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]

The bag is set down on the stone between them so that he doesn't accidentally eat them all, folding his arms comfortably with a slightly compressed breath in as he thinks about that.

"Bet not," on the exhale. "If you're pulling for a good memory, you're not thinking about someone's last moments anyway."

But he doesn't have a dog in this race, exactly. It'll be up to her, and Bastien, and it's not up to Byerly even less than it's up to him. He's thinking instead about lifelines, of the tickle of a fingertip tracing along on a palm, and how precious that might have felt on the other side. And it's a little like having the pieces of something, without being sure how they fit together.

"I'm sorry," he says. "About Darras."

[hassaran]

She collects a couple more almonds as she considers this, finally nodding as she drops one in her mouth and chews. Seems true. Not determinative, necessarily, but a good point. She chews, licks a bit of salt off the pad of her thumb, and does not stutter to a stop like a gear that's slipped out of line when Tony says Darras's name. Just the one weird jolt like a skipped tooth, a breath momentarily seized, and then her head is bobbing in a nod.

"Thanks." She ought to say something else, but she has not overnight through grief grown better at talking about anything other than work and after a moment, just shrugs--a narrow but loose lift and flop of shoulders and arms that conveys an air of sort of helpless frustration.

"He should've gotten to know people more," she finally says. "You might've got on."

[propulsion]

"Yeah?"

That's all, at first. A querying prompt, as he goes and rifles for an almond. Not truly expecting much—if Yseult feels like an outpouring, there's plenty of room to do so. She might just shrug again. He can eat an almond either way. He's always been better at grazing than trying to remember to attend to mealtimes.

[hassaran]

"Yeah." She's really not an outpouring kind of person, even now, but she sits with it a minute, almond rolled between fingertips this time so it can't skitter off into the void.

After a minute she adds, "He's--" the contraction trips her up first and the description second and after another minute she does, finally, shrug. "Not like me. Not much."

[propulsion]

"Hates heights," Tony guesses.

Great at outpouring, maybe. It's not what he expects of her but then again, you never know. He can guess. The shape of two complementary but dissimilar personalities. Someone who can get in under the armor of the other without working too hard.

"How long were you two...?"

[hassaran]

"Not that different," almost has the shape of a joke.

She eats an almond, and answers: "Fourteen years." Sometimes (on all the many occasions she discusses her marriage) she feels compelled to add caveats, to acknowledge the years apart, the separations both incidental and deliberate. It doesn't really feel like any of that matters now, compared to this.

"He's the talker," she confirms, unwitting, "If he were sitting here he'd have told you a dozen stories about me already. Some of them even true."

[propulsion]

He swings his feet a little, bootheels scuffing against the sheer stone wall that stretches far above rocky island edge. The corner of his mouth quirking up at that along with a glance, hands setting on the edge he's sitting on, on either side.

"I'll take one," Tony says, "if you're offering."

Set the bar low. She can do one. Even though he feels like he's playing catch up too late. Like there were big portions of Yseult's life that felt untouchable for no good reason beyond the way she had carefully delineated her boundaries through silences, to-the-point conversation, closed doors, but when had she ever said out loud, that her personal life was out of bounds? When had he ever believed that that was a real thing? And now here they are, picking through the debris of it.

But he at least knows what that's like. And, though it hardly ever applies to anything, Makergod forbid it ever happening again any time soon, it's not about him.

[hassaran]

(Surely she is suffering enough without people now also deciding she's not serious about her privacy.)

It seems for a minute like she might refuse, and she nearly does. It feels impossible to come up with something that feels appropriate to the occasion, some story that encapsulates who Darras was and all he was to her, but wrong to say anything less, when he'd have known just what to say.

"He had a gift," she says, for once electing to put words to her problem, "for concocting these stories. Fantasies about being rescued by dolphins or struck by lightning and marooned on island with a magical baby--complete nonsense. But he was always telling me something true by them. He told real stories the same way, everything was always some wild yarn with him. There's no living up to that."

She reaches for an almond, but doesn't eat it, lifting but then gesturing vaguely instead of completing the trip to her mouth.

"But he also-- we met because we were stranded by a hurricane at the same tavern. And when the storm finally let up he invited me to come see his cottage down the coast. He'd spent the whole time we were shut in telling me all these stories about his life, adventures he'd had, and when we got to his house he showed me all the work he'd been doing to shore up the root cellar and repair the roof and all his plans to rethatch after it dried. All this work he'd been doing. He talked about cleaning out the chimney with the same enthusiasm as he talked about finding treasure in a wreck off Afsaana. It was--."

She shrugs, abruptly self-conscious, and reaches for a second almond as if she's forgotten the first is already in her hand but playing it off and eating them both at once with a slightly too-loud crunch.

[propulsion]

(She can tell him no.)

She could fall completely silent in lieu of saying no. He'd leave her the almonds and go see if the mabari is less sad yet.

But she talks, so he listens. Focus set on her profile, mostly, and then out at ocean. The scissored off sentence and the crunch. Hums a sound, thoughtful, then says, fills in for what she was going to say with something she probably was not going to say; "Like not here." This semi-ghoulish existence with your neighbour-colleagues in the prison-fortress-island. You can find rays of light, here, if you try.

"The Dirthamen temple," has that tone of nearly a subject change, a glance to her. "The memory salad situation. I got a, you know. A little slice of something he remembered."

[hassaran]

It takes her a second to understand what he means. She wasn't sure what she was going to say. Charming, maybe--it was. Unexpected. But Tony's not so far off really, different might be the best word. Both the tales of adventure and the domestic dedication, two opposite poles both so different from anything else in her narrow life.

She catches up at memory salad, and turns to look at him, suddenly braced, wary, mind tumbling over a split-second kaleidoscope of the worst things it could be--crimes, secrets, all the most intimate things she's ever done. "What?"

[propulsion]

The glance he gives her has the audacity to be amused—muted, still, everything rendered in less exuberance than usual, which is not even out of respect so much as he's, in his own way, running on empty. But there's a small half-cocked smile kicked up, a configuration of his eyebrows.

"Nice slice," he clarifies. "Not a. Spice slice."

He glances down to where he turns his hand out, looking at the empty upturn of palm and fingers as he says, "Palm reading," which might not mean anything. Maybe it was a cute thing they did all the time, or something so small to her and big to Darras, maybe she remembers it more by the story she told rather than the way Darras soothed her, but either way—Tony doesn't look up at her immediately, in case he bail out.

"I figured you'd hate that," admittedly. "Me having that, anyone having that. If I could give it over to you I would. But you said something to him about your aunt. Do you remember?"

Now, a glance up.

[hassaran]

There's some relief in that distinction, though less than there might be said differently, without that ghost of a smirk. (Who says they're mutually exclusive, anyway.) Her frown remains but it's lacking its bite as well, and not only because she's all hollowed out. There could be worse recipients of whatever this is.

Palm reading only depeens the furrows between her brows as she tries to come up with a memory. And even when he mentions her aunt she might not put it together if she hadn't already had the Bronze Dawn to mind, high on the list of things that can't get out. She thinks back to a cold tower and a rotting ghost and Darras's heartbeat easing as she touched his palm and made up vague nonsense just as she'd been taught.

"About my aunt Sorcha?" she checks, "Was it here in the Gallows?" Because circus tricks are not necessarily a one-off, and she's still deciding how much she hates this aside from the general principal.

[propulsion]

"I don't know," Tony says. It's too close. He remembers words, and hands, the depth of feeling, and everything else rendered mute, background. But he leaves that at I don't know, returning his focus out to the view.

And collecting an almond, not eating it yet. "You were talking to him about aunt Sorcha. She had a cat and a box of beads and taught you how to read palms. And how that's all the stuff you want to remember about her, because it's what matters about her. Then you pretended," an interrupting drawn breath in, a belated easing of some kind of tension (it's called empathy), "to do some palm reading. A long line means a long life."

What was his point? Off-loading this thing that doesn't belong to him? A timely lesson, from another gruesomely killed loved one, to tide her over? What he says instead is, "He loved you so freaking much," in that way that is certain, and admiring.

And she, him. That much was also clear.

[hassaran]

This is not the first time this week Yseult has been reminded of a different dusty field somewhere in the Marches, a different scatter of corpses, her uncle Henrik's blood pooling on her back through her dress, a horse shrieking as the wagon it's harnessed to burns. Her aunt Sorcha, palms coated in blood, open at the neck. It hadn't been that clean for Darras, the dracolisk talons shredding his throat instead of a neat cross-section. A long life, Tony says. Palm reading always was a scam.

"I know," she says after a minute, jaw working, tongue pushing against the backs of her teeth, the inside of her lip. She crosses her arms against her chest and presses her shoulder to the stone until she can feel the edges of blocks press into skin and thinks about the sound of beads pouring through her fingers, the crash of the ocean against a cliff, Rosana still prowling around the office downstairs waiting for her to return. "I was very lucky to have him."

[propulsion]

"Sure,"

is not dismissive, strictly. More like: maybe luck has something to do with it. It goes both ways, but Tony doesn't particularly feel like telling Yseult more things about herself than she already knows. The line of her body pressing against the stone.

"It took me years to get my head out of my own ass about Pepper," he volunteers, after a moment, and an almond. "Now that's luck, not screwing up somewhere in between. Couple near misses," an addition, to be clear. "But there's something to that. Were you guys friends first?"

[hassaran]

"No, we were never anything else." It's at least part of what she means by lucky--the sheer coincidence of circumstance and timing required to thrust them together in the only moment it was possible they'd part as anything but strangers. (She means, too, that anyone would be lucky to be loved like that. And, yes, fine, there is a self-deprecating element: she has never understood what he saw in her to merit it.)

"How long were you and Pepper--?" Fingers gesture vaguely. Friends first? Together after? Both.

[propulsion]

"Thirteen years," supplied easy, like he doesn't have to do the math, even if the math were hard and he weren't good at it. "Together. Longer, just knowing her."

Tony, also, finds himself leaving off qualifiers. The near misses, the shaky periods of separation. Doesn't matter, now.

"You'd have liked her," he says. Which may or may not be just because he considers Pepper broadly likeable or because Yseult may personally find her to be so, but he adds, "Focused, efficient. Comprehensible."

[hassaran]

"I saw an image of her, in the Crossroads," Yseult says. The two of them posing for a series of portraits, holding hands on a red carpet somewhere. "She had a good face." Pretty, of course, but intelligent and with a hint of humor in the fine lines at mouth and eyes and the way she looked at Tony, that familiar air of eye-rolling fondness. All that plus focused, efficient, and comprehensible--he's probably right.

She wonders if it's easier to manage that loss in a new world, not a familiar thing in sight to remind him of her. She suspects nothing really makes it easier but time. And maybe not even that, at least not when it comes to the little girl with the dark braid building with colorful blocks. An actual future lost, instead of only a hypothetical.

"We may need to consolidate divisions," is what she finally says, after she's collected another almond. "There aren't enough people left for strict distinctions."

[propulsion]

Tony makes a sound like huh, neutral agreement. "Maybe. Peel out some heavier hitters from your house to replenish Flint's," he says. "Shuffle in some savvy Diplomacy types under you. I could use some clerks."

This sucks.

And there is some worry for what happens to the people with shards in their hands if it all breaks down. Where they get to go while everyone else scatters apart. Ambitions like mountains in the distance suddenly dust. Maybe it's why he's here, trying to sure something up. If he can get through to her, she could get through to Flint, and then—

"I kept hoping she'd come through to here after me," he says, instead. "At first. Stupid selfish, but what can you do."

[hassaran]

Just divvying up Diplomacy's not quite what she meant, but she is—weirdly—less interested in the logistics of managing this even-more-likely-doomed organization than in hearing about the shapes Tony's grief has taken. She doesn't examine the impulse.

"Impossible not to," she grants him. There are things even the most formidable self control is helpless against. What can you do. "She still could."