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

[hassaran]

"It's a talent," she agrees. No matter how preternaturally youthful one's back may be. Hers is nearing forty, a thing that worried her a week ago but no longer. "It also helps to be exhausted all the time." That at least should be easy.

"Where did you go when the weather was like this?"

[cozen]

"Le Faucon Blanc," she might recognize, or not, as one of Val Royeaux's cheaper inns, occupying a building that once made it an expensive inn, before everything about it fell swiftly out of fashion. "They have those tiny wrought-iron balconies—for decoration, you know? Or for not falling out of the windows. I'm not sure. But there was one window that was always dark and never open. Apparently the owner's husband had died there, a little horribly, and she boarded it up—so I would climb up to that one and sleep on the balcony. I woke up with lines everywhere, but there was a breeze from every direction, so..."

None of this matters at all.

"He seemed like a good man," might be unwelcome, but at least it isn't such inconsequential rambling. "Piracy aside. I can hardly judge."

If Bastien is like either of them—if he should have been better friends with either of them, free of particular circumstances that connected him to Yseult—it's Darras. Was Darras.

"And when he talked about you, it just radiated off of him, you know? The warmth and the pride and—it's just fucking bullshit that he's gone."

[hassaran]

Yseult preferred the inconsequential rambling. She could have tried to remember where Le Faucon Blanc is and whether or not she's confusing it with Le Faisan Blanc, or talked about falling asleep on the trapeze platform as a child or remarked on the truly miserable weather they're having or the time she did a job in weather like this and had to climb half a wall blind because of sweat running into her eyes. Instead, she is thinking about Darras, looking back over at the pair of villagers trying to make a run for it before lifting his arms to wave at the oncoming dracolisks, drawing their deadly attention. The lance knocking his sword aside, the beast rearing to slash his throat.

"It's because of me," she says, voice grim and a note of grating over gravel, something like it did for the first day or two back before the smoke-damage eased. "He never wanted to be here. I should've let him go instead of pretending I could do this and have a life."

[cozen]

Bastien considers that in silence. Considers the evening Yseult first told him about the handsome pirate who wouldn't take we're fundamentally different in ways I can't let lie for an answer—when he said something like, He's fighting a war for you? And that's a problem?

And the answer was yes. And now it's yes again, for other reasons.

He holds his hand out, palm up, to ask for hers. Feeling not much of anything very strongly will make the potential embarrassment of being left hanging much easier to bear. It will make it barely anything to bear.

"If he'd known it would kill him, do you think he would have left?"

[hassaran]

Yseult considers this for a moment, both the question and the offered hand. She decides on the hand first, reaching over to take Bastien's wrist, the angle pressing half her palm to the heel of his hand, and squeeze. And then let go, and draw her arms back to fold over her stomach.

"If I'd let him visit," she decides, "Yes. If he could've left without losing me, he would have a long time ago."

Maybe that's not fair to say now given how selflessly he died. She's avoided that fight so carefully the last few years, reluctant to find out nothing's really changed, too afraid to start it all up again. What a way to win it.

[cozen]

The wrist squeeze is better than nothing. The sensation of pressure lingers until his arm has looped around his own middle, brushing against buttons and rough dressed-down summer fabric, and then it’s gone.

“He might have died years ago that way,” he says. “Out at sea without you. And then.”

He wants to be wise for her. Say the correct and comforting thing. But for the moment he has reached a dead end.

[hassaran]

"He was lucky," she says, with the air of repeating someone else's words. Like luck is real, like so-called lucky men aren't lost at sea all the time, like no lucky man's ever been thrown from a horse or caught a fever. "Even when you all were taken captive and reported dead it was difficult to believe."

It's harder to kill that last kernel of hope when you haven't seen a body, haven't sat beside it as it goes cold and waxen and watched the blood soak into the ground and flakes of ash flutter down and settle in the cavernous ruin that used to be his throat.

"I'd always assumed it would be me. When I saw him fall I thought at least we'd go together. Finally something I wouldn't escape." She lifts a hand, lets it drop onto the tiles. "Did Byerly leave you a letter?"

[cozen]

“No. But that’s alright. We talked a lot, you know,” comes with a strained touch of self-aware humor. The amount they talked in public, times a thousand—imagine.

And at this moment, unable to attribute any of the roaring static of his misery to the fact there’s a letter for Benedict, he means it. Insofar as anything is alright anymore, this is. They talked about everything. They talked about this. The only things left unsaid are the new things Byerly could not have thought of then and will never think of now.

For a moment the wind off the water smells like home, and for the span of Bastien's deep inhale, trying to chase the scent, he almost feels everything. Then it smells like Kirkwall again. He exhales, he spends a quiet few seconds holding the horrible fact that she saw Darras go down and surely had to make the choice to keep fighting, right then, and he hazards a guess as to why she might ask.

“Darras couldn’t read.”

[hassaran]

"Oh, no, he'd learned. I told him he had to so that he'd be able to read the letters I left for him. He still pretended sometimes, to avoid paperwork. He just wasn't the sort to write." Thankfully, he also wasn't the sort to leave things unsaid. The lack of a letter bothers her less than the fact that they'd only ever prepared for her death. That he seemed to believe she'd be fine as the one left behind.

"I spoke to Byerly, near the end. He asked me to tell you something." And she thought maybe if there was a letter she'd be off the hook. "It wasn't anything you don't already know, but if you want to hear about it."

[cozen]

His faint smile and fainter huff of laughter, at Darras claiming illiteracy to avoid paperwork, drop promptly away.

"Oh."

On its own it would be a coin toss, whether he wanted to hear it. Whether he could stand to right now. Without the general disinterest and disapproval or the reluctance that must be behind making it something he has to ask for and offering a reason why not—then maybe. Even probably.

He says, "No, that's alright."

The sense that it is some sort of betrayal to refuse this last thing from Byerly, however unnecessary the message and unhappy the messenger, is instant but distant. Given some time for it to grow closer and louder, he might write to say he's changed his mind and hope that Yseult is forgiving enough to answer him.

For now he only curls his hand into his shirt.

"How is his crew? Are they going to stay?"

There's no grace in the haste or blatancy of the subject change. He doesn't care.

[hassaran]

"No. One or two might join the Walrus, but the rest will go and take the Fancy. They were only here for him."

She doesn't try to stretch the topic or supply another, just sits for a minute with the uncertain guilt of having avoided this other conversation. She could endure the awkwardness of being the bearer of final declarations of love for a couple she doesn't understand if it weren't for everything else. The inevitable follow-up questions: when was this, how was he, did he say anything else, did you see him after that, why didn't you stop him, why didn't you go with him? She has directed the late arrivals to bodies and answered dozens of questions and written a comprehensive report of the entire catastrophe and replayed every death she saw and those she didn't over in her head on an endless loop. The thought of going back to that tainted well again, tucked in the lee of an overturned cart, smoke and magic and blood in the air and the mingled screams of people and dracolisks and knowing Darras's body was somewhere there underfoot--it makes her want to slide down the roof and off the tower.

And for what? To give Bastien a strange, sad final memory of Byerly choosing to throw away any remaining chance of survival? Maybe he wouldn't want to hear it anymore than she wants to tell. Maybe he already has some other final memory he's content to hold onto instead. Maybe he doesn't want to think about it at all. She should've just written it down and put it in his pigeonhole, but it felt strangely impersonal. This feels worse, and there's a temptation to just spit it out. But now he's said no.

She reaches over and sets fingertips on his arm just above the elbow. If he doesn't shake them off they slide to curve around his biceps and sit there, the loose steady pressure she'd demurred earlier.

[cozen]

He doesn't shake them off. He doesn't do much of anything, still and silent at the crossroads of a dozen fragments of thoughts and regrets, flashes of gratitude and quickly-dying sparks of anger, unwilling to choose any of them. Instead he turns his head just enough to look at the ships in the harbor and imagines the Fancy sailing away.

By forfeit, even only knowing him so well, Yseult is now the person who knows him best in the world. If he told her he was leaving, too, she might know how to say something that could stop him. So he won't tell her, and he'll only feel so guilty. If Corypheus died and the war ended tomorrow, he's sure he'd never see her again anyway.

"When he stayed for you," he says, at length, "he wasn't giving up the life he wanted. He was choosing it. The same as everyone does every day, giving up one dream for another. Deciding what they can and can't live without. You didn't choose for him. It wasn't your fault."

It's not enough, but nothing would be, and right now it's all he has. He touches his fingertips to the knuckles of the hand she has on his arm, a silent thanks with an even more silent you don't have to.

"You should go to bed."