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

Julius

[overharrowed]

OTA

[overharrowed]

I. Granitefell

The rescue team will find Julius ready to help — insistent on it — but he's visibly a mess, dirty and exhausted and very slightly limping. Blood has dried on his left forearm, and he's done his best to clean his hands but it is more or less a lost cause before the reinforcements arrive.

He's aware he may get approached with questions, and while he clearly defers to Yseult when appropriate, he seems to still be taking his duties of keeping the company informed seriously. He also may give the impression of a man somewhat sleepwalking, but he's resistant to any insistence that he rest or stand aside while they're preparing to move.

II. Gallows

For once, Julius feels like he doesn't have enough work to do. Of course, that's an illusion; there's more than enough, especially given how much they've all lost. But it's not enough to keep his mind as occupied as he'd like. He helps out with Diplomacy, down a leader, and takes on whatever anyone will give him. It means he can be found in his office as much or more than usual, sorting through correspondence and reports. Or, sometimes, staring out the window.

He can't help wandering, though, noticing how empty the Gallows feels. Not only his heavy personal loss but the quiet of the training yard, the muted conversations in the dining hall, the free seats at the tables in the library. The way it reminds him of Kinloch Hold turns his stomach; he's eating noticeably less, though enough to keep moving forward.

Julius fills his time because he doesn't know what else to do. But the way it's ripped him open is visible even to those who don't know him well.

III. Wildcard

[I'm doing a few bespoke starters, but please hit me up OOCly if you'd like to discuss setting up something more specific than the above will allow and we haven't already talked about it.]

Bastien

[cozen]

viewing and visitation ota.

[tender]

The majority of the work to cleanse the worst of the battle's brutality from those who return toted by
wagons happens in the infirmary, halved between Stephen Strange and Derrica. It is quietly rendered, done to the best of both their ability.

And when they have done what they can, the last care they can bestow, between them they transport the dead from the silence of the infirmary to the hall set aside for those they have been tending.

Stephen and Derrica shroud them in white linen. Derrica draws the cold runes, careful sweeps of her fingers locking the magic into place before Stephen lays the dead down to rest, to be claimed and farewelled by those closest to them. They lay candles beside each of the fallen, so no one need linger in the dark.

It doesn't happen all at once. But by and by, all those escorted back to the Gallows from the devastation of Granitefell are returned to their colleagues, to be taken to pyre or burial, or whatever form of resting place they might have desired.

[ OOC / Consider this a general setting prompt open to everyone to use as a catch-all space. Please feel free to use it as a starter space for solo, contemplative threads, for threads with Derrica or Strange or both of them, as a space for starters for other characters, or whatever other content your heart so desires. ]

Flint

[katabasis]

[Bespoke starters only; hmu on plurk or disco and I can scrape something together for us, or just wildcard me.]

Ellie

[notathreat]

Kitchens OTA - even I thought I was joking

[wearyallalone]

Vanya has dealt with enough loss to realize that nothing in particular is going to help right now, and likely for some time to come. He carries the names of those lost, some heavier than others, just like everyone around him is doing. There's no way out but through.

That said, there are some things that can make it worse, and it occurs to him in the early morning hour on Sunday that one of them will shortly be clear to everyone. He'd only really spoken to Jude recently, but the rifter had been impossible to miss, invested as he was in everyone around him and their well-being. And the first Sunday without him will sting.

Vanya is aware he isn't much of a cook, and that he may be sent away for turning up in the kitchens before breakfast at all. Maybe he'll try to work the method out and fail to produce anything edible. (Or, maybe, someone else with better skills will have the same idea and he can just offer to help with things like cracking eggs or stirring.) But it feels like it's at least worth trying. Given everything. He wants to try.

► Yseult

[katabasis]

Dispatching hands to Granitefell to assist with whatever constitutes as cleanup; over land travel into and back out of the interior Marches spotted with Imperium patrols and outriders (and ravaging dracolisk cavalry); the brusque rearrangement of rota duties and communiques to see that what few hands are left in the Gallows can see it made secure should some follow up attack come here to Kirkwall—

These things take time. Energy. Paper, and the lists written on them. A great deal of thought, and planning, and something that looks like the meticulous patience. If these things had a sound, it might be easily mistaken for the ticking of a carefully tuned dwarven clock, and not the tinny sound of a hammer striking a chisel reverberating through a large, hollowed space.

At some point in those intervening hours, Flint had distantly considered the possibility that this would be the last straw for the Walrus men. Having delivered the news of their Quartermaster's demise, he would wake up one day, and look out into the harbor to see that the ship has slipped her moorings and made off into the night. It would have been prudent to take precautions against this possibility. Commandeered what now will make up a small fortune in unpaid Riftwatch wages and reallocated it to the ship's crew, maybe. Beaten them to the impulse to carry off with an ordered that they make directly for Antiva to link up with their partners there. Instead, he'd simply seen to other business. There's enough of it. Had been. Will be. And there still lies the dark shape of the Walrus tugging gently at her anchor chains in the harbor.

Stood here on the Gallows' ferry slip, Flint finds himself studying the ship rather than the smaller boat presently hacking its way across the dark water toward this landing, or any of the drawn and exhausted faces of the latter's passengers.

For Tsenka

[overharrowed]

Julius meant to go see Tsenka almost as soon as he returned to the Gallows, but the return itself is a strange combination of chaos and solemnity. He is immediately bundled off, still clutching both his own staff and Marcus's, to have his minor wounds seen to and the road dirt cleaned from him.

(As much as he'd been among those raising the point it made more sense to burn their dead back at Granitefell, in Kirkwall he's surprised at the feeling of new loss that comes from leaving Marcus's corpse on the wagon. Perhaps it's just that it's a new step away from a world where Marcus was still alive.)

Still. Tsenka deserves the chance to ask him about what happened if she wants to, and a hand extended in sympathy regardless. It just feels difficult to gauge the right time until he and Petrana come across Marcus's will. That, finally, gives him a concrete errand; something she needs to be aware of, a natural moment to seek her out.

He's not limping anymore after a few day's rest, but he looks distinctly older than he did a week ago.

granitefell

[prelest]

"May I?"

The woman before Julius was not in the battle. No mistaking that; her face is clean, her hair done up, her clothes tidy and - frankly - a little impractical. Part of the rescue team, clearly.

She holds out her hands. "I'm a healer. I can help."

[overharrowed]

The impulse to brush aside the offer is certainly present, but he can sympathize with the need for something to do, if nothing else. So he says, "I think the worst of it is that I overextended myself magically, everything else is fairly minor." While he's still downplaying everything — if she's seen him walk, she's likely clocked the slight limp — it has more the air of someone giving possibly useful information than a denial of her request.

[prelest]

Nina nods. And, since he didn't deny her directly, she takes his hand. And -

It's subtle, what she does. Julius likely won't even register that she's doing anything. It's not that she wants to be deceptive - certainly nothing like that - but Julius is a native of Thedas, and something like this might be seen as evil magic. Even though it's certainly nothing of the sort.

To all appearances, she's just applying magic to close up his few visible wounds. But under that, she's doing rather more: altering the glucose levels in his cells, drawing out a bit more cortisol to incrementally increase his adrenaline levels. Just a little something to push down his exhaustion and give him a little kick of energy.

When it seems like it's been enough, she withdraws her grip. "How do you feel?" she asks carefully, watching his expression.

[overharrowed]

Another day, he'd immediately want to know more, not from suspicion but from interest. Magic from other worlds has always interested him, and there's so little externally to indicate what she's doing.

Today, though, he can't reach for that curiosity. There's too much else. When she asks how he feels, he takes a long breath in and then lets it out. "...like I've had some coffee and maybe a couple hours of sleep," he says, after a moment. "Thank you. It ... it didn't help, that few of us got very much sleep before the ambush." And while being tired was not high on the list of his concerns, being less tired certainly doesn't hurt anything. (Except to the extent that he's more aware of what's happened.)

the last will & testament.

[ipseite]

Pain can always wait.

When Julius and Marcus had been missing, and none had been able to reassure her of their safe return, it had been a terrible stillness— Petrana folded up like a fan, waiting, her gaze fixed and her hands still, not rejecting kindnesses offered her so much as refusing even to acknowledge them. When she had wished to pace she had sat at (his) desk and found work and waited, in an agony that she did not name.

Brokenhearted, furious, there is nothing more to wait for — the bodies returned, the news grim, the doubts silenced. Julius has returned to her but Marcus has not, and the ugliness of her own anger is breathtaking, the way it chokes her. Julius, upon whom she can rely, and Marcus—

and Marcus—

“We will have to see to his affairs,” she is saying, brisk, jerking open this drawer and that, smoothing her hand within and biting back a stronger word than is her wont at a splinter of wood snagged in her finger, drawing it back along with a sheaf of papers. “He must keep his invoices somewhere — I'll not be surprised by a bill for a coat coming due—”

The words are not loud enough to be, truly, intended for Julius; the uncharacteristic speed of them, the undercurrent of irritation. She is surrounded by his frivolous things and not him and she is so

so

so angry.

[overharrowed]

The heat of it is impossible to ignore, even when his grief is more fog on the water than fire. He had been looking at Marcus' clothes, with the half-formed intent of doing something with them (folding? packing? he's not entirely sure). But Petrana's sudden motion toward the desk, her tone, draws him back to her.

"If you'd rather I deal with it," he offers, coming over to her, reading the anger but not sure what to do with it now that it's present in the room with them. He hovers near, willing to take her lead but unsure whether she'd rather he just take over.

[ipseite]

The effort it takes to curb the rebuke in her, “No,” is clear, in part because she doesn't entirely succeed; it comes out sharper than it ought, sharper than she wishes it to, sharp enough that she says, “no, I have it,” in a more measured way. If not softer, then quieter — she aches to beat her fists against something, but not him, not him.

She cannot breathe for want of screaming, and cannot bear to shout him down, and the impasse is a knife's edge.

Clenching her hand around the slim leather case she's found only reminds her that she's dug wood into it, and she grimaces, presses it upon him on second thought: “Only look and see what this is, I'll dig this out.”

[overharrowed]

He sits on the edge of the desk, mainly to make it easier to open the case and resisting the impulse to help with the splinter. She can do it; she's asked him to do this.

When he slides the scroll out, he doesn't have any immediate thoughts on what the papers might be. So he has no particular expectations to upset, but even so, he's startled to run across, first, his own name. The surprise is obvious, but he doesn't speak immediately as he goes through the rest of the bundle in lieu of reading the letter (for now). "...my love," he says, after a short pause. "He's made a will."

It hurts, thinking of Marcus sitting down to write these documents. Certainly practical, and not a sign that he thought anything particular would happen. They are in a war, and they've had close calls in the past. But it takes his breath from him, now, in a way he wouldn't have expected.

Granitefell & The Gallows: OTA

[notathreat]

I. Granitefell

Ellie knows she should scout the area and make sure it's free of threats, but when Vanya offers to do it she sees it for the kindness that it is. She lets him.

She keeps going over the checklist in her mind during the approach, during the aftermath, making sure she's done everything she can, everything she was supposed to do.

Ellie disappears for a time into the ashes and wreckage of the village. When she comes back she's clutching Maimer in one hand, holding it like it might try to leap free of her fingers. In the other she's carrying Viktor's thaumoscope. There is dried blood all down her front and crusted on her hands, none of it hers, but she doesn't seem to notice.

With singleminded purpose, she tracks down each and every one of the fallen with an anchor shard, calling back through the crystals to report locations of bodies and too-familiar names. At some point she is joined by Ruadh, Ellis' red-coated Mabari, who follows her from horror to horror.

She keeps going, doggedly moving. Makes sure every one of those twenty-one names is accounted for. She helps move corpses, both strangers and the people she loves. Her eyes are dry, but Ellie's not exactly there.

II. Gallows

Back at the Gallows, Ellie throws herself singularly into her work. It's obsessive, and obviously so. She barely remembers to eat, definitely doesn't remember to sleep. She might if she's reminded, but only then.

Before the services, she throws open the door of her room to air out the smell of paint, and her room's a wreck too, everything left where it's fallen and undisturbed since then.

There's a blood-smeared funeral shroud in the works, minimal and messy embroidery because she can't sew worth shit. Her hands are good for stitching skin and not much else. Instead there are painted chariots ringing the edges. They are meticulous until they aren't, until the paint smears together in unrecognizable smudges.


III. Wildcard

derrica

[tender]

[ bespoke content only, holler if you want something/wildcard if the spirit moves you. ]

Finding Abby: Closed, Solo

[notathreat]

[cw: death, description of mortal injuries, handling of a dead body.]

The air is cinders and grey dawn. Smoke that still rises and catches at her lungs, crawls down into them like it can make a home.

Ellie breathes deep and lets it. It burns a little, and that's okay with her right now.

She knows what she'll find as she walks through this mass grave. It feels like Santa Barbara, that slow dreadful undertow. Like walking through the pillars. The susurrus of waves.

All voices are muted, muffled, distant and unreal. She expects gunshots and screams, and so they are there in the shadows. In the back of her mind. In the corners of memory. There is pain in her gut, old wounds festering in her body like they can pretend they're not just in her head.

She knows it when she comes upon her, even before she recognizes what she's seeing. It is a festering ache, a black hole that snatches at her more and more as she processes in snapshots rather than as a whole. There is a ring of fallen soldiers around her body in the center. What's left of her skin is bloody and broken and bruised.

It was a blow to the head. It cracked her skull like an egg. They took their time with her. She made them.

It should feel like justice and it doesn't.

Ellie doesn't remember kneeling next to the body, but she comes to with her thumb on Abby's shattered cheekbone, and she's cold and still. Like she was nothing, like part of the landscape. One more corpse, like the thousands Ellie's stepped over without a thought. Ah, gross.

"Abby," she whispers, and it dredges out of the back of her throat, a voice she hasn't used in years. From back when she was hunting her. From the day she finally stopped.

She doesn't respond and somehow that silence seems perverse. It goes out in the world and there is nothing that comes back, not even an echo.

It feels empty, like Ellie always knew it would.

[altusimperius]

[while this is occurring]

The chatter from the crystal has become deafening and nonsensical, enough to make Benedict flee the office entirely, hurry downstairs and find something, anything that he can do to occupy his mind: in this case it's making coffee, which he does with his thoughts millions of miles away, and it's only when he returns to the Diplomacy office door that he realizes with a heart-shuddering jolt that he's made two cups.
But the recipient isn't here. Won't ever be here. Unless there's been a mistake? They'll all turn up still, surely.

Rather than go all the way back downstairs to dump it out, he shoulders his way back into the office and pauses, his heart skipping a full beat at the sight of a dark-haired, mustachioed figure sitting on the floor with Whiskey.
"Fuck," he gasps, coffee sloshing from both mugs onto the stone floor, and then he falls entirely silent, staring at Bastien with a lost expression.

Benedict OTA

[altusimperius]

Ia. In the Diplomacy Office

He spends all his time there now, even taking meals up the long flights of stairs to eat them in solitude, sitting folded into the chair at his desk while the Ambassador's office sits dark and quiet behind him. He only goes into it during the day, when the sunlight makes it look normal, like he's just waiting for Byerly to wake up or to come in from this or that engagement, and it continues like this for several days until he finally runs out of work to do.

Ib. After Finding the Letter

It was a choice between leaving finding more to do or leaving (and therefore abandoning?) the office entirely, and Benedict knew which one would end up thrusting him more quickly into a world of perilous uncertainty, so he's opted for the former.
What he found has stopped him dead, and he sits on the floor in front of Byerly's desk for what eventually turns into hours, holding the parchment and staring at nothing.

II. Outside Abby & Clarisse's Door

Rifters vanish. It's what they do. Unless they don't.
Late at night, when the hall is silent, and still wearing the same clothes he had on days ago, Benedict comes to kneel in front of the chamber door. He presses a rune to the ground, placing over it a black-waxed candle, up from which he curls his hand to draw a flame: an Andrastian sendoff, in the Tevinter style. Without intervention the flame won't go out, even after the candle is a puddle of wax.

solo contemplative thread (sct)

[cozen]

Bastien visits the body out of necessity. To make sure he wouldn't be embarrassed by how he looks on such an important occasion. To tuck a thin envelope into his burial shroud, just in case there is some magic in a pyre that carries things into the Fade. To let Whiskey sniff the linen in hopes it makes her understand and stop searching for him. Through all of this he avoids touching the skin—not out of squeamishness around the dead, but because he has a good memory, and his fingers would never forget the cold.

And because this isn’t Byerly. The sliver of visible eyes are vacant, with none of the misery or merriment that marked By in turns. The mouth has nothing glib nor shockingly raw to say anymore. His posture where he lies is not elegant like By was when awake or ungainly and sprawling like when he was asleep.

It’s a shed skin. It would be like caressing a clipped toenail.

Bastien does fix his hair. Or unfixes it, more accurately, to add a rakish tousle over his forehead. His hair feels the same in a way his skin would not.

When he talks, standing beside this husk of what he loved and a bewildered, bereft dog, it isn’t to the body. It’s to the air, where he imagines the Veil to be. Where a loosed soul might be pressed against the other side to try to tell him it’s alright, or he’s terribly sorry, or a dozen other things Bastien would not want to hear right now.

"That’s it? You make me believe it is all possible and then you take off? Fuck you."

It’s the kind of conversational fuck you that might answer a low blow of a joke or a particularly unexpected win at cards. He’s only a little angry. Angry enough to refuse, from behind the shutters that slammed shut as soon as Byerly's name was left off the list of survivors, to make a scene crying over the body. But no more than that.

"You promised to jump the fence for me when I get there. Remember. If you get distracted by His radiance and make me sneak in after you, I’ll be really cross about it, so—don’t forget."

That’s all. They left so little unsaid, after all, once they'd warmed up to saying it.

Whiskey, stubborn and lazy even when she isn’t confused and whining beside her unmoving unbreathing wrong-smelling master, does not want to follow him out. In the end, a little too desperate to escape the room to be patient about it, he has to crouch and heft up all eighty of her pounds and carry her.

Gallows

[sprent]

"... Julius?"

Not the first time she's called to him from the doorway of his office, palm flush on the wood. This instance is softer, more hesitant to interrupt him. He is sitting and staring out of the window and Gela does wonder if she should come back later to ask him – but that means she will have to put her work momentarily aside and she's only doing it so she doesn't sit around and, like him, stare out of windows, and cry.

Even now, seeing his grief so plainly, she has to lift a hand and touch it to the inside corners of her eyes. She sniffs. It prompts her to take a single step inside.

She has reports, is all. They're all doing an extra share, what with Byerly gone.

OTA

[cozen]

i. work.

Beginning from the early hours of the morning when the announcement is made, Bastien haunts the Diplomacy office and workroom, helping to organize documents and making sure the various half-completed efforts don't fall through the sudden, massive cracks. He does some delegation. He makes some decisions, when they fall into his lap and can't wait and aren't worth bothering the remaining Division Heads about.

But Byerly's directive to Benedict to make sure Bastien wasn't saddled the job was both entirely correct, in its estimation of what it would do to him—especially under the circumstances—and entirely unnecessary. There is very little room for it to seem like it is even somewhere on a long list of possibilities. Bastien never sits down in the Diplomacy office at all, let alone at the desk. He drags work out by the armful to his desk in the workroom. The clarifying notes he puts into some of the files are not for his own reference. Decisions that can wait are set aside for someone else, once there is someone else. Whenever he goes downstairs, he takes an armful of his or Byerly's things with him to his own room—where, privately, he is deciding what to keep and what to leave behind. He is moving out, not moving in.

But while that's a work in progress, the central tower is still the easiest place to find him during those first few days, letting cigarettes burn down while he scribbles notes and then scratches them out to try again, more slowly and carefully, so anyone else might actually be able to read them someday.

ii. post-rites.

“How do you decide,” he says to someone not long after the body burns—“the ashes.”

He is not trying to have this conversation with the ashes in hand. They’re in an urn. A bit of pottery serving as an urn. In his room, not here. He is trying to have this conversation while sitting in the dining hall and staring at a potato that he knows he needs to eat, sooner or later.

A moment to collect the words to actually put that thought into full sentences.

“If you don’t know what they wanted. Do you think it matters what they wanted? If I were a ghost watching someone throw dust of me around I think I would find it a little funny.”

iii. departure attempt (maybe) (maybe actual departure, tbd).

With different priorities, he would already be gone. The day after the body burned he would have packed a bag so small no one would look at it twice, taken the ferry ashore as if on an errand with the dog along for some exercise, and never been heard from again.

But he has, despite his better judgment, acquired things. A cello. Byerly's violin—a gift, he knows, but if anyone living has a claim to it they will have to catch him. Books from Byerly and from Ellis that he can't bring himself to leave behind. Sentimental clothing, of all things.

An urn.

Even leaving the printing press behind with a note attached to say it should belong to Madame de Foncé after the war, if she wants it, and otherwise might be sold—even so he requires a cart to move what he is taking from the tower to the ferry, and the cart clatters on the stone walkways, and Whiskey mopes along behind him and requires several pauses to wait for her to catch up.

But he does it in the early morning hours, just before sunrise, in a faint nod toward the concept of stealing away unseen.