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

[propulsion]

Offers of friendship and support and care are not in themselves panic inducing. That Tony semi-freezes in place is more about desiring to maintain the stranglehold he has on his own sense of control, and he nods at this first part, that little bit of tension creeping in at the corners. That it's not immediately backhanded away is probably the closest to unequivocal appreciation as he's likely to get.

At least in this moment. Glances, then, to the shape being pointed out to him. Tony does not immediately stride over there, standing in place, letting the news that Ellis has not been mauled beyond recognition (his face is safe to look at, what a statement) sink in and chill him.

"Do you know how? What did it."

[portalling]

It’s not a pleasant piece of information, but then again, none of this is.

He hesitates for a second over that question, about to ask are you sure you want to know, but Stephen’s used to treating his companions like responsible adults. He doesn’t baby them, doesn’t handle them overly-gently with kid gloves (he isn’t good at it, anyway). If Tony asked, it’s because Tony wants to know. He’ll do the other man the courtesy of handling his own limits.

“A deep stab in his side,” he says. It’s not like he’d done a proper autopsy, but he had automatically noted the detail at the time. The most likely cause of death, moreso than all those arrows. “It went between the armour plates.”

[propulsion]

Information he can work with. Facts. If he had his way, he'd have downloaded Strange and Derrica's autopsy reports already on everyone, a truly pathological desire to know everything at the core of any potential discomfort that information may bring. He is braced and ready throughout that hesitation, stare direct—always a little unnerving, when Tony's sometimes distractable focus locks on in this way.

Good choice, Stephen.

Tony says, "Uh-huh," on a delay, and looks back towards the figure that Stephen had pointed out. The corner of his mouth twinges aside. "He'd have some stuff with him. There's a ring on a chain that I need to, uh. Get. For someone.

"Funny story," sounds not true, but says it anyway as he heads over towards where Ellis is laying, something of an invite for Stephen to continue accompanying him on this godawful tour, "he tried to pass it off to me the last time he tried to sacrifice himself for the greater good."

This guy, right?

[portalling]

Second stop, second visit, another dose of human misery. Stephen trails along in Tony’s wake like he’s caught in the other man’s gravitational pull; he’s tagging along for this shitty ride, because it seems the least he could do at the moment.

He’d gotten to skip this entire part back home. Lights out, wake up five years later, not have to look the survivors in their faces and see their grief painted in the corners of their mouth, the hollows beneath their eyes.

“‘The last time’,” he repeats, echoing Tony’s choice of phrasing. “Was this a habit with him?”

[propulsion]

Stopping at the feet end of the shape of bundled linen that is Ellis' dead body, Tony holds himself stiff, arms folded, considering it. Considering Stephen's question, a short exhale that isn't quite a laugh.

"'Habit's not it," a hard swerve from the easy joke that exists there. "I'd call it a hero thing but he'd probably disagree."

A hero thing might be more understandable, except how he knows the way it's all snarled up in fucked up Warden duty, in survivor's guilt, in a million other things that makes none of this okay. He draws nearer, coming up alongside. Bloodless skin, stiffly still muscle. Perfect hair. Tony psychs himself up towards what he knows he needs to do, which is lay a hand down, but holds himself bundled up for now.

"He was probably the first person here who I could," he starts, bails out with a, "you know," as he feels that, muscles in his throat tensing like putting the brakes on something. Bails back in. "It was early days and I said something stupid, not even to him, and. I mean, coming here, everyone looks at you like you're a space alien, because you are, but I said whatever stupid thing and he laughed. And then after,"

a breath in, let out. "It's not just like he didn't treat rifters like weird temporary dream people, but it helped."

[portalling]

This is an offering — a confession — a piece of Tony Stark’s personal life carved out and offered to him, and Stephen finds himself oddly grateful for it. That insight.

He stands aside and looks down at that gravely-still face, which he’d gotten so close to during the preparations. He has picked dirt and metal out of Ellis’ bare skin, and yet never found the time to ask about the memory he’d seen of him in the jail. Something about that feels distinctly wrong, like an accidental trespass. He’s carrying a piece of Ellis, too.

“I didn’t know,” he says. “How that friendship happened. The two of you seem like such an odd couple. Opposites.”

Wysteria he could understand, she was a fellow force of nature in the Research division, but these two together had always been curious to him: Tony’s motormouth impulsive energy, Ellis’ careful stillness and quiet even in life.