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

[portalling]

It’s just meat in there would accurately encapsulate Doctor Strange’s opinion on the whole matter, but that feels perhaps a step too far; a cruel detail to drop in front of a woman who’s already striving to pin herself together. These days he knows there’s something beyond death, of course, he’s seen and exorcised too many ghosts, but in terms of what’s lying on the slabs in that entrance hall —

Strange hauls his attention to something else instead. Latching onto the slightly safer part of what Gela had said.

“I’ve read widely in the libraries here, but mostly on the Fade and magic and spirits. In turn, my cultural understanding is… lacking,” he admits, and that’s truly understating it. No recruit for Diplomacy, he. “What’s the relevance of being Nevarran?”

[sprent]

She's glad he takes the conversation there, seizes on the opportunity to explain herself with a bit of relief. "Our rites are very different."

Gela wonders if he is being true with her when he says he doesn't understand the relevance. Some, defensive, very Nevarran part of herself assumes somebody might have made a disparaging comment already, or started a rumour. It shouldn't matter but she feels raw, laid open by everything. "We don't burn bodies. We preserve them; entomb them, if we can."

Of course, here, her voice is the minority. As are her beliefs. She tucks her arms across her chest protectively. "I'm not trying to argue anything," she adds. "I'm only telling you."

[portalling]

Oh, like the thing with the zombies and the necropolis, he read about that in the historical reports —

But thank god he doesn’t actually blurt that out.

Instead: “And I’m listening,” Strange says, gentle. He’s been monitoring and gentling his tone as much as he can, sanding down all of his sharper edges this week. He’s too tired and heartsore to even try to argue over burial rites that don’t even track with his own.

“I don’t know how much you’ve spoken to rifters about this, but on my Earth, we mostly bury or entomb. Some cremate. So your way might actually be closer to what I’m used to.” But what about the zombies though. The man tamps down his curiosity, tries his hardest not to blunder his way into something offensive.

“This seems to matter to you. Sorry to be asking this, but if you were… I mean, we’re hardly qualified to handle proper preservation here. So if it were you in there, would you want to be sent back to Nevarra? For entombing.”

[sprent]

"I don't speak about it often," is quiet, tucked in-between what he says to her. He is trying to be gentle. He is saying sorry, and this seems to matter to you.

Seems?

Gela inhales quickly at the question, and squeezes herself tightly. Her eyes have gone round and shiny with tears and she lifts her chin to keep them from falling, staring very intently into the corner of the room for a moment. She doesn't really want to think about being in there. Neither does she want to give room for her thoughts to become dark and upsetting. She is good at turning on herself.

After carefully clearing her throat, she manages to tell him, "I have no idea. I'm not very welcome in Nevarra, and I don't imagine that changing if I were in there.

"Are you asking everybody this? Are you writing it down?"

If that sounded a little tight and pointed... She'll apologise for it later.

[portalling]

He doesn’t blame her for being sharp.

“I will be,” Strange says. It’s the truth, said frank and forthright. “It’s a question which has been buzzing around in my skull for a while now. Moreso after I had to—”

Now it’s Strange’s turn for his words to peter out, the rest of the sentence dangling unfinished, unable to find the right way to explain it. After I had to what. After I had to clean their wounds and pick out debris and warped metal and mangled flesh and try to make them look presentable. After I had to think about where all this dead meat was going, and how useless a healer-doctor-surgeon is when it’s already too late.

He clears his throat.

“Derrica and I treated the bodies,” is what he finally settles on. “I had a lot of time to think. And it occurred to me that not everyone will have had a lawyer or official paperwork written up, and that people do have preferences for what happens to them afterward. Differing cultural practices, differing religious views. I might not have the same beliefs myself, but as a healer, I can try to have them respected.”