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

[grindset]

Wrong again.

He drops a little ash on himself taking it back.

Since their last torturous exchange, Viktor has spared shamefully few thoughts for anyone else; his mind's iris has been fixed tight on the impossible density of his own pain. He could have done better. Might have checked in, at least—it would have been something, if only a dull gleam in the dark. (Same failure, different face.)

What is there to say, anyway? He can guess how she's doing (shitty), how it's going (bad), what her plans are (none, who cares about anything, fuck off), and she'll have had more than her fill of condolences by now. He wants none of these rote banalities for himself, so he won't inflict them on her.

A deep pull, a breath held—and he passes back to her while he holds it. Long exhale with a tail of wheezing coughs. Even as he grimaces through them, he doesn't take his eyes off the sky.

[notathreat]

Viktor would be correct on all counts, and Ellie is slightly ashamed of how relieved she is that he doesn't ask, or try to offer any sort of comfort. They both know how hollow it is, how it shatters and breaks under the skin, itching like splinters.

Ellie's eyelids lower as Viktor coughs his way through the exhale, and she hopes that the elfroot, at the very least, makes them hurt less.

Another deep pull for Ellie, and she can feel her shoulders starting to relax. Maybe, just maybe, she might sleep tonight. Chances are still shit, but. The cherry burns bright red in the dark, washing her face in flickering light, and she holds it a moment before passing it back.

She follows his gaze, looking up and up and up at the sky. Eluvia. Equinor. Satina.

Tenebrium.

She draws her knees up in front of her, pulls her hoodie -- Clarisse's hoodie -- up and over her legs. It'll stretch it out, but she doesn't care anymore. Puts her chin on her knees.

"See anything up there?"

[grindset]

They don't hurt much less—not the coughs, those remain sharp—but his limbs are loosening. While there can be no such shift toward relief in all the molded metal and stiff leather he wears, with a little help, the meat and sinew of his body can ease within these unforgiving structures, and by slow degrees it is.

Her question prompts a searching moment, eyes moving here and there, and then,

"Which is that?"

That group of stars. They're so plentiful that attempting to direct her attention with a gesture is useless, but since it's already busy he moves his hand anyway, led by a loose index finger, joint still pinched between middle and thumb. His voice is lower lying down, would be fuller without the dry rasp around the edges; he sounds like he's been shouting, though he hasn't been.

"Four, almost in a line."

He's found the sword's cross-guard.

[notathreat]

Ellie looks up, and has to lean in, following the pointing. There are so many stars in the sky that it takes a moment, and her fuzzy mind spins, struggling to catch.

She knows this one.

"Judex," she says softly. Her voice is intact, just husky from disuse. She clears her throat, once.

"The sword of mercy, in the south."

She pauses there again, longer than she means to, and it seems like that might be all. But she presses on, pushing her consciousness into the grooves of memory, following along to have something to cleave to that's outside of themselves.

"Judex is justice in old Tevinter. A downturned sword would be a guilty verdict for someone accused of a crime. Usually it meant execution. It was pre-Andraste, but now the Templar order uses it and calls it the sword of mercy, so most people associate it with them."

She points, tracing the cross-guard in the air, the blade slicing down.

[grindset]

It would be fine if that were all. It's fine that it isn't. Ellie's timbre isn't unpleasant, even rough, and even though what she describes isn't terribly uplifting, she describes it well. A noble attempt at distraction.

While he listens, Viktor expands his conception to include those nearby brighter stars that must finish the picture some stargazer imagined in times long past: one, two. Now it's a weapon.

"Typical."

Now, perhaps, another silence.

Viktor soon lifts the dwindling joint again, not very far, not for another hit, but to pause his celestial study in its favour. His raised little finger is not an affect, that's just how his hand goes.

"This tastes far worse than it smells."

[notathreat]

Ellie hums an agreement, eyes and face still upturned, but a little of the tension has settled, if not left. It's good to be with someone like this. To be a person for a moment, instead of the drawn lines of grief.

Even the silence is welcome, comfortable, and she sinks into it.

His observation earns a wry, tight expression that plays at being a smile but can't quite get there, glancing sideways. Her eyes are very green, moreso in moonlight.

"Yeah, but you don't smoke it for the taste or the smell," she admits, holding out her hand to mutely ask.

"There was this old guy in our village who used to smoke a lot. He says that in the old days they'd infuse it into butter, then bake stuff with it."

[grindset]

"Clever."

Viktor passes back to Ellie with a stiff reach. As his hand comes to rest on the flat of his belly, its landing ripples with stardust, stirs up soft electric currents that seem ready in place, as if they'd already dispersed to his limbs on first puff and simply lay in wait to discharge.

But the pleasure of it is muted. Infused butter, of all things, has tugged a line that was already unspooled and drifting: a bread basket, a bony face, bristly and wry. It calls to mind, too, the man that had arranged the basket, worked the dough that filled it—now diminished to a still shape under a sheet, too disfigured to display.

"I don't like Judex," he decides aloud, while staring at it. "The name can stay, but it should be something else."

[notathreat]

Ellie watches the sky thoughtfully, giving careful consideration to Viktor's proposal. Judex. Sword of mercy... Justice.

Ellie draws on the joint, holding it in until she has to cough a little, then passes it back, drawing air in through her nose until she can swallow again. Her mouth feels cottony.

"Flip it over in your head," she says, gesturing to the sword. "The cross-section. Looks more like a set of scales that way."

Less violent, perhaps, but still discerning. Weighing. Considering.

"Where I'm from, the court buildings had those as a symbol for justice."

[grindset]

He does as requested, imagines the curve of that imaginary line reversed—which no doubt bumps up against the spirit of interpreting constellations, but so what?

"Mmn." As far as grunts go, this one is receptive. "Could be scales. Or a drafting compass." He stirs, lifts his arm to point, interrupts himself with a dismissive flick, "Forget the flipping over," then it's back to pointing, arm and finger straighter than before. "Cross-guard. Connect the second star to the fourth, and the first to the third, to make an X. Then draw a line from the topmost star to the lowest one... now it's a wind vane. Or an anemometer. You see?"

[notathreat]

"Yeah. I see it."

Ellie follows him with her eyes, the rest of her in perfect stillness, the faint starlight shining off the mistiness there. It is quiet here, with him. Drawing imaginary lines, shaping the stars like children.

It's precious, and needed. So sorely needed.

"If you account for the top, an oval there. It could be a hand mirror." A pause, and then, "and if you follow the curve, top and bottom it could be a bow."

[grindset]

Precious play-acting. Veneer on rotting wood. This isn't a reprieve for Viktor—he's given himself no opportunity to become exhausted by sympathy, hasn't spoken to anyone about his loss, his anger, any of it, all crushed down to inconceivable density. He doesn't want to have to explain it.

The minor ordeal of getting an elbow under him dissuades him from sitting up all the way; a detour means curling to one side, away from Ellie, to make use of the flint striker on what remains of the elfroot.

"Huge carrot," he says, and strikes.

And something about this, this stupid thing that hardly coalesces as a thought before it comes out of his mouth, the morose deadpan of his own voice—it stirs something very like the urge to laugh.

[notathreat]

"Considering they're tons of light-years apart, really fucking huge carrot."

Ellie's cheeks have firmed, but she rolls her eyes to the side to take in the look on his face. She's not sure whether he's fighting the urge to laugh or cry. Frankly, she's not sure which she's fighting either.

Sometimes it really is the stupid things.

"Celestial carrot."

[grindset]

Viktor coughs out his smoke with a quick, fluttery sound just before the real hacking begins. He can tell up front that he ought to get out his handkerchief, so he hastily passes to Ellie to free up his hands—

As the spell tapers away, as he folds the cloth around the newest red spots, he's coughing through a smile. The rest is just breath and a faint bouncing in his slouch.

[notathreat]

Ellie takes it, resisting the urge to whack him on the back, like that might help him cough up whatever's stuck in there, but she suspects that he might actually cough up a lung with it. No way they can still firmly be attached.

She almost goes down that rabbit hole, and it's a near thing, that darkness snatching at her.

But then Viktor smiles. Actually smiles, and Ellie feels it clawing at her, too. And for a second in time it's almost okay.

She is so very glad that he's here.

And she falls silent, passing back to Viktor, knowing that if she opens her mouth she'll say something heartfelt and heartbreaking, and they can't have that.

[grindset]

It is, for a second. It's almost okay.

Handkerchief now tucked away with that half-secret inside, its point grudgingly taken, Viktor revisits the concept of sitting up, effort in the thin line of his mouth, the skinny reach of his neck, the way his hand scuffs in to take his weight. The stone is cold and a little sandy under his palm, the way paving stones always become populated with eroded grains, particles of grit left by the rain. By the time a slouch is achieved, the smile has faded, but a little of its spirit remains—in this very slouch, in fact. That he's made himself upright at all.

He wipes his hand on his trousers, takes the joint in progress—careful not to graze fingers—and brings it in to look at it.

Quietly,

"Have you slept?"

Tonight, or at all.

[notathreat]

Almost, but not quite.

Ellie extends her fingers a bit more to make the joint easy to take, and casts her gaze back up to the heavens as Viktor orients himself.

He manages, as he always does. For once, the grief etched into his face makes him look far older than the illness ever could.

"I don't know," she says, very quietly. It's just about the only fully honest answer anyone has gotten to that question. "I lay down and lose time, sometimes. I don't know if it's sleeping."

The stars move so slowly, Ellie has no idea if it's a trick of her eyes, the drifting of the world. They are hurtling so fast through time and space, and yet the moments of perspective seem so slow.

"You?"

[grindset]

She's describing something familiar, not only in these last days, but in his first ones here, and in times before. Back then he'd lie down only when he was too tired to work or think productively, and would end up cogitating in tighter and tighter spirals until he'd at last accumulated enough energy to set his body back in motion. And now—

She happens to prompt him just as he's touching finger and thumb to his tongue, a gentle pincer between lips barely parted. After,

"Some."

He wets the cherry with little taps, pinches it briefly, and again, firm. The heat reaches his finger pads, stops just short of pain.

"No dreams... just skipping ahead to more of the same."

[notathreat]

The winks out in the corner of her peripheral vision, and Ellie doesn't shut her eyes. Instead it plunges them into utter darkness down below, and Ellie likes that. Feeling like nothing. If only for a moment.

"A bunch of them would say that's kinder," she says, and they both know the them they're talking about. "No dreams."

Ellie doesn't sound entirely convinced.

She isn't.

[grindset]

Them. That bunches the skin between his brows.

"Perhaps."

He's still pinching it, twisting the end by degrees, though he needn't do that. Might even spill the rest. He doesn't care; it's something to do with his hands, like scraping the dirt with a stick, or dropping pebbles in the stream to watch the oily sheen part and melt together again.

It would be kinder, he thinks, never to wake up at all—and if the theories hold true, it would make no difference, for they, themselves, are only dreams.

"I thought we were supposed to vanish," he says, to his hands. "I thought we just... dispersed."

[notathreat]

Ellie knows exactly why he's saying it, what he's talking about. The bodies were too real, too solid. The rigor and the rot had set it. The scent of ashes still clings to the Gallows, and Ellie goes silent as thoughts coalesce in her skull.

"I think that's only if we don't die."

She doesn't shy away from the word, die. It is so simple and so real. It's the kind of thing that feels cruel to say out loud, but there's a cleansing burn to it. To be able to say this shit out loud, without all the pretty things about grief and coping and how this pain will pass.

[grindset]

It is real, and simple, the unadorned truth, and it doesn't strike him cruelly. All the same, resentment seeps in, tints his voice with a bitter stain from deep below.

"So, what... we're dreams, given transient form, until the world kills us? Why should a dream only be made real when it's destroyed?"

He's pinching the joint hard with his fingernails, twisting at it, releasing. Tiny fragments of crumbling leaf matter fall to the bricks between his legs. These aren't questions for her to answer, nor is his anger meant for her to bear; he sags crookedly into this acknowledgment not a moment later, but doesn't correct it aloud.

[notathreat]

"It's not different here from any other place," Ellie counters, but not unkindly. She pauses for a moment, unsure, but then decides to press on.

"We're all a collection of memories, right? The only proof of who we are and where we come from is in our heads."

Another pause.

"That makes us exactly as real as everything else."

[grindset]

Meanwhile, as she presses, Viktor's hands have gentled around the fragile thing they hold. Coaxed open by a thumb, it spills the rest of its contents. He resumes tearing at it, then, this thin crumpled husk, this little piece of nothing, and in the slow pull of his fingers it hardly makes a sound.

"We are what we do," he says. "And the proof is in what we leave behind."

The halves separate; he layers them and tears them both together.

[notathreat]

"What if all we leave behind is the memories?"

Her voice is quieter, as she navigates around the whispers of a countdown, the twang of phantom strings. Laughter in a dusty, broken-glass shopping mall, the fading taste of blueberries on her tongue. A song hummed while doing laundry.

The touch of little fingers.

"And the people who remember us?"

[grindset]

This pushes right through him, deepens the creases of his face miserably. The urge to move rises in a sudden swell, but his lead-heavy body does not rise with it, so it breaks across him and falls away, sweeping thoughts loose in its current.

"To linger as some... ephemeral remnant... to be conjured up now and then by a sight, or a mood... crude reconstitutions, each weaker than the last, until the few carriers of those impulses themselves expire..."

A joyless puff of breath barely slides past his teeth; he shakes his head.