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

[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.