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

[overharrowed]

"We'd have missed you. I would have," he can say, quietly genuine. While they're not as close as they could be, he'd be sorry to see her go for her own sake as much as losing one more link to Marcus. He wonders, if they both survive the war, if she'll be more patient with his politics for their shared history. Or maybe neither of them will live to see the end of the war and it will never matter.

"Well. First. We found Marcus's will. Petrana and I did. She's technically the executor, but I'm helping and ... he left his armor to you. He specified that he doesn't mind if you sell it, if you don't want it refitted but ..." He pulls out of a pocket a small piece of paper, where he's recopied the exact wording of the bequest. He hasn't been a scribe for years, but his handwriting is still quite fine.

Softer, he adds, "Of course, you're welcome to look at the original document if you'd like but ... I thought you might want your part in a way you could keep."

[delphian]

A joke about solidarity with the city elves and Marcus — noted illiterates — dies on her lips as she accepts the bequest, and studies for a moment Julius's fine handwriting, and thinks about the sort of man who copes with the loss of a third of his life by neatly copying out bequests.

“He's given me a lot of leeway with his condition,” she notes, instead, “I'll have to give it some thought.”

Ha, ha.

“You two don't need to do it all,” after a moment. “Handing these out. I can help.”

[overharrowed]

There's a flicker of surprise, and maybe a bit of relief, at the offer. "I'll have to see what Petrana wants, but I suspect she'll be happy enough to hand some of them off. She's not." It sounded absurd to say she's not taking it well; who was? But he amended, "She found some of the will's contents mildly frustrating, I think."

He feels a bit disloyal saying even so much, but in this context, at least there's a reason to make the observation.

"I also don't know ... if you think of anyone who needs to know. I have some names, but if you knew them better it might mean more coming from you." Julius had met some of Marcus's former compatriots the once, and there's no good way to get the news that someone you cared about has died. Still, if she's willing, it's something he'd be glad to hand off.

[delphian]

Something about the idea of conveying Marcus's death to those who'd once heard news of hers from him is—

it strikes her, that's all. Lodges somewhere and stays.

“Be easier for me to find some of them,” she agrees, instead of pursuing what exactly it was that his petite fauxlesian had found so frustrating about the will— either she'll guess some of it when she reads it or she won't, and as tempting as it is to pick at something she might be able to spark an argument off of,

well, if she wants a more satisfying argument with people she knows better, why were you two fucking around with Riftwatch at all is on the table, for later. It can wait.

“I can manage it,” with a light pat to his elbow. “What a fancy lad he was, him and his will and all.”

[overharrowed]

The elbow pat gets a small, tired smile. "Yes, well. I was surprised, though then I thought that I shouldn't have been. It's very like him, to have thought of it." Was. He doesn't correct himself. "I'll talk to Petrana and then we'll get back to you, about the will. Soon, I should think." It's not getting easier to deal with.

He sits back. "The other thing. I thought." An exhale that's not quite a sigh. "You may not want any details, and that's fine, but if you do. If you had any questions, or." Julius is usually an articulate man. "I was with him, at the end. And if you want to know anything, I think you're entitled to more than I was up to sharing over the sending crystals with all and sundry. So I thought it was important to offer."

[delphian]

Before Julius is even finished speaking, Tsenka is saying, “No, thank you,” swiftly, clenching the fingers of her other hand involuntarily around the mug in her hands. “You don't need to do that.”

If it sounds more like I don't want you to do that, then—

then he's good at listening, and in Diplomacy for a reason. It's a splash of cold water to the face in the sea of it they're already soaking in, and she looks at her mug, empty, and rises from where she's been sitting to briefly press his shoulder, instead of his arm.

“I'll hear from you when I do, then,”

because finding her way out of that conversational pothole sounds exhausting, and the idea of having the proposed conversation much worse. That'll do.

(She'll be able to draw enough conclusions from the state of his armour, and that's not a thing she's going to face lightly or soon.)