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

[hassaran]

"I can stand on your feet," she says, "Or you can pick me up like this. But it will be awkward reaching your purse to pay for the room. And the stairs. I could ride on your back." She thinks of hanging on as he raced over hot sand to the water one afternoon laughing as he charged into the waves and tossed them both into the next swell. And of the monkeys they saw in the jungle, one clinging to another's back as they swung through the trees, and how he'd made a face and told her not for the first time how much he disliked shipmates keeping monkeys as pets. (She thinks about him carrying their dream-daughter swaddled on his back or their dream-son laughing on his shoulders in futures she shouldn't hope for.)

It's all nonsense, but enough to shake her breath and lock her arms around him despite the clack of the tavern door and the passing traffic. She breathes and feels another faint bloom of sun on the back of her neck and finally peels herself away, one step back only and one arm remaining looped around him until she's transferred her grip to his, unwilling to give up her hold until another's been established. "Come on," says her tug and in they go.

The tavernkeeper eyes her and their joined hands curiously as he counts the coin, making a joke to Darras about his quick work, something about walking up to the shore with a pole and fish leaping into his lap. Being here as herself, in her own clothes, her own face, without even the flimsiest cover, feels like a spider skittering up her spine. But the idea of playing at someone else right now, even just of shifting her posture and putting on a smirk to play into the 'keeper's expectations, introducing any falseness to this moment, feels impossible. There are worse things, it turns out, than being known.

[staysail]

He should make some joke, play along--or he should say nothing, which is what Yseult would want--to be anonymous, unseen, if she had magic she would use it to make herself invisible. Instead Darras finds himself only grinning like a fool, like he has entirely lost his wits. He grabs tighter hold of Yseult's hand and kisses the back of it. Worse than a joke, maybe, but he can't help himself. How predictable that this feels like new love, like the first night he met her--but it does, and he can't help that either.

"Lucky," is all he says--because he is, lucky, lucky beyond belief. Simply being alive is lucky. Being alive, with Yseult--his wife, for years, forever--is lucky.

The innkeeper laughs, agrees--aye, some are born lucky--and when he tosses the key Darras catches it, easily, in one hand. It is heavy and real, very real and very solid. The stairs are narrow, a run up along one wall, and then a narrow hall full of doors. Theirs is in the middle--too far, Darras has to stop at the top of the stairs to kiss Yseult again.

[hassaran]

For once in her life when Darras grins like an idiot and kisses her hand in front of these people, Yseult doesn't roll her eyes or give him a look of fond exasperation or thinly veiled irritation. She is acutely uncomfortable, that visceral prickling itch of wanting to crawl out of her skin speeding the pulse against his palm. But even that can't drown out the thing she feels when he looks at her like that, when he says lucky, the sensation like a wave sweeping back out to sea and trying to drag her feet with it and the certain knowledge it will return.

She's not sure what's going to happen when it rolls back in, but she follows Darras and the jangle of keys up the stairs, quick on his heels and a hand on his back to push him faster if she must. When he stops she almost protests but he kisses her too fast and instead she clings with her spare fist in his shirtfront and barely two toes on the floor. He tastes like cheap ale. He tastes like anything at all. The incoming wave rises suddenly, crests over her, and she draws back with a shuddering breath and one hand lifted to cover her face. The other hand hasn't let go of his.

[staysail]

He holds tightly to her hand. If he knew that she was thinking of a wave, knocking her over--just the way it might on their beach at the foot of their cliff, when the tide was coming in and carpeting the wide swath of sand, its force strong enough to pull the legs out from under you--he might think that the way he's holding to her is the way you'd keep someone from going under. But he doesn't know what she's thinking. He's only thinking that holding her hand is all that he wants to do--well, that and more, but if it were just holding her hand or not, forever, of course this is the one he'd choose.

Counterpoint is, he isn't stupid. He can read her, even if he can't read her thoughts. When Yseult is cagy and quiet and saying nothing at all, he can still read a part of her. And this is the opposite: the shuddery breath, the way her face is pale under her hand. He grabs for her hand with both of his, pulls it to his chest. Here's his heartbeat. Him.

"Hey." Quiet. The sound of the inn beneath them, around the corner, down the stair--out in the harbor, a shout, the creaking of rope and the scream of seagulls.

[hassaran]

It's the right thing to do, their hands to his chest, the soft word. That it's right does, perversely, make it worse. Her face is crumpling, eyes shut and lip twitching and twisted as she tries to outlast the swell of emotion, or at least the tears that've come with it. She goes red after pale, and leans forward to press her face to his shoulder above their hands just in time to stifle a sob. Right here beside her nose is where the sword struck.

"'ll be alright in a minute," she insists (probably, it's hard to hear), "It's just--." She shrugs against him.

[staysail]

He nods. She'll feel it even if she doesn't see it where she's tucked close against him. His heartbeat thumps against their hands--a little quicker than usual, with their emotions running high--but it is a heartbeat, living and real, another reminder.

"The room." The door is just there, a few paces off. He's still got the key. "We'll go in."

It's one thing, to kiss her hand. Emotion, strong emotion, that's something else. Having the door between them and the rest of the inn, and Kirkwall, and the world--better than to be exposed. But Darras doesn't move yet. He keeps their hands where they are, keeps Yseult where she is. She can pull away.

[hassaran]

Her nod is only a rub of her forehead against his shoulder but she pulls herself upright, nods again, quick if unsteady. Her free hand (the other isn't leaving him, still laid on his chest at first and then closed around his wrist) flutters over her face again, palm pressed to mouth and fingers stretched. Her breathing is uneven, hiccup-y in rhythm as she tries to keep it under control at least long enough to follow him to the door and wait as he works the lock.

The room is small and unremarkable but reasonably clean at first glance, and there's a window on the far wall to let in the muted daylight. She sinks onto the edge of the bed and clutches his hand to her chest as her posture collapses in around it.

[staysail]

The little hitch in her breath sticks him like the tip of a knife--barely a prick but deeply felt. He remembers himself without her. And that was only when he thought she was dead. He wasn't there. He'd thought that worse, not knowing but believing, and still not knowing. Now he knows he was wrong. Knowing, that would be worse.

She crumples to the bed and he crowds in, close. The door has shut and taken with it the worst of the noise from below. Faint sound still makes it way through the chinks and gaps in the floorboards, but the world is mostly them, the two of them.

After a moment he kneels, puts his arms around her again, pulling her close without pulling her from the bed. The uneven rhythm of her breath flutters against his ear. He holds to her, tightly.

[hassaran]

She holds his hand in both of hers, pressed to her chest hard enough to feel the little chains of her necklaces against his knuckles through the fine linen of her shirt. The arrowhead and the big garnet ring that just barely stays on her thumb. When he kneels and gathers her in she puts her head to his shoulder again (again, that spot at the soft joint of neck and collarbone where they'd cleaved him open, and that wave crashes through her, flowing up past the high tide line) and weeps.

Not for so very long before she gathers herself enough to ask, voice thick and muffled as a result of neglecting to lift her head at all, "Do you remember what happened? Are you alright?"

[staysail]

"I'm alright."

And he is. Astonishingly, peculiarly. This might be any other day except that it isn't. There's a damp spot on his shirt where she's been crying and Darras doesn't move at all except to smooth his hand along the back of her head, a gentle push.

"I remember it like a dream, I think--hazy. But the kind of dream you don't soon forget. The," he frowns and lifts his hand, smooths it along the back of her head again. "No. I don't know. I remember thinking I saw you. I don't think I did."

And the pain, this distant prickle, phantom-like. Waking up after a battle sore--that feeling, magnified. Like the way your hand feels when it falls asleep but backwards. It makes no sense to say aloud.

"What--happened? Here?"

[hassaran]

"Magic." It comes out almost unintelligible, the need to feel his heartbeat taking priority. He's alright. He will feel her breathing change--it's slowed and steadied the last minute or so but now she takes a deep deliberate inhale that presses her against him, presses ribs to arms, and then peels her face from his shirt and sits back with a heavy exhale and a hand already raised to swipe at her cheeks.

"Magic," she says again, removing a neatly folded handkerchief from a pocket. She wipes her face before blowing her nose, then touches the damp patch on his shirt as she sniffs, and smiles apologetically. "Brought you back so I could get snot on your shirt." She looks up from his shoulder and seems to get caught on his face, silent and stilled for a moment just smiling at him, fingertips on his cheek. Tears rise again, he'll see it in her eyes and the flush beneath her freckles and the way her nostrils flare as she breathes through it, holds it at bay this time. She mops at her face again.

"You died," is admirably steady. She settles her hands on his arms. "Nearly everyone there did, except me and a few others. And then Research did some sort of magic to change time. They opened a rift to the past, to a few days before Granitefell, and sent people through it to warn you all so that the ambush would never happen. And it must have worked, because here you are. I don't understand how and I'm sure it will have some terrible consequence they haven't anticipated, but--." [But who cares?] "Here you are."

[staysail]

A smile flickers over his face at the apology, along with a little gesture that he makes without pulling away from her. Oh, this? Nothing. Worth it. That smile stays, softens into something almost wistful, or sad, as the tears swell in her eyes. What grip he has on her tightens, just a little, a squeeze that confirms: here he is.

Magic has been real for Darras in the way a mountain lake is real. It exists. He's seen it, usually from a distance. He could get closer to it if he wanted to. Only now he has gotten closer to it. It's saved his life, and all without him knowing it.

He searches Yseult's face--the pink on her cheeks that is fading as she masters herself, the glint of tears still hanging in the corners of her eyes.

"It must be costing you," he says, eventually, "not to be thinking through those terrible consequences just yet. To be sitting here, with me." Better than anything. More important than anything. To be alive, and with her.

[hassaran]

"No." The shake of her head is immediate. "Knowing I'd never sit here with you again, that cost me."

Her fingers curl tighter around his forearms, thumbs rubbed into the fabric as her head bows over them. "I didn't believe this was possible," she admits. "It sounded like wishful thinking. I told them the risks were too great just to indulge our grief for nothing. I couldn't dare hope." This confession is softer than the last, and she shakes her head without lifting it. "If I'd believed and it hadn't worked--.

"I saw you fall," is another, quick like a thing she's either forcing out or been holding back. "It happened so fast. I spotted you and then they were on you. I couldn't get back to you until it was over but I knew you were gone this time. And I--, it's been--." She exhales, short and heavy, and clears her throat, frustrated with herself, the thoughts she can't seem to finish. "As long as this is real I don't care about the consequences, now."

[staysail]

Her words call up that phantom pain again. Distant stings like wounds badly healed, there and then gone again. Does he remember falling? When they go to sleep tonight--in their bed in the Gallows, or maybe the bed here in this room--will those memories from her mind make its way to his? Calcify and solidify, make formless the unformed, the sparsely remembered. Or will it always be worse for her, more real for her?

He brushes a thumb under one of her eyes. In there is still the glint of a tear. The short stops to her sentences, nothing like the way she usually speaks. Freckles like rain on sand.

"I'm glad. That it worked, aye. But more'n that. I'm glad you hoped, in the end."

[hassaran]

"They didn't need my permission," she says (and wouldn't have cared if they had), "But I did help steal a great dragon's blood."

It strikes her as a ridiculous thing to say, on top of the stammering flightiness of a moment ago, and she shuts her mouth and instead leans her cheek into his hand, not letting the little shake of her head create distance. His skin is warm and rough and smells faintly of tobacco and ale and leather, the friction of callus against her jaw familiar, and she turns into it to press a kiss to the base of his thumb. "I love you," she says into his palm. That doesn't sound stupid.

[staysail]

He laughs, quiet, a little incredulous. Stealing a dragon's blood. Why not? Just another day here, another day for Yseult. And being alive, when you were meant to be dead. Will there be a time when that's just another day, too?

No, surely no. It will be signature, always. Something precious they got back.

"I love you."

Easy and simple and true. The truest thing. Darras is still knelt on the floor, so it's nothing at all to shift forward, turn her face so he can kiss her on the mouth.

"I love you. More'n anything." He's got to break the kiss to say it, and quick, makes up for it by kissing her again. "You're all I need, always have been. Even before I met you, you were. And wherever I was, all I was doing was waiting for you, so it's a mercy that we got to find one another again. A mercy and a miracle."

[hassaran]

She leans into the kiss and then into him, forehead to forehead as he speaks, lids low and hands rising to his shoulders, thumbs resting in the lee of his collarbones. More than anything, he says, all I need. She's never given him that.

She tips her head to kiss him and then rests her face against his cheek, eyelashes and breath brushing soft. "Let's go home. We'll collect Rosana and find the first ship to Antiva."