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

[grindset]

Viktor knows of Derrica more than he knows her. They've met. At a fair distance he would recognize her on sight as someone to be considered friendly, if not precisely a friend. He knows, because he's compelled by his own condition to know, she's the most capable healer left among them—but this is not why he's looking for her now. It's because he knows, too, that out of the eighteen of twenty-one whose names went horribly unspoken that first day, she's tending to the women.

The hall is at once crowded and empty. Candles limn too-still shapes under their shrouds. He's already been here, she might know. He came early, came alone, stood frozen in a certain doorway until his posture began to crumple—and then he fled.

When it's quiet, when she's away from the bodies but seems not to have surrendered her duties for the day—whether she keeps this distinction in her mind, he doesn't know, but she ought to be permitted some time to herself—he comes looking for her. By now the sound of his approach, that metallic tapping so particular to his equipment, ought to be familiar to—

To anyone left alive among them.

"Sorry to disturb you."

The way he speaks this, thin and gentle, is impossible to interpret as mere pleasantry. He looks—unwell, notably, even for someone who always looks that way. Sallow. Unrested. Seems to hang from his crutch, as though if it weren't tucked under his arm he wouldn't be standing at all.

"Can you spare a moment?"

In his free hand, clutched close to his chest, is a smallish rectangular box, wrought of brass.

[tender]

"You aren't," is so immediate a reassurance that it nearly overruns Viktor's query. "Of course I have a moment."

Viktor is known to her. She had not been the healer he preferred; Derrica recalls some glimpse of him, how he had sought Richard, and her own relief at the arrangement. She remembers feeling some initial flicker of worry at the sound of his cough; it had been eased knowing that he had someone treating him.

It occurs to her now that she should have checked to see if Viktor were seeking an alternative, since Richard is gone.

But that is unlikely to be what prompted this discussion. They are steps away from linen-shrouded bodies, one of which is likely dear to him.

"What do you need?" is put to him softly, her expression open as she turns fully to him. "How can I help?"

[grindset]

She can't, any more than she can slip her fingers between the atoms of a stone to pry it apart.

But there's this:

"This belongs to Ms Niehaus," he says, to a prickling along his sinuses, the ducts of his eyes. But they remain dry enough, and his voice steady enough, to go on. "They still aren't finished. I never got around to—" It doesn't matter. Keep going. "I-if you could... if you could give them to her."

Them, this, the box in his hand, matte finish and rounded corners, this he brings away from his vest to offer now. It may look dwarven to Derrica, the angular motif, the precision of its engraving. His hand is bone thin, pale as a shroud against it—and it doesn't tremble, though it looks like it ought to.

"Please."

(Once what it holds is taken, it will.)

[tender]

The box itself is lovely. Perhaps, along with its contents, have been fashioned by this man.

Derrica folds her hands around his, a brief, warm press of contact as she draws the box from his hand. They are not known to each other, so she does not allow that small touch to linger, whatever she might have hoped otherwise.

"Should this stay closed?"

Or does it contain something that should be worn? Viktor will specify, she thinks, if he's come this far. It matters to him. She is very aware of that, as much as she is his condition, how his hand trembles once empty. (Wants to simply take his hand again in her own, if she thought he would find that a comfort, permit the touch.)

[grindset]

Viktor's hand is very cold, all bones, feels smaller to hold than it looks. It releases the case to her as easily as ash through the fingers, retracts to a loose curl, close, elbow tucked in. And then she asks a perfectly reasonable question.

"Ah..."

For one paralyzed moment, which stretches remarkably long for being a second and a half at most, he stares at her eyes until something reengages in his own. Looks away, then.

"I'm... not qualified to make that decision."

[tender]

"Would you like to tell me what it is?"

Of course, she can simply open this little box. It doesn't seem to be locked, nor warded in a way that would prevent her from doing so.

But as she looks at him, feels the weight of this item in her hand, she senses the potential for transgression in that simple action. Seeks to avoid it, as much as possible. This man has weathered enough pain already.

"You don't have to," she quantifies. "But it might help. Or if you can think of who should decide."

[grindset]

He would not like that. Viktor would not like to decide anything, actually, nor to participate actively in passing a decision along to someone else who probably doesn't want to make it either. In times like these, decisions should simply be cancelled.

"It's just frames," would be too vague even for someone from home. He expels a quick, shallow breath, like a sigh's impatient understudy. "They were in the workroom, so I brought them down."

Having gone to the workroom specifically to see if they were there so he could bring them down.

[tender]

"Oh," is hardly an appropriate response.

It comes regardless, a punch of sound.

"To replace what she lost?" seeks confirmation, Derrica's thumb running along the edge of the case.

No one had found Cosima's glasses. Derrica cannot decide if it is worse to think they might have been melted by that last blast of fire, or if they had been taken by some Imperial soldier. Both possibilities twist in her chest.

[grindset]

Oh seems likewise ready on his lips as they part. Since he approached Derrica, his gaze has struggled to land anywhere for long; now it steadies in its downward drift. Softens, too, from surprise into processes of thought.

A glance aside, toward the hall where they all lay in the cold. He shifts his weight where he stands, the barest shuffling, a soft tap as the crutch foot resets. He hasn't been to see her. Hasn't even asked.

"Yes."

[tender]

"Thank you," feels inadequate.

It feels like such a small thing when set against every part of this interaction. The way Viktor is bowing under his own misery, so pale that she fears she can see the tracery of his veins if she studies him any closer.

She reaches out to his hand where it hangs at his side as she tells him, "I'll put them on her. She'll look like herself again."

As much as was possible, in these circumstances.

[grindset]

She would hardly need to study long; any more than a passing glance at his hands will yield, amid ghosts of bone and tendon, the faint blue of well-formed vessels standing out full beneath the skin. His hands, his forearms, are among the healthiest components his body has to offer.

She reaches into his downturned field of view, offers something deeply needed and seldom sought, and says something—touches his hand while saying something—

"No," he whispers. "She won't."