CONTENT WARNING: Discussion of suicide, depictions of survivor’s guilt

Esko had never really told Ellen how much he needed her. He’d never assumed he had to. They were best friends, and there was no hurry to profess how much they cared about one another when they had all the time in the world. They were just kids, young people with their whole lives ahead of them. They’d be fine.

And then, with a messy, handwritten note and a rope, all of that had changed.

A world once brightened by Ellen’s shining smile and force of will was suddenly dark, like the power had been turned off and the sun had been snuffed out. Life lost its color, food lost its taste, words lost their meaning.

How come he didn’t notice sooner? How was he so fucking blind? Esko was a shit friend. A terrible person. A failure who had let the person who mattered most to him fucking DIE. She FUCKING KILLED HERSELF and he never even NOTICED it was getting to that point. Not even once.

And now here he was, alone without her, surrounded by strangers he was stuck with by circumstance, none of whom would ever understand the pain of what he was going through. None of whom he could even think of a way to explain everything to. They didn’t know a damn thing about his life before his banishment, and they didn’t need to. It wasn’t their business, and he didn’t want to burden them, and they wouldn’t get it anyways, and he didn’t want to talk about it. Ever.

Esko may have been surrounded by people, but he was still entirely on his own.

He’d never dreamed of a world without Ellen. He’d never dreamed of a world beyond the walls of his city. He’d never really dreamed of anything outside the carefully set plan he had made for himself, back when planning was a thing that actually worked and he still had all the components in place.

How the hell was he supposed to get into a lavender marriage and live a life as a successful doctor with Ellen if he didn’t even have her anymore?

How the hell was he supposed to do anything without Ellen?

He hadn’t been surviving, just forcing himself to stay upright for vengeance, which was the only real goal he felt he could have anymore. People? Those were temporary. They would die or leave or disappear, he was certain of it. Anger? Anger could stay forever.

Esko had always been an angry person, but Ellen had brought him joy and kept the fires at bay. Now, without her, the flames consumed everything.

Everyth-

“Hey, Taika! School’s out, c’mon!”

---

A dream. Esko knew instantly that this was a dream. The air was warm, he was a little shorter, and he was being called by his legal name, which meant he was in public. The walls around him – plastered with a combination of educational posters and blatant propaganda – were familiar. School. He was in his school, probably 16 or 17, hunched over his desk in the history classroom in a way that suggested he’d just slept through class again. It was winter outside, and the heat was on, and he was in upper secondary school all over again.

“Taika,” someone said, poking him a couple of times in the shoulder. “Come on, class just let out. Don’t make me wait or you’re gonna walk home alone in the snow.”

Esko pulled himself up, trying to recall the name of the person he was speaking to. The name… her name, but the one that wasn’t really hers.

“Shit,” he muttered. “How long was I out for?”

Ellen poked him a couple more times, obviously just trying to ignore him at this point. “The whole class,” she replied.

“Taika! Viljami! Get out of my classroom before I lock you in here!”

Ellen grabbed Esko by the back of his jacket as their history teacher – a sharp-spoken man who made all his students call him Jalo because his last name was one that he hated – barked at them and waved around the yardstick he used for pointing at the board when he taught. Scruffed by his best friend, Esko found himself shaking tail to hurry out of the classroom before Jalo had another chance to speak or make good on his promise. You never really knew for sure when the man was serious, since he’d once glued someone’s laser pointer to the ceiling after trying to blind another student with it.

It was still there.

Boots crunched into the cold white drifts under their feet, and Ellen playfully chucked Esko into a patch of snow with a gentle amount of force. She was grinning at him. “You’re so lazy sometimes, did you know that?” she asked, hazel eyes sparkling as her golden-blonde bangs fell in front of her face. Esko groaned.

“I work harder than you, at least,” he replied before hitting her in the face with some snow.

“Hey! Hey, no fair! War crimes! That’s a war crime!”

“You’re so dramatic. Come on, let’s get home before it starts snowing again.”

As Esko got to his feet and continued down the sidewalk in the direction of his and Ellen’s homes, she bounded after him like an eager dog, grinning. “Hey, think we could take a detour for some warm soup along the way? I’m starving.”

“Did you not eat lunch today?”

“How am I supposed to eat lunch when fucking Kylli is trying to scare us all with Troll stories again?”

“… You put the food in your mouth. And then chew. And then swallow.”

“I- Ugh! You know that’s not what I meant!”

Ellen’s hands grabbed his shoulder, shaking him around a couple times with a laugh. She was grinning, upbeat despite the grey skies and frankly boring school day.

“I know, I know. What story did she tell this time?”

“I think it was another one about either eating babies or ritualistically sacrificing them. Possibly both.”

Esko snorted, rolling his eyes. He’d been familiar with Kylli since they were just entering primary school, and she’d always been known to spin tall tales and make everyone else’s life as difficult as possible. One would think she would have grown out of it eventually, but apparently not. Fortunately, in her refusal to change, she also seemed to be running out of new material.

“Have you ever noticed that about half of every legend she tells has something to do with human infants?” he asked, letting Ellen drag him around the corner to the soup place they periodically visited each week. Between the two of them, they usually spent around a third of their savings per week on lohikeitto – a worthy investment. It was one of their special things together, like the seemingly telepathic communication they shared just by locking eyes. Childhood friends just sort of did that.

Childhood friends did everything together.

… Except get banished, apparently.

For a moment, Esko felt a flash of white-hot anger that burned so much it felt like frostbite. He didn’t know who it was at – himself? The government? Whatever god was out there? The world? Ellen’s parents? Ellen? – but it went just as quickly as it came and left him staggering mentally, even as his body moved seemingly on autopilot through a dream that was very obviously a smoothie made of his memories pretending to be a cohesive storyline. He’d already watched the buildings all change colors at least thrice, and it seemed like every street was just copy-pasted in a way that not even a real city could ever be. Esko was far from being enough of a lucid dreamer to make his own choices, but he was at least marginally aware that he was dreaming.

Dreaming…

It was that thought that seemed to shatter his composure. Though his dream-self didn’t show it, a deep sense of anguish flooded him. The colors of the dream seemed to bleed away, leaving nothing but bleak snow in their wake. The memory of her flashed through his mind. Birthday parties, classes, snowball fights, sleepovers, hugs, the occasional argument. She really had been his lifeline from day one, and a part of him wanted to follow her into the dark just to see her again. There was no one else, after all.

But she wouldn’t want that for him, and he wanted revenge, and Esko was far too stubborn to actually give up.

His mind settled on a place in the woods, kneeling in the snow with the boughs creaking above him. Someone warm was pressed against his side.

“… I’m sorry, Ellen,” Esko began, already knowing who it was without having to look. “It’s my fault. This was my fault.”

She said nothing. The wind rushed through the pine needles, howling like a wolf without its pack. The snow beneath him should’ve felt cold, but instead it just felt crunchy, like the stuff that would compact into ice if you pressed it down hard enough.

“I should’ve noticed sooner. I should’ve asked if you were okay.”

Tears stung his eyes, streaming in hot rivulets down his cheeks, but somehow failing to blur his vision.

“I was a shit friend. I’m… I’m sorry I failed you…”

A sob wracked his entire body, and he doubled over, shaking like a leaf as his shoulders heaved. He glanced over towards where Ellen should’ve been, but saw nothing, even as the shape of her hand continued to soothingly rub his back. The lack of her visible presence was the final straw, and the grief welled up in his chest as a tidal wave and spilled from his mouth in a roar. What the exact emotion behind it was, he couldn’t tell, but he knew he needed to look her in the eyes, just one last time.

“PLEASE,” he shrieked, voice tearing itself like flesh against thorns, “JUST LET ME SEE YOU!!!”

---

Sunlight on his face. Warm hands gently holding his. Voices muttering, barely intelligible to his sleep-addled mind.

“… Do we wake him up?”

“I don’t know, Greta. I don’t know. Astrid, what the hell happened?”

“I don’t know! I just saw that he was crying, and I went to snuggle him, and then he started thrashing! I didn’t mean to wake him up!”

“Hey, hey, nobody said that. People wake up for lots of reasons. Especially from nightmares.”

“Look, let’s just… let’s just give him a moment.”

It took Esko a moment to recognize the voices, and another to match them to their owners. Greta, then Finner, then Astrid, then Olifur, then Finner again. Through the tears in his eyes, he gazed blearily up at the four, who were looming over him like he was waking up in the middle of a surgery. His eyes fell to Finner’s first, glowing like fireflies and sharpened by concern. Greta was holding his hand, ears drooping nervously and her mouth set in a frown. Astrid had taken up a position by one of his legs and looked like she might cry. Olifur stayed by his head, gently brushing away some stray hairs.

Esko’s first instinct was to punch someone, mostly because they were in his personal space, and his fully alarmed and half-awake brain only registered them as trolls. Then, Finner’s eyes locked on his and widened, and all thoughts of physical violence dissolved in an instant.

“Esko! Esko, are you okay?”

Olifur gently pushed him up and into Finner’s arms as the latter asked the question. The water Troll’s voice had lost its monotone, and was uncharacteristically soft, as though he thought anything louder than a half-whisper would turn Esko into dust. Esko couldn’t speak through the tears, but he managed to nod weakly. He didn’t want them to worry, nor did he want to explain anything to them. It was none of their business.

Besides, the moment was better with his silence, and his throat hurt from the scream he must’ve issued in his sleep. His eyes closed, and he didn’t move when Astrid climbed into his lap and Greta reassuringly squeezed his hand. If he just kept his eyelids shut and focused on their warmth and his breathing, Esko knew he’d be back to being functional… and in a world without Ellen, functional was really all he could hope to be.