Work Text:
“Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you’ve been ruined.”
(Ocean Vuong)
***
A moment of hesitation.
It must have shone from his face— a slight widening of the eyes, a change in their tincture, a minute quiver of his lips at the very corners. Or else, some small detail of posture that Askeladd didn’t reign in, a subtle betrayal of his own body. Bjorn had fought at his side for over twenty years now, he knew how he moved, his habits, his way of making sense of the intricate dance of battle. Askeladd rarely miscalculated, and when he did…
Bjorn noticed.
Though Bjorn towered over him, always making his size a menace on the battlefield, he could move deceptively fast when he wanted to, an underestimation that no-doubt cost many men their lives. Far from the lumbering brute, Bjorn closed in what little spacing they had and, looming over Askeladd like a storm-wave, kicked out his foot to swipe at his ankles. Askeladd could do little more than turn his sword away from his own body and hold out his free hand to brace for the fall—
—which was entirely the wrong instinct to have when one didn’t actually have a hand.
He slammed into the ground, the sparse grass that covered the hard dirt no cushion. He turned his stump of an arm away in time to prevent jamming it, but it left him sprawled on his ass gracelessly and his good hand only recovered control on his weapon too late; Bjorn didn’t even need to step forward, just used his longer reach to turn the point of his blade at his neck, the edge catching on the sunlight in a molten white, the thrill of the point a whisper of danger on Askeladd’s skin.
Fighting was all Askeladd knew how to do… and now he couldn’t even do that.
Chest heaving, Askeladd threw his sword down, admitting defeat, and it clattered onto a stone in a grating peal, like the shrill laughter of some bird. Bjorn seemed even taller from this angle, a dark figure from which the sun draped its brilliant arms over his broad shoulders, a cloak made of rays of streaming light. It seemed that time distilled into one long moment of staring across a length of iron, Bjorn’s lips pursed as if to speak and his eyes bright polished cabochons of amber.
Askeladd couldn’t bear it. He tore himself away, shoving Bjorn’s sword from the tremble of his neck and wrenching himself up from the ground with a grunt through his clenched teeth.
“Done for today,” he managed to grit out.
Bjorn didn’t even call after him as he stomped off over the fields, just stood there. His sword still in his hand like a lightning bolt of silver, the sunlight still cascading through his hair, lips still pursed and his eyes still looking at him like that.
*
He made it back home only when the sun dipped low on the horizon, her light slanting through the grass and stretching the shadows into long twisted serpents that moved with each rustle. He closed the door behind him softly and Bjorn looked up from where he sat on the floor prodding at the fire with an iron poker, the shine of relief tucked neatly under the line of his small smile and the motion of his nod and very suddenly Askeladd felt his weariness scatter like so many autumn leaves.
Easy to relent: he slid into place at Bjorn’s side, keeping a slip of firelight between them out of a caution that waned as quickly as the daylight outside. Askeladd can nearly hear the questions that go unsaid between them, and Bjorn’s eyes on him are both a welcome and a torment. He suppresses a shiver, something Bjorn probably notices anyways, some shimmer under his skin or tense of his back— he could read Askeladd's body as deftly as any simple carving of runes, whether in battle or out of it.
“I’m sorry,” Askeladd begins, stilted.
The words have an unfamiliar form in his mouth, like a paste of flour and honey. It isn’t that he wasn’t sorry, but the lack of his own poise was like a gust of winter in the north wind, freezing his words before they could flow.
“It was petulant and unsporting of me to run off.”
He can’t meet Bjorn’s eyes any longer and the word coward flits across his vision as searingly bright as the flames in front of them, pirouetting little teases he tries to blink away. He can feel Bjorn’s eyes on him too, as tangible as any gentle caress, a fingertip-touch along his cheekbone, his jaw, his lips. It’s followed with the more solid feel of an arm wrapping around his lower back, pulling him closer to close the avenue between them with a more comforting heat than firelight.
(How tired do I look? Askeladd wondered. The arm around him felt like it was the only thing keeping him from disintegrating, like he was an empty, unlaced garment that needed another body to hold him up, fill him out. His eyes felt as raw and red as the pulsing bark of the logs over which the flames danced.)
“Talk to me,” Bjorn coaxes, quiet and low, voice like rolling thunder. And oh, Askeladd should’ve known he wouldn’t let him retreat into silence. He’d just been so used to it in the past.
“You don’t normally lose your temper.”
For all his silver tongue, for all his pride in reading men— when it came to his own self, Askeladd was at a loss of words. He felt his lip quiver with that damned hesitation, and he thought once more about falling back on his ass, about Bjorn holding the point of his sword at his neck and it’s much the same as the raw scrape of now, sitting comfortably at the hearth of their small cottage home, disarmed and at the mercy of another.
Bjorn didn’t go easy on him, something Askeladd certainly appreciated at times because it gave him the illusion that there was nothing different from all the other times in the past that they sparred, a nostalgia for when he was able to give as good as he got. And Askeladd was nothing if not a talented faker, his sleight-of-hand dexterous enough to pull something from nothing. Or to seem to, anyways.
But it was the eyes, even more than his defeat.
Deep pools, a wine-dark sea gleaming with a thin foil of gold on the peaks, touched by the faintest breath of sun and green reflections. The line of the sword at his neck had led him in a path right into the forested eaves of Bjorn’s eyes, an alluring danger Askeladd had tried his damnedest to resist for two decades. Even looking down at him smudged with dirt and grass-stains, there had been no pity, no glee at defeating him when he’d been unable to before. No contempt at the pathetic state of his once proud Captain—
Just an ever-present, overwhelming, and gleaming adoration. Bjorn’s eyes had radiated awe like they had soaked up the light and released it again from the startling depths of his eyes, softened by it like honey, the tip of the sword yearning for flesh. How was it he could hold him with that look, like he was something precious, even as he held a blade to his pulse?
Pity would’ve been preferable. At least then Askeladd would know how to react: he would have a rightful excuse to defend his honour with another match. But what could he do with this… pride? Pride freely given to a defeated opponent?
“I don’t like the way you looked at me,” Askeladd finally admitted, his voice still rough around the edges. It was difficult not to let the disgust tinge those words into something stunted and bitter.
And though Askeladd refused to look up at Bjorn, continued to stare at the tongues of fire licking the splitting wood (coward, coward, coward ), he can almost feel the way Bjorn tilted his head in an almost animal-like display of confusion.
“You don’t see what’s really in front of you, you don’t…” and Askeladd takes a deep breath, his lips thinned into a knife’s-edge.
“It’s like nothing has changed, like you think I’m not…”
“Not what?” Bjorn asks when Askeladd's voice trails off and doesn’t find itself again.
For a sudden, shocking moment Askeladd is struck across the soul with hate, a gnarled thing like a fist clenching the fabric of his heart. He hated how Bjorn asked when he had to know the answer, forcing him to give shape to all the ugly things that crawled and writhed under his skin.
“Like I’m not broken, Bjorn,” he bit, throwing the words from his trembling lips like they were poison. Tired and angry and more than anything else: ashamed.
Ashamed that he’d been maimed. Ashamed that he could no longer function as a warrior when that was the one thing he was good at. Ashamed that he was ashamed, because he was still no better than his father, only ever able to destroy. The memory of his missing hand still reaching out for the hilt of a sword, it's comforting weight there to cut down any who stood in his path. Ashamed that the Danish mindset had colonized him so thoroughly that he was ashamed he wasn’t chosen by the gods for death.
All of this crawled up from the sick in Askeladd's guts and nestled, a thick and oily bile in the back of his throat, and it squeezed, a leaden ball etched with the taunts of his anxiety. His eyes burned at the thought, as if ash had blown into them, piercing him with the memory of so long ago it felt like he’d seen it woven in a tapestry, shoving his past into myth to maybe make it hurt less. His half-brother’s raid on the Welsh coast, dragon-headed prows clustered on the beach, blood in the sand and a familiar voice pulling him out of his violent reverie, a hand clutching a fistful of blood and flesh where an arm used to be.
(Ashamed that he couldn’t take his punishment like a man, as deserved as it was. This was his comeuppance, two decades late.)
Bjorn bumped into him, bumped him into the here and now.
“Well,” he said simply, his familiar voice pulling him out of the fullness of his guilt. “You’re not broken.”
And how the fuck could he say something like that so confidently? Bjorn was never a good liar, but this was spun to perfection: shiny, expensive silk of a lie. Askeladd knew of Bjorn’s unshakable faith in fate, in the gods. In him, most of all. But this was… different entirely. A delusion that was the very proof that he was ruined. Like sunlight from a world still capable of hope.
“Don’t lie to me, Bjorn,” he hissed, voice as cold and sharp as a knapped flint, blue eyes flashing like ice, a warning.
He was tired, not stupid. He held up his right arm, the wound which left him handless thick and pinched.
“It’s indisputable—”
“Do you know what I see?” Bjorn interrupted, seeing right through to Askeladd's response and cutting to the quick, his voice brooking no argument yet still with a gentleness. He waited for no answer.
“I see a warrior so devoted, so determined to protect his people that he lost the hand that did the deed.”
Bjorn’s voice, dropping low. Sunlight on the horizon, shadows stretched into long writhing shapes, a slip of heat between them where their legs pressed close. A sword thrown to the side, clattering on the stones.
“I see one-handed Týr, the bravest and most valiant. Victorious, unhesitating. That’s what I see. Nothing broken. A true warrior.”
A true warrior.
A true warrior.
A true warrior.
Rendered speechless. The words fizzle into nothing. The bile recedes from Askeladd’s throat but leaves behind a tight burn. His eyes sting at the fervency, the firmness of Bjorn’s words like a mountain, the spark in his eyes like an arrow of fire from which a wildfire kindled. He believed it, he wasn’t lying.
Askeladd blinked rapidly away the rushing torrent of a cold shiver, leaned back into the arm around him as if to banish the shiver from climbing up his spine, little static shocks like a wool blanket dragged over dry skin. He felt like a roe deer that had heard the hunter’s footfall, a twig snapping in the underbrush. Like he’d fallen into icy waters and the shock of it left him inhaling saltwater.
A true warrior needs no sword, his inner voice ever-mocked.
(Memories dredged from the very seabed of his being, a slimy dark and desolate bed of sand. Erfyll’s missing arm, how he’d comforted him when he should have been the one comforted. Askeladd didn’t want this, didn’t want this understanding.)
His ghost-limb still full of sensation, pin-pricks on his nonexistent fingers. Absence that hurt more than any wound. A rejection of the premise so primal that Askeladd didn’t think he’d ever weed it out of his psyche. Anger bubbles up from the depths, makes the red flames burn into his skull like a brand. It swells like a wave of hot, roaring and searing, reaching the flash-point of his enfeebled patience.
“A true warrior,” he muttered, his cheeks flushed.
“You compare me to a god, Bjorn?”
His quietly acidic voice, unsteady but unshakable, a paradox of conviction and doubt. Soured wine. He didn’t yell— wouldn't be so rude to Bjorn of all people— but he needed Bjorn to know, needed to know he had no honour, needed to know that he deserved what had been done to him.
“I’m nothing but a fjósner, a coward, ragr, and the loss of my hand wasn’t courage, but a miscalculation of my opponent’s ability. To win I had to play outside the rules.”
Breathing heavy. Was that his voice, with that tremble at the last syllable? How far he’d fallen, which wasn’t really far at all… his mask forever out of reach. He felt raw, shredded—
“I’m just a viking. All I know how to do is fight.”
(Like Olaf. I killed Sweyn like I killed Thors. And I run away like a coward when I can’t fight— I did it in Wales once before, left and never looked back and now… The voice in his head, mocking, a trill of laughter. Tuck your tail like a coward. )
This palpable disgust. Bjorn’s eyes narrowed at him, dark lashes shading the reflections of firelight in his eyes, eyes like a rich malt, like honey-tea, hardening into a whetstone. Gentle reassurance shifting into something like hard truth. Bjorn was the only man who could disentangle the knot of Askeladd’s emotions— even better than Askeladd could, himself, perhaps.
“Stop it.”
Gruff. It startles Askeladd, his anger slipping back under the water’s surface like the world serpent, leaving nothing but a deceptively small ripple. He pulled away from Bjorn’s draped arm around his waist to better meet his eyes, ready to protest but cut down before he could. But still, the instinct to distance himself, to tuck his tail and lick his wounds.
“You said it yourself, Askeladd: someone has to do it. Not a hero, not a god, just someone. You were that someone twice now, for your mother and for Wales.”
Bjorn sighed, a huff of frustration, as if he wanted to take Askeladd by the shoulders and shake him until he woke up from a long and fitful nightmare.
“I know you’re not actually Týr, I know you’re just a man. But what you did was heroic. Godly. A story worthy of a saga.”
But this was too much, too soon.
“My mother would be disgusted with what I’ve become,” Askeladd nearly snarled, but it came out weak. A wounded animal too exhausted, too resigned to its fate to protect itself for much longer.
“I’ve become my father,” he wobbled. “That’s not heroic, it’s… pathetic.”
But Bjorn just met his weariness with an arched brow, one of his large hands reaching out over the small gap between them to circle his wrist where his hand wasn’t attached, holding onto it without the awkwardness Askeladd thought he should feel at the gesture. As if it wasn’t awkward for him. Bjorn nudged him once more, a soft push of his elbow, affectionate as was his wont.
“No,” Bjorn said, leaning in close so his voice fell over him like a curtain of velvet, a blanket of down. Smothering his self-disgust.
“You haven’t become him, Askeladd. Because your father never cared. ”
Like a douse of cold water, a shiver. Could Bjorn see how lost he was? Was this why he’d reached out, to tether him to something solid, something dependable before he was flooded with the flotsam of his words?
(Bjorn's jaw squared, his convictions worn on his sleeve. His eyes were obsidian arrow-points, a beautiful conchoidal shine like dark, still waters. Maybe if Bjorn believed hard enough Askeladd would too, chipped away by his faith.)
Bjorn knew that Askeladd couldn’t live without a challenge.
“Do it again,” he dared. “You say I can’t see that you’ve changed but I can— you can’t see that you’ve changed. You just have to be someone, like you’ve said. We’re still here and we still have time and neither of us wants to live that life anymore and that’s what I’m trying to say…" and Bjorn's almost at the end of his words, searching for them, grasping them like Askeladd's wrist.
"Fight in this new way. A way your mother would be proud of: a way you’d be proud of.”
Askeladd stared at him for a long time. The wood in the hearth popped and groaned under the feet of the dancing flames, the light shifted over Bjorn’s face, his fingers still encircled his wrist, pressing close to the pulse there. It felt like he’d gone somewhere else, severed from his body and stuck in the winding paths of Bjorn’s words which bit into him, though flesh-and-bone to something deeper.
(Bjorn, silently pleading: the answer is right in front of you, stubborn man! Take it! His own exhaustion a thin shadow over his eyes, to always fight Askeladd’s demons with him. They were both too old now, too weary. And Askeladd can hear the echoes of long ago, another voice in another time, Erfyll laying on a pallet in a healer's cottage:
“You just have to make everything about you, don’t you, Askeladd?” )
“Oh.”
It's all Askeladd can say, his good hand shaking, grabbing onto his tunic until his knuckles turned stark-white.
Bjorn tipped his head in another nod, relief softening his eyes back into woodsmoke and forest. He released Askeladd’s wrist, moving his arm back around him to drape over his back and pull him closer, pressing him against the solid bulwark of his body.
It was the eyes, even more than his defeat. How they said, with the softest, silent voice and the gentlest of intangible touches, almost begging:
If you can’t trust yourself, trust me.
Bjorn's arm pulled him close, his hand curled over his waist and Askeladd let it, nestled against him, all-but burying himself into his side like the final resting-place of all his fears and shame. Bjorn’s arm was like the grassy weight of a burial mound under which all thoughts were banished. Shame slowly leached into the soil, leaving Askeladd's body clean and grateful, an overwhelming peace suffusing him, brilliant and pure.
Askeladd knew this glimpse of relief wouldn’t last long, knew he’d stumble headlong into shame and guilt. But perhaps… Perhaps he just needed to choose which part to focus on, the parts that Bjorn made him feel and not the ones he was left with. He made it sound so simple. He’d squandered his chance in Wales two-and-a-half decades ago… ran away from Erfyll and Gratianus like a coward and right into Bjorn. Young, idealistic, dependable, adoring, loyal, Danish Bjorn.
But maybe the gods had given him the fate of a second chance, returning him here to the beginning, to his mother’s homeland. Protecting his mother brought him here the first time, and protecting Wales a second— if Bjorn was right, then his most selfless acts were the ones that brought him a chance of peace in both instances.
Bjorn, a man so patient, so tender, so determined as to drag him across Britain unconscious and force him into living again. A man who saw right through him, who knew his love of violence and his every depravity— understood it himself just as intimately— and yet still, after all these years, looked him right in the eye as if he saw something there worth caring for. Two decades of pushing him away, of hot-and-cold, of fox-and-rabbit and could Askeladd do it to him again? Could he hurt the only goodness left, the light of hope in the world? Could he push him to the very limits of his already boundless patience?
(He’d seen, of course, the exhaustion in Bjorn’s eyes, the very same Erfyll had. Askeladd knew he was a lot to handle, that living with him was tiresome, that his hurt was a burden. But Bjorn shouldered it again and again and again and again—)
"If you can’t trust yourself, trust me," Bjorn murmured quietly.
Askeladd shuddered, let it scrape across his nerves like a sword falling onto stones. Leaned against his rock. Bjorn deserved the world from him, the least he could do was give his words a chance, to try. He'd already surrendered to him before, why not trust him beyond seeing his vulnerability to healing it?
“I trust you, Bjorn” he whispered, muffled into his side.
Bjorn just pressed his lips to the top of his head, rested his cheek there.
***