girlwithout | (no subject)

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It shouldn't be a surprise, when she can't quite get to sleep, even though she's exhausted. It's like every time she so much as shuts her eyes, there's these images imprinted on the back of her eyelids, images of dead girls and Bernard killing them. Something like an hour after she bundles herself in blankets, she finally rolls over to the edge of the bed to see Dogmeat. He looks back at her and thumps his tail against the floor, and she feels a little bit of a smile pulling at her mouth.

She pats the bed next to her. "Come on, get comfy."

With her fingers buried in soft fur, she manages to sleep.

(She jolts awake with Dogmeat whining in her ear and glances at the clock.

It's only been an hour.

It's going to be a long night.)

In the morning, she still feels barely less exhausted than when she started last night, but at least she tried. Now - or at least after she takes another shower and gets dressed - seems as good a time as any to assure Ellen that her dog hasn't been kidnapped.

Barely half an hour later sees her wandering through the hallways, suddenly realizing that she really has no idea how to navigate the room numbering system to find any room that isn't her own. Rikki glances down at Dogmeat. "If I tell you to go home, would you know where it is?"

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"As long as he didn't get anything on you, that's fine," Ellen says. "He's used to sleeping wherever I am. A lot of the time that means on whatever I can get between myself and the ground, but he jumps up on the bed from time to time when I'm at home, too."

Jerald's been caught by surprise that way a few times. Dogmeat's learned to wait for the okay signal first as a result.

Ellen pauses a moment, considering the situation. After a bit she says, "You still look a little off your pace, if you don't mind my saying so. I have some music, if you wanted a distraction or anything. I'm- sorry, I'm not trying to push, that'd be rude of me."

Rikki ducks her head. "It's cool, I guess I'm just kinda... I didn't sleep too great last night? And it wasn't Dogmeat's fault, he was great."

And she is clearly not ready to be going home if she still looks bad enough for people to notice. Great.

"It's okay. I know the feeling- I'm not just saying that, either. I still can't always get the basement in Andale out of my head," Ellen says. "At least here you can get some coffee. It's amazing what a difference that can make some days."

"Coffee sounds good." For a moment, she just... stays still, not quite sure if she's ready to move forward. "I just... feel like I should deal with this stuff. Better. Like I'm supposed to?"

God, she sounds stupid when she says it out loud like that.

"The soldiers back home think that, too," says Ellen. "Until they come to something they don't know how to deal with. And then it just gets worse for them, because they feel like they ought to be better at things than that... can I ask why you think you should be handling it better?"

Well.

"I was... trained to deal with some stuff," Rikki says, carefully. Because, well, teenage superheroes is pretty normal where she's from, but not so much other places, she's guessing. "Not this, exactly, but... emergency situations."

"Mm." Ellen considers this. "Lawman work, or fire? You don't- excuse me- you don't carry yourself like a soldier..."

And before the War, police and firefighters handled most of the non-soldier emergencies, if Ellen remembers her history right. Well, them and the Bureau of Alcohol, Drugs, Tobacco, Firearms and Lasers.

... not even kidding about the lasers.

"It might be just me, but what happened at that man's house seemed like a really particular kind of emergency. One that being prepared to handle other emergencies wouldn't do much good for."

"Lawman work, kinda. Where I'm from, we have kinda a section of people that deal with the really weird emergencies, like aliens and superpowers. That was me."

Rikki exhales heavily. "I guess it was." Or, at least, it hit closer to home than the stuff she usually handles.

"Oh, like Invincible," Ellen says. "Or Moon Shadow- sorry, they're both friends of mine who come here. Invincible's in school in his civilian identity but he's got genetic superpowers, so when he's not at school he works for the government. Moon Shadow's a little more independent, but he deals with similar things. He seems to get aliens a lot, but there's supers all over the place in his world, on both sides of the law."

She nods. "Everyone has something that gets them where they live," she says gently. "Even if you've been up against gigantic green rage monsters and alien invaders with disintegration weapons and orbital death rays and come out of it okay, there's going to be something that hits you personally. There's nothing wrong with that. Nothing at all."

"I don't have superpowers or anything, I'm just a normal person." Well. "Mostly normal, anyway. But I'm related to Captain America's original sidekick, so I guess it kind of runs in the blood."

She goes quiet for a second. "And... yeah. I mean, I guess. It was just... he was targeting girls like me."

Ellen nods. "Moon Shadow's told me there are people in his world without powers who do the superhero stuff anyway," she says. "Gadget heroes, most of them- anyway, I understand what you're saying."

She nods quietly at the second part, though. "And that made it personal," she says. "Not 'it could have been anybody', but 'it was going to be me, specifically'. Which just makes it a thousand times harder to get out of your head."

"Pretty much."

Gadget hero. Huh. She hadn't really heard of them being called that, but she guesses it makes sense. Even if it's a little bit misleading - it's not like she relies solely on gadgets or anything. "So, um, what did you do?"

"Made sure the people in Andale couldn't hurt anybody any more," Ellen says after a moment's thought. Rikki might not be powered, but if she's part of the superhero community, taking them all down with an alien energy weapon before they could kill me probably isn't going to go over well. Outside of Thor and Wonder Woman, and maybe Steve, the superheroes she's met haven't been the sort with much room for lethal action. "Made sure what- what I could find of their victims got a decent funeral. That helped a lot, at least for me... at least it meant I got to do something for them. I kept busy after that, too- I was trying to find my father at the time, so I had searching for him to focus on. But sometimes I just had to remind myself that it was over. The memories might be really, really vivid, but the whole thing was over."

Her shoulders slump a little when she exhales. The way Ellen says it... she gets the feeling they didn't just walk away from it. Of course, in a world like hers... would they even have prisons?

"I tipped off the police," Rikki says, quietly. "They already identified a couple of the girls, so. They'll figure out where the, um, bodies should go."

Ellen nods. "That's something," she says. "I'm glad you have them- police, I mean. To handle things from here. And to let the girls' families know what happened. There's... there was no way of identifying the people in Andale, let alone finding their families, if they even had any. At least the girls' families wil know, now, instead of wondering forever."

Instead of wondering forever.

It just... hits her, then (and she suddenly spins around so she's looking at Dogmeat instead of Ellen because she's trying so hard not to cry) that she may not be a body in the basement with the other girls, but she has folks back home who think the granddaughter they raised is dead and don't even have a body to bury. At least they would have been told what happened, but what kind of comfort is that?

Uh-oh. Ellen's seen that face before. Mostly on the people who've been brought back from the alien ship, trying like anything to hold it together.

She gestures to Dogmeat, who gets up and pads over to Rikki.

"IF you need to vent, go ahead," she murmurs. "No one will ever hear about any of this from me."

God. God, she is such a pathetic mess right now. Rikki drops down to the floor with a little bitter twist of deja vu. Apparently she can't even be away from Ellen's dog for five minutes.

Once she's safely settled with an armful of dog and doesn't have to look at the person she's talking to anymore, she lets the words spill out. "My folks think I'm dead."

It's been a bad day. Everyone gets those.

"Oh, jeez," Ellen says. "I didn't- I'm sorry. Is.... is there a reason for that?"

.... that was possibly the stupidest possible way to phrase the question. Way to go, Ellen.

Rikki wipes at her eyes with the back of her wrist, wishing she could pretend like it didn't come away wet.

"I, um." She lets out a sound that might have started out life as a laugh. "Probably cause I died."

"... that'd do it," says Ellen. "I'm sorry, I really could've phrased that better. I take it something happened to change that?"

"I did something that was supposed to... to save people." She scoots up against the closest wall so she can lean her head against it. "And then I woke up in a world that's pretty similar, except no one knows me because Rikki Barnes died in childbirth. I don't know why."

She occupies herself pulling a little tuft of shed hair out of Dogmeat's fur. "Sometimes I think it's like a purgatory? Like I wasn't good enough for Heaven or... or Valhalla or whatever. So I got sent away to do better."

It's a small room. The nearest wall's not far.

Ellen makes her way over to sit on the bed, because just at the moment it doesn't look like close contact would be welcome. "It's possible. I can't claim to know what your world's metaphysics are like, or whether God or whoever controls it would do that kind of thing," she says. "But- look, for what it's worth, I'm a military chaplain. And just speaking from my experience as a soldier, I've found that when you do impossible things and live to tell about them, more often than not, your reward is being asked to do something even harder. It's not a punishment. It's that your deeds stand out."

"I know it's not comforting, it's just- I don't think it's that you weren't good enough. It sounds more like you did something amazing enough to get you noticed when somebody amazing was needed."

That's... it's comforting, but also kind of terrifying. "I don't know if I believe in an all-powerful god that controls everything. There might be an afterlife, but that's mostly cause I used to know a Norse god and he knew valkyries. I always figured that was more like a different dimension than a heaven."

She breathes out. "I know I took on a lot of stuff. And I don't regret it, cause I did some good and met some people I never would have known. But... I'm sixteen, you know? Sometimes I feel like I'm barely keeping it together. I have one real friend where I'm staying, my family's dead, and I live in a shitty building that should probably be condemned. I don't know how much more I have to give."

"It's okay. I was never taught that God was all-powerful, myself," Ellen says. "I mean, I know that's what people used to believe before the War, but neither Reverend Avellone nor Knight-Captain Colvin ever said I should believe that God was all-powerful. I just meant that if there was some entity that did control things like that in your world, I didn't know their rules."

She rubs at the back of her neck with one hand. "I'd say you deserve at least something of a break, after all that. Even if it's just a rest somewhere, to help you get yourself back together. When I was your age I was just taking the test that was supposed to determine the job I'd be doing for the rest of my life, so for what it's worth you're way ahead of me in terms of accomplishments for your age. I kinda think you might be entitled to sit back and gather your marbles for a bit."

"Yeah. I guess."

Her life doesn't seem to have a lot of downtime, lately. If she's not being Nomad, she's struggling to keep her life afloat. It's... kind of nice, thinking about taking a vacation from that for a little while. "For a little while, at least."

"They put me on leave for a week or two after I got back from ... well, it wasn't the worst mission I ever had, but it was up there," Ellen says. "And then they put me on light duty around the garrison instead of the field. It wasn't much, but it helped- if you can stay here for a while it'll probably help you too."

"I think I can." She bites her lip. "I don't like using the minors' fund a lot, but I guess this is what it's here for? A kind of vacation would be good for me." Her voice tilts upwards at the end, almost in question.

"That's what I hear it's meant for," Ellen says. "Consider it the mental equivalent of vitamins, or bed rest after a poisoning. It's a necessity, just a different kind of one."

She can't help but make a face a bit at bed rest after a poisoning - that was pretty recent still, huh.

"Yeah. I... yeah. That sounds good."

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