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.

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[cozen]

It's at once a good and stupid question, and maybe the way Bastien looks—first at Benedict, a little flat and unimpressed, and then at his cart, like what is he doing—manages to convey both. His steady progress toward the docks slows to a stop.

It has been several days. Of course he's not over it; he is barely even into it, armored and apart from himself. But there are things in him stronger than grief, even this grief, and he is over never finding anything funny, so what he says is, "I'm taking the cello for a walk."

A little more dryly than usual for him, without a grin, but still.

Whiskey, lagging a few feet behind, lopes closer to sit expectantly at Benedict's feet. Pet her.

[altusimperius]

Benedict doesn't laugh. He stoops to meet Whiskey, running his hands over her ears (he's not very good at petting dogs, objectively, but he's improved since meeting her) and continues to watch Bastien with the gaze of someone who has clocked exactly what's going on but is afraid to say anything.

"Don't," he murmurs instead, barely loudly enough to be heard.

[cozen]

Bastien hums, says, "Alright. You've convinced me," and resumes walking—but Whiskey stays where she is being stroked, however inexpertly, and after a couple of yards Bastien has to stop again and turn back to frown at her.

Traitor.

"I will leave you," he lies—talking to the dog, not to Benedict. Benedict he really will leave, no lies.

[altusimperius]

It hurts to hear either way, especially after such a casual dismissal. Benedict has never exactly been bosom friends with Bastien, but he might've thought-- and especially at a time such as this one-- that there'd be a bit more... what. Commiseration?

In truth, that isn't what causes him to speak up again.

"We need you," he says, trying to keep the urgency out of his voice and largely failing. What kind of time is this to go fucking off into the darkness?

[cozen]

No, see, he’s trying to fuck off out of the darkness. Like a rat fleeing the chokedamp in Darktown. That’s different. That’s much more reasonable of him.

—and see, also, it isn’t that he was only here for Byerly. (He’s not Darras, whose motivations are fresh on his mind now.) He came for his own reasons. Stayed for his own reasons, months before he felt anything toward Byerly except a little nostalgic fondness and a lot of present annoyance that a third person in the Gallows knew Edouard Almary was a lie.

But the last time he had his bags packed—the last time a man he loved died horribly and he didn’t know what to do with the weight except try to outrun it—and then every time in the last three years when it stormed for two weeks straight, or the war moved backwards and backwards instead of forwards for months on end—almost all of those times it was Byerly noticing and Byerly being there and Byerly making it alright to have his little tantrums and feel his stupid feelings and Byerly gently screwing his head back on straight.

Now, with his head as unscrewed as it has ever been, there is only Benedict with his bedhead, saying we need you.

“You’ll make do,” he says. But while Whiskey is refusing to move, he lowers the handles of the cart and flexes his hands, giving them a rest. “This hasn’t been the place for me for a long time,” is not something he believed last week, curious and thrilled by airships and cell phones—or at least not something he wasn’t willing to push back against, when the feeling rared up. “The magic and the other worlds and—there are better places for someone like me to be useful.”

Maybe he will even go find one of them, eventually.

[altusimperius]

The look he receives is both pained and incredulous, the face of someone who isn't ready to lose yet another ally (or "ally", it would seem), and who has been around long enough to really give a shit about this place and the people in it. The Benedict who arrived here as a Venatori's apprentice would have a few choice words about the one who stands here now, petting a dog and suffering from the loss of his Fereldan boss, his Rifter friends.

"That's a load of shit," he snaps before he can really take stock of his thoughts, and though he instantly regrets both the statement and his tone, it's not like begging is going to make Bastien stop either.

"He wanted you to be interim Diplomacy head," he adds after a beat, "and even if you hate it, you'd be better at it than most." And besides, so did Byerly.

[cozen]

Bastien shrugs, at the first accusation. It might be. It might not be. Benedict can believe whatever he prefers.

He's aware that he is being disappointing to a young man he likes perfectly well, in a detached boyfriend's-increasingly-competent-assistant kind of way. He's aware, too, that at another time he might be sorry about it. Might yet be still, given a few weeks or months or years to feel like himself again.

But not right now.

"I'm sure the Division Heads will narrow it down to someone better than anyone," is a little amused; temporary and above average is not a blow to his fairly realistic ego, but it is a funny attempt at persuasion, "any day now. There are only so many people to choose from. Whiskey."

She lies all the way down, staring at him with the pitiful eyes of a dog who loves him and would like to please him but has been woken up too early in the morning to possibly be expected to go any further than she has already gone for love. For anything short of bacon. Maybe he'll put her in the cart—

A good idea, actually. He moves around to rearrange some things to make it possible.

It doesn't matter what Byerly wanted him to do. Byerly didn't get to tell him what to do when he was alive—hardly wanted to, of course, but wouldn't have been allowed if he did—and he doesn't get to start now, when he's dead, speaking through Benedict. But as Bastien turns the cello up on its end and slots the lute in next to it, he still asks, "When did he tell you that?"

Because it's something. Something new to him. One of what is now a permanently fixed and finite number of things he might learn By once said or did.

[altusimperius]

Few things can get Benedict worked up faster than feeling as though he's being laughed at, and the traces of amusement in Bastien's demeanor-- he knows nobody is themselves right now, that none of this is rational-- rankles him further, like perhaps this was just a game all along.
He continues to pet Whiskey defiantly, settling all the way down with her, legs crossed on the cold stone as his fingers work into the hard-to-reach spots under her ears.

"So it doesn't matter, then," he concludes, "you were here to get yours, and now you can't anymore, so you're leaving."
He hesitates a moment before adding, "he left a letter for me."

[cozen]

You were here to get yours sails past like a badly aimed arrow. Bastien could answer—almost does answer–you don't know me well enough to insult me in a way that matters—

which has always been part of the point, of that.

But the second part, the part unlikely to have been intended as a weapon. That hits. His hands go still in the cart for a second, and then he exhales and smiles, almost a laugh.

None of the things he has been stupidly jealous of in the last few days—the simplicity of widow and widower, the lingering someone-was-here proof of Enchanter Julius and Madame de Cedoux's rings, and now this more than any of those things put together and multiplied—would make him feel significantly better, if he had them. He'd be just as desolate, just as unreachable, just as leaving.

But it is easy to half-imagine otherwise. That Byerly might have somehow found something to say that they had not already said and written some unimaginable thing that would have soothed the unsootheable.

He blinks his control back into place without anything spilling out.

"People come and go all the time, Benedict," he says. Cart rearranged, he advances toward his traitorous, basking dog. "They will find someone for Diplomacy in no time at all, and I'm sure they'll be as happy as I would be to help you tie your boots every morning."

[altusimperius]

Benedict is already halfway through miserably rolling his eyes when that barb lands, and even if it's not entirely surprising-- he's been needling at Bastien, after all-- it still hits. And he hates how deep it goes.

"Fuck you," he says in an icy whisper to the ground past Whiskey, and draws his hands off her to stand, abruptly ready for this exchange to be over.

He has turned around to go back inside when he pauses in the doorway, like something else has occurred to him, and he reverses direction to pad barefooted back toward Bastien. He's not quite looking at him.

[cozen]

Bastien doesn’t look at him, either, and he’s jostling to carry a large hound dog across stone, and his hearing is half gone—given up pointlessly for the war to gain nothing in particular—doesn’t clue him in until Benedict’s almost on top of him. But he doesn’t flinch when he notices.

He says, “What?”

[altusimperius]

What, indeed. Benedict walks right past Bastien to his cart, where he puts a hand to one wheel and Mind Blasts it; the whole cart gives a loud clatter and a jump, then sags on one side as the axle snaps.
Then he turns back for the door again, meeting Bastien's eyes just long enough to communicate how not sorry he is.
If unimpeded, he'll continue inside.

[cozen]

Bastien nearly doesn't give him the satisfaction of that eye-meeting, his own on the cart, trying to visually calculate the probability that the pissy little stunt has damaged Byerly's violin. It's only after he's decided it's zero, or close to, that he glances Benedict's way, expression flatly resentful.

He wouldn't stop him even if his arms weren't full of large, lolling dog. Whiskey lifts her floppy head to try to sniff at him on his way past, but Bastien doesn't move until he's gone. If inconvenience and a half-hour delay makes Benedict feel better about himself—fine. It doesn't matter.