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]

"Thanks," Ellie says, very quietly. The chariots were good to work on, for a while. It did help once she gave up on the embroidery. She'd worked until her fingers were numb, until her eyes were blurry again, long past when she would've rested.

Useless, really. Funerals are for the living and not the dead, but Ellie wouldn't have felt right about doing anything else.

Still, his kind words ache.

Bastien moves closer, and Ellie looks up, impossibly tired eyes and hollow sockets. God, they both look like shadows of themselves.

She searches his face, too tired to be anything less than frank, and direct.

"How did you and Byerly meet?" she asks, softly. "I never asked."

[cozen]

When they were young men, when Bastien was bringing Byerly along into back rooms where a Fereldan nobleman was a novelty and meeting with fences to unload what they'd pilfered together from unattended rooms and insisting to his cadre of professional and amateur musicians that they had to let him play with them, just wait, just listen—then he had a dozen answers to where did you find him?

Washed ashore in a fishing net. Dancing alone and drunk on a rooftop. Bastien saved him from a pack of menacing street urchins; Byerly saved him from a hostile alley cat. They tried to pick one another's pockets at the same time. They offended the same brigand and had to run together. A Lady with a taste for dark-haired dark-eyed men forgot which of them was which and inadvertently invited them both over at the same time. Bastien heard his violin from the street and was so moved he had to climb to the window to find out who it was.

Now, with Ellie looking haunted and small and weary and still mustering up the energy to be the first person in years to give him the opportunity to make up some new fantastical explanation, he says, "The ordinary way. We were at the same party," and it may be the first time he has ever told the truth.

So little of it, and he can still feel his solid edges fray.

"I suppose there is no ordinary for you," he says. "Everyone you have met, you met at the end of your world or in a new one."

[notathreat]

Though Ellie can never read Bastien, not truly, she does get the sense that this is true. It would be like him to make something up, just the way Ellie does about her fingers when the truth would be too heavy.

There's a ghost of a smile, not on her lips, but in her eyes.

"There's a lot more ordinary than you think," Ellie says. "It just depends on perspective." She falls silent then. "Clarisse saw me picking the hooves of one of the horses. She started a conversation."

Are you heckling me?

"Was it something you knew right away? Or was it slow, until it wasn't?"

[cozen]

"It was slow. It was complicated. We weren't—"

They weren't together until they were here, eleven years after that ordinary meeting at that ordinary gathering. Bastien hadn't regretted the time it took when he thought they had their lives ahead of them. Now?

"I can't," he says. "Right now. I can't."

He smiles for her, sad but genuine, in a way that means it isn't her, that he appreciates the thought, that he is only doing what he has to do to stay afloat. The only lie in any of it is the silent some other time implied by right now.

It's alright, though. It's not why he stopped to talk to her.

"But tell me about your Clarisse. Half a god. Chariot racer. What else? Say someone was going to put her in a story. How would they get her right?"

[notathreat]

The look that crosses Ellie's eyes is a painful sort of understanding. Some people talk, and some don't. Some can't. She was that person for a long, long time, and she remembers how it felt when someone grazed those wounds.

She can't know Bastien's mind, exactly. She will never know what he feels, exactly. But she can sense the shape of it in the dark. Enough that she nods.

It's her turn to give him that look, then. Not a smile; it's been a long time since she wore a smile as armor. She's much better acquainted with anger now than she was as a child. It can't be any worse out there, can it?

But she can return that glimpse, and decide what to do with that pain. And to her astonishment, she does want to talk to him. To this man who appreciates stories, and heroes, and clever and terrible people who try to be the best versions of themselves. Because he would have thought she was wonderful, if he had the chance.

"Arrogant as fuck," she says, immediately. "Angry, sometimes. Quick to see a slight, quicker to fight about it. Prideful as fucking anything," she adds with a shake of her head, a curl of her lip. "Never able to back down from a challenge, even if it was stupid of her to try. Like there was never any room in her thick skull for the idea of failing."

The fierceness in Ellie's voice fades, and she looks down at the shroud in her hands.

"She thought she was clumsy," Ellie says softly. "And awkward, with feelings. She thought she wasn't good at talking. But then she'd forget to doubt herself and say the most romantic shit I've ever heard."

Past the lump in her throat, she continues. "She had-- this way about her. Like she'd take care of people without even thinking about it. Without even realizing she did it. I'm shit at letting anyone take care of me. But it took me weeks to realize she was grabbing an extra roll and bacon at breakfast because she knew that when I came in, I'd eat off her plate, but only if I wasn't taking the last of anything.

"She'd- get mixed up, writing letters. Like her brain just didn't work for reading, and it'd take her forever. But she'd write out stupid jokes and leave them for me just so I'd find her and tell her how stupid they were."

[cozen]

He listens with a faint, sad-eyed smile, admiring this girl he hardly knew—and feeling a sort of kinship with Ellie, loving flaws-first, astonished by the little signs that someone thought of her in her absence, swept off her feet by a side of someone not everyone got to see.

"She sounds amazing," he says. "And it sounds like you were a good match."

If he'd had to guess what Ellie needed, someone to make sure she eats enough and to make her laugh both would have been high on the list.

His hand goes out to touch her shoulder. Very briefly, if there's any sign of tension or discomfort, but a little longer if there's not. Either way his hand returns to his knee before he asks, "Do you want to tell me one? One of the jokes."

If they're for her to keep, he'll understand.

[notathreat]

Ellie nods. There's so much more she hasn't said, so many things that will make its way into her mind every waking second, rolling through like a fever dream. Clarisse isn't even the only person she misses. She doesn't answer, and because she's shut her eyes, she doesn't see the hand coming.

For once, though, she doesn't flinch. The steady weight of that hand unwinds her. Just a notch. Just enough for a shallow breath, a reprieve of the pressure.

Knowing that Bastien is taking care of her as a way of taking care of himself helps. It helps her resist the urge to corner herself like a wounded animal, to worry at her hurts in silence.

She could say them, probably. But there's a better way.

Ellie lays her hand over Bastien's, very briefly on her shoulder, and gets to her feet. Makes her way to her desk, where she opens one of the nondescript drawers. Pulls out a book, and opens it to a well worn page.

They are there. Small scraps of folded paper. Some are dirty, ink smudged. They are all different colors. Corners, torn. But they all have Clarisse's messy handwriting on them. Smudgy doodles, on some. On more than one there's Ellie's handwriting too- like Clarisse was writing back. Like the two of them were passing notes in class, back and forth during the Gallows workday.

Ellie kept all of them.

She plucks one from the top of the pile, hands it over, and sits back down, looking at the sheaf of paper scraps.

why are frogs always happy? they eat whatever bugs them.

why does it take pirates so long to learn the alphabet? because they spend years at c.