Reinhardt Wilhelm and Eileen the Crow
PG | COMPLETE
When Eileen had been a very little girl, and holidays weren't the same thing as running away from the city, her family had visited the sea-side. It was a good two-hour walk from one of the abandoned fishing villages they whispered about when they thought she wasn't listening, and although she was too young to understand how an entire town might be destroyed, she knew the word they used: cursed. Cursed was inescapable; cursed was already doomed. She didn't want to be cursed. But the village that they had visited was lovely and bright and showed no signs of catching whatever malady had eradicated the townships to the south. She ate spun candy in the sunshine (for there was still sunshine, back then - pale and tremulous in the sky, but present) - and played in the waves with her brother and mother. It was a beautiful memory, but it was one that alternately comforted and cut, for these days her family was long since dead and she had not seen a true summer afternoon in years.
So yes, the first thing she noticed in the Atlantis streets was the sunshine: bright, strong, and hanging overhead in the sky as if nothing could dislodge it. The second thing she noticed was the people.
There were all kinds. Young. Old. Exasperated parents. Teens jutting their lower lip out at some injustice. Some ate. Some chattered loudly. Others seemed pensive, or as watchful as she was. Eileen could barely believe it, and the constant hum of activity around her was overwhelming. So many people! She had not seen a crowd in years. Yharnam had been a place of boarded up areas and hidden corners for a good decade once the old part of the city fell. The population dwindled as the sickness that had destroyed that fishing village years before took hold. Those that remained weren't right. Not like these people who walked and talked and lived their life as if they had never seen the sun turn red and start dripping blood before disappearing from the sky entirely.
Eileen took a careful seat on a bench. And watched. She had been good at melting in a crowd in Yharnam, and she wanted to enjoy these sights before the mirage chose to disappear.
"You've got a weird mask," observed a kid.
Eileen looked at him through her crow mask, dark eyes sparkling. "That's what they tell me."
“I think it's cool!” The commentary, bold and cheerful, came from an older man with a Bavarian accent. He was very tall—nearly seven feet—and broad, and clearly in good fighting shape despite his white hair and missing eye. “Like the ones the plague doctors wore, yes? An old friend of mine made one for a Halloween costume once!”
That old friend was some eight years dead now, along with a number of others. Reinhardt Wilhelm was 61 years old, and he'd been a soldier since he was 18. The losses of friends and family were numerous now, and he found it most comfortable to remember the good times. It was better to think of the Gabriel Reyes who spent a small fortune and dozens of hours on crafting the perfect creative Halloween costume than the Gabriel Reyes who had been slowly poisoned by frustration and lack of support and died in a terrorist attack so severe that they couldn't even recover all the bodies.
Not much startled Eileen, but the sudden appearance of a very tall gentlemen came close. She reprimanded herself silently - letting her guard down already! Embarrassing - before turning her attention to the massive individual who had entered the conversation. She was glad that she had done her reading; it was strange to think of her outfit as a costume.
Although if she thought on it, it was just that - something to mark her as apart from the bloodthirsty mercenaries of Cainhurst or the well-intentioned idiots of the Church.
“I didn’t read about Halloween,” she said, her tone patient but friendly, and her accent thickly Scottish, “in the packet of information they provided us with in our rooms. Is it a holiday where you’re from?” Because he clearly was NOT from Yharnam even with that height that might’ve rivaled Gascoigne’s. Something about the cut of his hair, or the thread of his clothing was simply otherworldly.
“It is!” Reinhardt cheerfully replied. “In my world, at least—some countries celebrate more than others. I am from Germany, where we will take any excuse to throw a party, but it is a much bigger deal in America. I take it that you do not have Halloween where you come from?”
It seemed obvious that the lady was from somewhere quite foreign to him. The cut of her clothes was nothing Reinhardt’s world had seen in centuries, and masks such as the one she wore had been out of common use for even longer. If not for all the reading about medieval times that he'd done as a boy, Reinhardt might not even have recognized it. Throw in the fact that she'd never heard of Halloween, and...well, if she was from an Earth, it was a very different one from his.
Germany and America weren’t names she was familiar with, but she got the gist. Eileen shook her head, long beak going from left to right in a deadpan fashion, before she hooked her fingers beneath the bottom lining of her mask at her ears and pulled it off. Gods, she was actually nervous about doing so, not that one could tell - her face was calm, eyes cast off to the side. She’d never have removed her mask in Yharnam when meeting a stranger, but this wasn’t Yharnam - and she wasn’t going to be the biddy that jumped at shadows and refused to adapt. “No, no Halloween,” she confirmed, setting her mask into her lap. “Just a plague I’d rather not catch.”
Had the plague been cured by… whatever the Paleblood hunter had done? She wasn’t sure. But people here weren’t sick, and she dearly wanted to feel sunlight on her bare face. It was one of those moments where a million things came to her mind, but she tossed them aside and held out a gloved hand to shake: “I forgot my manners in all the excitement. I’m Eileen.”
Reinhardt took her hand and bowed over it with all the courtly grace that a gentleman of his size could manage. “A pleasure to meet you, Eileen!” he declared with a smile, rising back to his full height. “I am Reinhardt Wilhelm, formerly a soldier, now an adventurer and knight-errant... agent now, I suppose, since I’ve come to Atlantis. May I join you on your bench?”
Reinhardt had always liked making new friends. He particularly liked making pretty new friends, and he thought Eileen was very pretty indeed now that she’d removed her mask. There was something in her eyes that reminded him of his old friend and comrade Ana.
In confirmation she scooted over, gauged his size again out of the corner of her eye, and then scooted over some more. Gascoigne had towered over her, so Reinhardt’s size wasn’t intimidating, but she also didn’t want to invite familiarity by affording him so little of a public bench.
The courtly bearing she appreciated and filed away. He didn’t strike her as nobility, at least not the nobility that annoyed her, and so she instead focused on his list of accomplishments and professions. “They’re putting me in Intake,” she said with a nod of her head, pleased with the position. She had been treated kindly by the people who had greeted her when she had arrived, and the thought of easing that initial panic of “where-am-I” appealed to her. Particularly when so many people in Atlantis, she saw now, were so young. Who knew where they might have come from, what they had seen? “What did you fight?”
The question was casual, direct. Soldiers had any number of potential enemies, after all, and learning more about Reinhardt’s past was the easiest way of getting to know him. He seemed genial and friendly enough, but he also looked like he knew which end of the weapon to wield.
Reinhardt’s personality took up enough space on its own; he tried to be mindful of how much physical room he took up, particularly near women. He sat at the other end of the bench, which still didn’t leave a great deal of room, but he thought he was doing well enough staying out of Eileen’s personal bubble.
“Injustice!” he answered as he sat. It occurred to him after his enthusiastic response that she might have been looking for something more specific, so he attempted clarification. “Terrorists, both human and Omnic, when I was with the Bundeswehr and Overwatch. More recently, I have fought gangs, bigots, union-busters.. .people all across Europe who threatened the innocent. What about you?”
She said she was working in Intake, but Reinhardt had been around fighters too long not to know one when he saw one.
At least some of those words were familiar enough to Eileen that she got the gist - her mouth curved into an amused smile at his enthusiasm. She liked Reinhardt already, she decided. Eileen generally had a pretty good perception of people due to her line of work, but bald excitement and honesty had always been traits that she’d appreciated in a world filled with politics and people trying to hide shit from her.
Still, she hadn’t gotten all of that. “Omnics?” she asked simply, putting aside the notion of whatever a union-buster was for later.
“Robots built by the Omnic Corporation,” Reinhardt said, and then remembered that based on her clothing, Eileen might very well not know robots, either. More clarification might be proper. “Mechanical beings, some more sentient than others. There are good ones, who are essentially just metal people trying to live their lives. There are also bad ones who want to destroy all humans. And then there are the lesser battle units, which have no real intelligence and simply do as they are programmed or ordered to do.”
Her calm expression grew more skeptical by the sentence, although she did not argue. Already Eileen was understanding that Atlantis was by far further along than Yharnam, which had just started to install electricity when the worst of the plague had hit. “They sound as if they could be very useful,” she stated, and added: “Or very dangerous. Where did they come from?” She had a guess that they had been invented - humanity was terribly good at creating things that either helped them or did they in entirely. “I assume they were created by people in your world. That is usually the way of things.”
“Indeed,” Reinhardt admitted with some sorrow. For all the joy he took in a fight well fought, he knew too well the high cost of war, and of human arrogance. “People designed them, and built them, and made them better and better at their jobs, but even as it became clear that some had their own thoughts and feelings, we still treated them like objects and slaves. The Omnics eventually responded with killing, and humanity responded in kind. I fought for humanity in that war, but I could understand well enough why the Omnics started it.”
That was the way it went: no side was entirely evil, even if they were robots or bloodthirsty beasts. Eileen made a noise under her breath of resignation, squinting in the bright daylight - she’d have to get used to that. Or get a pair of big, lovely sunglasses that made her look distinguished. That sounded pretty good, too.
“After all this, I could use something hot,” she said after a moment, and then the corner of her mouth moved: “Or strong. Would you like to accompany me accordingly?”
“I would be happy to!” Reinhardt grinned, shaking off the bit of sadness without any hesitation. He stood to his full (considerable) height and bowed like a proper gentleman. “If we walk a bit, I am sure we can find someone who will put liquor in coffee or tea, and then we will have both!”
It was endearing to see such an enormous man with impeccable manners. Yes, Gascoigne might have learned a lot, Eileen reflected, and like Reinhardt, she pushed away any sadness at the notion. Here and now, as ever. “An excellent compromise.”