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

[wearyallalone]

He turns, not startled but clearly having been a bit absorbed in what he was doing. (It had mostly been looking at the ingredients while he thought about the best way to try to combine them.)

"If you think you might know where, that could be helpful," he allowed, quietly. "I'm not ... I can cook for myself, a little, but it is not my area of greatest skill." A brief pause, and then he adds, "If you would like to help, or ... no one asked me to do this, I only thought he seemed like he'd want someone to try. After everything." It feels a little presumptuous to say, but on the other hand, he doesn't feel like being wrong in this is very risky.

[favoriteanalyst]

Someone has to go through Jude's things, after all. And maybe it shouldn't be him, maybe someone else has a better right, but. He should at least be able to help. (And where do those things go, after? The blankets coated in fine wolf fur will be thoroughly washed for the next person to use, clean. The books with creased pages and the wolf tooth necklace and--)

He blinks a few times through the swell of hurt.

"Yeah. He'd want that. Everyone got used to pancakes; it would suck to break tradition now." He starts to roll up his sleeves, tugs off his gloves to shove in a pocket. "He's probably got a journal in his room or notes stashed away somewhere, but we can check with the kitchen staff first in case he left something. These aren't hard. It's just making enough for everyone."

He's racking his own brain to remember, how many cakes does a batch make, how big's a batch even, how big were the spoonfuls of batter. Sometimes it's the little details that are the ones that so easily slip away. Is it just for being the innocuous details, or is it just the first of many signs of his mind going?

"Don't know how many are gonna really want any this morning, but we can start small."

[wearyallalone]

"If you know more than 'make a batter thin enough to pour' and 'use a hot, flat surface,' you're ahead of me," he confesses, though the news that pancakes are not especially hard is at least welcome. Vanya's own concerns about memory are, at least, not triggered by a process he didn't really know in the first place.

He fetches down a large bowl, which seems a likely next step. "Even if no one wants them today, maybe we can know what we are doing next week, a bit more." A tacit acknowledgement that there will be another Sunday, and another, months and years of them. Vanya isn't sure how many of them will be spent here in the Gallows, but for the time being, it can't hurt to try.

[favoriteanalyst]

"It's not much more than that. The real question," he admits, "is knowing the amount of each ingredient for the amount you want to make. Some of it's not much. And he didn't really use numbers, so much." Added with a light frown at the measuring cups. "He did it so often back home that he just knew how to do it by heart. That's how it was with him, measured with his heart. Which doesn't really work when you're teaching someone how to do it."

Most of what he did in kitchens, before here, weren't sweeter fares. Hearty stews and some very plain bread to sop up the juices, for instance.

"Start with the dry goods first. Flour, sugar, salt, uh, the baking stuff, the leavener. Then you add the wet stuff after."

[wearyallalone]

It's not as helpful as it could be. But he knows how to make a pan bread that's popular in Nevarra, so he starts as he would for that, with the idea of making it thinner (more milk and eggs) and sweeter (sugar).

"I'm afraid measuring with one's heart is not a standard part of training at Cumberland," is deadpan enough Mobius is forgiven for missing that it's a joke. "Besides, we had porridge and sausage for breakfast every day for years. I'm not sure they wanted us to remember that other breakfast foods existed." It's an invitation, or at least an offering. Something to talk about other than why Jude isn't here to make the pancakes himself.

[favoriteanalyst]

It's basically just thin bread, right? Sweet and fluffy thin bread. It can't be that hard. He's trying to remember how many cups of what. Should he have written that down? Instead of just assuming Jude would always be here. He lets Vanya set to work, though, because too many cooks etc etc, but he can grease up a pan to set on the fire meantime, and fetch a spoon to dollop the batter on while reminiscing.

"Eggs," he says with such fondness. "There are so many ways to do eggs, I think it's hard to get bored of them. Easiest to just scramble them up in big batches, though, then throw in the scraps from dinner the day before to vary it up. But, yeah, lotta porridge. I don't miss that. I like what they do here. And I always appreciate Rifters trying to introduce new things. Pizza? We have got to perfect pizza. So versatile."

[wearyallalone]

The observation that Mobius doesn't miss porridge gets a brief but genuine smile from Vanya; fair enough. He starts mixing the dry things together. He's fairly sure that it should be substantially more flour than any of the other things, but that's about all he has to go on. His heart is not especially helpful as to amounts.

"My understanding is that pizza is mainly bread with vegetables and cheese on it, yes?" He's not averse, though he's not sure why Rifters who come from places where it exists are so attached. "I tried it when we were sort of in New York, last winter. It wasn't bad." Faint praise for a classic New York slice, but maybe that's just Vanya.

[favoriteanalyst]

"And sauce. Lotta ways to make it. It's convenient and tasty. Oh, but did you try soda?" It's been awful, in a way, to reminisce about fake New York. Partly because it wasn't real. Partly because it was real to the memories of those who came from there. Partly because they have such a long way to go to ever get anywhere close to that. But if he's going to remember it now, it'll be all the good parts.

"I guess it's unfair to just say soda when there's so many kinds of that, too. Bubbly and sweet and gives you that jolt of energy like coffee does, but less expensive. That, I want Rifters to invent that here."

[wearyallalone]

"I don't think so. Mainly coffee. The cold kind?" He likes coffee well enough here in Thedas, but Manhattan cold brew had been something else. "I did also like their ice cream, it had a different texture than frozen desserts I've had here." He wasn't particularly close with any of the rifters from New York, but the widespread demands that Thedas natives try various foods while there had been charming, in his view.

In the present, he's lifting a spoon out of the batter, eyeing the texture critically. He's pretty sure it's too thick, but whether it's much too thick or only a little bit too thick is less clear to him.