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

[tender]

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.

[notathreat]

"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.

[tender]

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?"

[notathreat]

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.

[tender]

"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.

[notathreat]

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."

[tender]

"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.

[notathreat]

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.

[tender]

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.

[notathreat]

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.