didn't usually get to have them," Ellie says, and there is a horrible edge to her voice. "In Boston there were mass graves. Just open, in the middle of the street of the unused sectors. You could smell it in the summer, before they set the fires at night."

She's speaking carelessly, and she knows it. It's horrible of her, but it still comes breaking out the edges, like a push of a lancet.

"Joel and I would come across bodies on the road all the time. Corpses in the snow and under tarps, curled up in corners. He said we didn't have time to stop. To dig. And we didn't, really. There were way too many."

She should stop. She doesn't. "There's a headstone on his grave. We brought him home, buried him in the town cemetery. Dug it out in the middle of winter. You'd think that would help, right?"

She takes a breath and it's wet, and it sounds like it hurts.

This was supposed to help, right?

As Ellie speaks, dragging these words from some deep part of her past, Derrica keeps hold of her hands. Strokes her thumbs along Ellie's knuckles.

Thinks of mass graves. Thinks of Dairsmuid. Of people reduced to ash. Erased.

"Sometimes, it does."

Sometimes operating at the exclusion of this time. This was not a peaceful loss. There is no way to pretend it is an event that came naturally.

"But it can take time. Especially when it's a loss like this."

Derrica stalls, quiets after. The enormity of the unfairness strikes her so hard. How can Ellie lose more than she already has? When she had already healed so much of the wounds she'd arrived with? Her fingers tighten over Ellie's, shifting to lace their hands together.

"I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry you have to bear her loss too."

Clarisse. Abby. All the others who have been torn from them.

"Yeah."

Ellie's voice breaks again, and she lets Derrica keep her hands, but she tilts her face forward, grits her teeth until her jaw creaks.

"Time will heal. Talking will help. Eventually it'll be better. Someday it'll stop hurting so much. Keep finding something to fight for."

Her newly healed hands curl into fists, trembling.

"And everybody's so fucking sorry."

It breaks in her throat, awful, grinding.

They have talked together so often of grief. Derrica has spoken of the way life builds up around the deep wounds this kind of loss leaves.

She still believes it.

But when Ellie's hands curl into fists under hers, Derrica understands that too.

"They want to do more," is surely nothing Ellie doesn't know. Everyone always wants to do more, and settles for the same thing Derrica has: I'm so sorry. They all must know it is not enough, just as Derrica does.

Softer, she prompts, "Ellie, will you look at me?"

It's not enough. It's never enough. It's not their fault and they want to help, they care about her, but they're not what she wants.

Nobody will be the person she needs right now, and it's unfair. It's unfair that Clarisse is ashes, that Abby suffered for so long before he died, that Ellis bled out before help could come. It's unfair that Peter has to come back on his own two feet and watch that wagon roll and roll and roll. It's unfair that Yseult had to hold Darras and that Julius had to find Marcus and that they were the ones who had to do the math, take count, five, five out of twenty-one.

And it's unfair that Derrica has to be here now, catching the brunt of Ellie's anger, all the tearing, gnashing things inside of her, the shrapnel that threatens to explode. All that anger and all that grief with no place to go.

Ellie thinks that she can't. That she can't look at her, but she makes herself tilt her chin up. She makes herself the same way she makes herself eat, and sleep, and roll over in bed in the morning and find it empty.

"I love you," is not enough either. What can it be against what Ellie has lost? A minor balm, maybe. Some small drop of rain on scorched earth. Derrica still presses on, "You can let me hold some of this for you."

Anger. Grief. They are written across Ellie's face. Derrica can feel the way Ellie's body is drawn tight in the attempt to constrain them.

"Tell me."

Are there even words for it? Derrica knows that there aren't. Remembers how long it had taken her to find words for the Annulment, for having Dairsmuid destroyed around her. (Remembers that Marcus had listened to her in the snow of the Vinmarks, and shown her sympathy without any hesitation.) The agony of that loss had been so overwhelming she had been nearly crushed beneath it.

"Show me," is a concession to that, to the idea that maybe all that's locked inside her is a scream fit to shake the stone foundation so far beneath them.

I love you breaks hard against the cracked shell she's thrown up, trying to protect herself. She feels like a bomb, like she's collapsing in on herself. I love you, Derrica says, and again, she's reminded of the things she'll never say.

Tears well in Ellie's eyes as Derrica holds her, and even though she doesn't hold her down, it's impossible for Ellie to pull away. The pressure of that anchor cracks her along the fault lines, and the breath all presses out of her lungs.

She wants to scream. She doesn't. Instead her voice sounds very, very far away.

"I never told her I loved her."

"Oh, Ellie," is a breath, more reaction than real rejoinder.

Derrica leaves her grip on Ellie's hands, lifts them to cup Ellie's face. The way Ellie's face shatters is—

She can feel the echo of that breaking in her own body. Pain that hooks into the grief she's been carrying, rebounds and echoes back. Pain that she can't take away, only attempt to soothe as best she can.

"Breathe," is the softest prompt. "Ellie, she knew. She knew you loved her."

They know each other very well, she and Ellie. Well enough for Derrica to believe this to her bones: if Ellie had felt this deeply for Clarisse, it would have shown through to her.

Ellie knew. Knew it in her bones, in her blood, deep down past that. She knew that Clarisse knew exactly how she felt. Really, what she needed was someone to tell her.

Abby could have. If Abby were still here.

Breathe, Derrica tells her, and Ellie breaks along the fault lines.

A sob rips out of her like something erupting, something little-child helpless and beyond all reason. She gulps for air, and finally starts to cry.

Ellie cries with an absolute abandonment of control, like a storm. Fucking furious and with shattering force. She digs her blunt and broken fingernails into Derrica's clothes and muffles a rending, throat-bruising scream into her shoulder. It tears out of her like a living thing, dampened only by the barrier that Derrica makes between her and world. She goes, all in a single breath, until her voice completely gives up on her.

It relieves some of the pressure, but not enough. Nothing will be enough.

They both know that. They both know grief too well.

It happens by degrees. Ellie comes all apart, and Derrica gathers her in, wraps both arms around her. Hand at Ellie's nape. A susurration of sound at Ellie's ear as Derrica rocks them both in small, incremental motions side to side.

"I've got you," is hardly more than a breath, a murmur underlying Ellie's sobs. An extension of Derrica's hand smoothing up and down Ellie's back, running in an endless loop as Ellie cries. "I've got you."

Nothing will be changed by Ellie's tears. But this break might ease the emotions Derrica had seen Ellie locking tight within her body. Wring out her out and leave space for even the smallest shift towards healing. There is no urgency to any part of this. There is simply the two of them, knelt here in the beginnings of a garden, while Ellie howls out her grief and her tears soak into the shoulder of Derrica's tunic.

By and by, Derrica says once more, "Breathe, Ellie," in a soft whisper against her temple.

Derrica's arms are warm, steady, keeping her attached to this moment and this place rather than countless others. Ellie collapses in on her, leaning in against her, and just like she promised, Derrica takes her weight.

It wrings her dry in time. In minutes that feel like hours as she cries it out. It's like lancing a wound, like poison being bled from her body. A purging. It doesn't clear the source of the rot, and she is left raw and aching, her head pounding and her mouth dry, but it removes the heat and the pressure.

I've got you. How many times has she said that? Breathe. How many worlds has it crossed? Derrica's hand smooths along Ellie's back, sanding off the jagged edges of feeling left behind, until the tears go silent and then stop.

Ellie breathes, near-boneless against her, the tiniest shudder of something almost like relief.

She doesn't lift her head. In the moment, she's not entirely sure she can move at all. But Derrica holds her, keeps holding her. She allows her this moment of weakness, the shelter to break down utterly.

For once, Ellie lets herself take it.

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player plot | when my time comes around, pt 2

ellie.

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