[ Ellie's description of her world before the outbreak sounds not that far off from the Midgard he's familiar with, technologically at least, barring the exclusion of magic in any form. Granted, he knows that he more or less blew the lid off of that secret when he attempted to take over the planet. Things he ponders as he adds sugar to his own tea, blowing on the surface of the liquid.
He's spoken with Abby about the place these two come from before, but it had all sounded frankly terrible. Haunting and haunted by turns. The dead, fighting the living, in the mindless pursuit of causing suffering and pain. A hunger for it, even.
Trying to imagine what it would be like to know that life is so causally discarded by those in power and coming up relatively empty-handed. Trying to imagine what it means to have children in a world that is actively, horrifically, dying around you. ]
Abby told me there was no cure for the infection. [ He shakes his head a little. ] It all sounds so terrible.
[ Terrible and pointlessly savage. An entire planet suspended in it's own fear of death, which in turn is quite active. ]
[Ellie remembers to take a sip of her tea, and thankfully it's still warm, while she lets Loki digest what she's given him.]
It was just how it was for us. We didn't know anything different. Anything that wasn't that was just stories.
[She falls quiet again. There's no way she can describe what it is to live in a world populated only by ruins and ghosts. To walk through a shopping mall in the process of being reclaimed by nature, listening to an old soldier recount what it was like in this very mall at Christmastime, lit up with lights and families shopping with their excited children. Safe, always, and without a inkling of what was coming for them.
And it came for them.
No wonder Winston spent his time drinking himself half the death, with only his horse for company. It strikes her that she might be only person alive who remembers that he lived at all.
Carefully, she comes back to the present.]
There wasn't. But... there might have been. If things had been different.
[Ellie doesn't look at his face. She doesn't know if Abby told him this part.]
When I was fourteen, I was out after curfew with my best friend. And we both got bit.
[She swallows, touching her forearm, and pulls back her sleeve. The tattoo is on top, old ink over scarred, burned skin. Layer after layer, keeping it hidden. She runs her fingers over it, a mute testament to all she'd done to hide it.]
If we'd gone back to our school they would've killed us as soon as they scanned us, and we came up infected. We figured we didn't have much time left, so we decided to spend all of it together.
She didn't make it. But for some reason, I did.
[Ellie stops. She's not sure why she mentioned Riley, but it still hurts to talk about her. She doesn't want to. She rubs the side of her nose, pushes on. She does not describe what happened. Maybe she never will.]
It usually takes a few hours for somebody to turn. For the infection to eat your brain and turn you into one of those things. The longest is two days. It was probably two weeks in before I really believed that I wasn't going to go to sleep and wake up with spores growing out of my face.
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no subject
He's spoken with Abby about the place these two come from before, but it had all sounded frankly terrible. Haunting and haunted by turns. The dead, fighting the living, in the mindless pursuit of causing suffering and pain. A hunger for it, even.
Trying to imagine what it would be like to know that life is so causally discarded by those in power and coming up relatively empty-handed. Trying to imagine what it means to have children in a world that is actively, horrifically, dying around you. ]
Abby told me there was no cure for the infection. [ He shakes his head a little. ] It all sounds so terrible.
[ Terrible and pointlessly savage. An entire planet suspended in it's own fear of death, which in turn is quite active. ]
no subject
It was just how it was for us. We didn't know anything different. Anything that wasn't that was just stories.
[She falls quiet again. There's no way she can describe what it is to live in a world populated only by ruins and ghosts. To walk through a shopping mall in the process of being reclaimed by nature, listening to an old soldier recount what it was like in this very mall at Christmastime, lit up with lights and families shopping with their excited children. Safe, always, and without a inkling of what was coming for them.
And it came for them.
No wonder Winston spent his time drinking himself half the death, with only his horse for company. It strikes her that she might be only person alive who remembers that he lived at all.
Carefully, she comes back to the present.]
There wasn't. But... there might have been. If things had been different.
[Ellie doesn't look at his face. She doesn't know if Abby told him this part.]
When I was fourteen, I was out after curfew with my best friend. And we both got bit.
[She swallows, touching her forearm, and pulls back her sleeve. The tattoo is on top, old ink over scarred, burned skin. Layer after layer, keeping it hidden. She runs her fingers over it, a mute testament to all she'd done to hide it.]
If we'd gone back to our school they would've killed us as soon as they scanned us, and we came up infected. We figured we didn't have much time left, so we decided to spend all of it together.
She didn't make it. But for some reason, I did.
[Ellie stops. She's not sure why she mentioned Riley, but it still hurts to talk about her. She doesn't want to. She rubs the side of her nose, pushes on. She does not describe what happened. Maybe she never will.]
It usually takes a few hours for somebody to turn. For the infection to eat your brain and turn you into one of those things. The longest is two days. It was probably two weeks in before I really believed that I wasn't going to go to sleep and wake up with spores growing out of my face.