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

[hornswoggle]

The look across the table telegraphs some similar skepticism at the prospect.

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.

[katabasis]

He isn't asking what was said, or what was done. He is asking what John Silver thinks of it in this moment. That there is no ready answer digs at a tender space between two joints. Nevermind that he knows not to ask after these things—he has made such good practice at steering round the point rather than throwing himself on it, though it comes unnaturally to him—, the withheld shape of the thing does prickle. Just a little. Only when he looks at it so directly as this.

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.

[hornswoggle]

No, no one is dead.

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."

[katabasis]

His glance flickers broad then, shifting from John and the hand covering his knee to instead take in the cadence of the L-shaped room about them. It is loud, and growing more crowded and wild both. It has the air of a place soon given over to fighting—a a sensation he can feel itching up the back of his own neck, and which he doesn't presently wish to indulge.

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.