faderift | player plot | when my time comes around, pt 2

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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.

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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Bastien glances up, then back down again long enough to finish a sentence, before setting down his pen and sitting back in his chair. He's been sitting in it crooked; it's easy to hook his elbow over the back, affectedly slouchy.

The kitchen staff might mind their own business. But he supposes he deserves this, for being so friendly with them. And for the dimples. Maybe after all of this he'll grow a beard to hide them.

He's not eating at the moment. There's a hand-rolled cigarette in an ash tray on his desk, burning away without being smoked. His heart rate is normal, blood pressure fine. Any unreasonable irritation he feels at being checked up on is distant and small.

"Was it Edith or Freddie?"

She’d proceed with more caution if she felt tension from him. Evidence of annoyance or defensiveness would lead her to tread carefully. But the utter absence of those signs makes her confident in her approach - perhaps unduly so.

So she comes fully into the room and says, “Freddie.” Again, his lack of frustration makes her certain she isn’t going to be getting the man in trouble by tattling on him.

“So? Are you eating?”

Freddie gets a tip of his chin. Noted.

And if he tried to lie convincingly, perhaps it wouldn't be noticeable to her, with how little he cares about it—but that is also why he doesn't try to lie convincingly. He says, "Sure," with half-assed dismissiveness that pretty clearly conveys the gist of not today, and not yesterday, but maybe tomorrow; we'll see.

As if it might somehow be proof—proof that he's taking something in—he lifts his cigarette. And then doesn't smoke it.

"Nina, right? The sleep soother."

There's a little something that catches the edge of her curiosity. Usually, when someone lies, even a casual and dismissive lie, there's a little spike in tension. She doesn't sense any of that from Bastien. She can't help but worry about that. Has he bottled his feelings up so tightly that he's completely indifferent even to the stories he's telling?

She curls her fingers lightly against her thigh. In response, the nerves of the stomach that tend to go numb when you go a long time without eating spring to life, and Bastien will feel a keen hunger pang.

"Mm-hm," she answers. There's nothing at all in her manner that suggests she's doing anything; it's just the subtle movement of that hand. Her face and voice stay pleasantly concerned for him. "I bet you haven't been sleeping, either."

Too much of that and Bastien, attuned to minute gestures as he is, will notice a pattern. But for the moment it is only a fidget in his peripheral vision, half noticed, coinciding with a distracting demand from his gut.

Maybe smoke will shut it up. He takes a belated drag, and on the tail of his exhaled smoke, he asks, "Bet what?"

"A full mouthful of food from you, is the stakes I'd like," she replies. "And I won't bother to offer my own wager, because I know I'm not going to lose."

At least he's engaging, even if it is cold and remote. She'd seen him around the Gallows, before Granitefell, and he'd been bright and sparkling and kind back then. The contrast is obvious. But he is entertaining the things she's saying, not just staring at her in mute agony, and, well, she can work with that.

"So will you take the bet?"

"With no incentive?" means no, although it wouldn't make a difference to him either way— "I am sleeping."

He is. Not well, but as much as the work allows, with Byerly's pillow under his head and Byerly's dog on his legs. Given the bouts of travel and the mismatched schedules and the lingering status quo of my room and your room, not their room—given all of that, falling asleep without Byerly isn't really unfamiliar. Waking up without him is only slightly more so. And in between he gets to not really be here.

"Look, I appreciate the concern." That's a lie. There is concern he might appreciate, at the moment, but not a near stranger fussing over his material existence. "But I'm fine. Tell Freddie I'm fine. Tell him if he really wants me to eat, he can put duck on the menu. I would come down for duck."

Another little twist of her hand, and once again, she clears the pathways for the stomach to talk to the brain. Again, there's a squeeze of hunger that even appetite-killing tobacco can't quite overwhelm.

"Look," she says, "I dragged my fat ass up all these stairs - " This, it should be noted, is said without any real rancor or self-loathing; if anything, she sounds rather proud of that fat ass - "which is no small feat. And you're not fine; I just heard your stomach growl." (Never mind that she caused it to happen.) "Would you come down so he'll stop fretting over you? Just for one day? And then he'll stop sending me all the way up here?"

This time his eyes flick to her hand, when it moves, and back to her face. He attributes the sudden emergence of his stomach from hibernation to the mention of duck, but still—a notation. And in the meantime, the small and distant irritation he felt when she first entered and gets a little bigger and a little closer.

It's measured, though, when he says, "You realize this is infantilizing."

He leaves the cigarette in his mouth this time when he hands go back to the pen and paper and work. He's hungry; alright. He acknowledges the gnawing in the pit of his stomach, acknowledges the slight fuzziness in his head and the fact that he might be dizzy for a moment if he were to stand up too quickly, the same way he would acknowledge the pain of a dagger in his side and the limitations it puts on his movement in the meantime and still say not yet.

She listens for the emotional quality attached to that - the lift in blood pressure, the tightening of muscles. It's still quite dull and remote, muted rather than sharp like she might expect from words that direct. (She notices, too, how he notices the movement of her hand - He's observant, it seems, in a way she should be cautious of.)

"Yes," she says evenly. But she doesn't apologize. Instead, she simply says, "We all become like children when pain comes calling."

Edited 2023-08-01 16:02 (UTC)

Bastien, sitting here and refusing to eat out of pure stubbornness now, is not objectively in the position to say, "Not me."

But he does say it. And he means it.

There is a void here where more curiosity should be. Who is she? Why does she care so much? Just go fucking lie to Freddie, say she found him halfway through an entire cake, it doesn't matter—

But instead a void. He tries to focus on the report and on talking at the same time, with mixed success, on account of the hunger-fuzz.

"Pain is information, non? It is a message to tell you that something is wrong, so you can stop it or mitigate the damage or learn not to do it again."

His little lapse into Orlesian, the non, makes her decide to use Orlesian herself when she speaks next. (Well - it's somewhat because of the lapse, and somewhat because there's a little needle that sticks in her at him acting like she's some nagging mother, and because she wants to show off the fact that she's sharp and clever.)

So it's in Orlesian that she responds - not perfectly, and more slowly than he speaks Trade, but good. Her accent is excellent, if rather obviously copied from the Marcher diaspora. She speaks like a Royan exile in Kirkwall. The Rifter has been studying.

"Oh, yeah. What is it, the thing that you're learning to not do again?" she asks. "Walk into an ambush at Granitefell? That is not the most useful lesson. And besides, even if it is for learning, that doesn't make it not horrible."

His head tilts very slightly to the left when she switches languages. Maybe he is impressed. He switches with her, talking at a normal clip, no slow-pronunciation or clear enunciation allowances—but not doing the truly dickish thing and employing an Tirashan accent at a quick pace. Mostly because it would take effort, on his part.

But before he says anything at all, his mouth parts and he breathes in, and he doesn’t say some things. Doesn’t answer her question with anything saccharine and pathetic, like love someone, or believe anyone will be there, or—most relevant to her and to Fred at the moment—let anyone take Maker-damned care of me.

What he doesn’t say twists in his blood, in a muted way. What he does say is more dispassionate: “Right. If you cannot stop it and you cannot fix it and there is nothing to learn, then it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t do anything.”

She lifts her eyebrows in agreement. But that doesn't make her back off. Instead, she says, "And so then the question is, what does that have to do with what I have said?" Her arms cross beneath her bosom, propping that magnificent display up even further. "You cannot learn, you cannot stop it. Ouais. That has nothing to do with what the pain does to you. And it has nothing to do with the needs you have while you have pain."

“What I mean is,” he says, eyes on his paper, temper finally slithering fully through the wall he’s erected, “I am not a fucking child who has forgotten how to feed himself because I’m in pain.”

Numbness isn’t pain. First of all.

“And I am not going anywhere until I finish this, so the longer you stand there trying to insert yourself into a stranger’s business out of—what, wanting to feel useful? Liking to boss people around? Then the longer it’s going to take me to do anything but this.”

He taps his pen against the paper. The tap speckles the paper with ink.

"A stranger?"

That sentiment startles her enough that she slips back into Trade. And she looks at him, eyebrows furrowed.

"You're not a stranger. You're - " She gestures around them, taking in all of Riftwatch. A fellow soldier. A brother-in-arms. Someone to be cared for.

But the anger is promising. It's something that isn't just icy nothingness. Whether it's better or not, she doesn't really know, because he is right inasmuch as she doesn't really know him. Maybe he'll be so furious that he'll starve himself to death out of spite. But in her experience, cold remoteness has done a lot more harm than fiery anger.

"Anyway," she says, back in Orlesian again, "the longer you dig in your heels and refuse it, the longer I'm going to be here. So you will suffer annoyance until you do this. And if what you were working on actually mattered, you wouldn't be getting ink all over it."

Bastien considers the ink on the report, which is still legible. He doesn't look up from it while he also considers her lingering presence and whether or not he wants to continue to have every single thing he says nitpicked until she runs out of steam.

He leans to one side and opens a drawer. This is his desk, for the last few months since Jeshavis shut its books, which means his old habit of keeping snacks in his office to lure people inside had translated into keeping snacks in a drawer to snare people with in the afternoon. He burlap sack he pulls from one of the drawers makes a clacking sound when he drops it onto the surface, and he sticks his hand in for a palmful of nuts.

He shows them to her before he puts them in his mouth, then resumes writing while he's chewing and swallowing.

"Wow," he says. (Waouh.) "You were right. I feel much better. Thank you."

His tone is perfectly pleasant. His face, too. The sarcasm and unspoken now go away is only in the context.

All right, Nina should say, thank you very much, and she should go away and pat herself on the back for a job well done. She's semi-successfully bullied this grieving man. Good job Zenik. Hooray. He's in pain, but at least he'll survive another day to continue to be in pain.

But even though her conscious mind says, he's unhappy, and everyone is snappish and a little cruel when they're unhappy, her heart says, I'm so tired of this jackass pretending like he's the only one suffering, and also I'm really annoyed at the fact that he's so good at lying (which is utterly irrational and completely besides the point right now). And so she does a surpassingly stupid thing - so stupid, because she's already seen him taking notice - and she clenches her hand (mostly hidden in the fold of her voluminous skirt) once again and gives him a hunger pang severe enough to nearly double him over.

"I'm so glad you feel better," she coos as she does. "Food does wonders, doesn't it?"

Edited 2023-08-02 18:30 (UTC)

Not reacting takes effort. Tensing core muscles, a steady breath. The pleasant expression on his face is a little too still for a second.

Without the prior announcement of her ability to induce deeper sleep, he might have needed another clue. Without spending his teen years in a house where he might be frozen in place at any moment, held paralyzed by Thomin while his bardmaster inspected his form or explained to the others what mistake he'd just made in a fight and how it could have killed him, he might have panicked.

Or, he might have panicked outwardly. Silent pulse-thudding doesn't count.

Instead he says, "You are not going to have a very pleasant time here," quiet and calm, "if you think you can use magic on people without asking. I thought they would have covered that with you when you arrived."

His most recent document, with its fresh wet ink, goes into a drawer. He begins packing up everything else. It'll be a much longer walk, to get what he needs from the Diplomacy office after he finishes this and that, but his room has a lock.

It's the fear she senses from him, even more than the admonition. That gets to her - feeling the heart hammering in his chest, the jagged pulse of adrenaline. This sad man, doing the best he can, still trying to help this place by doing his work when his heart has been broken -

Oh, Nina. What the hell are you doing? Immediately, her conscious mind takes control and reasserts itself. Her hand unclenches. She touches her chest and looks at him with wide eyes. "I'm - Saints, I'm so sorry. I don't know - " What came over her. What an evil, awful, horrible thing to do. And for what reason? What possible cause? It wasn't her friends who died. She has no reason to be spiteful or cruel, and even if she did, this man of all men doesn't deserve it.

"I'm so sorry," she says again, her hands held out in a gesture of remorse. "I - I'll leave you be. I just meant to tell you that there are people who care. I'm so sorry."

He is taking his time with gathering his things. If he's going to run away from her, he's going to keep some dignity about it, not pile things in his arms and run out with paper fluttering loose behind him. He looks up at her when she apologizes, face still impassive, trying to decide whether he is looking at someone who is sorry or someone who is an actress. She is in Scouting.

Either way, his pulse is settling.

"I'm not going to tell anyone," he says, in case that makes a difference to how sorry she is, though maybe he should. Yseult might like to know, if only to keep an eye out and make sure it doesn't become a pattern. "And it's—"

He caps the ink bottle and rubs his eyes, smearing ink across one eyelid. He feels it—the moisture—but it is what it is now. Everything is what it is. He might have preferred her bickering with him over the big eyes, over feeling responsible for reassuring her, but he flexes his jaw like it's arthritic and has a go at it.

"It's fine. You are still new here, and this is a lot, so—I would want to win one, too. Have a little control over something." He picks up the bag of nuts, before dropping it back into the drawer, to illustrate the point: "And so you did."

"Oh, don't do that," she says. "Don't act like it's your job to make me feel better when you feel awful yourself."

Though, she's realizing, she can't really tell whether he does feel awful. Even when he'd been afraid, there'd been something muted about it. She looks at him now - looking like a middle-aged clerk, with that little smudge of ink and that rumpled collar - and realizes that all this time, his signals have just been off. She has no excuse for the way she acted, to be sure, but she's realizing she may have something of a reason. At least part of it is because of that muffling of emotion coming from this man. Nina listens when she speaks with someone, attends to all the little surges and lulls in their body - and so she'd listened to him, and she'd only heard silence and indifference coming from him. So she'd thought she had room to provoke, until suddenly the emotion actually broke through.

She studies him, then, brows furrowed, eyes trained on his face. She ought to keep her thoughts to herself - who knows if he's going to see this as another instance of her using her "magic" on him without permission - but curiosity gets the better of her. After all, she can't sense any drugs in his system that would suppress the functioning of his sympathetic nervous system, and it doesn't quite feel like simple emotional numbness, either. The mystery is going to bother her if she doesn't find an answer.

"Sorry. You don't have to answer me. But you're very - " Quiet is the best word for it, but she settles on a slightly less-accurate but less-vague - "Self-controlled. More than most people I've met."

Edited 2023-08-03 14:42 (UTC)

If Bastien had spent less time in the Fade-constructed copies of the rifters’ world reading fairy tales and political philosophy and Tony Stark’s brick-weight biography, and more time reading psychology textbooks, he might have acquired the vocabulary required to say, Well, my dear, I am having a dissociative episode.

—which would not fully explain it, of course, or answer the question she is not quite asking him.

He doesn’t answer it, exactly, anyway. But there is a small stirring of life and interest, as well as an implication, in his slightly raised eyebrows and slightly competitive question: “More than Yseult?”

Her lips part in a silent oh. Of course. Not all spies would be in Scouting, would they? And he does, actually, look like a spy, now that she's really looking at him. Most of the spies she's known have been pleasant-looking but rather ordinary, just like him. Good-looking, but not in a Genya Safin sort of way. In an ordinary person sort of way.

Well. In honor of his division, she gives a diplomatic answer. "About the same, I think," she says, voice light.

Then she pushes a curl of hair behind her ear and speaks more directly. "I am too. Obviously. Since I'm in scouting, and am clearly not someone who likes to tromp through the countryside." She turns her hand to draw attention to her voluminous skirts and lovingly coiffed hair and general elegance. "Though my strength has never been the, mm, emotional control part." (The second obviously goes unsaid.)

"No," Bastien agrees. Obviously not.

His things have been gathered; he still intends to leave. But now that they are not talking about whether or not he needs to eat and whether or not he's in pain, and how that she seems to be keeping her magic out of his stomach, it's less urgent.

He rests his hip against the desk, standing crooked and slack. This time it's not to pretend to be slouchy and indifferent. It's because he's tired.

"What is? The magic?"

Edited 2023-08-04 04:41 (UTC)

player plot | when my time comes around, pt 2

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