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“Are your eyes closed?”
Bjorn huffed, a soft noise exhaled from his mouth in the tune of a breathless laugh. He tipped his head down lower to show the wrinkles around his squeezed-shut eyes, his lashes thick and dark as a raven’s folded wing.
“Yeah, see?”
Askeladd rolled his eyes even though Bjorn couldn’t see them, nor the grin that was slowly insisting at the corners of his lips. He clicked his tongue.
“Good, now put your hands over your ears,” he commanded playfully, jabbing at Bjorn’s ribs with his fingers.
Bjorn sighed, as if to ask the gods why they tested him so.
“How am I going to know where to go?” he asked, his large hands hovering over his ears but not yet clamped over them.
“Silly man,” Askeladd chided, leaning in to loop his arm around his waist, pulling him closer to his side and trying to avoid his raised elbow.
“Like this, now—”
Bjorn clapped his hands over his ears with an audible pettiness that, once again, had Askeladd rolling his eyes.
“Better not lead me over a cliff,” Bjorn mumbled, though his words were stitched through with a smile and he leaned against Askeladd in an eager crutch.
“Would I ever?”
“Hmmm?”
He couldn’t help but laugh as he started leading Bjorn from the back door of their modest cottage and along the footpath towards the open grazing fields, a light sound that chimed lowly though the both of their bodies, a resonance that made the warmth between them grow like a hungry shoot. After looking up to make sure that Bjorn still had his hands over his ears, he turned him in the right direction off to the sidepath leading around the parameter, pausing only to shut the gate.
Late spring, the sun shone down on them like liquid gold, just as warm as a few paces from a bonfire, drying up the most recent puddles of rain that made the path shimmer with green reflections. The trees, tossing their new crowns, the clusters of wildflowers pushing up from the clutter of leaf-litter from the previous years, the grass long and sweetening the air. Even without sight, one could feel the vivacity in the sun-glowing breeze, the fragrant floral smell, the chatter of a warbler and the trill of a tern soaring inland from the sea.
Askeladd picked out the path carefully, taking his time so their shoes didn’t get caked with mud, kicking aside the branches that had dropped in the winter months. He guided Bjorn to the far edge of the field, where the wildflowers grew clustered under the canopy of a small grove of apple trees, still leaden with delicate white flowers which dropped around them like large flakes of snow.
Using his good arm, he stopped Bjorn from continuing with a press of his hand to his chest, making him turn with a small gesture, pleased to see the crease of his closed eyes and the ease with which he allowed himself to be led. Nothing about this trust surprised Askeladd, of course, but it lit a fire under his heart until it was tender, hungry for the other man and all his silent devotions.
He stood in the sun for a moment, looking out over the fields and the clouds of sheep grazing, the sounds of their contentment carried in the wind. Almost impossible not to feel as close to Avalon as ever, even if it made him ache in a way a scar sometimes ached when it healed wrong, pinching the skin.
(But still: healed. )
Breaking from his musings, Askeladd tipped his head up at Bjorn, face breaking into an unrestrained smile like a beam of sunlight pushing open the sky to gaze at the green earth. It felt… good. Odd. The muscles on his face were unused to such a smile, not his smirks but something kinder that he had never indulged in the past.
Pulling from Bjorn’s waist he reached up to pull at one of his arms with his hand, curling his fingers around the pulse in his wrists.
“Don’t open your eyes yet,” he murmured.
“Yes, Captain!” Bjorn whispered loudly back, again squeezing his eyes shut in an exaggerated way, a crow's foot of crinkles.
Askeladd swatted at him for the old title, though now it was stripped of all burdensome responsibility and remained bare, a statement of allegiance and reverence only. But Bjorn had already forgotten, his head tilting like Garmr’s sometimes did at a word he didn’t know. The sounds that were too low and soft for him to hear from under his hands were now striking for their conspicuousness.
Humming, the busywork of insects flitting from flower to flower, the birds nearby in the trees and the faint baa of sheep. But a buzzing, loud and unmistakable over the breeze twirling its fingers in the grass, twisting garlands of petals for a moment in the air before dropping them. Bjorn’s brow creased under his shaggy fringe, wondering…
Askeladd couldn’t help but smile, the anticipation low and light at the same time, like wisps of dandelion fluff skirting the meadow. Shifting slightly on his own feet, shoving down the dim murk of doubt:
“Alright, you can open them up.”
Brown eyes, deep and variegated as the dusk, blink away the sparkles of sunlight caught in the corners of his eyes like sleep. The moment passes, and his eyes clear, and Askeladd watches with a mounting tide of... something! he couldn’t describe, as he looked over his gift.
Several large skeps have been set up on this end of their field, each sitting secure on its own wooden box to keep it off of the damp grass and in the sunlight where the wicker warmed the hives. Already after having been disturbed in their transfer to the new field, the bees passed in and out in lazy flight, as if they’d accepted their new home or were eager for the nectar after such a trip.
Bjorn remained silent. His hand clasped over his mouth as he looked over the gifts, the equipment placed on a nearby stump, a smoker and a long cloth robe to protect from stings. He circled a hive slowly from a cautious distance, the wildflowers brushing against his calves transferring the morning dew, the gold grains of their pollen sticking in the pearls of water.
Askeladd shifted again on his feet in the quiet buzzing, the buzzing he felt in his own body like a ripple of uncertainty. Bjorn’s face remained intense; brows still creased and mouth pursed, his eyes catching like amber in the light. The quiet sent him down the winding, beckoning path of overthinking, one he got lost in despite its well-worn familiarity.
(What if he made the wrong choice? What if he remembered Bjorn's interest wrong? He should’ve checked before getting something so expensive, something that would require more work! Maybe Bjorn would be upset he’d sold his last piece of jewelry from their old life, maybe he was trying to think of what to say—)
Bjorn turned, and before Askeladd could resurface from the wooded tangle of his thoughts, two big strides had him back in front of him, nearly picking him up clear off his feet with the effortless strength of his embrace, his shoulders hunching to stoop down and pull him closer to his chest. Askeladd had only enough time to let out a surprised gasp, eyes wide and all thoughts halted to a hush of quiet. A moment of being absorbed into what could only be called a bear hug, and Askeladd let out a strangled breath, squirming in his grasp.
“I love them,” Bjorn said, placing him down in front of him but not letting fully go.
His neck was craned to look directly in his eyes, chasing the blue in them like Sköll chasing the sun, intensely fervent. His eyes were like honey in the light, did he know that? How the light turned them to liquid gold?
Askeladd rubbed the back of his head sheepishly, running his fingers through his short hair.
“Well, I remember you mentioned being curious about beekeeping but couldn’t really learn because we were always gone in the warm months…”
Bjorn looked down at him with wonder, a softness that absorbed all with its transcendence, as if it shone from his face and touched all it could glance with a weightless hand. Something in that expression— the crinkles around his eyes, the way his hair framed his face in messy locks, his full lips pulled into a gentle curve— it made Askeladd's heart swell in his chest as if his ribs were now too small to contain it, all that he felt in the moment.
“That was so long ago…” Bjorn whispered.
Askeladd slipped from the enchantment of that look and back to the beehives busy with small yellow bodies, the flowers visited with a kiss of soap-bubble wings and eyelash-feet. Heat flushed his pale cheeks, and he cleared his throat and shrugged.
“I remembered.”
Bjorn’s smile grew into a blossoming thing, a missing lower tooth from a battle long ago more charming than anything else, his eyes holding that same indescribable emotion that Askeladd hadn’t seen on any other face, caught somewhere between awe and longing and tenderness. He pulled him close once more, drawing him up to his lips.
“Love you,” he pressed there, right where he kissed all his affection as if to punctuate it, to seal it to his lips like wax.
Now Askeladd’s cheeks burned furiously, the sun not enough of an excuse.
“So you like it?” he asked, trying to will away the blush while not squirming under the intensity of Bjorn’s gaze.
Bjorn laughed, a deep reverberation that Askeladd felt all around him like the bees, a rumble that held him in its humming tune— the arms snug around his body to their chests pressed close, to the lips that traced a circlet around his forehead, small pecks to his temples. The only crown he needed.
“Silly man,” Bjorn breathed, having him in another hug, his voice light with ' of course! ' and yet thick with the honey-sweet of his happiness. “I love it.”
And Askeladd didn’t know how to respond, so he just let out a pleased huff and let himself be manhandled into a long embrace, the sun warming his back and Bjorn warming him everywhere else. Leaning in, the sound of the bees and the breeze in the spring grass and wildflowers, the sheep baaing a sound Askeladd thought, must be in Avalon.
***