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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.
no subject
"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."
no subject
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.
no subject
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."
no subject
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.”
no subject
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."
no subject
“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.
no subject
(All that adrenaline needs to go somewhere.)
no subject
"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.