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

[cozen]

Bastien shrugs, at the first accusation. It might be. It might not be. Benedict can believe whatever he prefers.

He's aware that he is being disappointing to a young man he likes perfectly well, in a detached boyfriend's-increasingly-competent-assistant kind of way. He's aware, too, that at another time he might be sorry about it. Might yet be still, given a few weeks or months or years to feel like himself again.

But not right now.

"I'm sure the Division Heads will narrow it down to someone better than anyone," is a little amused; temporary and above average is not a blow to his fairly realistic ego, but it is a funny attempt at persuasion, "any day now. There are only so many people to choose from. Whiskey."

She lies all the way down, staring at him with the pitiful eyes of a dog who loves him and would like to please him but has been woken up too early in the morning to possibly be expected to go any further than she has already gone for love. For anything short of bacon. Maybe he'll put her in the cart—

A good idea, actually. He moves around to rearrange some things to make it possible.

It doesn't matter what Byerly wanted him to do. Byerly didn't get to tell him what to do when he was alive—hardly wanted to, of course, but wouldn't have been allowed if he did—and he doesn't get to start now, when he's dead, speaking through Benedict. But as Bastien turns the cello up on its end and slots the lute in next to it, he still asks, "When did he tell you that?"

Because it's something. Something new to him. One of what is now a permanently fixed and finite number of things he might learn By once said or did.

[altusimperius]

Few things can get Benedict worked up faster than feeling as though he's being laughed at, and the traces of amusement in Bastien's demeanor-- he knows nobody is themselves right now, that none of this is rational-- rankles him further, like perhaps this was just a game all along.
He continues to pet Whiskey defiantly, settling all the way down with her, legs crossed on the cold stone as his fingers work into the hard-to-reach spots under her ears.

"So it doesn't matter, then," he concludes, "you were here to get yours, and now you can't anymore, so you're leaving."
He hesitates a moment before adding, "he left a letter for me."

[cozen]

You were here to get yours sails past like a badly aimed arrow. Bastien could answer—almost does answer–you don't know me well enough to insult me in a way that matters—

which has always been part of the point, of that.

But the second part, the part unlikely to have been intended as a weapon. That hits. His hands go still in the cart for a second, and then he exhales and smiles, almost a laugh.

None of the things he has been stupidly jealous of in the last few days—the simplicity of widow and widower, the lingering someone-was-here proof of Enchanter Julius and Madame de Cedoux's rings, and now this more than any of those things put together and multiplied—would make him feel significantly better, if he had them. He'd be just as desolate, just as unreachable, just as leaving.

But it is easy to half-imagine otherwise. That Byerly might have somehow found something to say that they had not already said and written some unimaginable thing that would have soothed the unsootheable.

He blinks his control back into place without anything spilling out.

"People come and go all the time, Benedict," he says. Cart rearranged, he advances toward his traitorous, basking dog. "They will find someone for Diplomacy in no time at all, and I'm sure they'll be as happy as I would be to help you tie your boots every morning."

[altusimperius]

Benedict is already halfway through miserably rolling his eyes when that barb lands, and even if it's not entirely surprising-- he's been needling at Bastien, after all-- it still hits. And he hates how deep it goes.

"Fuck you," he says in an icy whisper to the ground past Whiskey, and draws his hands off her to stand, abruptly ready for this exchange to be over.

He has turned around to go back inside when he pauses in the doorway, like something else has occurred to him, and he reverses direction to pad barefooted back toward Bastien. He's not quite looking at him.

[cozen]

Bastien doesn’t look at him, either, and he’s jostling to carry a large hound dog across stone, and his hearing is half gone—given up pointlessly for the war to gain nothing in particular—doesn’t clue him in until Benedict’s almost on top of him. But he doesn’t flinch when he notices.

He says, “What?”

[altusimperius]

What, indeed. Benedict walks right past Bastien to his cart, where he puts a hand to one wheel and Mind Blasts it; the whole cart gives a loud clatter and a jump, then sags on one side as the axle snaps.
Then he turns back for the door again, meeting Bastien's eyes just long enough to communicate how not sorry he is.
If unimpeded, he'll continue inside.

[cozen]

Bastien nearly doesn't give him the satisfaction of that eye-meeting, his own on the cart, trying to visually calculate the probability that the pissy little stunt has damaged Byerly's violin. It's only after he's decided it's zero, or close to, that he glances Benedict's way, expression flatly resentful.

He wouldn't stop him even if his arms weren't full of large, lolling dog. Whiskey lifts her floppy head to try to sniff at him on his way past, but Bastien doesn't move until he's gone. If inconvenience and a half-hour delay makes Benedict feel better about himself—fine. It doesn't matter.