CLOSED | She said, "Where'd you wanna go? How much you wanna risk?"

[notathreat]

WHO: Ellie & Jude, Various
WHAT: Various closed prompts in one convenient place!
WHEN: (Spanning) Fantasy September
WHERE: Gallows, Kirkwall, Arlathan Forest
NOTES: Gonna have some fallout/followup threads from this log re: Abby's canon update! Mind the warnings. Graphic injuries. Spicy/sexual content. Hookah use. More TBD.

Comments

[propulsion]

"But people love sides."

You're gonna deny them a little righteous fury and coleslaw, Ellie, says Tony's raised eyebrows. The answer is clearly yes, so he doesn't say it out loud, just tries to consider how to handle the spiky thing he's been presented with. A hand goes up, gestures loosely.

"Enough heat, enough agitation, things explode. You know that. And a truce without forgiveness is just a countdown. I could come up with more metaphors but you get the picture. What're you gonna do now?" His hand goes back into a pocket. "I'm guessing the same thing as before."

[notathreat]

Well, Tony knows all the answers to the questions he's asking. It doesn't really make it all that much easier. It's not a thing Ellie would have wanted to make him carry.

A truce without forgiveness is just a countdown, Tony says. You're just keeping the embers alive long after the wildfire's taken out the forest, Mobius says.

"What can I do?" Ellie asks, soft, but if she says it at full volume she's worried it will sound pathetically miserable. But leaving it at that sounds awfully like giving up.

So she takes a deep breath.

"What would you do?"

[propulsion]

Superior question: what would a slightly better version of Tony Stark do? It's what he hears, anyway.

"Couple of options," he says. He knows who Abby is, but they aren't what he'd call friends. Some joking around at the conclave, a little bit of field testing. But Loki was charming enough that people got, like, mad at him for having a problem with the guy.

The lesson being: he doesn't know her. "Is she going to continue to be an active danger to you or anyone else from your world who gets rifted in? And don't play it down, real talk."

Protagonists are the worst, he should know.

[notathreat]

The expression that crosses Ellie's face is... interesting. It's a bit of a nose-wrinkle, like it's a question that's never once occurred to her.

"No. Definitely not."

She pauses, giving serious thought to it, so he knows that it's not a knee-jerk reaction. Said reaction would still be a weird knee-jerk reaction. She takes a deep breath.

"The reason she did it was because Joel killed her dad. And the only reason Joel killed her dad was because he was protecting me. It's- it was this whole thing. But she's not going to hurt anyone. No more than I would."

Her brow pinches, here. It's weird to defend Abby. It's also truthful.