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.

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[ipseite]

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.

[luaithre]

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.

[ipseite]

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.

[luaithre]

The strike to his chest is absorbed, doesn't stop him. That he puts his arms around her isn't entirely to do with preventing her from doing it again—she could, and she can—but something akin to noticing a pattern of breaks in something made fragile, in wanting to collect the pieces and hold it together.

"I know," Marcus says, a warm mumble into her hair.

No trace of horse or griffon. No volcanic smoke or dirt or sweat. His clothing is perfumed only in whatever it was laundered in and a recent cigarette.

[ipseite]

“All of this time you have been dead and I have been so toweringly angry with you—”

her fingers clutch convulsively at the front of his (hated, dreadful) jacket, not resisting him but feeling more like something caught and held than pliant. It has been a brittle agony, held barely at bay, and the release is a relief without an outlet. Trusting that it's real and feeling that to let go is not to break apart entirely are two thoroughly different things,

she feels like glass. Not delicate, but shards.

[luaithre]

Holding onto her is a mutual kind of arrangement. Something he can imagine that Petrana might (deep down) appreciate but it is just as much for himself. Marcus hadn't wished her onto the battlefield but had, for a delirious moment, attempted to recall in detail their last parting, and hadn't been able to discern one from the other, a shuffled deck of moments.

Here, he can invite in detail, even if the trapped muscle tension of her posture is not the giving pliancy of a shared embrace, even if her voice is strung through with distress and anger, the clutching fingers at his coat. It is all good, it is all her.

"It was a trap," against her hair. "We were lured and hunted. It wasn't—"

It was no blaze of glory, not really. A remote chance at seeing that a few of them lived. Maybe he'd turned the tide, maybe the riders'd simply gotten bored before Julius and whoever else made it out. Maybe they'd done what they'd come to do and it didn't matter.

He takes her back into his hands, cradled up around her jaw and throat, as gentle as it is intrusive. Looking at her. "I might have died running as well as fighting," is a bid for understanding.

[overharrowed]

It has felt like trying to wade through syrup. Waiting for the ferry with John, the ferry over itself, all the Maker-damned stairs. He has rushed the entire way, and it still feels interminable, the time it's taken since the awareness of what had happened and pushing open the door to their room.

(Unlike Marcus, he didn't check the offices first; in the amount of time it took him to come back, he expects most nonessential work will have been abandoned for the day.)

Despite all the rushing, Julius isn't flushed but rather a bit gray around the edges, in a way Petrana has seen before and Marcus has not. He's dressed immaculately for some Hightown function, trousers and tunic, care taken with the outfit by a man for whom Marcus was never dead. But the expression is all the Julius who'd lived through the counterfactual: hope and wariness over a grief he hadn't known how to handle any more than Petrana had.

For a man with a quick word always at the ready, he finds himself fully at a loss for what to say when it's true, and Marcus is standing there, holding Petrana's face.

[ipseite]

It is true. It is true, and had been starkly obvious in the aftermath — it isn't as if all of those cut down were battlemages, certain to have remained in the fray. More than a few of the dead more than likely died in the process of attempting to flee, or help others to do so; the way her willingness to acknowledge it wavers has very little to do with whether or not she understands it, or how true she believes it to be.

“And I would not have forgiven you any the sooner,” is—

a sort of understanding. An acknowledgment of something. An acknowledgment that it wouldn't have mattered; that there was not a version of his death she would have felt differently about, however she might cast about for a justification for those feelings. The order of things is not: a fact, and then a feeling. It is: a feeling, and heaven help what's in its path.

Which has mostly been Julius, who has borne the weight of trying to grieve alongside her vibrating fury, and there is something nearly apologetic in the way that she turns to reach for him.

[luaithre]

There will come a point where it's assuring, that anger at him is an indirect thing, rage as grief, and nothing within his control.

That point will come when there has been time for reflection, when the news of how it is he is even here isn't mere seconds away from having landed. Now, there is only a spike of frustration for not having that control, of saying unforgiven, of a formless and not entirely rational hurt that (at least) allows him to ease his grasp of her so that she can turn without struggle or needing to wrest from him.

Mostly because Julius is there, now. If he was not, perhaps Marcus might have held on all the tighter.

One hand drops. The other lingers, finding a place along the slope of her shoulder and neck. Petrana is already reaching for Julius and Marcus doesn't have to do the same to convey that he would prefer that the other man do as she says, and come closer.

[overharrowed]

It had been a parallel grief: the terror of feeling a gulf opening between him and Petrana, the helplessness of not knowing how to bridge it to reach her. He'd like to think, in the worse world where they had to live without Marcus, that they'd have found a way back together, even with an ugly scar to show for it. The reality that they don't have to know (at least not now, not this time) hasn't fully registered for him as he reaches for them both with equal amounts of relief, even if the sources are different.

"I didn't think it would work," he blurts out, as one hand catches Petrana's fingers and his other hand goes to Marcus's arm. If it sounds like an apology, that's not an accident, as he continues, "I told Stark I didn't think it would work, when he asked me, I almost..." He doesn't think the four rifters who spearheaded the project would have actually been deterred. Even so, the sense that he could have undone this still shakes him the in moment where, miraculously, they're reunited.

Even the concrete evidence of Marcus's arm against his hand doesn't full dispel the fear that this is somehow a trick, when the memory of Marcus's hand going cold against his chest is still so vivid.

[ipseite]

A desire still lingers to — to bolt, to take this moment and find her steadiness with it by herself. Between them is a better place to unbend, to gather up all of that fight and let herself tangle her fingers with Julius's instead, to be prevented from going further. It's hard for it to feel real that it has worked, that it is not just something conjured up in her head to finally have something, someone to shout at—

“There was nothing but to try regardless,” she says, less clear if she had believed it possible or if it had just seemed impossible not to at least make room for the prospect of it being so. “Riftwatch would not have survived in its shape— to act while we still had the ability to do so...”

She takes a breath. Less that Julius steadies her but that now that the three of them are together, she focuses her efforts on breathing out some of that harsh tension.

[luaithre]

It occurs to Marcus, very immediately, that stepping into this room and dodging thrown things and trying to hold Petrana while reasoning with her about the circumstances of his death is a very different thing to registering that odd shock in Julius' tone. That even as she had told him what had happened, there was something simpler about processing this all as if this were another near miss. That this was a homecoming, not so different from any other instance.

And then it is. Different. Marcus looks from him, to her, the painfully familiar little circle the three of them make. The catch of her breath, steadying. His arm lowers to bracket across her shoulders at the same time his other slips beneath Julius' arm to curl around the torso.

That way, he can gather them to him, or him to them, the press of his forehead into Julius' shoulder like a very belated (but also, not very belated, as far as he can tell) follow-through of the impulse he'd had, laying in the dirt, to hold him closer than he'd been capable of.

[overharrowed]

Julius has the dim thought that it might be a relief to cry, but he doesn't just now. Instead, he responds by returning the embrace fiercely. He carries the weight of those last moments in Graintefell and the heavy weight of the weeks he can remember following, and it's enough that he might shake apart if he lets go.

There are enough things that he wants to say that they choke one another in his throat, and he can't manage to say any of them. He just holds on, a hitch of breath in lieu of a reaction that might feel like more of a catharsis. Overwhelmed. Frozen, in contrast to Petrana's initial fury.

[ipseite]

In the midst of that very conscious determination to relax into this, there is a muffled, “I'm sorry,” which might not be clearly directed by the way she eases into Marcus's grip except that she continues, “for the way that I have behaved, these past weeks,”

because it has been different. Because this was not the same as other frights that Marcus has given them. Because he was gone.

[luaithre]

These past weeks induces yet another disorienting lurch in him.

But at least when it happens this time, Marcus is being gripped fiercely, and he can feel Petrana giving in to the way he's drawn her in against him. There's the impulse to echo her, I'm sorry, but stifles it in the moment. Here, high up on Julius' back, the fabric drawn there under a fist.

[overharrowed]

It takes him a moment before he can say, "I didn't know what to do for you." And though it's a response to Petrana, it's not only that. Not when he can so clearly remember the helplessness that marked what he thought were his final moments with Marcus. It had felt like a warped mirror, both of them slipping away while he wasn't even sure what to try to hold them close.

It seems like he might leave it there for a moment, but instead he says, without pulling back: "Peter and I were walking around the battlefield, after. Looking for survivors, supplies, you know, whatever we could find before support arrived. And he found a healing potion almost right off. I almost broke the flask in my hand because what good was finding it then?" He speaks quietly, but it's something he hasn't said to Petrana before, either.

[ipseite]

How could he have known, when it had so eluded her? She had wanted—

she nearly laughs, both at the terrible misfortune of a healing potion past the point of no return and the fact that simply, she had wished to be angry with Marcus. To shout at him and throw things at him and tell him how terrible he was for dying, and little wonder then that she feels so drained of it all now. Now that he's here, and she has, and what is she ever to do if this happens again?

If he were to die, or Julius, and there is no Provost Stark to bring them back to her to tell them what vexatious and unkind men they are for leaving her alone.

Her fingers find Marcus's, and she clutches him tightly as she buries her face in Julius's chest. “I had nothing in me left for kindness,” she says, “I couldn't bear it, but I couldn't bear to be away from you, either.”