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

Barrow

[thereneverwas]

for Tiffany (and whoever's around, if they want)

[thereneverwas]

The first thing Barrow does after extricating himself from Whatever The Fuck That Meeting Was (he'll come back to it, it'll be fine) is hurry down to the Diplomacy workroom, peer inside, and immediately continue his descent to another common area. He does this until he finds her.

He probably wouldn't even remember where or what time of day it was, but all that is immaterial when Barrow sees Seeker Hart across the room. He goes to her, mindless of whom he might be jostling out of the way, and as soon as he knows she sees him, he envelops her in a tight embrace: the kind that, say, one might give if they knew they might never get another chance, and almost didn't.

[fairforce]

What Tiffany will, later, remember: it was after the noon hour and in the kitchen, it had finally grown more quiet with the luncheon at last discharged. Murmurs of conversation, the slide of a spoon against a bowl, the thud of dough on the board as the next meal was already being prepared--and the steady swish of her knife cutting a recently peeled onion. The sharp perfume of it was stinging the air, making her eyes water. She had been thinking how meditative it was, to cut an onion into even slices, how easy it was to get lost in the methodical movement of it.

Memory had stilled her knife--the fourteenth cut, the fifteenth, sixteenth, and then no more. She had set down the knife and put her hands on the board, steadying herself for a moment--a long moment, remembering her breathing, remembering everything. Later she will remember that her hands were still grubby with onion juice when she left the kitchens--where would anyone be at this hour? Anyone that had been lost? Who does she start to look for?

In the hall, then, it seemed only a moment later (but of course it must have been longer) that she heard footsteps behind her. Her ear was pricked by their directness--the familiarity of them came second, and she was half turning to look and then all at once Barrow was there. Alive and real, well and whole.

The tears in her eyes are not just from the onion. After a beat of real shock, she puts her arms around him. Her hands, pressed to his back, are still dirty, and she does it anyways. There is no blood on him. Onion juice will not matter.

[thereneverwas]

Her hands are on his back, his arms easily encircling her upper body, and the tears in his own eyes-- also not from the onions-- rest perilously, threatening to spill.
He might care at any other time, might fight to preserve an appearance of tough masculinity, but this isn't the priority at the moment: instead, he ducks his head, his mouth seeking hers.

[fairforce]

She is kissing him back before she really thinks of it--but it only makes sense, in a thoughtless sort of way. Not thoughtless; there is thought behind it. This is something that Tiffany has considered: Barrow, and kissing him. And it was a thought that she had then put away, focused on what work there was to do with Riftwatch--and there was always work, so she could always put the thought away. This is thoughtless as in she is not thinking so hard about it. It is just that one moment her arms are around him and his arms are around her and he is alive and so then in the next moment she is kissing him.

When she does manage at last to realize what she is doing, it comes to her like she is waking up. A surprise, a weird funny pitch in her stomach. She can taste tears and Barrow's mouth, too--a different taste, surprising--and then she laughs, which breaks the kiss, and Tiffany has to say, "Sorry," lips bumping against his, and she laughs, again.

[thereneverwas]

Barrow has gone somewhere himself, lost in the relief and ecstasy of being suddenly alive (technically he was alive the entire time, but the instinctual part of his brain doesn't believe that), and the sensation of holding her feels exactly the way he hasn't allowed himself to imagine prior to this moment. Someone off-limits shouldn't fit so perfectly in his arms.

When she pulls back and apologizes, he meets her laugh with his own, adding a furtive "I'm not," before meeting her mouth again. He never wants it to end.

[fairforce]

"Oh," is what Tiffany next says, and then, again, they are kissing. And it is good. Not at all clumsy--did she think it would be clumsy? But that would be admitting that she has thought of this. And she hasn't. Not like this, anyways--certainly not when Barrow was not dead, after having been dead--that sort of thing does not happen outside of Riftwatch, where memories can blur and come to life, where there is magic everywhere, where, apparently, the dead can be made not to die.

It is scary, that power. She will think of that later. Right now she is thinking--well, she might as well admit it, because she is doing it. She is thinking that it's good to kiss Barrow. That she likes it. A thought probably not befitting for a Seeker of Truth, but a Seeker is still a human. His arms feel quite heavy around her in a way that she also likes. She isn't small and she doesn't like to feel small but to feel a sort of safeness--well, who doesn't like that.

[thereneverwas]

Not quickly, but with a certain inevitability, the moment ends-- it may just be because they have to come up for air, but there's also something to be said for just looking at someone, and that's what Barrow does when he finally pulls away. He continues to hold her tightly, as long as she'll allow it, though he transfers one arm from the embrace to brush a strand of hair out of Tiffany's face, his smile terribly fond and a little sad.

"Been wanting to do that for a while," he admits in a secretive undertone, the corner of his mouth tugging mischievously up into a smile he can't contain.

[fairforce]

Tiffany laughs. She can feel a flush in her cheeks--silly, girlish, something she's not felt in--well, since she can remember. When Barrow tucks the strand of hair out of her face she uses that movement to turn her head, tuck one burning cheek against her shoulder.

"Don't say that." There's a little smile tugging at the corners of her mouth as well, shyly pleased. She shifts one hand so that it's laid on his upper arm, and rubs a little spot there with her thumb. "It only makes me think of lost time."

[thereneverwas]

"Lost," Barrow begins to repeat, but the reality of it, the absurdity, catches up with him: it's not what she means, of course, but when time has been literally lost, when a person wakes up mid-meeting with someone who openly hates him and they're both remembering their own deaths in lurid detail, can time get any more lost than that?

His broad shoulders convulse with something almost like mirth, and then it breaks loose, whatever it is-- he's shaking with laughter, tears are streaming from his eyes, it is impossible that he's even fucking alive.
He pulls Tiffany close again, perhaps only to hide his face from her in this wild and deeply undignified firing of every powerful emotion at once.

"Sorry," he gasps after a moment, his hands shaking against her.

[fairforce]

Emotion plays across his face, breaks over him so quickly and suddenly and thoroughly that it takes Tiffany by surprise. She isn't so surprised that she resists being pulled close again. She lets it happen. For a moment, she stares over his shoulder. There's a patch of wall where the stone has crumbled, showing a different face.

She puts her arms around him again, hands pressed, gently. Steadying.

"No." A little muffled, since they're twined close together. The Gallows must be full of reunions like this, or larger. There were so many that were killed. Killed. "It will take time, I think. I-- can't imagine it. Being on your side. If you need time, alone--" Though he just came back, and she can't imagine letting that go just yet.

[thereneverwas]

"No," he echoes quickly-- time alone, the very thought-- he pulls back just to draw Tiffany's hands up in his own, to press a little kiss to the back of them. He's still shaking, but a bit of warmth returns to his expression as he looks into Tiffany's face.

"Let's," he breathes, "...get out of the hallway." His grin is automatic and genuine, but at the same time self-effacing; he doesn't need to be seen like this by other people.

[fairforce]

She gives his hands a gentle squeeze, and a little smile to answer his grin, even though she knows it to be a kind of white lie, a mask slipped briefly back into place. His hands feel quite solid in hers. She keeps one in her grasp and slips free the other so she can lead them somewhere else, somewhere quieter.

There's a small storeroom not too far off. Tiffany points it out.

"I still remember when I first came to the Gallows. I didn't know where anything was. I kept opening doors, thinking I would find the staircase I was looking for, and it'd be someone's room instead. I never surprised anyone but I felt like it was only a matter of time."

Keeping a conversation going, that's sort of like a white lie as well. Not pretending that everything is normal--they can't do that. Not this time. But it keeps things even. Like the sound of wind through the trees. Concentrate on that, and the shaking will stop.