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]

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."