It's not something that can be forgiven. Derrica knows that. Losing someone so deeply loved is the kind of transgression that sticks too deeply to heal over easily. It takes more than a few months, more than a year. Maybe a lifetime.
Her thumb strokes gently across Ellie's cheek. Reassuring.
"You're strong."
So much stronger than Derrica, in some ways. Derrica will hate the Chantry until the day she dies. Chances are, she'll die fighting them. What Ellie is trying to do, what she wants to do, takes something Derrica has never mustered the strength to do.
"And it will hurt you less, in time. Both of you."
Hating a person is both easier and harder than hating an idea.
Ellie tips her cheek further into Derrica's palm, shutting her eyes, letting herself be touched. It loosens up the knots inside of her. If she were thinking in rational terms, she'd realize that allowing herself this is progress in itself.
Something in Derrica's words tugs at her, though. The same way the hurt in Abby's voice had. It's the same feeling she gets when she and Abby linger near each other even when they've said all they've needed to say, because there's something else.
"You want to know something crazy?" Ellie asks, her mouth dry.
"If things had been different, not even a lot different, Abby and I would've grown up together."
As Ellie speaks, Derrica's thumb runs back and forth across her cheek. Her fingers gently through Ellie's hair, nails scraping along her scalp, as much as the tie in her hair allows.
"Would you have?" Derrica prompts. "What does that mean?"
They've talked so little about what Ellie's world actually looks like, which feels like an oversight. Ellie's told her so much else, so many things about herself, but very little about everything else.
And nothing that made Derrica think Abby and Ellie lived similarly enough for this. For the possibility to be that close, on the other side of a little different.
There's a gulf in Abby and Ellie's experiences, but it's one that Ellie can picture so clearly. Her brow furrows as Derrica asks, the way that says she's trying to find the words to paint a picture she has in her head, complex and evolving. Her eyes nearly shut as Derrica touches her, soothed.
"... In the Quarantine Zones, the military -- FEDRA -- controlled everything. They took in orphans, then raised them up to be soldiers. I got dropped off at one of those military prep academies as a baby. Me and hundreds, probably thousands of others. I didn't know anything about my parents."
Ellie says it a little distantly, like she's aware it should be fucked up and painful, probably, but she doesn't know anything else. "I was lucky- there were plenty of kids there because their parents were dead. Starved, or killed, or infected.
"The military wasn't great. But I got enough to eat. Somebody would patch my wounds if I got hurt. I went to school. Most kids, even in the QZ, weren't that lucky. Some of them starved to death on the outside, when the rations weren't enough to go around. But, there was a group rising up, fighting for the people, still looking for a cure for-"
Ellie makes a gesture. To indicate the sickness, the infection that ruled her life from day one, and then-
A litany of words Derrica doesn't know, forming the shape of a concept that feels familiar: children, taken away, trained to be something else.
Not a Circle, but something that feels as if it exists in the same vein. Children, made into an army. Children no one wanted, children who had no one. Her heart aches, thinking Ellie was one of them. And it aches for the alternatives Ellie is describing, this harsh life. What a world, where every option was a varying level of harsh.
Derrica's fingers are moving steadily in Ellie's hair, loosening the tie holding everything in place with every sweep of her fingers. She's partway to nudging it out entirely when Ellie starts, cuts off.
"Told me what?" Derrica questions. So much of this is new, so Derrica can't gather which part could draw Ellie up short.
It's a simple twist to hold everything back; her hair's gotten longer, but a few strands still naturally fall out to frame her face, wisp around her ears. It comes out silky-soft against Derrica's fingers- Ellie puts her fine, thin hair up while it's still wet, so it never has time to frizz out in the humidity.
"Why my world was so shitty."
It was shitty- she's imparted that much. But the why takes it to a whole different level of shitty. While it was normal for her...
"Almost thirty years ago, there was an outbreak. An infection that would- get into somebody's brain, hollow them out, kill the person they were and make them mildness, violent. It's- like if the darkspawn taint rose up and could be passed with a bite."
She doesn't say this lightly. They've fought in the Deep Roads together. Ellie's seen Darkspawn, and what they can do to people infected with the Blight.
"It killed most of the world overnight. What was left of society collapsed. Abby and I were born about six or seven years after."
Ellie's face holds nothing haunted, at least not to the average person. The world has left a mark on her, a dark handprint that shows in the very way she doesn't flinch while saying it. She looks more worried about how Derrica will react.
The Fifth Blight swept across the south, so far from Derrica that all she ever heard of it was recounted third or fourth hand. It had been terrible. She understands this. It had killed thousands upon thousands. It had scarred the land, and the people left to try and piece their lives back together when the Wardens had scoured the darkspawn's armies from the surface.
But it likely wouldn't be a help to hear of this.
And Derrica has a sense that it would not help to hear that if a darkspawn put their filthy, taint-drenched mouths upon any living thing, it would be eaten up with infection. Contamination doesn't come only at the edges of their ichor-soaked blades.
A warning for another time. Maybe one that isn't necessarily needed, if Ellie is already used to—
To living in a Blight. Living in a Blight where no Wardens existed to beat it back.
Her fingers draw slowly through Ellie's hair before returning to cup her cheeks. Look into her face, making note of what she finds there.
"I'm so sorry."
What else can be said? Nothing Derrica does here will change the shape of the world there.
Something complicated passes over Ellie's face. She loves Derrica's compassion, appreciates the concern shown to her, but it still -- hurts. Because regardless of whether it's fair, confessing that she comes from a broken world means that she worries that that's the way other people see her. As some kind of broken, scarred thing.
She can't even deny that it is. That she is. It's left a mark on her that won't ever go away.
But this is Derrica, and she's honest with her, even when it's shitty.
"I don't feel like it's something to be sorry for," she says, her voice tight as she lays her hands on top of Derrica's, not quite meeting her eyes. "It's just how it is. It's not that life where I'm from is harder, it's that a lot of things here are easier."
Ellie gives a wry smile, looks up. "We don't have Corypheus, or magic, or templars there. We don't have money and nobility and fucked up parties where people smile at your face and stab you in the back. It's all relative."
Ellie's eyes drift shut. Her lashes are damp, but nothing more. She takes a deep breath. Lets the feeling of Derrica's hands on her cheeks steady her. She strokes her thumbs along the backs of Derrica's wrists, letting herself be held until her heart rate eases.
"I'd tell you anything," she says, frankly. "But sometimes don't know where to start."
Finally, she blinks her eyes open, visibly bracing herself for the rest of it. It puts it in a different perspective. Rather than bracing for the pity, she braces instead for how hard this will be for Derrica to hear.
She's started, now. She's broken through.
Ellie gives her a soft tug, enough to guide her to sit down next to her, so she doesn't have to remain standing. It's not a quick story and her legs will ache by the time she's done. After a moment of thought, she shrugs off her overshirt, enough to leave her in a sleeveless tunic that shows all of her arms, the pale starkness of the acid-burn scars underneath her tattoo.
"When I was thirteen," Ellie begins, trailing her fingers along the tattoo -- or more accurately, along the scarring beneath it. "I snuck out from military school with my best friend, Riley." Both military orphans, training to become soldiers. Little cogs-to-be in the great machine.
"We ran across a skirmish between some of the FEDRA soldiers and a rebel group in the city," she explains. "They called themselves the Fireflies. They wanted to topple FEDRA, put an end to the military rule. They were also the only ones looking for a cure, at the time. Everybody else had given up." Ellie wets her lips.
"Riley wanted to join them."
It doesn't escape her, the echoes and parallels that still ring today, in Derrica's eyes when she talks about the Chantry, about the circles. The way she'd asked her to stay and fight.
Ellie had wanted to run then, too.
"We fucked up, gave away our position, and we ended up getting bagged by some of the Fireflies themselves. I tried to fight us out, but we were just kids. The only thing that stopped them from killing us was because their leader recognized my face."
Ellie's expression crumples, just a little, and only at the edges.
"Her name was Marlene. She'd known my mom. Turns out..."
Ellie sets her jaw, bulls onward, though the part of her voice that wants to shake.
"Turns out that when my mom died, she asked Marlene to take care of me. Marlene put me in the safest place she could think of. But she didn't let me know that she existed. I figured at the time- that that made sense, right? Leader of a rebel group. Too dangerous to have a kid tagging along. But-"
This is more than Derrica had thought Ellie would ever want to give up to her. She knows that each part of this story is a painful thing to unearth, made more so by Derrica's scrutiny. It is never easy to offer up the raw, wounded parts of the past for another person to observe.
For her part, Derrica tries to make this easy. All her instincts beg closeness. She would wind herself into Ellie's lap, if she felt it would be a comfort. All Derrica's instincts urge her closer, as if it were possible to absorb the muted hurt in Ellie's voice through simple touch.
But she curbs it. Settles for just a hand, reaching out to catch at Ellie's fingers as she winds her way to her point.
"If Marlene hadn't sent you away," Derrica finishes for her. She watches Ellie's face, searching. "Do you wish she'd chosen differently for you?"
What would Ellie be like? Maybe she wouldn't carry around this kind of pain. But Derrica has to wonder whether it would just be replaced by something else. She isn't nearly as familiar with Abby, but nothing about her has given Derrica the impression that she isn't hurting somewhere too.
Ellie winds her fingers around Derrica's hand, and the hold keeps her from wringing them on habit. It's something she never realizes when she's doing. It's good to be still. To be stilled.
"Yes," she says, and her expression crumples still more at the edges. It sounds like a confession, like something guilty. Like something that Ellie's carried for a long, long time and never let herself look directly at.
"It wasn't such a big deal when I didn't know where I came from, because I figured nobody knew. But she knew everything. She knew my mom, and she kept that from me. I never got to just... sit and ask her anything."
The bitterness leaks in, try as Ellie might to keep it out of her voice. She was a kid who grew up utterly, completely alone, always shuttled off to somewhere else. Always the problem that no one wanted wanted to have.
"I didn't know. All that time, there was another Firefly base she was in touch with. She made it sound like just a lab, just some scientists, but it wasn't just that. It was families. With kids."
What Ellis is describing is such an unknown to Derrica.
She had been taken away at a young age, left somewhere safe. Had she been wrong, to let any opportunity to ask after her mother slip away? To find whether or not her father is alive, and if he knew of her?
It had never felt important.
But she hears all this pain in Ellie's voice over the absence of it. Ellie had lost something, and what she'd been given in it's place hadn't been enough to sustain her. Derrica leans in her, hips, thighs, knees all connecting in a warm line. Grip tightening on Ellie's hands, then loosening, thumb stroking gently along her knuckles.
"I don't know," Ellie says immediately, and then more slowly: "A little?"
She sighs, opening up the palm of her hand to let Derrica touch her, looking down at their tangled fingers. It feels nice, the way Derrica uses her like a worry stone, almost. Like touching her is soothing. She likes the thought of being easy for somebody.
She relaxes where Derrica touches, like it reminds her of where the tension is, and to let it go.
"For all I know it could've been worse," she says, the corner of her mouth twitching into something almost like a smile.
"I got kicked out of half the schools in the QZ. Maybe the Fireflies wouldn't have tolerated my ass either."
Her smile widens. Either she grew up, or it took Maria to keep her in line, and then Yseult.
Of course Ellie was trouble growing up. Derrica might not have seen it in her when they'd first met, but she has caught glimpses of it over and over as Ellie settled, lost some of the haunted weight in her face. Mischief. Good humor. Derrica can only imagine what she had been like younger, before all that had happened to her.
"You would have been very different, if you'd grown up with them."
The smile settles and disappears, leaving something more sober behind. But it's not sad, not haunted. Just... thoughtful. Ellie traces a line with her fingertip, from the top of Derrica's thumb to her pulse point, the tender softness just inside of her wrist, like she's drawing a line of thought.
"Maybe. It's hard to say without knowing," she admits. "Could have been that it all happened anyway, just that I was on the other side of it. I could have had everything I ever wanted and then had someone take it from me overnight."
It's the closest she's come to saying aloud that she understands what Abby did and why. Once, that would have burned her hollow, the anger and pain licking her up inside. Now, she still burns, but it's different. It still tests her, but she's more. She and Abby are both more.
It settles, and it hurts, but the hurt isn't all there is.
"Maybe it wouldn't have been so different after all."
Permission. Derrica takes it for what it is: a gift.
And maybe she could press Ellie tonight, try to draw a little more poison from her so the pain behind it might be less. But it's been a difficult conversation, maybe more than Ellie had bargained for when she arrived. So—
"Not tonight," she stipulates. "We should walk down to the kitchen and get something to eat, and talk about something else. Please."
Ellie presses the breath out of her lungs and tries not be relieved, because it feels cowardly. But she can't help but be fine with being out of the hot seat for tonight.
She presses her forehead briefly to Derrica's shoulder to hide her smile, and nods against her.
"Don't have to ask me twice."
When she gets to her feet, she offers Derrica her hand first, and tries not to act like that's new, when she doesn't let go.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Her thumb strokes gently across Ellie's cheek. Reassuring.
"You're strong."
So much stronger than Derrica, in some ways. Derrica will hate the Chantry until the day she dies. Chances are, she'll die fighting them. What Ellie is trying to do, what she wants to do, takes something Derrica has never mustered the strength to do.
"And it will hurt you less, in time. Both of you."
no subject
Ellie tips her cheek further into Derrica's palm, shutting her eyes, letting herself be touched. It loosens up the knots inside of her. If she were thinking in rational terms, she'd realize that allowing herself this is progress in itself.
Something in Derrica's words tugs at her, though. The same way the hurt in Abby's voice had. It's the same feeling she gets when she and Abby linger near each other even when they've said all they've needed to say, because there's something else.
"You want to know something crazy?" Ellie asks, her mouth dry.
"If things had been different, not even a lot different, Abby and I would've grown up together."
no subject
"Would you have?" Derrica prompts. "What does that mean?"
They've talked so little about what Ellie's world actually looks like, which feels like an oversight. Ellie's told her so much else, so many things about herself, but very little about everything else.
And nothing that made Derrica think Abby and Ellie lived similarly enough for this. For the possibility to be that close, on the other side of a little different.
1/2
"... In the Quarantine Zones, the military -- FEDRA -- controlled everything. They took in orphans, then raised them up to be soldiers. I got dropped off at one of those military prep academies as a baby. Me and hundreds, probably thousands of others. I didn't know anything about my parents."
Ellie says it a little distantly, like she's aware it should be fucked up and painful, probably, but she doesn't know anything else. "I was lucky- there were plenty of kids there because their parents were dead. Starved, or killed, or infected.
"The military wasn't great. But I got enough to eat. Somebody would patch my wounds if I got hurt. I went to school. Most kids, even in the QZ, weren't that lucky. Some of them starved to death on the outside, when the rations weren't enough to go around. But, there was a group rising up, fighting for the people, still looking for a cure for-"
Ellie makes a gesture. To indicate the sickness, the infection that ruled her life from day one, and then-
2/2
no subject
Not a Circle, but something that feels as if it exists in the same vein. Children, made into an army. Children no one wanted, children who had no one. Her heart aches, thinking Ellie was one of them. And it aches for the alternatives Ellie is describing, this harsh life. What a world, where every option was a varying level of harsh.
Derrica's fingers are moving steadily in Ellie's hair, loosening the tie holding everything in place with every sweep of her fingers. She's partway to nudging it out entirely when Ellie starts, cuts off.
"Told me what?" Derrica questions. So much of this is new, so Derrica can't gather which part could draw Ellie up short.
no subject
"Why my world was so shitty."
It was shitty- she's imparted that much. But the why takes it to a whole different level of shitty. While it was normal for her...
"Almost thirty years ago, there was an outbreak. An infection that would- get into somebody's brain, hollow them out, kill the person they were and make them mildness, violent. It's- like if the darkspawn taint rose up and could be passed with a bite."
She doesn't say this lightly. They've fought in the Deep Roads together. Ellie's seen Darkspawn, and what they can do to people infected with the Blight.
"It killed most of the world overnight. What was left of society collapsed. Abby and I were born about six or seven years after."
Ellie's face holds nothing haunted, at least not to the average person. The world has left a mark on her, a dark handprint that shows in the very way she doesn't flinch while saying it. She looks more worried about how Derrica will react.
no subject
But it likely wouldn't be a help to hear of this.
And Derrica has a sense that it would not help to hear that if a darkspawn put their filthy, taint-drenched mouths upon any living thing, it would be eaten up with infection. Contamination doesn't come only at the edges of their ichor-soaked blades.
A warning for another time. Maybe one that isn't necessarily needed, if Ellie is already used to—
To living in a Blight. Living in a Blight where no Wardens existed to beat it back.
Her fingers draw slowly through Ellie's hair before returning to cup her cheeks. Look into her face, making note of what she finds there.
"I'm so sorry."
What else can be said? Nothing Derrica does here will change the shape of the world there.
no subject
She can't even deny that it is. That she is. It's left a mark on her that won't ever go away.
But this is Derrica, and she's honest with her, even when it's shitty.
"I don't feel like it's something to be sorry for," she says, her voice tight as she lays her hands on top of Derrica's, not quite meeting her eyes. "It's just how it is. It's not that life where I'm from is harder, it's that a lot of things here are easier."
Ellie gives a wry smile, looks up. "We don't have Corypheus, or magic, or templars there. We don't have money and nobility and fucked up parties where people smile at your face and stab you in the back. It's all relative."
no subject
Her thumbs stroke softly along Ellie's cheeks.
"I still wish it was easier for you," Derrica tells her. "The way I do for Matthias, when he tells me of how it was for him in Tantervale."
Not pity. Just—
It is hard, knowing of this suffering. But there is nothing for it. No changing it. And it has made Ellie who she is, and so—
"I'm glad you told me. I am glad to know you, where you came from."
no subject
"I'd tell you anything," she says, frankly. "But sometimes don't know where to start."
Finally, she blinks her eyes open, visibly bracing herself for the rest of it. It puts it in a different perspective. Rather than bracing for the pity, she braces instead for how hard this will be for Derrica to hear.
She's started, now. She's broken through.
Ellie gives her a soft tug, enough to guide her to sit down next to her, so she doesn't have to remain standing. It's not a quick story and her legs will ache by the time she's done. After a moment of thought, she shrugs off her overshirt, enough to leave her in a sleeveless tunic that shows all of her arms, the pale starkness of the acid-burn scars underneath her tattoo.
"When I was thirteen," Ellie begins, trailing her fingers along the tattoo -- or more accurately, along the scarring beneath it. "I snuck out from military school with my best friend, Riley." Both military orphans, training to become soldiers. Little cogs-to-be in the great machine.
"We ran across a skirmish between some of the FEDRA soldiers and a rebel group in the city," she explains. "They called themselves the Fireflies. They wanted to topple FEDRA, put an end to the military rule. They were also the only ones looking for a cure, at the time. Everybody else had given up." Ellie wets her lips.
"Riley wanted to join them."
It doesn't escape her, the echoes and parallels that still ring today, in Derrica's eyes when she talks about the Chantry, about the circles. The way she'd asked her to stay and fight.
Ellie had wanted to run then, too.
"We fucked up, gave away our position, and we ended up getting bagged by some of the Fireflies themselves. I tried to fight us out, but we were just kids. The only thing that stopped them from killing us was because their leader recognized my face."
Ellie's expression crumples, just a little, and only at the edges.
"Her name was Marlene. She'd known my mom. Turns out..."
Ellie sets her jaw, bulls onward, though the part of her voice that wants to shake.
"Turns out that when my mom died, she asked Marlene to take care of me. Marlene put me in the safest place she could think of. But she didn't let me know that she existed. I figured at the time- that that made sense, right? Leader of a rebel group. Too dangerous to have a kid tagging along. But-"
Deep, deep breath.
"Abby grew up with the Fireflies."
no subject
For her part, Derrica tries to make this easy. All her instincts beg closeness. She would wind herself into Ellie's lap, if she felt it would be a comfort. All Derrica's instincts urge her closer, as if it were possible to absorb the muted hurt in Ellie's voice through simple touch.
But she curbs it. Settles for just a hand, reaching out to catch at Ellie's fingers as she winds her way to her point.
"If Marlene hadn't sent you away," Derrica finishes for her. She watches Ellie's face, searching. "Do you wish she'd chosen differently for you?"
What would Ellie be like? Maybe she wouldn't carry around this kind of pain. But Derrica has to wonder whether it would just be replaced by something else. She isn't nearly as familiar with Abby, but nothing about her has given Derrica the impression that she isn't hurting somewhere too.
no subject
"Yes," she says, and her expression crumples still more at the edges. It sounds like a confession, like something guilty. Like something that Ellie's carried for a long, long time and never let herself look directly at.
"It wasn't such a big deal when I didn't know where I came from, because I figured nobody knew. But she knew everything. She knew my mom, and she kept that from me. I never got to just... sit and ask her anything."
The bitterness leaks in, try as Ellie might to keep it out of her voice. She was a kid who grew up utterly, completely alone, always shuttled off to somewhere else. Always the problem that no one wanted wanted to have.
"I didn't know. All that time, there was another Firefly base she was in touch with. She made it sound like just a lab, just some scientists, but it wasn't just that. It was families. With kids."
Ellie's voice breaks, just barely. Just enough.
no subject
She had been taken away at a young age, left somewhere safe. Had she been wrong, to let any opportunity to ask after her mother slip away? To find whether or not her father is alive, and if he knew of her?
It had never felt important.
But she hears all this pain in Ellie's voice over the absence of it. Ellie had lost something, and what she'd been given in it's place hadn't been enough to sustain her. Derrica leans in her, hips, thighs, knees all connecting in a warm line. Grip tightening on Ellie's hands, then loosening, thumb stroking gently along her knuckles.
"Are you..."
A pause, Derrica's eyes moving over Ellie's face.
"Do you think you envy her, growing up there?"
no subject
She sighs, opening up the palm of her hand to let Derrica touch her, looking down at their tangled fingers. It feels nice, the way Derrica uses her like a worry stone, almost. Like touching her is soothing. She likes the thought of being easy for somebody.
She relaxes where Derrica touches, like it reminds her of where the tension is, and to let it go.
"For all I know it could've been worse," she says, the corner of her mouth twitching into something almost like a smile.
"I got kicked out of half the schools in the QZ. Maybe the Fireflies wouldn't have tolerated my ass either."
Her smile widens. Either she grew up, or it took Maria to keep her in line, and then Yseult.
no subject
Of course Ellie was trouble growing up. Derrica might not have seen it in her when they'd first met, but she has caught glimpses of it over and over as Ellie settled, lost some of the haunted weight in her face. Mischief. Good humor. Derrica can only imagine what she had been like younger, before all that had happened to her.
"You would have been very different, if you'd grown up with them."
An easy conclusion to draw.
"Would you have wanted that?"
no subject
"Maybe. It's hard to say without knowing," she admits. "Could have been that it all happened anyway, just that I was on the other side of it. I could have had everything I ever wanted and then had someone take it from me overnight."
It's the closest she's come to saying aloud that she understands what Abby did and why. Once, that would have burned her hollow, the anger and pain licking her up inside. Now, she still burns, but it's different. It still tests her, but she's more. She and Abby are both more.
It settles, and it hurts, but the hurt isn't all there is.
"Maybe it wouldn't have been so different after all."
no subject
Everything is fragile. Derrica knows this, has had it demonstrated to her very thoroughly. It's not the kind of lesson a person forgets.
Her hand relaxes under Ellie's fingertips.
"Thank you for telling me," she murmurs. "I know it's not easy to talk about all this."
no subject
It's long and depressing and emotionally galvanizing to go through, even just to hear about, and Ellie's proud of exactly none of it.
"I'll... tell you more, okay? And you can ask questions. Sometimes that's better."
put a bow on this y/y
Permission. Derrica takes it for what it is: a gift.
And maybe she could press Ellie tonight, try to draw a little more poison from her so the pain behind it might be less. But it's been a difficult conversation, maybe more than Ellie had bargained for when she arrived. So—
"Not tonight," she stipulates. "We should walk down to the kitchen and get something to eat, and talk about something else. Please."
Y! <3
She presses her forehead briefly to Derrica's shoulder to hide her smile, and nods against her.
"Don't have to ask me twice."
When she gets to her feet, she offers Derrica her hand first, and tries not to act like that's new, when she doesn't let go.