WHAT: Freyr has a good morning, until he doesn't WHERE: Vallo Forest WHEN: 2033, the first few days the past Outlanders arrived WARNINGS: Wanda's mind manipulations, horror themes/slightly gory STATUS: Complete
“Toast with cream cheese and jam is an underrated combination,” said Wanda, slathering up a piece of toast with just that – plain cream cheese, strawberry jelly. Morning light was coming through the cottage windows, a bit diluted from all the surrounding tree coverage but the ambiance was nice. It was as if her home had a dim glow from the inside.
Today she’d made coffee instead of tea, and it smelled wonderful. Everything felt warm, untouched by dread or destruction. Freyr must have spent the night with her – you know, friends giving each other a hand in a way that didn’t involve clothes – because he was here with her, and she was plating some of that toast for him.
Pantsless but in a t-shirt, she smiled at him warmly. Her hair was mussed up from sleep. Birds chirped outside. The plants she kept indoors were flourishing. Freyr helped with that sometimes, when the leaves were looking dull and needed a pick-me-up.
“What do you think is going to happen today?”
Wanda took a bite of her toast, the crumbs falling onto the counter. She was still smiling at him. Content, and carefree, and relaxed – because everything was fine.
Freyr was a natural at taking it easy. Sure, on one hand, he was the God of bounty, harvest, peace, and pleasure, and on the other hand, he was lazy and good-natured. Times could be hard. Not specific times, of course. General times, that felt very distant and removed from anything that possibly mattered right now, with a smart, fierce woman in bed next to him and some toast to enjoy. Better to enjoy rest while you had it, for it could end at any time, right?
He took a sip of coffee, making a face because he never expected the rich smell to taste like that, and added six sugarcubes to it. There. Maybe it was vanquished, now, and he could give Wanda’s question the consideration it deserved.
“Let’s see,” Freyr said, and accepted his plate of toast. “I think we eat. I think we lay around a little while longer. Maybe a long while longer,” he added with a smirk, gaze sliding down her bare legs before returning to her face. “I think one of your kids makes a big ol’ production about the door being closed, definitely hams it up for the audience in the back.” He grinned. “I think we emerge. I think we argue about dinner, whether we order in, or we order out. I think we settle on some place with a good view of the sunset. But before all that… I think I help you get that jelly off your face.”
He leaned in. The strawberry jelly was thick and red, smeared on the corner of her mouth like a wound, and Freyr thought fleetingly of kissing it off, but something, somewhere inside of him - some strange impulse - said not to. It looked so like blood. He dabbed at it with his finger instead.
His finger came back clean. Her face was smiling, unblemished. Something bothered him that he could not figure: “What time is it, even?” This was breakfast, right?
Wanda’s expression didn’t waver. That smile seemed permanent, etched to her face like a scar. The birds kept chirping outdoors. The coffee machine kept brewing, and brewing - an endless pour that never spilled over. That couldn’t be too unusual, with what the Scarlet Witch was capable of. Her cottage had always been steeped with magic, whimsical and primal, shifting to her desires.
“Mmm, it’s early,” she hummed softly, abandoning her toast to slip behind him. Her hands went to his shoulders but her touch didn’t have heat to it, and the black polish of her nails seemed to have stained her fingertips. Wanda squeezed him gently, though; rubbing and massaging the muscles there, like how a lover might do.
Like how she’d done several times for him in the past.
Calm, blissful mornings.
She pressed her lips to his ear. “Do you know what I think?” Her voice was hushed and sultry. “I think that you want to stay here with me.” The plate of toast began to glitch, as if this were some simulation they were stuck in. It was a brief malfunction before turning back to normal. “I think you don’t want to leave me. I think – you like it here with me.”
The birds stopped singing.
It was instinct to lean back against her touch, to turn his head toward her, even as disquiet rippled down his spine. Wanda was right, after all; of course he wanted to stay with her. She smelled like she always had to him - sweet apple, sun-goldened grain, the electric flick of strong power. Everything was in its right place, arranged on an artful stage just how it should be. Her fingers, though cold, felt good, drawn as they were to the knots in his shoulders as if she’d been the one to put them there.
What a silly thought. Freyr felt a little like he’d fallen down a well and hadn’t stopped falling, as if the abyss he’d been stupid enough to trip into had no need for such petty concerns as unforgiving ground to splatter against.
“Early?” he repeated. “Feels too late.”
Late, he’d meant. Just late. Too late? Slip of the tongue. But the sun that streamed through the windows had a pale morning quality to it, the sort of foggy subterfuge you’d find in an impressionist painting. “Let’s get up, ask the kids about—“
About what?
“Let’s— have you seen Kratos?” Random. But - it felt like it’s been forever. Which was silly. Kratos was fine. Everything was lovely.
Freyr was still falling. It was nearly (too) late. The morning air twinkled against clean windowpanes. Wanda smelled of burrs and smoke and vegetal rot, the sort that grew on damp, abandoned wood. The scent filled his nose.
The indoor plants began to sag, so sad, the leaves wilting and withering. The coffee started a new brew cycle – when would it stop, when would it spill, why was the pour of it getting so loud? A waterfall, perhaps. “Kratos isn’t here,” she sighed contently. Wanda remained close, molding herself to Freyr’s back, and she breathed him in. Her lips ghosted over his cheek as her hands kept going, kept working.
Merely moments ago, her skin was flushed and glowing and now–
Her face was the color of ash, veins like a black spiderwebs. Paint began to peel off the walls. Beneath the shade of forest green that was her kitchen, there was darkness. “Freya isn’t here,” she went on, speaking to him gently, affectionately. One of her hands stopped to cradle his face, and she looked into his eyes with her pitch black ones. “But maybe they should be. Maybe you’ll fail them. Maybe they will be like me.”
Wanda traced his cheekbone with her thumb, like she was moments away from worshipping every point and edge of his face with touch alone. “Maybe I will kill them, and I will make you watch.”
Shadows writhed against the cottage from no discernible source of light. The coffee cup had vanished from Freyr’s hands and yet he still felt the heat of it against his fingertips. His heart had begun to thud with renewed force. Freya-- the threat against her would always wake him up like a beer flung against his face. Not Freya. And Wanda didn’t look like that, Wanda was wry and steadfast and warm like the late afternoon. She--
His shoulder jerked away from her touch and in fluid gesture Freyr drew Ingrid from the holster at his hip and held the sword up, ready to strike. He saw Wanda now for what she was: a thrall. A shell of a woman now filled with poison. There was no cottage, no cheery little pots of plants, no family pictures looking down on them. There were only illusions, fetid and vicious, and Wanda smiling at him like a mortician had sewn her lips into position.
“All right Wanda, cut the crap,” Freyr said, and he sounded bold. He sounded like he’d go on fighting forever. But… Ingrid ‘s blade trembled. It wasn’t because she was still alive, for magic failing years ago had taken her consciousness with it, but because Freyr’s hands trembled, and he couldn’t keep them steady. This had been close; this had been too damn close…
Down, down, down came the illusion. It began to be eaten away by flashes of sinister magic – goodbye to the furniture that had always been well-loved, the trinkets, the thrifted teacups, the flowers she had preserved over the years from all the times Billy and Tommy had gifted them to her. It ate away what she wore too, replacing it with garbs that were leather and worn and scarlet.
They were in the forest, and there was rot beneath her feet, the corrupted energy bleeding through touch. Wanda looked tired, but also wild. Unhinged. With a subtle, almost cute tilt of her head, she kept smiling at Freyr.
Oh, but wait. Look at the corpses, the scattered limbs, the heads of those he knew. Carnage was a perfected art when it came to Wanda, and the earth around them was bathed in it. “Maybe they’re already dead,” came her voice, a haunting breath that didn’t come from her lips but from her mind to Freyr’s.
From one false reality to another, he could just stay here and keep falling through them – with her.
On the whole, it was kind of cool being a god. Freyr wasn’t indestructible, but he was difficult to kill. And sure, right, whatever, he was already dead - he’d died back home to Ragnarok. But the point was, being a god was pretty great, if you didn’t take into account the fact that he had great peripheral vision. Freyr was trying so damn hard not to look at the corpses Wanda was weaving around them - at his sister’s face, white and still. At Atreus, crumpled like a dirty shirt on the ground. They were illusions. Freyr knew this. But they were his weak spot, the thing he’d literally died to save, and for one shivering moment, he-- almost---
“Better dead than whatever you are,” he spat, and the shocking thing was that his voice wasn’t cruel. It was sad. It was the truth, wasn’t it? Wanda - the one he knew, the one he’d loved, she’d already come back from some much. Clawed herself out of some real dark shitholes. Would she be able to come back from this?
Would any of them.
Freyr backed up, kept backing up, looking at her. Not on the illusions. That was how you got out of this - never move your eyes off of her. “Wanda. It’s been real.” That’s what kids said these days right? “Don’t you miss me too much.”
“Don’t leave me,” she said, lips unmoving again – and the words would imply that she was begging him, desperate to not be left alone like this. Instead, it was a mockery. It was cruel and twisted, her smile opening to reveal teeth. The earth continued to rot beneath her weight as she took a step forward, her movements jerky like a marionette on strings (which she was), but that step also triggered something else.
A light show of blue and white erupted from the ground, ropes of it weaving an intricate encasement that had her stunned. The illusions were dispersed, and the bloodbath that was never really there was washed away.
Billy was here.
Wanda’s focus was now officially elsewhere.
Freyr lacked the kind of pride that wanted him to stand his ground, never give up, etc etc. He’d spent years in guerilla warfare with Odin’s forces; you didn’t survive that without knowing how to git when the gitting’s good. He took off, knowing that Billy was stupidly powerful and capable, not even bothering with another pithy one-liner. Sometimes you just had to vamoose and think up something clever to say after the fact.
But gods, the mere thought of Wanda being like this hurt like a goddamn toothache.