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

[overharrowed]

It had been a parallel grief: the terror of feeling a gulf opening between him and Petrana, the helplessness of not knowing how to bridge it to reach her. He'd like to think, in the worse world where they had to live without Marcus, that they'd have found a way back together, even with an ugly scar to show for it. The reality that they don't have to know (at least not now, not this time) hasn't fully registered for him as he reaches for them both with equal amounts of relief, even if the sources are different.

"I didn't think it would work," he blurts out, as one hand catches Petrana's fingers and his other hand goes to Marcus's arm. If it sounds like an apology, that's not an accident, as he continues, "I told Stark I didn't think it would work, when he asked me, I almost..." He doesn't think the four rifters who spearheaded the project would have actually been deterred. Even so, the sense that he could have undone this still shakes him the in moment where, miraculously, they're reunited.

Even the concrete evidence of Marcus's arm against his hand doesn't full dispel the fear that this is somehow a trick, when the memory of Marcus's hand going cold against his chest is still so vivid.

[ipseite]

A desire still lingers to — to bolt, to take this moment and find her steadiness with it by herself. Between them is a better place to unbend, to gather up all of that fight and let herself tangle her fingers with Julius's instead, to be prevented from going further. It's hard for it to feel real that it has worked, that it is not just something conjured up in her head to finally have something, someone to shout at—

“There was nothing but to try regardless,” she says, less clear if she had believed it possible or if it had just seemed impossible not to at least make room for the prospect of it being so. “Riftwatch would not have survived in its shape— to act while we still had the ability to do so...”

She takes a breath. Less that Julius steadies her but that now that the three of them are together, she focuses her efforts on breathing out some of that harsh tension.

[luaithre]

It occurs to Marcus, very immediately, that stepping into this room and dodging thrown things and trying to hold Petrana while reasoning with her about the circumstances of his death is a very different thing to registering that odd shock in Julius' tone. That even as she had told him what had happened, there was something simpler about processing this all as if this were another near miss. That this was a homecoming, not so different from any other instance.

And then it is. Different. Marcus looks from him, to her, the painfully familiar little circle the three of them make. The catch of her breath, steadying. His arm lowers to bracket across her shoulders at the same time his other slips beneath Julius' arm to curl around the torso.

That way, he can gather them to him, or him to them, the press of his forehead into Julius' shoulder like a very belated (but also, not very belated, as far as he can tell) follow-through of the impulse he'd had, laying in the dirt, to hold him closer than he'd been capable of.

[overharrowed]

Julius has the dim thought that it might be a relief to cry, but he doesn't just now. Instead, he responds by returning the embrace fiercely. He carries the weight of those last moments in Graintefell and the heavy weight of the weeks he can remember following, and it's enough that he might shake apart if he lets go.

There are enough things that he wants to say that they choke one another in his throat, and he can't manage to say any of them. He just holds on, a hitch of breath in lieu of a reaction that might feel like more of a catharsis. Overwhelmed. Frozen, in contrast to Petrana's initial fury.

[ipseite]

In the midst of that very conscious determination to relax into this, there is a muffled, “I'm sorry,” which might not be clearly directed by the way she eases into Marcus's grip except that she continues, “for the way that I have behaved, these past weeks,”

because it has been different. Because this was not the same as other frights that Marcus has given them. Because he was gone.

[luaithre]

These past weeks induces yet another disorienting lurch in him.

But at least when it happens this time, Marcus is being gripped fiercely, and he can feel Petrana giving in to the way he's drawn her in against him. There's the impulse to echo her, I'm sorry, but stifles it in the moment. Here, high up on Julius' back, the fabric drawn there under a fist.

[overharrowed]

It takes him a moment before he can say, "I didn't know what to do for you." And though it's a response to Petrana, it's not only that. Not when he can so clearly remember the helplessness that marked what he thought were his final moments with Marcus. It had felt like a warped mirror, both of them slipping away while he wasn't even sure what to try to hold them close.

It seems like he might leave it there for a moment, but instead he says, without pulling back: "Peter and I were walking around the battlefield, after. Looking for survivors, supplies, you know, whatever we could find before support arrived. And he found a healing potion almost right off. I almost broke the flask in my hand because what good was finding it then?" He speaks quietly, but it's something he hasn't said to Petrana before, either.

[ipseite]

How could he have known, when it had so eluded her? She had wanted—

she nearly laughs, both at the terrible misfortune of a healing potion past the point of no return and the fact that simply, she had wished to be angry with Marcus. To shout at him and throw things at him and tell him how terrible he was for dying, and little wonder then that she feels so drained of it all now. Now that he's here, and she has, and what is she ever to do if this happens again?

If he were to die, or Julius, and there is no Provost Stark to bring them back to her to tell them what vexatious and unkind men they are for leaving her alone.

Her fingers find Marcus's, and she clutches him tightly as she buries her face in Julius's chest. “I had nothing in me left for kindness,” she says, “I couldn't bear it, but I couldn't bear to be away from you, either.”