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

[armd]

There's a shared moment in which they both look at each other and realise, and his grin makes Abby grin a bit too even though her head is spinning, even though she saw him last at that campfire, singing, and then across a battlefield, charging at soldiers. She doesn't remember what became of him in the end.

"Barrow," she says, breathless and relieved, then, "Hey," when he pushes her very successfully out of the way so he can get ahead of her, "Wait a second!"

He has a big stride. Abby is not used to having to work to keep pace with anybody. She is the one who typically sets it.

[thereneverwas]

His laugh is joyous, affectionate, and of course triumphant as he pulls ahead, flashing a wink over his shoulder at Abby as he passes through the doors. Sucker.

[armd]

"Wait," she insists, and isn't laughing any more, the relief curdling into something she can't quite name. Is he just going to chuckle and wink and push her shoulder like it's all fine? It doesn't really feel like that.

Not yet, anyway.

[thereneverwas]

He's given pause by the tone of that wait, and stops short with his hand on the door as he looks back at Abby. His expression is uneasy suddenly, like he's bracing himself: don't make me confront this, his eyes seem to say, not yet.

[armd]

Abby doesn't know what to make of that look he gives her. It's at war with her burning need to acknowledge what happened, talk about it, but—it's not going anywhere. And neither is she, and neither is he.

She relents.

"C'mon." She's moving again, following him. "Where were you? When it happened."

The worlds colliding. That's neutral enough to talk about, right?

[thereneverwas]

A bit of levity comes through, however forced, with a chuckle-- to be fair, it was kind of absurd.

"Meeting with Rowntree," he replies, "you?"

[armd]

"Weird," she echoes, trying to remember if she saw what happened to Marcus in the end. She thinks she saw him on the field once or twice... Or maybe she was imagining that.

"Walking the dog."

[thereneverwas]

Barrow laughs, but it becomes stilted: it's sort of funny to imagine someone suddenly having an existential crisis while walking a dog, but then he remembers what caused the crisis, and it veers back into don't confront it territory.

"How, erm, how'd he take it?" he asks, struggling to keep it light.

[armd]

"Pretty well. He knocked me over."

He was whining, high-pitched and pathetic, his tail going frantically. She has no idea who was looking after him all that time. Presumably somebody was. But Abby wasn't the only person who left an animal behind, it must have been chaos. What even happened while they were all dead?

She really can't stop thinking about it, no matter what Barrow wants her to do otherwise.

"I think I have to go."

[thereneverwas]

He nods, either to acknowledge or to echo her sentiment, but either way not arguing with it: there's a lot of processing to be done, and he won't keep her.