When she was just a girl, she expected the world

[notathreat]

WHO: Abby, Ellie
WHAT: The conclusion of Cuntgate
WHEN: End of Bloomingtide
WHERE: The Gallows
NOTES: They haven't spoken since, y'know, this

Ellie's back from a mission. Sweaty. Tired. It's late, and all she really wants is to soak her feet. She's still too keyed up to properly go to bed.

Once the kettle's warm enough to take off the brazier, she pours the steamy water into a basin next to her bed. Pulls her boots off one by one. Eases her feet into the water and lays back on the sheets with a low groan.

"Fuck," she mutters under her breath. Deep breath in, let it all out.

A snuffly-nosed overgrown puppy lets himself in. Noses around her fingers until she moves her hand to scratch him behind the ears.

"Hey, buddy," she mutters, but doesn't get up to play or properly pet him. He licks at her fingers, whines softly, then fucks off for something much more interesting -- one of her boots.

"No, don't-" Ellie mutters as Wags scoops up one of her boots in his mouth, then takes off excitedly running down the hallway. Ellie stares after him, considering, then lets out a deep sigh and lets it go.

She's due for new boots soon, anyway.

Comments

[notathreat]

"Right. Going up a spiral staircase isn't so bad, it's going down that fucks with me," Ellie admits. The fresh air helps, and the way the stone gives back the sound.

"There's some places in Kirkwall that get me, too. Darktown?"

[armd]

"Hate it. Hate going there." This is fun, "The mess hall at night sucks too, it's too big."

[notathreat]

"The practice yard."

This is so fun, just throwing these out. Getting to hate on perfectly normal things and have someone instinctively understand why.

"Too open, with too many places to hide all around it."

[armd]

"Lowtown after dark?" She grins. "Though I guess once the sun goes down the danger is more from the people who already live there, huh." All the scoundrels, and such.

Wags gets to his feet, but he goes to Ellie this time. He drops his chin on her knee. Abby watches him, and rolls her eyes. "He really likes you."

What bad taste. Kidding, kidding...

[notathreat]

"Yup."

Ellie huffs under her breath, almost a laugh, and holds out her hand in welcome even before Wags anoints her knee with his puppy slobber. Good boy. Best boy.

She fondles his ears, giving him a really good scratch in the places under his collar where he can't reach.

"Yeah, well..." she trails off, her stomach churning. Remembering. But she's in too deep. They can't dance around everything forever.

"I usually get along well with animals."

They both remember the exception.

[armd]

"Yeah, when they aren't coming at you."

It's a dark thing to say and the skinniest of olive branches, because Abby gets it, really, if she pushes past the hurt and indignation. Alice came at Ellie in defense, and she reacted. You can't have a level conversation with a dog.

She watches Wags rub his face happily all over Ellie's knee. Thinks about Lev and Yara, and their fear of Alice, and how many times she had to reassure them both that she wouldn't attack them.

"... She wasn't my dog," she says, numbly. It's not to reassure Ellie or absolve her in any way, it just spills out. "She was the WLF's. They all were, we didn't own them." And Alice was always the less egregious of what Ellie did to her, anyway. "We used them against the Scars. Seraphites."

[notathreat]

It feels more like a twist of a knife than an olive branch, but maybe acknowledging what happened directly is one of the first steps to... not forgiveness, exactly. But not fanning the embers of the fire that burned between them.

Ellie absorbs the information quietly. She doesn't know how to speak on it. She knows that if this were just someone from her world, she wouldn't push, wouldn't press, wouldn't be demanding answers.

... but this is Abby. And there's an awful intimacy that comes in being each others' worst source of pain.

"Why did you join them?" she asks. "The WLF? Everything I found out about them just made them seem like FEDRA, but without as many rules."

[armd]

Abby smiles, but it isn't a nice smile, closer to a baring of teeth. She isn't angry with the question, just remembering. The Fireflies fled Utah in tatters.

Her voice is blunt when she explains, "There weren't many of us left. They offered to take us in if we'd fight for them. We said yes." The WLF had a lot of reach back then, but Abby doesn't expound. She won't tell Ellie that she put her head down and did the work, climbing ranks and using them as leverage to start asking around. Casually at first; know anybody named Joel Miller?

"They had a lot of land. They had a lot of food. You didn't ever see inside the old stadium, did you. Couple thousand of us were living there."

[notathreat]

It's horribly practical, but it's in a way that Ellie understands. They had food. Ellie was privileged compared to some of the kids she knew, but she still understands what it is to have her body starving to death under her, even as she demands more of it.

It was more than survival for Abby, clearly. It was information, weapons, supplies.

She remembers Seattle.

"Never had to. Must've deployed a few hundred just looking for us," Ellie says, without looking away from Abby's face. "And the Scars wiped out the rest. We heard it, on the radios."

Abby knows where. But then, Ellie remembers:

"I never went to the island, but I saw it burning."

[armd]

"Yep."

Maybe her tone indicates exactly what she thinks of that particular decision, but-

There's no point commenting on it, not really. Isaac did what he did. Most of the WLF paid the price. Abby's expression changes then, her gaze storming over and she looks haunted, remembering. "I was there. Lev– he tried to go back, we had to go get him. It was terrible."

[notathreat]

The change that comes over Abby then has her looking a lot more like the woman Ellie remembers. Angry, hurting, haunted. Hollowed out by her own rage and helplessness.

It hurts to realize that Ellie can look at her face now and read all of it, when she couldn't before. They both lived it.

"We?"

She keeps it to that one syllable. It's a big ask, she knows- but she still doesn't know who bled all over that table. The reason Abby was sighted at the hospital. It wasn't the kid- Ellie saw him, and he wasn't injured nearly enough for that blood to be his.

[armd]

Oh, shit. Well.

Abby looks at her while she runs her tongue over her teeth, and then she says, "Yeah. Lev's sister couldn't stop him from leaving, so I said I'd go with her to find him. He tried to go back for their mom."

She looks a little surprised for having said anything at all, especially to Ellie, but it's... a weird relief to say it out loud, actually. Nobody else was on that island but the three of them and when she got back from it, Mel and Owen were...

No.

Can't go down that path. Abby drags herself numbly off of it. "... Lev and I barely got off the island before the whole thing went up in flames."

[notathreat]

What Abby doesn't say is as poignant as what she does. Lev's sister had gone with Abby to the island. For their mom.

Only Abby and Lev had come back.

Worse, Ellie knew exactly what Abby had come back to.

She doesn't wonder now, why Lev followed Abby to the theater to hunt them down. The two of them had both lost absolutely everything in the span of a day. And he'd still been the one to call Abby's name, when she had Dina's throat under her knife.

Ellie feels somewhat ill, thinking of what came after. All that came after.

"Why were the Seraphites and the WLF at war?"

[armd]

She doesn't look up while Ellie absorbs all of this, processing what hasn't been said outright. Abby doesn't want to see her reaction. Getting empathy from her for losing somebody feels... what's the term? Like dramatic irony.

"Why is anybody at war."

Abby's grateful for the question. Getting too close to what happened in that theater feels like teetering on the edge of a fucking cliff face, but she can be flippant about this. "Land. Resources. To prove that we're better than them 'cuz we weren't part of some fucked up death cult."

Casually, "Jackson didn't have any enemies?"

She has always fucking wondered about this. Surely. Surely she wasn't the only person out there, gunning for Joel.

[notathreat]

There's a bad taste in Ellie's mouth; she'd witnessed what the Scars did to the people they captured, what they'd do to them while they were still alive. The Seraphites always mistook her for a Wolf, and when the WLF saw her arrows, they mistook her for a Scar.

It never mattered to any of them what she actually was. She was other.

"No," Ellie answers, a little dully. Jackson was a wonderful place, and she loved it in her own way. But it had no chance of being home again. Not after Joel's death.

"There were bandits, hunters. They used to hit the dam on the regular, try to steal supplies and kill anyone they caught. But Jackson would take in refugees. Anyone willing to work and contribute and live by the rules. Eventually, Jackson was too big to fuck with, and Maria handled them. After that it was too big and too isolated for most people to bother with, and too useful to trade with if you were passing through. And 'cause it'd take in strangers, anybody who wanted a piece could just come in and be accepted."

Ellie rubs her thumb over her forefinger, keeping herself from picking at the skin.

"Some of the people who built Jackson were former Fireflies. Reformed hunters. People who were alive on Outbreak Day. We got people who fled the QZ's as they were falling."

Ellie knows what Abby's asking, and after another few breaths, she makes her way around to it.

"They weren't all good people. But they knew how to build something good."

[armd]

Yeah, yeah, she gets it. Jackson was a prosperous safe haven and willing to take anybody in no matter where they had come from last... and maybe if the Salt Lake Fireflies had made it there instead of up into Washington state, things might have turned out differently. Abby doesn't think a change of scenery would have made her stop looking for Joel, but... she can't deny that Isaac took one look at her bruised and grieving group and immediately put all of them to work. It didn't help. It was a distraction.

Thinking about their tangled lives like that makes Abby feel uncomfortable. What if she had grown up in Jackson? What would she have done the day Ellie came along, with a monster nipping at her heels?

She shivers out of the thought.

"... I didn't know you had former Fireflies there." She sounds sober. She wonders if she'd recognise any of their names. "There were a lot at the stadium to start with, but only a handful ended up staying."

Abby lost touch with everybody else.

[notathreat]

It paints a sadder story than Ellie would have thought. The crew that was with her- they probably were what was left behind from St. Mary's. Maybe all that was left, period.

All of them kids Ellie's age, when Joel happened to them.

"Tommy was a Firefly," she says softly, wondering if that's how Abby knew how to find them. Former connections, tracking him down.

"Eugene. They were stationed in the Denver QZ. They had to blow up a checkpoint, and some FEDRA soldiers with it."

Ellie pauses, remembering how Dina said it.

"Some civilians got caught up in it. I think that's when he defected."

[armd]

... Does she recognise the name Eugene?

No. She's reaching, and isn't really sure why. She rubs at the back of her neck. "A couple of the Fireflies who served with him got picked up at the wall outside the stadium," she says. Her tone is casual, "Mentioned he was in Wyoming, when we asked."

That's how they did it. Years spent following every single thread to its conclusion, the answer was handed to her in a moment of sheer, dumb luck. Funny how the world works sometimes.

"I wonder if he knew." Her tone is flat and distant. "That we were Fireflies."

Even if he did he killed Manny, so Abby can't say she feels particularly bad about getting even. Fuck him.

[notathreat]

Shit.

Ellie leaves her eyes shut for more than a blink. Of all things. Somebody saying something offhand. Sheer fucking luck, and Joel's finally ran out. Had they searched the whole fucking state on the off-chance that Tommy would be with his brother?

She doesn't want to ask. She doesn't want to know how they hunted him. So it slips out before she can check her answer.

"Yeah, he knows."

[armd]

Unpleasant realisation washes over her like a cold sweat when the tense hits, and Abby lifts her head to stare at Ellie cross-legged on the mattress. She looks disturbed. They're coming very close to the barbed wire of their shared past, now. Close enough to reach out and grab.

There's a numb, white-noise kind of buzz in her ears. She says, over the top of it, "He's alive?" in ugly disbelief.

She shot him in the fucking head–

[notathreat]

"Yeah."

It's short and flat, and Ellie's face is set and near-expressionless. It's fucked, seeing the knowledge that Tommy survived spread across her face and hurt her. It's fucked that she cares.

"He lost an eye. And his kneecap. But he's alive."

Deep breath in, and out.

"And he'll probably never speak to me again, because I didn't kill you."

She doesn't sound particularly sorry, but it's still -- it's still heavy. Fuck. She doesn't know why she told her that.

[armd]

The shot must have gone wide.

Abby doesn't remember the actual moment of it thanks to the accompanying rush of adrenaline, but she'd assumed that the only people she left behind were Ellie, and that other woman; goddamnit.

She scowls at her hands. "Sure," she mutters darkly, uncaring. What else is she supposed to say. She's wrestling with herself now that she knows she left Manny's shot body behind in that empty pier, and failed to get even on his behalf.

... What happened to his dad when they deployed out for the island, anyway? She feels sick to her stomach thinking about him. Hoping he's okay, that somebody else will look after him in Manny's absence.

She thinks about asking about what part Tommy had to play in Ellie mysteriously finding her and Lev out in Santa Barbara, but knows it isn't a good idea. As if she needs Ellie to twist the fucking knife. Instead, she says, "Any other questions?" Her clenched jaw is a clear indication: change the fucking subject.

[notathreat]

There's a swirl of different feelings involved in this, so much so that Ellie barely knows what to listen to. They have a fragile peace here, but there are still so many open wounds, and those will never close.

They were enemies, and they wanted each other dead, and that's a fact. No peace will ever fully bridge that gap. No matter how much the both of them wish that things were different.

But she can see Abby trying, and hurting, and Ellie is trying to learn to keep her teeth in her own goddamn mouth instead of in a throat. She's done with burning herself alive in order to hate her, and that means done.

She knows what kind of person Abby is. Because she's the same.

"No," she says, the word barely more than a breath.

"You?"

[armd]

She really thinks Ellie is going to push the subject. She's tense and unhappy with it, but a question doesn't come even though the air between them thrums with unease. Abby takes in that no, little more than a puff of air. Because they're both already back in the dark red light of the theater basement she says, quietly, "Yeah. What happened to the woman who was with you?"

The one who was pregnant. Abby has barely thought about her since but she thinks she'd like to know if she made it out okay. If Ellie will deign to tell her about that, anyway.

By now Wags has slumped good-naturedly against Ellie's leg, leaning bodily into her, nosing at her hands. Immune to the mood in the room.

[notathreat]

From Ellie's perspective, Wags might be the only one dialed in. She gives him the good scritches, the kind he can lean into all he wants, not minding his slobber or doggy groans. She thumps the side of his barrel chest like a drum.

"She's fine," Ellie says quietly. "Concussion. Of course. But okay otherwise."

A lump rises in her throat. She can't talk about JJ to her. She just can't. Not with this phantom saltwater in her nose and bile in her throat, blood pooling in the slickness of an algae-spotted floor, the scent thick with rot and copper.

Her skin prickles. Ellie makes herself breathe.