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

[grindset]

He would not like that. Viktor would not like to decide anything, actually, nor to participate actively in passing a decision along to someone else who probably doesn't want to make it either. In times like these, decisions should simply be cancelled.

"It's just frames," would be too vague even for someone from home. He expels a quick, shallow breath, like a sigh's impatient understudy. "They were in the workroom, so I brought them down."

Having gone to the workroom specifically to see if they were there so he could bring them down.

[tender]

"Oh," is hardly an appropriate response.

It comes regardless, a punch of sound.

"To replace what she lost?" seeks confirmation, Derrica's thumb running along the edge of the case.

No one had found Cosima's glasses. Derrica cannot decide if it is worse to think they might have been melted by that last blast of fire, or if they had been taken by some Imperial soldier. Both possibilities twist in her chest.

[grindset]

Oh seems likewise ready on his lips as they part. Since he approached Derrica, his gaze has struggled to land anywhere for long; now it steadies in its downward drift. Softens, too, from surprise into processes of thought.

A glance aside, toward the hall where they all lay in the cold. He shifts his weight where he stands, the barest shuffling, a soft tap as the crutch foot resets. He hasn't been to see her. Hasn't even asked.

"Yes."

[tender]

"Thank you," feels inadequate.

It feels like such a small thing when set against every part of this interaction. The way Viktor is bowing under his own misery, so pale that she fears she can see the tracery of his veins if she studies him any closer.

She reaches out to his hand where it hangs at his side as she tells him, "I'll put them on her. She'll look like herself again."

As much as was possible, in these circumstances.

[grindset]

She would hardly need to study long; any more than a passing glance at his hands will yield, amid ghosts of bone and tendon, the faint blue of well-formed vessels standing out full beneath the skin. His hands, his forearms, are among the healthiest components his body has to offer.

She reaches into his downturned field of view, offers something deeply needed and seldom sought, and says something—touches his hand while saying something—

"No," he whispers. "She won't."