faderift | player plot | when my time comes around, pt. 5

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player plot | when my time comes around, pt. 5

WHO: Everyone!
WHAT: Everything's fine and we're going to have feelings about it.
WHEN: August 15 9:49
WHERE: Primarily the Gallows! But potentially anywhere.
NOTES: We made it! You are all free of my tyrannical plot grasp! There is a final OOC post with some notes + space for plotting here.

This is a timeline where, some mild chaos aside, things for the last month have carried on as normal. Riftwatch hasn't lost anyone at all. There were no funerals. The work continued. The late afternoon of August 15 may find people at their desks, in the midst of meetings or debriefs, in the library, in the sparring yard. Or maybe afield, seeing to errands or meetings or missions somewhere else in Thedas. Maybe, if they are particularly unlucky, they are deep in conversation with an ally or embroiled in combat with an enemy agent at the precise moment when the magical connection between two realities closes and the diverging timelines snap together into one existence.

At that moment, everyone forgets what it is they were just doing. Instead they remember what they might have been doing in the world where a third of Riftwatch's number was lost, despite their hands suddenly occupied with the normal business of handling pens or swords or books they don't recall picking up.

For the always-living, it may feel as though they have been magically transported somewhere new mid-thought. For the dead—the formerly dead, the might-have-been dead—it will feel as though they have just woken up. Perhaps they'll have a vague sense of a dream they now can't recall, in between their last conscious moment amid the blood and screams in Granitefell and awakening just now in a quieter world, or perhaps they'll have a sense of nothing at all.

For a few hours, the worse world will be the only one anyone can remember. Over time, memories of the other world—the only one that really exists now—will filter in, competitive with other memories in a way that might require everyone to double or triple check whether they wrote a letter or completed a mission in that timeline or this one. But the memories of death and dying will never fade into anything less real.

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The dimensions of this room are perfectly familiar. He can tell what time it is from the slant of light coming through the windows (late afternoon) and the air is permeated with the after-scent of cigarette smoke.

It's a different kind of smoke than the one he'd just been recalling. That smoke had been heavy with char, burned flesh, sulphur, the kind of smoke that pours thick and black up into the sky like ink. The ash of buildings and bones, not just dried leaf, fine paper. He is sitting at his desk when he last remembers being on his back. He is trying to apologise, and catch his breath to do so.

In front of him are notes, his handwriting somewhat scratchy and big, notes of—(he isn't reading it, but they are notes around a training schedule for the Forces division on anti-siege weaponry and the drilling there of).

He isn't reading. He's drawing in a sharp breath, the chair legs scraping slightly on the wooden floor where he jerks backwards from his desk, some, still seated. Raises a hand and grasps at his shoulder, which feels—perfectly fine, and not like it's been shattered at all, and his heart is beating fast but healthily, not the quick weak pulses of a dying animal. It's not as immediate as all that, because it's like he'd been asleep and is waking, and like there is some formless stretch of nothing between laying on his back in the mud and now sitting here in his desk, but also,

how to make sense of it? Marcus grips the edge of his desk with his other hand, and then snaps focus to the other person in the room sitting on the other side of his desk, as if realising, in that same moment, that they're there.

The person across the desk has the distinction of doing exactly the same thing, jolting violently as though awakening from a falling dream. He croaks the word "beat," as he does, half-inhaling, followed immediately by a cough as the cigarette drops from his mouth-- he has the presence of mind to crush it out with the toe of his boot while otherwise staring downward, dumbfounded.

When he finally lifts his gaze, it's to see Marcus sitting there, and it both makes sense and doesn't. A surge of admiration, of terror, and then Barrow coughs again, like he's trying to work blood out of his lungs that isn't there.

Edited (html) 2023-08-22 05:52 (UTC)

Recognition of Barrow comes just as he blurs to Marcus' eye, and his own fierce and wary focus muddies, dulls, as tears prickle to the surface on a delay. Delayed but unable to be helped, when he'd felt feeling drain from his hand beneath the press of Julius'. Here, in the present, the next breath out has a frustrated rasp to it as he snatches his watery focus away, sets both hands against the edge of his desk.

Focusing on the hard edge of it under his palm, while the dry reflexive coughs from Barrow buy him some time as he tries to wrangle his composure, some internal amount of leash hauling.

"What is this," is half-whispered, and only aimed at Barrow after the fact with a glance back over.

A wordless, pathetic sound escapes Barrow as if in response, and for the briefest of moments his expression mirrors Marcus', complete with stinging eyes. Dead, they're all dead, it's all pointless, they've failed, so...

...so what is this, indeed?

He narrows his eyes at the documentation in front of him, then looks at Marcus once again, shaking his head in mute bewilderment. "We're," he rasps, hunts for the word, and settles on:

"...alive?"

It's a flicker of a question: should he be? Who is to say he shouldn't be? He's come back from the brink of death before, never mind that intellectually he knew that Derrica hadn't been called to Granitefell, that Dickerson was no longer even in this realm of existence. Who's to say, even so, that the darkness he'd slipped into was the kind that should last?

Except he does know. Had heard it in Julius' voice, had felt it in the way he could feel himself pulling away from the moment as if his consciousness were as liquid as the blood pumping forcefully out of wounds.

A subtle shift of shoulders confirms that is no deep, puncturing wound by his spine any longer.

And then, a jerk of focus, a wrench from internal to external, back to Barrow. "I saw you," and his tone has more substance to it, this time, if no louder than a moment ago. Characteristic brogue a little thicker for it. "Where you fell. You were dead."

"I," Barrow counters, sunken back in the chair slightly, looking at his own chest: no arrows, it rises and falls without complaint. "...I wasn't." Not yet. It felt like years that he lay there, listening to the sounds of battle dwindle. He thought he'd heard Marcus fall, but now he isn't sure.

He absently rubs a hand over his throat, his eyes fully meeting Marcus' for the first time. "I thought you were." And as for himself, there's no reason he should be here, should have no memory of how he came to be bleeding out slowly to sitting upright in this office.

Oh.

It doesn't change much, save for the way this adjustment produces in Marcus a vaguely sickened twinge, formless. Amounts to the same, anyway. Barrow, dead or dying, grievously wounded in the dirt, and not sat here, whole, respectable.

Marcus doesn't sit back in his chair. His posture is that of someone who is about ready to spring to his feet, a hand braced against the desk edge and now one wandered to the arm of his chair, but he doesn't, remaining poised. Barrow says I thought you were, and the next heart beat pushes ice through the arteries.

"Aye," is quieter, more texture than volume. He keeps coming back to that, the certainty of it in his body and in Julius' voice, and the absence of that other man is as off-kiltering as any other part of this. More so.

Prise his own hand off the chair arm to dig thumb and forefinger over the bridge of his nose, up near the eyes.

Engaging with this too closely would be a disaster, it would be an unraveling. Barrow drops his gaze from Marcus to the surface of the desk, willing himself to hold it together, pushing down the terrible strangeness to be processed later, preferably alone. When he glances up again, he sees something rather similar happening across from him.

"All right?" he asks automatically, stupidly, because he not only isn't sure he wants to know the answer, but he wouldn't answer that himself.

Their offices are right there, Petra's closest. Once free of his own, recklessly leaving the door hanging open in his wake, he checks them first. Feels some unbidden spike of irrational anxiety when the doors, both, stay locked fast. If he thinks to go for his crystal, he elects not to touch it—and it's highly possible it simply stays forgotten in his coat pocket, by the time he's near-angrily pushing off from Julius' office door and marching his way down the stairwell of the central tower with the intent to get to the other.

The people who would compel him to stop in his tracks are few and far between, and don't appear, and so he continues unimpeded, unseeing of anyone else he storms past.

By the time he makes it to the hallway with their room, surging adrenaline has been spent on that many flights of stairs, pausing for a moment to master quickened breathing. Tastes blood. Or maybe not, he hasn't exerted himself that much, maybe that's just what he remembers, because he does remember it, all of it, vivid little nasty details in the foggy haze.

He moves, grips the door handle, feels his heart leap in a more hopeful direction when it gives and he doesn't need to search out the key, pushing into the room as if on a mission.

What she had been doing a moment ago, Petrana cannot be sure. Perhaps she's late to something — certainly she must be, an outfit set out for her on their bed that suggests she had had plans today in Hightown, and her hair is still loose and she has not got further in dressing than her petticoats and stays, sat at the end of the bed crumpling her fine skirts beneath her weight, gazing at the open wardrobe where Marcus's coats are hanging undisturbed.

The last she remembers—

she had been reading the letter he had written her, conscious that if it were to work she would (presumably) not have another opportunity to do so soon. Perhaps, she thinks, he will have to write another one, since she's read it.

Her hairbrush, boar-bristle and bone, is a warm weight in her hands for being held for so long. Marcus is probably not expecting it to come flying at him when the door opens.

He is not.

But instinct takes over, registering on a basic level the swift wind back of her arm and then a projectile— so he ducks aside enough for the hairbrush to go hurtling past his shoulder, clattering somewhere behind him. He does not retrieve it, even if that might be a good cover for retreat. Doesn't think to. Steps into the room, the door dragged closed after him with a negligent catch of his hand at the edge.

The other hand is already placating, hovered between them, as if she were a spooked horse or griffon. "Petra," is all he can think of to say.

“All of these were gone,” she says, gesturing to the wardrobe, inaccurate in its imprecision but certainly speaking to some great sentiment, if not — probably — one that would make a great deal of sense in this moment. In this moment, no, she looks—

frazzled, furious.

“You were gone.”

A glance to the wardrobe does not reveal anything to him that would make this make more sense than it does. You were gone catches somewhere in his chest, but it's formless, whatever it catches upon. There is little he can be certain of right now.

So it's a natural thing to focus on what he can be certain of. She is frazzled, furious. He would like her to not be.

"There was an ambush," he tries. A step forwards. "At the village. A dragon, Venatori, riders."

The nearest thing to her to snatch up — with more than a little threat in the gesture — when he starts to move toward her is one of his boots, and there's a moment when she fixes it in her grip where the awareness of what it is she's picked up nearly

something. Whatever it is, that split second of not quite faltering, it is still agony.

“I am most certainly aware—” comes out much louder than she even seems capable of producing a sound.

Marcus stops as she hefts the boot, at the hiked up volume of her voice. Alright, says the splay of his raised hand.

"Then you've the advantage," he says. "I don't remember coming here," and that sensation he would not identify as 'white noise' but is nevertheless the best description of it begins again to fill his senses, the immense disorientation of it, the lurching moment of seeing another man alive after seeing him dead, even the harsh brightness of daylight when the sky had been black.

He wants, badly, to close the distance between them, but stays. He wants it less than he wants to avoid her harming him in a way that'd have her feel bad later.

"I don't know what's happened," is a little more transparently helpless.

The best and kindest thing— she should explain. She knows what he does not; had sat in her office penning misinformation in conversational letters as if her heart had never broken, as if he were perhaps only in the next room, buying time and less scrutiny to manage this exact thing. To bring him here, again, hale and hearty and home where home has less to do with stone and hearth than it does herself, and Julius, and this stolen-back time.

She grit her teeth and carried on and they made it so and what thing in her has broken so dreadfully that she cannot only be glad. That she is so angry, now, her gaze falling to the coat he's wearing and her face screwing up as she says, nonsensically,

“I hate that coat. I have burned that coat.”

He doesn't look down, but does glance to his raised wrist, because he hadn't taken any note of what he is wearing, only that it isn't his armor—silk lined and nicely tailored, the coat in question is grey with a blue thread run through it, a little embellishment at the folded sleeve and silver clasps and buttons stamped with floral patterns. The kind of thing he would select for a day of office work, meetings,

with no recollection at all of that decision, but he must have made it, which makes as much sense to him that it should be on his body now as it makes sense to know that she had burned it.

He turns his focus back to her, registering that slightest indication of crumpling. Internal implosion. Doesn't make an approach, yet, but does say—

"Would you like to again?" with the rare hint of humour, if a little desperate.

—no, never mind, he does step forwards.

The twitch of her fingers is not no, but there is a wonderful thing about the Lamorran practise of magic — which feels, itself, imprecisely inaccurate as a descriptor but for lack of something better — which is that it requires true purpose. Effort. It cannot be expended inadvertently or thoughtlessly except by one who has cultivated that behaviour and made it ordinary in themselves; the words and gestures that would shape that impulse into reality require will behind them.

Those are not the words she wishes most of all to shout at him, in this moment.

“I would like you to expend even a moment upon trying to come home to me— I would like! To see that you not prioritise first and foremost how you might fling yourself into the maw of inevitability—! One iota of self-preservation,”

the boot takes flight, at this point, so he can demonstrate some by ducking again,

“God forbid a sacrifice ever be not yourself!”

It glances off a shoulder as he turns aside, and it might sting—from the intent of it more than the impact—if not for the battering of the words that precede it, and continue after it.

But he'd been waiting for it, and now that it's done, he continues across the room before she might get her hands on the second one, or some other object in range. Taking her wrists in his hands, first, lest any claws come out, but his grip is more gentle than firm. She could twist out of it if she truly wished to.

That flicker of humour is gone, of course, it wasn't going to last anyway.

"I'm sorry," he says. "I promise it wasn't like that. It was—"

—awful, and yes, maybe he could have survived it. Maybe if he cut his losses, waded through the chaos, found Julius, convinced him to be selfish too, they could have escaped. But that it never struck him as a possibility means that could is only as useful as, say, one could eat glass, if they set their mind to it.

But all of that is a little more complex than what he is capable of articulating, here and now. He knows, now: he did die, this happened, and now he is alive, and both things are true, somehow, as evidenced by the shape of her mouth, the line at her brow.

His hands squeeze, a pulse, as he asks, "Did Julius come back?" with the slightest fracturing at the edges of his tone.

Edited 2023-08-21 02:35 (UTC)

“Of course he did,” is unfair, a spiteful twist to her mouth when he takes her by the wrists — and it tastes no less bitter to her, by the downturn of her mouth, the stiff unwillingness in her shoulders to relent. She has held herself so tightly, these past weeks, and in this moment it's all she can remember: holding so still not to strike him, until the restraint was its own separate ache.

"Good."

Barely audible, that word, and barely felt, what should be a rush of relief. It has a lot to compete against, but it's there, and he stands upright and contained with the knowledge that if he were alone in this room, he might find the opportunity to weep into his hands with the desire to exorcise himself of all of it. It writes, some, in his expression, a flinch of tension.

More than that, though, Marcus can feel the overwound tension in Petrana's arms, her tensely held posture, not so unlike his own.

"Petrana," he says, a little steadier. His hands gentling further but not parting the loose circle his fingers have made around her wrists. "This is true, isn't it?"

The Fade has proven itself to do strange things. Increasingly, there is the sense maybe this is just some strange thing. The idea that this could be something different from reality is the sort of thought he can't entertain for more than a second lest it completely unravel him. That loosened grasp doesn't tighten again, but does shift up higher on her forearms.

"I'm home with you, now," is something he desperately wants to be true.

Petrana has not forgiven him for dying.

Among the other things that are true, that is true, and what a terrible, awful, stupid thing to be stumbling over while he is gripping her so tightly (and gentler, then) at the very edge of his own ability to comprehend the impossible thing that's befallen him. A moment ago he was dead (he was not dead, these past weeks, but she cannot recall—), he lay where he had fallen in the dirt and the blood that Julius had taken his staff from and now he is before her, wild-eyed and deserving of a softer landing.

“You died,” she says, unwilling yet to relent, “and then that thing undone, time unwound, new orders given— as if,”

her mouth twists,

“as if it had never been.”

Only she cannot stop remembering it.

The worlds the Fade can build have proven to be deceptively intricate things, and if he wanted to, he could persist in believing something else.

Historical precedent says, however, that Marcus would sooner believe the thing in front of him anyway. The warmth of her skin against his palms and the flush to her face, the slight twinge between his shoulderblades he gets when he's been at his desk for too much of the day, the dust motes in that shaft of light. Whatever existential anxiety had begun to fray at his nerves is mercilessly dispatched.

Time unwound, and there's the release of a small breath out. Some new impossible thing. Standing by, helplessly, while new emotion crests into place, about as controllable as tidal shifts, crashing waves. Relief, here. For all her words have landed with some precision, he didn't wish for death.

"Maker," he murmurs, "Petra," and possibly risks real physical harm to his person as he pushes past the invisible boundary he's been careful of up until now, his hands lifting to take her face between them. Here, a kiss laid off-centre to her mouth, and then her brow, her hair.

Edited 2023-08-22 01:51 (UTC)

Marcus surges forward and she stiffens, her hands tightening into fists as he takes his newly regained life into his hands—

she bursts into tears, and it feels like bursting, like a dam breaking. It is not a gentle moment; one of her hands smacks into his chest, harder than play but given little momentum in the space that isn't between them, and she says, “I have had no where to put it,” desperately wounded.

player plot | when my time comes around, pt. 5

marcus rowntree.

just a normal day. closed to barrow.

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