Re: Camp: Lagertha/Ragnar
There had been nights, years in the past, where the two of them could spend hours in each other's company and not say a word. Days where snow or rain trapped them inside, and even with their children under the same roof, they had gone quiet, moving in each other's spaces the way stars moved around each other. It had been comfortable when the sun was up and passionate when the sun was down, and it had been them. They'd lost that after they'd moved to Kattegat, after her miscarriage, but here it was again. Sneaking up on her in a way that held more stealth than any raiding party could ever hope to. There was a silence between their words, but (though the circumstances were unsettling in the most extreme way) it was once again comfortable.
Once, Lagertha had thought herself too injured by this man to ever forgive his actions. She had carried that humiliation with her all the way overland until she'd found her new husband, a man that would take both her and her son. It had become a hard layer of ice within her, but that ice was only a masking layer over the part of her that still held warmth. Warmth for anything, but mostly for Ragnar. Being with him again, traveling with him, tossed around by circumstances that forever grew stranger, it all served to drill through that ice. She could state that she was a good and loyal wife to her new husband, to Sigvard, but she had never held the same sort of warmth for him. And it didn't stop those long-hidden feelings for Ragnar from beginning to seep out again, like sweet, clear water from a deep-dug well.
The press to her hair was familiar, as was the inhaled breath that followed and the heat that caught in braids and seeped through to her skull. Her eyes remained shut, but she could not deny that she leaned more against his side, shivered into the curve of his arm where it wrapped around her back. What might happen if she chose to finally believe him - that things were different here, that the gods had seen fit to realign them in this strange way after being set apart for so long, that he had no other wife and no other children. Hadn't she sometimes wished for such a thing, in the very darkest hours of her nights, the drunken snores of Sigvard beside her? She was a strong woman, a shieldmaiden. She did not need to place herself at a man's side if she did not wish (not now that her son was grown and gone), could likely rule and fight better than many of them. But wanting to stand side-by-side with someone (with him) was a different tale.
And it could happen. She knew it could, and her body tensed with the renewed knowledge of it. She could turn to him, lift her face to him, and erase the years that had passed, erase the strangeness that had plagued her since she'd set out on the road and lost her fighters and her son. Their son. She would only need to lift her head, look up at him...
She stayed still and sighed again. But she was not so hardened that she couldn't give just a bit. Her mouth curved in the smallest smile as she opened her eyes again to watch the nearly-dead glow of the fire, still in the shelter of his arm. "And if tomorrow the gods decided I should become Rollo? Or even Torstein. Would you still think I was myself if my form was theirs?"