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Entry tags:
- ! open,
- ! player plot,
- bastien,
- benedict quintus artemaeus,
- derrica,
- ellie,
- fifi mariette,
- florent vascarelle,
- gela,
- james flint,
- julius,
- loxley,
- matthias,
- mobius,
- petrana de cedoux,
- redvers keen,
- stephen strange,
- tsenka abendroth,
- vanya orlov,
- viktor,
- wysteria de foncé,
- yseult,
- { peter parker },
- { tony stark }
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.
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.
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.
no subject
They're also older garments. A little sun-worn. Faded at the knees. Still a bright point, in the Gallows grey.
He does not pause his playing, but does glance to the other man. No big smile, or even some weak attempt at it. "If I were faster," he says, in easy Orlesian, "I'm sure you would." He hasn't the calluses of a proper musician, or the dedication of a proper hobbyist, and his fingers are twinging anew as he plucks his way through the song. "Here—"
He loops back to the chorus, and, a little clumsily, gets through the melody, recognisable as an opening song to a play. Or, technically, its closing mirror, rendered a little sadder for its minor notes.
no subject
He wants very suddenly and strongly to be at the theater, absorbed in some other life. But he'd have to walk an awfully long way through his current life to get there.
He leans just sideways enough to touch his shoulder to Florent's, not quite leaning. He thinks, and then he says what he is thinking: "It feels stupid to ask how you are doing, but I do care. If you want to tell me."
no subject
That doesn't happen, but his eyes gloss over, wet, an easy reaction to that simple fact of caring while his fingers pluck slowly over strings. One of them is in need of tuning, which, even with Bastien's diminished hearing, he may be able to tell as Florent tests that string again, but doesn't busy himself with fixing it.
The song finishes, though, transitioning into fidgety scales that thrum quietly through the air. He started playing here because it was too quiet, and it still is, as he thinks.
"Not very well," Florent settles on. "It was very horrible, that night. I shouldn't have been there."
no subject
While he listens he can almost see some other self, like a ghost, who musters the cheekiness to fix Florent's string while he plays, and he lets the ghost finish before he clarifies.
"You were helping. You were doing a good thing. It shouldn't have gone that way. I don't know how we could have—if we missed something, if we should have seen it. I don't know. I'm sorry."
no subject
Florent absorbs it, considers it, looking at his own hands delicately placed over the strings. "I shouldn't have been there," he repeats, after a moment, clarifying for himself his own meaning before he offers it, "because if I had not been, my friend would be alive."
Because he needed saving, curled up on the ground. Because he wouldn't have made it out otherwise. The method and mechanism of that protection is too shameful to put into words and so he will not elaborate further. What he does say is—
"Maybe," granted.
no subject
Now, at the worst of times, it doesn't feel like it matters any more than Florent's out-of-tune string.
"Maybe," he agrees. More likely not, given the statistics, but— "Mademoiselle Baudin?"
no subject
A drawn in breath follows Florent setting about tuning the instrument, slow and lazy and unfocused in his handling. But he can't very well play to any degree of satisfaction until it is done, and so.
The glance he gives Bastien is a brief flicker of study over his features. "She," he starts, stops, looks back down at the dulcimer. Shakes his head. "She wished me to find purpose here too. She gave me a jacket."
This must be related in some way, because it is enough that he crumbles, just a little, just enough for his hands to leave off the dulcimer and press his palms to the sides of his face as if to try to stem this fresh spill of tears.
no subject
"She had singular taste," he says, a little wry but mostly quiet. Whether it's a symbol of something larger or only a random detail Florent is grasping from a sea of them, all equally important—either way, they can talk about the jacket, or whatever else. "Is it a jacket I've seen?"
i don't have appropriate icons for this plot so everyone be nice to me
But what Orlesian doesn't have an overemphasis on public expression? He swallows, nods mutely first, then says, "She made it for me."
A wet-sounding breath in, hands lifting off his face. Looking at them, like checking for blood. "Because I didn't have anything to wear for the work, you know, of the kind that is done. It's that blue one. It's too hot to wear right now," and his tone climbs a little higher on the end of it, as if this fact is a compounding factor to his sense of personal tragedy.
hey everybody come look at this kid with the repeat icons
Bastien hasn’t cried, and if anyone encouraged him to they would get one of the least impressed minor eyebrow adjustments in his arsenal. But there’s no disdain, masked or not. No attempt to hush or hide the display on his behalf.
“It will cool off,” he promises. “In a few months you will need it every day, and whenever anyone compliments it, you can tell them about her. It will be a little easier then.”
>8|||
What Bastien says, though, gets a faint laugh, the breathy mirthless kind. "You're right," Florent says. "It will be winter and I'll still be here."
Wet fingers spread, his left hand curling ever so to make the faint green light nested there glimmer, before they turn around to rest again on the dulcimer, adjusting its sit on his knees. "I want to go home very often," he says. "But now, I'd give anything."
ilu and ur icons are great
no subject
It's a good thing they are huddled so closely, or the word would be lost as a mumble. Picks out a few notes on the dulcimer. A minor shrug, more felt than particularly visible, a wisp of not-quite laughter. "But that scares me." On just about every conceivable level, and so there's no attempt to define exactly what about it is scary. Just all of it.
"I'm sorry," he says, a little clearer. Sniffs. Reaches past the dulcimer to pat Bastien's knee. "How grim of me, to complain. As if this place were not already so miserable now."
no subject
“You are entitled, I think. Everything is horrible and you did not ask for any of it.”
He lifts his head. He does not think Florent needs to be told the things he might tell him. To be sure it is someone competent, if he does it. To have Derrica or some other healer on hand. To ask Madame de Foncé for advice, and perhaps for assistance with a new arm. He is clever enough, and careful enough, and certainly not looking to die of blood loss or gangrene.
no subject
Bastien lifts his head, so there is space enough for Florent to look at him. A watery kind of eye-crinkled look, affection marked plainly there. It's nice to be told this thing. For someone to take notice and state it so plainly. He absorbs it, simmers in it, considers it.
"I'm sorry you lost your love," he says.
no subject
And the part of him that is very desperate for any invitation to speak about Byerly—to say were you here that Satinalia he dressed as Corypheus and wind up laughing, maybe with a few tears but mostly laughing, to tell someone that as a boy he would ditch Chantry school to catch frogs, to explain what it is Bastien saw when he looked at him, to say anything to keep him that little bit alive and to have anyone listen the way Byerly would have—is not quite as powerful as the wall and the distance and the quieter, steadier need to keep it together.
Which is what he is doing, clearly, by not saying anything about any of it and privately packing his shit.
“I was in love once before,” is what he says instead, “you know, for real.” A hundred times, for not-real. Surely Florent can relate. “It wasn’t—I wasn’t his type. But for years I—“ was pathetic. Anyway. “He died, too. They hanged him in the market square.”
A secret from nearly everyone still here and alive, less difficult to say only in comparison, all for: “Maybe next I should go to Tevinter and see if I can find something compelling about Corypheus.”
no subject
"That would be very heroic of you," Florent agrees, no hesitation for playing along. "And if anyone could."
He looks back out at the broad hallway, the light coming in through its narrow windows, high up near the tall ceiling. "Why did you come here?" is not rhetorical.
no subject
"It was after they invaded Orlais. I wanted to help. I wanted to not be so bored all the time. And I wanted to matter," comes easily, because he has already done the self-examination required to arrive at that slightly embarrassing truth, "not too much, you know. But a little bit."
As he answers he looks at Florent, follows his gaze up to the windows, and looks down at his own hand, the one not still dangling around the other side of Florent's shoulders.
"I was not leaving behind fame and feting."