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

[notathreat]

"A couple of times," Ellie admits. "But I was never any good at it. I'd always cut too deep. Hold it too hard."

She swallows, slowly.

"He used to carve guitars, too. Six-strings." It aches, still- but she finds herself wanting to talk about him. It's easier, that loss farther away, the good memories closer than the absence.

"He taught me how to play. I was a lot better at that."

[sprent]

It's nice to hear this gentle speak from her, a more comfortable remembering. Gela nods, and she looks past Ellie toward that cloth on her bed again, the needle sticking out of it. She's so creative. She's always making something with her hands, music and art.

"Can I hear it sometime?" The playing, that she's good at. And, with a gesture of her head toward the cloth, "Will you show me that?"

[notathreat]

"Sure," Ellie says automatically, because Gela always asks things kindly, and Ellie finds that she can rarely say no. Maybe it'll be good for her to play.

Her heart sinks at the other question, and she nods, holding it out so Gela can take it, examine it.

"It's chariots," she says quietly. "Or it's supposed to be, anyway."

[sprent]

"I see them."

Several, racing each other across the shroud. Gela doesn't touch them but instead finds a spot stitching started and stopped again shortly afterwards. There are a few dots of blood on the linen to indicate exactly where Ellie gave up on it.

Maybe she won't want this. Maybe it's a rifter-thing, to make it for your lover, but Gela thinks there won't be any harm in offering. "I could help with what you're stitching, if you like. You could keep painting."

If time is of the essence.

[notathreat]

Ellie pauses, takes a breath, and nods.

"Her brothers would've made this for her," she says, in the tones of a confession. "They'd make one every time she went out on a dangerous mission. They'd do it for all the demigods."

She has no idea if Gela knows. If she knows anything at all. But Clarisse never kept it a secret; she was proud of who and what she was, and Ellie can't imagine pretending she was less.

"When they got back alive, they'd burn them," she adds, then falls silent. Picks up her still-wet brush.

"She had a lot of shrouds made for her."

[sprent]

She knows. She says, "She told me about them. That they were like an army together." There were a lot of them. It hurts in a new way to think that they won't know she died. Or maybe she should envy them?

Gela slowly frees the needle from the cloth. She doesn't unpick anything, simply starts from where Ellie clearly left off, following the line. Work like this always drags a little part of her mind away from whatever is bothering her.

A suggestion: "Maybe we could put a little bit of you into this one, so that you're with her."

[notathreat]

Ellie blinks slowly at the sheet. Her eyes feel full of sand. Burning, stinging. She should sleep, she knows she should, but the service isn't that far away and she doesn't want to risk missing it. And she needs to finish this fucking shroud.

Gela's suggestion hurt, but it's a slightly more satisfying kind.

"Yeah," she whispers, pressing her lips together. She settles, putting brush to shroud, and begins to add griffons. Just two.

[sprent]

“Okay.”

It’s almost nice, to sit in silence together and do this bit of work. Gela doesn’t make a griffon. Glancing sideways every so often at Ellie’s arms as they move, she completes a little fern along the line of stitching. It isn’t very detailed but it’s definitely recognisable as the dark, filled in one that lines her forearm. Ellie, there, tucked into a crease of the shroud.

Then, she continues on.

[notathreat]

Ellie catches it, pauses, and continues.

It seems fitting. It seems right. It feels good to do something even if Clarisse will never see it.

If she's going on her shroud, then someone else needs to, too.

Ellie begins a pattern at the edges. It's not obvious, at first, simple as it is. But the crosshatch coalesces into an endless braid.

[sprent]

She notices this pattern, pauses to watch it appear. “That’s beautiful.” The interlocking thirds, forming a braid that slowly encircles the chariots, the griffons, and Gela’s little fern.

She isn’t reminded of Clarisse or Ellie by it, and tilts her head in silent question, lifting her head to look at Ellie as she continues to crosshatch.

[notathreat]

Ellie keeps going, quiet for so long that it seems she might not answer, and when she does, it's still just as quiet.

"Abby," she says simply. "She was Clarisse's best friend, and they roomed together. If she were here, she'd want to help."

But she's obviously not.

[sprent]

"Abby," she echoes. "I'm sorry she's not."

Ellie lost a lot in one turn. This strikes her as so unfair but she can't start to think like that or she'll make herself cry, so she picks her needle back up and keeps working. The shroud is coming together, linked in a beautiful, eternal loop of chariots, braiding and fine, dark stitches.

"You've made this so beautiful for her."

[notathreat]

And she'll never see it.

Ellie thinks it nastily, but keeps it in the back of her throat instead of spitting it out. Gela doesn't deserve her anger. None of them do. She's mad at Clarisse. And Abby, and a dragon. And herself.

"Thank you."

A breath, just a small one.

"For helping."

[sprent]

"Thank you for letting me."

She recognises that this was no small thing, to let her in here, and touch the things she's working on in Clarisse's name.

Hedging her way, speaking gently as she finishes off the last of her work, "I'm not saying I completely understand what you're going through, I know I don't. But I've lost people and I know how it sits inside, and what it does to you." For example: it is impossible, not to sit here, sewing, and think of her mother. There is an ache in her throat.

"If you ever need somebody to be with, I can do that. I'll do that for you."

[notathreat]

It leaves Ellie feeling scoured empty, unmoored, and she makes herself nod her head. She wishes that something, anything could help. Instead very little feels real.

It comes and goes, the waves of grief. They're each of them different.

"Thank you," Ellie says softly. She's not sure she can manage much else. But at least now, she has the option. And she's grateful.

It occurs to her that there's a lot of care being shown for her, during this. A lot of people who understand the magnitude of what she lost. It's a good indication of what she still has.

"I'm glad you're still here, Gela."

[sprent]

"... Thank you, Ellie."

Truly. It's a really kind thing for her to say. She has to sit there and widen her eyes and wait before she says anything else. Her vision is filmy with tears. Eventually it feels safe to blink again.

She should go. She gives Ellie a clumsy pat on her hand, a little touch, brief and trembly and then she stands to go. With all the big-sister-authority she can muster under the circumstances she says, "Eat your food," and closes the door behind her, to leave her to it.

[notathreat]

Ellie sniffs one, and nods.

For Gela, she'll actually try.