![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
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
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?"
no subject
"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."
no subject
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.
no subject
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."
no subject
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."
no subject
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.
no subject
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."
no subject
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."