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

[elegiaque]

Her first attempt doesn't come as swiftly as her grip; the slight flex of her fingers where her palm rests over his chest, trying to come to grips with the suddenness of going from that battlefield to this room. Florent, Florent, Florent. Where is he, if she's here? Is he safe? Is she safe?

You're alright, you're alright.

“Pianoforte,” she starts, a bit blank. “The pianoforte. Wine. Oh, I've spilled the wine,” a quiet, foolish distress in the face of how certain she is that she doesn't remember picking it up.

[portalling]

Stephen’s never heard her so small, so lost, and some undefinable ache lances through him at the sound of it; normally Gwenaëlle is so confident, so utterly sure of herself, and that disparity leaves him more shaken than anything else.

The wine? Was that what that noise was? Not the universe breaking, then — except it still feels like it did.

“It’s fine, you can probably afford another bottle. Three more things, please.” Her fingertips digging into the cloth of his shirt, his still lined up along the knobs of her spine: a tether. He would let go except that Gwenaëlle’s still grimly clinging onto him, a woman drowning in her own parlour, and so he stays there huddled by her side.

“And what are four things you can feel?” he says. “The wine counts.” And his solid presence counts, probably, but the point is to let the woman reabsorb her surroundings at her own pace. He’s never been particularly good at bedside manner, but: he can walk her through these regimented steps to re-focus and stave off the panic, just as he himself had once been taught.

[elegiaque]

“I can feel—” a grimace, her nose wrinkling, the way she sinks sideways to roll her knees off of broken glass and fit in against his side, “glass. I can afford another one of those, too,” is promising, in that it is just this side of snippy.

(And it's two glasses, but she can't see both stems yet.)

“The decanter. The rug. I feel the hardwood, the wine, the glass, and you. I'm— I am in Hightown.”

Her accent is thicker for the effort that it takes not to just switch to Orlesian, the necessity of speaking trade to him itself a sort of tether, an anchor to the realness of what's happening. In a dream, would it matter what language she spoke to him? What sort of fucking afterlife would dump her in Kirkwall.

[portalling]

“Good,” Stephen says, and for the first time he finally has the space to feel that relief uncoiling like some snake relaxing its grip around his lungs, where it had been steadily pressing the air out of him. He breathes for the first time in three weeks; almost laughs before he bites it back, it would feel insane to sit on her floor laughing in giddy exuberance, but by god, they did it.

Gwenaëlle’s a little calmer now, less like a prey animal about to claw off its own skin and bolt out of the room, less waking up gasping from the impact of that morningstar crashing through her ribs. Is it time yet? Maybe it’s ripping off the band-aid too soon, but he’s always liked explanations, has seized on them like a lifeline himself, and he thinks having an explanation for this incomprehensible experience might be better than Gwenaëlle thinking she’s losing her goddamned mind.

“I’m sorry for what I’m about to say, and it’s complicated, but— whatever you’re remembering, it was real. You and others died at Granitefell, Gwenaëlle. We cracked time magic to rewind it and stop it it from happening. This— must mean it worked, we undid it, we fixed it. You’re back. You’re alive.”

[elegiaque]

It is significantly better than thinking she's losing her goddamned mind.

It is— unhinged, frankly, the thing that he's said. The ramifications of it are presently beyond her. It feels impossible, except it is also the only thing that makes what she's currently experiencing make any fucking sense because the truth is she doesn't need him to tell her that it was real; that isn't the part she's doubting. As long as she now lives, she will remember what it felt like to die,

but maybe he's allowed this, too, to be real. They — him and what army? Stark? he wasn't at Granitefell, this sounds like something he'd do — cracked time magic and unspooled the already done thing and now she's here, and her knee hurts from the broken glass embedded through her skirts, and his hand is warm, and in that case Florent must be alright, which is a relief. She was dead and now she isn't.

“No one's going to come to my third funeral,” she says, into his shoulder. “They're going to say, fuck off, I'm not falling for that again, and that's going to be that, I hope you know.”

[portalling]

That dislodges it, finally: her comment shakes a surprised laugh loose, Stephen’s ribcage shaking with amusement beneath her hands. He shifts his grip from her shoulderblades to the back of Gwenaëlle’s head instead, fingers curling into the chaotic mass of her hair, trying to give a reassuring pat to whatever he can reach, with her head tucked into his shoulder and face hidden.

“Fool me twice, et cetera,” he says, but that giddy stupid relief keeps welling up in his throat. The satisfaction of a job well-done, a hail Mary succeeded against all odds. He threw his lot in with Tony Stark and it worked, again, his faith in their own ability to move mountains validated. Are fifteen other people having variations of this conversation at this exact moment? What a miracle.

“But this was only my first one for you, so selfishly, I think you deserve some slack.”

Humour is a crutch, is recapturing normalcy, is reaching for some familiar shape. Gwenaëlle Baudin is back and she’s cursing again and therefore some small part of the world is thankfully, blessedly, settling back into place.

[elegiaque]

Curls wound into pinned up twists form an elaborate style that is starting to lose its cohesion by the way Gwenaëlle has burrowed in, heedless of pins and placement— a maid's particularly thoughtful work earlier this morning now a casualty of time travel. The pressure of leaning on him and the grip of his fingers pushes it a little lopsided when she tips her face up, wet-eyed but not teary.

The world still feels upended around her. She should move, but the thought of doing so seems immense.

She starts to say something like, why us? but it isn't, actually, that hard to see the clean, straight line from what happened to what's happening. They're hardly the first to die in this war, not even the first among Riftwatch's own to give their lives, but it's clear: you and others. Granitefell was a fucking massacre, how many made it out alive? Did anyone?

What would they have done, if not this?

If the options were break open the concept and reality of linear time or rejoin the Inquisition, she thinks, pawing unsteadily through the logic as she can envision it, if anything this seems like less of a gamble on outcome.

“You'd have hated the Inquisition,” is a bit incoherent. Or maybe it isn't.

[portalling]

“So I gather. I somehow have the impression they won’t have been fans of a bunch of rifters thinning the Veil and ripping open reality to, how did Tony put it? ‘Get all our husbands back’.”

Stephen’s been crouched down in an uncomfortable position this whole time but he finally executes a similar roll off his aching knees, shifting to sit down ignobly on the hardwood floor beside Gwenaëlle instead.

And echoing her phrasing moment ago: “I’m going to be insufferable about this, I hope you know. Local time sorcerer rewinds time, saves lives. I’m going to be coasting on this collective Riftwatch goodwill for the next six months minimum.”

It was a massive group effort, of course, there was no way in hell he would’ve been able to do this by himself,

but he can joke.

[elegiaque]

Gwenaëlle casts him a sidelong look that's more amused than it isn't, even as she draws her knees up and starts — sort of absently — picking broken glass shards out of damp fabric and her skin. The thin, dark fabric makes it hard to tell by sight rather than texture what's wine and what's blood, which spares her something that might've otherwise been much more of a jolt, although.

Mostly, she hadn't seen. She remembers looking down at Florent, pale and afraid, and feeling—

she starts making a pile of the shards. Says, “Stark might let you have a small sub-heading. If you're good. Local engineering genius cracks time, also a sorcerer was there or something,” panning out one free hand, as if imagining the headline somewhere. In a broadsheet from across the Marches or, god forbid, she still remembers Twitter.

[portalling]

“Ah, fuck that. I’ll volunteer to write the report myself. Any opportunity for good press.”

It feels indescribably nice to hear that ghost of humour from Gwenaëlle again, in the ebb-and-flow of this odd conversation. Realising what she’s doing, Stephen tries to pick some of the glass out of the thigh of his trousers as well, but his nerveless fingers slip off the wet, slippery pieces. His mouth purses. And the next thing which slips off his tongue is a real question rather than banter:

“Are you— alright? I know it can be a lot. Not to make it weird, but I’ve died before and rewound time, so I can— understand, a bit, of what you’re going through. The cognitive dissonance is hell, but I try to hang on by remembering where I am in the moment afterwards. The wine, the glass, the pianoforte.”

Had he told anyone about Dormammu before? He doesn’t think he has, but it turns out it’s astoundingly relevant now.

[elegiaque]

When he asks if she's alright, the first response — tellingly — is a choked laugh, not so quiet that the edge of hysteria in it is likely to go unnoticed. Her instinct is to say of course I am because the likelihood of there ever being a scenario in which that isn't her instinct is so slim as to be irrelevant. If this isn't it, maybe there's not one.

Eventually, she says, “That is weird,” which isn't a criticism. An observation. It doesn't seem like entirely his fault that it's weird, or even mostly.

Funny, she thinks. The wine, the glass, the pianoforte. Ordinary things to tell her where she is. Cope with having died, actually died, the same way she's always managed convincing herself that she's not actually in any real danger. Breathe. Look around. Ground herself. Focus. She thinks, fleetingly, of the rift where they'd discovered she could close them by herself, and how they'd discovered it, and then she thinks there's probably a joke about not having got her husband back in here somewhere if she really tries but then, she thinks, better not.

He's talking about it like ... not just once. I try to hang on, like more than once, like ... strategies he's had to come up with. She still hasn't said how she is, but she asks, “How many times was that?”

[portalling]

So about that.

Stephen hesitates; an uncharacteristic thing, because he’s used to just flippantly tossing alarming comments into conversation to get a rise out of her, but this is a little different, a little more delicate. “Uh,” he says. “Well. To be honest, I lost count— More than dozens, I think, by the end.”

It’s not trying to outdo or one-up her tragedy; his tone is just gentle, straightforward, this is a thing that he is saying. The point is the overlap and this unusual, unique sympathy extended across the gulf. He has been there. He knows what this feels like.

“I trapped a powerful entity, Dormammu — basically a demon — in a time loop. We were trapped in there together, where he killed me over and over again. I kept him there until he grew tired of it and tired of me and, basically, I annoyed him into agreeing to bargain. Until then, I died.”

Gwenaëlle doesn’t know what Groundhog Day is, but it was Groundhog Day; somewhat darkly funny if you overlook the visceral memory of it all. He remembers the deaths and how they felt: impaled on spikes, crushed beneath a meteor, crushed between Dormammu’s massive fists, incinerated by a spell, doing battle and losing over and over again, knowing he was going to lose. He remembered that pain each time he reset, each time he stepped back onto that rock with an incongruously intact body and started it all over again.

“Your brain splinters a bit, holding those multiple sets of memories, maintaining several truths at once. But it will settle. I promise it’ll settle.”

[elegiaque]

Basically a demon, he says, so off-hand, like he hasn't just described what sounds like the worst sort of Harrowing. It isn't as if she knows much about what a Harrowing entails, but enough from all the mages in her life these past years that the connection comes readily— though, she supposes, if something like that were taking place in a Harrowing, he wouldn't have lived on the other end.

(It's hard not to wonder, at once, if there have been Harrowings that should have, could have been survivable and were not survived. Almost certainly, no one who could answer her about her aunt is still alive to do so.)

“Irritated someone into getting bored of killing you,” she says, instead of immediately reckoning with the idea that she's going to remember these past weeks (since she died)— “that does sound like something you'd do.”

[portalling]

The corner of his mouth ticks upward. His words have had their desired effect: Gwenaëlle Baudin is ribbing him again and therefore all’s right with the world.

“Asshole,” he says, but it has the warmth of relieved grudging affection behind it. “But it does, doesn’t it? I am nothing if not perpetually on brand.”

Her presence beside him is oddly comfortable but the hardwood floor is increasingly not, and his trousers are wet. It’s a wonder no one came running at that sound of glass breaking — but it hadn’t been accompanied by raised voices and screaming at each other, so perhaps none of the servants want to interrupt their lady unless explicitly called for.

Finally, reluctantly, Stephen disentangles himself from her; it’s like gently prying loose a cat, releasing its claws wound into his shirt. He briefly clasps his hand over hers and squeezes once, an unspoken reassurance, before clambering back to his feet with the tinkling of glass in his wake. He reaches out that hand afterhands, offering to help pull Gwenaëlle back up to her own feet; as he’d once pulled her out of the mud at Starkhaven.

“This is my first time working time travel here,” he says, unnecessarily, thinking aloud, “and it’s like— timelines collapsing as they merge, maybe? Because I don’t remember coming here. I’ll need to compare notes with Tony.” Ever the researcher and academic, even now —

He doesn’t voice that small desperate fear he’d had that they wouldn’t manage it. That it wouldn’t have worked. Or that even if it did, it was entirely possible that his own original consciousness would have been snuffed out as the universe course-corrected.

Don’t think about it, Stephen.

Instead they’re standing in the wreckage of their wine and the wreckage of a lost timeline, but she’s here and alive and hopefully that means the others are here and alive and the rifters probably deserve a raise. And a nap.

[elegiaque]

Accepting the hand up — Gwenaëlle pulls a face as her wet skirts fall across grazed knees and shins, where she'd knelt in the glass, and glances down at the mess that she's choosing to interpret as being actually Tony Stark's fault for doing time travel. She'll ring for someone to deal with it shortly, she decides, looking up to take in the room around them, where they are. That they are here, particularly, penetrates for seemingly the first time; absorbing the details of it for more than only a catalogue of reality.

Pianoforte. Right.

“I've heard about time travel before this,” she says, “something about my aunt, some other things. But I don't know what that was like. I don't remember anything except Granitefell, yet.”

[portalling]

“Me either. I mean— not Granitefell specifically, I wasn’t there, but,” floundering a little, grasping for the right words, “I remember the aftermath. What we did. We built a machine and we sent Gela, Mobius, and Benedict back to warn you all not to go. I stood at the portal to keep it open.”

It must have worked. Because a moment ago, surely, he was still wrenching that portal open and waiting for their return — and it feels like he hasn’t slept in weeks, because actually, he hasn’t really. His consciousness is running on fumes even if this body isn’t.

But he only has one friend with a house in Hightown and a pianoforte. Looking around the room, he could put two-and-two together, mostly, about where they are. Stephen has been to Hightown and he’s been to Val Royeaux; he recognises the style this maison is imitating.

“The last I knew, though, I was in the basement of the Gallows. This is your house, yes?”

[elegiaque]

“The de Coucy residence,” she says, sinking down onto the nearest low chaise. “My grandfather arranged it for me when the Gallows became an Inquisition outpost in the first place — he comes and goes, my cousins are here, now.”

A certain preference for precision can net a lot more information in conversation from her than is really necessary; she could have just said yes, or even, yes, approximately, or yes, sort of, and any of those answers would have been perfectly sufficient. It's not as if he doesn't know about the boat.

Still.

“We were going to play the pianoforte. I remember that, I mean not...today, I remember that conversation we had, before you went to Orlais.”

[portalling]

“Yes. I suppose perhaps this time we—”

They finally got around to it, after Orlais?

A mad thought occurs to him, flint striking on steel. Stephen starts patting down his pockets with the absentminded and slightly frazzled look of a man who forgot his wallet somewhere, but then he reaches into a trouser pocket and finally finds what he’s looking for. Pulls out a small chapbook bound in twine. There’s a splotch of blood-red wine on the cover, which he sweeps off and wipes clean on his clothes; it’s slightly stained, but thankfully isn’t soaked. An odd sense of relief grips him and he clutches it a little too hard, fingers digging into the soft paper, before he crosses to stand in front of Gwenaëlle’s chaise. Clears his throat.

“I promised you this. Kind of had to break reality to get it to you, but here you go,” and with that small smile still tugging at the corner of his mouth, a little sheepish and a little pleased, he holds out the book. The latest publication from one of her favourite Orlesian poets.

[elegiaque]

Something about the sheer absurdity of sitting on a chaise in a house her grandfather rents for his grandchildren, with wet, bloodied knees that stink of wine unable to recall the journey or even the past week (month—) and finding herself presented with a book of poems that in another version of his life she would not have ever lived long enough to read—

her fingers close around the book. She teeters for a moment on the brink of tears or hysterical laughter, and looks down at it, instead, says,

“I didn't take you for quite that passionate a devotee to the arts,” instead of giving way to either impulse. “But Orlais wouldn't consider it excessive, only unlikely.”

She is all at sea, and not even on her boat.

“Merci,” when she trusts herself to look up, and she's still clutching the chapbook a little too tightly when she pivots both because she needs the information and because she needs to pivot. “Florent Vascarelle— he was alive this whole time?”

[portalling]

“He was, yes.” Answered confidently, not because Stephen knew Florent at all or had even seen him much in the aftermath, but because he knew the list of all the dead. Had memorised it, even when he’d never spoken to any of the deceased. They deserved that much. He’d had to treat the bodies. The least he could do was memorise all their faces and names.

“He’s—” fine is likely the wrong word, he can’t attest to that, “alive and will probably be very glad to hear from you. I didn’t spy any naked elf dance parties through the window while you were away.”

These pivots are a little safer, and easier than examining the half-formed nascent impulse which had put that book on his desk; it was the same stubborn determination which once had him wearing a broken wristwatch for years. A reminder of what needed fixing.