Chapter Text
The grass was too slick for sparring. Granted, it was certainly beautiful; the frost was just beginning to dissolve into mist, revealing the lush spring growth, a deep, almost unnaturally green carpet beneath silvery spiderwebs, beaded with drops of dew. The morning sun was just starting to intensify from soft peach shades into its usual bright-whiteness. The breeze was crisp and cutting, and tasted of melting ice as it stirred Thrúd’s hair and froze her breath mid-air.
The grass was too slick for sparring—but that had never stopped her before.
Reeling back from a particularly heavy blow, Thrúd’s boot carved a trail through the frost, which soaked through the fur and turned her toes cold, and sent her knee knocking into the ground. Her fingertips raced forward to steady her as she made contact with the earth, before she realized that her sparring sword had fallen just out of reach. Her right hand darted out—just as an enormous boot landed on the wooden blade.
“Dead. Again.”
Rolling her eyes, Thrúd looked up and met her father’s gaze. Thor’s figure cast its massive shadow over her, and no matter how temperate the expression on his face, in his shadow, the spring morning felt like the depth of winter.
“Wanna know why I landed that hit?” he asked, effortlessly sweeping the wooden weapon off the ground.
“Well, first of all,” Thrúd grunted as she got to her feet and reached for her sparring sword, “I slipped on the grass—”
“Ah, ah,” Thor admonished, holding the weapon out of reach, “no blaming the terrain. Next.”
“Uh…you’re just that good?”
Thor chuckled. “True, but no.”
“Wha—” Thrúd threw up her hands. “I don’t know, Dad. I thought I was going great, but—”
“There it is. You thought.” Thor gestured with the sparring sword, his eyes narrowing, his expression growing serious. "And that’s what’s going to get you killed. Every. Single. Time. This has to become an extension of your body. And you have to trust your body—trust that it knows what to do.”
Thrúd blinked. “But it doesn’t. Not yet, anyway.”
To her relief, Thor’s face warmed back up again as he smirked and turned the blade’s handle into her waiting hand.
“And that’s why we’re out here,” he joked, “at the ass-crack of dawn, freezing our junk off when we could be nice and warm in our beds. Builds character.”
Thrúd laughed as Thor shot her a wink and lumbered a few paces away, picking up his own weapon.
“All right, kid. Square up. Try again—don’t think. Just do.”
Thrúd adjusted her grip on the sword, swung it once in her hand to remind herself of its weight, to regain some control of it. Control…she closed her eyes, took a deep breath in, let it out again. Slowly, she watched behind her eyelids as she let her mind go white.
Don’t think. Just do.
As she opened her eyes, Thrúd sprinted forward, raised her weapon—her father raised his—
And then a spear pierced through his chest from behind. The viscera that coated the weapon glittered like the fading frost, like the violent blue of her father’s eyes as they widened, as he let out a gasp that sounded like a question, as he reached a trembling hand toward her, as he dissolved into nothing, not even a body left to burn, revealing, behind him—
Thrúd screamed as she charged at Odin, blank-faced, staring into nothing with his one living eye. The sword in her hands was wooden, but it didn’t matter. She could bludgeon him, splinter his ribcage, crack open his skull like a sparrow’s egg, scatter his all-knowing brains across the grass—but he wasn’t getting any nearer. The more Thrúd ran, the further away he seemed—she screamed again, and suddenly, he rocketed forward, the spear, still dripping her father’s blood, plunged into—
Thrúd woke with a sob clogging her throat. Her hand clawed at her chest, only to find it unharmed—not so much as a blemish. Beneath her hand, her heartbeat slowed as she came back to reality.
She closed her eyes again and laid back down against her pillows, resisting the urge to throw her fist into them. Damn it. Damn it, damn it, damn it. Despite the weight of the furs and blankets on top of her, she shivered. Every time. Every time she thought she’d moved on, the dreams came back, like an old wound that ached when the weather changed. All of her favorite memories of her father—their early-morning sparring sessions, the gifting of her prized, one-of-a-kind sword; even memories that she wasn’t sure were real—one of her as an infant, a hand wrapped around her father’s forefinger while he looked down at her with an indescribable tenderness, rocking her back and forth, back and forth, speaking in a low, warm voice—all her best memories, shattered as Odin murdered him. Murdered him—for finally saying ‘no.’ For finally standing up for his family—standing up for her.
If she had just been faster—
Thrúd growled as she threw off the covers and sat upright on the edge of her bed. No. She couldn’t fall back into that hole. She’d been there before—and it was dark.
“One day at a time,” she muttered, getting to her feet and crossing to her trunk. “One day at a time.”
It had been her mother’s favorite phrase in the year since Ragnarök. In fact, it seemed like she could hardly say anything but One day at a time, like those words acted as some kind of charm that kept her tethered to the earth. Or else (and, Thrúd thought, more likely), the words were a shield that kept Sif from facing whatever pain she had buried. At first, Thrúd had found it annoying, as if her mother was trying to put a thin strip of bandage over a disemboweled gut—an utterly useless gesture, without putting in the effort of stitching the flesh together again. But eventually, Thrúd decided that a tiny bandage was better than no bandage at all. Besides, her mother’s words seemed to be just about the only dependable thing in the world.
As she fastened her breastplate, Thrúd winced; her ribs were already blossoming into deep purple splotches. Yesterday, she’d trained even harder than usual, with even Sigrun taking notice and asking her to stand down. But no—she’d thought that getting out of her own skull would make her forget, as if she could sweat and bleed out her grief. So she worked, and worked, until even her calluses opened up to bleed into the grooves of her weapon’s handle— Mjölnir’s handle. The training had only compounded all the feelings that needled at her insides. Now, not only was it a year since Ragnarök, the anniversary of the destruction of her home, the dissolution of her family as she knew it, and the death of the person who knew and loved her most in the world—but now, her ribs hurt, too.
Thrúd shrugged as she fastened her sheaths to her hips. She was meant to shadow her mother today. Oh, well. If she got bored of Mom’s political lessons, she could always slip away. After all, knowing the people was part of politics—or so she would say to her mother when she inevitably caught on.
///
Thrúd ran her finger along one of the grooves in the limestone wall, following the curve in the molding until it swooped out of her reach, an arabesque into a decorative arch over a doorway. Smooth, pale stone. It felt like that was all the residents of Vanaheim knew how to build with—well, other than the rough canvas of the refugee tents, still stubbornly flapping around the edges of the newly-rebuilt city like gulls trapped in a tar pit. In contrast, the formerly-ruined city gave the impression of a clumsily-made quilt. The new lodge especially—lodge only in name, of course, what would the Vanir know about a real lodge anyway?—their new lodge openly displayed the hurried nature of the evacuation from Asgard. It had been the first building to be restored, thus the obvious mix of ancient crumbling stone and hastily-mixed plaster.
But it wasn’t just the materials that bothered Thrúd. It was the entire look, the essence permeating through the halls. All the formal columns and arches, the sweeping elegant lines and tapered windows, the vines and foliage invading every inch, despite all efforts to keep them back…she hated it.
In fact, as she shoved an errant branch out of her face where it sprouted from the wall, Thrúd decided that she hated all of Vanaheim—ever shifting, ever changing Vanaheim. Here, there could never be warmth without humidity like a damp cloth over her mouth and nose. Here, there were plants that could poison you without warning, two wolves who had to be told when day and night was, and a landscape that shifted every time they changed places in the sky. There were no pine trees, no cold breezes, no cliffs by a crystalline sea—nothing, Thrúd thought, that made a place perfect.
Vanaheim wasn’t home. And it never would be.
She would never be home again.
With the quiet in the halls, Thrúd considered the unlikely possibility that she’d woken up before everyone else. But just like every other morning, when Thrúd pushed open the door to the dining hall, there sat Sif in her usual seat at the head of the table. Her mother looked up from her plate and gave Thrúd a smile that almost felt like home.
“Good morning, sweetheart.”
“…Morning,” Thrúd replied as she unstrapped her sheaths and sat her weapons by the door. Now this was odd. Normally, Sif was constantly surrounded by advisors and representatives, at every time of the day, laying out infrastructure proposals over breakfast and catching her ear on the way to bed. But this morning, with the sun making a halo of the stray blonde hairs and glinting off the golden ornaments in her thick, intricate braids, Sif almost looked like the continuation of the dream—well, nightmare.
The heavy wooden chair growled against the flagstones as Thrúd pulled it away from the table and sat down by Sif’s side. Sif leaned closer to her.
“Did you sleep okay?”
Thrúd debated. They were alone, just the two of them, just this once. It might be nice to unburden herself, let her mother in on the return of the nightmares. But even with the gentle smile on Sif’s lips, the bruise-colored crescents under her eyes gave away the game. She hadn’t slept. Again. Not that she ever slept nowadays—lines had appeared beside Sif’s eyes, just above her eyebrows, around the corners of her lips.
“Pretty good, yeah,” Thrúd lied as she pulled her features into a look she hoped was convincingly cheerful. Her stomach let out a loud growl as Thrúd started piling porridge onto her plate. “Woke up with some new bruises, though.”
Sif chuckled. “What else is new?”
Giving her mother a crooked smile, she cracked some bacon apart and dropped it onto the porridge, then reached for the honey pot. She heard a sigh, an almost choked sigh, and she chanced a look back at her mother. The smile had suddenly slipped away, and Sif now toyed with what little food was on her plate. The realization hit Thrúd and she cringed; her father had been the one to show her this breakfast, a long time ago. Listen, kid, you come by the sweet tooth honestly. But you’ve got to eat some meat, too. You wanna get big and strong like me, right?
Of course she did. Thrúd finished with the honey and shoved it as far away from her as she could.
“What about you?” she asked around a mouthful, even though she already knew the answer. “How’d you sleep?”
“Oh,” Sif said lightly, taking some milk curd on her spoon, but never bringing it to her lips, “Well enough. Had to take care of some last-minute preparations before I could sleep. Busy day today.”
“Indeed, my Lady!”
Behind Thrúd, as if on cue, a man entered the dining hall, his almost silent scuttling masking his approach. Thrúd couldn’t help rolling her eyes, and didn’t mind Sif’s hasty look of reprimand before she turned her polite attention to the man entering the room.
“Good morning, Forseti—have you eaten?”
As he circled around to Sif’s other side, Thrúd noted that the white hair around his temples looked, somehow, even more frazzled than normal. The lenses on his beaky nose hung perilously close to falling—so did all the scrolls and bits of parchment clutched in his reed-thin arms, swamped in long emerald-green sleeves.
“Oh, er—your offer is most kind, my Lady,” he wheezed in his whistling tenor, already dropping his papers and eagerly pulling a platter of fruit closer to himself. “Perhaps I will partake, just a bit, of course. Ah—good morning, Lady Thrúd.”
Lady. She tucked a half-chewed mouthful into her cheek and tried not to wrinkle her nose at the sycophantic propriety of the title. “Morning, Forseti.”
Forseti’s hand froze midway to his plate, clutching a handful of berries. Thrúd fixed her eyes on his own watery gray ones, and poured as much of her annoyance and grief into her gaze as she could manage.
“Yes,” he said, averting his eyes and scattering the fruit onto his plate, “an unfortunate day, a mournful day. But, as any other day, it is still a busy one. I like to think that…those we lost would be grateful that we keep moving forward.”
He couldn’t even say his name. The victims of Ragnarok, her friends--her father--they had now become those we lost.
“Yes. I think so, too.”
Her mother’s agreement with the euphemism scattered salt into the already-open wound. Biting her lip, Thrúd looked back down at her plate and set about finishing her breakfast as quickly as possible.
“I would even argue that today is a
celebration
,” Forseti continued as he spat a seed into a napkin with more noise than was necessary. “Yes, we mourn—but we also rejoice that we have remained, thanks to their sacrifice. Now, there are some final preparations that need your approval, Lady Sif..."
Forseti’s words, and Sif’s responses, faded into the distance as a rushing sound flooded Thrúd’s ears. The boulder inside her chest sat even heavier than when she’d woken up that morning. She should have told her mother about the nightmare. Maybe if she had, Sif would have sent Forseti away. Or maybe she wouldn’t. Maybe she would tell Thrúd to wait until tonight to talk. But then tonight would become tomorrow, would become tomorrow night, would become…well, it would become forgotten. In all the politics, all the mothering of the displaced Asgardians, Thrúd would always be forgotten.
Plate emptied, Thrúd pushed it away from her and rose from her chair, bolting to reach her weapons where they stood by the door.
“I’m going for a walk.”
“All right. Be back in an hour—we have the ceremony to prepare for.”
Sif didn’t even look up from the parchment that Forseti had laid out before her. Thrúd swallowed the sting as she walked away, hollow.