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

[hassaran]

"No. One or two might join the Walrus, but the rest will go and take the Fancy. They were only here for him."

She doesn't try to stretch the topic or supply another, just sits for a minute with the uncertain guilt of having avoided this other conversation. She could endure the awkwardness of being the bearer of final declarations of love for a couple she doesn't understand if it weren't for everything else. The inevitable follow-up questions: when was this, how was he, did he say anything else, did you see him after that, why didn't you stop him, why didn't you go with him? She has directed the late arrivals to bodies and answered dozens of questions and written a comprehensive report of the entire catastrophe and replayed every death she saw and those she didn't over in her head on an endless loop. The thought of going back to that tainted well again, tucked in the lee of an overturned cart, smoke and magic and blood in the air and the mingled screams of people and dracolisks and knowing Darras's body was somewhere there underfoot--it makes her want to slide down the roof and off the tower.

And for what? To give Bastien a strange, sad final memory of Byerly choosing to throw away any remaining chance of survival? Maybe he wouldn't want to hear it anymore than she wants to tell. Maybe he already has some other final memory he's content to hold onto instead. Maybe he doesn't want to think about it at all. She should've just written it down and put it in his pigeonhole, but it felt strangely impersonal. This feels worse, and there's a temptation to just spit it out. But now he's said no.

She reaches over and sets fingertips on his arm just above the elbow. If he doesn't shake them off they slide to curve around his biceps and sit there, the loose steady pressure she'd demurred earlier.

[cozen]

He doesn't shake them off. He doesn't do much of anything, still and silent at the crossroads of a dozen fragments of thoughts and regrets, flashes of gratitude and quickly-dying sparks of anger, unwilling to choose any of them. Instead he turns his head just enough to look at the ships in the harbor and imagines the Fancy sailing away.

By forfeit, even only knowing him so well, Yseult is now the person who knows him best in the world. If he told her he was leaving, too, she might know how to say something that could stop him. So he won't tell her, and he'll only feel so guilty. If Corypheus died and the war ended tomorrow, he's sure he'd never see her again anyway.

"When he stayed for you," he says, at length, "he wasn't giving up the life he wanted. He was choosing it. The same as everyone does every day, giving up one dream for another. Deciding what they can and can't live without. You didn't choose for him. It wasn't your fault."

It's not enough, but nothing would be, and right now it's all he has. He touches his fingertips to the knuckles of the hand she has on his arm, a silent thanks with an even more silent you don't have to.

"You should go to bed."