Warning: Yes, I'm doing something about Tuuri's death again. Putting a trigger warning for suicide and pre-suicide thoughts to be on the safe side.

For the greater good

Prompt: "She died for kindness."

Why had she told Lalli she was going to bed? There were probably many things she was supposed to do, now. She remembered Mikkel telling her about the questions she would need to be able to answer in case she turned out to be sick, and suggesting that she think a little of the answers and write them down somewhere, so that they would be taken care of if the worse was to happen. She had been so convinced she would be fine that she hadn't listened. Now, she no longer remembered what the questions had been. She had planned to simply go through the quarantine as a concession to precaution, and after that enjoy the rest of the trip with the slowly healing shoulder wound being the only sign anything bad had ever happened. But she couldn't do that anymore, could she? What was supposed to happen next? Mikkel had probably told her that while she wasn't listening, as well. Maybe she should call him to ask him. No, she couldn't do that. Given the circumstances, asking him to come with her inside the office was as good as broadcasting the fact that she had started to show symptoms. Maybe she could wait until her routine morning exam. It would give her time to figure things out. She suddenly realized the real reason Mikkel had told her to think of answering those questions during the quarantine: she probably wasn't going to get much time to do so after it. Turning into a troll was more of a risk in some families than in others, and her family was one such family. This meant that the others could let things follow their course only for so long before she would have to die for the greater good. And even if the Icelandic ship let her on at an advanced stage, she would probably die before she could tell Onni goodbye. Sher heard a noise coming from behind the tank wall against which she was leaning. Reynir. He had effectively been locked up in the back of the tank for the last few days, and allowed to go outside only under Mikkel's supervision. She remembered their conversation just a couple of days ago, only a medical tape sealed door separating them, without their masks. That rash on her neck meant she had been contagious at the time, and that she would have condemned him as well without that door between them.

They were going to leave the tank in the morning. Sigrun was ill also, but at least with something the Icelanders would be able to help with. Reynir's security was their top priority, alongside bringing the books back. She didn't know Lalli well enough to know how he would react if an official decision to end her life early were to be made. She realized one thing would keep all these problems from happening at the same time. Keep the trek from happening with two thirds of the crew ill. Keep Reynir from risking being infected. Keep the others from having to restrain Lalli while a hard decision was carried out. She glanced at the group made of Sigrun, Mikkel and Emil sitting around the fire. Neither them, nor Lalli, who was standing guard just outside the security perimeter, seemed to notice her. She took her mask off, and ran.

It took Emil a few moments to realize that there were two sets of human tracks in front of him, yet only Lalli was supposed to be further down the path than he was. He finally found Lalli kneeling on the outer edge of the ice that had built up on the edge of the nearby sea, right where both sets of tracks ended. His first thought was that he needed to pull Lalli to somewhere safer. He came next to Lalli, and placed his hand on his shoulders:
-Come on, you can't stay here, it's dangerous.
Having lowered the rest of his body so his mouth would be closer to Lalli's ear, he noticed something strange about the nearby water he hadn't a few moments before. He couldn't quite tell what it was, and only had time to notice a whitish color before Sigrun and Mikkel caught up with them, the former asking what was happening. Emil told her about finding Lalli, and the strange shape in the water. Sigrun had Emil take Lalli away from the ice so she could go on it without risking it breaking under the weight of too many people. She stared for a few moments, then told Mikkel to go back to camp to get some rope on a tone that was strangely neutral coming from her. Emil was about to ask Sigrun what she had seen when his mind made a connection with the extra set of human tracks. His question came out as asking if the shape he had seen was Tuuri.

xxxx

Tuuri was dead. It had to be that. If it hadn't been hours ago that he and Lalli had been ushered into the dorm room before Emil closed the door and elected to sit right in front of it, it sure felt like it had been. All this time, Lalli had been sitting on the floor, looking tired but making no move to go to bed. Reynir remembered the sounds he had heard from the office while he was painting the rune on the tent. He had dismissed them as Kitty having a bout of restlessness, but he was now quite sure it had been Tuuri, who had elected to no answer him. Had that really happened only a few hours, possibly a much shorter time, ago? He couldn't actually ask any of the two others what was going on, and they couldn't tell him what was happening for the very same reasons. He could eventually talk to Lalli, but it probably wasn't the right time to try to ask him to come to the dream world. He wasn't sure he was going to be able to fall asleep or concentrate enough to go there anyway. Both he and Lalli had agreed to keep their mouths shut about the fact that they knew Tuuri was infected, so she could have a few extra days doing things as she wished to an extent. Having that conversation with her without letting it slip had been particularly hard. But he had managed to nudge Mikkel into telling him what would happen if Tuuri turned out to be sick, and he had made it sound like there would be time for proper goodbyes. He came to the slow realization that he and Lalli were probably being kept out of the way because things hadn't gone as planned, and the older adults were trying to sort out the resulting mess without any interference. Tears came to his eyes. He considered trying to hold them back due to the fact that Lalli didn't seem to be shedding any, but found himself unable to actually do so. He noticed Emil wasn't crying either. Maybe they had been taught some kind of trick in their army training. If there was one, he was really wondering what it was.

He didn't know how much extra time passed between the moment he had started silently crying and the moment the door was opened behind Emil, Mikkel told him something in Danish that prompted him to go out with Lalli, and switched to Icelandic to tell Reynir what he already suspected.
-We can't have you outside while we are burning her body, unfortunately. The best I can do is let you watch from the driver's cabin. Unless you'd rather stay back here.
He chose the driver's cabin. Of all the things that could be going through his head, he found himself wondering why she had done this so suddenly, and quickly realizing he'd never know.