faderift | player plot | when my time comes around, pt. 5

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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.

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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Two weeks makes the thing no easier to parse. John has two weeks of memory. He has been assembling them as they come trickling back to him through the blankness that had nearly swallowed him in that opulent parlor.

And he has the memory of ebbing away in the mist of a losing battle in Granitefell.

The application of funds elsewhere is of some interest. But John is obliged to consider it from some distance, stood there alongside Flint at the end of a street while Kirkwall moves around them, about its business as if nothing extraordinary had happened in the course of the day. Try to overlay these two divergent paths out alongside each other.

“I’m having some difficulty,” John begins, a truer, more incisive thing transmuted by the addition of: “Caring about our appointment this evening when it seems there is something much more pressing to make sense of at present moment.”

—Is an understatement.

Flint, stood there beside him in that gap where the sea air just barely touches, says, "Okay."

So they're not going to get to seeing the Aynura's quartermaster today. Presumably, the soul in question will survive. 'Okay,' sounds like So what now?

What now?

This too, John had felt in that parlor. Julius' reaction had driven him in the opposite direction, a concentrated sort of calm rising like a pane of glass between John and the flood of new memory. It had come crashing down like the tide. As it draws back out, revealing all manner of items left embedded in the sand, John has turned over these pieces.

"Did I carry the trunk myself, or did we have one of the men cart it up for me?"

Or did Flint carry it himself?

This is a small piece of the puzzle, isn't it? It had been a blissfully simple annoyance in the moment, banging open the door and finding all his things misplaced. What a relief to simply be irritated about something common place.

Maybe it is easy to pick apart this thing, already decided and settled, than to recollect any part of what he had accepted on that battlefield.

Neither. After he'd removed the important papers and things from it, hadn't the trunk been carried down rather than up? Ported out to a jolly boat and dredged back onto the Walrus where it could remain safely stowed in perpetuity.

—Only, no. Obviously it had been. He's just seen the thing in his quarters. And if he thinks on it for longer than a moment then he recalls pausing on the central tower's third floor landing to catch their breath, and the bruise on his hip from where the trunk had been prone to bumping heavily against it.

"I did." Mostly. Maybe those last few sets of stairs has been a joint effort.

A hazy shadow of a thing: An impatient chuckle. The clunk of the trunk on the landing. Maneuvering the weight of it between them, hoisting it with punched exhales of breath, a groaned curse.

What had come before that? John has a piece of that too, indistinct. It hasn't yet come into focus, exists only as an impression and murmur.

A slight nod, this information taken in stride. Laying Flint's answer alongside the imprint of memory.

"I want a drink," he says. Finally. A point placed in front of them to supplant the scuttled appointment.

"All right."

They do not turn back up the roadway they just came down and seek out the usual slanting balcony back room at the top of Emelyn's. Instead, they proceed down this set of stairs and double back up the the warren-like footpath scribbled in between various Lowtown trade houses and brothels and pawnbrokers and lending services, and eventually find themselves in a narrow basement tavern. Little daylight penetrates in through the gutter-height window slats, and the front portion of the roughly L-shaped room is crowded by a cadre of dwarves who appear to be freshly in possession of more money than they know what to do with. Traders, or mercenaries, or Carta underlings flush with the fruit of some ill-gotten score.

There is a table near the elbow bend of the house, and drinks promptly had. A bottle, cups, a small loaf of very dark bread for sopping.

They're afforded some measure of anonymity here. Not total; there are few places in Kirkwall that John hasn't made a point of frequenting, and it serves a man to be on relatively friendly terms with dwarven merchants and Carta hopefuls.

But not so friendly that they cannot recede into the background of the room's activities. Calls for a song run round those assembled as John works the cork free, hands sure and steady on the neck of the bottle. The ache in his palm has not faded; maybe it grows stronger even as more memories come back to him, draw into clearer focus.

And carries with it a growing desire to be elsewhere, though they have only just sat down. The bottle and bread are nearly untouched. John's urge to pick up and put a door between himself and all who might observe him in this moment is set aside, for now.

The shape of some other thing shadows the tone when John asks, "Did you notice whether or not you had hold of the key?"

It stands to reason, if the trunk had been lifted out of his room, the key must surely have been relocated as well.

Flint meanwhile makes prompt use of his cup, allowing it to be only partially filled before a turning gesture of the hand—rings glinting in the thin lamp light—halts the flow of wine. He raises the cup and nips down a short sip of its contents.

No, he nearly says. He didn't take notice of a key, though he'd hardly been in the apartments so long as all that. If it's there, perhaps its in some drawer or pocket or tucked away behind a particular book on one of the room's many shelves. If that's so, hopefully the details will come swimming back to save them mounting a search.

"Do you not have it on you?"

"Not at the moment."

He hadn't carried it with him to Granitefell. This he can be certain of it; the memories of preparation for the journey overlay each other without variation. He had not brought the key along with him.

There is a book on a high shelf in those apartments, rarely consulted but not fated to be discarded on the off chance it may someday demonstrate use. There is little reason to start a search anywhere else, apart from the notion that he might have put the key directly into Flint's hand this time, rather than concealing it himself.

Relieved of the management of the bottle, John tears a chunk of the bread from the loaf. Considers his own cup.

"Did we ever discover how they orchestrated the ambush? Or was it as simple as predicting our reactions?"

"My assumption is that they'd scouts with eyes on the village and were waiting for us to arrive," he says, which is a matter of simple reasoning rather than it is fact. But somehow saying the thing aloud plucks more concrete truth forward out the jumbled shape of these last weeks. "When news of the force lying in wait reached us, we withdrew the main body riding to Granitefell. Rowntree and Adjei were sent forward in secret to survey the village and see what, if they anything, they could make of Tevinter's cavalry. I gather Granitefell hasn't suffered another attack, so it would seem likely they were only bait on the hook."

It'd been cleverly done. He might almost respect the man behind it if not for how fucking bitter the whole thing had been.

"I'd be curious to know if everyone on that side is having the same conversation we are now."

Well— A flicking glance across the table to John. Perhaps not precisely the same conversation.

Yes, it had been cleverly done. John, who had slipped from all manner of traps and threats, had been unable to see a way out of the one laid out at Granitefell.

"If they recall the resounding victory that's been tugged from their grasp, I imagine it's prompted some discussion."

Time magic, Julius had said. Would the Venatori work out that's what came to pass, how it was utilized to undo what had been orchestrated?

"I'm sorry," is an abrupt tack away from the dispassionate contemplation of their enemies, how they may or may not be grieving their defeat. His hands have settled, the bread abandoned on its wooden platter.

Is the feeling he has been carrying with him today so different than that miserable stretch of time in which he was obliged to adapt to the absence of his leg? There is some comparable quality here; the way two realities run alongside each other, the way John's awareness of what's missing is impossible to ignore. And here too, Flint is a fixed point in these swirling currents. John looks across the table at him, a conversation coming to him in echoes, resolving so slowly in the wake of John's acclimation to his present state.

It catches at him—the sharp point of a gleaming hook turning unexpectedly and finding root between the ribs. Across the table, the cup pauses part way back to Flint's mouth. Given that split second hesitation, he sets his drink down rather than continuing his nursing of it. The public house's cheap leaded cups are too soft to do much clattering when laid on a table top.

His hand doesn't so much hover over the cup as it does rest there, palm across the mouth of the vessel and fingertips hooked. If he lets it—and it would be easy to let it—, that drowning sensation that had found him on the Gallows' stairwell might easily flood in and over him here as well. So rather than wait for it to find him—

"Did I tell you what was done to me in Hasmal?" is a hypothetical question. Yes, he has. They were captured and kept in a basement awaiting passage back to Tevinter. They were asked questions. They escaped. But also: no, he hasn't. A dozen fine white scars that hadn't been on his person prior to being captured. An absent prospensity toward rubbing the joints and sinews in one hand.

This is a question they both know the answer to, and so it really must be, Do you want me to tell you now?

Had it needed to be said?

Not that night, when the business of reunion had felt so urgent. The shape of it came later, the scaffolding explanation upon which John set those new scars, the ache in his hand, and observed the shadows they cast.

Had he needed the details laid out for him? Maybe not.

Here and now, he looks across the narrow table to Flint for a long moment before his eyes shift to take in the room around them. Dwarves, dragging a barrel into the crowd. Their overlapping objections and demands. The churn of activity holding what seems to be all the attention in the place. They are two humans in a corner, and perhaps not worth more than the cursory glance.

Perhaps it would have been better to solicit Emleyn's back room. To put coin in the hand of the first unoccupied boatsman they came across to shuffle them back to the Gallows. But they are here now, and the question has been laid, and John looks back to meet Flint's eyes as he answers, "You hadn't."

Invitation. The question hadn't been raised for no reason, even if the invocation of Hasmal raises more immediately the recollection of a rocky beach, a canvas tent, a fire burning itself out in the sand.

He turns the cup between his fingers. It's a compulsive, unthinking movement; as the lines of his face are somewhat prone to betraying the sentiments running behind them, James Flint doesn't sit half so well as he likely imagines he does.

"Ayaz Tagaris, a Magister. I never worked out whether his purpose there had been to capture us, or whether it was unhappy coincidence. Either way, he was the man responsible for our capture, and charged with extracting whatever information could be had from us until some blood mage could be brought up either from out of the Marches or from deep in Tevinter to see the questions reduced to obligations."

It is loud enough here that these things practically constitute as private regardless of how many bodies are in close proximity to them. They might as well discuss some secret of the war itself and be trust it to travel no further than the edge of their table. Anyway, he is speaking to John and not to the room, and the difference is significant enough to separate the one from the other.

"Tagaris made up for the deficiency with some measure of creativity. Putting a body in a bath, and turning the water to ice. Broken knees, broken fingers; healed knees, healed fingers, and the whole thing done over again."

(A knife in Yseult's gut, leaving her to bleed and shiver in the dark. This, somehow, feels too private to mention. He isn't discussing Yseult, or how tired she'd looked when the survivors had first returned from Granitefell.)

"I realize," he says, turning his thumb up from the edge of the cup. It's halfway to an open handed gesture. Occasional imagined ache or no, the joints remain dexterous enough. "That it's possible for the ghost of a thing to linger even where it logically no longer belongs. It will pass."

Will it?

In the passing hours, John has thought very little about where the recollection of this undone death will live in his own body. The shadow of his split palm has ached the entire time, a convenient point upon which to hang all the memories that came after.

(How death came to him: parts and pieces, wounds rebounding back to him as Marcus Rowntree split the earth and ignited a volcano. John hasn't been able to look at this directly.)

Will it linger? Will his death linger the way the pain in his years-absent leg sometimes appears? Will he be seized in a rictus of agony as the phantom of a wound reminds him of a thing that's been undone? Will it be easier to assuage that pain if it radiates from living flesh instead of phantom limbs?

Will it pass for Flint, who perhaps received what salvageable pieces of John were toted back to Kirkwall? Rings, necklace, the detritus carried within his pockets, the cracked crutch that he'd taken to the ground with him? (It has not yet occurred to him that his corpse had been carried back.) Is there any way to undo the finality of that business? What it would have been, to receive that news?

Beneath the table, John lays the deep ache in his palm over Flint's knee.

"I know."

This is not contradiction. It is recognition. Pain doesn't pass. It carves a place for itself, puts down roots.

"I'm sorry," he says again, a repetition for the reality that hovers at the edge of this table: that John died, and Flint had to bear it.

Whatever the feeling is that finds its way up behind the ribs, clenching at the back of the neck as a hand clamping down, at the behest of John's hand at his knee has no place in a crowded tap room. So he is aware of the lumpen shape of it, the pressure sensation of the thing, and little else. The rest is folded away. Later, maybe, he will give the thing further consideration. But for the moment, this mutually exchange bit of sympathy can pass over and through him without much trouble.

Anyway, it isn't as if these past weeks have been the first time they'd done this. It's only the most concrete.

His, "You might consider breaking the habit," is light enough to suit the room.

That feeling does not quite manifest, but John discerns the shape of it as he might the form of a shark passing at depth beneath a launch. He has learned to glean understanding from the flex of Flint's jaw or the restless movement of his hands.

But maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe the shape of that unspoken, suppressed feeling would be known to John, even in a dark room.

"But I have so few hobbies," is light too, a matched tone as if they are not talking about death and the way it has dogged their steps. The different ways it has clutched at them.

Flint has an assortment of scars to mark the occasion of his escape from Hamsal. John's reprieve from Granitefell is an absence instead; there is nothing to mark it but the thing he finds at the edges of Flint's expression now.

"We might make a list of how else I could occupy my spare time," John suggests, watching a dwarf wobble wildly atop the unsteady barrel. The song has progressed to shouting, stomping feet. John's palm remains where it has been set, though the warmth of Flint's knee doesn't quite chase the ghostly pain from his palm.

A snort, a scoff; accordingly, the shark's shadow passes from sight as Flint peels his fingertips back from where they'd been balanced about the cup's rim.

"Here I was thinking that I'd sold you on the merits of a good book." The leaded cup is fetched up. Before draining it, he adds, "Failing that, I'm sure there's some poor Hightown bastard you could be persuading to part with their money."

"You're welcome to make the case again," John invites, magnanimous as they fall into this familiar exchange.

It is a cushion, a buffer drawn between them and the recitation of the types of torture performed in captivity, the unspoken spectre of John's death, these things that wait so patiently at the edge of the table.

More easily called forward—

"Perhaps after we lay a hand on the key to my trunk, or otherwise."

Otherwise.

Between two pirates, how long can a lock truly remain latched shut?

The cup is drained. Flint's hand moves to the bottle so he might refill it. Maybe this glass, he will savor instead of swallowing briskly down for the purpose of doing something with his hands and mouth and the humming note of restlessness that has spent the hours since running into Clarisse—alive and whole and as startled to be so as he had been to find her in such a state—coming alive and growing increasingly urgent.

When the bottle is righted, he says without thinking, "It's under the lamp on the mantel."

Which is not something he'd known until— some days ago. A minute ago. But is true. It has been placed there for temporary safe keeping with the expectation that a better place be afforded it so it might be kept with a second set of keys made to fit the division office's lock and the apartment's door beyond it—

But that had been days ago, surely.

The effect is not unlike the cinching of a loose sail, lines drawing tight all in one movement by a dozen pairs of hands.

This too snaps disparate impressions into place, more memory than fragment: whose hand lifted the lamp, the conversation in which they came to the conclusion of what would be set where for safekeeping while a second pair of keys were procured to set on the ring.

John knew these things this morning. It is not new to him, except that it is new in this moment.

His cup is empty. His opposite hand settles around the cool metal, traces the patterned grooves and dents set into it. The air around them is warm and John is alive; he'd been on the road to Granitefell for a number of hours before turning back. He'd thought of it so little since.

"Yes," he agrees. "I remember."

Like he recalls the business of toting that trunk up the stairs. What bits and pieces he had collected in the days after, and what he had chosen to leave behind.

"Did I ask, or did you?"

Is the answer as simple as the memory John has no question about: a rocky beach, as the tide rolled in and the fire guttered just beyond the opening of the tent and John had said—

The beginning of the thing, perhaps. But something had come after, he is certain.

He doesn't remember. He remembers some outlandish fucking conversation with the other division heads, and recalling the contingent making for Granitefell in spite of how absurd the whole arrangement sounded. Fine. Sure. Why not throw the whole effort away over some lunatic suggestion from the three least likely members of the entire company? It's not as if he doesn't have better things to apply the division to if they're not to be spending a week or three in the Marches cleaning up after Tevinter soldiers.

He remembers sitting in the Gallows chapel when Yseult had come back with all the dead. He remembers being stood in the infirmary side room turned impromptu morgue, and the sensation of reckless irritation that had risen up in him at the behest of all those corpses. All this, and for what?

Did John ask, or did he? He tears a piece from the bread. The mouth of the cups are made wide to accommodate the shape of fingers and knuckles so as to encourage dipping these scraps into the wine, and so he does that.

"Does it matter?"

Does it matter?

No. Yes.

A year ago now, sat together as the gray dawn gathered outside the Gallows Tower, John's expression in response to some similar sentiment: I can't imagine that you you've failed to grasp—

Maybe it is similar to the flash of reaction now, what moves across John's face like a lightening strike. Some old, deep gouged wound illuminated and returned to shadow in the span of a breath.

No, it doesn't matter. Yes, it does matter. These are both true. John reaches for his cup at long last.

"I imagine the end result was the same, regardless of who raised the possibility."

No one could mistake John Silver's old room as bare, but all of import had been shifted from it. The work of the magic Julius had described had not changed that fact.

It's possible that later, these half remembered pieces will settle over top of one another like the onion skin pages in an old copy of the Chant in which the block of verses on the proceeding page can be clearly marked alongside the facing one. There will be no question of how the thing was done, and maybe that will satisfy that thing that shows for a moment there in John's face.

No. Yes.

For fuck's sake. Nevermind, Flint does take a brisk sip from his cup. He should have solicited something stronger from the tap. Maybe that would have seen things settled things in the interim.

"Apparently."

And then, bluntly because the sensation in his belly has quickly snarled into a knot with no visible loose end to begin untangling it with (who proposed it, and why then, and how intolerable will it be to have the thing anywhere where someone else might observe it)—

He looks at him. Prompts, "So?"

There is a half-beat of quiet in the wake of Apparently, one which could be mistaken for an end to the conversation. (A pause, more than end, because the unfinished nature of it couldn't be truly left alone.) In that space, John's eyes flick to the crowd of dwarves, the wobbling barrel, the laughter ratcheting higher and higher as the song grows bawdier and bawdier.

Halfway to proposing they take their leave before they're obliged to find out what follows after the present slate of implications about the dwarven houses, his attention is pulled back at the clipped nature of the question.

"So?" John returns, an echo to draw the thing out, whatever is near to being said. To draw the nature of the question into focus, though John might guess at it now.

player plot | when my time comes around, pt. 5

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the breaD

https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/804/876/aa3.jpg

HAHAHAHAHAHAH

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sorry too many words

puts them all in my pocket

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I see that back of the head icon you terrorist

winks

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