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“I can’t do anything. I don’t even know what I should be doing. I’m empty.”
“You can start learning things one at a time. If you’re empty, then you can fit anything inside you. In fact, it’s better to be empty if you want to be reborn.”
***
Some nights Askeladd can almost forget the make-believe of his life, the feeling of disintegration nearly tangible in a transitory way, like the fluid solidity of sand. Most days it’s enough that he holds himself together. Most nights it’s enough that he falls apart.
Bjorn’s hands along the inside of his thighs, kindling warmth in the wake of lingering fingertips, holding him up to his lips like a bowl from which he sipped. Awareness in only the way his short nails pressed into his skin to leave an imprint in memory of many cycles of moons, time waxing with the heat of his mouth’s mouthed poetry. Askleladd doesn’t even have the wherewithal to hope that there will be bite-sized bruises in the morning tangled within the constellations that measure out the spacing of Bjorn’s splayed hands.
Askeladd just reassures himself: that he wasn’t giving up so much as giving in. Because he wanted Bjorn inset, pressing against him like he’d burrow deeper if he could, like he’d dredge out of him that lonely throbbing ache and make it bright and hot as a star, delicious as a droplet of fermenting honey. Reverent, almost, the way Bjorn’s mouth worked colour into his pale flesh, the way he traced the conspicuous strain of his cock with adoring tongue. Hungry like Christians were for the voice of God, for that gaping absence within to be filled with more than just shallow heat and the ghosts of touches overlapping with the sting of now .
If you wanted to surrender with all of your Being, was it truly a surrender? Or was it a gift, bittersweet but welcome?
Molten. Crude iron glowing red-hot and heavy, sinking down, down, down as if it would fall from Askeladd and into the crucible of Bjorn’s mouth. His large hands, calluses catching on the raised lines of scars, push Askeladd’s legs up so they can fall again propped onto a folded wool blanket, so more of him can be revealed. It’s both immediate and agonizing how long it takes for the feeling of Bjorn to return, plaited beard dragging along the valley between his flexed thighs, teasingly coarse, his lips startlingly soft, his tongue’s wet wavelets bold over the secret of him.
Askeladd moans, the sound of himself hazy and distant as his awareness condenses, potent, Bjorn’s tongue coaxing him open with insistent lapping, nose pressed against the tender spot behind his stones. From this angle, Askeladd can see only his unkempt mane of dark hair dipping low from behind the pulsing brand of his own cock, pink and leaking. His hand trembles to bury itself to Bjorn’s scalp, but the motion collapses under the force of a shudder that sparks up from the languid roll of Bjorn’s tongue over raw, hidden nerves. Another drawn-out moan. Low, curling like a ribbon, his hips pressing closer of their own accord, wanting all he could take of Bjorn’s mouthful.
All tension burns away like smoke. Askeladd is only tangentially aware that all thoughts fail fruition, that his usual vigilance had been worn smooth like a riverstone. Slowly his limbs, pleasantly heavy, work only to bring him closer to Bjorn, to surrender to that well of trust deeper than even the roots of Yggdrasil— after all they’d been through, he’d pour himself out if only the other man asked, show him how profound the echoing emptiness inside of him really was.
He’s unraveling, a knit pulled apart by a single thread back into a skein. He tangled his fingers in Bjorn’s hair and leaned into abandon, moans devolved into pants of
Ahmm, ahhh, mmmn
and languished pleas of Bjorn in gasps of rolling r’s and dropped b’s: —jorn! that sounds more like
yours! over and over again.
But Askeladd pulls up on his fistfull of hair, demanding in a greedy animal way, drawing an impossibly low groan from the other man as he removed his mouth to replace with fingers; soreness and satisfaction indistinguishable. Bjorn presses a single digit within, crooking it, rubbing tight little circles as if searching for the source of his yearning to draw it forth onto his palm, a beating organ, slick-skinned and red. Working Askeladd open as if he was sent to do so by the gods, two thick fingers and another bruise livid and wanting sucked into his thigh.
Bjorn murmurs something there breathily that Askeladd can’t make out beyond the rush of his own blood in his ears, but when he looks down at him through the thatch of his own eyelashes he meets dark eyes so soft, so warm that it melts right through him to the very cavity of his chest, nestling there such adoration that it became like a second heart. Askeladd knew Bjorn was memorizing every detail of their joining as if he would perish from it; how tenderly he stripped himself of all barriers, and what to do with such a brazen intensity but meet it with equal challenge?
How Bjorn’s flushed cheeks still burned in the dim hazy light, his strong jaw’s shadow falling over the motion of his neck straining around a moan, the severe line of his nose healed crooked, the light picking out only vague dapples of freckles across his cheeks. His long eyelashes were a fan of raven’s wings through which dark eyes glittered like a shaded pool, deep and still save for a few ripples. Submerged, like falling into the sea at night. Full and swollen lips, his tongue flicking out to lick along the tight throb of Askeladd’s cock in front of him.
Fingers thrusting into him— another— such patience in a long stretch of implacable time. A mounting wave, the irrepressible, desperate need to have Bjorn fully and to the root, Askeladd’s hips rocking to meet his crossed fingers halfway. By the gods he wanted this man more than he’d wanted anything in his life, he swore it; it was one reason he’d resisted for so long, knowing such madness would consume him utterly. He was lost, left stoked like a low-burning campfire, half-deaf and blind from the feeling of him. Addicted.
Askeladd had resisted this helplessness as long as he could, but what he hadn’t expected was the overwhelming, vanquishing abandonment, the absolute…
R e l i e f.
Large hands, he wanted Bjorn’s hands to touch him, all of him, at once and all over. Wanted his mouth to devour him whole, wanted to slip snugly inside of the other man to hide from the world in the hot dark chambers of his beating heart. There, the secret and shameful torture of Askeladd’s starved yearning for love wouldn’t be seen or abused, just held close and saturated with Bjorn’s lifeblood, shielded by the strongest part of the strongest man he’d ever known.
The absurdity of it couldn’t touch Askeladd in this moment— just the intensity. Like battlefury but softer in its violence. Like lust but needing infinity to be quenched. Like an infection that one could never cure. He threw himself onto the sword of this devotion, right up to the crossguard, pressing against it as if to sink down to the pommel.
He only wondered, dimly, why he’d ever held back. Couldn’t even fathom it now.
Bjorn’s tongue along the underside of his cock, suckling the head into the girdle of his mouth to sip the wet from where it pearled. One of his hands caressed the raised circle of an arrow-scar on Askeladd’s thigh before he popped off, moaning at the taste of him slick-salt and masculine over his tongue, a sound so unashamed of its small weaknesses that it sent back Askeladd’s internal wanderings like an echo:
How long had he spent struggling when he could’ve just turned to drift on his back and let the waves carry him in? To the far shores of Avalon…
Cold assaults him when Bjorn pulls away, Askeladd’s whine trailing into a pleased moan when the other man settles over top him, eclipsing him with broad shoulders and the thick bulk of muscle; impossible not to imagine Bjorn pressing him into the mattress until the world couldn’t see him anymore, until he was surrounded as intimately as a cast in a mold. And how at odds with the desire to split himself open, to tear himself in two to receive him! Curl up or fall apart? Askeladd remained malleable, fully surrendered to whatever Bjorn wished of him.
A nose nuzzled his neck, hands steadying him, mouth now where his heart was stuck fluttering in his throat, nips and bites. Bjorn murmured something against him again, but Askeladd was too far gone, too inarticulate to think. He just pressed his hips against the stiff line of Bjorn’s cock, against the muscle-and-fat of his solid stomach, rolled over it. His hand disentangled from the thick knot he’d held against Bjorn’s scalp to squeeze the flex of his chest where the hair there was surprisingly soft, a dark path leading to the jut of his cock, swollen scarlet, weeping from want. If Askeladd didn’t have him soon he would burst apart at the ragged seams.
Bjorn’s arms cradle either side of his head and his hips shift, lining up to press into him; Askeladd is so loose and at ease that he fills him like they were created to fit together, both of their bodies slick, smooth— a stamp in wax, feverishly warm, the entirety of their sensation drawn into the motion of their joining so that all else fell away, dimming and humming into irrelevance.
Askeladd’s nails scratch runes of blood up from Bjorn’s back to his mussed hair where his fingers interlace once more, grasping blindly into the soft strands to keep him close, Bjorn’s face tipping up to kiss him, sealed sloppy lips, panting and breathing each other’s air. Suffocating. Inebriated. Their hips flush, just staying like that— tension, anticipation. The world suffused with warmth and light like a good, clear metheglin: honey and alcohol and spice in a thick syrup.
Their hips grind and rut more than snap, sounds of skin rubbing on skin, close heat and fullness, the angle of Bjorn inside of him making sparks flick from the corner of his vision and morph into dancing sprites even if they’ve barely separated. Time is only a vague concept or is reborn into measurements of motion; languor and ebb, rise and fall, grasp and ripple. A candle melting down to a puddle of heat and ash but as eternal as the motion of the tides, as the revolution of the stars. As the moon, full to null.
Bjorn thumbs the hard peaks of Askeladd’s nipples, the sweat on his temples making his hair stick to the shine in damp strands, eyes heavy-lidded as if struggling to keep witness to the way he wrung Askeladd of all pleasure. Rocking into him, the sounds from parted lips low and taut as a plucked string, body arched and strained, undoing, merging, Bjorn’s heart too loud, so loud Askeladd could no longer ignore it, suffocating, can’t breathe, thick air, loud gasp, struggle, scrabbling hands, too much,somuchcan’t—
Almost violence, the white-hot bolt of his orgasm, brilliant behind Askeladd’s eyes, wrecking through him like a rippling heat strong enough to melt and reforge him, a shuddering of the soul’s acceptance, snowmelt flowing down from the jagged peaks on high to the loamy plains and subterranean secrets— this total nudity, the tender picked-apart meat of him, this echoing ablution of all the years of holding everything too close now crumbling to ash.
(As always: Bjorn taking him as he was and asking for nothing more in return.)
Bjorn around him, cradling him in a safe warmth, nuzzling into his neck and murmuring, lips brushing skin, spilling heat within him, filling that aching emptiness, rasped voice, near-incoherent babbling—
“Gods, I love you! Lucius… love you so much.”
Another bolt, a clammy dissolution, Askeladd moaning for air like the wind was knocked from him, like he had been molten and opaque and now he was cooled into a clear fragility, shattering like quenched glass.
Sickness slicks up the back of Askeladd’s throat, bitter and oily and dry, an overpowering aridity that shocks him with the following torrent of hot liquid nausea, black and thick as tar. This feeling not so much a feeling as all feelings at once : overwhelming love and absolute trust, the face of unflinching devotion and selflessness. Wanton abandon to fate, his long life of waiting resolving into bone-deep pain and a buzzing quagmire of guilt. It all burst, lanced like a festering, stinging blister.
He can’t stomach any more the way Bjorn looks at him, the way he’d taken his vulnerability like raw wool and made something bright and worshipful instead of hanging him with it like he had expected of the world. Surrender, something that Askeladd wanted more than he’d ever wanted anything else— oh, how he craved for someone to take care of him like he’d taken care of his mother and her stories, her love of home. Someone he could follow, someone he could give his life to.
But something in Askeladd’s douse of lucidity tore from the very depths of his soul a mutilated dreg of betrayal.
(Askeladd, eleven, kneeling next to his mother in the mud and cursing his own soul in all the blind rage of a child who’d known hope and comfort only from the fanciful stories of a sick woman— swearing to himself that he’d never let himself be seen as weak, never let himself be vulnerable, never let the world in. His mother weeping silently in shock of Olaf’s raised sword, staring off to a horizon he couldn’t see. Surrender became a foreign word, and he’d never betrayed the knowledge of it.
Until now.)
Something twisted. A knife in Askeladd’s gut, the kind of wound where the blade had to be held in place to keep from bleeding out, to keep from fading out of life. How long had it been there? Askeladd couldn’t recall and yet now he was being pried open, gristle and bone, joints split, the meat of marrow slipping from the hollows.
He scrambled— where it didn't matter, just away . Heavy, shameful gasps like he’d inhaled water, a quiver through his being struggling to contain all the panic saturating him, the heat behind his eyes like a spark of burning nettle. Askeladd couldn’t recall the last time he cried and he wouldn’t start now, biting his tongue to keep himself in check.
Bjorn moved off of him as quick as his bewilderment allowed, his eyes still hazy with his release, his body still uncoiling from the afterglow. But never with any impatience, generous when he shouldn’t be: his worried expression wrinkling his face still so debauched; sickening, what Askeladd had done in such a sacred moment. Bjorn’s lips parted with concern, still swollen and shiny, his flushed cheeks turning pale with the thought of hurting who he’d just professed to love, his brown eyes reaching out as if to enfold him into the dark room of his pupils and soothe away the pain.
“Did I hurt you?” he asked, desperate, the rasp of his voice catching at the end of a tremble, eyes wide.
Bjorn’s hands unconsciously reached out, pulled back by the sight of Askeladd flinching away from something so horrible wrong— that Bjorn could ever hurt him— that it drove an iron spike through the flesh of his guilt.
Yet why? Why this? Why would Bjorn follow him for years and years and years, watch him fray at the edges, watch his pretense slip to the pathetic truth only to risk himself for the scraps of a man he used to follow? Lamed. Penniless. All his grace gone with the revelation of his inherited thralldom. And now he was the Kingkiller, outlawed and hunted, his heart too heavy for his own long-games, his charismatic facade as eroded as the Roman columns and temples he so loved to visit. If there was anything noble in Askeladd to begin with, it had died with his mother, and it would surely be nothing but dust now.
So what? Askeladd had taken everything he could in this life, killed a King and put a contender on the throne, protecting the home his mother longed for. Why not take this like he had taken all else, claiming Bjorn’s affections just like he’d pillaged and raided? Let this fool of a man fawn over him, make love to him, take care of him— they both wanted it.
But. There was a lump in Askeladd’s throat, a growing cancer, a tight bolus of self-hate that insisted just as his lungs insisted, just as his heart— Bjorn deserved better.
He was supposed to be nothing but a heartless brute, dumb and violent, a berserker, and Askeladd had used him accordingly: like a loyal dog that could still turn feral. Something that came with a leash and a muzzle and a few commands. But he’d been quickly proven wrong in those first few raids. Bjorn: quiet, thoughtful, resourceful, perceptive, steadfast. He’d been this one rough-cut jewel amongst the heap of rubbish and he’d never left his side. And how he looked at Askeladd as if he were one of the gods, awe-stricken, hanging on his every word.
How long, Askeladd wondered, would it take Bjorn to become disillusioned with the lies? How long until he looked at him with an overwhelming nausea of disgust, as if he needed to spit when he heard the name Askeladd to rid himself of some foul taste? Nothing but a slave pretending to be worthy of a legend, that’s what he was.
(It was a potential that never materialized but which nevertheless haunted Askeladd’s waking memory with conviction: not a what if, but a when. When would Bjorn finally see— that he was no Artorius.)
“Please, Askeladd,” Bjorn whispered hoarsely, his hand hovering near, hesitant to touch him as if he’d crumble.
“Tell me if I hurt you.”
Brown eyes, deep like the shadows of a forest, dappled with what might be snatches of green turning in a wind. Askeladd knew that look, the look of Bjorn when he thought he’d done something wrong: asked too much, held him too close, admitted too much. Askeladd had played hot-and-cold for two decades now, enough that Bjorn didn’t know that he was no longer playing. Askeladd was just fucking pathetic, unable to stand Bjorn’s almost-touch, his tenderness, his unceasing loyalty.
“Of course you didn’t hurt me,” Askeladd managed to grit, pushing himself up against the bed slightly to hide the quivering of his hand. “I’m not some fragile maiden.”
But his voice is raw like it had been sanded, gravelly syllables tinged with a rash of blood. Completely bared, nothing hid the way his shoulders trembled, the bruise of his tight-laced face trying to keep from weeping even as he attempted to reassert the strength he clearly didn’t have. He’s just an old and tired man now, sick of the world and yet entirely of it, formed by it. His skin cold and clammy and grey, pale lashes hooding his glossy eyes, his mouth a thin-pressed line.
A ripple through Bjorn’s being, a deluge of worry that narrows his eyes with the weight of collected tears and hurt like deepening shadows in the corner of his lips, pulled down. Such a large man overcome by a tremble, and the sight of it makes the sickness threaten Askeladd with the nausea of turned meat or soured wine. Gods, it was easier to kill than this! Then facing his own cowardice and the barefaced reality: that he was worse than those he despised, that he could no longer endure all that he had done, all that time he wasted. It stuck to his throat like a wad of wool. Two decades he’d spent, cursing Bjorn and wishing for something as simple as hate because of his own inability to face it—
Bjorn was the only other aside from his mother that he loved. And he desperately wanted him and wanted to hate him, and punished him for it with his games, a cat batting around a mouse. Bjorn had shown him hope again. For something greater. For a home. For dreams beyond their next target.
“Askeladd. Lucius.”
Bjorn’s voice, deep and resonant and heartfelt. It floats up from the spiraling whirlpool of despair draining into Askeladd’s gut, making him lightheaded with the queasy vomitous motion. Had he been weeping? There was a damp to his own cheeks, a wet-cold that clung to him, flaking brine. But Bjorn’s voice… something soothing in it, something he did to his name— his true name— that solidified. He could grab onto it if he wanted to.
Only Bjorn could put him at ease and on guard at the same time, peeling the layers of him back just like he did when he carved wooden animals from small blocks. Shaving each layer until the form fit in his palm and felt right. Bjorn had told him once, long ago, that he never had a plan while carving, just let the wood curl away on his knife until what had been hidden underneath was revealed for what it always was, hidden in the block.
(He couldn’t understand it, the wooded depths and the lush, verdant groves, the rich wildlife thriving in Bjorn’s eyes. Askeladd prided himself in reading men, but Bjorn was one of the only who had camouflaged the secret depths of his soul with the hearty simplicity of a warrior. Bjorn searched for something beyond violence and sex, death and riches. And he’d found it. And he’d never let go.)
All men were slaves to something; Bjorn was a slave to him. Askeladd had used him, exploited him, and Bjorn let him. And so Askeladd returned to the beginning of the spiral:
Why? Could it all be just for love?
Askeladd hadn’t realized it but he’d been clenching his jaw hard enough that his cheeks ached in the hollows, and his eyes swam with light and rhythmic pulses, a dull and tolling headache. Get a fucking grip. The tears on his skin itched and mocked. He wanted to scrub them off so violently, so permanently that he’d grate off his face.
He wasn’t anything more than ash. Ash! The ash for which he wasn’t named so much as labeled: one who is covered in ashes. Askeladd didn’t deserve anything but to be treated as chattel, used and defiled. Not this honor. He inhaled, sharp and quick, like a startled awakening, scrambling to understand where and when he was, self-conscious suddenly of the ragged and torn edges of his own breathing, the shameful nudity of both body and soul as it rose from the deep and winding paths of slumber.
And Bjorn was still there, watching this unsightly, ugly mess of him. He sat next to him a space apart, the bed dipping down with the welcome weight of him, his body heat gracing Askeladd’s side like sunlight on a clear cool spring. His breathing, deep and even, was slightly exaggerated so that the rhythm was obvious but not intrusive: deep and even, deep and even, deep and even. Askeladd hadn’t even realized he’d been following the motions of it like a longship sailing windward, swift and smooth, nature and craft in sync as one.
He manages to rip his breath leeward. Blood stings Askeladd’s cheeks and ears, an unsightly stain on such pale skin. Humiliation is a beast that stalks him relentlessly, ready to pounce, maim and tear. The anticipation of it was almost sexual, a drop like an anchor chained around his guts.
Bjorn keeps his pace steady.
“You can tell me,” he reassures, gentle and firm, like a healing touch pressed to a sickly forehead.
“I know you’re tired, Lucius. There’s no reason to hide anymore.”
Too much, too much, too muchtoomuchtoomuch.
Askeladd whips around, startling even himself with the vehemence— it’s instinct, an animal protecting itself when it's cornered, his voice a desperation of impending defeat. He was an empty, unmoored vessel in a vast and stormy sea.
“You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Their eyes meet, crossed swords. Parry and a flash and the sound of iron-on-iron. Askeladd is the first to jump back and away, eyes fleeing to stare at the far wall; the eaves of the forest in Bjorn’s eyes too dense, too welcoming, too teaming with life and understanding. Unconditional acceptance of the savage garden of this shitty world. Everyone wanted Heaven, Avalon, Valhalla, but what about the here, what about the now?
Bjorn doesn’t let him crawl back into his shell.
“Then tell me,” he growls.
His square jaw sets into determination, a stubborn bear as fierce in love as in battle. He would no longer sulk like he used to, let Askeladd push him away or joke off. He folded his thick arms over his chest, frowning deep enough for lines to bracket his full lips.
And the truth of it all is: Askeladd no longer had the stomach for falsities. He was shaking from the strain of propping up his act like he used to, his breathing stuttering, his eyes still blurred with the haze of tears. Bjorn knew him well enough now to dismantle him, had seen the soft underbelly and the knife stuck in. He’d always been Askeladd’s better. He wouldn’t twist it.
(Askeladd had spent two long, agonizing years making nice with Olaf, getting close and becoming the perfect deferential son. But Bjorn had spent twenty-one years breaking through to the quick, leaving Askeladd just as raw and defenseless as the worthless scum of his father had been. Now it was his turn to look up, wide-eyed with surprise and gasping
Why? )
Bjorn’s voice dropped, a rushing susurration like a current of water in the velvet-deep of a sea. A watery tremble; his heart always worn on his sleeve.
“You don’t need to be on guard with me, Lucius.”
It’s unmistakable, the soft opening of his words like the tender meat of a mussel embroidered with pearls. Those words were like his arms held wide, wanting to hold Askeladd close but demanding he open back up too. Put your strength down, it commanded . Bjorn would stick him with a thousand stitches of a needle to mend him— of course it was uncomfortable, but it was patient, and kind, and healing.
(Tease him, pester him, frustrate him— but Askeladd had never broken Bjorn’s patience.)
Askeladd choked on the words that wanted to rush out from him like a torrent of sickness. This beautiful man who applied his heart to all things that so-called warriors did in their body only: no shield, just confidence in his own naked resilience. Bjorn had saved him from certain and terrible death in the gaols of Jorvik, and what? Askeladd’s silver tongue-tied. Just tell him.
(I’m not doing alright, Bjorn. I spent my half-life accepting that I was no better than Olaf because of my blood. I didn’t need to. But I wasted it all being no better than the piece of shit who enslaved and raped my mother, sent her off to die like an animal in the filth and cold. My mother must be disgusted with me. My ancestors must curse me. I deserve to die in thrall.)
His hand shook. It had been shaking for a while now, as long as he’d been weeping silently, the tears seeping down over his cheeks. He clenched his hand into a fist but it felt like some part of him had to tremble: his heart gushed and throbbed in his chest, ached against the bars of his ribs. There was a dry, poisonous pith of a rotten fruit stuck in his throat.
Warmth, an intangible blossom . Bjorn is so warm, even without contact. Askeladd wanted to find the strength to enter that warmth and have it enter him again, fill him, to tip his head up and accept Bjorn’s lips like redemption, to prove that he wasn’t fucked up to the core. Even just the thought of it— of Bjorn’s lips against his own, of how gentle his tongue would be along the seam of him, pressing into him to savor his taste— it stirs a longing deeper than the radiation of pain.
Even Askeladd’s cock stirs at the idea of it, arousal in the fleshy horror of his panic coaxing him back into a retch because what the fuck was wrong with him? How wasn’t Bjorn disgusted, watching him pathetically cry with his dick half-hard, unable to hold himself together? His missing right hand, the thick scarring around the stump when he tried to wipe a tear away only to remember that he was utterly broken.
Breathing. Deep and even. Deep and even. Deep and even. Steadfast, eternal. Askeladd couldn’t wait Bjorn out. Did he want to?
No. He needed the other man, needed him fearfully, desperately, feverishly. Needed Bjorn because without him he truly had nothing left but the void of himself. And as if hit with a spear, the impact sending him lurching, Askeladd realized with sudden clarity the gaping, gnawing maw of his soul’s necrosis, what had been his canker all along:
He didn’t know who he was.
When was the last time he was himself? Askeladd didn’t even think his mother could answer that, never seeing the abraded hurt of his childhood— he had to be strong for her, had to do her slave work and his just to earn a meal for them. She didn’t need to see the way the work and degradation ate away at him until there was nothing left. And now, what was left of him after decades of being his father’s son?
(Nameless. As nameless as he was when he was child, covered in shit and ash. As nameless as when he wore the false bravado of his ancestor’s lorica.)
He’d lectured Thorfinn about finding a purpose, and warned him about falling into the same-old trap even as he was still in it. Askeladd had expected nothing less than death when he unsheathed his sword and took the King’s head. Now that he hadn’t died there was only this yawning, gaping, humming purposelessness, personlessness. Did Thorfinn ever give thought to life after revenge? No. But Askeladd hadn’t thought of life after killing King Sweyn. It was his ouroboros of irony: disdain for others when he was just as much a waste of skin.
( Bjorn, there’s nothing left of me. There is no man behind the mask. )
“I don’t—” Askeladd finally choked. The hard-pressed line of his mouth wavered. The words crowded his mouth, jumbling and mixing into a formless sludge of bile. A hot tear pressed into his eye like the point of a knife, dragged a line down his cheek.
“I don’t know how… to say it. Don’t know what… to do.”
All those rushing, spinning, churning, howling thoughts and here he was, showing up empty-handed. Naked, shivering, shameful. He wanted to disappear into his own emptiness. Wanted to stab and kill and maim because it was easier. Wanted to sink into Bjorn’s arms and sob. Wanted Bjorn to fuck him hard and ruthless into the pounded dirt floor. Wanted to be kissed so delicately that it was like a butterfly had landed on his lips, carrying with it the soft inside of a petal. Wanted to dig his nails into the flesh of his own chest and for Bjorn to drink at the blood that oozed from the wounds.
The foul taste in Askeladd’s mouth was overwhelming, parched. His skin crawled with cold sweat. Sickness and relief in his admission overlapped like river-water-meeting-sea, and he pressed his remaining hand to his mouth to keep it closed, to maintain the last scrap of dignity he had left.
But Bjorn just nodded thoughtfully, his eyes like dark amber with their own internal warmth, his long lashes dewed with moisture— had he cried? Had he wept for him?
“Just stay,” he whispered.
So simple the answer. As if he had accepted Askeladd wholly and without judgment.
“Stay until you can find the words. You don’t need to struggle on your own; I’m here.”
It takes a while for Bjorn’s words to penetrate. But they do, suffusing Askeladd’s entire being with something akin to hope, a light and warmth that brought with it Bjorn’s personal smell like a blanket he’d used wrapping around him, his deep voice and soft hair and warm body heat and everything good in this world. Askeladd trusted Bjorn entirely in the chaos of battle, why not this?
Why not Surrender?
(Nothing left to lose but Bjorn. )
Long, cliff’s-edge of quiet. Askeladd’s heart struggling in the confines of his chest like a fox struggling in a trap. Bjorn would be there to free him if he allowed it, would stop the bleeding once the knife was pulled out and fill the empty space, sew him better. How could such large hands be so steady, so gentle, invoke such healing? How could one man contain a startling depth of multitudes and not just superficial facades?
Askeladd nods his head, breath skipping with a sob, tears like silent rain.
Bjorn moved in closer, his arm curving around him tentatively, asking without words for permission.
He nodded again, letting him pull him up and into his lap, his arms, holding him like he so desperately wanted but never wanted to admit to himself, never wanted to allow himself. Askeladd pressed his face into his neck and fell apart in the safety of Bjorn’s arms. Surrendered.
***