“Shhhhh. We have to be quiet.” Hermod opened the door to his father’s hall and looked around. The coast was clear. This was going to be so much fun. They just had to be sure he didn’t get caught. That would really spoil everything.

Odin and Frigg had gone out for the entire day. They were probably doing something royal. They had needed someone to watch Hermod and his younger half-brother, Bragi. Balder had run off with some of his friends and Hod was blind. Being blind made it hard to watch over his younger brothers, even when Hermod promised not to go running around the hall. That left a few other choices. Thor was just too… Thor. Vidar was off learning something important. So Tyr was the one recruited o watch them with Hermod’s parents were away.

( They had just finished lunch... )

Idun knew she was at a severe disadvantage the moment Bragi presented the guns to her. They were deceptively simple in appearance, which meant that they were incredibly intimidating to look upon, and in all her years, Idun had never seen anything quite like them. Her husband handed her one politely, a gentleman to the end, and then they were both armed with three barrels of firepower. Three! It was wickedness to an extreme, and they had decided to fight one another with them. She knew this wasn't going to end well. Idun had very limited experience with guns, and Bragi had been able to fiddle with these prototypes for an undetermined period of time before he presented them to his wife. He could've practiced! Bragi might be an expert marksman by now! They each took their guns and, to be fair, bolted in opposite directions to spread the battlefield across their entire hall. But Bragi was an expert marksman, and he was very fast. Oh, she was definitely at a severe disadvantage.

( What Idun needed was a hostage. )

Frigg didn't necessarily hate it when Odin left for a indeterminate amount of time, she just didn't like being left alone. She wasn't even alone, persay, she would just retreat to Fensalir whenever he went away and only returned to Valaskjalf when he returned to Asgard. There was something so vast, cold and empty about Valaskjalf when Odin wasn't there. It had been quite different when their sons had been young and wandering the hall at all hours getting into all sorts of trouble. But those days were gone. Baldr and Hod were dead. Hermod was grown. Valaskjalf was quiet. Empty. Lonely. Fensalir was always a bustle of activity with all the maidens that resided there, and while it was not a replacement for her husband it always managed to help her forget, for awhile, that she was lonely.

Even Vili and Ve couldn't put the damper on her emptiness, no matter their attempts while they warmed her bed in Fensalir (never in Valaskjalf, her marital bed was her marital bed). But it didn't matter who graced her bed or when, no one had ever held a candle to her husband. So when he was gone, she missed him. ( It was as simple as that. )

When Idun blinked, it felt like she always imagined being born felt. There had been no comprehension before this, not a single noise or image or proper thought. When she blinked, it cleared tears from her eyes and Idun realized that thinking of this as though she had just entered this world was far nicer than thinking of herself as ( frozen before this moment. )

The skald watched Bragi going over his prose. There was an eager sort of light in the skald's eyes. Bragi did not know the skald's name. He didn't know the tavern's name either. Or the town's for that matter. Bragi never asked. He hadn't asked about any of the last skalds or the last taverns either. He just sat and wrote in any spare moment. He took his meals at the same time every day. He said please and thank you when it was expected to say please and thank you. When someone spoke to him, Bragi listened all the way until they finished a sentence before he politely excused himself. When someone expected him to smile, Bragi turned the corners of his lips upwards. He went to bed as soon as possible, because that was the best time to go to bed, and woke up late, because the writing didn't require him to get up early. He didn't stay at any one place too long. Every place looked rather similar and the differences didn't really matter, but Bragi didn't stay anyway. Bragi did not keep moving because he wanted to go somewhere. He kept moving because he didn't want to be anywhere.

The pieces Bragi worked on contained some of the best prose he had ever written. And in the past three months since he had started traveling, he had written mountains of it. All jam packed with sentiment, beauty, and characters who always died at the very end, because Bragi couldn't think of anything else better to do with them. Occasionally in the evenings, he read a loud. The people who didn't know him, but who called him father when he wasn't there, clapped. They complimented. They asked for help with their own prose. Bragi didn't hear any of it, but he did help.

Together they were starting a movement. They were putting expression into their work so that it didn't have to exist in the regular world. People felt when Bragi read. They didn't have to feel anything when he didn't, because it was all in the paper. They used to play songs in the evenings too, but that had stopped. Their instruments gathered dust. They'd all lost interest in music for some reason. This was good. ( It gave them more time for other things. )

The axe sliced through the air where Bragi's head was a split second ago. Idun's brother nearly toppled from the momentum, but caught himself in the last second. He grinned, but Bragi didn't see it. Bragi wasn't looking at his face. He couldn't afford to blink or focus on any one thing for more than a fraction of a second. He saw the arms swinging the axe. Left. Go the other way. The advancing legs. Right. Go the other way. Tavern wall. His shoes. Alley. Dirt. Faces. Shoulder. Arm. Axe. Sidestep. Axe. Duck. Axe. Move. Fist. Run. Duck. Don't crash.

How many minutes Bragi could keep dodging exactly matched how many minutes he had left to live. Bragi intended to live for as long as possible. Optimistically, he had maybe five minutes left.

The axe came from the left. He didn't see it that time, but he heard it and sidestepped out of the way right on time. Almost. A searing pain shot up Bragi's arm where the axe grazed. Blood soaked into his sleeve then dripped on the ground. Bragi didn't have time to wince, or cry out. He kept moving. His arm was on fire. His muscles grew wearier. Idun's brother grew angrier.

( Maybe he'd been too optimistic. )

(Note: After Bragi and Idun are married, but shortly before Sigyn and Loki wed.)




Again?

Again.

He was gone again.

It was enough to make Sigyn want to stomp her foot like a child, but she wasn't a child. And she didn't generally give into petulance like that. But she'd gone to the trouble of making oatcakes with cloudberries in them, because he said he loved cloudberries. So she'd tromped out to a bog, getting her dress wet, not to mention her feet, and picked the stupid things; then she'd come home to mix up the batter and fry the cakes on the griddle, which at least warmed her toes up after the cold marsh waters, and for what? ( He hadn't shown up. )

There was a good amount of pondering for a goddess to do after unexpectedly finding herself trapped in a net suspended precariously from a tree branch. This was surprising to Idun when she found herself in just such a situation. Her thoughts refused to stop at Now what? On the contrary, she had thoughts stumbling over one another in a frenzied attempt to grab her attention first. Perhaps it was because Idun had never given nets much thought, but now that she was trapped in one, she realized it would've been nice to be prepared for something like this. ( Having an 'In Case of Imprisonment in Tree Net' emergency plan probably would've made her feel better. )

As far as Idun was concerned, there was absolutely no reason to count the days since she unexpectedly ran across a relative stranger of a god on an unfamiliar road while she happened to be very lost. There was no reason to count the days, because there was no pressing need to keep tally of the time passing. Why track something that had no true relevance, no striking, groundbreaking purpose in her day-to-day life? She was existing as she always had, nothing changed, nothing altered, absolutely nothing different whatsoever. Why would anything be different, anyway? It wasn't like he'd rocked the very foundation of her existence. Bragi was just a god on a road. What did it matter if exactly fourteen days had passed by? What were fourteen days in the stretching expanse of time?

Nothing. That's what. A tingling sliver of a fraction of a sneeze blown from the nose of eternity. That's what.

Except, to some extent, in some small way, fourteen days had been excruciating. ( And it was all because of that kiss. )

It was here. At the edge of the water his mother had jumped from his arms and onto his father's boat.. into the fire. Into the fire and died there. Sobbing for Baldr. He had watched all of it. Watched his mother burn away, watched the ship cross the water in flames. He had stood there, held back by his family. All of them had wept. He had wept. His eyes were already wet now. Staring into the water. Could he have done something differently? Could he have stopped all of it from happening? The questions wouldn't answer themselves, and no one else could answer them for him.

Forseti had spent so much time with his other family members lately he almost felt like he was going to be sick from seeing tears in their eyes. From seeing the sadness that would not leave them, and the anger behind that. He wasn't sure he even felt angry anymore. He had felt angry, and betrayed. But the more he heard about it the more he wished he'd seen his uncle and spoke to him first. No one could give him an answer he wanted. That he needed. Who was to blame for this grave injustice?

( Maybe if he had an answer he'd be able to rest. )

Well. There really was no hiding it. Idun was lost. She was horribly, delightfully lost, and she was enjoying every moment of it. While she knew the forests, the fields and roads were a different story entirely. Her goal wasn't to learn them, either. She liked that she was lost. It brought on a rather charming sense of aimlessness. She could follow her feet in any direction and still be lost. Walk closer to the treeline and still be lost. Flop onto her back in a meadow, stare at the beautiful sky, and still be lost.

Much of her morning had been spent just like that, in a meadow, staring at the sky, lost. She had never done a bit of cloud-gazing while lost before. It added a shocking variety of options to each cloud shape, oddly enough. Idun could be as dramatic as she pleased. Oh, that one's the tree I'll never climb again, because I'm lost and Look, my brother, who I'll never see again, because I'm lost! If anybody happened to wander by, she would've left the impression of deep-seeded insanity, of course. A goddess in a flowing white dress, covered in grass stains and stray leaves, laughing alone in the middle of a meadow. She might've been lost, but she looked like the soundness of her mind was the only thing missing. But Idun was lost. ( There was nobody around to call her crazy and ruin her good time. )

Idun was no stranger to the trees of Asgard. She once decided to count every single one of them, for no real reason beyond a simple whim and an amused sort of curiosity. The task grew tiresome rather quickly, and Idun shouted 'Oh no, I've lost count!' as though the trees needed to hear this before she was officially allowed to abandon the whole ridiculous endeavor, but she truly did try. Her time was simply better spent learning the trees anyway. Each one had its own story, from the roots to the bark to the highest branches, and Idun wanted to know as much of each story as possible. ( The purest sense of calm always washed over her at the top of a very old tree. )