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.

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[cozen]

Bastien, who has decided already that he will not be here come winter, watches the green light pulse. A small blessing to count, that he doesn't have one of his own. He leans his head over, temple to the side of Florent's head, and asks, "Your arm?"

[deuselfmachina]

"Maybe."

It's a good thing they are huddled so closely, or the word would be lost as a mumble. Picks out a few notes on the dulcimer. A minor shrug, more felt than particularly visible, a wisp of not-quite laughter. "But that scares me." On just about every conceivable level, and so there's no attempt to define exactly what about it is scary. Just all of it.

"I'm sorry," he says, a little clearer. Sniffs. Reaches past the dulcimer to pat Bastien's knee. "How grim of me, to complain. As if this place were not already so miserable now."

[cozen]

He might feel Bastien’s cheek tensing from his tight fraction of a smile, more than see it.

“You are entitled, I think. Everything is horrible and you did not ask for any of it.”

He lifts his head. He does not think Florent needs to be told the things he might tell him. To be sure it is someone competent, if he does it. To have Derrica or some other healer on hand. To ask Madame de Foncé for advice, and perhaps for assistance with a new arm. He is clever enough, and careful enough, and certainly not looking to die of blood loss or gangrene.

[deuselfmachina]

He is no kind of musician anyway.

Bastien lifts his head, so there is space enough for Florent to look at him. A watery kind of eye-crinkled look, affection marked plainly there. It's nice to be told this thing. For someone to take notice and state it so plainly. He absorbs it, simmers in it, considers it.

"I'm sorry you lost your love," he says.

[cozen]

“Yeah,” Bastien says, answering that affectionate crinkling with a bit of his own, despite the topic.

And the part of him that is very desperate for any invitation to speak about Byerly—to say were you here that Satinalia he dressed as Corypheus and wind up laughing, maybe with a few tears but mostly laughing, to tell someone that as a boy he would ditch Chantry school to catch frogs, to explain what it is Bastien saw when he looked at him, to say anything to keep him that little bit alive and to have anyone listen the way Byerly would have—is not quite as powerful as the wall and the distance and the quieter, steadier need to keep it together.

Which is what he is doing, clearly, by not saying anything about any of it and privately packing his shit.

“I was in love once before,” is what he says instead, “you know, for real.” A hundred times, for not-real. Surely Florent can relate. “It wasn’t—I wasn’t his type. But for years I—“ was pathetic. Anyway. “He died, too. They hanged him in the market square.”

A secret from nearly everyone still here and alive, less difficult to say only in comparison, all for: “Maybe next I should go to Tevinter and see if I can find something compelling about Corypheus.”

[deuselfmachina]

If Florent clocks something of a diversion, a topic shift, it doesn't reflect back at Bastien in big watery eyes or the way his focus is interested and earnest about the thing he has to say instead.

"That would be very heroic of you," Florent agrees, no hesitation for playing along. "And if anyone could."

He looks back out at the broad hallway, the light coming in through its narrow windows, high up near the tall ceiling. "Why did you come here?" is not rhetorical.

[cozen]

Bastien nods—yes very heroic, yes he could achieve it—but is relieved not to need to carry the joke any further or find a new subject himself.

"It was after they invaded Orlais. I wanted to help. I wanted to not be so bored all the time. And I wanted to matter," comes easily, because he has already done the self-examination required to arrive at that slightly embarrassing truth, "not too much, you know. But a little bit."

As he answers he looks at Florent, follows his gaze up to the windows, and looks down at his own hand, the one not still dangling around the other side of Florent's shoulders.

"I was not leaving behind fame and feting."