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

[hassaran]

There's some relief in that distinction, though less than there might be said differently, without that ghost of a smirk. (Who says they're mutually exclusive, anyway.) Her frown remains but it's lacking its bite as well, and not only because she's all hollowed out. There could be worse recipients of whatever this is.

Palm reading only depeens the furrows between her brows as she tries to come up with a memory. And even when he mentions her aunt she might not put it together if she hadn't already had the Bronze Dawn to mind, high on the list of things that can't get out. She thinks back to a cold tower and a rotting ghost and Darras's heartbeat easing as she touched his palm and made up vague nonsense just as she'd been taught.

"About my aunt Sorcha?" she checks, "Was it here in the Gallows?" Because circus tricks are not necessarily a one-off, and she's still deciding how much she hates this aside from the general principal.

[propulsion]

"I don't know," Tony says. It's too close. He remembers words, and hands, the depth of feeling, and everything else rendered mute, background. But he leaves that at I don't know, returning his focus out to the view.

And collecting an almond, not eating it yet. "You were talking to him about aunt Sorcha. She had a cat and a box of beads and taught you how to read palms. And how that's all the stuff you want to remember about her, because it's what matters about her. Then you pretended," an interrupting drawn breath in, a belated easing of some kind of tension (it's called empathy), "to do some palm reading. A long line means a long life."

What was his point? Off-loading this thing that doesn't belong to him? A timely lesson, from another gruesomely killed loved one, to tide her over? What he says instead is, "He loved you so freaking much," in that way that is certain, and admiring.

And she, him. That much was also clear.

[hassaran]

This is not the first time this week Yseult has been reminded of a different dusty field somewhere in the Marches, a different scatter of corpses, her uncle Henrik's blood pooling on her back through her dress, a horse shrieking as the wagon it's harnessed to burns. Her aunt Sorcha, palms coated in blood, open at the neck. It hadn't been that clean for Darras, the dracolisk talons shredding his throat instead of a neat cross-section. A long life, Tony says. Palm reading always was a scam.

"I know," she says after a minute, jaw working, tongue pushing against the backs of her teeth, the inside of her lip. She crosses her arms against her chest and presses her shoulder to the stone until she can feel the edges of blocks press into skin and thinks about the sound of beads pouring through her fingers, the crash of the ocean against a cliff, Rosana still prowling around the office downstairs waiting for her to return. "I was very lucky to have him."

[propulsion]

"Sure,"

is not dismissive, strictly. More like: maybe luck has something to do with it. It goes both ways, but Tony doesn't particularly feel like telling Yseult more things about herself than she already knows. The line of her body pressing against the stone.

"It took me years to get my head out of my own ass about Pepper," he volunteers, after a moment, and an almond. "Now that's luck, not screwing up somewhere in between. Couple near misses," an addition, to be clear. "But there's something to that. Were you guys friends first?"

[hassaran]

"No, we were never anything else." It's at least part of what she means by lucky--the sheer coincidence of circumstance and timing required to thrust them together in the only moment it was possible they'd part as anything but strangers. (She means, too, that anyone would be lucky to be loved like that. And, yes, fine, there is a self-deprecating element: she has never understood what he saw in her to merit it.)

"How long were you and Pepper--?" Fingers gesture vaguely. Friends first? Together after? Both.

[propulsion]

"Thirteen years," supplied easy, like he doesn't have to do the math, even if the math were hard and he weren't good at it. "Together. Longer, just knowing her."

Tony, also, finds himself leaving off qualifiers. The near misses, the shaky periods of separation. Doesn't matter, now.

"You'd have liked her," he says. Which may or may not be just because he considers Pepper broadly likeable or because Yseult may personally find her to be so, but he adds, "Focused, efficient. Comprehensible."

[hassaran]

"I saw an image of her, in the Crossroads," Yseult says. The two of them posing for a series of portraits, holding hands on a red carpet somewhere. "She had a good face." Pretty, of course, but intelligent and with a hint of humor in the fine lines at mouth and eyes and the way she looked at Tony, that familiar air of eye-rolling fondness. All that plus focused, efficient, and comprehensible--he's probably right.

She wonders if it's easier to manage that loss in a new world, not a familiar thing in sight to remind him of her. She suspects nothing really makes it easier but time. And maybe not even that, at least not when it comes to the little girl with the dark braid building with colorful blocks. An actual future lost, instead of only a hypothetical.

"We may need to consolidate divisions," is what she finally says, after she's collected another almond. "There aren't enough people left for strict distinctions."

[propulsion]

Tony makes a sound like huh, neutral agreement. "Maybe. Peel out some heavier hitters from your house to replenish Flint's," he says. "Shuffle in some savvy Diplomacy types under you. I could use some clerks."

This sucks.

And there is some worry for what happens to the people with shards in their hands if it all breaks down. Where they get to go while everyone else scatters apart. Ambitions like mountains in the distance suddenly dust. Maybe it's why he's here, trying to sure something up. If he can get through to her, she could get through to Flint, and then—

"I kept hoping she'd come through to here after me," he says, instead. "At first. Stupid selfish, but what can you do."

[hassaran]

Just divvying up Diplomacy's not quite what she meant, but she is—weirdly—less interested in the logistics of managing this even-more-likely-doomed organization than in hearing about the shapes Tony's grief has taken. She doesn't examine the impulse.

"Impossible not to," she grants him. There are things even the most formidable self control is helpless against. What can you do. "She still could."