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

[propulsion]

Operation roll dog over onto its back is a success, taming kicky paws with a gentle kind of fending off. Tony has his attention down when Wysteria offers her condolences in return—you don't really notice it until sixteen people of various degrees of importance to various people are dead, as opposed to just one or a couple, but there is something kind of absurd about wandering around, giving out apologies, when you don't exactly love getting them in return, but it still feels like it matters to say, so he mumbles something acknowledging.

He remembers what it was like, half the world dying. The deep wrenching sadness of personal loss and the more abstracted horror of other peoples' and the general sense of an emptiness that followed. The shock that wore on for years. This only feels like that because the human brain is terrible at scale. Sixteen is not billions, but at a certain point, it may as well be.

"He was quieter," Tony offers. "If that's even possible."

He leaves the dog alone, resting an elbow to bent knee. "You know back when we were field testing rifts and we'd load him up like a packhorse and he had to conserve his energy so he'd get even less of a word in edgewise. Carrying too much. I don't know," is a little dismissive. He does know. He has a memory like an unwanted splinter, a slashed throat, blood running in reverse.

But more relevantly, "Maybe. I wanted to give you something, speaking of."

[heirring]

She has lost the habit of picking at her fingernails when she is worrying over something, but here has raised her thumb absently to nip at the perceived shape of a hangnail near the cuticle and only belatedly corrects herself. Turns her hand to shape her palm to her knee and rest her chin on top of it instead.

Yes, maybe he'd just been otherwise engaged. Her attention drops, briefly, to Ruadh, and then to the little dog who has flopped over onto his side with the rolling eye look of creature who means to lay still for ten seconds before demanding further amusement, and then back up at last to Tony only when it feels less liable to crack something to do so.

He looks very tired. Grey and weary around the edges in the way that prickles at the uncomfortable pretend memory of a thing that never actually happened.

"Oh? What is it?"

[propulsion]

"You tell me."

Here, Tony dips his fingers into the breastpocket of his waistcoat. The fine gold chain is visible first before the small silver ring is tugged free. She asked me to hold onto it, Ellis had explained, as if that were all that needed explaining—for how he still had it, and how he'd put it into Tony's palm. There it is, now, coiled around in the middle, like Ellis had put it there again.

He hadn't. He'd had to ask Strange about it. Had to remember to do it himself in a sudden jerk of feeling. He offers it out for the taking.

"He'd wanted me to," he starts, and stops. Starts again. "It was back in Arlathan, when he thought he might not make it out, so. Wanted me to give you this back. Figured it still applied."

[heirring]

Where she has it propped on the back of her hand, the crumpling in her face at the sight of the silvered ring is very clear. The frown that follows is clearly a habitual reflex—an attempt at cramming some feeling back down and having to work hard enough at it that it's a struggle.

"Is that why everyone has been so irritatingly coy about the first trip into the forest? All because it was dangerous?"

These are hypothetical questions to avoid touching the ring, tempted to leave it there coiled in Tony's palm rather than to take it. She doesn't want it back. Certainly not under these circumstances where it has been removed from Ellis' dead body. That's not why—

"I gave it to him," is a very obvious thing to guard a very unhappy feeling. "For the tourney, you remember. Maud and I collected all manner of ridiculous favors from the whole company for him." And, "It came with me through the rift. It was meant to be good luck."

[propulsion]

These are hypothetical questions and so Tony is off the hook about them, he's pretty sure.

Keeps his hand held out while she talks, and when he relaxes it, it's not exactly withdrawal. But keeping it held out like waiting for a shy animal to nibble at your fingers isn't the play, so he brings it back into his space, studying it like he hadn't before now. A breath escapes him at this last part—

"I mean, he's had his share of near misses. I bet it was working overtime."

[heirring]

This fails to eke a laugh out of her. Rather, the line of her mouth slants briefly hard down—an expression that might be comical if it weren't so short lived and so abjectly miserable. She looks away. Fixes her attention somewhere beyond Tony on some spot on the wall that shouldn't be there, and blinks very hard.

The ring on the end of the gold chain is unassuming, save for that somewhere in the dark blue stone is etched the very delicate shape of a bird. She doesn't want it. She doesn't want Tony to have it. It should go back to Ellis' pocket and he should be burned with it, or whatever terrible things they intend to do with his body.

After a moment, she unsets the clench of her teeth. Moves, then, to pluck up the little field book and to fish the ring from Tony's hand.

"I don't know what I'm meant to be doing with all these terrible things everyone's left behind. There's so much to empty out of this house already. And I don't want Gwenaëlle's dog or any of her birds, and I only wanted him to be happy."

[propulsion]

"Hey."

Here, Tony leans forwards, hands laying on her arms. Gentle, like how his voice has gone. "Me too," he says. "And you know, I think we did okay."

It catches in the throat, but something something there's a truth around if you're in a survival situation and the other guy is panicking, it's easier to keep your own shit together out of pure necessity. "And you did great. Look, he," and Tony draws in a breath, let's it out again. "He loved you. That's what he wanted me to tell you, along with the—giving back the ring."

His hands turn out, resettle. "That he's sorry and he loves you, and I didn't, uh, ask for clarification about the apology part, like, what for, so this is without any editorial on it, also maybe we can find some kind of bird sanctuary or something."

Which is where he runs out of steam.

[heirring]

It's a gentle touch, but it halts her from doing the thing she'd started: stacking the ring on the little notebook, and these things together with the closest book, which would have inevitably been bundled with the other scattered volumes with the intention of shoving them onto an unused desk or table or dusty shelf. She stops. First the motion of her elbow to set the book and the chain aside, and then altogether. Her chin tucked low among the shape of her knees and brow furrowed against the strict thing clenched high in her throat, just there at the base of her tongue as Tony says—

(Oh, they must have been very dangerous then. The Arlathans, is an absent thought like the sound of the wind that sometimes comes up off the harbor and racing through Hightown to vibrate loose window shutters in their casings.)

(And, wouldn't it be very nice if everyone in danger saw it coming from some ways off. If no one ever disappeared, leaving just their papers and their dirty rooms as if they'd simply stolen away into the night and put everything behind them. If Valentine had set letters aside for his very closest compatriots—'TO MY DEAREST(S) BARONESS AND GOOD JEANNOT, IF YOU ARE READING THIS THEN I AM, TRAGICALLY, QUITE DEAD.'—that she might simply unearth and send along. No one would have to scavenge pretty year old sentiments out of anyone's pockets. It would all be so much neater.)

Wysteria lifts her chin a half degree to look at Tony. "But what about the dog," she warbles unhappily.

It's a very stupid question for the least important part.

[propulsion]

"Dog sanctuary."

Stupider answer than the question, to be sure.

But he moves, then, pushing a book aside and probably an animal too to sit alongside her, where he can bracket her shoulders with his arm and see if she won't tip in against him. Maybe not, maybe she'll hold herself brittle and upright like he's seen her do before, but personally he wouldn't mind giving someone a hug.

"I don't know what we could have done," he says, anyway. "I keep thinking about that. Kind of used to being able to look at a disaster and track right back to something that could have consciously been done different, but. I don't know. They got us."

[heirring]

She does—give, a split second flex of resistance crumpling in under the strain required to maintain it. She leans halfway against him, and then fully in sat there in the bracket of his arm. Sat close like this, when she turns her face in toward him it's really too close to properly look at him so much as to observe and examine the stitching where sleeve meets shoulder, but

it counts.

"Couldn't the Scoutmaster send someone to kill the Tevinter captain? That might be a good place start," could sound like a joke and fundamentally doesn't.

[propulsion]

"Yeah maybe. Once we stop bailing water."

Tony keeps his arm wrapped comfortably about her shoulders, hand on arm. Studying the cracking around the cornice, up high. Down aside at the mabari, who hasn't lifted his head up from his paws. It would be easy to imagine Ruadh as some kind of piece of Ellis left behind, dog-shaped and just as reliably quiet, and not a whole other sentient being smart enough to mourn too.

"Revenge is good for the soul, famously. Makes everyone feel better."

[heirring]

"Well, I hardly see how it could make anyone feel much worse," is a very good and reasonable point, which she might insist on further if she really felt like. Maybe tomorrow. Perhaps she can prepare some papers to submit to the Scouting division which includes a general accounting of Research's stored explosives and incendiaries. Were someone to take them up with a griffon, locate the Tevinter cavalry encampment and release them all at once under the cover of night down onto the most prominent tent—

"This has happened before, hasn't it?" She raises her hand, shoulder shifting under the shape of Tony's palm as she makes to scrub her eyes. If she starts to shed real tears, Tab will come try to lick her face again and Ruadh might very well scold him. And of all things, she would surely be least able to tolerate the resultant scrap.

"Something more terrible, really. On Earth. All those people gone. I read the column on Wikipedia," she explains.