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

[propulsion]

Tony's mouth twitches, wanders a look aside that turns his face from Strange entirely as they move. Stops. Squints at nothing.

"Thanks," he says, on that delay. No, he's good. Looks back to the other man, considering that list, and how it is roughly the people he'd intended to check in on. "Same."

Grief is an irritant. Gets in the lungs, stings the eyes. Irritated is a natural response.

But visibly not at Stephen himself, who gets that quick study, a restless shift in Tony's posture like he's thinking of extracting a hand from a pocket to execute a shoulder touch, but ultimately doesn't. "They grow on you," he adds. "They'd probably put it the other way around, but, you know."

His eyes snag. Drifts that way. Strange will know, better than him, that he's zeroing in on Niehaus.

[portalling]

Echoes of each other, in so many ways. They have good taste.

Stephen sees the way Tony’s leaning towards that side of the room, like a comet arcing towards its inevitable destination, and says, “She’s just over here.”

They approach. Shoulders squared against the sight, and Stephen finally finds himself looking at Cosima properly, where he’s avoided it before. Derrica did good work with the gut wound, and she’s dressed again so you can’t even tell. He truly isn’t accustomed to this part of death; there hadn’t been a viewing at Tony’s, they’d just put his first arc reactor out on the lake, at the cabin where he’d lived with his wife and kid.

Now, it’s Tony’s assistant, his platonic Pepper, The relationship must have been close. Stephen doesn’t glance over at his friend’s expression (he’s bad at these definitions, but pretty sure he might be able to finally claim that title here), gives Tony privacy in the reaction, stares at Cosima himself instead.

And she looks indefinably wrong somehow. He hasn’t exactly made a habit of gazing at his Riftwatch comrades in repose normally, but it’s not just the pale skin and slack unmoving face, there’s something unfamiliar about her features besides —

The realisation of what’s missing hits him a second later. Ah, fuck.

[propulsion]

Tony's reaction, unseen, is quizzical. Head tipped as he regards her pale face above the shroud, neither comfortable nor uncomfortable within but insensible to the shared silence as they both look at her.

"—glasses?" is what he breaks the silence with, like the spoken half of a thought.

A glance to confirm Strange is thinking the same. Damn.

He moves a little nearer, more alongside than at the foot of the bed. No heebie-jeebies seem like they're gonna come get him, so he can do this, observe her, visit, and stand there in the rising guilt like allowing a tide to come in and wash the stone out from under him. Eventually;

"She'd come in and disappeared again before I got here," offered, back to Stephen. "Hashtag just rifter things. Left behind a stack of research, explanatory stuff. The microscope. So I was a fan, first. And then she got here and was also a cool dude. No one mentioned that part."

Her anger at him in his office. Her twist of elfroot, while they went in circles about Circles in Cumberland. Morning coffee. He flicks his focus back up at the stone wall.

[portalling]

“We should start putting that into the reports. Who is and isn’t a cool dude.”

It’s only the faintest touch of humour; they’re both running on empty for it. But as they’re standing there, Stephen can feel it settling in: this part seems important. The monks at Kamar-Taj had often talked about the philosophy of it, people not being fully gone so long as others were left to remember them. So. Perhaps they ought to remember her. Them.

“We talked about that. Coming-and-going in a world. We had that in common,” he offers back. An unusual foundation for a burgeoning friendship, but the uniqueness of it was what made it stand out.

“When I was in quarantine, neck-deep in research, I came across a lot of her notes too. Smart cookie. And I don’t really know if this makes sense, but she feels—” verb tenses, Stephen, “felt like she could’ve been from our world. Like, she wouldn’t have been out-of-place at a biotech division at Stark Industries. I keep thinking: we might’ve gotten along, even outside of this place.”

Translation: Cosima Niehaus was likeable even beyond the forced friendship of convenience; not just politely putting up with the people you’re trapped in the Gallows with, lest your anchor-shard eats you alive.

[propulsion]

Faint humour gets a faint smile, the tight and crooked kind. Not insincere; sincere for how little he feels like it and does it anyway.

Ticks his gaze back down from the wall to her face again. "Yeah," Tony says. "Her world was pretty close. Less awesome, but close." A hand finally emerges from a pocket, touching somewhere on the linen, near her shoulder. Just enough to register that material shape of her. That she is cold beneath the shroud doesn't matter when the air in this room is freezing.

"Tough break, Berkeley," is quieter, almost a sigh.

And the work is going to suck. That he lacks an assistant is insubstantial compared to what she might have accomplished, out from under the weight of war. That thing they were starting to achieve. This, he doesn't say out loud, just lifts his hand and tucks it back into his pocket, shoulders hiking up to shake off the chill in the air.

"We can share the iPhone. Division exclusive, plus exceptions. She probably wouldn't care but we could arrange a burial. Do you think?"

[portalling]

That touch is confirmation, a tactile reinforcement, realising the truth of it firsthand. These bodies have been close enough to feel their flesh beneath your hands and to know: this was no trick. No case of mistaken identity, no bodies falsely burned in a pyre far away, no names missing and presumed dead. There was no chance of these people walking back into their own memorial, laughing and relieved. (Gwen was so fond of mentioning she’d crashed her own funeral.)

The question of burial logistics, however, twists his mouth.

“I think so,” Stephen says contemplatively. “I mean, that’s customary back home. I wish I knew what everyone’s preferences were. Who’s Jewish, who wants to be cremated, who wants to be scattered out at sea, whatever. I’m thinking I’ll do a survey. Later. So it’s on record, in the infirmary.”

Logistics and practicalities are how he keeps going: hanging grimly onto what he can do, how he can be of use, in the wake of so much helplessness.

“Is there anyone else who needs contacting? She mentioned she used to have a fiancee.”

[propulsion]

"Yeah. The ex-Diplo head." Which gives him pause, and a twinge to his expression as he adds, dry, "Maybe she'll want the job."

There's an opening, after all.

Without another look back at Cosima's unmoving features, Tony wanders away from her side, skritching the back of his neck as he goes. "Me and the other two will be writing some letters," he says, which is a guess, but, the point is, "So don't worry about it." He will write to Herian, and check in on the third wheel elf, and ask Wysteria what needs to happen about Valentine, and he figures the rest will be taken care of, despite about how dog-tired Flint looks, how vacant Yseult is.

Which is also not watercooler shareable, so.

Tony glances across the room, the lumpily shaped shrouds, the steam on his breath giving way to a sigh. He says, "Can you point out, uh. Ellis. Tryna avoid getting best friend jumpscared."

[portalling]

What a shit job, being division head.

“If there’s any way I can help, Tony, feel free to ask,” he says, tentative. An offering. Their relationship has been more distanced and professional than not — it’s often been work and practicalities and pleasantries, rarely digging beneath the personal surface between them — but the more that time has gone on, the more Stephen’s come to accept that he likes Tony Stark. Respects him. Finds him funny, although he wouldn’t admit it. Doesn’t mind working for him as much as he thought he would. Wants to consider him a friend.

And he must be reeling, right now.

Case in point: Ellis. A thing he can do to help.

So Stephen looks out into the room, then says as gently as he can, “Yeah. Back row, third from the right. He’s—” A brief hesitation, a skip in the record, trying to figure out the most tactful way to say this. “His face is safe to look at.”

Not all of them are.

Some have suffered dracolisk venom searing its way through flesh, burns from dragonfire, skulls crushed, talons ripping a throat open. At least Ellis is better from the collar up, but that’s still probably a paltry comfort for the loved ones who come to visit him.

[propulsion]

Offers of friendship and support and care are not in themselves panic inducing. That Tony semi-freezes in place is more about desiring to maintain the stranglehold he has on his own sense of control, and he nods at this first part, that little bit of tension creeping in at the corners. That it's not immediately backhanded away is probably the closest to unequivocal appreciation as he's likely to get.

At least in this moment. Glances, then, to the shape being pointed out to him. Tony does not immediately stride over there, standing in place, letting the news that Ellis has not been mauled beyond recognition (his face is safe to look at, what a statement) sink in and chill him.

"Do you know how? What did it."

[portalling]

It’s not a pleasant piece of information, but then again, none of this is.

He hesitates for a second over that question, about to ask are you sure you want to know, but Stephen’s used to treating his companions like responsible adults. He doesn’t baby them, doesn’t handle them overly-gently with kid gloves (he isn’t good at it, anyway). If Tony asked, it’s because Tony wants to know. He’ll do the other man the courtesy of handling his own limits.

“A deep stab in his side,” he says. It’s not like he’d done a proper autopsy, but he had automatically noted the detail at the time. The most likely cause of death, moreso than all those arrows. “It went between the armour plates.”

[propulsion]

Information he can work with. Facts. If he had his way, he'd have downloaded Strange and Derrica's autopsy reports already on everyone, a truly pathological desire to know everything at the core of any potential discomfort that information may bring. He is braced and ready throughout that hesitation, stare direct—always a little unnerving, when Tony's sometimes distractable focus locks on in this way.

Good choice, Stephen.

Tony says, "Uh-huh," on a delay, and looks back towards the figure that Stephen had pointed out. The corner of his mouth twinges aside. "He'd have some stuff with him. There's a ring on a chain that I need to, uh. Get. For someone.

"Funny story," sounds not true, but says it anyway as he heads over towards where Ellis is laying, something of an invite for Stephen to continue accompanying him on this godawful tour, "he tried to pass it off to me the last time he tried to sacrifice himself for the greater good."

This guy, right?

[portalling]

Second stop, second visit, another dose of human misery. Stephen trails along in Tony’s wake like he’s caught in the other man’s gravitational pull; he’s tagging along for this shitty ride, because it seems the least he could do at the moment.

He’d gotten to skip this entire part back home. Lights out, wake up five years later, not have to look the survivors in their faces and see their grief painted in the corners of their mouth, the hollows beneath their eyes.

“‘The last time’,” he repeats, echoing Tony’s choice of phrasing. “Was this a habit with him?”

[propulsion]

Stopping at the feet end of the shape of bundled linen that is Ellis' dead body, Tony holds himself stiff, arms folded, considering it. Considering Stephen's question, a short exhale that isn't quite a laugh.

"'Habit's not it," a hard swerve from the easy joke that exists there. "I'd call it a hero thing but he'd probably disagree."

A hero thing might be more understandable, except how he knows the way it's all snarled up in fucked up Warden duty, in survivor's guilt, in a million other things that makes none of this okay. He draws nearer, coming up alongside. Bloodless skin, stiffly still muscle. Perfect hair. Tony psychs himself up towards what he knows he needs to do, which is lay a hand down, but holds himself bundled up for now.

"He was probably the first person here who I could," he starts, bails out with a, "you know," as he feels that, muscles in his throat tensing like putting the brakes on something. Bails back in. "It was early days and I said something stupid, not even to him, and. I mean, coming here, everyone looks at you like you're a space alien, because you are, but I said whatever stupid thing and he laughed. And then after,"

a breath in, let out. "It's not just like he didn't treat rifters like weird temporary dream people, but it helped."

[portalling]

This is an offering — a confession — a piece of Tony Stark’s personal life carved out and offered to him, and Stephen finds himself oddly grateful for it. That insight.

He stands aside and looks down at that gravely-still face, which he’d gotten so close to during the preparations. He has picked dirt and metal out of Ellis’ bare skin, and yet never found the time to ask about the memory he’d seen of him in the jail. Something about that feels distinctly wrong, like an accidental trespass. He’s carrying a piece of Ellis, too.

“I didn’t know,” he says. “How that friendship happened. The two of you seem like such an odd couple. Opposites.”

Wysteria he could understand, she was a fellow force of nature in the Research division, but these two together had always been curious to him: Tony’s motormouth impulsive energy, Ellis’ careful stillness and quiet even in life.