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

[sprent]

It does, happily, keep Gela from seeing inside the visitation room at all, which she prefers at this stage. She looks raw-edged and tired, but so does everybody. Her upset isn't special, but Strange may notice her flinching ever so slightly at the word 'pyre'.

What he says does make sense (letting loved ones decide, make that choice). It does, it should.

She says, quietly, "And when will you do the treatment?"

Because she doesn't want to look at it or even think about it, and she'll leave the Gallows for that day. The thought of them burning the bodies of her friends makes her feel sick. She can't get by it.

[portalling]

Strange’s own expression goes a little blank, a little distant, as he tries to do that math of the situation: how long is socially appropriate for these visitations to last? He has no idea. He doesn’t know this part. He had avoided the occasion and the ritual when it was his own family at stake; hadn’t gone home for it.

“Maybe a couple days,” he says. “We want people to have enough time, but—”

But the time which had already elapsed. But that long carriage ride back from Granitefell. But the heat. The cold runes are labouring away, but they’re not industrial-strength freezers and there are limits.

“And I gather,” slowly, carefully, “that demonic possession is a worry in this land, so we don’t want to delay too long.”

He’s looking at Gela’s face, trying to read whatever complicated cocktail of emotions are present, and landing in the wrong place: “So there should still be time, if you… y’know, want to sit with them.”

[sprent]

Gela doesn't look at him. Her attention has gone back to that scant glimpse of the hall from where they're standing, and a shrouded, indistinct shape that features most prominently in it. She can't tell who it is from here, a small mercy. She helped to lift most of them and put them on the carriages out at Granitefell; she found that her arms and shoulders ached through all of the next day.

Then he says that, and at last, she looks.

"... I don't think I do." She sounds a little distant, tired. "Is that odd?"

[portalling]

Strange pauses too long over his answer and this next admission. When it finally comes, his exhaustion seems to mirror her own: “Not at all,” he says, firmly enough that there’s no question.

“For all that I’m a doctor, I’m not comfortable with this aspect of it. Death generally meant I’d failed at my job, and I’m usually very good at not failing at my job.” He hasn’t been sneaking glances at the bodies unless it was necessary. His walkabout with Tony, and that was it. He’d seen enough of them earlier.

“My parents,” he starts, then stops, then starts again. He’s unaccustomed to doling out any information about his family; he’s free and open about his own life, but this has remained such a locked box. It’s relevant, though:

“They were elderly and ill, and I didn’t go home when they passed. Others were furious at me for it, but it seemed a pointless gesture. It wasn’t them any longer. I preferred to remember them living.”

[sprent]

Gela listens. When he pauses shortly, she puts a hand on his arm for a few moments and squeezes warmly before she lets go. Family is so difficult. It would be impossible to tell him that she wasn't with her mother when she died either and that she regrets it; she wouldn't want to, either. "I'm sorry."

She tells him, "I am Nevarran; I should want to go inside and see them, especially if they won't be staying here. If this is the last bit of time that I have, but I..."

There is a lump in her throat, painful, undeniable. She has to pause and join her hands together, fighting for a bit of calm before she continues. "I feel the same as you. I want to remember them alive and smiling."

[portalling]

It’s just meat in there would accurately encapsulate Doctor Strange’s opinion on the whole matter, but that feels perhaps a step too far; a cruel detail to drop in front of a woman who’s already striving to pin herself together. These days he knows there’s something beyond death, of course, he’s seen and exorcised too many ghosts, but in terms of what’s lying on the slabs in that entrance hall —

Strange hauls his attention to something else instead. Latching onto the slightly safer part of what Gela had said.

“I’ve read widely in the libraries here, but mostly on the Fade and magic and spirits. In turn, my cultural understanding is… lacking,” he admits, and that’s truly understating it. No recruit for Diplomacy, he. “What’s the relevance of being Nevarran?”

[sprent]

She's glad he takes the conversation there, seizes on the opportunity to explain herself with a bit of relief. "Our rites are very different."

Gela wonders if he is being true with her when he says he doesn't understand the relevance. Some, defensive, very Nevarran part of herself assumes somebody might have made a disparaging comment already, or started a rumour. It shouldn't matter but she feels raw, laid open by everything. "We don't burn bodies. We preserve them; entomb them, if we can."

Of course, here, her voice is the minority. As are her beliefs. She tucks her arms across her chest protectively. "I'm not trying to argue anything," she adds. "I'm only telling you."

[portalling]

Oh, like the thing with the zombies and the necropolis, he read about that in the historical reports —

But thank god he doesn’t actually blurt that out.

Instead: “And I’m listening,” Strange says, gentle. He’s been monitoring and gentling his tone as much as he can, sanding down all of his sharper edges this week. He’s too tired and heartsore to even try to argue over burial rites that don’t even track with his own.

“I don’t know how much you’ve spoken to rifters about this, but on my Earth, we mostly bury or entomb. Some cremate. So your way might actually be closer to what I’m used to.” But what about the zombies though. The man tamps down his curiosity, tries his hardest not to blunder his way into something offensive.

“This seems to matter to you. Sorry to be asking this, but if you were… I mean, we’re hardly qualified to handle proper preservation here. So if it were you in there, would you want to be sent back to Nevarra? For entombing.”

[sprent]

"I don't speak about it often," is quiet, tucked in-between what he says to her. He is trying to be gentle. He is saying sorry, and this seems to matter to you.

Seems?

Gela inhales quickly at the question, and squeezes herself tightly. Her eyes have gone round and shiny with tears and she lifts her chin to keep them from falling, staring very intently into the corner of the room for a moment. She doesn't really want to think about being in there. Neither does she want to give room for her thoughts to become dark and upsetting. She is good at turning on herself.

After carefully clearing her throat, she manages to tell him, "I have no idea. I'm not very welcome in Nevarra, and I don't imagine that changing if I were in there.

"Are you asking everybody this? Are you writing it down?"

If that sounded a little tight and pointed... She'll apologise for it later.

[portalling]

He doesn’t blame her for being sharp.

“I will be,” Strange says. It’s the truth, said frank and forthright. “It’s a question which has been buzzing around in my skull for a while now. Moreso after I had to—”

Now it’s Strange’s turn for his words to peter out, the rest of the sentence dangling unfinished, unable to find the right way to explain it. After I had to what. After I had to clean their wounds and pick out debris and warped metal and mangled flesh and try to make them look presentable. After I had to think about where all this dead meat was going, and how useless a healer-doctor-surgeon is when it’s already too late.

He clears his throat.

“Derrica and I treated the bodies,” is what he finally settles on. “I had a lot of time to think. And it occurred to me that not everyone will have had a lawyer or official paperwork written up, and that people do have preferences for what happens to them afterward. Differing cultural practices, differing religious views. I might not have the same beliefs myself, but as a healer, I can try to have them respected.”