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]

"You don't have to," Ellie says immediately. Her voice seems to come from far away.

She thinks of loss, and the fucked up moments while the dust settles. She thinks of Joel, and too-small graves, and the silences on the road. The words that she held on her tongue for so long that she really forgot how to form them.

She realizes vaguely that this also might've been the first time Peter ever killed someone, probably with the arrows that she taught him how to shoot. She feels fiercely relieved and also a little bit sick.

"How the fuck did you make it out?" she whispers.

[heartstumbles]

Peter feels helpless, the same way he'd felt when he held May, dying, in his arms, her eyes vacant and her blood pooling all around him. Here, more people lay unmoving and blood fills the ground like a dark, sticky ocean. He feels like he could choke from the taste of death in the back of his throat.

Some of those people, he knows, he killed himself. Some of those people laying dead were the forces attacking them, and Peter killed them to protect himself and others. This feels more real than the battle with Thanos and his army; these were people Peter fought, not alien creatures.

When Ellie asks how he made it out, Peter lets out a laugh that hiccups into a sob. He blinks back more tears.

"I keep asking myself that same question," he admits. "And the only answer I can come up with is sheer dumb fucking luck."

[notathreat]

Peter hiccups against her shoulder, hot tears, hot shivering breath. Ellie laces her fingers into his hair. It's filled with ashes, sticky, and Ellie's stomach flips over but she doesn't pull away. It's unthinkable.

"I don't even believe in luck," she says quietly. "But that's some good fucking luck."

There is pain there, and relief. It hurts. God, it hurts. Ellie has survived enough times when others have died to know exactly how this feels.

[heartstumbles]

Ellie puts her hand in his hair, and Peter leans gratefully into the touch. Her presence keeps him grounded, and her touch is a comfort against the horror of this aftermath. He takes a breath and then another. It's hard even just to breathe, but he's going to keep trying. He has to keep trying.

He lets out another harsh huff of air that may or may not be laughter.

"I guess it depends," he says. "I just...I don't feel lucky."

He closes his eyes a moment and takes another breath.

"Thank you," he says quietly. "Thank you for being here."

[notathreat]

There's a lump in Ellie's throat. She's not crying, but her eyes are wet. They've been wet pretty much since she arrived, tears steadily tracing through the soot and ash, carving cleaner paths.

"Yeah," she whispers.

She leaves it there, staring into space, into nothing, unable to summon the will to talk. She wants to ask him if he spoke to Clarisse or Abby. If he saw what happened to Marcus and Ellis and Silver. But it feels so unspeakably cruel.

"I should've been here," she whispers, toneless. "Earlier."

She knows the obvious responses. She could've died too. Probably would have, actually, and then they'd be even worse off. But what if?

What if she'd had Abby's back, been there to guard her blind spots? What if she and Clarisse had taken the dragon from opposite sides? She's just torturing herself at this point, but she can't help it.

[heartstumbles]

They sit in silence for a few moments, and Peter doesn't mind. The quiet feels almost...not comfortable, not exactly, but steadying. Reassuring. Peter takes a few breaths, trying to tread above loss, grief, sorrow, and a myriad of other emotions he doesn't have a name for just yet.

Ellie says that she wishes she were there earlier, and part of Peter panics internally, wondering, if Ellie had been earlier, if she wouldn't have been among those they lost too. Not that she isn't a strong, capable fighter, but the attack took out almost everyone, including, from what Peter has gathered, some of the most skilled and experienced members of Riftwatch. His chest tightens, thinking of it. His chest restricts more, dwelling on the possibility of finding Ellie among the bodies.

"I wish we could have known," he says, pained. "I wish we had some way of preparing, of preventing...everything that happened."

He closes his eyes for a few moments before opening them again. His eyes ache from both crying and trying not to cry.

"I wish I could have done more."

[notathreat]

I wish, I wish.

If wishes were horses, everyone would ride, Joel used to say, and Ellie had wanted to sock him at the time but she'd laughed anyway. Now, the ghosts seem closer than ever. Tonight there's a lot more of them.

Ellie goes silent, rubbing the heel of her hand along Peter's upper back. It has a mindlessness to it, a repetitive motion that's as much a comfort for her as it is for him. Very little, but not nothing.

"The people who did this," she says, and it's much lower, much more detached than her usual way of speaking. "Are gonna get what they deserve."

[heartstumbles]

Peter lets out a long, low breath as she rubs his back, unconsciously leaning back into her touch. His eyes ache from crying, as does his chest. He wishes he could fall asleep and wake up to find out this is all just one bad dream, one long, especially detailed nightmare, and that they didn't just suffer so many casualties and losses like this.

But he knows that life doesn't work like that, especially the worst parts of life.

He sighs; takes another breath and exhales again.

He nods as Ellie speaks, fully agreeing. She sounds different to Peter, but he can't disagree. "They will," he agrees, and for a moment, he remembers someone else getting what they deserve. He remembers pulling back his fist and slamming it into Norman Osborn's face, again, again, and again. He remembers that rage, white hot and potent, and the way it almost consumed him. He feels those same flames lick at the edge of his vision now.

"We'll make sure they will."