Inspiration: "Undo It" by Carrie Underwood
Setting: Post-mission
Characters: Onni, Emil, Reynir
Relationships: Onni & Taru, Emil & Torbjörn & Siv, Reynir & Arni (Y90) & Sigridur
Warnings: Familial strife/estrangement, unspecified trauma
Other tags: A rather harsher look at the actions of the backers, I took an angry breakup song and turned it to a story about familial estrangement, because of course I did
Onni
Everything that had ever gone wrong could be traced back to the day that Taru showed up.
Ever since they had returned, Lalli had been acting oddly, and he refused to speak of why. Tuuri, when asked, claimed that everything was fine and that Lalli was throwing a fit again over nothing, but Onni knew better. When it came to Lalli, Onni could always tell.
"I'm taking them home," Onni had growled when Taru had brought up the possibilities for handling the unfortunate aftermath of the mission. Lalli had not resisted the notion of a return to Keuruu; even Tuuri had been shaken enough at that point that she had accompanied him without a fight, though Onni knew that his word would not hold sway with his sister for long.
Even as he'd tried to prevent them from leaving, there'd been a small part of him that had hoped that this mission would be good for Lalli, that he'd make friends and finally be given an incentive to push past the crippling social isolation that had plagued him ever since he'd been a child. Instead, it seemed, he had only gotten worse.
"Didn't you say you made a friend during the mission?" he prodded, once, during one of the rare quiet times when Lalli seemed approachable.
"Yes. One." Instead of surly or guarded, though, Lalli now sounded utterly miserable.
"I don't know," Tuuri said when asked. "They were getting along fine by the time we came home."
Onni had no idea what had gone wrong, and he was utterly helpless to stop it. Finally, at his wits' end, he met up with Taru and gave in to his despair and rage.
"Look," she said after he had finally shouted himself out, as calm as the rocks beaten by a raging ocean, "this was the Silent World, and Lalli is a soldier. Sometimes, traumatic things happen out in the field, and there's nothing we can do about it, even if we speak out against some of the more foolhardy courses of action—which, for the record, I did."
"Doesn't seem to me like you spoke too hard."
Taru shook her head. "You are, of course, perfectly free to spend the rest of your life hating me. But that's not going to change whatever happened out there; what's done is done. In which case continuing to take is out on me is not going to do anything for anyone other than yourself."
Of course, that did nothing to cool his rage. Though what she said was true, she was still responsible for this mess, and the least she could have done was do her part to try to clean it up! Now, though, Onni knew that she had no interest in doing that, and she was right on one count: using his time and energy to fight her would not help, not when his family needed him most. So, Onni did the only thing he could do, told her to never come near them again unless it was to make reparations, and went home.
"What about that friend of yours?" he asked Lalli at last in a last, desperate gamble. "The one you made on the mission? Why don't you try to get in touch?"
In response, Lalli only shook his head. "He has his own problems."
Emil
"You knew! You sent me out there, and you knew how likely it was that I wouldn't come back!"
"Emil, it wasn't like that—"
"Then what was it like?" He crossed his arms, leaning against the wall.
"We thought it was going to work." Torbjörn looked ready to tear his hair out. "It should have worked! I don't know what went wrong—"
"You don't know what went wrong?" Emil exploded, pushing himself off of the wall. "You don't know what went wrong? You sent us out there on a shoestring, you shorted us on everything from rations to medicine, half of the crew barely had any training, and you're trying to tell me you don't know what went wrong?"
For a few moments, they could only stand and stare at each other in the dark. Siv was the first to break.
"We're ruined," she whispered, sinking into a chair and leaning her arms on the table. "We put everything we have into this mission. Without anything to show for it…"
Emil said nothing. He hadn't enjoyed seeing his family sink into poverty, but… they might not have had much compared to their previous fortune, but it was still far more than what he'd had to live on while out in the wilds. They had enough. Plus, if there was one lesson he'd learned during his time in the Silent World, it was that there were things that mattered to him far more than money.
"I'll still be by," he said on his way out the door, "to make sure the kids are okay." Neither of them answered; his unspoken meaning had come across loud and clear.
Emil held his head high as he walked down the street. Whatever the Silent World had taken from him, it had also given him something in return. From now on, he would make his own fortune.
Reynir
"How long have you known?"
The reunion with his family had been tearful, but tense. After all, his little adventure had been the first time in his life that he'd defied his parents. It had also been the first time that he'd started to question them.
"Known what, honey?" his mother asked, but Reynir could hear the dread in her voice indicating that she already knew what he was going to ask. He did not answer her verbally, but pulled some pieces of paper from his pocket and spread them over the top of the table.
Runes. Runes made to ward off ghosts and trolls, to light up a dark night, to heal a wounded crewmate. He'd scribbled them on paper he'd pulled from Tuuri's typewriter and on blank pages he'd ripped out of books; he'd painted them on doors, stitched them into clothing, carved them into disks of wood, pricked his own fingers and drawn them in blood. By the time they'd made it back to civilization, everywhere the team had been had been littered with failed runes. Reynir had made careful notes of every experiment that had worked. He'd asked Onni to teach him about the Dream World and the spirits even knowing the older man could never teach him magic. He'd asked Sigrun to show him how to pray even though he couldn't understand a word she was saying. He'd known nothing, yet had had to learn everything because he absolutely could not fail.
"If I'd had some training," he said, softly, "there are a lot of bad things I might have been able to prevent from happening. But that doesn't matter, does it? Because if I'd known some of the things I should have known, I never would have ended up there in the first place."
"Reynir," Guðrun started, "I'm sure Mom and Dad were just trying to protect you—"
"Protect me from what?" It was amazing, how calm his voice sounded even though he was shaking inside. "From ever having to make a decision for myself? To ever see anything outside of Iceland? To ever see anything outside of this farm?" His hands, he realized, were shaking, his fingers clenching into fists against the wood of the table. "Did you think that I wouldn't know the outside world existed just because you never let me see it?"
They said nothing. There was nothing to say.
The Academy would take him. He'd be sitting in classes alongside children a third of his age, and he'd probably be nearly the only male in his class, but they would still take him. Iceland did not turn up its nose at good mages, or even at mediocre ones. Reynir might not have had much money, but he was a hard worker; he could earn his own wages and pay his own way. It was only too bad that he would have to wrest his future away from those who should have been ensuring it.
There was no undoing what had already happened. Now, all they could do was do what they could to salvage the future, and wonder what might have been.
A/N: Remember that emotional confrontation between the characters and the backers I was planning to do for O before Tuuri and Emil completely derailed my plans? Yeah, it got bumped here.
Originally I was also going to include a section for Sigrun and Trond, but... yeah, Sigrun got herself into this. And we still don't know enough about Mr. Mystery Man for me to write about him confronting anyone.