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

Entry tags:

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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

( limit to three takers. one thread, first come first serve. )

Lady Eulalia has a lovely parlor.

Having become a regular guest to her Hightown estate, John is familiar with the trappings, the little things that are set out to impress this guest or that. Today Lady Corrina is in attendance, sighing over her newest husband and his mother in law. John can surmise that is why Lord Temo is not in attendance, and why Lady Anelie is seated by the far window. Serah Norwood has been tipping something from his flask into his cup again. Were John not seeking their generosity, he might have made his excuses. Perhaps abandoned his companions to the mercies of Hightown society; it's a relatively informal gathering, what is the worst that could happen?

And there is nothing Lady Eulalia loves more than an uproar at her gatherings. It is why Lady Sasha and her boisterous husband are continually invited.

Lord Demir has been talking at length about the play itself; his great-grandmother was Antivan, a patron of the arts, so in her honor he must contribute, perhaps enough for a dragon—

Abruptly, John is aware of a sharp pain in his palm. There and gone, no cause when John turns his hand to look, except that he remembers...

"Break them," Marcus Rowntree had said.

John's hand closes over this phantom ache.

Lord Demir has continued to speak, so comfortable with the concept of a captive audience that he startles when John sets down his own cup.

"Have I mentioned to you that Agnia was questioning the Antivan history of puppetry? If you've the expertise, than far be it for my recollection to stand as her basis for understanding."

It is a smooth redirection. Hardly any work at all.

And it buys John the requisite time to simply step out of the room into the cavernous hallway. Look again at his palm. Try to shake off the very vivid recollection of life siphoning away from him, of falling.

"Fuck," is the most eloquent summation one might manage, with a brief look around the hall to see who might have followed him out. "Did you feel that?"

Feel as close to the thing as John can get without saying it outright.

Edited (html woes) 2023-08-20 08:08 (UTC)

This is the sort of thing Petrana would usually be at, but Julius is a member of Diplomacy, and it's important that he show his face in Kirkwall rather than exclusively maintain correspondence with farther-flung contacts. He's dressed not to intimidate today, Marcher clothes and not robes, though he has his staff; he'd calibrated the message as precisely as everything else. Petrana would, of course, be expecting a full report, both tactical and probably entertaining; he'd assumed she'd compare his notes and John's. Or she would have expected the report, until the bottom fell out of reality.

It's likely that Julius murmured some sort of covering pleasantry upon leaving the room, but maybe he didn't, given that his face has gone fully white as he appears in the hall only a few moments later. "Andraste's fucking tears, it worked," he says quietly, which is probably not immediately helpful. But given how overtly shaken he looks, at least safe to assume he also felt something. His hands are trembling.

The disconnect is so stark that John is momentarily unable to reconcile being stood here in an opulent Hightown estate and the bloody field that had filled his vision moments ago. The sense that he has been displaced can't be reasoned away, even when it is at such clear odds with his surroundings.

Some cosmic joke has put Julius in front of him, rather than Marcus. Or maybe it is a favor. The sense of unreality could only have been intensified by finding the pair of them in that room together when only minutes ago John had used his own blood to link them.

"What happened?" is such a broad question that even John isn't entirely certain what answer he wants.

What happened on that battlefield?

What worked, miraculously enough to put this expression onto Julius' face?

"I assume I wasn't drive to hallucination by Lord Demir."

Except how can he be here? He wasn't. They weren't.

He shakes his head: no, you haven't been or maybe no, I can't joke about it. Either way, he says, "It's too much to explain in Lady Eulalia's hallway, but it's ... you didn't hallucinate. You died. Everyone there but five of us, it was a." There's no good word to put there. He exhales, and that trembles a bit too.

"We should make some excuses and go, I can explain on the way back to the Gallows." Because he needs to be going that way soon, and he assumes John will likely also want to regroup. Whatever's meant to be happening here, they're unlikely to achieve it now. And is it even that important, in comparison? (Everything is important, a part of him things; but everything isn't equally important, another part counters.)

Everyone but five of us.

John is good at figures. He understands, immediately, the number of people slaughtered that Julius implies with even this brief accounting of survivors.

And John among them. (He knew this. He had known it when he'd offered a torn, blood-drenched palm to Marcus.) Marcus among them, if Julius' reaction is any indicator. And which others? It is a morbid kind of guessing game to try and parse who might have been lost. Jude or Jayce? Clarisse or Abby? Cosima or Florent? Marcus or Theophenia? Val de Foncé or that new young rifter?

(Gwenaëlle?)

"I'll make our excuses," John says, because Julius is pale as a sheet and John is not. "I had another appointment to account for today, regardless."

This comes so, so distantly to John, without knowing fully to which appointment he refers. The duties at hand are all of a sort that are surely no longer relevant: ministering to the displaced at Granitefell, what he had been discussing with Abby, what he'd proposed for Clarisse.

Where is James Flint in this moment? John must know but in this moment, he can't lay a hand on exactly where he might find—

He grips Julius' shoulder briefly, a tight squeeze as he passes back into the parlor. The conversation carries, indistinct but surely predictable. Their apologies, John's excuses, promises of a luncheon in the weeks to come, please, there will be tickets for the production should they get it off the ground, of course...

And in a matter of minutes, John reappears in that cavernous, silent hallway.

Julius nods his thanks and they go. When they're outside, either because he was waiting to get out of earshot or because it took him that long to collect his thoughts, Julius speaks again.

"I'm not entirely sure where to begin, but it's ... we're here now because of fairly massive time magic." His voice is pitched such that it would be hard to casually overhear, but John can catch it clearly enough. "Provost Stark spearheaded the project. For those of us who lived, it feels like it's been weeks since Granitefell. I'm not entirely sure when it is now relative to when I expect it should be, I imagine we'll sort that back at the Gallows." There's so much to explain that he's still trying to sort through the components even as he starts. They've both been thrust into an unfamiliar present, even if their paths there diverged sharply.

He's not as shaken as he was after Granitefell itself, but however many weeks it's been for him, it's certainly not been enough for him to process everything that happened. Layering it unhappening on top has left him more than a little agitated, for all that he's hiding it better now that he's had some time after the initial shock.

There is a few beats of quiet.

"I've an appointment," John says slowly. Does he? The sense of having been unmoored persists, makes it difficult to reconcile with the present moment. He has an appointment. Is that true now or not?

"How massive?" comes as if picking up a dropped thread, little expectation of discussing what obligations may await John regardless of this rupture in reality. A spell as great as Julius alludes to must have carried some severe risk in its undertaking. Had the Provost begged permission, or simply gone ahead with it?

"Massive enough that they needed the buy-in of the organization as a whole, more or less," he says, muted. "We had to coordinate a fair number of raw materials, including a substantial quantity of dragon blood." John presumably knows enough for that suggest a scale in and of itself.

Julius rubs his wrist absently, his staff on his back and leaving his hands restlessly unoccupied.

"The thrust of it was a coordination between several of the surviving rifters. Stark, Mme. de Fonce, Strange and Viktor. Stark had Flint and Yseult's buy-in before he informed the rest of us, but it was." A shaky laugh. "I told him I didn't think it would work. Fuck. Sorry." He would love to give John a more solid and coherent account, but he's doing his best under the circumstances.

John Silver's palm aches, a raw slash of pain that has no cause, originates from nowhere.

The absence of his sea chest, among a handful of other items, from his room should be cause for real concern. But it is slow in coming, exists as a nagging confusion at the edges of his mind as he moves through Kirkwall.

The disorienting sense of lost time (because what else can John resolve the feeling into, if not lost time?) lingers. The wave of fatigue passed quickly and hasn't returned, but the flashes of a battlefield, Marcus Rowntree turning away from him, gouts of fire bursting from a dragon's mouth, those images remain. Nagging at his attention while DeGroot hems over lumber prices.

When they part ways, DeGroot continues his descent to the docks. John maneuvers his way into Lowtown, seeking a familiar figure.

They saw each other earlier in the day, John is certain. They've spoken since the world reoriented itself around him in Lady Eulalia's parlor. The nagging sense of things misplaced and lost dig at John as he moves briskly past clusters of pedestrians and merchants. Emlyn's tavern is already bustling when John marks Flint, weaves past a salesman with a wooden crate of parakeets to fall in alongside him.

Hadn't they seen each other? Why does it feel as if a long stretch of time had passed?

"You haven't been waiting long?" is the first thing he asks. The pinch at his brow has lingered for hours, followed him from Lady Eulalia's estate and accompanied him all the way here. It loosens slightly when Flint comes into view, but doesn't fade entirely.

He has, actually. Been waiting. Given ten further minutes of delay and one of Emlyn's sturdier employees might have come to discuss Flint's loitering here at the corner, and whether he could be engaged to do so across the street where patrons wouldn't have to pass directly under his scowl in order to reach the public house's door. Failing that, could they at least ply him with a drink and see if the general state of affairs could be improved that way?

Thankfully for all involved, John Silver materializes and those ten minutes do not pass.

Though plenty of time has prior to this moment. It has been an hour since they spoke, and nearly twice over that since Flint had found suddenly found himself in a place he didn't remember going, faced with the abrupt appearance of a young woman nominally under his purview who he had last seen as a corpse. Some of the immediate disorienting effects have diminished; he has had time between the armory and this street corner to do some accounting of their current affairs.

"Nope," he answers, giving Silver a once over there as if he expects something to fall out of his pockets or at the very least is required to take inventory of the man's immediately visible person. Rings on all the right fingers, and so on.

Good start.

In the span of time since Lady Eulalia's parlor and his arrival here, a handful of impressions have filtered through to him but none quite fit into the great gulf of blankness that lives between this moment and what he last recalls. The certainty of parting ways with Flint that morning. A dingy collecting him from the docks, the complaints of the Walrus men assuaged and noted. Meeting Julius in the Hightown marketplace.

All of these things exist in disjointed certainty alongside what John recalls: the tether between himself and Marcus, the draining, waxing pull of Marcus drawing upon it.

He was there, and he is here.

And so is Flint, who John saw this morning and has not seen for several days past. In the beat of quiet following his arrival, John too makes a study of him. Tries to reconcile the swell of desperate relief with the understanding that they have been parted for a number of hours.

"Shall we go?" John poses, shifting his weight over his crutch. A few voices call out to him, summarily dismissed with a wave of the hand. No, they aren't staying, surely.

Right. He isn't actually stood here on a Lowtown street corner for the express purpose of laying eyes on John Silver. There is a meeting—the Aynura's quartermaster—, and they've a modest walk ahead of them if they're to make that appointment. Figures that the one of the few times they agree to meet a person on their ground rather than their own, the public house in question proves to be one of Lowtown's grimiest shit holes (the Hanged Man exempted).

Flint rocks forward from the narrow strip of shade he has been occupying. With a squinting glance in the direction of Emlyn's doorway, he moves to join the sluggish current of foot traffic flowing lazily parallel to the dockyards cheap sailors' lodging houses.

"Do you have any idea what we're meant to be discussing once we get there?"

"No," is not without some irritated humor. "I had written myself some notes to review, but I couldn't lay hands on them."

The day has contained nothing but strange happenings. Maybe that is why even now John cannot summon anything beyond irritation at the inconvenience of opening the door to his room and finding it empty of anything useful.

What's come back, structured by Julius' explanation, has not quite included what should be said to the Aynura's quartermaster.

"It'll come to me on the way," John guesses. Or if it doesn't, between them they can draw the topic of discussion out of their guest once they've all sat down at the table. "Unless you had something in your ledger to jog my memory?"

What's come back to him is all fragments, parts and pieces. Things that he might have sat and tried to wrench back into place, had it not felt so necessary to remain in motion. All things propelled him here, into Flint's company, where a specific knot of tension in his chest has begun loosening at last. It's a thankfully slow process; John is uncertain what happens when all that tension dissipates.

"Just the appointment. Though I have all your papers," is true, and comes out of him without much consideration. He'd taken them from the sea chest and combed through them when John had been a dead man. He'd taken more than just them, hadn't he? But the whole trunk?

That this is still true, and Silver isn't dead, is something which is measured only after he has spoken the thing aloud.

He slows. For a moment, it seems as if Flint might draw to a complete halt again though they've only travelled a few feet of distance to begin with. But instead, forcing some length back into his stride—

"I didn't think to review them before crossing."

I have all your papers, prompts a sidelong glance in that near-stop. A look that telegraphs a question: Still?

But even as John looks at him, he is turning over that thought in his mind. All that was missing from his room. The lack of alarm that it should have prompted raising only a buzz of annoyance.

There is so much blank space he has been attempting to account for in these past hours, but the shape this dredges up very nearly—

"We'll manage," John replies, offhand reassurance that is as instinctive as drawing breath, as the way they fall in alongside each other, the way John matches his pace without missing a step. "I'm more than capable of keeping them talking until they lead themselves to the point."

Even if it seems so painfully trivial in this moment.

"I've been trying to piece it together," is a glancing, broad extension of that sidelong look. "From what Julius was able to tell me."

Someone down the way is shouting, a rhythmic pattering bark—snapper and swordfish, cod and hake; all freshly had, though the hour of the day is late enough that fresh must be something of a flexible term. It's late summer. It's warm, and the air is salt thick and there is a thick layer of dust swirling over uneven paving stones. If it rains tonight, this street will go to mud.

Flint is not thinking much of the street, or the fact that they should be turning down the next when when they reach the end of this block. He is working at the unconnected pieces in his head, and the uneasy knot in his belly that is still insisting this doesn't make complete sense.

"Which was?"

"That the Provost's ambitions bore significant results."

Significant.

John's palm aches.

"That it's been some weeks since Granitefell, regardless of what I've been able to recall otherwise."

Weeks of life, business and work and life moving on as usual, coming to him piecemeal as he tried to reconcile the last place he stood with where he stands now.

His hand finds Flint's elbows, obliged to adjust his own trajectory along the street as a knot of merchants breeze past them. Their overlapping chatter, joyous, demands a pause in the flow of their conversation.

Flint shoots a dirty look back after them, annoyance bristling up the back of his neck like the scratch from a too stiff collar. But the shape of his elbow and the muscle bound about it is firm enough, flexing to form a habitual brace in deference to the shape of John's hand as they're coaxed along by the flow of foot traffic.

"Some weeks," he agrees.

He'd read all of John's papers, and cleaned out the drawers of the desk in his study (though there had been hardly anything that wasn't simply overflow from Madame de Cedoux's own work space); he'd taken Silver's old coat and seen it stowed in his own sea chest. —Or hung from a hook, maybe? The one inside the apartments adjacent to the division office. He's taken the rings from the man's fingers (at his elbow now) and put them in a packet and had seen it surrendered to a courier who would secure its way to Antiva. And there had been letters to write, and reports to sort, and he recalls signing a great deal of paper. Some business about Estwatch. Preparing to send a ship there. In fact here, as they reach the corner and a space opens between Kirkwall's spot stained Lowtown warehouses, if he turns his head to scan the harbor he can mark the ship in question, and to his eye it looks as if it still might be in the process of refitting and taking on stores as if it imminently means to be on its way.

It's disorienting not to hear a ringing in the ear given this sensation of double vision.

He stops there at the end of block where they should turn and take a series of stairs down to follow the zagging of the docks and shopping yards and harborfront storehouses.

"Your coat is in my apartments too."

They draw to a stop. John's fingers flex tighter at the bed of Flint's elbow.

It is close to hand, the passing thought about the ruin of his coat. John remembers carrying that minor regret down into the dirt as the life had run out of him like flowing water. He had recalled a warm, quiet room. A fire. Flint's face as he shook out the fabric. The coat itself had been beyond salvage. John remembers this.

Apparently not.

And now, beyond that, John must turn over the lack of surprise. The sensation, unmistakable, that this is not notable information. It isn't, really. John has left things behind before. It is only the circumstances that make it so—

"How many weeks?" is theoretically the more pressing question than the province of John's coat.

"Two," sounds right, though if he thinks on the specifics it becomes difficult to parse how correct that answer is. Maybe it was three. A month? Or half that time, even. Though no, it wouldn't have been possible to bring the bodies back in so short a window and—

"Long enough to strip a portion of Riftwatch's accounts and begin the business of applying it elsewhere."

He hadn't thought to check after the stacks of coin siphoned from the payroll of the decimated division. The sense that those might still somehow be set aside itches distantly between the shoulder blades.

Two weeks makes the thing no easier to parse. John has two weeks of memory. He has been assembling them as they come trickling back to him through the blankness that had nearly swallowed him in that opulent parlor.

And he has the memory of ebbing away in the mist of a losing battle in Granitefell.

The application of funds elsewhere is of some interest. But John is obliged to consider it from some distance, stood there alongside Flint at the end of a street while Kirkwall moves around them, about its business as if nothing extraordinary had happened in the course of the day. Try to overlay these two divergent paths out alongside each other.

“I’m having some difficulty,” John begins, a truer, more incisive thing transmuted by the addition of: “Caring about our appointment this evening when it seems there is something much more pressing to make sense of at present moment.”

—Is an understatement.

Flint, stood there beside him in that gap where the sea air just barely touches, says, "Okay."

So they're not going to get to seeing the Aynura's quartermaster today. Presumably, the soul in question will survive. 'Okay,' sounds like So what now?

What now?

This too, John had felt in that parlor. Julius' reaction had driven him in the opposite direction, a concentrated sort of calm rising like a pane of glass between John and the flood of new memory. It had come crashing down like the tide. As it draws back out, revealing all manner of items left embedded in the sand, John has turned over these pieces.

"Did I carry the trunk myself, or did we have one of the men cart it up for me?"

Or did Flint carry it himself?

This is a small piece of the puzzle, isn't it? It had been a blissfully simple annoyance in the moment, banging open the door and finding all his things misplaced. What a relief to simply be irritated about something common place.

Maybe it is easy to pick apart this thing, already decided and settled, than to recollect any part of what he had accepted on that battlefield.

Neither. After he'd removed the important papers and things from it, hadn't the trunk been carried down rather than up? Ported out to a jolly boat and dredged back onto the Walrus where it could remain safely stowed in perpetuity.

—Only, no. Obviously it had been. He's just seen the thing in his quarters. And if he thinks on it for longer than a moment then he recalls pausing on the central tower's third floor landing to catch their breath, and the bruise on his hip from where the trunk had been prone to bumping heavily against it.

"I did." Mostly. Maybe those last few sets of stairs has been a joint effort.

john silver.

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as always with tags this old, we can handwave if you prefer

flint.

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