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Entry tags:
- ! open,
- ! player plot,
- bastien,
- benedict quintus artemaeus,
- derrica,
- ellie,
- fifi mariette,
- florent vascarelle,
- gela,
- james flint,
- julius,
- loxley,
- matthias,
- mobius,
- petrana de cedoux,
- redvers keen,
- stephen strange,
- tsenka abendroth,
- vanya orlov,
- viktor,
- wysteria de foncé,
- yseult,
- { peter parker },
- { tony stark }
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.
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.
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.
no subject
A kindness, she thinks.
A kindness that won't last once they arrive, and see for themselves what was done.
"It was very bad, I think. I think he didn't want to say, so I wouldn't carry it longer than I needed to."
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Loxley lowers his head and he kisses the crown of Derrica's, a hand cupping behind it to usher her into an embrace that he imagines doesn't have to be only for him. He doesn't know, offhand, who all went, only that it was a large group and he didn't go because Derrica didn't go, and,
he feels fiercely glad for that, suddenly, and holds her firmer as if the pressure might do something for the heartache of it.
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And a truth she keeps carefully clipped behind her teeth: she should have been there.
Maybe there would have been more than five survivors if she had been there.
But she is here instead, holding on to Loxley so tightly her arms ache with it. How terrible, how selfish, to rejoice in his safety.
"I'm so sorry," she says again, slightly muffled against the join of his neck and shoulder. "I didn't want you to go without knowing..."
And she had wanted him so badly to go with her. Derrica had wanted him near, someone who would touch her this way, who would reach for her and she could reach back to, easy and simple as drawing a breath. But the only way he can come is by knowing what he risks, what he might see when he swings down from his griffon.
no subject
There is simply no way he would not have gone, not without her telling him firmly not to at least a few times in a row. He had, at the very least, known that he had friends there himself, if the knowledge of Derrica's imminent departure, somewhere dangerous, wasn't enough. And it is.
His voice is thicker, but not exactly shaky. There is a familiar kind of control at the centre of him, for all that the way his hand squeezing over her braided hair is true.
"You did the right thing," he murmurs. "And I won't have you going there without me."
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"I couldn't ask you to stay behind."
Gwenaëlle had volunteered herself, so incisive as to her own worth in relation to three others stood alongside her. She'd had a burn on her arm. She'd gripped Loxley's sword so tightly.
And Loxley had tried to die for her. Derrica hasn't forgotten that.
"Is there something we should do for her?"
Other than what Derrica intends to do for her: take her home, care for her as respectfully as she knows how. But Loxley had known her far better than Derrica. Her hands continue, slow sweeps up and down his back, as she puts this question to him.
In some ways, it's about what Loxley will need to do for her too. What eases the pain of knowing he was here while she was there.
no subject
"Just to go get her," Loxley offers. "I think. I don't know, exactly, she's so contrary sometimes—"
Was, of course. The past tense.
He detangles himself and steps back, as if that rush of feeling might be harmful to be in contact with. Presses the edges of his hands to his eye sockets (reflexively, even if only one of them has this ability) as if to push back that welling up. "She'd probably," he says, continuing, "want us not to fuck around wasting time about her, or something. Which I would tell her is stupid."
His hands lower. Remaining eye bright, brow crinkling, studying his hands pointlessly and offered a shuddered out laugh. "I've only done this once. We buried someone under a tree. We didn't know what else to do."
no subject
"It sounds beautiful, being laid there," Derrica murmurs. "We could do that for her, if her grandfather wishes it."
The sum of what Derrica knows about Gwenaëlle doesn't come to very much. A series of links, between her and the Duc, her and the Commander, her and Loxley. These people who may know better whether they should lower Gwenaëlle into the earth or set her onto the pyre.
Does it matter that Derrica thinks there is something lovely about laying her down into the roots of a tree? Maybe not.
"You should speak of her. She was more than she gave herself credit for, I think."
How quick Gwenaëlle had been to diminish herself. They should make much of her, a better eulogy than she had attempted to give herself among the ruins.
no subject
"She has family," Loxley says, more to himself. Quietly spoken, in this close space between them. "Her grandfather and the rest. They'll know. She probably has all her affairs in order."
This appears to be some small relief. A delay, almost.
But not quite. His hands lower, gently curl up under Derrica's arms. Speak of her. It squeezes his heart to think of that responsibility, the way he could easily get something wrong. Richard had, before, drawn focus to his terrible read of people. And there is a little self-awareness for the way he can feel himself skittering away from each gentle suggestion Derrica makes.
So he breathes out, nods. "Perhaps I'll know better when we see her."
no subject
In the space that follows after that statement, Derrica flattens her hands across his chest. Feels how badly she'd like to fold him into her again, find a way to interpose herself between Loxley and this reality they've found themselves in.
"We'll find her, and we will bring her back to the Gallows to tend to her. You needn't make any decisions now."
An out given to him: Derrica isn't trying to corner him, only provide what little comfort she can.
"I know how much she cared for you, and you for her. I'm sorry, Loxley."
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Even Richard's disappearance feels abstracted, still, except suddenly less so. Suddenly, one less person he might turn to, who would absolutely be here in this infirmary, gathering supplies, or maybe not, maybe—
"I had this other friend who fell," Loxley says, an internal wrenching away from that useless train of thought. His hands rest on Derrica's, drawing them into a hold, each. "In battle. We had to run. We had to leave her behind. I never really forgave myself that, the leaving her."
He shrugs. "At least Gwenaëlle got to know that I wouldn't do that again."
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Gwenaëlle had to have known that.
Derrica understood it. She had seen, in those ruins at the whims of cruel spirits, how far Loxley was willing to go to protect his friend. Regardless of how it had ended, it had been such a clear demonstration.
Here, she brings his hands to her lips. Lays a soft kiss on his knuckles.
"I know you wouldn't have left her," comes with an understanding that Derrica might have lost him too, trying to save her. "You've grown. Even since I've known you."
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"I'm really," he says, "really glad you weren't there."
It bears saying. It bears saying because they've had their share of near misses and this might as well be one, given how likely that Riftwatch's standing healer might have been roped into relief efforts if she hadn't been busy (as Riftwatch's standing healer) on the day they gathered some numbers.
He's not sure he could fathom what all of this would be like, if it had gone any differently.
no subject
Block this news out, bar it from their lives.
(She should have been there. This thought squeezes around her heart, claws of it digging in.)
"I'm glad you're here," she tells him instead, that sentiment's twin. "That you're brave enough to come with us."
No one would blame him if he'd stayed away.
"I love you," like a reminder, something that still brings anxious tremors along with it. A true thing. It doesn't yet sit easy, regardless.
no subject
He doesn't have to have a sharp read of human nature to know that very likely, some part of Derrica might have wished to be there, or at least feels a sense of duty about it. There is no time here to guess that this is the case and try to dismantle it, standing in the doorway of the infirmary, but he can impress this: that she is here with him, that he needs her too.
She has friends out there. He imagines they know (knew) even better than Gwenaëlle how much Derrica cares.
"What do you need, for right now? What can I do?"
The words come less tightly, now, more focused.
bow?
She breathes out, urgency rising to take anxious knots in her stomach. Julius' voice comes back to her, carrying an understanding she wished she could flinch from.
Derrica understands what they're going to find when they arrive.
She arches up, balancing on tiptoe as she draws Loxley down to kiss. Threads her fingers into his hair, thumbs at his temples. The reprieve is dwindling down to an end, and behind her there are the boxes to be packed, to be toted down to the courtyard where Ellie and all the others will be waiting.
When she breaks, she tells him, "Help me carry these crates down to the courtyard."