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

[favoriteanalyst]

There's a lot not being said. But it isn't something he'll push on. Another time, maybe. There's too much pain to dig through in both of them, in everyone here, that he risks her ire rising back up quick as a snake striking if he pushes. It would probably only come out as needling out of him.

He scribbles down more notes. He used to be a lot faster at this when he felt his hands. The tip of his tongue pokes out between teeth as he does so, partly from concentration, partly to literally bite his tongue.

He'd said words over Abby. And at her door, and Clarisse's-- Would Ellie want to know about that?

"I can ask around, see if anyone else knows how to play. It won't be important until..." The end of her days, anyway. "I'll ask around." Finished lamely. He's not normally so bad at talking about death, but this is talking of future deaths. Ellie might simply disappear. It's a thing that's shockingly more likely for Rifters, it seems, than dying. The ones that went just weren't so lucky on that end. (Is that luck? Which is worse? He can't ask that, because no one is around with an answer.)

"I'll probably be saying a prayer for you just out of habit." It's his way of being kind. "But I won't if you tell me not to." Or at least he'll keep it on the inside, like he should've done before, maybe.

[notathreat]

"Bastien does. And Tony." If they're still around. If they don't leave. She remembers back then; the impromptu theater troupe, the four of them going round and round. Byerly with his violin, Bastien with his cello, Tony with a lute. They'd played off of each other, created things. She and Tony had shared what riffs they remembered.

Those happy days seem far away, now, despite only one of those voices being silenced.

Ellie sits, and with pinpricked, stained fingers, finds a page on her sketchbook to write out the lyrics of Wayfaring Stranger.

She thinks about the offer, then slowly nods. "If there's a service, don't. But if it's just you and me, go ahead."

[favoriteanalyst]

There's no guarantee for anybody. Obviously. But that should mean cherishing what's left all the more. Maybe if his hands still worked the way he wanted them to, he'd take lessons from her. Just to learn something else new he never bothered with before.

"Just you and me, kiddo." He imagines any kind of service would have a non-denominational bent to it anyway. But his faith gives him comfort, and it's unlikely to be offensive to any spirit that's left of her, if there's that much hanging around.

"I think there's the plan to get everyone's funeral arrangements on record, officially, so I imagine Strange might come by asking the same things. I just wanted...to know. For myself."

And now the awkward transition to the other uncomfortable and ill-timed portion of this conversation. He sets his writing back down, satisfied that someone looking through it could make out his chicken scratch, and that he can see that information whenever it's needed in case he forgets. In case the lyrium makes him forget.

(Someday he might tell her. But not today.)

He watches her write quietly, settling himself down on a seat, hands folded. Is there any way to go about this than to just say it? He at least waits until she's either hit a pause or is done.

"I'd like you to be in charge of taking care of me, and my stuff, and decisions on what to do with me when I'm dead. You and Strange; I'll be asking him later. You know. So you each have a backup. Or emotional support." He says the last bit with some wry humor; Stephen Strange is as emotionally supportive as a damp rag, but he tries in his own way. "A work it together if you're both here but if one of you is gone then the other gets the grim duty sort of situation. If...that's okay with you?"

[notathreat]

Kiddo, he says, and not for the first time, Ellie desperately misses Joel.

He was shit about grief. The worst person to talk to. Mostly because he wouldn't talk at all, and would shut her down when she tried. But her way of processing it has fallen into the ruts of what he taught her, and he would have been able to be there. Silent, with the kind of gruff gentleness that came out when he was worried about her.

So Mobius talks about funeral arrangements, and she struggles through the fog to stay with him, here in the present. To write out the lyrics as she remembers them.

Her pen scratches to a stop, though, at what he asks her. She knows why, but thinking of him dead too, of organizing Mobius' service-

"I'm-" she cuts off, soft, choked up. "Are you planning on dying, or something?"

[favoriteanalyst]

It's awful to hear the way it's brought everything in her to a screeching halt. She must be picturing it, winding herself back up. Is that better than the numbness, maybe?

"Maker, no," he says gently, on the cusp of a laugh. "By Andraste's grace, I'll live to be a ripe older age, the wizened old Kirkwall librarian or something." She will not be that graceful. He knows. "But it's hard not to plan on what happens, now. I could've been on that mission. You could've. There aren't any guarantees, in this life or the next."

Arguably there's no guarantee that there's a next in the first place.

"You don't have to." A quick amendment. "You don't have to have an answer for me. But if I don't bring it up now, then when, right?"

[notathreat]

It's never been something that she's been entrusted with, before. It feels like a dull throb behind her eyes, a white noise in her ears.

They used to joke with each other back in Jackson. Burn me, they'd say. Scatter my ashes somewhere pretty.

She swallows, rests the hand with the pen on her lap.

"What do you want done?"

[favoriteanalyst]

"Not much. Nothing big or elaborate. Just make sure I'm burned. Nothing needs done with my ashes; I don't really have anywhere they ought to go. Or anyone they ought to go to." That he knows of. Home is sometimes a complicated idea to struggle with. "Unless someone trusted claims them, I guess." If they really want to be that sentimental.

"I don't have anything important, either. Dish it all out as seen fit. I'll probably have it all written down," with a little nod at his notebook, "which'll be with my things, if there are any special requests."

It all sounds so calm and easy and reasonable when he says it. Like he isn't asking a grieving young woman to add the extra burden of a friend's possible future funeral.

"I haven't really had to think about this before. Not really. When I was in the Order, you could trust that your commanders would see to your affairs. When I left...I didn't have enough to my name to make it worthwhile to think about. And most people, most human people anyway, would make a point to burn bodies anyway; it's just the way of things."

[notathreat]

"Yeah."

Ellie's voice comes from very far away, and she finally nods to herself.

"Writing it down is a good idea, I um..."

Ellie rubs her tongue along her lower lip. "Considering the kind of shit I get up to, you might not want it to be me."

[favoriteanalyst]

"Kinda why I'm planning on putting the burden on someone else to share it," he says with a brief wry pull of his mouth. "You've managed to survive a lot back home, and in the other world you were in, and now this one, too. But I mean...never any guarantees, ever."

[notathreat]

"Never," Ellie agrees, and her voice sounds a little hollow, even to her own ears.

She falls silent again, looking down at her hands. Her eyes burn, her mind is white noise.

"... hey, Mobius? Can you do me a favor?"

[favoriteanalyst]

He can't take it back, not a word of it. He'd warned how shit the timing was. But the guilt piles up on his shoulders to hear, see, feel the way Ellie only half-exists now. What right does he have to wring promises out of someone who seems so much a ghost? Such a selfish thing, to lay this at her feet.

"Anything."

It's a dangerous thing to promise, something easily taken advantage of. But it's Ellie. He means it.

[notathreat]

"If you ever see me heading into a situation that's basically suicide," she says, and it falls numbly off her tongue.

"Something I don't have a really good reason to do."

Her voice trembles, just barely.

"Can you remind me what this feels like? What it feels like to be left behind?"

[favoriteanalyst]

He's pretty sure she won't ever need the reminder. But the warning's for a reason. Means it's likely, back home probably, that she's done that before. After Joel, probably. 'A really good reason' is the part that will probably trip the both of them up, something that she might find a good reason but her friends think is nonsense to convince her of.

"I'll ready a devastating verbal blow if I think you're about to run off and get yourself killed for no good reason."

He offers up his hands, palms up. Something to hold, if she'd like, as tight as she needs. Instead of holding herself so tightly she's starting to fall apart. "You wanna go outside, get some air? Or stay right here a while yet?"

[notathreat]

It's a difficult, shitty thing to ask. It's not a position she wants to put Mobius in. It shouldn't be his responsibility to hold her back from her own bullshit. But at the same time, Ellie knows that she needs all the help she can get.

She's made choices so far, and maybe, like Derrica says, it will get easier.

For now, it only seems like it's getting harder and harder to breathe.

Ellie looks at his hands. She wants to hold onto somebody, but fears holding too tight. Abruptly, she reminds herself that he won't be able to feel it. She reaches out and clasps her hand into his, squeezing until something inside of her eases.

"Yeah. Let's get some air."