faderift | 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.

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.

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Something about standing here, up all of these stairs, confronted with the prospect of crossing that threshold—

it's been some time since she had to pause, upon a stair. It's the same feeling in the pit of her stomach, the sense that any step might find empty air and the ground rushing up to meet her. Petrana says,

“As he has bid me, it is thus my responsibility,” neutrally. Or Julius's, but she supposes it follows that he would name her first: has she not kept all of their affairs in order, all this time. The thought spurs another, and an opportunity, and she says, “He wished you to take charge of his horse, though for the time being I imagine it will necessitate little change.”

For Kevin, in effective retirement in the stables already.

The breath goes out of her.

Petrana is not doing her an unkindness. She is relaying a piece of information that would have found Derrica always, one way or another.

But the weight of it—

Derrica looks away from her immediately, blinking hard against sudden tears.

"It is," she says, and stops. Draws a deep, slow breath. "It was kind of him. He was always generous with me."

These aren't the right terms to frame the passing of a retired war horse from one to another. But Derrica knows what Kevin meant to Marcus. She knows this isn't a small thing.

It is not an unkindness.

Petrana says nothing, for a time, against the burdensome welling up of unkindnesses in her throat, of unfair things to say of Marcus and to say to Derrica, so grievously wounded by his absence. By the absence of his kindnesses. Unfair to wonder why it is that Derrica can grieve him with such loveliness, approach the thing with such delicacy and gentle hands, and the thing that has seized around her own heart is so ugly and so vexing.

Lock it up with everything else that she'll have time for when she's dead herself.

“Yes.” A step back from the office door; Vysvolod's head stirs, a little, but he makes no move to rise or follow. “So he was.”

For the sake of having always preferred to be kind to Derrica as well, she gathers her skirts in her hands and turns to descend the stairs.

"Petrana," is a small entreaty.

It can be ignored. Derrica's eyes are wet but her voice is steady.

"Please let me help."

Perhaps with the management of the office behind them, or the dog at their feet.

It is a transgression to offer more, Derrica thinks. To say I'm so sorry when it will find no purchase between them and do little to ease Petrana's grief besides.

But it feels a transgression as well, to let her go.

Her skirts still sway, when she stops. Even these plainer dresses that she wears within the Gallows — simply made and by her own hand, unremarkable blue, repurposed bedding from the many unused beds of this place — are heavy-skirted, hemlines that reach past her ankles and only high enough not to drag in whatever dust follows boots in.

It strikes her, at a distance, that she has no mourning clothes. Perhaps somewhere in all of Marcus's frippery, he was so prepared.

“I can think of no good it would do either of us,” she says, finally.

"If there is something..." trails into a momentary pause.

There is so little she can offer. Even this, an extra set of hands, is near useless. Petrana is capable. She is more self-possessed than Derrica, who felt herself crack upon this demonstration of Marcus' trust in her.

"I know there is nothing I can do to ease this for you, not truly. But if there is some small way I can help you in the coming weeks, I would like to."

If the words she chooses are rote, now — spoken devoid of sentiment because they are the correct words, in the correct order, at the correct time — then at least she speaks them as much because she knows in time she would regret the failure. How is she to say instead: I want to break everything behind that door and scream until he hears me, wherever he is, and knows that he is the worst of bastards for leaving me the thankless job of living without him—

“Thank you, Derrica. That's most kind.”

Her jaw feels as if it's going to break from being clenched so tightly against herself.

There is a brittle quality to this rejoinder that seems almost incongruous set against the opaque sheen Petrana has presented thus far.

They are very different, Derrica considers. She has never thought of it in exactly these terms before, all the ways their lives have forged them into vastly dissimilar shapes.

Maybe it is an unkindness she is doing, anchoring Petrana here with her.

"I sat with him there," she says, abrupt. "He wasn't alone while the preparations to bring them home were made."

Is she speaking of Julius or Marcus? It is hard to distinguish. Derrica isn't separating them as she offers this sliver of a recounting.

"We never have to speak of it. To talk about it is..."

The words don't come to her, won't take shape. She is thinking of Ellie, aware suddenly of similarity where she might have previously found none.

"But you don't have to sit with it alone. Is all I mean."

A little like a parting, implied in these words. Petrana may excuse herself. Derrica will stand here and try to drum up the strength to open that door. They needn't speak any further, now that the offer has been made.

On the edge of stepping — perhaps without acknowledging even that Derrica has spoken — it isn't quite that she relents. The part of her that considers the shape of this moment is not the sentimental part, the woman who had held Derrica's shoulders and told her she was proud, the friend. No, that she stops and speaks comes from the same reservoir as her ability to still sit behind her desk and work; the steely certainty that to do so is much better than anything else she might be occupied with.

She cannot come unraveled, else they take that from her, too.

“I understand,” she says, half-turning, to acknowledge her. To make eye contact, for all that her face remains as a porcelain doll. “And I will remember the preferred shape of your kindnesses, and when there is a future time that you need them, I will be glad to do it. It will be no burden to me.”

There will always come more sorrows. If her life has taught her anything, it has taught her that.

“But I must tell you honestly,” as she feels much less need to tell most others, “that if I am to bear this, now, then I cannot also bear you. I'm sorry for that.”

She means it for a kindness, that Derrica not feel she has failed, that she not wish to dash herself on an unassailable cliff-face, that she not think there was another way to offer that might have been welcome.

The quiet that follows after is a measuring sort. Observing this truth and understanding it to be a demonstration of friendship, however remote the distance it travels from.

"Don't be sorry."

This, of all that's passed between them in this hallway, is such a clear expression of need. Of a thing Petrana needs, and what she cannot tolerate. Derrica catches hold of it with both hands. Steps back, towards the observant dog, the door behind him.

"Please, don't let me hold you here."

If Derrica seeks her company again, perhaps she will come bearing a task. Something detached from every part of this, as much as the business of Riftwatch can ever be in the coming days, or months.

player plot | when my time comes around, pt 2

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