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]

"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."