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

yseult | open

[hassaran]

I. Granitefell

Yseult is as streaked with blood and soot as any of the living, dull smears across her face (as if she's tried to wipe it clean with a dirty sleeve) cut through by a single vibrant red trickle of dried blood from hairline to jaw. One sleeve has been rent by dracolisk acid, the edges of the holes bleached grey-white beneath later stains, glimpses of burnt skin beneath. At times she may be caught moving gingerly, favoring a hip, but she doesn't go looking for treatment.

When the others arrive, the pyres for the villagers' dead are already burning. Yseult is where she would be expected to be: in the center of things, delegating tasks as simply as possible, helping surviving villagers load the wagon that will take them on to a safer town, collecting what supplies and personal belongings can be salvaged from the remains of the camp. Though this latest round of smoke has reduced her voice to a painfully hoarse crackle, she will direct the reinforcements, too—whether that is to the location of a particular body or to a task, though the to-do list is the shorter of the two.

II. The Gallows

If anyone had been asked to guess what form Yseult's grief might take, the answer would likely have been: quiet, contained, buried beneath work. And so it is. There is light beneath her office door at nearly all hours, but there always has been. She is often found at her desk, neatly dressed, hair braided, a report before her, a pen in hand, as always. Sometimes it looks as if nothing has changed. Other days she may be caught: with eyes too red and shadowed to be fully cosmeticked away even by her powers of disguise, or even, once or twice, asleep at her desk with head pillowed on arms or curled up on the sofa by the window, a gray tabby cat by her shins.

She eats in the dining hall, never without a report to read as she consumes whatever is on offer. She works on the training grounds, throwing knives by the dozen into a target or hitting a dummy with a sword until she can't lift her arms. She visits the eyrie to tend to Pockets and Hugo, she collects the mail in her pigeonhole, she leads the division's biweekly meeting and remains in the workroom to address any questions or concerns, all the normal steps in her routine carried out as expected. Sometimes, on hot nights, she can be found up on the ramparts or the roof of a tower, laid back on the stones with her feet dangling and her face turned to the sea breeze.

She has always maintained a professional reserve—she is polite, approachable but not chatty, and she remains that now. Her office door is open more often than not, she is responsive to agents by crystal, will discuss reports and plan missions and answer questions. She plays the role of Scoutmaster as well as ever, and she has always been difficult to read. But despite that, despite the insistence on business as usual, it's not hard, actually, to see the difference in her. Being inscrutable requires the presence of something hidden beneath the surface, hinted at but held, tantalizingly, just out of reach. Whatever that was is gone, a personality made conspicuous only now by its absence.

II, office

[untiltheyarent]

Part of Fifi's morning routine involves coming in to give the Scouting Head office its standard sweeping/polishing/wipedown, and generally when Yseult is in, this might also include a quiet briefing on any gossip or other significant details she'd heard in the previous day.

Today is no different, and Fifi arrives exactly on time as always, her footsteps silent and her presence announced only by the light rap on the door as she opens it. Once inside, she pauses at the sight of Yseult's (presumably) sleeping form curled over her desk, and, after a moment's decision, closes the door behind herself anyway.
They can talk later, or not. But she still needs to clean, and she begins to go about this as quietly as possible.

[hassaran]

The room is as neat as ever. A sheaf of reports on a side-table, an empty cup on the sideboard, the pillows misarranged on the sofa, a stub of pencil forgotten on the arm, but no other mess, no sudden grand untidiness to put the inner turmoil on display. But it takes a minute or two for her to register Fifi's presence and wake, and for a woman who has always seemed to know who was coming before they got to the door, that is its own statement.

She twitches once, peels her cheek off her forearm and wipes at her mouth before cupping a hand around the back of her neck as it protests both the previous position and the new one. She's clocked Fifi already, recognized the familiar sound of her moving about the room, and so there's no startled alarm, and she doesn't try to pretend. Just eases upright and then back into her chair, breathing in deeply and out shorter, scraping a little finger carefully around the corners of her eyes.

She swallows once, runs her tongue over her teeth, and then says, "Thank you."

[untiltheyarent]

Yseult's words are met at first with only a look, a little half-smile over Fifi's shoulder as she straightens the pillows-- she always appreciates Yseult's office for its ease-- and it isn't until she's made her way through most of the room, doing all the actual work, that she hesitates before moving toward the door.

"It's not fair," she observes in Orlesian, turned mostly away.

[hassaran]

Yseult looks up at the comment. (She'd begun to reacquaint herself with the papers lately under her head, always careful not to seem to be watching Fifi work.)

"What is?" she replies, her shrug resigned.

[untiltheyarent]

A sigh through her nose, and Fifi mimics the shrug, turning the rest of the way around to fold her hands in front of her.

"One hopes... it will come to be so, someday." Or something fairness-aligned, something that at least can be lived with.

[hassaran]

Yseult's head tilts, more thoughtful than another shrug but no more hopeful. "There will always be good people that die and worse who do not. But maybe fewer when this war is ended. Until the next begins."

i.

[prelest]

"Scoutmaster," says Nina, "may I help with your hip?"

Yseult will likely understand the meaning of the question. Nina had told her boss about some of her abilities - shared her ability to heal, if not yet her ability to stop someone's heart or crush the air from their lungs. Just the nicer things she can do, at least for now.

Nina's expression is carefully neutral, not wanting to trigger any unwanted grief by showing too much sympathy. She's just businesslike.

[hassaran]

She has no particular interest in speaking with anyone if it can be avoided, but at least it isn't another person asking if she's seen their friend, if she's sure their friend is dead, if there's anything they can do. (Yes, yes, and no.)

So when she says, "No, thank you," accompanied by a shake of her head it isn't with annoyance. It's just what she's decided for the moment. "But you could help with my arm." She holds out the left, the sleeve of her shirt riddled with acid burns, the skin beneath no doubt the same. "Can your magic prevent scarring?"

[prelest]

"Mm-hm."

Nina doesn't hesitate to take Yseult's arm. She pulls away the shredded fabric, and grimaces - but it's not a flinch as much as a thoughtful frown, as she decides how to approach this wound. She's never worked on a chemical burn before. Complex wounds like that were saved for the real healers.

"And I can clear up scars if they form. Particularly if they're new."

The burn goes deep. And oh, it must hurt something awful. So the first pass of Nina's hand, she concentrates on the nerves - quieting their activity, numbing the area. And then she gets to work stitching together the the little patches of damaged muscle where the acid penetrated beneath the dermis.

"Was that one of the - dracolisks? That did this?"

[hassaran]

"Good." A scar like this would be draws attention, gets remembered.

She's been using her arm all day, careful not to bend or straighten it all the way and tear the delicate remnants of skin and new scab, but unwilling to avoid work that needed doing just to avoid pain. When the nerves shut off the muscles go abruptly slack, arm momentarily dead weight in Nina's hands. It's an odd new sensation, unlike the spirit healing she's experienced in the past, and she watches with mild curiosity as the rifter works.

"Yes. Some of them spit acid."

[prelest]

"Horrible," Nina murmurs. Another pass of her hands rebuilds the deepest layers of skin, cells dividing and redividing at speed, leukocytes called to combat any disease that the animal might have had in it.And then Nina pauses to catch her breath - frustrated, once again, at how taxing it is to use her powers here. Back home, she could go all day with work like this; here, though, she has to take breaks.

As she gets her strength back, before she starts in again, she looks the Scoutmaster in the face. Is the redness around her eyes from exhaustion, or from crying?

"I can numb other types of pain, too," she says carefully. "It's not a solution to anything, and it won't make anything go away. But if there's anyone who doesn't want to be feeling their grief right now, I can help."

[hassaran]

Smoke, mostly, hours of it that've made a ruin of her voice, too, and dust and ash and dirt and dripping blood and exhaustion, yes, but no tears. Not today, not here. She is watching the pyres burning the villagers' dead and rubs a hand absently across her throat, the backs of knuckles pressed over trachea as she swallows.

"Florent might," she says. "I don't know the rifter well--Peter. The others likely not. But you may ask them."

ii, roof.

[cozen]

He would not be here if he hadn't glimpsed her up there from the window of an adjacent tower, her dangling feet recognizable in the same half-conscious way the sound of a person's footsteps become over time even if you aren't trying. And he's aware, the whole walk up, that Yseult keeps firm boundaries, and people don't go lie alone on roofs because they're hoping for company. He is climbing the stairs selfishly. Selfishly sitting down beside her, upright in the vicinity of her shoulders.

It isn't the first Bastien's seen of her since she came back. He's been in and out of her office to hand off or request information from the grey area between spy work and diplomacy. Once or twice he's sat in her vicinity in the dining hall, quiet except to ask if the soup was meant to be cold or to offer to take her finished bowl to the wash basin with his own. On one of the days her eyes were red, he pretended not to notice, save when he touched the back of her hand on his way out.

Not for the first time in his life, beneath the layer of libertinism learned–or sometimes only mimicked—from Royan artists and layabouts, he has found himself reluctantly and commonly jealous of simpler labels. Straight lines connecting this person to that one. Single words that serve, if not perfectly, well enough to get the point across alone. Like widow.

He's unlikely to say so.

He comes close to saying nothing at all. But before he settles so deeply into the silence that breaking it would be awkward, he says, "You can tell me to go away if you want. I might listen."

[hassaran]

She's always liked high places. They are quiet and peaceful and safe, removed from the world, a chance to observe it without having to be part of it. They are also, on a night like this, the best chance of a breeze. If she closes her eyes, and listens to the waves and lets the warm salt air waft across her face and ruffle the hairs on her arms, she can almost pretend she is somewhere else and everything is different. But she's not, and it isn't, and despite persistent exposure she has yet to develop an immunity to the pain of that return to reality.

So it's just as well when she's interrupted. She shakes her head, lifts a hand from the tile. "It's alright. I fell asleep up here last night. I'm not sure my back can take two in a row."

[cozen]

"Your back," Bastien echoes with a touch of skepticism. A week ago those two words would have been followed by a whole paragraph of teasing disbelief about her aging at all, being physically a day past twenty-seven, experiencing the same aches and pains as thick-middled mortals like him. This evening it is only implied.

He braces on arm behind his back, picks at the edge of a tile with the other hand, discards a half-dozen questions that seem varying combinations of unwelcome and unfair. For a moment he leans forward, a gesture toward getting a measure of how far the fall would be, but he doesn't bend far enough to successfully see straight down over the edge.

"I miss being able to sleep anywhere," instead. "When I was a boy I had a dozen spots. One for every kind of night."

[hassaran]

"It's a talent," she agrees. No matter how preternaturally youthful one's back may be. Hers is nearing forty, a thing that worried her a week ago but no longer. "It also helps to be exhausted all the time." That at least should be easy.

"Where did you go when the weather was like this?"

[cozen]

"Le Faucon Blanc," she might recognize, or not, as one of Val Royeaux's cheaper inns, occupying a building that once made it an expensive inn, before everything about it fell swiftly out of fashion. "They have those tiny wrought-iron balconies—for decoration, you know? Or for not falling out of the windows. I'm not sure. But there was one window that was always dark and never open. Apparently the owner's husband had died there, a little horribly, and she boarded it up—so I would climb up to that one and sleep on the balcony. I woke up with lines everywhere, but there was a breeze from every direction, so..."

None of this matters at all.

"He seemed like a good man," might be unwelcome, but at least it isn't such inconsequential rambling. "Piracy aside. I can hardly judge."

If Bastien is like either of them—if he should have been better friends with either of them, free of particular circumstances that connected him to Yseult—it's Darras. Was Darras.

"And when he talked about you, it just radiated off of him, you know? The warmth and the pride and—it's just fucking bullshit that he's gone."

[hassaran]

Yseult preferred the inconsequential rambling. She could have tried to remember where Le Faucon Blanc is and whether or not she's confusing it with Le Faisan Blanc, or talked about falling asleep on the trapeze platform as a child or remarked on the truly miserable weather they're having or the time she did a job in weather like this and had to climb half a wall blind because of sweat running into her eyes. Instead, she is thinking about Darras, looking back over at the pair of villagers trying to make a run for it before lifting his arms to wave at the oncoming dracolisks, drawing their deadly attention. The lance knocking his sword aside, the beast rearing to slash his throat.

"It's because of me," she says, voice grim and a note of grating over gravel, something like it did for the first day or two back before the smoke-damage eased. "He never wanted to be here. I should've let him go instead of pretending I could do this and have a life."

ii. up.

[propulsion]

It's a quiet spot, the ramparts. Not silent. Ship bells, the wind skidding off the stone, waves crashing on the jagged rocky edges of the island. There are corners where the sound of people training in the yard can echo the clak of wooden swords or staves (not today—Forces really took a beating, huh).

Everything at a distance. When Tony joins her up there, and even sits with his legs dangling, it's not because he has her same meticulous sense of balance or because he has secret rocket thrusters in his boots, but he just kind of lost the natural animal caution of heights sometime ago. Low centre of gravity. He'll be fine.

He joins her like that, wordlessly. Somewhere behind, where she might have heard him emerge, there was also the scrape of blunt mabari claws and heavy mabari panting, but the mabari to which these things are attached has lowered himself down to lie, patient, within the fortress.

Angles something to her. A little sewn baggie of almonds is seated in his palm, open for picking.

[hassaran]

She is leaned against one side of the embrasure, head and shoulder pressed to the stone. She doesn't straighten up as Tony joins her, but she does turn when he offers out his hand, the instinct to decline noted and reconsidered. She picks a couple out with fingertips and pops one in her mouth. No burrito? she might joke.

"Thanks," she says.

[propulsion]

No avocados, he might reply.

He takes it back, fishes one out, palms it into his mouth. Cronch.

"Didn't think he'd take me up on it," Tony says, after a moment. "Cutting Diplo."

(If there is a category for ill-timed jokes, this one slots into Testing The Waters.)

[hassaran]

The way she exhales out her nose might be some cousin thrice-removed of a laugh. It's probably also equidistant in relation to a sigh.

"I spoke to him near the end," she says. "He'd decided to die making an impossible attempt on Ferra, the cavalry leader." A second almond cracks between her teeth. So maybe that's a no to jokes. "I haven't told Bastien."

[propulsion]

It's hot out, the sun baking off grey stone and water, soothed by the gentle breezes that this elevation is good at finding. Still, Tony's next breath in feels a little more like winter, sharp and dry, held there for a second longer than needed.

A no to jokes doesn't mean no jokes, but there isn't really one anyway, where Tony is silent for a pause. And the time it takes to get another almond, rolling it between his fingers.

"He'll wanna know," he offers. "There's no good time for it, so. You're off the hook for finding one."

[hassaran]

"Will he?"

She is contemplating a third almond, rolling it end over end across a knuckle and back. It's not really the right shape for that and squirts away into the air and down. She glances after it and then leans her head back against the stone of the merlon.

"It adds nothing. He might prefer to think he'd tried to survive."