faderift | player plot | when my time comes around, pt. 5

Entry tags:

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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

He has, actually. Been waiting. Given ten further minutes of delay and one of Emlyn's sturdier employees might have come to discuss Flint's loitering here at the corner, and whether he could be engaged to do so across the street where patrons wouldn't have to pass directly under his scowl in order to reach the public house's door. Failing that, could they at least ply him with a drink and see if the general state of affairs could be improved that way?

Thankfully for all involved, John Silver materializes and those ten minutes do not pass.

Though plenty of time has prior to this moment. It has been an hour since they spoke, and nearly twice over that since Flint had found suddenly found himself in a place he didn't remember going, faced with the abrupt appearance of a young woman nominally under his purview who he had last seen as a corpse. Some of the immediate disorienting effects have diminished; he has had time between the armory and this street corner to do some accounting of their current affairs.

"Nope," he answers, giving Silver a once over there as if he expects something to fall out of his pockets or at the very least is required to take inventory of the man's immediately visible person. Rings on all the right fingers, and so on.

Good start.

In the span of time since Lady Eulalia's parlor and his arrival here, a handful of impressions have filtered through to him but none quite fit into the great gulf of blankness that lives between this moment and what he last recalls. The certainty of parting ways with Flint that morning. A dingy collecting him from the docks, the complaints of the Walrus men assuaged and noted. Meeting Julius in the Hightown marketplace.

All of these things exist in disjointed certainty alongside what John recalls: the tether between himself and Marcus, the draining, waxing pull of Marcus drawing upon it.

He was there, and he is here.

And so is Flint, who John saw this morning and has not seen for several days past. In the beat of quiet following his arrival, John too makes a study of him. Tries to reconcile the swell of desperate relief with the understanding that they have been parted for a number of hours.

"Shall we go?" John poses, shifting his weight over his crutch. A few voices call out to him, summarily dismissed with a wave of the hand. No, they aren't staying, surely.

Right. He isn't actually stood here on a Lowtown street corner for the express purpose of laying eyes on John Silver. There is a meeting—the Aynura's quartermaster—, and they've a modest walk ahead of them if they're to make that appointment. Figures that the one of the few times they agree to meet a person on their ground rather than their own, the public house in question proves to be one of Lowtown's grimiest shit holes (the Hanged Man exempted).

Flint rocks forward from the narrow strip of shade he has been occupying. With a squinting glance in the direction of Emlyn's doorway, he moves to join the sluggish current of foot traffic flowing lazily parallel to the dockyards cheap sailors' lodging houses.

"Do you have any idea what we're meant to be discussing once we get there?"

"No," is not without some irritated humor. "I had written myself some notes to review, but I couldn't lay hands on them."

The day has contained nothing but strange happenings. Maybe that is why even now John cannot summon anything beyond irritation at the inconvenience of opening the door to his room and finding it empty of anything useful.

What's come back, structured by Julius' explanation, has not quite included what should be said to the Aynura's quartermaster.

"It'll come to me on the way," John guesses. Or if it doesn't, between them they can draw the topic of discussion out of their guest once they've all sat down at the table. "Unless you had something in your ledger to jog my memory?"

What's come back to him is all fragments, parts and pieces. Things that he might have sat and tried to wrench back into place, had it not felt so necessary to remain in motion. All things propelled him here, into Flint's company, where a specific knot of tension in his chest has begun loosening at last. It's a thankfully slow process; John is uncertain what happens when all that tension dissipates.

"Just the appointment. Though I have all your papers," is true, and comes out of him without much consideration. He'd taken them from the sea chest and combed through them when John had been a dead man. He'd taken more than just them, hadn't he? But the whole trunk?

That this is still true, and Silver isn't dead, is something which is measured only after he has spoken the thing aloud.

He slows. For a moment, it seems as if Flint might draw to a complete halt again though they've only travelled a few feet of distance to begin with. But instead, forcing some length back into his stride—

"I didn't think to review them before crossing."

I have all your papers, prompts a sidelong glance in that near-stop. A look that telegraphs a question: Still?

But even as John looks at him, he is turning over that thought in his mind. All that was missing from his room. The lack of alarm that it should have prompted raising only a buzz of annoyance.

There is so much blank space he has been attempting to account for in these past hours, but the shape this dredges up very nearly—

"We'll manage," John replies, offhand reassurance that is as instinctive as drawing breath, as the way they fall in alongside each other, the way John matches his pace without missing a step. "I'm more than capable of keeping them talking until they lead themselves to the point."

Even if it seems so painfully trivial in this moment.

"I've been trying to piece it together," is a glancing, broad extension of that sidelong look. "From what Julius was able to tell me."

Someone down the way is shouting, a rhythmic pattering bark—snapper and swordfish, cod and hake; all freshly had, though the hour of the day is late enough that fresh must be something of a flexible term. It's late summer. It's warm, and the air is salt thick and there is a thick layer of dust swirling over uneven paving stones. If it rains tonight, this street will go to mud.

Flint is not thinking much of the street, or the fact that they should be turning down the next when when they reach the end of this block. He is working at the unconnected pieces in his head, and the uneasy knot in his belly that is still insisting this doesn't make complete sense.

"Which was?"

"That the Provost's ambitions bore significant results."

Significant.

John's palm aches.

"That it's been some weeks since Granitefell, regardless of what I've been able to recall otherwise."

Weeks of life, business and work and life moving on as usual, coming to him piecemeal as he tried to reconcile the last place he stood with where he stands now.

His hand finds Flint's elbows, obliged to adjust his own trajectory along the street as a knot of merchants breeze past them. Their overlapping chatter, joyous, demands a pause in the flow of their conversation.

Flint shoots a dirty look back after them, annoyance bristling up the back of his neck like the scratch from a too stiff collar. But the shape of his elbow and the muscle bound about it is firm enough, flexing to form a habitual brace in deference to the shape of John's hand as they're coaxed along by the flow of foot traffic.

"Some weeks," he agrees.

He'd read all of John's papers, and cleaned out the drawers of the desk in his study (though there had been hardly anything that wasn't simply overflow from Madame de Cedoux's own work space); he'd taken Silver's old coat and seen it stowed in his own sea chest. —Or hung from a hook, maybe? The one inside the apartments adjacent to the division office. He's taken the rings from the man's fingers (at his elbow now) and put them in a packet and had seen it surrendered to a courier who would secure its way to Antiva. And there had been letters to write, and reports to sort, and he recalls signing a great deal of paper. Some business about Estwatch. Preparing to send a ship there. In fact here, as they reach the corner and a space opens between Kirkwall's spot stained Lowtown warehouses, if he turns his head to scan the harbor he can mark the ship in question, and to his eye it looks as if it still might be in the process of refitting and taking on stores as if it imminently means to be on its way.

It's disorienting not to hear a ringing in the ear given this sensation of double vision.

He stops there at the end of block where they should turn and take a series of stairs down to follow the zagging of the docks and shopping yards and harborfront storehouses.

"Your coat is in my apartments too."

They draw to a stop. John's fingers flex tighter at the bed of Flint's elbow.

It is close to hand, the passing thought about the ruin of his coat. John remembers carrying that minor regret down into the dirt as the life had run out of him like flowing water. He had recalled a warm, quiet room. A fire. Flint's face as he shook out the fabric. The coat itself had been beyond salvage. John remembers this.

Apparently not.

And now, beyond that, John must turn over the lack of surprise. The sensation, unmistakable, that this is not notable information. It isn't, really. John has left things behind before. It is only the circumstances that make it so—

"How many weeks?" is theoretically the more pressing question than the province of John's coat.

"Two," sounds right, though if he thinks on the specifics it becomes difficult to parse how correct that answer is. Maybe it was three. A month? Or half that time, even. Though no, it wouldn't have been possible to bring the bodies back in so short a window and—

"Long enough to strip a portion of Riftwatch's accounts and begin the business of applying it elsewhere."

He hadn't thought to check after the stacks of coin siphoned from the payroll of the decimated division. The sense that those might still somehow be set aside itches distantly between the shoulder blades.

Two weeks makes the thing no easier to parse. John has two weeks of memory. He has been assembling them as they come trickling back to him through the blankness that had nearly swallowed him in that opulent parlor.

And he has the memory of ebbing away in the mist of a losing battle in Granitefell.

The application of funds elsewhere is of some interest. But John is obliged to consider it from some distance, stood there alongside Flint at the end of a street while Kirkwall moves around them, about its business as if nothing extraordinary had happened in the course of the day. Try to overlay these two divergent paths out alongside each other.

“I’m having some difficulty,” John begins, a truer, more incisive thing transmuted by the addition of: “Caring about our appointment this evening when it seems there is something much more pressing to make sense of at present moment.”

—Is an understatement.

Flint, stood there beside him in that gap where the sea air just barely touches, says, "Okay."

So they're not going to get to seeing the Aynura's quartermaster today. Presumably, the soul in question will survive. 'Okay,' sounds like So what now?

What now?

This too, John had felt in that parlor. Julius' reaction had driven him in the opposite direction, a concentrated sort of calm rising like a pane of glass between John and the flood of new memory. It had come crashing down like the tide. As it draws back out, revealing all manner of items left embedded in the sand, John has turned over these pieces.

"Did I carry the trunk myself, or did we have one of the men cart it up for me?"

Or did Flint carry it himself?

This is a small piece of the puzzle, isn't it? It had been a blissfully simple annoyance in the moment, banging open the door and finding all his things misplaced. What a relief to simply be irritated about something common place.

Maybe it is easy to pick apart this thing, already decided and settled, than to recollect any part of what he had accepted on that battlefield.

Neither. After he'd removed the important papers and things from it, hadn't the trunk been carried down rather than up? Ported out to a jolly boat and dredged back onto the Walrus where it could remain safely stowed in perpetuity.

—Only, no. Obviously it had been. He's just seen the thing in his quarters. And if he thinks on it for longer than a moment then he recalls pausing on the central tower's third floor landing to catch their breath, and the bruise on his hip from where the trunk had been prone to bumping heavily against it.

"I did." Mostly. Maybe those last few sets of stairs has been a joint effort.

A hazy shadow of a thing: An impatient chuckle. The clunk of the trunk on the landing. Maneuvering the weight of it between them, hoisting it with punched exhales of breath, a groaned curse.

What had come before that? John has a piece of that too, indistinct. It hasn't yet come into focus, exists only as an impression and murmur.

A slight nod, this information taken in stride. Laying Flint's answer alongside the imprint of memory.

"I want a drink," he says. Finally. A point placed in front of them to supplant the scuttled appointment.

"All right."

They do not turn back up the roadway they just came down and seek out the usual slanting balcony back room at the top of Emelyn's. Instead, they proceed down this set of stairs and double back up the the warren-like footpath scribbled in between various Lowtown trade houses and brothels and pawnbrokers and lending services, and eventually find themselves in a narrow basement tavern. Little daylight penetrates in through the gutter-height window slats, and the front portion of the roughly L-shaped room is crowded by a cadre of dwarves who appear to be freshly in possession of more money than they know what to do with. Traders, or mercenaries, or Carta underlings flush with the fruit of some ill-gotten score.

There is a table near the elbow bend of the house, and drinks promptly had. A bottle, cups, a small loaf of very dark bread for sopping.

They're afforded some measure of anonymity here. Not total; there are few places in Kirkwall that John hasn't made a point of frequenting, and it serves a man to be on relatively friendly terms with dwarven merchants and Carta hopefuls.

But not so friendly that they cannot recede into the background of the room's activities. Calls for a song run round those assembled as John works the cork free, hands sure and steady on the neck of the bottle. The ache in his palm has not faded; maybe it grows stronger even as more memories come back to him, draw into clearer focus.

And carries with it a growing desire to be elsewhere, though they have only just sat down. The bottle and bread are nearly untouched. John's urge to pick up and put a door between himself and all who might observe him in this moment is set aside, for now.

The shape of some other thing shadows the tone when John asks, "Did you notice whether or not you had hold of the key?"

It stands to reason, if the trunk had been lifted out of his room, the key must surely have been relocated as well.

Flint meanwhile makes prompt use of his cup, allowing it to be only partially filled before a turning gesture of the hand—rings glinting in the thin lamp light—halts the flow of wine. He raises the cup and nips down a short sip of its contents.

No, he nearly says. He didn't take notice of a key, though he'd hardly been in the apartments so long as all that. If it's there, perhaps its in some drawer or pocket or tucked away behind a particular book on one of the room's many shelves. If that's so, hopefully the details will come swimming back to save them mounting a search.

"Do you not have it on you?"

"Not at the moment."

He hadn't carried it with him to Granitefell. This he can be certain of it; the memories of preparation for the journey overlay each other without variation. He had not brought the key along with him.

There is a book on a high shelf in those apartments, rarely consulted but not fated to be discarded on the off chance it may someday demonstrate use. There is little reason to start a search anywhere else, apart from the notion that he might have put the key directly into Flint's hand this time, rather than concealing it himself.

Relieved of the management of the bottle, John tears a chunk of the bread from the loaf. Considers his own cup.

"Did we ever discover how they orchestrated the ambush? Or was it as simple as predicting our reactions?"

"My assumption is that they'd scouts with eyes on the village and were waiting for us to arrive," he says, which is a matter of simple reasoning rather than it is fact. But somehow saying the thing aloud plucks more concrete truth forward out the jumbled shape of these last weeks. "When news of the force lying in wait reached us, we withdrew the main body riding to Granitefell. Rowntree and Adjei were sent forward in secret to survey the village and see what, if they anything, they could make of Tevinter's cavalry. I gather Granitefell hasn't suffered another attack, so it would seem likely they were only bait on the hook."

It'd been cleverly done. He might almost respect the man behind it if not for how fucking bitter the whole thing had been.

"I'd be curious to know if everyone on that side is having the same conversation we are now."

Well— A flicking glance across the table to John. Perhaps not precisely the same conversation.

Yes, it had been cleverly done. John, who had slipped from all manner of traps and threats, had been unable to see a way out of the one laid out at Granitefell.

"If they recall the resounding victory that's been tugged from their grasp, I imagine it's prompted some discussion."

Time magic, Julius had said. Would the Venatori work out that's what came to pass, how it was utilized to undo what had been orchestrated?

"I'm sorry," is an abrupt tack away from the dispassionate contemplation of their enemies, how they may or may not be grieving their defeat. His hands have settled, the bread abandoned on its wooden platter.

Is the feeling he has been carrying with him today so different than that miserable stretch of time in which he was obliged to adapt to the absence of his leg? There is some comparable quality here; the way two realities run alongside each other, the way John's awareness of what's missing is impossible to ignore. And here too, Flint is a fixed point in these swirling currents. John looks across the table at him, a conversation coming to him in echoes, resolving so slowly in the wake of John's acclimation to his present state.

It catches at him—the sharp point of a gleaming hook turning unexpectedly and finding root between the ribs. Across the table, the cup pauses part way back to Flint's mouth. Given that split second hesitation, he sets his drink down rather than continuing his nursing of it. The public house's cheap leaded cups are too soft to do much clattering when laid on a table top.

His hand doesn't so much hover over the cup as it does rest there, palm across the mouth of the vessel and fingertips hooked. If he lets it—and it would be easy to let it—, that drowning sensation that had found him on the Gallows' stairwell might easily flood in and over him here as well. So rather than wait for it to find him—

"Did I tell you what was done to me in Hasmal?" is a hypothetical question. Yes, he has. They were captured and kept in a basement awaiting passage back to Tevinter. They were asked questions. They escaped. But also: no, he hasn't. A dozen fine white scars that hadn't been on his person prior to being captured. An absent prospensity toward rubbing the joints and sinews in one hand.

This is a question they both know the answer to, and so it really must be, Do you want me to tell you now?

Had it needed to be said?

Not that night, when the business of reunion had felt so urgent. The shape of it came later, the scaffolding explanation upon which John set those new scars, the ache in his hand, and observed the shadows they cast.

Had he needed the details laid out for him? Maybe not.

Here and now, he looks across the narrow table to Flint for a long moment before his eyes shift to take in the room around them. Dwarves, dragging a barrel into the crowd. Their overlapping objections and demands. The churn of activity holding what seems to be all the attention in the place. They are two humans in a corner, and perhaps not worth more than the cursory glance.

Perhaps it would have been better to solicit Emleyn's back room. To put coin in the hand of the first unoccupied boatsman they came across to shuffle them back to the Gallows. But they are here now, and the question has been laid, and John looks back to meet Flint's eyes as he answers, "You hadn't."

Invitation. The question hadn't been raised for no reason, even if the invocation of Hasmal raises more immediately the recollection of a rocky beach, a canvas tent, a fire burning itself out in the sand.

He turns the cup between his fingers. It's a compulsive, unthinking movement; as the lines of his face are somewhat prone to betraying the sentiments running behind them, James Flint doesn't sit half so well as he likely imagines he does.

"Ayaz Tagaris, a Magister. I never worked out whether his purpose there had been to capture us, or whether it was unhappy coincidence. Either way, he was the man responsible for our capture, and charged with extracting whatever information could be had from us until some blood mage could be brought up either from out of the Marches or from deep in Tevinter to see the questions reduced to obligations."

It is loud enough here that these things practically constitute as private regardless of how many bodies are in close proximity to them. They might as well discuss some secret of the war itself and be trust it to travel no further than the edge of their table. Anyway, he is speaking to John and not to the room, and the difference is significant enough to separate the one from the other.

"Tagaris made up for the deficiency with some measure of creativity. Putting a body in a bath, and turning the water to ice. Broken knees, broken fingers; healed knees, healed fingers, and the whole thing done over again."

(A knife in Yseult's gut, leaving her to bleed and shiver in the dark. This, somehow, feels too private to mention. He isn't discussing Yseult, or how tired she'd looked when the survivors had first returned from Granitefell.)

"I realize," he says, turning his thumb up from the edge of the cup. It's halfway to an open handed gesture. Occasional imagined ache or no, the joints remain dexterous enough. "That it's possible for the ghost of a thing to linger even where it logically no longer belongs. It will pass."

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the breaD

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