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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
This too snaps disparate impressions into place, more memory than fragment: whose hand lifted the lamp, the conversation in which they came to the conclusion of what would be set where for safekeeping while a second pair of keys were procured to set on the ring.
John knew these things this morning. It is not new to him, except that it is new in this moment.
His cup is empty. His opposite hand settles around the cool metal, traces the patterned grooves and dents set into it. The air around them is warm and John is alive; he'd been on the road to Granitefell for a number of hours before turning back. He'd thought of it so little since.
"Yes," he agrees. "I remember."
Like he recalls the business of toting that trunk up the stairs. What bits and pieces he had collected in the days after, and what he had chosen to leave behind.
"Did I ask, or did you?"
Is the answer as simple as the memory John has no question about: a rocky beach, as the tide rolled in and the fire guttered just beyond the opening of the tent and John had said—
The beginning of the thing, perhaps. But something had come after, he is certain.
no subject
He remembers sitting in the Gallows chapel when Yseult had come back with all the dead. He remembers being stood in the infirmary side room turned impromptu morgue, and the sensation of reckless irritation that had risen up in him at the behest of all those corpses. All this, and for what?
Did John ask, or did he? He tears a piece from the bread. The mouth of the cups are made wide to accommodate the shape of fingers and knuckles so as to encourage dipping these scraps into the wine, and so he does that.
"Does it matter?"
no subject
No. Yes.
A year ago now, sat together as the gray dawn gathered outside the Gallows Tower, John's expression in response to some similar sentiment: I can't imagine that you you've failed to grasp—
Maybe it is similar to the flash of reaction now, what moves across John's face like a lightening strike. Some old, deep gouged wound illuminated and returned to shadow in the span of a breath.
No, it doesn't matter. Yes, it does matter. These are both true. John reaches for his cup at long last.
"I imagine the end result was the same, regardless of who raised the possibility."
No one could mistake John Silver's old room as bare, but all of import had been shifted from it. The work of the magic Julius had described had not changed that fact.
I see that back of the head icon you terrorist
No. Yes.
For fuck's sake. Nevermind, Flint does take a brisk sip from his cup. He should have solicited something stronger from the tap. Maybe that would have seen things settled things in the interim.
"Apparently."
And then, bluntly because the sensation in his belly has quickly snarled into a knot with no visible loose end to begin untangling it with (who proposed it, and why then, and how intolerable will it be to have the thing anywhere where someone else might observe it)—
He looks at him. Prompts, "So?"
winks
Halfway to proposing they take their leave before they're obliged to find out what follows after the present slate of implications about the dwarven houses, his attention is pulled back at the clipped nature of the question.
"So?" John returns, an echo to draw the thing out, whatever is near to being said. To draw the nature of the question into focus, though John might guess at it now.
no subject
(He doesn't think of Petrana, furious in her grief, or any similarity between them. He only senses the twinge of impatience and how sharp it must be to cut up through everything surrounding it. The volume in the public house has risen considerably in just these last minutes.)
"So, what is your opinion on the arrangement?"
no subject
Had they been adjacent to rowdy dwarves? Had they been on horseback? On the balcony at Emlyn's? Were they splitting a better bottle between them? Had John proposed it or had he?
These are trivial questions, perhaps. Maybe it is even unnecessary to linger over them, when the outcome is so clear. The arrangement must have worked; it has been some weeks of lost time, weeks in which they must have settled upon the thing and seen it done.
What is his opinion?
(Again, the susurration of the tide, the low-voiced requested passed between them: Stay. Does it not apply here?)
A minor lift of John's palm: Peace.
"I can see no reason to reverse it," comes slower, as John weighs out the jokes that might have been closer to hand if the moment did not feel so frayed. (Some mournful observance of extra stairs, the much maligned mattress, and so on, all familiar ground that may have inspired some good humor in better circumstance.) "When it has served us well enough for weeks thus far."
A careful, hedging sort of answer. The kind of answer that treads in a protective circle around some deeper truth.
no subject
If he'd suggested it—he thinks he must have—, how had John answered? Not like this, surely.
He drinks another mouthful of wine.
"It might have been done yesterday."
(No, that's not right. The bruise on his shin from carrying the trunk has gone.)
no subject
It might have been done yesterday, perhaps. But that assertion does not fit with what little John has of the past weeks.
What had he said? If he had been asked, how had he answered? If he had asked, how he had put it?
There is a terrible kind of pain in making himself so vulnerable, John thinks. To ask to stay, rather than inviting someone through the door. It feels not unlike prying open a closed door.
But then, he had put a key into Flint's hand long ago. Further back than a handful of weeks.
In the raucous not-quiet that fills the space after that proposition, John looks at him. His hand has remained, set over Flint's knee, his own cup more or less untouched. There are no scars on him, if the absence of slash over his palm is any indicator. Like so much else, the past weeks have been swallowed into a void.
"I said yes," John says, something that becomes both an internal accounting and a reminder of an undeniable truth. "Or I asked, and you said yes. And we saw it done."
These are the things they know for certain, surely.
no subject
Fine. It had not happened yesterday. Fine. There is a hand at his knee and it's meant to be both reassuring and connective. He knows this too.
"Drink your cup," he says. "We should have this and a second bottle. We're meant to be celebrating."
No one is dead. Everything is in order.
no subject
But John remembers dying. It had come to him like a blow in that parlor, an abrupt wave of recollection dragging him down into the depths of that battlefield.
There is no longer one singer, but many. Boots stomping on the floorboards. Beer slopping over tankards lifted and lowered in near synchronization. Somewhere, the men must be engaging in some similar revels. (What do the men remember, if anything at all?) His thumb presses hard against the edge of Flint's kneecap.
What does he think in this moment? That the crowd has taken on a suffocating quality. That there is something he should say that he has known for a long time, that had caught in his throat on that field.
(Stay, he had said in the molten quiet of that tent.)
"We might entertain the idea of procuring that second bottle in a different location," is another suggestion once removed from a truer request as his opposite hand finds his glass. "Perhaps less likely to see you wearing the contents of someone's cup."
no subject
He would prefer not to show his teeth tonight, particularly not at the man across the little table from him. So yes, maybe they should go (though his coat is hardly so delicate as all that; it has survived worse than a tankard of beer being splashed down a shoulder and sleeve).
"Fair enough."
He lapses then to tearing the what remains of the modest loaf in half so they might each have a hock of the bread. His cuo is drained a second time. While the din of the house thumps along, the contents of the bottle is portioned out briskly between. He makes no further remark about the trunk in his quarters, or how or why it came to be there. Not here.