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Angrboda is born on the autumnal equinox, born with light and dark splitting the day clean down the middle and into equal, even halves.
That’s what her parents call her, Angrboða, a name as old and proud as the very land they live on, and it means—well. It means a few different things depending on who you ask and when you ask it, and then where you look when asking isn’t enough. She Who Offers Sorrow. Harm-bidder. When broken down into its essentials, cleaved in two, the core of the meaning becomes quite plain.
Angr—anger, or affliction, or sorrow. Boða—perhaps a little less simple, a little less clean-cut. Unable to translate it directly for herself, it’s the internet that offers her the simplest explanation:
Boða, the page reads, is cognate with the English word ‘bode’, as in “this does not bode well”.
Angrboda is born on the day the leaves begin to wither and die.
Angrboða means The One Who Brings Grief.
She thinks about that more than she should.
They all come slowly. The winter, the sorrow, the grief—like so many things, they all take their time.
It’s always autumn in her childhood. The leaves on the Norway maples are always painted a fine fire red; her grandmother is always in the kitchen chopping butternut squash to add to a bubbling stew. Her mother is always covering a new canvas with thick golden-yellow strokes, encouraging Angrboda to sit beside her and do the same; her father is always glowing in the dying light, skin amber brown with a halo made from the setting sun at his back.
And she knows, she knows, that none of this is true. That it can’t be. Her family lived on that farm for years, for all sixteen years of Angrboda’s life and for years even before that, and she’s seen the leaves heavy with April rain and the fields white from December frost. She’s felt her skin raw and aloe-slick after a day spent under the July sun.
Her mother died in the winter. Her father, the same. Her grandmother—
It doesn’t matter. It isn’t true.
Memory is unreliable; Angrboda knows this better than anyone. She does. She knows, but knowledge doesn’t seem to matter much when she drifts at night through restless half-sleeps. It doesn’t help when Mimir and Sigrun ask her with kind, unfamiliar eyes if there’s anything they can do to help her feel more comfortable in her new home.
“It was always autumn there,” she tells them, and then purses her lips, furrows her brow. “That probably doesn’t make sense, but I don’t know how else to explain it. It just was.”
Memory is unreliable, but this is how Angrboda remembers it: they came slowly, the winter and sorrow and grief, but they all came at once.
How can we help you feel at home here? they ask, and the next morning she wakes to find a pumpkin-scented candle on her bureau. A red fleece blanket at the foot of her bed. A mossy green wool sweater folded up in her drawer. Not home, but something fond and achingly familiar nonetheless.
It is, if nothing else, a beginning.
They’re always asking things, her new foster parents. Asking how she takes her tea. Asking what they should keep in the pantry for breakfast, for lunches, for snacks. Asking what sort of products she likes for her hair and her skin, so different from their own. Asking when—asking if—she thinks she’ll be ready to go to school.
It’s nearly the start of February, too late for her to begin this year, but they tell her they can enroll her for the fall. Her mother’s homeschooling had been, to everyone’s shock but her own, thorough enough to put her right on level with the highest scoring students in her age group. Perhaps even ahead of them. If she starts up at the nearby high school in September then she’ll be able to finish up her last two years of school in an actual classroom, surrounded by kids the same age as herself.
“I’d be more than happy to take over your education myself, mo leanabh,” Mimir assures her one afternoon. Leanabh, a strange and unfamiliar collection of sounds, and she makes a mental note to look up the meaning once the conversation is done. “If you think it’d be too much too fast, that is. No need to throw yourself in the deep end if you don’t feel ready.”
Beside him, his wife offers a fragile smile. “We simply want you to know that the choice is there, should you wish it. Whatever you think would be best is what we shall do.”
What would be best, she thinks, would be allowing her to return home.
They’re still staring at her, still waiting, still asking, and she pinches her eyes shut.
Hazy afternoons spent with her mother doing arithmetic at a kitchen table, highlighting passages in Walden after lunch, ending the day with acid-base titrations in a makeshift lab set up next to their paints. She tries to imagine Mimir doing the same, accent heavy and thick as sap in her ears, and something unpleasant curls in her stomach despite herself.
Those memories, awash in a marigold tint, are the last thing she has left of her family. As kind as Mimir and Sigrun are, those memories are not for them to touch.
“I mean,” she begins, voice purposefully light as the brittle winter breeze that slips through the nearby window, left open just a crack, “this is all so new to me already. What’s one more thing to add to the list, right?”
It’s Angrboda herself who suggests it, after a bit of discussion over dinner: in order to decrease the pressure of a new, real school, to slowly ease herself into socialization with people other than adult relatives and pet yaks, she’s going to join a club. A group. A sport. A something.
Whatever you think would be best, they say, and show her a list of classes offered at the community center nearby.
Cooking—hunched over the stove with her grandmother, garlic and saffron and warmth. Swimming—lazing in the river with Jalla, laughing as her father watches them from the shore. Painting—her mother at her shoulder, the whole world in pink and orange and sunlight. Dancing in the living room. Book club by the fireplace at night.
Every space already occupied, everything offered already owned, except perhaps…
Her hand stills over the letter A.
Sigrun stills at her side. “Archery?” She doesn’t sound displeased, only mildly surprised. “Well, you won’t be short of opportunities to socialize. That’s one of their most popular classes.”
“Do you think they’ll have room for me?” They must; it’s her only option. Not much of a choice at all. “Or is it too late to try and join?”
“For someone else, maybe. For Mimir? Almost certainly.” Sigrun laughs, bright, at a joke Angrboda knows she’s not yet privy to, and points with an elegant finger to where the instructor is listed. “But for you and I?” she says, and taps the name on the screen again: Freya. “The spot is as good as yours, should you want it.”
They arrive early on the day of her first class, Sigrun wanting to make sure Angrboda has an opportunity to settle in and meet her closest friend before the chaos begins. Upon introduction Freya greets her with a bright smile, a tight hug that feels like a blanket of sunlight wrapped around her shoulders. She smells like honeysuckle and morning dew and she commands the room with a voice like a mountain spring, steady and free-flowing and astonishingly alive.
And it feels like it’ll always be winter here, always cold and bleak and bitter and gray, the chill burrowing so deep into her bones that she fears it may never leave. Angrboda is a stranger here; anyone can see she doesn’t belong.
It seems that Freya, bold and lovely and brilliant and so very warm, doesn’t much belong either.
It takes three full lessons before either of them says a word to the other.
Three full lessons of the boy watching her from the other side of the room, staring at the ceiling when she looks his way and staring right back at her when he thinks she can’t see. Angrboda has always been good at that, though: she’s always been good at seeing things, seeing people, and he’s made himself hard to not notice.
Tall and wiry and awkward but clearly far too talented with a bow to be a student in their bi-weekly beginner group, it doesn’t take her long to realize that he must be Freya’s son. His father, a hulking beast of a man, arrives ten minutes before the end of the class and watches their instructor with poorly veiled affection in his otherwise stony gaze, and at the end of each lesson they walk off together, the three of them, and cause something cruel and jealous to claw at the base of Angrboda’s throat.
Three lessons, three hours of furtive glances in her direction, before they finally speak.
Sigrun is running late to pick her up and she’d seen his father and Freya slip off into one of the offices a few minutes ago, and everyone else has gone home already so it’s just the two of them alone. It’s just the two of them, sitting on the benches by the front door barely five feet apart and yet acting like the other isn’t there.
She doesn’t plan on saying anything. Not for a while, not at first, but there’s something so sincere about him, something about the way his knee is bouncing up and down at an erratic pace and the way his mouth is pursed, as if he wants to tell her something but can’t remember how words work—and after all, it’s not as if Angrboda is the most socially gifted herself, is she? It’s not like she’s got room to judge.
But he’s sitting on the bench a few feet away from her, the only other person in the room, and it’s dead silent, quieter than a grave, and she figures one of them has to be brave eventually. Why shouldn’t it be her?
So she leans to the side, leans toward him a bit to ask, “Why are you in a beginner class?”
He nearly falls out of his seat at the sound of her voice; Angrboda does her best not to laugh.
“Um…” He glances over his shoulder as if unsure that he’s the one her words are meant for, then turns back whip-quick with a furrowed brow. “I—Sorry, what?”
“You’re in a beginner class,” she repeats, “but you do everything twice as fast as the rest of us and I’ve seen you hitting the bullseye every time, so I figure you’re either some sort of a prodigy, or, you know, not a beginner.”
He looks—
He looks stricken, and oh no, no, no, she’s just inadvertently insulted the first person her age that she’s actually attempted to strike up a conversation with, and he’s going to go tell his mom that she’s some kind of freak and she’s going to have to—
“I could be both.”
Angrboda frowns, lost, internal panic momentarily forgotten.
“A prodigy and a not-beginner,” he elaborates, and the pink on his cheeks has darkened but there’s a smile tugging the corners of his lips, crinkling his eyes at the corners. It’s…nice, Angrboda thinks. It suits him much better than wide-eyed discomfort. “I could be both.”
“So you’re both,” she says, delighting when his grin widens. “That doesn’t explain why you’re in a beginner class, though. Just trying to make the rest of us look bad?”
He shrugs, the movement overemphasized like a fawn still growing accustomed to the span of its limbs. “Maybe I am. Not that I think you would ever look bad, though! You’re getting really good,” he says, and he says it all in one breath, the words a jumbled rush. “I mean, you were always good, but now I think you might be a prodigy too.”
She thinks of her target in other room, the one that less than half of her arrows had managed to hit—and all wildly off center, at that.
“Uh huh.”
“You’re getting better,” he amends, emphasizing the word better like he really does mean it, and her laugh slips out unbidden.
“I’m getting better,” she agrees, content.
(She is.
She’s more excited about that than she thought she would be.)
“Freya’s going to let me teach some classes in the summer.” It takes a second for her to catch it: Freya, he’d said, not Mom. A stepmother, then, or something equivalent. “She wanted me to redo the beginner classes first, though. Something about me needing to relearn the basics before I can start to teach them.” This makes sense to Angrboda, but he sounds so utterly put out by it that she can’t help but grin.
“That’s amazing,” she says, because it is.
“Yeah?” he asks, and Angrboda doesn’t really know why he needs her to confirm it for him, but he clearly does, because when she echoes her affirmation, Yeah, he looks like she’s just given him something far more precious than a four letter word.
“Is that how Freya and your father met? Through your classes?” she asks, “or did you take up archery after they started dating?”
And, as it turns out—
It turns out either Angrboda isn’t as good at seeing people as she thought, or the boy—Atreus, his father calls him, interrupting his sputtered denials with a shout to declare that it’s time for them to leave—is much, much worse.
She spends the rest of the week trying not to think about it.
It’s the middle of February and it’s still well below freezing outside, still cold enough to sting her cheeks and water her eyes when she takes one step out the front door. Mimir and Sigrun bicker and tease and laugh in equal measure, and the heavy strangeness of his accent is becoming more familiar now, and the occasions on which Angrboda wakes up in the middle of the night disoriented and lost and confused are becoming less and less frequent.
Mo leanabh. She looks it up one afternoon. It means my child.
She spends the rest of the week trying not to think about it.
It turns out she doesn’t have to try very hard at all; there are far too many other things worth dwelling on.
“They’re not dating.”
It’s less than five seconds after Freya ends the class before he’s standing beside her, and he’s pouting like a petulant child who’s been put in a time-out.
(She’d been prepared for him to ignore her, honestly. She’d been ready for it.
But he’d smiled at her during their water break, waved, and her heart had skipped a handful of beats in her chest, hummingbird-quick, and—
Apparently she hadn’t been ready at all.)
“Okay.”
“They’re not.” Atreus repeats, and she can hear it so clearly in his words, the fragile thread of doubt, the frustration, and—and that really hadn’t been her intention when she asked the question last week, not in the slightest, so Angrboda has no plans to press the issue any farther. Not even if she thinks he’s wrong.
“Okay,” she says, “They’re not dating. I’m really sorry, Atreus, I shouldn’t have assumed that they were, sometimes I don’t think before I talk and—”
“They’re not. They can’t be,” he continues, and oh, he’s not saying this for her benefit at all, is he? It’s entirely for his own, and that—that changes things. Significantly. Exponentially. “They can’t be, because if they are then that means they’ve been lying to me for ages, and they wouldn’t do that, right? They wouldn’t lie to me about something like this."
She raises her hands, speaks in the same soothing voice she would use to calm Jalla during a late-October storm. “I’m sure they wouldn’t lie to you.” And she should end it there, she really should but…well, Angrboda is a helper. It’s how she was raised. She helps people, and she’s certain that being in denial isn’t going to help him at all. “Not unless they were, I don't know, afraid you wouldn’t take the news well or something, but that’s definitely not the case. Right?”
He stills, the little paper cup of water he'd been holding frozen a half inch from his lips. “Right. Definitely not. Definitely.”
“Or unless they’ve had some kind of pain in their past that would make them struggle with openly expressing their feelings.”
“Mhm. That would also—yeah.”
“Or maybe if they’re just stubborn, stupid adults.”
He blanches.
Groans.
“Oh my God. Oh my God. I can’t believe I—I knew she wasn’t staying with us because her water heater broke!”
She doesn’t mean to grin at his breakdown like some kind of sociopath. She doesn’t, but his distress is so genuine and over-the-top and at once she feels so utterly fond, and it really can’t be helped.
“Wait. Hang on—are you telling me she lives with you?”
“For the last four months,” he says, words muffled as he holds his head in his hands.
“Wow. What, have they been sneaking into each other's bedrooms at night, too?”
He mumbles something, incomprehensible, and Angrboda has to ask him twice to repeat it before she can make the words out.
“They sleep in the same room.”
This—this is what tips her over the edge, soft giggles blown into full hysterics, tears forming at the corners of her eyes. “Oh, Atreus. I’m so sorry, I swear I’m not laughing at you, it’s just…seriously?”
“I thought my dad was sleeping on the floor! Or that they’d make a pillow barrier between them.” He gestures with his hands in a straight line, dramatic. “Like…like a wall or something, you know?”
“Mm-hm. Totally the more reasonable option.”
Now, finally, is when he breaks. First a smile, then a grin, and then a proper laugh at last, his head tilted back and hands clutching his stomach. “Oh my God,” he says again, except he sounds a good deal less distraught this time around, “Holy shit, I’m such an idiot.”
“You’re not an idiot.” Affection slips into her words with ease; Angrboda’s certain he can hear it. She hopes as much. “You didn’t see it because you didn’t expect to. That’s only natural.”
Across the room, by the doors, Freya and his father glance in their direction. Just once, just for a moment, but it’s long enough for her to see it: curiosity, plain as day. The ones they’re gossiping about are talking about them in return.
“What do you think I should say to them?”
She snaps her gaze back to his, abrupt. “What do you mean?”
“Like—I don’t know. Do you think I should confront them?” Atreus shuffles on his feet, back and forth, and she wants to tell him that it’s really none of her business; this is far from her area of expertise. She wants to, but then that wouldn’t really be true at all, because isn’t this her mess in the first place? He’d been living in blissful ignorance until she opened her big mouth. “Or should I just keep ignoring it and hope one of them will eventually crack?”
She wants to tell him that it’s none of her business, but Atreus is looking at her all imploring and hopeful and—
And she’s holding her hand out, expectant, before she has a moment to second-guess herself.
“Give me your phone,” she says, and he does, no questions ask. “I think you should give them room to tell you themselves, but maybe start dropping hints that you know. A few little approving statements about how close they are, how happy they make each other, how nice it’s been since Freya moved in—little things like that. And when they tell you,” because they will, Angrboda’s certain of it, “you can text me and tell me how it goes.”
She hands his phone back, her contact information still on the screen, and tries not to blush at how much he’s blushing, like she’s just done something horribly intimate and romantic instead of typing her name and a few numbers.
A few numbers. Her phone number.
Her phone number, which she’s just given to him. To a boy.
“I should go,” she blurts, before either of them has a second to make this moment more mortifying than it already is. “Sigrun is probably waiting in the car for me, and Mimir’s making stew today, some kind of Scottish lamb thing, and he’s said that if we’re late he’ll never forgive us.”
“Mimir’s a terrible cook,” he says, still looking a little dumbfounded.
“He is,” she agrees, “but don’t you think it’s sweet that he still tries?”
“Angrboda,” he starts, and oh, he looks like he might faint, “I—would you maybe want to—”
Her phone buzzes in her pocket once, twice, three times, and she winces. “I really need to go. You’ll text me when something happens, right?”
“I—yeah. Yeah, I will.”
“Promise?”
“Promise,” he says, far more solemn than a teenage boy should ever seem, and she believes him. “Nothing could stop me.”
Atreus. It’s a Greek name, she learns, and she thinks of the sharp, proud lines of his father’s face and thinks yes, this seems just right. Atreus is the name of a king; it’s an old name, old like her own, but there are no twisted, confusing translations. Unlike Angrboða, his name only seems to mean one thing.
Atreus. Fearless.
She wonders if he knows this, wonders if he’s ever searched for the meaning himself. Perhaps foolishly, Angrboda hopes that he hasn’t. It’s a nice thought, fearless, a nice concept, but…
It’s just that a name, and the weight it holds, can often be a very heavy burden to bear.
This is something she understands better than most.
unknown number
so, you were totally right.
they told me over dinner tonight. i guess freya was scared i would think she was trying to replace my mom, and my dad is just bad at talking about his feelings in general, so they kept trying to say something and not knowing how to do it. it was nice, though.
dad cried. like, a lot.
i can’t believe i didn’t take a video of it.
unknown number
oh wait, this is atreus btw!
maybe that was obvious. not sure how many people you have texting you at midnight about family dinners where their fathers cry.
kind of hope i’m the only one. is that weird?
She keeps the messages, short as they are, clutched to her chest all day.
And there’s no way he could know the truth of his words, not as Angrboda scrolls up and down through the list of contacts over and over and over again as if it might, by some miracle, expand before her eyes.
Dad. Freya. Grandmother. Mimir. Mom. Sigrun. Six names, and two of them are dead. Two of them are dead, and one of them is something close.
Back up again, back to the very top.
It sits there, bold, above everyone. Atreus.
She types, You’re definitely the only one, then, It's definitely weird, and it’s innocent, she thinks, innocent and light and sweet.
So long as she ignores the wildfire warmth spreading in a rush across her cheeks, down the column of her throat, it feels easy enough to convince herself that this must be the truth.
And she has, in fact, had friends before.
Jalla was her friend. Her parents were her friends. Her grandmother, telling her stories of the old ways, letting Angrboda pick which spices to put in her new batch of soup—maybe it’s not quite the same, maybe it’s not exactly what most people her age would consider friendship, but she knows that it was.
And there were other children on nearby farms once, before…before everything. Before they came in with chainsaws and cement trucks and plows, before the skies turned to an ashy-grey smog, before wandering too far upriver meant wandering into forests stripped of trees and fields stripped of crops—before that, there were families. Homes. People, and some of those people had been children like herself, a few years older or a few years younger but close enough that it didn’t matter much, and some of those children had been her friends.
They sit together during their fifteen-minute breaks, and after the first time Atreus starts packing an extra juice box for her each day Angrboda begins sneaking an extra of Sigrun’s special krumkake for him in return. He sends her photos of his dogs; she sends him photos of the charred remnants of Mimir’s latest kitchen experiment gone wrong.
She has had friends before.
She has, which is why she can’t figure out why this feels so different.
In the second week of March, she lands her first bullseye.
It’s a small thing, she knows, small and ultimately insignificant, but the way Freya beams when she sees it, the way Thrúd gives her a high-five that leaves her hand stinging for what feels like hours after, the way Atreus cheers at the top of his lungs like she’s done something incredible, something miraculous, the way he keeps looking at her the rest of the class, looking at her like he’s looked at her from the very beginning, like she might be something incredible herself—
Waiting by the front doors, she nearly jumps out of her skin when a hand rests, gentle but remarkably large, upon her shoulder.
“Congratulations,” his father says, and then leans a fraction of a hair closer, softens the gruff timbre of his voice to add, “and thank you.”
He doesn’t tell her what he’s thanking her for; Angrboda doesn’t feel the need to ask.
And it's something small, sure, but it’s something so very big, too.
“I’ve been thinking,” she starts, gaze focused solely on the food in front of her and not at the two adults to whom she’s speaking. “I know it’s always kind of hard for you to get to the community centre on time after classes, Sigrun, driving one way to drop me off and then going home just to come back less than an hour later to pick me up again, and so maybe—”
“It’s not a bother at all, Angrboda,” the woman says, achingly sincere, and it’s kind of her but it’s also very much not the point. “Truly, it isn’t.”
She spears a piece of broccoli with her fork; it’s perfectly cooked. Sigrun must have helped in the kitchen today.
“Right, but I was just thinking…well, if it’s easier, maybe you could pick me up a little bit later?”
“And have you sit around waiting on your own? That’s very kind of you, leanabh, but we wouldn’t ask you to do that.”
They’re still looking at her. Firmly. Intently.
Angrboda is very much not looking back.
“Actually,” she says, “Atreus said I could come over to his for a bit after class every week, and then you could just pick me up there.”
And, quite suddenly, it’s quiet.
It’s very, very quiet.
“He already asked Freya,” she tells them, “and he said that she thinks it’s a great idea, and that if you guys ever want to come over after then we can all have dinner together at their place? Apparently she’s got some new recipes she wants to try out but Kratos and Atreus only ever want to eat steak and pork chops so she hasn’t had a chance to make any of them yet.” She’s over-explaining, Angrboda knows that she is, but they’re still staring at her, still quiet, and the words are slipping out before she has a chance to stop them. “Don’t you think that sounds nice?”
Now, finally, she looks up.
Sigrun, normally so composed, so poised—Sigrun’s face is split in a grin so bright it’s nearly blinding.
Mimir, she thinks, looks as if he might start to cry.
“Aye, child,” he says, and she sees the movement of his hand under the table as he reaches for something, sees his wife do the same. “I think that sounds lovely.”
The frost, the ice, the cold—it’s all beginning to thaw. Slowly, like so many other things, a tremulous crawl towards something warmer has begun.
They’re standing in his back yard, watching his dogs frolic and play in the snow that still covers the ground in a thin blanket of white. It seems like the winter has stretched on for forever, for a lifetime and then some, but Angrboda has felt the shift in the air; it’ll be gone soon enough, and something else will come to take its place.
It’s this thought, the gentle hopefulness it instills, that prompts her to speak.
“My birthday is the first day of autumn. I’ve always hated that.”
Not the smoothest conversation starter, not by any means, but if he’s bothered it doesn’t show. “Huh. How come?”
“I don’t know. I just thought it was so…sad, I guess? I mean, I like autumn.” Angrboda huffs a breath, watching with a sort of childish wonder as the puff of air floats like smoke before her. Sixteen years old, almost an adult herself, but she doesn’t think she’ll ever tire of that. “I like the colours, and the fuzzy sweaters, and how cozy everything feels. Snuggled up by the fireplace with hot cocoa, wrapped in a fleece blanket, with the leaves falling past the windows—I love it.”
“That sounds nice,” Atreus agrees, and the tip of his nose and the apples of his cheeks are wind-bitten and pink, but she swears it’s more pronounced than it was a second ago. She’s certain of it. “That sounds really nice.”
“Right? It’s beautiful, but it’s only like that because everything’s dying.”
Angrboda, born at the turning of the seasons.
Angrboda, the one who brings grief.
There’s a brush of something, hesitant, along the side of her hand. A touch so soft she thinks she might have imagined it, would have written it off as nothing if it weren’t for the slide of Atreus’ palm against her own a moment later. First one, then the other; he cups both her hands between his own with an anxious tenderness that nearly breaks her heart in two.
And he’s warm, she thinks, so incredibly warm, this ridiculous, lovely boy, with his eyes like ice and his smile that seems to crack the dawn. She never thought such a thing was possible. She hadn’t known someone like him could exist.
“You looked cold,” he explains.
She wasn’t.
“I was,” she says, and he squeezes her hands a bit tighter. “Thank you.”
“My mom used to tell me a story—a few different stories, I guess, but they were all about the same thing. The stags of the four seasons.” Beyond them she can hear a scuffle, a growl, a handful of barks, but her gaze stays fixed on him. She’s pretty sure the whole world could end, in fact, and she still wouldn’t be able to look away. “Dáinn, Dvalinn, Duneyrr, and Duraþrór. Have you ever heard of them?”
Her mother, painting antlers made from spruce and pines and frost. Her father carving a little wooden stag to rest on her nightside table. Her grandmother, telling her stories of the land before her family ever set foot there, before it was anyone except for the seasons, the birds, the trees.
“Only a little,” she says, and it’s not the truth but it’s not really a lie, either; she’s heard about them, but she’s never heard of them from him.
The Dead One, The Unconscious One, the Sound of Thunder, The Thriving Slumber; he tells her the stories of his childhood with an impressive amount of enthusiasm, swinging their joined hands as he speaks. She’s seen photos of his mother scattered through their house, a woman with hair like his own and eyes like his own, but she’s never seen the resemblance so strongly until now—even without having met the woman, even knowing that she never will, Angrboda finds she can imagine her just like this. Alive in radiant colour, filling every empty space with her words.
He tells her the stories, and he holds her hands all the while.
“She used to talk about all of them,” he says, “but when she got sick it was The Dead One that she would talk about the most.”
“Duneyrr?” she guesses; he shakes his head.
“Dáinn,” he says, “the Stag of Spring. Every night before bed, right up until she died, she would tell me the same thing: the season of rebirth can never come without death to lead the way. I always loved that.”
“She sounds lovely.”
“She was,” he agrees. “She would have loved you. But I guess the point I’m trying to make—not that I’m doing a very good job of it, like, at all—is that ever since then autumn has become my favourite season. Like, the leaves start to change and that’s because they’re dying, yeah, but they’re dying to make room for something new, and that’s kind of beautiful. So it makes sense that you were born on the first day of autumn because you’re something beautiful, too.”
Oh.
Oh.
“Was that,” he begins, and his grip around her hands starts to loosen, and no, no, no, she can’t allow him to slip away, “was that okay? I feel like that might have been too much. I didn’t mean to—I mean, I did mean it, because you are beautiful, but—”
“Atreus.”
“—I don’t want to make you uncomfortable or anything, and if you just want to be friends that’s fine, that’s more than fine, I can—”
“Atreus!”
“—deal with that, you know? I’ll be happy with you in my life no matter what, and…God, that was too much again, wasn’t it? I don’t know why I keep—”
It’s not until later, much later, that she figures it out.
After a dinner spent Freya and Kratos’ dining room table, after Mimir has finished telling stories that Sigrun spends every other minute interrupting, after Atreus sits next to her on the couch and bumps his shoulder into her own once, twice, three times before she finally grabs onto hand, grip iron-tight, to lock him in place. The adults pretend not to notice but do an absolutely terrible job of it, and she thinks the blush on her cheeks might be permanent, now; it’s so dark it’ll stain them for weeks.
It's not until later, not until she’s home, with her grandmother’s quilt pulled up to her chin and her father’s little stag on her bedside table, her mother’s painting hanging behind her on the wall—it’s not until later that she realizes what she’s done.
“—Seriously, Angrboda, if you never want to talk to me again I totally under—”
Rose-petal soft, tremulous and sweet, she kisses him. And it’s not elegant, not practiced or graceful or even particularly good, honestly, because he’s still in the middle of talking and she’s got no idea what she’s doing at all, no idea in the slightest. It’s perfect, she thinks, even when he jumps back a bit in surprise. Even when she bursts out laughing at the sight of him, pupils blown wide, mouth hanging open, still caught on whatever word he was about to say next.
Even when he takes a step forward and asks with a wavering voice, certainly not fearless but undeniably brave, if they can try that one more time.
“Or two more times, or three, even,” he says, and she starts laughing all over again. “However many times you want.”
She loses count after five.
As it turns out, however many times she wants is quite a lot.
Angrboda kisses Atreus on the twentieth day of March; she kisses him on the first day of spring.
It is, in so many ways, a beginning.