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

[cozen]

Bastien almost never looks impatient with anyone. He only very occasionally feels impatient with anyone, either, even secretly. But he does right now, for just a second. His expression flickers frustrated. Flickers how dare you look at me like that right now, as if deciding what he should do, himself, isn't taking everything he has.

Then it is as smooth as a morning pond, so quickly that that frustration might have been a trick of the firelight.

"Diplomacy's contacts. You can make a list. You can draft what we will tell them. Once Flint and Stark give the go-ahead you can send it out."

[altusimperius]

A task. He can do this, it’ll tide him over until,

until… something. He nods, dropping his gaze, and is turning back to sit at his desk when the words almost leave his mouth unbidden: “do you think—-”

He stops himself before he can finish and looks down again, hunching his shoulders. It’s not a ruse. People wouldn’t have sounded like that if it were.

[cozen]

There are at least dozen people in the Gallows who feel the way Bastien feels right now.

Or: the way he would feel, if not for the distance between him and himself, from which he is only observing and cataloging sensations, like how his chest is not quite allowing full breaths.

Still. There are at least a dozen who feel that way, but there's only one other person who might even approach feeling the same way about Byerly. Who might say something genuine and specific—the sort of thing that comes from actually knowing the man, actually understanding him—that will land like a pickaxe.

So Bastien very much needs to leave. He is leaving.

"No," he says on his way past Benedict's desk, to whatever it is he isn't saying.

[altusimperius]

Accepting the answer without complaint, Benedict nods silently to himself and drops his gaze to the desk, which he continues to stare at for the next ten or so minutes before he finally sinks to his chair and gets to work.