![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
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
no subject
“Apples,” she says, aggrieved, a thing that will make no sense at all as she leans against the desk, and then against Julius, curling her hand when he releases it.
no subject
Eventually, he says, "We don't have to do it today, you know. If you don't want." He's not sure another day will be any easier, but they could always try it and see.
no subject
How long could it possibly take for this to not be impossible?
“If we are to speak of wanting,” she says, bitterness twisting the words, “then it should never be done.”
no subject
no subject
A will, and all else, and the grim business of continuing when to do so is unbearable, and all of a sudden to stay there against the warmth of Julius is just that — unbearable — and she draws away not roughly but with a suddenness as brisk as every other motion she's yet made. As if some urgent thing has come to her, which in a manner of speaking it has:
“There is still work to do,” she says. “His will may wait, as you say. He will be no less dead on the morrow.”
no subject
"Yes, well. No shortage of work to do," he says, a bit quieter, agreeing because it isn't as if she's wrong. After a moment, unsure whether this will make it better or worse: "I can keep going through his desk, if you like."
no subject
“If you wish,” she says, after a long enough pause to make the words she finally speaks brittle and awkward. “His office will need taking in hand, but that—”
and everything,
“—can wait, I expect.”
He will need replacing; that, too, will take time. The new diplomacy appointment will be more urgent, and a hundred other things in the interim.
no subject
He feels like there is some way he should be making this better. Easier for her, at least, if not for himself. But if there's a way, he doesn't know what it is; instead, he's just standing in the middle of the room, apart from her and hands empty. He could take up the papers again, but he doesn't know if that's better or worse. He could give her time to herself, but he doesn't know if that's better or worse. And he isn't sure that if he asked, she'd know either.
no subject
This sounds like a fact, not a plan, not an immediate intention or even one that she seems prepared to immediately assign. Only a thing that is true: it will fall to them, or it must fall to them, or it should fall to them to see that thing done.
That she had rather see all of it at the bottom of the harbour is neither here nor there.