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

[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."

[prelest]

That's a pretty clear answer to the implicit offer. So Nina tells herself not to make it explicit, because she'll probably just end up offending the Scoutmaster by doing it, or worse, hurting her...

But it's coming out of her mouth anyway. Great job, Zenik. "What about you?"

[hassaran]

Yseult turns, slow, to look at her. Fixes her gaze--flat, cold, unimpressed with this decision--on Nina's face. She takes a breath in through her nose and exhales it, and then just says, "No, thank you," and turns away again.

[prelest]

It's fair. Nina's not particularly impressed with herself, either. But she would have been disappointed by herself in a different way if she hadn't asked, because if Yseult was struggling and simply wanted to save help for her people, and if the offer had been the difference between continuing to suffer or having some relief, then it would have been horrible to not reach out. So: stupid, but at least not disloyal?

This is horrible. She doesn't know what to say. The last time she'd been in any situation nearly this bad, she'd been a kid, and kids don't need to know how to act. She wishes she could make it better. All these poor people - the poor dead, and the poor living.

"I'm just about finished here," Nina says. Her voice is a little bit more hesitant than before. "I'm going to restore feeling to your arm - let me know if anything feels strange. Burns can sometimes cause nerve damage."

[hassaran]

"Is that something you can heal?" she asks, flexing her hand experimentally. She turns back to look at it as she does so, as if to observe the return of sensation. It's odd, like the reawakening of a limb after being slept on wrong, and she waits for the buzzing in her fingertips to stop, the faint tremor in her clenched grip. "Later."

[prelest]

Nina hesitates, then admits, "I - probably can't. I'm not really much of a healer." That's not said with shame or self-deprecation (she isn't about to be ashamed of her talents), but it is said with some disappointment. She'd like to be more helpful than she is. "But it never hurts to try."

She offers a small, sorrowful smile. It seems she hasn't really learned her lesson about being excessively familiar, because she says, "I'm here for anything you need me for. And I'm so sorry."

[hassaran]

"It's fine." As soon as Nina says she can't heal it any further, it's clear that she no longer has Yseult's attention. She's not angry or even disappointed in this answer, just disinterested. She returns her mostly-healed hand to her pocket, and gestures with her chin.

"You should check with the villagers if you haven't already. Some of them would likely appreciate pain relief."