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Entry tags:
- ! open,
- ! player plot,
- bastien,
- benedict quintus artemaeus,
- derrica,
- ellie,
- fifi mariette,
- florent vascarelle,
- gela,
- james flint,
- julius,
- loxley,
- matthias,
- mobius,
- petrana de cedoux,
- redvers keen,
- stephen strange,
- tsenka abendroth,
- vanya orlov,
- viktor,
- wysteria de foncé,
- yseult,
- { peter parker },
- { tony stark }
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.
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.
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.
no subject
Gwenaëlle had to have known that.
Derrica understood it. She had seen, in those ruins at the whims of cruel spirits, how far Loxley was willing to go to protect his friend. Regardless of how it had ended, it had been such a clear demonstration.
Here, she brings his hands to her lips. Lays a soft kiss on his knuckles.
"I know you wouldn't have left her," comes with an understanding that Derrica might have lost him too, trying to save her. "You've grown. Even since I've known you."
no subject
"I'm really," he says, "really glad you weren't there."
It bears saying. It bears saying because they've had their share of near misses and this might as well be one, given how likely that Riftwatch's standing healer might have been roped into relief efforts if she hadn't been busy (as Riftwatch's standing healer) on the day they gathered some numbers.
He's not sure he could fathom what all of this would be like, if it had gone any differently.
no subject
Block this news out, bar it from their lives.
(She should have been there. This thought squeezes around her heart, claws of it digging in.)
"I'm glad you're here," she tells him instead, that sentiment's twin. "That you're brave enough to come with us."
No one would blame him if he'd stayed away.
"I love you," like a reminder, something that still brings anxious tremors along with it. A true thing. It doesn't yet sit easy, regardless.
no subject
He doesn't have to have a sharp read of human nature to know that very likely, some part of Derrica might have wished to be there, or at least feels a sense of duty about it. There is no time here to guess that this is the case and try to dismantle it, standing in the doorway of the infirmary, but he can impress this: that she is here with him, that he needs her too.
She has friends out there. He imagines they know (knew) even better than Gwenaëlle how much Derrica cares.
"What do you need, for right now? What can I do?"
The words come less tightly, now, more focused.
bow?
She breathes out, urgency rising to take anxious knots in her stomach. Julius' voice comes back to her, carrying an understanding she wished she could flinch from.
Derrica understands what they're going to find when they arrive.
She arches up, balancing on tiptoe as she draws Loxley down to kiss. Threads her fingers into his hair, thumbs at his temples. The reprieve is dwindling down to an end, and behind her there are the boxes to be packed, to be toted down to the courtyard where Ellie and all the others will be waiting.
When she breaks, she tells him, "Help me carry these crates down to the courtyard."