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

[charmoffensive]

It's the kind of question he has no good answers for. It seems like it races ahead of him. For a moment, he simply stands and holds Derrica to him, is held to her.

"Just to go get her," Loxley offers. "I think. I don't know, exactly, she's so contrary sometimes—"

Was, of course. The past tense.

He detangles himself and steps back, as if that rush of feeling might be harmful to be in contact with. Presses the edges of his hands to his eye sockets (reflexively, even if only one of them has this ability) as if to push back that welling up. "She'd probably," he says, continuing, "want us not to fuck around wasting time about her, or something. Which I would tell her is stupid."

His hands lower. Remaining eye bright, brow crinkling, studying his hands pointlessly and offered a shuddered out laugh. "I've only done this once. We buried someone under a tree. We didn't know what else to do."

[tender]

A sliver of space between them, in which Derrica's hands catch at his tunic. Affords Loxley his hands, to try and physically stave off his own grief, while her knuckles set firmly at his chest. Maybe it is grounding. She would like it to be.

"It sounds beautiful, being laid there," Derrica murmurs. "We could do that for her, if her grandfather wishes it."

The sum of what Derrica knows about Gwenaëlle doesn't come to very much. A series of links, between her and the Duc, her and the Commander, her and Loxley. These people who may know better whether they should lower Gwenaëlle into the earth or set her onto the pyre.

Does it matter that Derrica thinks there is something lovely about laying her down into the roots of a tree? Maybe not.

"You should speak of her. She was more than she gave herself credit for, I think."

How quick Gwenaëlle had been to diminish herself. They should make much of her, a better eulogy than she had attempted to give herself among the ruins.

[charmoffensive]

It was a little beautiful. It had also been guesswork, none of them with any real bearing on what that person would have wanted, as they'd been unable to bring her back to—

"She has family," Loxley says, more to himself. Quietly spoken, in this close space between them. "Her grandfather and the rest. They'll know. She probably has all her affairs in order."

This appears to be some small relief. A delay, almost.

But not quite. His hands lower, gently curl up under Derrica's arms. Speak of her. It squeezes his heart to think of that responsibility, the way he could easily get something wrong. Richard had, before, drawn focus to his terrible read of people. And there is a little self-awareness for the way he can feel himself skittering away from each gentle suggestion Derrica makes.

So he breathes out, nods. "Perhaps I'll know better when we see her."

[tender]

Her eyes move across Loxley's face as she considers what it might mean to see Gwenaëlle. What it might be like for Loxley, to see someone he loved after the violence of a battlefield claimed them.

In the space that follows after that statement, Derrica flattens her hands across his chest. Feels how badly she'd like to fold him into her again, find a way to interpose herself between Loxley and this reality they've found themselves in.

"We'll find her, and we will bring her back to the Gallows to tend to her. You needn't make any decisions now."

An out given to him: Derrica isn't trying to corner him, only provide what little comfort she can.

"I know how much she cared for you, and you for her. I'm sorry, Loxley."

[charmoffensive]

Now that it's happened, he is more resigned to tears than he was a moment ago. One after the other, just that one track from one eye, but still an internal and carefully held measure of control—likely made possible for how unreal it all still seems. The magnitude of it. Recalls tossing Abby Anderson her Satinalia gift in the hallway, just a small trinket. Recalls Gwenaëlle, not so long ago, expressing gladness that he was still here.

Even Richard's disappearance feels abstracted, still, except suddenly less so. Suddenly, one less person he might turn to, who would absolutely be here in this infirmary, gathering supplies, or maybe not, maybe—

"I had this other friend who fell," Loxley says, an internal wrenching away from that useless train of thought. His hands rest on Derrica's, drawing them into a hold, each. "In battle. We had to run. We had to leave her behind. I never really forgave myself that, the leaving her."

He shrugs. "At least Gwenaëlle got to know that I wouldn't do that again."

[tender]

"She knew."

Gwenaëlle had to have known that.

Derrica understood it. She had seen, in those ruins at the whims of cruel spirits, how far Loxley was willing to go to protect his friend. Regardless of how it had ended, it had been such a clear demonstration.

Here, she brings his hands to her lips. Lays a soft kiss on his knuckles.

"I know you wouldn't have left her," comes with an understanding that Derrica might have lost him too, trying to save her. "You've grown. Even since I've known you."

[charmoffensive]

Loxley turns his hand, opens it, settles his palm against her jaw and cheek.

"I'm really," he says, "really glad you weren't there."

It bears saying. It bears saying because they've had their share of near misses and this might as well be one, given how likely that Riftwatch's standing healer might have been roped into relief efforts if she hadn't been busy (as Riftwatch's standing healer) on the day they gathered some numbers.

He's not sure he could fathom what all of this would be like, if it had gone any differently.

[tender]

Immediately, absurdly, Derrica wants to take him up to her room. Close the door. Draw the covers over both of them.

Block this news out, bar it from their lives.

(She should have been there. This thought squeezes around her heart, claws of it digging in.)

"I'm glad you're here," she tells him instead, that sentiment's twin. "That you're brave enough to come with us."

No one would blame him if he'd stayed away.

"I love you," like a reminder, something that still brings anxious tremors along with it. A true thing. It doesn't yet sit easy, regardless.

[charmoffensive]

"I love you," is echoed, his other hand rising to mirror the one at her cheek, laying a kiss down onto her head, into her hair.

He doesn't have to have a sharp read of human nature to know that very likely, some part of Derrica might have wished to be there, or at least feels a sense of duty about it. There is no time here to guess that this is the case and try to dismantle it, standing in the doorway of the infirmary, but he can impress this: that she is here with him, that he needs her too.

She has friends out there. He imagines they know (knew) even better than Gwenaëlle how much Derrica cares.

"What do you need, for right now? What can I do?"

The words come less tightly, now, more focused.

bow?

[tender]

Two answers rise to meet the question: the practical, and otherwise.

She breathes out, urgency rising to take anxious knots in her stomach. Julius' voice comes back to her, carrying an understanding she wished she could flinch from.

Derrica understands what they're going to find when they arrive.

She arches up, balancing on tiptoe as she draws Loxley down to kiss. Threads her fingers into his hair, thumbs at his temples. The reprieve is dwindling down to an end, and behind her there are the boxes to be packed, to be toted down to the courtyard where Ellie and all the others will be waiting.

When she breaks, she tells him, "Help me carry these crates down to the courtyard."