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]

He is taking his time with gathering his things. If he's going to run away from her, he's going to keep some dignity about it, not pile things in his arms and run out with paper fluttering loose behind him. He looks up at her when she apologizes, face still impassive, trying to decide whether he is looking at someone who is sorry or someone who is an actress. She is in Scouting.

Either way, his pulse is settling.

"I'm not going to tell anyone," he says, in case that makes a difference to how sorry she is, though maybe he should. Yseult might like to know, if only to keep an eye out and make sure it doesn't become a pattern. "And it's—"

He caps the ink bottle and rubs his eyes, smearing ink across one eyelid. He feels it—the moisture—but it is what it is now. Everything is what it is. He might have preferred her bickering with him over the big eyes, over feeling responsible for reassuring her, but he flexes his jaw like it's arthritic and has a go at it.

"It's fine. You are still new here, and this is a lot, so—I would want to win one, too. Have a little control over something." He picks up the bag of nuts, before dropping it back into the drawer, to illustrate the point: "And so you did."

[prelest]

"Oh, don't do that," she says. "Don't act like it's your job to make me feel better when you feel awful yourself."

Though, she's realizing, she can't really tell whether he does feel awful. Even when he'd been afraid, there'd been something muted about it. She looks at him now - looking like a middle-aged clerk, with that little smudge of ink and that rumpled collar - and realizes that all this time, his signals have just been off. She has no excuse for the way she acted, to be sure, but she's realizing she may have something of a reason. At least part of it is because of that muffling of emotion coming from this man. Nina listens when she speaks with someone, attends to all the little surges and lulls in their body - and so she'd listened to him, and she'd only heard silence and indifference coming from him. So she'd thought she had room to provoke, until suddenly the emotion actually broke through.

She studies him, then, brows furrowed, eyes trained on his face. She ought to keep her thoughts to herself - who knows if he's going to see this as another instance of her using her "magic" on him without permission - but curiosity gets the better of her. After all, she can't sense any drugs in his system that would suppress the functioning of his sympathetic nervous system, and it doesn't quite feel like simple emotional numbness, either. The mystery is going to bother her if she doesn't find an answer.

"Sorry. You don't have to answer me. But you're very - " Quiet is the best word for it, but she settles on a slightly less-accurate but less-vague - "Self-controlled. More than most people I've met."

[cozen]

If Bastien had spent less time in the Fade-constructed copies of the rifters’ world reading fairy tales and political philosophy and Tony Stark’s brick-weight biography, and more time reading psychology textbooks, he might have acquired the vocabulary required to say, Well, my dear, I am having a dissociative episode.

—which would not fully explain it, of course, or answer the question she is not quite asking him.

He doesn’t answer it, exactly, anyway. But there is a small stirring of life and interest, as well as an implication, in his slightly raised eyebrows and slightly competitive question: “More than Yseult?”

[prelest]

Her lips part in a silent oh. Of course. Not all spies would be in Scouting, would they? And he does, actually, look like a spy, now that she's really looking at him. Most of the spies she's known have been pleasant-looking but rather ordinary, just like him. Good-looking, but not in a Genya Safin sort of way. In an ordinary person sort of way.

Well. In honor of his division, she gives a diplomatic answer. "About the same, I think," she says, voice light.

Then she pushes a curl of hair behind her ear and speaks more directly. "I am too. Obviously. Since I'm in scouting, and am clearly not someone who likes to tromp through the countryside." She turns her hand to draw attention to her voluminous skirts and lovingly coiffed hair and general elegance. "Though my strength has never been the, mm, emotional control part." (The second obviously goes unsaid.)

[cozen]

"No," Bastien agrees. Obviously not.

His things have been gathered; he still intends to leave. But now that they are not talking about whether or not he needs to eat and whether or not he's in pain, and how that she seems to be keeping her magic out of his stomach, it's less urgent.

He rests his hip against the desk, standing crooked and slack. This time it's not to pretend to be slouchy and indifferent. It's because he's tired.

"What is? The magic?"

[prelest]

She lightly wrinkles her nose at the word magic, but doesn't protest it.

"That's part of it," she answers. A very slight hesitation has her weighing the potential drawbacks of frank honesty, but then she decides: ah, why not. "There's a lot that a Heartrender can do that's useful in situations like that - I can tell if people are lying, and I can influence their moods, and if things go bad I can knock someone out without them making a sound." Or kill them, of course, but she prefers to avoid that when she can.

"The other part is that I have an ear for language. Especially accents."

She offers him a little smile, and then wonders if this is all right. Here she is, talking about herself - chattering about herself, really - when he looks like he's about to collapse under the weight of his broken heart. Is he going to appreciate this frivolity? She thinks so - he looks so much less guarded now - but she still does worry.

[cozen]

"If I weren't retired, I would be worried about you putting me out of a job," Bastien says, giving her a fresh look over. Heartrender. Evocative. All the work his ilk does to shift the mood of a gathering or a particular target with a story or a song, unnecessary—except for elegance's sake. Still a little worth it.

Standing now, posture habitually askew, hours of barely moving in his wooden chair start catching up. He twists his shoulders to crack his back.

"Your Orlesian is good, especially how long you have been here. You might talk to Fifi—she is one of the maids. She is from the country, but she spent a lot of time in Val Royeaux. Both of those accents will be useful."

He is less guarded. It's easier, thinking about someone else. Talking about anything else. But he's still struggling; the thousand curious questions that would easily flood forward at another time are only a trickle now. (He will make it up to her some other time, in some other timeline.)

"You were a spy at home as well?"

It would make sense. But the same way half of the rifters find their way to Research seemingly by virtue of being able to do or know things Thedosians do not, it would also make sense for her to be applying skills in a new way here.

[prelest]

"A soldier at first," she says. "And then a spy."

Though she wonders if he's put himself out of a job. The creaking of his back and the stack of paperwork before him don't exactly match up with what you'd expect from an espionage agent. When's the last time, she wonders, that he was out there, running a mission? Blending in with the local populace? But maybe that's just age.

"Were you a spy before the war?" she asks, though she suspects she knows the answer. "Or did the times drive you to it?"

[cozen]

A small shake of his head.

"Before."

His disinterest in talking about it is not his usual—not too-good manners or fear that someone doesn't want to hear it. He doesn't want to talk about it. He doesn't want to think about himself and his life, because his life leads to right here.

He moves away from the desk, shifts his armful of paperwork.

"I'm going down," he says, in case it weren't obvious. His smile is barely a smile, one corner of his mouth twitching higher. "If you would like to cheer me up a little bit," a very little bit, "you can walk with me. Tell me—were you a good soldier? Or was it too much tromping around in the countryside?"

[prelest]

Nina would like very much to cheer him up a little bit. So she offers him a little smile and says, "I'll walk with you. And even help you carry your papers. In a very ladylike way, of course."

(She wonders if he's usually so closed-mouthed. Probably not. Being secretive and evasive about your life builds more curiosity, after all. So a good spy generally doesn't keep secrets as much as they tell lies.)

"And too much tromping around the countryside," she says agreeably as she holds out her arms. "I wasn't really a soldier soldier for terribly long - the civil war ended not too long after I passed out of school and into the army - so there was only a little bit of tromping. But after that, we went out searching for other Grisha to give sanctuary, and tromping galore. Too much tromping. Waking up every morning with an aching back from sleeping on the ground." She has a very pretty pout - which fades as she admits, "It is nice to fall asleep looking at the stars, though."

[cozen]

One arm's worth of documents go into hers. The rest he keeps, with his hand free to open the door ahead of them as he leads the way down to the staircase. He waits for her to go through ahead of him—good manners, and an easy way to make sure he's keeping her on the side of his good ear.

"No one will stop you from putting a hammock out in the gardens," he says. "One of the elves used to sleep in the trees."

Extremely elven of him, Bastien might say, if the elves who always come first to his mind weren't those of Val Royeaux. Not a lot of trees in the overcrowded alienage there, save the one important one.

It is, anyway, only an a side. Civil war, sanctuary—

"What are Grisha?"

[prelest]

"Practitioners of the Small Science," she answers, because she likes that so much better than this point of comparison - "Rather like your mages." Not that there's anything wrong with sharing kinship with mages, of course. It's simply that the inaccuracy rankles. If it were just, wave your hand, woo-woo, magic, then she wouldn't have had to spend so many years hunched over cadavers in anatomy lab.

"We can control the elements, or materials, or we can do healing and the like." Control the body came rather close to slipping from her mouth, but she knows that's the wrong way to describe it here. She really has to practice saying only the things that are pleasant to hear. "Which some people see as unnatural and evil. Hence: sanctuary."