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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.
welcome.
Maybe Ellis too had made calculations about the ferry schedule and found himself obliged to wait. Had weighed the potential of taking a griffon, but a griffin's saddle doesn't accommodate Ruadh and beyond that, if he simply took to the sky, then there's a chance—
No. If this scraping, shattered-glass misery of rebirth drives Ellis into the mountains, he can't steal from Riftwatch in the process of his going.
So he is waiting for the ferry in this slip of a courtyard with it's overgrown foliage and overlarge tree. He has been slowly, methodically, assembling a joint. (It has taken a long time, because delicate work is made difficult by unsteady hands.) Ruadh has tucked himself close, sat with his chin on Ellis' knee.
The sound of footsteps brings his head up. Meets Tony's eyes and feels the vise around his chest wind miserably tighter.
Says nothing, but remains there, seated on a crumbling stone bench as the silence settles around them.
no subject
His breath catches in his chest, which is likely as much to do with having finally stopped from marching about like he's playing a one-sided game of hide and go seek and someone set a timer, as it is to do with sighting Ellis whole and alive. And unexcited to see him, but then, only one of them possesses two whole and concurrent months worth of memory. Felt an absence.
The dog gets it. Tony twitches back out of frozen in a jaunt of a step forwards, a ceaseless path that crosses the courtyard and moves to take a seat down next to Ellis on the partially crumbled bench. Tony looks as though he's had a normal amount of sleep, has maintained a certain level of fussy grooming as is the usual, eaten right, and not at all like he's been on a three week science bender.
Inside, though, thoughts crackling across overworked synapses. Like something's bound to surge, overheat.
"Welcome back."
no subject
There is effort involved in steadying his breath, forcing the rhythm of inhale and exhale into something slow, even in spite of how hard his heart is beating in his chest. The way his skin feels too tight, the sweat gathering at the nape of his neck.
Welcome back.
Ruadh's chin digs into his thigh. The soft huff of breath he gives is near to an answer from both of them, holding place while Ellis nods. Absorbing the sentiment.
The return of his attention to the methodical assembly of this joint gives Ellis a little space. Some room to dredge up a response; it is not unlike the process of trying to draw water from a deep, deep well.
Eventually lifts the joint to his mouth, sealing it. (Recalls Richard Dickerson, sat alongside him in a medical tent after Hasmal and Tantervale fell nearly two years ago now, lifting a flame to his mouth.) Silently, Ellis tips the joint towards Tony as he digs the lighter from his pocket.