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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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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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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.
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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.”
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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."
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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.
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"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."
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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.
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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."
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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.”
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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."
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“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.
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(All that adrenaline needs to go somewhere.)
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"Well," he says through that half-repressed smile. "All right."
There are less likely cures for this—for watching from twenty feet behind his eyes, for not quite feeling like Byerly is real—than getting naked.