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.

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Of all the things Byerly was expecting -

"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.

"Offended," Bastien echoes—not a word he had considered before—"that I didn't know what you wanted done with your ashes, and I felt half like a thief going through your things, and I had to write to your sister and your wife and your lover and I did not know what you wanted me to say to any of them, and when I had done all of that and did the work that had be done and I was trying to get out of here before I,"

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."

"Well, that's - "

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.

Before he nods, Bastien hesitates, because here he is again: bumping into the conflict between wanting Byerly to know that he’s wounded, like a child displaying a skinned knee, and not wanting Byerly to be sorry about it. Not very sorry. Not when his mind is so little removed from the memory of bleeding out on a battlefield.

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.”

"I see," says Byerly, and is glad that his tone wasn't accusatory. Careful, conscientious Bastien. Not just with a letter, but with a letter to update. Are there versions of it? How often does he rewrite it? What's in it?

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."

Not a surprising answer. Bastien nods again and leans his head over to tap against By's shoulder. "That's good," he says, "because after I portioned out some to your ladies," aforementioned wife and lover and sister, "I was going to do something really embarrassing with the rest. Maybe have them worked into clay and made into a bust. Busterly."

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.

"Don't do that."

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."

It takes Bastien a moment to quash his own you don't really have to protests, another moment to evaluate the misery around the edges of By's voice, a third to really acknowledge what he's doing. Kissing that scraped knee. Putting a salve on it.

"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."

Oh, Maker. Byerly's fingers stop their slow scratch of Whiskey's back. The thought of saying that message aloud is nearly intolerable - not because he's embarrassed to say it. He's said it a hundred times before, hasn't he? It's just that -

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."

Edited 2023-09-08 13:25 (UTC)

“Mm. She was right. I do know that.”

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.

The genuine sentiment in Bastien's voice helps a little. But just a little. By grunts, and looks down, and feels like a fool.

"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?"

The question cuts in before Bastien can assure Byerly that there’s nothing lovelier, and his smile drops without disappearing entirely.

“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.”

Something, finally, aside from the grief and the guilt and the panic. A swell of real anger.

"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?"

“No,” Bastien says quietly. He wants to say it again—that she offered, that she didn’t say she didn’t want to—and he will say it, eventually. For now he only tries putting his hand down over By’s, loose enough to prevent him from petting Whiskey. “No, she didn’t say anything. I don’t think she wanted to talk about any of it.”

That takes a bit of the wind out of his sails. How nice would it be, he thinks, to have someone to loathe right now? But he can't manage it. She was dismissive of his attempt to help - insultingly so, really, never even entertaining the idea that he might be able to do anything at all - but she wasn't unkind.

Still. He holds onto as much as he can. "I was still owed some consideration." He frowns. "It was a bloody last wish, wasn't it."

At the same time, he turns his hand upwards, inviting Bastien to hold it.

“Ouais.”

He laces his fingers through Byerly’s.

“I shouldn’t have told her I didn’t want to hear it. I should have—”

Screamed. Thrown glassware at the wall. Burned the violin and the cello together. Set out on a revenge quest to find the fucking Vints behind the slaughter and carve By’s name into them one at a time. Eulogized him in verse. Cried himself to sleep on the floor. Cried at all. Stayed.

Any of it would have still been less than the mourning Byerly deserved. But Bastien is the way he is—and entertaining, for really the first time in his life, the possibility that the way he is might be a little fucked up.

“I’m sorry, By.”

"No," Byerly says, tightening his grip on Bastien's hand. "It's not your fault. You were - "

What, grieving? Why does that work for Bastien but not Yseult? Even in his current state, he can't quite mentally justify that hypocrisy. She watched her husband die. Just because Byerly thinks her to be cold, and thinks of Bastien as warm and loving and tender and sweet under his iron control, that doesn't mean one grief was truer than the other.

"I love you," he says instead, and meets Bastien's eyes. "And I don't want you to feel sorry."

“Too bad,” Bastien says, but he says it with a little smile. “But not the miserable self-loathing kind. The better next time kind. D’accord?”

He raises By’s hand to kiss his knuckles.

“Next time better be when we are a hundred, though.”

He means it to sound nonchalant and mildly cheerful. It does sound nonchalant and mildly cheerful. But even though his voice doesn’t crack, something inside him does, heavy under the certainty that it won’t be when they’re a hundred, and the future they’ve murmured about across their pillows won’t ever come.

Byerly tips his head to the side, resting it upon Bastien's shoulder.

"I thought no one would notice when I died." He runs his thumb over the back of Bastien's hand. "I always thought it was waiting around the corner. That I'd be killed by a jealous lover, or by slipping and falling when drunk. By freezing to death. And they'd just say, well, we all saw that coming, and forget within the hour."

He's quiet a moment, debating whether to say the next part aloud. But the thought of staying silent after all they've confessed is absurd. So he finally says, "This will make me sound like a proper beast. But it's comforting. All of this."

“A dramatic death?”

If Bastien’s manner so far has been perhaps too restrained, for the situation, there’s at least this: he turns his head to press his nose into Byerly’s hair, and his inhale of the heavy scent of scalp oils and hair products is hungry and unsubtle.

“Someone who would never get over it? Everyone bending the most fundamental laws of nature to their will to bring you back?”

Not only to bring Byerly back. Of course. Not only any single person among the dead.

"Mm." He traces the veins on the back of Bastien's hand. "It's horrible. You suffered, and I hate that you suffered. But - I don't know. You didn't forget me."

Absolutely beastly. He knows it.

"The dramatic death, I could have done without, though. I hear freezing to death is much better. If you have to pick a way to go."

“You can freeze to death when you’re one hundred, By,” Bastien says, with a patience so simultaneously indulgent and dismissive that it’s practically spousal.

He’d be less dismissive, perhaps, if he were ready to consider Byerly’s death hypothetical again. Some far-future possibility to joke about now. But he isn’t. He kisses the top of By’s head, right on a cluster of three grey hairs.

“I’ll never forget you. I never would have. And I’m not the only one.”

"You'll keep me warm," Byerly agrees. It's funny. He'd been devastated to see Bastien in that moment of his resurrection, horrified at the thought that his beloved had died so soon after him. But now he wonders if that had been the wrong reaction. He wonders if, perhaps, the best thing to happen is to die alongside the person you love. No chance for either heart to break. "Till we're a hundred."

He settles in closer to Bastien, lays his hand on Whiskey's side. He could stay like this forever. "I'd never forget you, either," he says. "You're so - " He searches for the word and settles on, "Special." Or, better: "Irreplaceable."

It’s not the first time By’s said something along those lines, but every time feels like having a knot kneaded out of his back. Even now, closed-off as he still is.

“You, too,” is insufficient. Nothing wouldn’t be.

He leans his temple into By’s hair. But sitting here forever, feeling things by halves, small and helpless against the scale of loving Byerly and losing him and getting him back, doesn’t quite hold the same appeal, to Bastien.

“Do you want,” he says, and the point where it begins to feel like a stupid question is audible, “a bath, or—does it feel like you were really there?”

In the ash and the grime, covered in his own blood.

"I want," Byerly says slowly, as he thinks about the question, "to take you to bed." He nestles in a little more closely. And, just to make sure Bastien doesn't misinterpret this as a request for sleep, "And do filthy things to you."

(All that adrenaline needs to go somewhere.)

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cozen - 2023-09-18 04:23 (UTC) - Expand

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