REINHARDT, AT YOUR SERVICE! (catch_phrase) wrote in saveatlantisic, @ 2019-01-25 20:27:00 |
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The trip down the mountain was a hell of a lot easier than her initial trip to Skyhold, of course this time she wasn’t still healing off a few injuries and down a mountain was always going to be a bit better than up one. The trek did bring up some awful nostalgia in Ellana, however, for how much more simple things were before she’d… known as much as she did now. When the only problem had been Corypheus and they hadn’t gone to Adamant yet and Solas hadn’t left and Cassandra hadn’t gone off and become Divine and… too many things to mull over, really. Which was why she was quite happy to laugh and listen along to Reinhardt’s tales of Overwatch. It was comforting, really, to hear someone else’s story - to hear about another world that, despite its own problems, was eons away from her own troubles at the moment. It didn’t calm her heart rate, it didn’t ease the tension in her shoulders, it didn’t unknot her stomach - but it sure as hell managed to put a little smile on her face and make the trip a hell of a lot easier. After a rest, some refueling, and at least a little of the liquor they’d brought along they continued on. Ellana hadn’t really missed the Hinterlands. She tended to be a forest or a mountain person and they were empty and vast and creeping with possibilities around every corner, in every cave on a good day. And this was not a fucking good day. Week. Whatever. She was glad that they entered into the Hinterlands at a place where she wouldn’t be tempted to go on any little side trips, check in on anyone else. At a place where it was normally empty anyway - a place that would give her just a little more buffer as the came upon Redcliffe from the southwest after a little over a day of travel, she kinda needed that buffer. Of course, walking through the gate at Redcliffe didn’t solve anything. But it did answer at least one thing; that Ellana’s worst suspicion was very, very likely her worst fear. “Well, shit.” She said in a light huff.
Another place as empty as all the others. Reinhardt looked around, seeing the carts that should have had horses pulling them, the market stalls that should have merchants standing behind them. It was as eerily silent as Skyhold and the road had been. Reinhardt had been willing to go along with Ellana's suggestion to look into another place, but now he was beginning to lose patience. “Clearly it is not only the Inquisition that is gone,” he said. “It is everyone. I think it is time for you to be honest with yourself about what this means.”
“Not everyone.” Ellana muttered, but there wasn’t any volume or weight to the words. There was no real point in getting into who it meant was left - they sure as hell wouldn’t be hanging around Redcliffe and she sure as hell wasn’t going to go marching around, dragging Reinhardt to find them. If whatever this was had been about confronting him directly, she wouldn’t have been plopped down in Skyhold and basically sent on a ‘best guess’ wild nug chase of what the hell she was supposed to be doing. “May as well go and have a rest in the Gull and Lantern.” She said - figuring at least there’d be some food they could find and, you know, probably something a little stronger than ale while she actually tried to wrap her head around the idea that she’d either given up or just flat out failed this spectacularly. Nodding down the road she lifted her hand and made a gesture to a building that sat just a little ahead of them. “It’ll be safer anyway, the front room only has two easily watched ways to enter.” She added, giving at least a little tactical reasoning to not just standing around outside; which she figured was valid. People being gone didn’t mean other shit couldn’t show up and the Hinterlands were riddled with wolves she figured might be pretty hungry at this point.
“I do not object to a tavern or an easily defensible position, but I do not think a physical attack is what we have to worry about here,” Reinhardt said, beginning the trek toward the location Ellana had indicated. They could go there, or stay here, or do most anything, he figured; this wasn’t a problem that was lurking in a place, waiting to be defeated. “When I had to face my fear, there was nothing to fight. As you said earlier, fighting is much easier for me than other things. My worst fears will never be things I can fight. I suspect the same is true for you. So what is it that you really need to face?”
“Clearly, you haven’t met the wolves.” Ellana joked as she headed up the road, Reinhardt with her. She really wasn’t trying to totally deflect, that was the honest truth. There was as much to fear from scavengers around here as there would have been any people. It didn’t mean he was wrong, however, because the Inquisitor had a suspicion that what was going on wouldn’t mean that the local wildlife actually bothered with their presence. But it did make for a damn good excuse for a joke, so she’d take it. Pursing her lips she pushed open the door to the tavern - familiar as it was to her from her few visits to Redcliffe - unchanged, still smelled of stale ale, but it was missing the hustle and bustle. It was missing its barkeep. It was missing most of the things that actually made it feel familiar. “That’s the problem.” Ellana said, as she went behind the bar to find whatever she could that was strongest and pour herself a hefty glass of it, “The only thing I can think of isn’t something I’m going to be willing to negotiate with.” It was true, without a doubt, that there was no way in hell that Ellana would ever just give in and accept defeat, accept that nothing else could be done, accept that she’d lost.
“How long are you willing to be trapped in an empty world with me as your only company?” Reinhardt asked pointedly. Ellana could be unwilling to negotiate all she liked, but the current situation was not a viable long-term alternative. They had jobs to do, in Atlantis or in their home worlds, and they couldn’t just putter uselessly around an uninhabited Ferelden forever. “Whether you want to negotiate or not, if that is our way out, you will have to.”
Drink poured she leaned forward, both hands gripping the edge of the bar as she let her head hang - looking towards the ground. “Just be glad its not the Fade.” She half-heartedly chuckled out. Definitely true, also totally irrelevant at this point - the Fade had never really scared her. Not when Solas had brought her the first time. Not when they’d been getting her memories back and facing the Nightmare Demon. So it wasn’t shocking to her that this wasn’t the Fade. The Fade couldn’t hurt her in the ways that the real world could. The Fade couldn’t destroy her in the ways that the loss of very real people could. “If I could send you back and wear this mantle alone, I would.” She said, picking up the glass and slamming a healthy amount of it back as she stood there - still using the bar to keep her steady. “Then we have a fucking problem.” Definitely true, definitely unfortunate for Reinhardt. Ellana gulped down and just stood in silence for a moment before she pushed back off of the bar. “I can’t negotiate with losing.” She said, bluntly. “I can’t negotiate with giving up.” The Inquisitor’s eyes met Reinhardt’s face with a truthful and stern look.
“You cannot go and have an argument with it, no.” That much was obvious. What would she even argue with, the sky? “But we must find a way for you to deal with the possibility of failure, because giving up now is also no good. We have friends and worlds depending on us. Throwing our hands up and drinking our lives away is not an option.” Reinhardt refused to believe that they were simply trapped permanently and had to wait for a magical rescue from the other side. He wasn’t the “wait and see” type.
It wasn’t that Ellana didn’t agree, logically she did - but the problem was that logically, she also just couldn’t admit defeat. And that’s what it would take, she figured. The ability to admit defeat. That wasn’t going to happen and Ellana could even try and lie and say fine whatever she admitted defeat, she didn’t succeed, none of her plans worked, she didn’t talk him down from things, she didn’t outmaneuver the inevitable. But that wasn’t going to happen and she knew it. “This is bullshit.” She muttered, pushing away from the bar and reaching up to run her hand over the braids on the top of her head, letting it rest there as she took in a deep breath and let out a frustrated huff. “Yeah well, if you have any brilliant ideas or insight on magically being okay with fucking failing have at it.” It was crass, it was rude, and it was frustrated. She felt a little bad and she took that much out on the back of the bar, giving it a solid kick as she grit her teeth. “We could march to our little heart’s fucking content and it wouldn’t fix a damn thing. I won’t… I can’t be okay with the idea of giving up, of losing. It won’t fucking happen.”
Reinhardt was luckily well past the point in his life where anyone’s random snappishness was going to hurt his feelings. He’d been ignoring that kind of thing from Torbjorn for years, and from countless German army officers before that. When he responded, he sounded more like a patient grandfather than anything else - not angry, and kind enough to not be terribly amused by her naivete. “Oh, it will,” he said. “On some level, anyway. Take it from an old soldier who has been at war longer than you have been alive. You are likely right, it will not magically happen any time soon, but eventually you will face enough problems that you cannot solve and battles that you cannot win that you will know losing is always a possibility. Eventually you will no longer fear it, either, unless you go down with your boots on before you live long enough for that to happen. No one is so good or so lucky that they avoid that lesson entirely.”
The Inquisitor had to hold back the urge to ugh outloud. She knew she couldn’t argue her age away, even if she felt eons older than she was because of the the things she’d seen, because of the things she’d lived, the blood she’d spilled. “I know its always a damn possibility.” She grumbled out, she’d known it marching out of Haven to defend it, storming Adamant, and she’d been ready to be the one left behind in the Fade if it meant saving everyone else - even though she knew that her being left behind would have only resulted in more deaths with no one else who really wanted to be Inquisitor and without the anchor to keep fighting against the rifts and that damned Tevinter Magister asshole. Ellana knew defeat, she knew loss. Haven had been more than a loss, it had been a punch right to her stomach and even though it was what took her from Herald to Inquisitor; it still felt like… she didn’t know. She wasn’t good with the words that she would have needed to actually describe it. “This-” She said, motioning with her remaining hand, “Isn’t a loss. Its not just failure. Its… I don’t fucking know.” She admitted in a huff before continuing. “I’ve had to run from battles, I know I lose my arm, I’ve walked away from everything I ever cared about just to start over because it was the right damn thing to do.” She’d lost a piece of her heart she’d never get back, but that one wasn’t for saying out loud. “I’ve exiled friends. I’ve… made decisions I knew could and would likely kill me. I’ve gotten lucky that I’m not splayed in some field for the damn crows.” She grumbled less than subtly under her breath, “I know that losing happens.” Reaching forward, she finished off what she’d poured herself and slammed the glass down - walking back around the bar without a refill as she moved towards the window that overlooked the lake and the now-empty merchant stalls below them. “I’m alive because other people are dead.” Ellana stated through gritted teeth. “I can’t, I won’t… this can’t happen, I won’t let it.”
“But you are afraid you will, or we would not be here.” Reinhardt sat at the bar, folding his forearms on the worn wood surface. He had never been the one to fall into the position of Team Therapist - that had always been Ana or Angela - but here he was the only one to do the job, so he would do his best at it. They needed to get out of here, and if this was the fight they must fight for that, so be it. “So why is that? What is it about this loss that seems so much more frightening than the others? Why does this scare you when old failures do not?”
Because this was her lose-lose-lose scenario brought to life. She lost her hand. She lost her friends. She lost Solas. There was no part of it salvaged. There was not uneasy truce to keep for years so Solas would feel like he’d gotten part of what he wanted. There was no saving her hand, though that one at least she knew was always going to be a loss whenever Atlantis decided to actually drop her back in Thedas, but at least it was a nice thought that maybe she could avoid it while she was there. There was no bit of humanity, of the Thedas she’d grown up in left. There were just spirits and emptiness. Just wind in trees that would go untended. Redcliffe wouldn’t look like it was frozen in time like this for long - no, it wouldn’t take more than a few years for the food to go, the ale to turn, the wine to sour. The wooden beams would break down leaving bits of stone overrun by nature. And of course, a little bit of that Dalish woman stuffed deep down in there wasn’t exactly adverse to some of the cities getting a pretty solid ‘fuck you’ done to them. Not with the way they treated elves, not with the way they treated the poor. But not this way, not because someone decided they knew better than everyone. Resting her hand against the window frame she looked back over her shoulder at Reinhardt, “I don’t know how to answer that.” She didn’t know how to put into words one of the people she cared about the most in the world causing… this being different than everything else. Ellana didn’t have the vocabulary for why she’d rather the world just outright end than someone whittle it down to just the bits they wanted and live in some faux utopia. But the fact of the matter was that that was where the truth she wasn’t able to face laid. In the complicated quagmire that was the very stern difference between staring down some half-demon half-magister jackass trying to end it all and… well, this. This thing she didn’t even really have words or a description for. “Maybe its hindsight. The other losses… comparatively weren’t the same or something ridiculous like that.” Scratching the surface, but refusing to dive in again - Ellana looked back out the window.
“The only difference I can see is that you do not seem to see a way forward from here,” Reinhardt replied. Ellana had told him very little of what had emptied this world, but it seemed obvious that she considered this the true end of everything. She wasn’t looking for a way to undo what had been done, or to bring the people who had caused it to justice...she was simply accepting it as a complete and total failure. “Maybe that is what you should consider - how, if this happens, do you go on?”
Ellana leaned forward - letting her forehead rest upon the cool glass of the window for a moment as she actually took in what Reinhardt said. Now, of course, there was a big difference between taking something in, accepting it, and the ability to let go of your stubbornness and actually say it out loud and make it… real. And if you asked Ellana, she’d generally consider something not necessarily actually accepted if you didn’t, couldn’t, or wouldn’t say it outloud. “I don’t.” She said bluntly, pushing herself away from the window and crossing her arms over her chest. The lack of hand making her awkwardly re-adjust herself several times as she found her stance - looking over at Reinhardt with an almost blank expression, “Because dead people don’t move forward. They’re dead. That’s sort of the point.” The only other possibilities in this situation, the ones where she might not be dead (either because Solas found a way to not include her in whatever his end-game-killing-spree-whatever was or because for reasons she couldn’t and wouldn’t even fathom she ended up siding with him… were just far too painful to even scratch at). “That’s kinda the whole thing about being dead. Whats happened has happened and you can’t do shit about it.”
“But you are not dead!” Reinhardt made a broad sweeping gesture with his hand, the kind that had a tendency to accidentally hit people who sat next to him. “Others, yes...perhaps, at any rate. I have seen no bodies. But regardless of what has happened to them, you stand here, alive! So what will you do?” He was really hoping that ‘curl up behind this bar and also die’ was not the answer.
“I’m not dead because Atlantis is full of fun, torturous whimsy that likes to throw you into shitty no-win scenarios.” Ellana huffed again, her frustration, dread, and sadness were playing tug-of-war with each other and whichever was winning at any one moment never seemed to stay in control for long as her emotions fought it out with her ability to rationalize and accept any of this. “For all we know I am a spirit here and I’ve just refused to fucking move on because I have unfinished business or because of how I died.” Not that either were good options, neither option really left her in a place to do anything. “We lost. I failed. He got what he wanted. That’s fucking that.” Saying that out loud all but tore Ellana’s heart from her chest and she tried not to let it show on her face. “Me, Atlantis me, isn’t dead. Me, Thedas me? Dead. Definitely fucking dead.” She flat out refused to accept any other scenario. He wouldn’t have tortured her with letting… with causing… with... everyone she cared about outside of him being dead and leaving her alive. She had to believe that because if she didn’t believe that the part of her that was so desperate to find something to redeem in Solas, something that could be used to stop him crumbled and that left her in no better of a place. “That’s why this is my worst fucking fear.” She half-laughed out, “Because its about being able to do nothing. I told you, its not just losing or failing - that I can handle.”
She was frustratingly determined to believe the situation hopeless, it seemed. There was little in the world that he hated more than thinking one’s self into a corner and refusing to leave it. Reinhardt’s frustration was obvious in his heavy sigh and the little slump that he briefly let his shoulders indulge in. More of it came through in his voice. “So that is your plan, then? Give up? Just sit here and hope someone in Atlantis finds a way to fix this?”
Ellana actually did feel bad for Reinhardt. Of all the people he could have been stuck with he was stuck here in Thedas with her in the worst case scenario for basically… any of the other Thedosians. Almost any, that was. At least he was a soldier, so he got it - in his own way, at least and she definitely didn’t blame him for his clear frustration. She was a lot to handle on a good day with the circles she could run around an issue before actually tackingly it (or, her preferred way to handle it of course, just you know - stabbing at it). “I don’t know how to make you understand this.” Her tone softened. “Being here, it being like this. It has nothing to do with Atlantis…” She closed the space between where Reinhardt sat at the bar and herself - leaving about two feet between them as she gulped but a few feelings she didn’t feel like slipping out, “Or I mean, that’s the problem. If its like this, there isn’t a fix… how can I… reset button. Its like a reset buttons been pressed.” It was the only way she could think of to explain it, at least Atlantis had been good for one thing - modern terminology. “I’m not giving up. There isn’t a fix if this happens. That’s why its my worst fucking fear.” She took a few more steps and leaned against the bar next to him - looking over it as if willing herself to see someone else standing behind it, instead of just empty space. “Its my worst fucking fear because there’s no fix - so I can’t tell you how to fix it. Because the whole damn point of the fear is it can’t be fixed.” She sighed heavily, “Its… the lose-lose-lose ending.” The Inquisitor huffed, a hit of amusement amongst the sadness of the reality. “No hand. No redemption. No life.” If Ellana had been a more introspective person, she might have realized that the only way to conquer the fear was to admit that was even possible, but it was just something she wasn’t willing to do. She wasn’t willing to admit that this scenario was a very real possibility and that even if she shouldered everything and fought until her very last breath this could still happen.
“Because things cannot be fixed does not mean there is no way forward from them.” Reinhardt had his own stubbornness and refusal to give up. Jack had said of Reinhardt once that his whole life was just trying not to say goodbye - or would, rather. The Jack Morrison who had come to Atlantis wasn’t there yet. But Reinhardt thought other people were willing to say goodbye too easily. Things broke, people died, and worlds ended, but there was always more to do. Ellana’s insistence that she was dead seemed blatantly incorrect, as she was sitting right next to him. She was here, and that meant she could still do something. That would, however, mean accepting what had happened; there was no way to assess next steps without first making sense of the situation. “But I know as well as you that only you can manage your fear,” he sighed, and he reached over to pat her shoulder with his very large hand. “And the fears like this, they take time. I do not know how long I sat in my own prison - hours, days, months, it could have been anything. So, you will take the time you need, too. And in the time between, we will hope that Atlantis decides to pull us out of this scheiße.”
As bad as she sort of felt for Reinhardt getting stuck with her, she was probably lucky it was him and not some other people. He may not have understood in a way she thought she could make him, mostly because she was just flat out not willing to give out some information (particularly about knowing about Solas’ plans, given she was yet unaware he’d left Atlantis and she wasn’t out here to you know, whatever). But at least he was willing to understand that shit didn’t just happen with emotions like this. “So, what do you want to drink while I figure this the fuck out?” She asked, pushing off the bar with a smirk as she made her way behind it once more.
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