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

[ipseite]

Maybe it isn't exactly this thing that Gela has felt, before.

It's an unfair thing, after all: the flare of irritation, impatience. The conclusion that Gela comes to is a reasonable one, with the information available to her — a woman bereft, a great loss. All of those sinking coats, and how she holds herself, and any kind and sensible person might think the same. The way that Gela doesn't think to hesitate before offering her aid is even commendable, though it is not a commendation that she receives for her troubles.

For a moment, the curling at the corner of her mouth obscured by the rise of smoke in front of her face, Petrana only watches. From a distance, one might think her observation dispassionate, even, moreso than paralyzed.

When she extends forward the fingers holding her cigarette, murmuring beneath her breath unfamiliar words, her eyes flare with light and a moment later the coat that Gela is trying so admirably to reach roars sudden into flame, slick like oil on the water.

[sprent]

She nearly has one all the way in. It's such a splendid coat, half-sunk into the water and Gela has to strain to get it out, she isn't that strong. Petrana doesn't move at all while this is happening. She doesn't say anything, only watches her and Gela can feel the prickling of her gaze on the back of her neck. It makes her pause momentarily, breathing harder through her nose.

Suddenly, she feels as if she shouldn't be here or doing this.

And then the coat she is tugging lights itself on fire.

It's still in her hands when the flames leap at her, licking her fingers. Gela screams, more startled than hurt; she throws the coat back into the water, reeling away.

[ipseite]

The smoke that curls out from her cigarette still evokes the scent of a man who is not coming back for his coats, whether they be burned or sunk to the bottom of the harbour. There was no gratitude in her pitiless gaze; there is no especial concern, now, for Gela's scream or fright. She has carved herself out a niche in Riftwatch that so rarely obliges her to cross paths with her own division; so long now removed from when knowing was her duty, it's hard to say if she can even readily place Gela's name.

(It's harder to remind herself how she might feel in time about having behaved this way when the unwary target for her fathomless, directionless ire is a stranger.)

“They are well where they are,” she says, flatly matter of fact.

[sprent]

Her heart is beating quickly in the wake of the scare. She's okay and wasn't badly hurt, but it brings tears to her eyes almost instantly. She doesn't dare turn her head. Crouched over like this with Petrana, a mage, at her back feels both familiar and dangerous.

Gela forces herself to breathe. It comes in suddenly and she swallows, wiping her eyes across the back of her arm. Be calm, be polite, don't give her any reason. The coat is burning away on the top of the water and Gela can smell the burning fibers.

"I see. I'm sorry, I thought you dropped them."

Not wanting to seem like she's trying to run away, she gets very slowly to her feet, brushing her skirts off.

[ipseite]

Some distant twinge of familiarity at the way that Gela holds herself, the control she exerts. Maybe not distant, maybe just a thing to which Petrana is not listening right now— looking into a mirror and finding it difficult to muster much feeling for the reflection. For anything, nearly, except for this fist around her heart.

“How kind of you,” she says, courteous by rote as if she hadn't disabused Gela of that notion with unnecessary harshness— or, not really even as if that. As if it is simply beyond her to muster a reaction that isn't dredged up from habit, empty muscle memory. “As you see, no assistance is required.”

[sprent]

"Of course."

But all those coats in the water, a bitter protest... She looks at them again, then at her hands. Some of the skin on her fingers is growing red and shiny, blistering from where the heat licked her; anger and pain.

"Who did they belong to?"

[ipseite]

A fair question.

There are only so many people it could be, surely. Sixteen. Less than that, narrowed down by those who'd fit these coats. Those who'd actually wear them. Hard to imagine Ellis in them. That strapping young rifter girl would have looked terribly smart.

“Captain Rowntree,” she says, and there's an edge in it, the effort that it takes answering the question straightforwardly and without any cruelty to a man no longer here to complain of it or of her ill-treatment of his coats or, for that matter, Gela. “He has no further need of them. Neither do we.”

Julius may feel differently, but the thing is done.

[sprent]

This will never be something you can apply practicality to. It doesn't matter that somebody else could use the coats in the river, even want them. This is raw, angry grief at work. Gela didn't know that Marcus had somebody who would miss him like this; she feels very terrible then, because, for a moment, she had found a small relief in realising she wouldn't ever have to reckon with the huge lie she'd told him. Not if he wasn't coming back.

"Okay." That's all she needs to say. "Then I'll leave you to it."