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

[propulsion]

The clatter and splash of a full cup of tea is enough to draw focus. The thin, quick sounds of breathing do the rest.

To Cosima's perspective, she is only alone for a second, and then, the sound of fast footsteps. Tony appears, and if there is a minor hesitation before he approaches—well, it's a split second, silent, and then he's there, around the desk, his hands on her shoulders before he can really help it or consider whether that's helpful to her personally.

"Hey," he says, not a greeting, a bid for attention, focus. "You're okay. Holy shit."

[youwonscience]

"What the fuck?" she asks, feelingly, but she leans into his hands and not away. Her breathing is still a little fast and shaky. "How am I not in Granitefell?" is code for how am I alive?, or maybe a request for Tony to tell her whether or not she's just had a vivid break with reality. Given Rifters' connection to the Fade, she doesn't think the latter is out of the question. Either way, she's grateful that he was in his office because at least she's not going to shake apart alone at a library table.

She doesn't remember disappearing, when she did. She assumes it happened in her sleep. But now she feels a little bit like she could evaporate and blow away. One of her hands is still pressed to her stomach, though the other caught the edge of the table.

[propulsion]

Tony is first kind of just bent there, but drops down into a crouch by her chair, a hand remaining on her arm. Disorientation is—

Easy. Because he's not, not really. Sure, one moment he was in the basement of the Gallows, standing by and watching levels and green light crackling across his gauntlet, and the next, he's here, but he knew that, he knows why. Catching up is a matter of shaking it off and trying not to immediately dissolve in the giddy realisation that

it worked. Or something.

"It's kind of a lot," he tells her, presently. "But you're here and you're okay and it's all real, those are the headlines. Do you want— I think I got coffee over there, if you need a prop."

Tea splashed on the ground. It's fine, they'll get it in a sec.

[youwonscience]

"Yeah, okay," is more of an acceptance than an expression of a positive desire for coffee. "Is everyone else ...?" She hadn't seen anyone else die, not for sure. But she knows how their odds were. She knows that people with better battle skills were running toward danger, not away from it, to try to save the rest of them. Ellis's name is almost on her lips, but she thinks if he's not here and okay, it might be a particularly cruel thing to ask Tony.

She thinks about the two teenagers she'd tried to save; thinks of Peter, who she's barely got a chance to meet yet, but who's barely older than those two villagers. She doesn't know what to hold onto, other than the table.