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

[cozen]

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.

Comments

ellis.

[heorte]

open.

[heorte]

( limited to two takers, one thread. first come first serve. )

There is a rhythm to Ellis' days when he is in Kirkwall. Guard duty according to the Commander's rota. Tending to the animals at the Hightown house. Whatever Wysteria or Tony begs of him in between.

And the training yard, always a stretch of time spent in the training yard.

Today, Ruadh is stretched out in the shade of stacked hay bales, passingly attentive to Ellis' activities. There is nothing remarkable about the routine itself, how Ellis weaves through the practice dummies. He has been at it for long enough that his muscles burn pleasantly, that he is aware he is nearing the end of his practice for the day. It is rote. His mind can be elsewhere as his mace clacks off the wood.

The pain comes first, more so than a memory. As if his body parses what's happened before his thoughts can catch up.

It had taken Ellis such a long time to die. (He has been dying for so many years now. He has been dying since Joppa passed him a tarnished silver chalice almost fifteen years ago.) It was not a sudden thing. He had understood it. He had walked towards it, with Marcus Rowntree at his back.

There in the training yard, very clearly, Ellis sees the face of that Imperial soldier standing over him. Recalls how she had lifted Ellis by his ruined breastplate from where he had been crushed into the earth.

Recalls her knife. The angle at which she had punched it into him.

It staggers him. The flow of his movements dissipates as he slows to a stop, presses a hand to his side. He is warm, sweat prickling across his skin. No wound, but he knows—

Ruadh has come alert, stubbed ears pricked. Every muscle in his body has gone rigid. Not upright, not yet, but suddenly watchful, seeking for something amiss.

His mace hangs at Ellis' side, his grip tightening and loosening and tightening again on its hilt. Stood there in the sun, it is very hard to draw a steady breath. Slowly, he grows aware of how fast his breath is coming. How far from himself he feels, pushed out of his body by the tangle of emotion roaring in his ears.

Again, he thinks. It is only because he's had some practice at this that he recognizes some of what he is feeling now.

[armd]

It's hard to keep the thread of a single thought running smoothly as she walks back toward the Gallows; Abby's attention veers, left to right. Right to left, remembering each place that she wants to go and check for other people, all the busy spots. The docks, the dining hall, the infirmary, the training yard.

There is somebody standing out there, not moving.

"Ellis," she calls, when she's close enough to recognise him by shape, and the mace at his side. The last time she saw him—

Abby is trying very hard not to think about that.

let me here

[heirring]

Wysteria is not in the Gallows when the whole wrong turns itself over, and the dreadful intervening weeks come pouring in over her through a crack between universes. This is not particularly atypical—she makes a habit of charging to and fro, up and down across Hightown, and back and forth over the harbor, and up and down the fortress' various towers, and then back again on a fairly regular basis. There is business with the enchanters guilds, and shipments from Antiva to pester customhouse inspectors for, and division approved purchases to be made in the markets. To say nothing of her own business, and the web of her private solicitors, and Kirkwall governing offices (one of which is presently trying to levy an outrageous fine against her for unapproved subterranean renovations), and so on.

All that being said however, on this particular day, it is something of an imposition to be caught across the water when she would much rather be far easier to hand and where she might go racing up and down various Gallows' stairwells and expect to be delighted with whatever familiar faces she might first come across. At the very least, it might be marginally preferable to be relatively less visible from the public eye when she bursts abruptly into both laughter and tears.

But oh, they are all quite clever aren't they?

So she makes no immediate appearance. And when she does finally make it to the Gallows, she is immediately tangled up in a celebratory session of jumping around with a handful of other equally silly Gallows laundry girls who have quit their work to hoot and holler in one of the lower courtyards.

Which would, were anyone to ask, go a ways toward explaining the clean pressed men's shirt she's still wearing about her shoulders like a conqueror's cape as she comes racing up the former Mage Tower's stairs, calling "Ruadh, Ruadh! Bark twice when you hear me!"

me.

[propulsion]

There's a moment where Tony is stood outside of his office, crystal in hand, before deciding that it's not good enough. He had needed more, a little, when they were dead—putting his hand on unmoving shapes beneath the cloth, that queasy sensation of too cold, human-shaped give. Now, he still recalls Cosima's shoulders all knotted up like an overwound spring, how he'd squeezed them, and also,

the suspicion that a crystal might go ignored. Can go ignored. No, it gets dropped into a pocket, ignored first, and Tony sets out.

Not just for Ellis, necessarily, at first. The Gallows are always big and empty feeling, but everyone had noticed it over the past month, so there is something to walking down corridors and flights of stairs and catching the shape of someone moving by or the half-snared fragment of a conversation. It all feels so tenuous, like he could make a wrong turn and it would all slip back into the wrong timeline.

It doesn't take long until Tony is setting off in directions of likely spots. A walk across the ramparts, and then down, and then a calculation about the ferry schedule before he gets to dismiss this when he steps into a courtyard, the impatient stride of boot falls slowing and stopping.

welcome.

[heorte]

Reducing a training dummy to splinters hadn't steadied Ellis, hadn't drawn him back into his own skin, hadn't eased the sense of disconnect or the sharp, twisting pain in his chest.

Maybe Ellis too had made calculations about the ferry schedule and found himself obliged to wait. Had weighed the potential of taking a griffon, but a griffin's saddle doesn't accommodate Ruadh and beyond that, if he simply took to the sky, then there's a chance—

No. If this scraping, shattered-glass misery of rebirth drives Ellis into the mountains, he can't steal from Riftwatch in the process of his going.

So he is waiting for the ferry in this slip of a courtyard with it's overgrown foliage and overlarge tree. He has been slowly, methodically, assembling a joint. (It has taken a long time, because delicate work is made difficult by unsteady hands.) Ruadh has tucked himself close, sat with his chin on Ellis' knee.

The sound of footsteps brings his head up. Meets Tony's eyes and feels the vise around his chest wind miserably tighter.

Says nothing, but remains there, seated on a crumbling stone bench as the silence settles around them.

[propulsion]

"Hey."

His breath catches in his chest, which is likely as much to do with having finally stopped from marching about like he's playing a one-sided game of hide and go seek and someone set a timer, as it is to do with sighting Ellis whole and alive. And unexcited to see him, but then, only one of them possesses two whole and concurrent months worth of memory. Felt an absence.

The dog gets it. Tony twitches back out of frozen in a jaunt of a step forwards, a ceaseless path that crosses the courtyard and moves to take a seat down next to Ellis on the partially crumbled bench. Tony looks as though he's had a normal amount of sleep, has maintained a certain level of fussy grooming as is the usual, eaten right, and not at all like he's been on a three week science bender.

Inside, though, thoughts crackling across overworked synapses. Like something's bound to surge, overheat.

"Welcome back."

[heorte]

The weight of Ruadh's head on his knee is not immovable, but it is a pinning kind of pressure. Like Tony's reaction, the frenetic energy coming off him even as he settles alongside him.

There is effort involved in steadying his breath, forcing the rhythm of inhale and exhale into something slow, even in spite of how hard his heart is beating in his chest. The way his skin feels too tight, the sweat gathering at the nape of his neck.

Welcome back.

Ruadh's chin digs into his thigh. The soft huff of breath he gives is near to an answer from both of them, holding place while Ellis nods. Absorbing the sentiment.

The return of his attention to the methodical assembly of this joint gives Ellis a little space. Some room to dredge up a response; it is not unlike the process of trying to draw water from a deep, deep well.

Eventually lifts the joint to his mouth, sealing it. (Recalls Richard Dickerson, sat alongside him in a medical tent after Hasmal and Tantervale fell nearly two years ago now, lifting a flame to his mouth.) Silently, Ellis tips the joint towards Tony as he digs the lighter from his pocket.