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

[thereneverwas]

The person across the desk has the distinction of doing exactly the same thing, jolting violently as though awakening from a falling dream. He croaks the word "beat," as he does, half-inhaling, followed immediately by a cough as the cigarette drops from his mouth-- he has the presence of mind to crush it out with the toe of his boot while otherwise staring downward, dumbfounded.

When he finally lifts his gaze, it's to see Marcus sitting there, and it both makes sense and doesn't. A surge of admiration, of terror, and then Barrow coughs again, like he's trying to work blood out of his lungs that isn't there.

[luaithre]

Recognition of Barrow comes just as he blurs to Marcus' eye, and his own fierce and wary focus muddies, dulls, as tears prickle to the surface on a delay. Delayed but unable to be helped, when he'd felt feeling drain from his hand beneath the press of Julius'. Here, in the present, the next breath out has a frustrated rasp to it as he snatches his watery focus away, sets both hands against the edge of his desk.

Focusing on the hard edge of it under his palm, while the dry reflexive coughs from Barrow buy him some time as he tries to wrangle his composure, some internal amount of leash hauling.

"What is this," is half-whispered, and only aimed at Barrow after the fact with a glance back over.

[thereneverwas]

A wordless, pathetic sound escapes Barrow as if in response, and for the briefest of moments his expression mirrors Marcus', complete with stinging eyes. Dead, they're all dead, it's all pointless, they've failed, so...

...so what is this, indeed?

He narrows his eyes at the documentation in front of him, then looks at Marcus once again, shaking his head in mute bewilderment. "We're," he rasps, hunts for the word, and settles on:

"...alive?"

[luaithre]

It's a flicker of a question: should he be? Who is to say he shouldn't be? He's come back from the brink of death before, never mind that intellectually he knew that Derrica hadn't been called to Granitefell, that Dickerson was no longer even in this realm of existence. Who's to say, even so, that the darkness he'd slipped into was the kind that should last?

Except he does know. Had heard it in Julius' voice, had felt it in the way he could feel himself pulling away from the moment as if his consciousness were as liquid as the blood pumping forcefully out of wounds.

A subtle shift of shoulders confirms that is no deep, puncturing wound by his spine any longer.

And then, a jerk of focus, a wrench from internal to external, back to Barrow. "I saw you," and his tone has more substance to it, this time, if no louder than a moment ago. Characteristic brogue a little thicker for it. "Where you fell. You were dead."

[thereneverwas]

"I," Barrow counters, sunken back in the chair slightly, looking at his own chest: no arrows, it rises and falls without complaint. "...I wasn't." Not yet. It felt like years that he lay there, listening to the sounds of battle dwindle. He thought he'd heard Marcus fall, but now he isn't sure.

He absently rubs a hand over his throat, his eyes fully meeting Marcus' for the first time. "I thought you were." And as for himself, there's no reason he should be here, should have no memory of how he came to be bleeding out slowly to sitting upright in this office.

[luaithre]

Oh.

It doesn't change much, save for the way this adjustment produces in Marcus a vaguely sickened twinge, formless. Amounts to the same, anyway. Barrow, dead or dying, grievously wounded in the dirt, and not sat here, whole, respectable.

Marcus doesn't sit back in his chair. His posture is that of someone who is about ready to spring to his feet, a hand braced against the desk edge and now one wandered to the arm of his chair, but he doesn't, remaining poised. Barrow says I thought you were, and the next heart beat pushes ice through the arteries.

"Aye," is quieter, more texture than volume. He keeps coming back to that, the certainty of it in his body and in Julius' voice, and the absence of that other man is as off-kiltering as any other part of this. More so.

Prise his own hand off the chair arm to dig thumb and forefinger over the bridge of his nose, up near the eyes.

[thereneverwas]

Engaging with this too closely would be a disaster, it would be an unraveling. Barrow drops his gaze from Marcus to the surface of the desk, willing himself to hold it together, pushing down the terrible strangeness to be processed later, preferably alone. When he glances up again, he sees something rather similar happening across from him.

"All right?" he asks automatically, stupidly, because he not only isn't sure he wants to know the answer, but he wouldn't answer that himself.