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

her office

[katabasis]

In fact, so rare is John Silver's occupation of the office that it has taken until now—a considerable number of days after the news of Granitefell had reached the Gallows—for Flint to even consider that the contents of his desk's drawers might contain some pressing article or half written letter. After all, there had been so much paper in the man's quarters, locked away in that well battered sea trunk. Why not elsewhere? Surely there must be other bits of handwriting—carefully attended notes and papers relevant to the working of his office, to the working of the ship, half written letters to a woman half a world away. Something.

The thought had found Flint all at once mid-way through a debate with the Harbormaster's pissant of an assistant, an errand he might have ordinarily remanded to literally anyone else in the Gallows were there a body to hand to see it accomplished.

'—Now if you would only be so kind as to this time file the correct paperwork with this office, I would be more than happy to—' had seen fit to prompt the knife from Flint's belt, its point briskly driven down through the sheaf of evidently objectionable papers on the man's desk, along with the very sincere guarantee that should Flint return for the knife in a few hours' time and find his business suffering further delay that he might be inclined to find something other than his belt to sheath the blade in.

The ferry ride and the walk up from the Gallows' slip has somehow done very little to lessen the urgency of the impulse to act on the thought, so that when he arrives in the office's doorway it seems to be a very sudden appearance. Indeed he is two strides across the threshold, already angling for John's workspace in the room, before Petrana's presence in the other half of it checks his way so abruptly that it might very well rattle teeth.

(He has been a remarkably stolid presence these last days; a man giving the appearance of being unflappable despite the hard cuts into his division's ranks and the death of what must be widely understood to be one of very few trusted companions.)

"I'll only be a moment," though, is too bluntly put.

[ipseite]

Obviously, when he enters she looks up — of course. Natural to do both because the door to a room she's in opened and a person came into it, and because she's in her office, and quite reasonably expects that generally, people who open that door have come looking for her, typically for the purposes of her work. All that having been said, it becomes apparent so swiftly that he has not come looking for her, and when he collects himself to recall her presence she has made no gestures to helping that along.

Her eyes are dry now, if red-rimmed and tired, and she holds herself so terribly still.

“He used the desk so rarely,” she says, turning her face back to her own work, allowing him the limited privacy of her turned back, “much of what is in it is only my encroachment. Please do not remove my brandy.”

Or her paperwork, but frankly, right now,

look.

[katabasis]

He doesn't consider excusing himself, but there is a taut moment in which he probably ought to. Then, he is moving to the unoccupied desk. He reviews what is ordered there on its surface, and then moves on to opening drawers and rifling through the papers there. He is uninterested in a great majority of it, recognizing what are merely the ordinary documents one might expect to find in the office's desk more or less on sight. Excepting a handful of pamphlets which require closer examination—maybe he'd set them aside and kept them for some purpose—, and a few pieces in paper in a familiar hand that for a moment seem like they might reveal themselves to be significant before it becomes clear they are so old as to have likely been written and then forgotten, they are very little that warrants real attention.

The bottle of brandy remains undisturbed. Presumably however, the rasping and clanking of various desk hardware and drawer runners hardly makes for ideal working conditions.