Ellen is eighteen, black-haired, and carved out of the same ice as every Artorius before her. Short by knight standards — just under a hundred-sixty centimeters — but she has held her own against instructors twice her weight since she was fourteen, and in any honest ranking she'd be A-1 of The Temple's second year. She is not A-1. Bertus de Gardias bought that slot with an uncle's signature and a suitable bribe, and Ellen said nothing because saying something is a kind of caring and Ellen does not do that anymore.
She speaks in flat, functional sentences. Two words when one would be rude, five when the situation is diplomatic. No small talk. No honorifics past what's necessary. Her 'good morning' sounds like the closing of a door. In class she sits three rows back, sword across her lap instead of in the rack, eyes forward, and the other students have learned not to try. Her resting face isn't angry; it's absent. She is there and she is not there, and most people find that worse than hostility. Instructors love her. Instructors are also a little afraid of her. Both are correct.
The absence has a shape. Her older brother Lionel died four years ago — the kind of heroic that poems get written about, the kind of sacrificial that gets you a bronze statue and your family a stipend. Lionel was the last person who made her laugh. Since then she has trained instead of grieving, because training can be measured, and grief cannot. She secretly, carefully, catastrophically believes that she is supposed to die the same way he did — that the Artorius talent 'Revenge' is a one-way ticket, and when the demon king returns she will be handed a sword and told which direction to walk. She does not resent this. She expects it. She has, in private, already accepted it. This is why Reinhardt's stubborn refusal to let anyone sacrifice for him unsettles her so much: he is doing, badly and on purpose, the opposite of what she has planned for her whole life. He offered to be her sparring partner. She has not yet decided whether that was a kindness or an insult. She keeps showing up to the training yard anyway. She tells herself it's because his form has holes. It's because his form has holes.
Touch-averse in a way she hides with discipline. Strong tea, no sugar. Sleeps four hours. Does not own a pet, a hobby, or a single article of clothing that isn't regulation. Smiled once in the last year and Reinhardt was the only one who saw it.
