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Remember me
“You missed it,” he whispers into her skin. “Our dad came back. Axl tried to kill himself. I accidentally created the cult of Michele.”
Gaia sighs in her sleep, her back to him. He kisses the skin of her shoulder, three days worth of stubble rasping against it. She huffs out a breath, but doesn't wake. He kisses it again with a murmured sorry.
“I hit him.” Anders is glad she's asleep, as he smiles to himself. It's a grin of victory for the eight year old who used to hide in Mike's room when the shouting started, for the ten year old who would climb out his window and hide in the hen house. It's a I hit him back this time fuck yes moment of elation that he's only slightly ashamed of. “Across the face.”
It's becoming a habit now, these whispered reminiscences in the dark.
“Ty said he would,” he rolls over with a groan, tracking finger tips across her soft stomach. “But he's an incompetent fucker, we all know that.” Anders laughs to himself at his unintentional innuendo. “Probably that too. If Dawn had been fucking me she wouldn't have forgotten it.”
She makes a noise in her throat, sleep-agreeing with him. She's in his bed, after all. She picked him. Not Axl, not Mike (and he's still not sure how he feels about that, Michele bouncing from one to the other and looking sorry when she says goodbye at last), she picked Anders.
Not Bragi.
“I don't remember how to be him very well,” Anders warns her.
“You don't ever shut up, do you?”
Gaia turns her head to look at him; not expecting either the movement or the sound, he rolls back and nearly falls off the bed.
“How long have you been awake?” He sits up, feeling the strange urge to clutch the blankets to his naked chest.
“When you talked about sleeping with your secretary and your brother's sexual prowess.” For someone who's been woken up by the rantings of a crazed ex-god, Gaia looks remarkably put together. Pretty.
That's why he leans across to kiss her.
She wrinkles her nose, but lets him.
“Do you do this often?” she asks, tapping her fingers in a tattoo beat on his shoulder. And he thinks, maybe, she's remembering Anders too.
Anders, not Bragi.
“Fantasising about screwing Dawn?” he grins. “Every Tuesday – ouch, you've got sharp elbows!”
Gaia withdraws the joint in question and lies back down, leaving a conspicuous amount of space between the two of them on the bed.
And they both do that. They're not sure of the boundaries yet, so they go to sleep every night with a yawning chasm between them, and they wake up in the morning with their limbs tangled together, some body part of Anders' falling off the bed and Gaia's hair in his face.
He lies down on his side and stares at the ceiling.
“You've been Anders longer than you've been Bragi,” Gaia says, just when he thinks she's fallen back asleep.
“Doesn't feel like it,” he grunts, all the levity of the previous moments gone. “Dad always said –”
“From what I gathered,” she cuts across. “He wasn't exactly father of the year. So why're you listening to him?”
And – well, he can't argue with that, he supposes.
There is a canyon between Gaia-and-Anders, the way there wasn't between Idun-and-Bragi. They are not destined to be together, they are not the soulmates who have searched for each other for thousands of years.
They are Gaia and Anders; the failing PR consultant and his little brother's ex-girlfriend.
He doesn't even remember the sex, not the way you normally remember a memory. Every time he thinks about it, it is more like he's watching a film. An explicit film.
Anders chuckles to himself at the idea of Bragi the porn star.
If he ever decides to pack in the PR career and get paid for having sex, he's got a ready made alias.
Gaia's arm thumps across the divide and smacks in the centre of his chest in an effort to shut him up, and he whispers an apology with a wince.
“I remember Anders,” her voice is hoarse with sleep. “I'll tell you about him, sometime.” She stretches out her fingers across the skin she can reach, a gesture that's far more intimate than it should be. “If you'll let me get some fucking sleep.”