Work Text:
Hel’s cousin comes to her with the bees - two of them, humming in through the crack in the doorway from the wide-golden summer flooding through Asgard, creeping in to where her father and brothers have left her alone, to her spinning - mistress of the house, though not yet fully grown. The dust is dried so much that they are louder than he, with his soft boots scuffing over the dirt, and it takes her long seconds to watch them dance upon the draft between the rafters. Only after that does she notice the hands curling around her doorframe, and halts her spindle and tucks her distaff under her arm to welcome him inside - with the warm hand, further softened with lanolin, and Hodr laughs and lets her pull him into the shadow of the walls. He bows exaggeratedly to her when she tells him she has been left in charge of the house until her kinsmen return, and makes mocking obeisance, calling her lady and queen, overwrought like a story.
He also sits on the floor at her knee and drags her fleeces over the comb, helps her wind her skeins in the crook of his thumb and over his elbow, twists them up and ties them for the dyeing as dextrously as she ever could. “Perhaps I ought to have you for my assistant always,” she taunts. “Perhaps I ought to teach you to spin as well, and then we could be getting done twice as much, and twice as quickly.”
His grin splits his face, white teeth and black maw like snow against a moonless sky. “You would make more use of me thus, cousin, than any other.”
“Oh, do not say such things.” She bares her teeth at him, and knows he can hear the shape of it in her voice. “You do not know what you invite. You will never again be free of me if I can so make use of you; I would be at your door every day, to take you from your family and so to make you serve me - and that I think they would mourn, eventually.”
He passes her another handful of top. “Only eventually?”
Soon he will be a man, and she a woman in truth; soon it will no longer be allowed for him to do things so childish as to sit upon her floor, and stay in her home. Soon she will be a lady in her father’s house in truth, and she will have all the management of it that her father give to her; soon he will leave his, and live alone.
But on that they must wait at least another winter, and far sooner, and more importantly, than that will she run out of fleece, and he will drag her out with the bees into the summer, hands warm and clamped together, lanolin-soft.