Scene: the lifts.

[abyssum_invocat]

So what exactly happens when you combine lots of people with little or no experience with telepathy, a young telepath who is very much still learning the ins and outs of her abilities, confinement to a limited area with few quiet and isolated spots within it, and a tension headache?

You get an eight-year-old with a steadily trickling nosebleed, tucked into the corner of one of the lifts--they totally have corners, it's the junction of wall and floor--with a decidedly miserable look on her face. She may be vehemently hoping no one else uses this one for a while, because she hasn't had any real alone time since she got here.

Realistically, though, just watch out for the child on the floor. Nobody likes getting stepped on.

Comments

[home_fires_burning]

Alas, here comes an end to the alone time, in the form of Sigyn. On the bright side, she's likely a lot less loud than some of the other people they're sharing space with... but still, she is a presence.

And a mother.

She crouches down nearby, doing her best not to invade her personal space--few people enjoy that, especially when strangers are involved.

"Are you all right?" she asks. "Did someone do this to you?"

[abyssum_invocat]

Sinthia's reply is to sniff wetly and lay her head back against the wall, shaking her head slowly.

Headaches for telepaths suck, frankly. "No. Bad day. My head hurts." And the major downside--not the nosebleed--is that she has zero ability to filterthe thoughts she hears.

[home_fires_burning]

Sigyn may not know the particular problem, but she knows a few things that tend to help.

"Come with me," she says, offering a hand. Her tone isn't the oh, poor baby sort, for all that she is sympathetic--it's much more matter-of-fact. Whatever the cause of this situation, it's not being helped by bleeding on the floor of a lift.

"I hope you're not allergic to wool."

[abyssum_invocat]

"I'm not allergic to anything, but I don't want to be around people," she says, reticent to move. "That will make it worse."

She knows this as well as she knows the cause of the headache.

[home_fires_burning]

"Well, you're in luck," she says. "There's no people in our room. Just foxes--and they're probably asleep."

The younger one, anyway.

"I can help you get cleaned up, and put the lights out for you. Dark and quiet. You'll feel better."

[abyssum_invocat]

"How do I know I can trust you?" she asks simply. It's not a question usually heard out of children, but hey, this is not a place for children, usually.

"Light doesn't matter. Thoughts are what causes it. That's what I mean by noise."

[home_fires_burning]

"There's no reason for you to trust me, but no reason not to trust me either," she says. "I'm not about to hurt you, especially not with my grandson in the room--he's a fox, a baby one. And if you come with me, you're likely to feel much better. It's your choice."

[abyssum_invocat]

Of course there's a reason not to trust her; Sinthia doesn't know her. But she doesn't know anyone else on the ship either, and she's at least marginally trusted them not to hurt her.

The headaches make her cranky, and harder to talk to than she usually is.

"What will you do?" Because that phrase of 'you're likely to feel much better if you come with me' sets off all kinds of alarm bells.

[home_fires_burning]

"It's not what I do, it's what I am," she says.

"I am the shelter in the storm, the stillness at the center of the world. I am the hearth on which the home fire burns. I have soothed my husband through all his troubles, just by being there. By defining that interior space and letting nothing else in."

[abyssum_invocat]

Sinthia just looks at her for a long time, blinking. As if doing so would let her see whether that's truth or a lie; and though she's good at discerning that it doesn't work that way with nonhumans, sometimes not even with severely neuroatypical humans.

"Alright."

[home_fires_burning]

She doesn't appear to be dishonest, but she's got more mental stillness than normal people. She's just there.

"All right, then," she says. "Our room isn't much, I'm afraid--I can't even offer you home cooking. It's all those replicators. But it's something."

[abyssum_invocat]

"That's all right," she says cautiously. "As long as it's quiet and not crowded."

[home_fires_burning]

"There's just my husband and grandson, and they're most likely asleep," she says. "Well, the baby will be, anyway. And my husband can be very quiet when he wants to be."

Surprisingly enough.

"Shall we?"

[abyssum_invocat]

"Is your husband going to want to be quiet?" she asks, wary though she does stand and take a half step forward toward Sigyn.

[home_fires_burning]

"He will if I ask him to," she says. "For our people, hospitality is important--and for us personally, it's even more important. Our home is never much, but when we bring people into it, we do everything we can for them."

They could never shower people with riches and feasting, so they make up for it with attentiveness and care.

[abyssum_invocat]

For Sinthia, attentiveness and care is just as strange as riches as feasting is to them; she's rarely paid much attention to in positive ways. Usually, sadly, she's left alone to deal with her problems the ways she sees fit, however that may be as long as her problem doesn't affect her strength in the superphysical arena.

The headaches hurt, but they don't dampen her abilities any, so her father doesn't frankly care. "I didn't ask your name," she says, after accepting this statement. It doesn't seem like the woman's lying to her, after all.

[home_fires_burning]

"I didn't ask yours either--goodness, being here has shaken up my manners. I am Sigyn."

Well, sometimes there are needs more pressing and situations more immediate than exchanging names. Make sure an injured child is all right. See that everyone is safe.

[abyssum_invocat]

She blinks.

A lot.

And stops dead in her tracks. "...Are you really?"

[home_fires_burning]

"It's the name my parents gave me, and the only name I've ever had."

And one she's fond of. It suits her.

[abyssum_invocat]

"No, I man are you really Sigyn. The goddess," Sinthia says. "The one in the stories."

[home_fires_burning]

"I am."

There's nothing really bad about her in the stories, is there? Just that she loved the wrong man, and was loyal to him to the end.

He was never the wrong man.

"Does that bother you?"

[abyssum_invocat]

If it wouldn't be close to blasphemous, Sinthia would say something along the lines of 'oh my god'. She doesn't, though, and stays silent through several breaths--and oddly this is the quietest she's gotten in a while.

Clearly she's not just blanking out of reality, though, because her nose slowly starts to bleed again, trickling down her lip until the sensation makes her raise a hand and brush it away. (That was a bad idea. Sigyn's mind is just so vast that it overwhelms her ability to handle it all.)



"No," she says softly. "No, it doesn't bother me." How on earth would it bother her?

[home_fires_burning]

"As I said, my husband is here," she says softly. "If you know me, you know him also--the stories don't do him justice at all."

She's biased.

But it's also true.

"So you know what our hospitality means."

[abyssum_invocat]

"Are they that wrong?" she asks. All she knows of the gods her father swears are real is what's written down about them, and even that has discrepancies in and of itself.

"I don't want to make you angry."

[home_fires_burning]

"They have the basic actions correct, but not the motives, and that makes all the difference. My husband didn't act out of selfishness. That's not how he is."

Still biased.

"Give us the same chance you give everybody, and neither of us will be angry."

[abyssum_invocat]

Sigyn probably doesn't actually want Sinthia to do that. It tends to get bloody, invasive, and all kinds of uncomfortable when she does.

But she doesn't actually say that.

"What is he like, then?"

[home_fires_burning]

"He's wonderful," she says with a smile. "He's the spark that animates the world--he'll do anything for the people he cares about. He has a joy for living like no one else I've ever met, even after all we've been through. He never loses hope."

You learn a lot about somebody by spending an indefinite amount of time as a disembodied consciousness wrapped around his likewise disembodied consciousness. They've been closer to each other than two people can normally ever get, and they just love each other more.

[abyssum_invocat]

"What will he do for the people he doesn't even know about, though?"

[home_fires_burning]

"The same he's always done," she says. "He loves them. He fought for them, he suffered for them, he lived for them and he died for them. The outcasts, the oppressed, the people who have no one else--they have him. Always."

And Sigyn, too. They're a package deal.

"He has a very loose definition of family."

[abyssum_invocat]

Sinthia considers the offer carefully. On one hand, it's not an offer she can lightly refuse, because they're gods ad she knows only the faintest of things about them, and one of those is that they do not take rejection well.

"Okay. I think." She's still nervous about this proposition.

[home_fires_burning]

These two are used to rejection, at least. They handle it well enough, as long as it's the nonlethal kind... they do have a reputation, though.

"You've got nothing to lose but a few hours, and I doubt you'd be doing much with those hours with a headache anyway."

[abyssum_invocat]

She bites her lip, pulsing her teeth against the tissue for a second silently. "Okay."

[home_fires_burning]

"Excellent."

She directs the lift back to the floor their rooms are on.

"Are you hungry at all? We can get something on the way."

[abyssum_invocat]

"I'm not really very hungry, no," she says, shaking her head and sending her choppy dark hair swinging across her face. "I don't eat much when I have a headache. It makes me sick."

[home_fires_burning]

"Something to drink then? I know an excellent tea. I used to gather the ingredients myself--you can make it stronger that way--but that doesn't seem to be an option here."

Neither does cooking. She's not exactly happy about that.

[abyssum_invocat]

"No. I'm alright," she says, not wanting to take too many chances. It's not that she doesn't trust Loki and Sigyn in particular, it's that she doesn't really trust anyone on the boat yet.

"What kind of tea was it?"

[home_fires_burning]

"There are some plants that only grow in the upper world," she says. "Shining fields, nourished by blood--and if you went into the forests there, and were determined enough, you could find all manner of plants there. We had a little garden for the more conventional things, but if you really want something, it takes a journey."

When he wasn't away, Loki would pick flowers for her every morning, and weave them into a crown for her. When he'd first brought her to Asgard, she'd still had the shorn hair of a slave, and that was his remedy.

[abyssum_invocat]

She pales at the mention of fields nourished by blood.

She doesn't want to think about how that happens.

"I don't think I want to go there," she says quietly, obviously unhappy.

[home_fires_burning]

Valhalla, mostly.

Thousands of men fighting to the death every day, being healed at night, and then the next day doing it all over again--all that blood has to go somewhere.

"It's not like it used to be, anymore, at least from what I hear. I haven't been there since my husband was arrested."

[abyssum_invocat]

She twitches at the pictures the thoughts of bloody anything sends through her head, and Sinthia claps her hands over her eyes, though she knows objectively it won't do anything. But she feels sick and she wants to be out of this lift and away from this person who keeps reminding her of things that make her want to throw up.

"I don't want to think about it," she murmurs, voice tight as the rest of her.

[home_fires_burning]

"My husband wants us to get a trailer," she says, looking toward the door of the lift. "He's partial to Airstreams; he used to have one, sixty years ago, and he likes how shiny they are. That way he can still travel, but I can have a home, and we can be together."

A perfectly pleasant little dream, and about as far from the Norse world as a person can get. Contentment with the ordinary.

"Do you like traveling?"

[abyssum_invocat]

"I've never been asked," she says. "We always just packed up and moved, and nobody cared if you liked it or not."

[home_fires_burning]

"Well, you're being asked now," she says, and steps out of the lift--they've reached their floor.

"I like asking the things people have never been asked before. My husband's better at it than I am, of course."

[abyssum_invocat]

"I...don't know. If I like it," she says hesitantly. "I don't have anything that's tied to a location."

[home_fires_burning]

"You'll travel now, at least for a while," she says. "And you can see whether you'll like it or not--maybe you will. Maybe you'll find that that's what you're meant to do. Or maybe you won't like it, but when you're home again, you'll have some stories."

[abyssum_invocat]

"I don't have anyone to tell stories to, though," she murmured.

[home_fires_burning]

"My husband always says--look at what you have, and at what you need," she says. "Sometimes they overlap more than you think, and sometimes you can stretch the things you have to fit your needs. And when you've crossed all those things off the list, you know what you need, and you can decide how to get it."