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

[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.