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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.
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.
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.
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Whiskey might have loped off to a garden in their absence, but more likely she’s in the office, basking in shade—or sniffing around Byerly’s room, obsessed with his fresh scent after a month without it.
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A nod to Benedict. His gaze is grim, but grateful.
He and Bastien walk in silence a moment, crossing the courtyard, approaching the tower. It's only been a few days, in his estimation, since he was here, and yet there are signs indeed that it's been longer. The vegetation is heavy and lush, as it gets in late summer. Overhead, a line of geese fly, perhaps heading north for the winter.
"How long has it been?" he asks. "Since the battle." (Had Bastien said? By can't remember. For a moment, he fears that it has not been a matter of weeks, but of years. Is that conceivable?)
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It’s impersonal. He doesn’t talk about Byerly’s body, or what he did, or who he talked to, or when he left, or what he took, or where he went. The only thing that distinguishes it from a report to a superior on important tactical details is the fact that he’s clutching By’s hand the whole time, even when the stairs and the mismatched lengths of their legs threaten to make it awkward.
He doesn’t let go until they’re near the office doors, and only then because Whiskey—the laziest creature alive, they’ve established—has recognized a scent or the pattern of Byerly’s footfalls and come bounding through the office door with more manic energy than she had even as a puppy, loose skin sloshing around her face, baying once before switching to an overwhelmed whine at the sight of him.
If By is still interested in being slapped, the dog will handle it—with her front paws, with her tail, with her entire body.
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So maybe it's the forced aloofness that leads him to not really expect the sudden assault. Byerly didn't even know that Whiskey could jump - she'd done it a few times as a puppy, to be sure, but once she hit adulthood she'd decided it wasn't really for her. She even often wants him to lift her into bed, huffing and puffing at her weight. And so he's staggered backwards by the force of her -
"Oof - "
And lands with his back against the wall behind him. She can't reach his face to lick, and is clearly deeply outraged by this inability; so he bends down, and she slobbers on his face, and he finds that he's crying and hugging her, and whispering, "I'm sorry" into her neck as she gives little whines of shock and delight. (Though her reaction is not tempered with any anger, or any regret, or really even any sorrow; her joy is pure and unadulterated. So, truly, she's probably not the one he's apologizing to.)
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When he comes back he sinks down beside them. Whiskey tosses one swipe of her tongue in his direction, a yes, hello, love you too before returning to the vital business of trying to be absorbed directly into Byerly’s skin.
It’s a desire he can relate to.
He doesn’t interfere with their reunion. He presses in against By’s side without needing to push her away. Gets an arm around his back without disrupting her. Rubs her back with his other hand out of affection and gratitude.
Byerly has said he’s sorry more than Bastien ever wanted him to, when he wanted him to. He whispers, “Shh,” and then, “I missed you,” which is such a small thing to say. Like By had gone away for a little while. Like his absence was less than total; like he was out there somewhere, cheating at cards and annoying people into donating money in some faraway city, and Bastien knew the whole time he only had to wait.
He should cry, but he doesn’t. It’s easier to talk now that he’s gotten started though, in this unwatched space, with Whiskey still whining even as she begins to settle down and accept leaning her full weight heavy into Byerly as a substitute for writhing with joy—
“I missed you so much I didn’t know how to do it.”
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"I thought about - " Byerly creaks out, fingers buried in Whiskey's wrinkles, compressing and stretching them by turns, "how much I wanted you to join me. And how little I wanted you to. I missed you so much. But I'm so glad you would have survived - Fuck, it's such a mess." He buries his face into the crook of Bastien's neck, arms tightening around his dog.
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He tries.
“Yeah,” he says. A mess.
And he tries to think about what Byerly needs from him. There is nothing in his catalog of human observations for this. What does a person who’s come back from the dead need?
“What did it feel like?” comes tentatively, primed to be retracted at any sign that Byerly would rather not talk about it right now.
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There's no sign that Byerly doesn't want to talk about it. After all, it's that moment that's sat in his head for this whole time, the central obsession for every step from Hightown to here. He needs to talk about it, as one needs to vomit up one's sick.
"It was like passing out drunk." But that's not a metaphor that Bastien will understand well enough, is it? Not self-controlled Bastien, who'd only recently learned the feeling of a hangover. "Or like skidding downhill on your ass, just - nothing to grab onto. I knew it was coming."
But then there's this last part. This last part is difficult.
"And then there was nothing."
Byerly is not such a believer, of course, that this will shatter his world. The thought of some existence after death has at times been a comforting one, but at other times, the thought that there is no true escape from the work of existence has terrified him. At another point in his life, the knowledge of nothing might, in fact, have been a comfort. But not now. Not when there's something he wants to hold forever.
"Hard to know what that means."
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A concession to his own agnosticism. He’s more hoper than believer.
Whiskey has quieted down, seemingly content to believe Byerly isn’t going anywhere ever again, now that she has him pinned between her weight and the wall and the floor. She lies down across him, head lolling, droopy eyes occasionally flicking toward his face to make sure he’s still there and maybe, hopefully, paying attention to her. She only whines every minute or so, and they begin to mix with contented sighs.
It gives Bastien a little room to lean away, forcing By’s face out from its hiding place in his neck, and hold his face in his hands instead.
He dries his cheeks with his thumbs. He smiles, just a little.
“Oblivion would at least be better than the Maker’s side looking like Hightown.”
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By rests his chin in Bastien's hands. That beloved face has become strange, in the way that a word repeated too many times becomes unreal, in the way that a familiar song turns alien when your mind twists just a certain way. Like floating pieces, disconnected from one another, just happening to coincide in the same place. By's free hand comes up to trace the heavy brows, the broad nose, the soft lips. He studies the eyes, dark and keen - a marvel, always, that Bastien could pass unnoticed with those clever and watchful eyes. How many fools are there in the world? All these parts are so familiar, and yet so strange when taken as a whole.
"You had died, once," he says, taking himself a little by surprise as he says it. "Not in truth, but in that dream of the future. It was very hard, being without you. Even just in the dream." His hand comes down further to rest on Bastien's throat. "I mean to ask - Are you doing all right?"
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Now Bastien starts to smile again, teeth and tongue positioning already for the first syllable of you know me. Always all right, or at least more all right than everyone else.
He says, "No," though. "I mean, I haven't been."
He leans into By's hand, which also means leaning his head against the wall behind them.
"I've been—I left, you know. And I haven't—I can't believe you wanted me to do your job." In the face of a whole-ass miracle, Bastien's outrage at that has simmered down to wry, friendly annoyance. Which is still absurd. But focusing on this is easier than focusing on the enormity of By's absence. "I can't believe you told Benedict to tell me to do your job."
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"You'd be good at it," he says, as if that's the most important thing. And to duty-bound Byerly, of course, it is. "And besides," he adds, "I only meant it in the interim. Until someone else could be trained up. The Lady Seeker was who I had in mind - she's still a little green - and you could do that. So it wasn't doing my job, per se, just - "
He laughs, then, this noise a little more baffled and a little stronger for it. There's no real sadness in that confusion. There's just incredulity.
"Were you offended?" Because Bastien is giving - lightly, but giving - an air of offense.
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had some kind of breakdown, probably, but he doesn't finish the thought or the sentence. His hand slips off By's face onto Whiskey's back.
"Then I find out that your assistant has your last wishes, and your last wish for me is that I go back upstairs and do some work?"
Offended.
"Sure. I was offended."
Head lolling against the wall behind him, the look he gives Byerly is not devoid of self-aware humor. He's complaining to a man who just miraculously returned from the dead about the practical details of handling his affairs. Absurd.
"And it was stupid, and now it is even more stupid to be talking about it, because it didn't even really happen."
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Valid. All of it. Byerly's excuse is flimsy: that it's easy to write down instructions. That it's easy to be thinking about the logistics of death. It's all the more flimsy because it's an excuse that falls apart under scrutiny. It wasn't just instructions he'd written to Benedict; he'd shared care, as well, and said the things he didn't say while he was alive. So he doesn't even have the excuse of only wanting to put the impersonal down in writing.
Why didn't you have something for him?
"Do you have instructions for me?" He's careful to make that a question, rather than something accusatory. Because maybe Bastien - careful, conscientious Bastien - does. And Byerly would look like an idiot if the answer to that is yes.
His hand falls onto Whiskey's back as well. Petting her gently, not quite touching Bastien's hand.
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But yes, there’s a letter. Nothing flowery—like he told Yseult, they’ve said everything. There aren’t any grand confessions left to make. Only reminders (good man, so loved) and practical instructions. Advice for not spending all of the money on Wicked Grace and fine hosiery. A sealed letter for Alexandrie, no Byerlys allowed, begging her to come back for him for at least a little while. A hand-drawn map of a section of Val Royeaux, unlabeled save an arrow pointing to one street, that was scratched onto a scrap of paper and stuffed into the envelope after Bastien woke up in the middle of the night with the thought he might die without ever making good on the promise to show Byerly where he grew up.
“I put it in your shroud,” he says, “to burn with you. I suppose it is back in the drawer now. I’ll have to change it. I didn’t tell you what to do with my ashes, either. I didn’t think about that.”
Which is better than not thinking of any of it—
but then Bastien thinks of Yseult, again, and the message he declined to hear, and the guilt floods out some of the self-righteous offense. He puts his pinky and ring finger over By’s hand on Whiskey’s back, still petting her with the other three.
“I would have sat you down and made you tell me what you wanted before,” he says, “but I thought it would be me, I guess. If it had to be one of us.”
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He knows the confession of I thought it would be me is a peace offering, something to focus on that isn't just his guilt. But he does feel guilty. Why didn't he have a letter for Bastien? Maker, it hadn't ever even occurred to him to create one. He should at least be able to say that he sat down, and started to write, but no words came - but he didn't even start.
"It did always seem more likely." Byerly's voice is distant, absent, distracted. "You take on far more dangerous missions than I do." More capable of taking care of himself, but all the more vulnerable for that. It's the stalwart men and the deadly men who end up dead in war.
After a moment, he says, slowly, "I don't - didn't - " He stumbles over what tense is correct. Eventually, he settles on, "Don't care much what happens with my ashes. For what it's worth. Dust is just dust."
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The delivery of this is tired, sad—trying, though. He strains his eyes to look at By's face without moving his head, hoping for a smile.
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Don't do that, in this case, means specifically, don't try to make it better. Because he shouldn't. He should not comfort Byerly when he was the one who failed him. Who failed to be loving and attentive in the way Bastien deserves.
But he can't make it all about his own sorrow, either. Because it's hard enough for Bastien to even admit that he's brokenhearted. As soon as Byerly starts laying in with his guilt, his regret, Bastien will allow it to happen; he'll permit it to become all about Byerly, and By's feelings, and will simply slip into the background.
And so Byerly digs his fingers into Whiskey's loose skin, rolling it between his thumb and forefinger, and clamps his teeth down on his remorse. He will not make this about himself. He will not make it about his unhappiness.
"I am sorry. That I didn't." That's said as calmly as Byerly can manage. Not quite the composure of a Bard, but not so bad. "I'll remedy it as soon as I have the chance."
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"Thank you," he murmurs.
He lifts his hand from Whiskey to Byerly's chest, unsubtle about the sentimentality of placing it over his heart and feeling for the steady thud of it. Not a wraith, not a dream.
"I'm sorry, too," comes at a delay. For any number of things—although grief is for the living, he knows, and he suspects By would agree. (And with more time, he would have thawed and crumbled, maybe cried, maybe broken a few things in a fit, probably written to beg for that last message, and eventually reoriented himself to the new, more barren landscape of his life and reapplied himself to the task of being someone Byerly Rutyer would be proud of. In a year, maybe.) "What did you want Yseult to tell me? Or was that my one chance. It's alright if it was."
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Well, a man's final words on the battlefield have inherent romanticism and significance. Even banal sentiments are given fresh life when they're chosen as someone's last statement to the world. But Bastien had refused to hear them (why?), so no doubt he has grand expectations now of the danger of them, the weight, and the words might have lived up to that if Byerly had been dead but as a living man -
(Maybe this is why Byerly left no letter. When there's a pen set to paper, you have time to make it perfect. But Byerly isn't a poet. If a letter full of cheap come-ons would have sufficed, he'd have been able to deliver. But to sit down and write out a last message, to have the space to write page upon page upon page about what Bastien means to him - He wouldn't even know where to start. Better a gasped sentiment on the battlefield, where the circumstances will give the words the art that this poetaster cannot.)
"No, not your one chance," Byerly says. His fingers renew their stroking of Whiskey's fur; this time, the motion is a bit fidgety. "Just - I asked her to tell you that you are my great love. That's all."
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But he knows it through choice. Through the deliberate decision to believe that he’s not merely the bittersweet epilogue to By’s true love story, the staid and survivable alternative to a fiery passion that could have destroyed him, briefly on stage only so Byerly can hesitate in following him off of it for one last look back—
That would be the better opera. That’s probably how Bastien would write it, too. It’d sell more tickets.
But life’s not an opera, and Bastien does know he’s more than that. He trusts it when Byerly says it. It’s a trust that benefits from the occasional shoring-up, though, so it never hurts to hear it again. When he says I do know that, it’s not dismissive or disappointed. It’s warm, grateful. Taking this little bit of treasure to add to the pile By has already given him.
“Thank you,” he says again, watching By’s fingers fidget in Whiskey’s fur.
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"I'd have tried to give you something more beautiful. But - You know."
How embarrassing it is. And how foolish it is. With everything going on, the odds that Bastien is thinking, hmm, Byerly's a bit dull and uninspired are close to zero. But still, he does think in moments like this that, well - That he's certainly nothing like the heroes of stage and verse that Bastien so admires. The Black Fox, he'll never be. Even when extraordinary things happen to him, Byerly cannot help but react with banality. I love you, rather than something grand.
By would rather die again than have Bastien leave him out of boredom. Horrible, horrible, horrible thought.
But still; Bastien's voice is warm, and so it does feel a bit less fraught to ask this now. "Why did you not want to hear it?"
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“I don’t know.”
When he says it, it’s honest. He hasn’t thought about why yet. But he’ll think about it now, with prompting, aloud.
“The moment they said you were gone, I felt like a shell, or like—I knew I was sad, and I knew I was angry, but it was all on the other side of a wall, and I—I liked the wall, I guess. I didn’t want any cracks. Ellie tried to ask me about you. She’s a sweet girl. But I couldn’t tell her.”
He flattens his fist against By’d chest. Maybe the wall’s still up.
“And Yseult—I should have heard it. For you. But she didn’t really want to tell me, and Darras was gone too, you know, and,” searching his own chest, “maybe it was a little spite. For you leaving. And for her. Not wanting her in it at all after,” whatever. The occasional dryly critical comment. The absence of anything but the occasional dryly critical comment.
Bastien can’t see her face, but Whiskey seems to have fallen asleep. He presses his temple into By’s shoulder.
“But she did offer,” he says. “She didn’t say she didn’t want to. I could tell, is all. And she was grieving.”
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"I died," Byerly says, fingers smoothing down Whiskey's fur as she heaves an enormous snore, "and she survived. And I had one bloody request for her. She didn't get to decide she didn't want to tell you. Some fucking people." Which is perhaps a petty response to something as complicated as grief, and the many difficult ways in which grieving people act. But as one of the people who, again, died, in no small part so that she could live, he really does feel like he was owed some respect to his wishes.
(That Bastien does not receive any of that anger, in spite of the fact that it was Bastien's choice and not hers - Well, perhaps there's a wall up in Byerly, too, for the time being.)
"I suppose she told you all about how she-told-me-so, too?"
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