Work Text:
England
Ivar could not storm off to his room in a fury; he had to make slow, laborious steps across the stone floor on his crutches, gritting his teeth against the pain and just hoping he could stay upright, because falling over would be further mortification.
Then came the stairs.
The most prestigious room in the great hall at York was upstairs. Naturally Ivar had claimed it. Which meant even slower, even more laborious movements to coordinate his body up onto each new level of stone. And so many more opportunities to fall.
Once he had gotten around the turn, out of sight of his brothers in the main room, Ivar abandoned his crutches (quietly, he didn’t want them to hear) and crawled the rest of the way up the stairs. This was not really much faster, but his body was more used to the movements, and he had much less risk of injury.
It did not improve his mood, however.
Once at the top of the stairs it was a straight crawl down the hallway to his room. Their room. Sansa was behind him, following dutifully, carrying his crutches. His soulmate, having to be his nursemaid already.
Ivar crawled up into a chair and just sat there, silently seething. His exertions themselves did not tire him, just the pain, including the searing humiliation Sigurd liked to heap on him. Sansa leaned his crutches quietly against the table and sat still, waiting to see if the storm would blow over. She had really won a prize with her soulmarks, Ivar thought bitterly.
He knew he should say nothing to her, because he was still furious and it would come out badly. But his judgment was not the best right now.
“Do you agree with him?” he began, in the most unfair way possible, knowing she wouldn’t have understood what Sigurd said well, if at all.
Sansa tried to demur. “I don’t—”
“About being married to a cripple,” Ivar supplied sharply. “What Sigurd always talks about.” It had to be Sigurd’s favorite topic of conversation, especially since Sansa had appeared.
She was still a moment, weighing her options, then stood and began to drag another chair over. They were heavy, and Ivar could not get up to help her, of course, which was another twist of the knife. She arranged the chair next to Ivar’s, but facing him, the arms touching. He hoped whatever she planned to say had ben worth all that trouble.
“The first time I saw you,” Sansa began, thinking back to just a few days earlier, “you were sitting in the middle of a battlefield, with all the Saxons pointing their spears and arrows at you.” Ivar listened in spite of himself; he liked to hear about his own exploits, and she sounded admiring. “And you were screaming at them, ‘I am Ivar the Boneless! You cannot kill me!’” Ivar smiled, just a little, at the memory. “They should have been able to kill you, very easily. So many of them, so close, and just one of you. But they could not,” Sansa noted. “They were too frightened of you.” She gave him a serious look. “That does not sound like a cripple to me,” she judged definitively.
Ivar smiled a little more, leaning on the arm between them. “You saw me?” he asked proudly. This had not been discussed before.
“I was here, in the great hall, looking out the window,” Sansa described. Her tone became lighter, more playful. “It was like an arrow had pierced my heart!” She acted this out, to Ivar’s amusement. “And there was a rope tied to it, and at the other end of the rope was you,” she finished warmly.
“I felt the same way!” Ivar assured her excitedly. “When they brought you to my tent, before I even saw you—because Bjorn, that big ox, was in the way—I could feel you. Like I had been hit with an arrow. Another one,” he added with a smirk.
Boldly she put her arm out to touch his and he did the same. For a moment he was content to simply sit there gazing at her, feeling her warmth. But eventually he remembered this wasn’t going to solve any problems and sighed.
“Perhaps we could move to a room on the ground floor,” Sansa suggested lightly, as if it was no big deal. She felt Ivar’s arm tense under her hand but wouldn’t let him pull away.
“This is the best room,” he tried to explain. “I have to have it. If I give it up, I look weak to my brothers.”
“Who says it is the best room?” Sansa shrugged, as if it was that easy to merely change reality.
“It has the best stuff,” Ivar pointed out, not even bothering to look around at all the furniture and tapestries he’d found here.
“Those things can be moved,” Sansa suggested. “Who used to work in this place, me or you?” she added rhetorically.
“You,” he replied with a grin. From kitchen girl to princess, he liked that he could make that happen.
“And I say this is not a good room,” Sansa dismissed. “The food and water is cold by the time it gets up here. The windows are drafty, and they leak when it rains. It is too isolated, you don’t know what is happening in the rest of the building—”
“Okay,” Ivar chuckled. “I get it. I am to say my wife does not like this room and wants to move?” They both grinned involuntarily at the term; there had not been any formal ceremony yet, but Ivar told her among his people it was understood with soulmates, and she was happy to accept that.
“You may blame me, or you may blame the draft,” Sansa allowed. “Whatever you think would work. My grandmother told me a story…” She hesitated, unsure if Ivar would be interested, but he indicated he was. “Once there was a gathering of all the most powerful kings, and their wives. Someone wanted to cause trouble, to sow discord at this peaceful gathering, so they had an apple made from gold, and inscribed with the words ‘For the Fairest.’” Ivar smirked as he guessed where this was going.
“They tossed the apple among the queens,” Sansa continued, “who began to argue over it, because they all thought they were the fairest. The arguments turned into fights, and their husbands got involved, and the fights became wars.” She shrugged. “I am not saying you want to create discord in your army like that, it does not seem very smart. But for some reason, I thought of this story.”
“Perhaps, this is still a good room,” Ivar suggested, “but it is not suitable for me, so I am giving it to… the most worthy of the other leaders. And they must decide who that is.” He snickered a little imagining it. “But I suppose they will go with either Bjorn or Harald, my other brothers do not have enough ambition to put themselves forward,” he added, rolling his eyes. “But it might be amusing.”
She could tell the moment his thoughts darkened again, but still wouldn’t let him pull away. Although she didn’t fully understand the language Ivar and his brothers spoke, it was not hard to get the general idea of what they said, based on tone and body language. Sigurd always had something disrespectful and unnecessary to say, mainly to Ivar.
“Sigurd tries to make you angry,” she observed. “When you show that he has, you let him win. And I know you do not like to let people win.”
“This advice, I have heard before,” Ivar sighed. “But I cannot sit there and let him insult me. I will look—” Well, she knew the rest. Maybe in her culture, men of power pretended to seek humility; but in his, they had to constantly show strength. Especially when starting from a position of considerable weakness, like he was. “Maybe this is not something a woman understands,” he decided to say. In his mind, he was giving her an excuse, an out, but once she became offended, he had to quickly rethink that.
“You think a woman does not worry what other people think of her?” she demanded hotly, and now it was him urging her not to pull away. “You think a woman does not hear insults and cruel comments? I am sure one of your shield-maidens could tell you differently!” Ivar granted this, trying to calm her. “Perhaps men and shield-maidens are allowed to simply fling an axe at someone who insults them,” she acknowledged with a sigh.
“Or an arrowhead,” Ivar reminded her, to cheer her up. Being reminded of his kills always cheered him up.
Sansa gave him a small smile. Any discussion was better with her smile, he decided. “You do not have to suffer his insults,” she tried to explain. “You could ignore him. Like a yappy little dog, you look at him and go, ‘Hmm, back to the grownups talking.’”
Ivar giggled envisioning this. “That would really set him off!” This was a good thing, in his mind.
“Then if he is the one to get mad and stomp off, that is his own fault,” Sansa told him. “Or you can laugh with him, but really laughing at him. Or just hold your head high, let him dribble at the mouth, and go on about your business.”
“Have you gotten many insults?” Ivar asked curiously. “You have so many strategies. Who would insult you?” Sansa snorted, then saw that Ivar was serious, which was clueless if sweet. “You are beautiful, you are smart, you are strong,” he continued, taking the opportunity to lean into her more. "What offensive thing would someone have to say to you?"
"That they think I should be theirs when I do not wish it," Sansa shrugged, knowing Ivar would grasp this one quickly. “That I am a rival for their man when I could not care less about him. That I am a stranger and thus suspicious. That I am just an uneducated kitchen girl, and they are better.”
Ivar nodded slowly. “How many of the people who said such things,” he asked leadingly, “are dead now?”
Sansa smiled at him. “Probably many,” she agreed. “I would not have given them death for their insults,” she added thoughtfully. “But it is true, they are now dead.” Vikings had a way of drastically reducing the local population.
“And you have practiced these strategies with them?” Ivar asked.
“Mainly I would try to ignore them,” Sansa tried to explain. “I could not afford to make them angrier. I did not have the power you have. You have more options.” She shrugged. “I think Sigurd is jealous of you.”
“Yes, I was my mother’s favorite,” Ivar agreed easily, “and she spent all her time with me rather than the others. Ubbe and Hvitserk are a little older, they understood better. But Sigurd always resented it.”
Sansa supposed this was old news among the brothers. “And now you have found your soulmate,” she reminded him. “Does he have his soulmate?”
“No,” Ivar replied, smugly. “He and Hvitserk are not married. Ubbe has his soulmate. Bjorn is married to Torvi, but they are not soulmates. So one day he will probably leave her.”
“Oh,” Sansa responded sympathetically. One could not always manage to wait around for one’s soulmate; or sometimes the soulmate died, maybe even before they had met. So sometimes people married others. But it was a risk, if your soulmate might turn up at any time.
“I mean, Bjorn could just marry his soulmate also, and have two wives,” Ivar went on casually, “but I’m not sure Torvi would like that.”
Sansa was staring at him with wide eyes. “You can have two wives? At the same time?”
Ivar grinned. “Christians do not do that?” he guessed.
“No,” she confirmed. “It is considered wrong. A marriage is supposed to be with one person for life.” Ivar shook his head at how inflexible her people were. “Can a woman have two husbands?” she asked curiously.
Ivar’s lack of an immediate denial was answer enough. “Some people make… arrangements, to share, that everyone agrees to,” he tried to explain, but he could see that Sansa was not having this, and he laughed. “Don’t worry, my love, I am not going to share you with anyone,” he promised.
“And I will not share you!” she agreed, as a warning to both him and others.
But this made him think of something else, and he shifted awkwardly in his chair. “Perhaps, maybe in time, you would want a different arrangement, though,” Ivar said, slowly and painfully. “If you… want to have children.”
Sansa frowned. “Do you not want to have children, Ivar?”
She would not let him go, but he turned his head away, trying to shrug as though it didn’t concern him. “I cannot.”
She blinked at him in confusion. “Why not?”
She was really going to make him spell it out, apparently—well, she didn’t understand Sigurd’s insults, and obviously no one had passed on to her the juicy gossip about her husband. Forcing Ivar to explain it himself. “My legs are not the only thing that doesn’t work,” he told her, significantly.
He tried to ignore the heat in his cheeks and—even more humiliating—the tears that threatened to well in his eyes. They were soulmates, they were married (sort of), they should be able to talk about difficult things together, and decide what to do about them.
“Oh,” Sansa said when she finally got it, a blush also rising on her face. Ivar glanced away, not wanting to see her no-doubt disappointed expression. “Um… I do not know much about men,” she reminded him, which ordinarily would please him, if he had anything to offer instead. “Are you saying you tried to have children with someone already, and she never became pregnant?”
“No,” Ivar countered, rubbing his face tiredly. He made a special effort to stay calm, because this was not Sansa’s fault, and it was something they would have had to discuss eventually. “I mean, I cannot…” He really didn’t want to be crude about it to her, but he didn’t know a lot of other terminology, especially in another language. “I cannot get it up,” he finally said, with a hand gesture. “I cannot satisfy you that way,” he rushed on, before she could answer. “I understand there are other things that can be done, for enjoyment, and I would like you to have enjoyment, but the main thing, I cannot do. Do you understand?”
“No,” Sansa replied in confusion, and Ivar wanted to throw himself out of the chair and maybe down the stairs by this point, rather than prolong this conversation. “It pokes me in the back at night, so I would have thought—”
Ivar did a double-take. “What?”
“I am not very familiar with sleeping with men,” Sansa reiterated, “but I assumed that’s what it was.”
“At night?” Hope was beginning to flare within Ivar, hope and excitement—he didn’t usually sleep in the same bed with other people either, so how would he know what his body got up to at night? Sometimes he thought maybe he remembered a sensation or a dream, but it was nothing he could recreate on command.
“I think so,” Sansa nodded. “You know more about it than me, but I am happy to… try, and see what happens.”
“Let’s start now,” Ivar decided, ready to leap for the bed.
“Hold on,” said Sansa, and now she sounded a bit indignant. “I thought we were waiting because… your leg hurt, with the arrow, or maybe you were just waiting for me to feel comfortable!”
“No,” replied Ivar, but that was clearly the wrong answer. “You just said you were happy to try!”
“I thought you were being considerate of me!” Sansa shot back. “If you thought you could take me when we first met, would you have done so?”
There was a wrong answer here, Ivar could see that in her face, but what it was exactly… “Of course, I would not take you against your will,” he finally said. “But I think you would have wanted to—” Yep, wrong. “I thought maybe the first night, or the second, I would have to fight you off—”
“You had an arrow in your leg, Ivar!” Sansa reminded him.
“That’s nothing,” he dismissed. “I hardly notice it now.”
She sat back with a huff. “This is a ridiculous conversation,” she judged, exasperated.
“Yes, I agree,” Ivar told her. “My leg does not hurt. I would like to have sex with you, and it seems maybe I can, but you are angry about something?” Sansa shook her head and started to laugh—not at him, at the whole situation, so Ivar started to laugh also. “Do you feel comfortable now?” he finally asked, in a leading tone.
She smirked a little. “You could at least kiss me first, Ivar.”
He smirked also, and leaned forward. “Come here.” He touched her cheek gently, trying to hold her steady, or maybe himself, as he brushed his lips across hers. It seemed so intimate somehow, their lips pressing softly together, moving against each other, just enjoying the feel of the other one in a new way. Sansa’s lips parted slightly, and Ivar slid his tongue against them, experimentally, the thought of having part of his body inside hers driving his heartrate and breathing up, his thoughts scattering in so many directions. Sansa made a little noise and pressed closer; he felt her hand in his hair, and her tongue touching his.
“This chair is in the way,” she complained, unable to pull him as close as she wanted.
He opened his eyes to gaze at her, cheeks flushed, lips wet. “Now can we move to the bed?” he suggested cheekily, at the same time dreading being parted from her, even for a moment.
“Yes,” she agreed. Sansa roes from her chair, keeping her hands on Ivar as she went behind his chair and then came around in front of him, kneeling swiftly at his feet. His expression stuttered slightly, but she was only unbuckling his braces. He moved quickly to help.
“Do the lower ones,” he suggested. “I have more trouble reaching those.” He was pleased to note that both of them fumbled the straps in their eagerness. He set the braces and boots aside as soon as possible, ignoring the familiar ache that removing them caused, and lowered himself to the floor, following Sansa to the bed. She moved shyly, glancing back as if uncertain if he would really follow.
There was a chair next to the bed that Ivar boosted himself into, while Sansa turned the blankets back. Then from there, he could get himself onto the mattress. “When they move this bed tomorrow,” he decided as she took off her shoes, “let’s have them cut the legs off, so it’s shorter.”
“That is a good idea,” Sansa giggled. The bed was high enough that even she had a little trouble with it, and had to climb in like she was crawling up a hill.
Ivar pulled her over to start kissing her again, from a much more comfortable position. He wanted to know how his lips felt against every part of her, her jaw, her cheek, her neck; the idea that he was allowed to do this with her, that she wanted him to, made everything sharper, more urgent, like something would snatch this indulgence away at any moment.
He wanted to do everything, to devour her whole, and couldn’t focus on where to put his hands. “What do you want to do?” he finally murmured in her ear.
Sansa seemed to be having the same confused thoughts, running her hands over his arms and shoulders, starting to kiss him then realizing she was supposed to say something. Ivar smiled at her, cupping her face in his hands. “We can do anything we want,” he promised her. “There is no one to tell us different.”
She nodded solemnly. “Can you take off your shirt?” she requested, and he did so, with her help. She had seen him without his shirt before, it could hardly be helped in close quarters, but she hadn’t felt free to look or touch previously. Now she could do that all she wanted, feeling his muscles shift as he pulled her closer and nuzzled at her neck. “You’re very strong,” she said, almost blurting it without thinking, and her face flushed in embarrassment.
“Yes. I can protect you, Sansa,” he promised her. She craved security after the upheavals of her recent life, and his words drew a pleased noise from her. “I can take care of you.”
“Maybe I will take care of you,” she shot back playfully, and leaned forward to trace her tongue along the lines of his tattoo. He gasped in surprise, then tried to hold still for her, hand digging into the mattress to anchor himself. He kept looking down to see that it was her tongue and not a trail of fire; that’s what it felt like, in the best possible way. The feeling was profound, like he felt at the height of a really good ceremony, with the priests chanting and the moon just right and the sacrificial blood still warm on his face, like he was being touched by the gods themselves.
“Sansa,” he murmured, as her tongue followed the markings lower. Something tightened inside him, low and hot, making his heart flutter. It was frightening and thrilling at the same time, to not be quite sure what his body was going to do next. “Sansa.” He pulled her back up and kissed her, rolling her over onto her back, bracing himself on his forearms as she got the tangle of their legs and her skirts sorted. He pressed himself between her legs, eyes rolling back at the pleasure the friction caused. “Is this what you feel at night?” he checked.
“Yes,” she assured him. “Is it good?”
He pulled back to meet her gaze, blue eyes blazing. “Very good,” he promised. “Let’s see what else we can discover.”