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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That knocks him from his grooves much more surely than would an embrace or a kiss or a scream or a slap across the face. All those excesses of emotion feel reasonable, expected - trite. A spirit, a demon, a construct of the Fade, all these entities would act in trite and practiced ways. They would come from Byerly's mind and form a Bastien informed by Byerly's expectations, or an inversion of his expectations. They would not surprise.

This is surprising. And so, for the first time, By's thoughts are not focused on this is death, and he is dead with me, and I am wracked with grief - but instead, there's an introduction of another element: wait, why am I an asshole?

The irreal weakens, and the real creeps in. His collar is itchy. His ass still hurts from that chair. A seagull takes a shit before it launches itself into the air. Bastien's fingers had been so solid.

"If you're not dead - " He swallows, licks his lips. He starts to follow. His feet feel so clumsy on the cobblestones. Do dead men stumble? Do they search for something to say? Is he a reanimated skeleton? He fingers his hand, just to make sure there's still flesh there. Barely, but yes, there it is.

Then. Then the next question. The next grim conclusion. "Am I - mad? Have I gone mad?"

Edited 2023-08-21 20:29 (UTC)

“Not that I know of.”

Less kind than an outright no. No, of course not. But his eyes are scanning the street ahead, searching for any sliver of privacy that might be nearer than the Gallows. He thinks he won’t make it to the Gallows—and then he knows that he will. If he needs to. By the time they reach the stairs he will have shoved what is threatening to overflow back down, and he’ll make it the rest of the way, and perhaps go on like that forever.

Speaking Orlesian is only of so much use here. Sometimes it feels as though half of Hightown is Orlesian, and another half of the remainder speak it as a sign of refinement. But for the fourth who would not be able to eavesdrop, this way, he does switch.

“They undid it, what happened. Stark and Poppell,” first because he knows them best, “and Strange and Viktor. I couldn’t explain how.”

That is not fully true. He’s curious enough to have nosed his way into the basics. But they are, still, in the middle of the street.

"They - " The Orlesian that comes from his mouth isn't the careful Royan dialect that his mother taught him in lessons; it's the country-accented, child-directed Orlesian she spoke when she was unguarded. Too many diminutives, this language has. Vowels too broad.

"I don't understand. How did they - ? I felt it happen. I felt myself..."

Bastien is still so cool. So distant. The greatest moment of passion was when he called him an asshole. Was it something unspeakable? What they had to do? Byerly's mind flies to thoughts of elven temples and ancient sacrifices; he imagines Bastien laying his heart down on the altar, cutting out his love to bring Byerly back - Was that the plot of an opera he saw one time? -

Calm down, calm down, calm down. Of course Bastien is cool and distant. He's a Bard. That's what they do. And he wouldn't lie if Byerly had gone mad. And he wouldn't be calm if Byerly were actually a Revenant about to fall upon the people of Hightown and kill them.

Byerly touches his throat. Whole and entire. Not a hint of a scar. No; he's not a repaired corpse. He is himself.

"Where are we - going?" he asks, and his accent is more Royan now. Calmer.

“Somewhere we won’t be making a scene.”

It would be nice, maybe, if the edges of that sentence frayed. Because it’s absurd. Because the rifters changed time, and Byerly, who he last saw lying cold and unmoving with his throat only as reconstructed as possible, is walking and talking beside him. They should make a scene about that. Or at least it should be more difficult for Bastien to ignore his own thudding heart and Byerly’s lost and bewildered trust in him and to choose not to do so.

But the edges aren’t frayed. He been spending the last month setting impulses aside in the interest of not having a fucking meltdown—at least not in the usual ways—and it’s a simple matter to continue for now, when real harm might come from announcing to the occupants of any given street that Riftwatch can do time magic to resurrect the dead.

But Byerly’s accent is shifting, and Byerly remembers dying, and Byerly is touching his throat, so—alright. They won’t walk all the way to the Gallows. They’ll walk to an alcove in the stone between housefronts, framed by vines and frequented by courting lovers who want a little privacy but in a respectable way, and Bastien will manhandle Byerly into sitting on the bench there and stand in front of him like a shield against the infrequent passersby.

Aside from quick glances he looks mostly at By’s shoulder, not his face. It expands his peripheral vision, see, on the side he cannot hear from. It’s also easier. Quiet, he says, “We lost nearly all of you.”

"Yes," Byerly says. "I know. I - I saw a lot of them go, not everyone - Maker, did Yseult get out?" He realizes the question is stupid as soon as it comes out. He got out. They all got out. If Yseult died there, then she'd be back, now, too. (And yet it feels so important, for some reason, knowing that she ended up all right. Why does it feel so important? Ah, Maker, it's all so confusing - )

He clasps his hands together to stop them trembling. And then he releases them, and he lunges forward, wrapping his arms around Bastien's thighs, pressing his face into his middle. It is less a warm embrace than something desperate - like he's trying to break through some barrier. Like Bastien's skin is a closed door, on the other side of which is a warm fire and a soft bed and a nurturing meal. Like Byerly's dying of thirst and there's an oasis behind that hipbone.

"I thought - Oh, Maker," Byerly mumbles into Bastien's shirt. "Oh, my Maker."

Edited 2023-08-22 14:41 (UTC)

Bastien's hand goes into his hair. Another onto his back.

"It's alright," he says. "You're alright now."

Is that true? Byerly remembers dying. Remembers watching the others die. Alright is not a reasonable expectation, not of him or of any of the others. In the rush to make the leap as quickly as possible, to minimize any unintended consequences, there wasn't time to plan for that—to come up with some step by step program for easing this, some sabbatical while they figured out how to live in their skin again.

Bastien rubs his back. The muscles in his abdomen twitch from the effort of restraint when he breathes in and out, trying stubbornly to stay steady even though By's arms around his leg and face against his hip are threatening to loosen everything Bastien had wound up so tightly in his absence.

The hand in By's hair finds its way to the side of his neck. Not mended. Never torn at all.

"There was a pyre," he means to say, but he doesn't mean for it to sound as accusatory as it does. He doesn't want to add to the things Byerly has to contend with, he doesn't want him to be sorry, he doesn't want to make this about his own misery while Byerly has been resurrected for all of five minutes—but he does, actually, a little bit. "Whiskey didn't understand."

In many ways, though, it's far easier to be sorry than it is to be afraid. Shame is easier than confusion. The world is strange and bright and piercingly real; Bastien is remote and restrained and more solid than he has any right to be; it's all unfamiliar. But shame is something that Byerly knows better than he knows his own reflection. And an anchor tied with rough and abrading rope is still an anchor.

"I'm sorry," he whispers, "desolé, I'm sorry." Whiskey didn't understand feels like it rips into him, and he groans softly thinking of it. His poor girl, with her mournful eyes, whimpering because he was gone. Dogs feel grief, he knows. He broke her heart. Maker, will she remember this?

He finds that he's crying into Bastien's shirtfront, the cloth growing damp. "Sorry," he mumbles again, this time a simpler apology - sorry I'm fucking up your clothes.

Then - "Please tell me you love me."

Bastien hesitates, but only to try to shore up his defenses against cracking, with medium success. “I love you,” comes out both whispered and rushed, like it’s being jerked out of him. But once he’s said it, the next time is easier. “Of course I love you. I’ve been so—“

Far away from himself, with little interest in returning. He’s still resisting. Heels dug in. He knows it.

He never wanted to need anyone so much he wouldn’t be alright when they were gone.

But he can feel the dampness seeping through his shirt to his skin, and Byerly is four times sorry, and Byerly has his arms around him. Bastien twists and slides down onto the bench beside him, trying not to dislodge him, but only to transfer his clinging a little higher, to offer his neck instead of his hip for shielding By’s face.

Still, he watches the street outside their alcove. Still some part of him is thinking what explanation they might feed to the gossips later, if there’s any discussion of l’Ambassadeur weeping into Bastien’s shirt in the middle of Hightown.

He says, “I fought a dragon for you,” more wry and wondering than bragging—and not accusatory this time. Not how dare you make me fight a dragon. The four sorries were plenty.

"You - " That strangeness penetrates the fog. Byerly's tears don't stop, but they slow just a bit, and his throat loosens, and he pulls away.

(The I love you helps. It helps so much. He knows, in some distantly analytical part of his mind, why Bastien is being so remote: if Riftwatch has done some forbidden magic, if Riftwatch has disrupted time itself, then that's the sort of thing that must be kept silent. The Bard would be thinking about this. The Bard is focused and consistent in a way that the dilettante spy, the shabby Southern cousin, can't really be. He's keeping up appearances.

(But the analytical part of Byerly's mind is, right now, a tiny squeaking voice amongst the shouting terror that's seized the rest of him. And in the sudden absence of mortal danger and certain death, that terror needs something else, and he doesn't love me is an easy thing to fear. The words help to dispel the source of the terror; the cracking vulnerability of the words helps even more.)

"Metaphorically?" By asks, tentatively meeting Bastien's eyes.

Edited 2023-08-24 15:11 (UTC)

Bastien shakes his head. For a second he smiles, too—for By’s moving muscles, his bright eyes, the faint feeling of his breath across the short distance between their faces. But the smile drops away as he presses his sleeved wrist beneath each of By’s cheeks in turn, to clear the tears away. (No rubbing. Rubbing only makes skin raw and redder.)

“We needed parts,” is as specific as he will get, here. A pair of idle walkers choose that moment to rubberneck at their alcove, right on time to emphasize that that is all he can say.

He trades his sleeve for his hand, fingers splayed toward Byerly’s jaw, thumb brushing over his clumped-up eyelashes. Because he missed them. And because it separates them again, a little, and hides a little bit of the evidence of his crying.

“I love you,” he says again, in case its calming effect can be doubled, and maybe later he will consider the fact that this is the first time he has ever said it to intentionally try to manipulate or corral By into anything—“and I’m—I’m so mad at you, and I’m so happy to see your face.”

True things, even if they are being held back, muted like music through walls and closed windows.

“But we need to get to the Gallows before we do this. Okay?”

"Yes."

He's right. He is right. A few minutes ago, Riftwatch had been obliterated, and Byerly had been cut loose from its yoke. How long had the battle at Granitefell lasted? How long had he had to process that it was all over, and that they had lost? It doesn't matter; it's moot now. Riftwatch is once again a thing that needs defending.

It takes visible effort, calming himself. But it doesn't take a lot of visible effort. His fingers twist in the cloth of Bastien's sleeve, gripping him for strength. He takes a few breaths. The tears dry up; the moisture is blinked away. He fishes a handkerchief from his pocket and wipes away snot. Fingers fluff and tousle his hair artfully, and a thumb runs over his eyebrows to settle any stray hairs. And as he does, his brow smooths out, and his jaw relaxes, and his habitual expression of light irony settles back into place. And then, finally, he folds the handkerchief into an even square and tucks it away again.

It's not a flawless simulacrum of the Ambassador coming away from a dull-but-successful meeting on a hot Hightown afternoon, but it'll stand up to light scrutiny.

"Well," he says, just a little breathier than it would be otherwise, "shall we?"

Watching Byerly reminds Bastien of watching Alexandrie arrange herself. Her end results were always a little more polished, perhaps, but a similar piece-by-piece erasure of emotion. They are made the same, he thinks, her and Byerly. Unruly hearts tethered and bucking. And he is something different.

He wrote to her. And to Byerly’s wife. And to Byerly’s sister. Only a week ago, and even three weeks out from the loss the best he could manage was a few sentences for each of them, a simple statement and simpler apologies, a post-script note that he had everything of Byerly’s that he could carry and if they wanted any particular belonging they could let him know. Maybe the messages didn’t reach them before the world became one where the messages never existed. Maybe, even if they did, they won’t remember receiving them now. Maybe there won’t be any tear-stained replies or impulsive visits to Kirkwall.

And their friends here—who came closer to giving Bastien what he needed than anyone, without their own losses to mourn, tipping their glasses and telling him stories he already knew about the time Byerly did this or said that, missing him too, rude jokes and all, and only ruining it a little bit with eagerness for gory details or promises Bastien would be alright or, in Franz’ case, a friendly drunken I’m sorry kiss on the corner of the mouth that lingered long enough to become an invitation to borrow some comfort—

They will have to figure out who knows what later. Bastien nods, stands, and offers Byerly his arm for the walk.

Once they are out in the open again, making steady progress toward the stairs, he says, “A Chantry Brother traveling between abbeys lost his way in the forest,” and stops there, tone prompting, waiting for another sentence from Byerly. A distraction for the way down.

Edited (word repetition) 2023-08-25 14:55 (UTC)

As they go, Byerly affects a tiny limp. Something that will imply to passers-by, ah, yes, he must have turned his ankle; that's why he's leaning on his companion's arm like that. Because he knows he's going to have trouble letting go of his beloved, even as they're descending the grand stairs to the ferry, even if someone else is coming up and they end up running the risk of crowding that poor fool off the edge. And so there ought to be a reason for that ostentatious clinginess.

A Chantry Brother lost his way in the forest. He came upon a burning village -

"As he wandered, searching for a familiar tree or rock or stream, he heard a voice call out to him."

“The voice—“

of a lost love

of a dead friend

“—was creaking and ancient, familiar in a way he couldn’t place right away. And it said,” as they have to pause a moment at the entrance to the staircase to let someone wrestling with a full cart of goods, oblivious to any recent miracles, pass through first, “you still owe me five royals.”

When Byerly laughs, it comes out like the laugh of someone with a broken rib, or who's suffering from a bad cough.

"'Who's there?' said the Brother, looking around wildly. And then there, emerging from the mists, was a skeleton, its eyes trained on the Brother." Byerly looks down at a few scattered flowers that have fallen from the cart ahead of them. "Single eye. It had a glass eye in life that stuck around after its flesh eye rotted."

Byerly’s laugh, however precariously close to wounded it sounds, makes Bastien smile. He’s still smiling when they reach the addition of the glass eye, so it only has to widen in appreciation instead of starting over from nothing.

“The Brother knew that green glass eye, because he had been there when the original one was lost—before he was a Brother at all. When he was called Malden Two-Toes, and he was one of the fiercest pirates of the Storm Coast.”

He offers more support as they step around the cart on the stairs, playing along with Byerly’s favored ankle without needing to think about it at all.

“Ooh,” says Byerly, in unforced and unfeigned appreciation for this twist. He loves a man with a secret past nearly as much in story as in life.

“You may be wondering why ‘Two-Toes.’ It was not, in fact, because the pirate-turned holy man had two toes himself. No; in his wickedness, he had left his victims with only two toes, so that they could not chase after him.”

It’s easier, moment by moment, as the story takes over and the battleground recedes.

A voice comes over the crystal, hopeful and uncertain: "Byerly?" Are you here, is the unasked question.

Without this intervention, it’s likely that Brother Two-Toes would have a tragic backstory and a star-crossed lover by the time they reached the bottom of the stairs.

With it, Bastien face freezes a moment, mouth smiling and half-open in preparation to take his turn.

“Hello, Benedict,” he says instead, mostly as a good-mannered warning that he is not having a private conversation. He sounds perfectly polite. Too perfectly polite—not icy, never, the same way a summer day is never really icy. But maybe sometimes it’s still a little cooler than it ought to be, for summer.

The unexpected disrupts Byerly's fragile calm. The voice - familiar, in its own strange way beloved, and sounding utterly unlike how it normally sounds - brings him back to the present moment, the present unnaturalness.

"Ah," By says, and grips at Bastien's arm harder. And he forces himself to sound normal - normal - sound normal - when he answers, "Yes, Artemaeus. Did you - have something you needed?"

His fingers come up to hook around the crystal, extricating it from where it hangs on a pendant, tucked under his shirt. He toys with it.

“Bastien,” comes the prim, hesitant response of around the same temperature— oh, you’re here too— but it doesn’t deter him from his initial reasoning.

“It’s true then,” Benedict continues, wonderment in his voice, “it worked. It’s you.” He’s not tearing up, YOU’RE tearing up, etc.

Bastien glances up at By’s face, as his grip tightens, to gauge the likelihood they’ll make it to Lowtown without any further breakdowns. Even odds, he’d say, but dwindling.

So it’s protectiveness of their calm progress that makes him take Byerly’s crystal-holding hand and pull it closer to his own face. That, and a distant gurgle of jealousy. For the privilege of getting emotional. For the ability to tear up. For the damn letter.

“We’re on our way to the Gallows. We’re on the stairs,” he says, quiet and still pleasant, and then adds, deliberately insulting in its obviousness, as wheels clatter down one long step at a time and the trickle of pedestrians stomp and chatter past in the background, “in public.”

He is, mercifully, too Orlesian as to go so far as to say don’t say anything stupid outright.

Oh, Maker. Why is there such emotion in the boy's voice? Byerly looks, for a moment, openly stricken, openly helpless, before he steels himself as best he can. (His best is not very good. His expression is all right, but there's a little tremble in his hand, palpable to Bastien.)

"You're - doing all right then, lad?" By asks, his voice gruff and awkward.

In public, Bastien says, and it rankles appropriately; Benedict's eyeroll is practically audible, but he keeps any commentary to himself. Oh, so it is going to be like that.

"Yes, better-- better than ever," he replies to Byerly, getting back on track, "I'm coming back to the Gallows now." You don't need to know where he was, or what he was doing. It's fine.

Behind Bastien’s smoothly unconcerned expression, his teeth grit—but hopefully this doesn’t mean they’ll wind up on the same ferry trip. But a moment later that feels like such a stupid thing to worry about. By’s hand is trembling; Bastien squeezes it for a moment before letting it go, tentatively trusting Benedict and Byerly not to ruin all his efforts to keep from drawing too much attention.

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forgive me my typos as I forgive others who typo against me

our autocorrect which art in iPhone

hello be thigh same

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