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

[dared]

It was rhetorical, her attention not even really on the immediate space around her anymore. The memories have slotted into order fairly neatly, but she already finds herself charting them against one another: this is where this happened, instead of this.

The reply doesn't illicit surprise, but it's fairly clear that it draws her back into the hallway. Out of the memories.

"That's kind," she says, because it is. Replying to her at all, as much as the sympathy. "But I could've tried."

They'd told her, sixteen dead. But she'd heard bigger numbers than that before, seen whole caravans devastated, families destroyed. Had learnt the practicality of loss. This hadn't been the right place to apply that, and she would've known that, if she'd taken one second to actually listen.

[wearyallalone]

It's a fair point, but he's also in a position to extend some sympathy (maybe more than most). Or maybe it's just the thing that unknots in his chest at the realization that those he'd mourned are not longer lost: that just this once, they've had a true reprieve from tragedy.

Regardless of the motivation, he says, "You could have, perhaps. But you're far from the only person in the Gallows who has made a serious mistake and is trying to do better. Presuming that's your intent, it is not a mistake that cannot be overcome. At least I don't think so." Certainly, many of them have reason to understand that sort of practicality, even if they found it misplaced. Certainly, many of them have done worse things.

The fact that she recognizes, now, that it was a mistake is a hopeful sign as far as Vanya is concerned.

[dared]

For a stranger, an arsehole in one timeline erased, he's offering her a lot of kindness. She can recognise that, even as she baulks against much of what he's saying. Trying to do better, overcoming mistakes, those were the kind of things you had to stick around to accomplish, and even the concept coming near her feels like weights being chained to her feet. No. She could be better by not being an arsehole, sure, but she wasn't staying longer than she needed to. She never did.

"I'm sorry, I don't think I got your name before."

Not an arsehole: learning people's names, instead of carrying on with them as "kind guy" in your head.

[wearyallalone]

"Vanya Orlov," he offers, clearly not expecting her to have known it. "And yours Kingfisher, yes? Like the bird?" Whether his uncertainty about her name is real or to put her more at ease, he extends it like a hand up off the floor. Even if she wasn't talking to him originally, he can sympathize with the particular brand of embarrassment when such a slip is highly public. He'd rather see someone try to do better than berate themself, even if he suspects his own motives in holding that preference.

[dared]

"Yeah, that's it," she says, genuinely delighted that he knows that. She's considered changing it in the past, the amount of people she's encountered who have no idea, confusion or jokes about fishing for kings. But she can't. She won't change it. "You ever seen one?"

[wearyallalone]

"A captive one, once," he replies. "I was on an assignment in Nevarra City many years ago that took me into a noble family's home. The lady of the house had a passion for birds, and I think she lacked for interested listeners." His tone has softened, very slightly, at the memory. It had been a strange moment in the day, he remembers: how genuinely touching he found her enthusiasm but how melancholy the birds in their ornate cages seemed.

(In hindsight, perhaps a bit on the nose.)

"Are they more common, where you're from? I'm afraid we didn't get as far as their native habitat, or if we did I've forgotten."