faderift | player plot | when my time comes around, pt 2

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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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It's been a minute since he became Provost and stopped frequenting the Hightown house so—frequently. He remembers when it had felt a little like a naughty kids' clubhouse, this haunted ass rundown mansion. They might have made a sign: no Thandruils, keep out.

Or anyone, outside of this weird little arrangement, outside of three extremely different people who, nevertheless, had more than their fair share in common. Here, the table in the kitchen, talking rapidfire over Ellis' head while he patiently listened, maybe sometimes did that little brow-curl thing when he caught something he thought maybe he should allow to sink in. There, a card game and a losing hand, and then in that room, bringing in some coffee as the hour pushed later and later and they were spending lamp oil on a conversation over something—

They did that a lot. A lot of talking past, over, around.

Tony lets his hand drop to Ruadh's dense head, ruffling his ears in a reflexive sort of way, like it'll ease the catch that hooks in his chest. And it does, actually. Paused here in the hallway in his pursuit of seeking out Wysteria. It isn't lost on him that the usual traffic through this house has thinned way out, in the way that it's not lost on him that he is being stubborn whenever he sticks to calling her Poppell.

Knocks on a wall, adjacent to the room he hears shuffling.

This, naturally, summons a considerable parade of stamping feet—the ratta-tat-tat of heeled shoes only barely preceding the shrill bark of a small dog. In short order, both Avvar goat (hooves, not heeled baby shoes) and footstool shaped dog clatter into the doorway to greet Tony and Ruadh both. The former's unsettling goat eyeballs stare expectantly up at him; the latter springs to nip at Ruadh's jowls as a good friend ought to.

"Come in," calls Wysteria from within the room, for the list of possible guests loitering in the hall is rather short.

The room itself is one of the haunted mansion's many once-parlors turned work-room. This one has a large desk overflowing with a great deal of paperwork, and one or two chairs, and a heavy rug, and a distinctly goat nibbled set of curtains. Wysteria is sat in none of the chairs, but rather is arranged on the floor with a heavy dictionary, a series of books with titles like The Hand and the Cipher and Basic Code Cracking For Absolute Beginners: A Pictorial Guidebook, and the larger of the two household dogs lounging fully stretched out alongside under the pretense of a nap.

Wysteria herself is dressed in black silks—what cost had been mitigated by the comically crated value of the fabric presumably offset by the haste in which it had been rendered into a wearable garment—and is presently nose deep in a little booklet. She hardly looks up when Tony appears in the doorway.

"Do you read Orlesian?"

What, do I owe you money, or, can be heard quietly muttered, probably at the goat, as Tony navigates his way into the room.

He is dressed normal, having not been widowed, personally, although barely passing muster for blending in on Hightown streets. It's hot enough out that he's foregone a jacket or coat in favour of the necessarily sturdy fabric of his vest to mask lyrium glows, sleeves rolled, and a folded set of sunglasses in his hand.

Doesn't blink for too long over this particular tableaux, just moves to go join her, a creaky but confident lowering into a cross-legged sit across from her, then rolling aside to set his glasses down on an elevated surface so the goat can't get it.

"Sure," he says. "Kinda."

Wanders a hand out to a book, checking the title. Basic Code Cracking gets a skeptical look and an immediate rifle through. The mabari trots in at a delay, having busied himself with greeting the other animals.

"New hobby?"

"Not really," she says, offering him the slim little field notebook from across her collection of assembled texts. "It's only Valentine's notebook, over which I've always been very curious. But he's written it in some kind of code. My Orlesian isn't very good, but it's not so terrible as to be completely incapable of deciphering any sense from a page at all."

Déranger lifts her curly brown head as Ruadh crosses the rug to join them, pursued by the small dog but not the goat which has evidently found more interesting diversions (most likely: nibbling at peeling wallpaper and licking the old glue). But after a brief inspect, the large hound lays her head back down. She sighs heavily.and makes no effort to intervene when the mabari insinuates himself into this circle like a gambler taking up the last seat at a card table. The little white dog stamps happily about his haunches for a moment or two, and then abandons Ruadh in favor of sniffing at Tony's knee.

"I suppose I might ask Madame de Cedoux for her assistance," Wysteria is prattling on. "Though I imagine she has other concerns demanding her attention at present."

Tony accepts the book, thumbing it open. Ignores the wall-licking goat. Why is this place so nasty. He can feel allergies he didn't previously already have starting to rack up.

Asks the little white dog can I help you in a mutter, before setting his hand on its head and giving it a quick ear ruffle while he focuses on the book in his hand. "I mean," he says, on the topic of wrangling the cryptographer, "that was true for anyone even before—you know." Turns the book sideways to follow the trail of some margin notation being squeezed in.

What he would like to know is why the mating habits of the great spotted chupacabra or whatever (he assumes) needs to be written in a cipher, but, he picks up a pencil discarded amongst the books, reflexively making small marks on the pages to start picking up on its patterns.

"How're you holding up?"

"I really couldn't say," she says, taking a moment to adjust the criss cross of her legs under her skirts as she has been sitting like this for quite some time and reversing the order in which their stacked would seem prudent. Rearranging the fall of her skirts, and then allowing her hand to move to scratch Déranger behind one curly ear. The fawn colored dog wriggles a little on her side, stoically squirming closer.

"I've been thinking that now would be a good time to resume the lyrium study. I discussed it with Mister Ellis some weeks ago, and he said I shouldn't hang on hoping that Mister Dickerson might return, but I'd been very slow to put everything back together even though I knew he was right when he said it. But it really does do very little good to let the research molder."

Turning his hand, Wysteria runs her fingers in under the edge of the curly dog's collar. It's an absurdly ostentatious piece, unnecessarily studded with a great number of interesting stones.

"I don't know," isn't technically repeating herself, but also is. How is she holding up? What a question. Fine. Not fine. Ask her in five minutes and maybe the answer will change. "How are you?"

"Okay, I guess."

Which could be a wild exaggeration, but feels shockingly close to true. There's been work, and quiet conversations, and deep spikes of sadness that have nevertheless not completely unmoored him. Maybe it'll hit later, days from now. Maybe it won't. Maybe Ruadh's disconcertingly familiar and consistent presence is doing something to delay the inevitable.

He shrugs, still concentrating on the cipher. Who knows. "I could use a project, if you want a hand with it," is true, anyway. "Viktor was keen on the lyrium stuff. I bet Strange could stand to do literally anything else."

"I'm sure he could," is absent agreement. Yes, this is all true. It sounds like a fine arrangement of people, and Strange is a physician besides. If he were in attendence, then no one can complain that they're being foolhardy.

(Most of the people who might have, or had, are dead.)

She returns to smoothing the dog's curls.

"Will you need much help, do you suppose? As Miss Niehaus has— I mean, I know that you'd taken her on as your assistant."

There's a pause. Tony studying the cipher, pencil twiddled between fingers.

"Yeah," he says, after that, and makes a mark. "I have a pile under 'only semi-urgent' that I'll try and delegate at some point."

There's the sound of tearing, and tacky resistance, and he glances over accusingly where the goat has worked free a loose strip of wallpaper off in the corner. Back to the matter at hand, which is,

"I mean, if you're offering. You have kind of a zoo on your hands. Do you need help?"

"Oh, they mostly mind themselves. And Missus Hovey—she's my new maid—is here somewhere, and is only a little frightened by Veronique."

But who wouldn't feel one or two reservations about the keeping of a giant Donarki ant? Why, even Val had given ample consideration to the insect's safe keeping.

"So I suppose it might be possible to find an hour two here and there in order to help you. Only until you find a proper assistant, of course. And strictly on account of my handwriting being better than yours."

If Missus Hovey turns out to be an alpaca or something—

Well, that's no problem of his, and why shouldn't she be. His very legible handwriting getting lambasted in this manner is, but if Wysteria's only gonna be his assistance strictly because italicised cursive is better than blocky capslock shouting, who is he to say otherwise.

"Obviously," Tony says instead. "Thanks. And, quick question, have we considered that Val was filling this book with garbage nonsense to look busy? Just putting it out there."

Another mark made.

Her laugh is sudden and bright like a chiming bell, and is abruptly smothered when Wysteria looks up and is mortified to realize she's laughing at poor Valentine's expense. Only—

"Oh." Her hand comes up from the dog— "He probably was." —and covers the lower half of her face as she snorts out a strangled little noise.

This draws the attention of the little white dog, who abandons Tony's knee in favor of springing cheerfully into Wysteria's lap, his pom pom of a tail wagging as he leaps all over her. Prompting Stop, stop, you horrible thing, from his mistress while she tries to fend him off with her elbow and shoulder without removing her hand from where it's clamped—now as much to protect herself from being licked on the mouth as to keep herself from further laughter.

Chin still tilted down towards his deciphering, Tony flicks his focus across that short way, eyebrow raising. Beside then, Ruadh rolls big brown eyes in her direction without going so far as to raise his head off his paws.

Unable not to let it, a tight smile cracks across Tony's face, and then sets the book down. "Okay, kids," he says, leaning across the way to go help extract squirming furball out of Wysteria's lap. Not exactly the most animal adept, but he did get some practice in with wrangling a particularly precocious toddler for a couple years. Gets a hand up under its chest and butt, lowers it back down between them.

Keeps it there, fingers skritching lightly, run-off anchor glow lighting green in white fur.

The little white dog wriggles amenably to being fetched up, being something of an 'under the arm' dog by nature, or habit, or both. Only once Tab has been peeled from her does Wysteria remove the guarding hand from her face and rock back to evenly distributing her weight on her haunches. Laughs again, once, as she wipes her palm on the black silk of her skirts, and rearranges her hems, and then uses the back of her hand to rub the damp prickle that has sprung unbidden into her eyes.

It would be just like him to fill up a book with nonsense just to frustrate her, yes. But she would prefer it if he hadn't. It would be better if that little field book had something interesting in it—

"You're my very last proper friend, you know," she says at once. "All the other people I knew best from near when I first came to Thedas have gone or died."

Reflexively scritching the dog behind the ears, there's no real surprise for the sight of face leaking, but it doesn't prevent the little under-ribs twist.

Glances up, away. This weird haunted house that smells like dog hair and mildew, the city outside with cobblestone and mud with hoofprints and carriage tracks, a satellite-free sky above. It still happens, that moment of zooming out, that sense of disorientation for where he is and how, and for how long, and for how well he's gotten used to it. Back to her.

"Yeah," is quiet, from Tony. "Same, with you."

He frees the dog, who squirms around in a circle in the space between his hands, seeming to have deleted from its peanut brain what it was doing. "I am sorry about Val," Tony says, italics mild but present. Putting it on the record. "He seemed, you know. Unique. The book's probably not all garbage nonsense. Like, half's probably about a cool bird or something."

"Oh, it's all right," she says. On second thought, she will draw her knees up under her skirts in hops that her lap will prove less of a temptation for the little white dog being bracketed by Tony's hands. "You can say he was rather irritating."

That the house seems very quiet without him stamping around in it is, she's quite certain, a trick of the mind. He was hardly in it, just like she is hardly in it, and there is no such thing—really—as quiet with a goat clopping around and barking dogs and the infrequent groan of the floorboards overhead from some meandering spirit. It would be uselessly dramatic to think otherwise. Still, she had liked having sometimes to go only into the next room if she wished to argue bitterly with someone.

Wysteria sets her chin on her knees. Somewhere in the room, the little rasp of tearing as the goat makes off with a wider scrap of wallpaper. It's fine. It was all meant to come down eventually anyway.

"I'm sorry about Miss Niehaus. And the Ambassador, who I'm sure you knew better than I did and who also was quite impossible." And Gwenaëlle Baudin, and Jude, and Silver, and Viktor's partner who he'd been so pleased with, and Ser Barrow, and Enchanter Rowntree who she'd known not at all, and so many that it's difficult to parse them all. She keeps finding herself with an urgent question, only to recall the person who ought to have the answer is absent and be shocked all over again.

And, of course—

"I think he'd been very unhappy as of late. Mister Ellis. Did you see that too?" She looks at him, and wants very much for Tony to say, No, he hadn't noticed at all.

Operation roll dog over onto its back is a success, taming kicky paws with a gentle kind of fending off. Tony has his attention down when Wysteria offers her condolences in return—you don't really notice it until sixteen people of various degrees of importance to various people are dead, as opposed to just one or a couple, but there is something kind of absurd about wandering around, giving out apologies, when you don't exactly love getting them in return, but it still feels like it matters to say, so he mumbles something acknowledging.

He remembers what it was like, half the world dying. The deep wrenching sadness of personal loss and the more abstracted horror of other peoples' and the general sense of an emptiness that followed. The shock that wore on for years. This only feels like that because the human brain is terrible at scale. Sixteen is not billions, but at a certain point, it may as well be.

"He was quieter," Tony offers. "If that's even possible."

He leaves the dog alone, resting an elbow to bent knee. "You know back when we were field testing rifts and we'd load him up like a packhorse and he had to conserve his energy so he'd get even less of a word in edgewise. Carrying too much. I don't know," is a little dismissive. He does know. He has a memory like an unwanted splinter, a slashed throat, blood running in reverse.

But more relevantly, "Maybe. I wanted to give you something, speaking of."

She has lost the habit of picking at her fingernails when she is worrying over something, but here has raised her thumb absently to nip at the perceived shape of a hangnail near the cuticle and only belatedly corrects herself. Turns her hand to shape her palm to her knee and rest her chin on top of it instead.

Yes, maybe he'd just been otherwise engaged. Her attention drops, briefly, to Ruadh, and then to the little dog who has flopped over onto his side with the rolling eye look of creature who means to lay still for ten seconds before demanding further amusement, and then back up at last to Tony only when it feels less liable to crack something to do so.

He looks very tired. Grey and weary around the edges in the way that prickles at the uncomfortable pretend memory of a thing that never actually happened.

"Oh? What is it?"

"You tell me."

Here, Tony dips his fingers into the breastpocket of his waistcoat. The fine gold chain is visible first before the small silver ring is tugged free. She asked me to hold onto it, Ellis had explained, as if that were all that needed explaining—for how he still had it, and how he'd put it into Tony's palm. There it is, now, coiled around in the middle, like Ellis had put it there again.

He hadn't. He'd had to ask Strange about it. Had to remember to do it himself in a sudden jerk of feeling. He offers it out for the taking.

"He'd wanted me to," he starts, and stops. Starts again. "It was back in Arlathan, when he thought he might not make it out, so. Wanted me to give you this back. Figured it still applied."

Edited (belated ring deets were uncovered) 2023-08-03 08:27 (UTC)

Where she has it propped on the back of her hand, the crumpling in her face at the sight of the silvered ring is very clear. The frown that follows is clearly a habitual reflex—an attempt at cramming some feeling back down and having to work hard enough at it that it's a struggle.

"Is that why everyone has been so irritatingly coy about the first trip into the forest? All because it was dangerous?"

These are hypothetical questions to avoid touching the ring, tempted to leave it there coiled in Tony's palm rather than to take it. She doesn't want it back. Certainly not under these circumstances where it has been removed from Ellis' dead body. That's not why—

"I gave it to him," is a very obvious thing to guard a very unhappy feeling. "For the tourney, you remember. Maud and I collected all manner of ridiculous favors from the whole company for him." And, "It came with me through the rift. It was meant to be good luck."

These are hypothetical questions and so Tony is off the hook about them, he's pretty sure.

Keeps his hand held out while she talks, and when he relaxes it, it's not exactly withdrawal. But keeping it held out like waiting for a shy animal to nibble at your fingers isn't the play, so he brings it back into his space, studying it like he hadn't before now. A breath escapes him at this last part—

"I mean, he's had his share of near misses. I bet it was working overtime."

This fails to eke a laugh out of her. Rather, the line of her mouth slants briefly hard down—an expression that might be comical if it weren't so short lived and so abjectly miserable. She looks away. Fixes her attention somewhere beyond Tony on some spot on the wall that shouldn't be there, and blinks very hard.

The ring on the end of the gold chain is unassuming, save for that somewhere in the dark blue stone is etched the very delicate shape of a bird. She doesn't want it. She doesn't want Tony to have it. It should go back to Ellis' pocket and he should be burned with it, or whatever terrible things they intend to do with his body.

After a moment, she unsets the clench of her teeth. Moves, then, to pluck up the little field book and to fish the ring from Tony's hand.

"I don't know what I'm meant to be doing with all these terrible things everyone's left behind. There's so much to empty out of this house already. And I don't want Gwenaëlle's dog or any of her birds, and I only wanted him to be happy."

"Hey."

Here, Tony leans forwards, hands laying on her arms. Gentle, like how his voice has gone. "Me too," he says. "And you know, I think we did okay."

It catches in the throat, but something something there's a truth around if you're in a survival situation and the other guy is panicking, it's easier to keep your own shit together out of pure necessity. "And you did great. Look, he," and Tony draws in a breath, let's it out again. "He loved you. That's what he wanted me to tell you, along with the—giving back the ring."

His hands turn out, resettle. "That he's sorry and he loves you, and I didn't, uh, ask for clarification about the apology part, like, what for, so this is without any editorial on it, also maybe we can find some kind of bird sanctuary or something."

Which is where he runs out of steam.

It's a gentle touch, but it halts her from doing the thing she'd started: stacking the ring on the little notebook, and these things together with the closest book, which would have inevitably been bundled with the other scattered volumes with the intention of shoving them onto an unused desk or table or dusty shelf. She stops. First the motion of her elbow to set the book and the chain aside, and then altogether. Her chin tucked low among the shape of her knees and brow furrowed against the strict thing clenched high in her throat, just there at the base of her tongue as Tony says—

(Oh, they must have been very dangerous then. The Arlathans, is an absent thought like the sound of the wind that sometimes comes up off the harbor and racing through Hightown to vibrate loose window shutters in their casings.)

(And, wouldn't it be very nice if everyone in danger saw it coming from some ways off. If no one ever disappeared, leaving just their papers and their dirty rooms as if they'd simply stolen away into the night and put everything behind them. If Valentine had set letters aside for his very closest compatriots—'TO MY DEAREST(S) BARONESS AND GOOD JEANNOT, IF YOU ARE READING THIS THEN I AM, TRAGICALLY, QUITE DEAD.'—that she might simply unearth and send along. No one would have to scavenge pretty year old sentiments out of anyone's pockets. It would all be so much neater.)

Wysteria lifts her chin a half degree to look at Tony. "But what about the dog," she warbles unhappily.

It's a very stupid question for the least important part.

player plot | when my time comes around, pt 2

tony stark.

hightown house. closed to wysteria.

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