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

[notathreat]

Ellie watches the sky thoughtfully, giving careful consideration to Viktor's proposal. Judex. Sword of mercy... Justice.

Ellie draws on the joint, holding it in until she has to cough a little, then passes it back, drawing air in through her nose until she can swallow again. Her mouth feels cottony.

"Flip it over in your head," she says, gesturing to the sword. "The cross-section. Looks more like a set of scales that way."

Less violent, perhaps, but still discerning. Weighing. Considering.

"Where I'm from, the court buildings had those as a symbol for justice."

[grindset]

He does as requested, imagines the curve of that imaginary line reversed—which no doubt bumps up against the spirit of interpreting constellations, but so what?

"Mmn." As far as grunts go, this one is receptive. "Could be scales. Or a drafting compass." He stirs, lifts his arm to point, interrupts himself with a dismissive flick, "Forget the flipping over," then it's back to pointing, arm and finger straighter than before. "Cross-guard. Connect the second star to the fourth, and the first to the third, to make an X. Then draw a line from the topmost star to the lowest one... now it's a wind vane. Or an anemometer. You see?"

[notathreat]

"Yeah. I see it."

Ellie follows him with her eyes, the rest of her in perfect stillness, the faint starlight shining off the mistiness there. It is quiet here, with him. Drawing imaginary lines, shaping the stars like children.

It's precious, and needed. So sorely needed.

"If you account for the top, an oval there. It could be a hand mirror." A pause, and then, "and if you follow the curve, top and bottom it could be a bow."

[grindset]

Precious play-acting. Veneer on rotting wood. This isn't a reprieve for Viktor—he's given himself no opportunity to become exhausted by sympathy, hasn't spoken to anyone about his loss, his anger, any of it, all crushed down to inconceivable density. He doesn't want to have to explain it.

The minor ordeal of getting an elbow under him dissuades him from sitting up all the way; a detour means curling to one side, away from Ellie, to make use of the flint striker on what remains of the elfroot.

"Huge carrot," he says, and strikes.

And something about this, this stupid thing that hardly coalesces as a thought before it comes out of his mouth, the morose deadpan of his own voice—it stirs something very like the urge to laugh.

[notathreat]

"Considering they're tons of light-years apart, really fucking huge carrot."

Ellie's cheeks have firmed, but she rolls her eyes to the side to take in the look on his face. She's not sure whether he's fighting the urge to laugh or cry. Frankly, she's not sure which she's fighting either.

Sometimes it really is the stupid things.

"Celestial carrot."

[grindset]

Viktor coughs out his smoke with a quick, fluttery sound just before the real hacking begins. He can tell up front that he ought to get out his handkerchief, so he hastily passes to Ellie to free up his hands—

As the spell tapers away, as he folds the cloth around the newest red spots, he's coughing through a smile. The rest is just breath and a faint bouncing in his slouch.

[notathreat]

Ellie takes it, resisting the urge to whack him on the back, like that might help him cough up whatever's stuck in there, but she suspects that he might actually cough up a lung with it. No way they can still firmly be attached.

She almost goes down that rabbit hole, and it's a near thing, that darkness snatching at her.

But then Viktor smiles. Actually smiles, and Ellie feels it clawing at her, too. And for a second in time it's almost okay.

She is so very glad that he's here.

And she falls silent, passing back to Viktor, knowing that if she opens her mouth she'll say something heartfelt and heartbreaking, and they can't have that.

[grindset]

It is, for a second. It's almost okay.

Handkerchief now tucked away with that half-secret inside, its point grudgingly taken, Viktor revisits the concept of sitting up, effort in the thin line of his mouth, the skinny reach of his neck, the way his hand scuffs in to take his weight. The stone is cold and a little sandy under his palm, the way paving stones always become populated with eroded grains, particles of grit left by the rain. By the time a slouch is achieved, the smile has faded, but a little of its spirit remains—in this very slouch, in fact. That he's made himself upright at all.

He wipes his hand on his trousers, takes the joint in progress—careful not to graze fingers—and brings it in to look at it.

Quietly,

"Have you slept?"

Tonight, or at all.

[notathreat]

Almost, but not quite.

Ellie extends her fingers a bit more to make the joint easy to take, and casts her gaze back up to the heavens as Viktor orients himself.

He manages, as he always does. For once, the grief etched into his face makes him look far older than the illness ever could.

"I don't know," she says, very quietly. It's just about the only fully honest answer anyone has gotten to that question. "I lay down and lose time, sometimes. I don't know if it's sleeping."

The stars move so slowly, Ellie has no idea if it's a trick of her eyes, the drifting of the world. They are hurtling so fast through time and space, and yet the moments of perspective seem so slow.

"You?"

[grindset]

She's describing something familiar, not only in these last days, but in his first ones here, and in times before. Back then he'd lie down only when he was too tired to work or think productively, and would end up cogitating in tighter and tighter spirals until he'd at last accumulated enough energy to set his body back in motion. And now—

She happens to prompt him just as he's touching finger and thumb to his tongue, a gentle pincer between lips barely parted. After,

"Some."

He wets the cherry with little taps, pinches it briefly, and again, firm. The heat reaches his finger pads, stops just short of pain.

"No dreams... just skipping ahead to more of the same."

[notathreat]

The winks out in the corner of her peripheral vision, and Ellie doesn't shut her eyes. Instead it plunges them into utter darkness down below, and Ellie likes that. Feeling like nothing. If only for a moment.

"A bunch of them would say that's kinder," she says, and they both know the them they're talking about. "No dreams."

Ellie doesn't sound entirely convinced.

She isn't.

[grindset]

Them. That bunches the skin between his brows.

"Perhaps."

He's still pinching it, twisting the end by degrees, though he needn't do that. Might even spill the rest. He doesn't care; it's something to do with his hands, like scraping the dirt with a stick, or dropping pebbles in the stream to watch the oily sheen part and melt together again.

It would be kinder, he thinks, never to wake up at all—and if the theories hold true, it would make no difference, for they, themselves, are only dreams.

"I thought we were supposed to vanish," he says, to his hands. "I thought we just... dispersed."

[notathreat]

Ellie knows exactly why he's saying it, what he's talking about. The bodies were too real, too solid. The rigor and the rot had set it. The scent of ashes still clings to the Gallows, and Ellie goes silent as thoughts coalesce in her skull.

"I think that's only if we don't die."

She doesn't shy away from the word, die. It is so simple and so real. It's the kind of thing that feels cruel to say out loud, but there's a cleansing burn to it. To be able to say this shit out loud, without all the pretty things about grief and coping and how this pain will pass.

[grindset]

It is real, and simple, the unadorned truth, and it doesn't strike him cruelly. All the same, resentment seeps in, tints his voice with a bitter stain from deep below.

"So, what... we're dreams, given transient form, until the world kills us? Why should a dream only be made real when it's destroyed?"

He's pinching the joint hard with his fingernails, twisting at it, releasing. Tiny fragments of crumbling leaf matter fall to the bricks between his legs. These aren't questions for her to answer, nor is his anger meant for her to bear; he sags crookedly into this acknowledgment not a moment later, but doesn't correct it aloud.

[notathreat]

"It's not different here from any other place," Ellie counters, but not unkindly. She pauses for a moment, unsure, but then decides to press on.

"We're all a collection of memories, right? The only proof of who we are and where we come from is in our heads."

Another pause.

"That makes us exactly as real as everything else."

[grindset]

Meanwhile, as she presses, Viktor's hands have gentled around the fragile thing they hold. Coaxed open by a thumb, it spills the rest of its contents. He resumes tearing at it, then, this thin crumpled husk, this little piece of nothing, and in the slow pull of his fingers it hardly makes a sound.

"We are what we do," he says. "And the proof is in what we leave behind."

The halves separate; he layers them and tears them both together.

[notathreat]

"What if all we leave behind is the memories?"

Her voice is quieter, as she navigates around the whispers of a countdown, the twang of phantom strings. Laughter in a dusty, broken-glass shopping mall, the fading taste of blueberries on her tongue. A song hummed while doing laundry.

The touch of little fingers.

"And the people who remember us?"

[grindset]

This pushes right through him, deepens the creases of his face miserably. The urge to move rises in a sudden swell, but his lead-heavy body does not rise with it, so it breaks across him and falls away, sweeping thoughts loose in its current.

"To linger as some... ephemeral remnant... to be conjured up now and then by a sight, or a mood... crude reconstitutions, each weaker than the last, until the few carriers of those impulses themselves expire..."

A joyless puff of breath barely slides past his teeth; he shakes his head.

[notathreat]

"It's more than a lot of people have," Ellie says quietly. There are countless corpses where she's from, part of the landscape, scraps of notes. Love made real only in stitches in a child's sweater, mending a darn, rotting in a basement. Unmarked graves, or none at all.

There are a lot of names, now, that only Ellie still remembers. If she died, there would be no one at all.

"It would be nice, though. Getting to do something that mattered, even after we're gone."

[grindset]

There are platitudes for this—everything we do matters—no one leaves the world without changing it somehow—and they might have been a comfort, once, when he was too small to know better. Love on its own goes only so far. Stitches will always rot.

This silence is long, and by its end, Viktor's hands are empty. From the scattered remains his attention shifts to his own leg, strapped and shanked, and from there, with a turn of his head, to the crutch lying by his side. He reaches for it, brings it across his lap. White stained wood, brass fittings, red grips—not the one he uses while they're away. This one rarely leaves the Gallows.

"We were going to change the world," he says, soft.

[notathreat]

They are not the sort for platitudes.

Ellie is still in the dark, settled with the stained sweatshirt of a dead girl stretched over her legs, arms wrapped around her knees. She holds onto it still, unable to let it rest. Unable to let it be forgotten.

Ellie expects Viktor to leave when he picks up his crutch. She expects to consign herself to the starlight, the echo-ghosts of things long burnt out. Instead, Viktor speaks, and she stills to listen.

[grindset]

"Before," he clarifies, not quite turning his head. "Before all of this. Coming here. Losing everything."

Or, as a spirit clinging to some far-off impression, merely believing he lost everything.

"He made this." As Viktor's long, pale hand relaxes, the crutch's shaft rolls into the cradle of gently bent fingers, its heaviest features pointing down. "When a cane was no longer sufficient. It was his take on the old design." As he grasps the red hand-grip, he says, "This part was mine."

First his wrist bends one way, which seems to do very little, and then the other, which loosens the whole fixture. It comes away from the main shaft as a separate piece, with a threaded mouth: hollow. He's holding it like he's waiting to tip it into her hand.

[notathreat]

Ellie's no stranger to fiddling with things, even if her skills are miles below Viktor's, and her eyes widen at the little click, the hollow compartment in his crutch. Something kept secret, and close. Something vital and guarded.

Ellie's brow furrows as she reaches out with inkstained fingers to hold out her hand, accept anything that Viktor wants to drop into it.

She looks from her own palm, back up to Viktor's face.

They've been through things, the two of them, but she didn't expect this.

[grindset]

What slips out is a slim glass phial, roughly the size of a finger. One can see immediately that it's not from here—not Kirkwall, not the Marches beyond, not Thedas. Each end has a metal cap, and, as with everything else from Viktor's world, even those small details were given aesthetic consideration. With a little shake of encouragement, it slides out of the hollow handle and into Ellie's palm.

Empty.

That vital thing—it's the secret itself.

"I built something," is how most of his stories begin. "It began as a... learning machine, a way to harness the arcane forces of our world, dynamically and intuitively... but soon revealed itself to be much more than that." He isn't looking at her, only slowly fixing the handle back in place. "It was regenerative. Transformative. And with this," a nod to the empty phial, "or what this once contained, it would have changed everything."

[notathreat]

It's lighter than she expected, the delicacy and design making it clear that this is no result of anything done in Thedas.

She turns it over in her hand, this empty vial, and looks up and into his face before really understands. What would Viktor build, if he could do anything, anything at all?

Regenerative.

"... and then you came here."