Dancing On The Rainbow - for brigits_flame
Title: Dancing On The Rainbow
Genre: Um... ^-^' Sorry, my brain isn't really working today.
Warnings: Besides the ladlefuls of angst, not much. xD Mind you, angst seems to be pretty much par for the course with my stuff, so...
Summary: When a boy is fated to kill his brother, there's bound to be a few stresses. But there are other bonds, which cannot be broken, and they are still brothers. Baldr remenisces.
(Essentially, a prelude to the Norse myth)
A/N: This was written in response to the brigits_flame theme for this week, which was 'Myths', and made me squeeble by virtue of being what I am most interested in. I wrote no less than four entries for this; the first was terrible and I scrapped it, the second (based on Hercules' 12 Labours) is still in the works and probably won't be finished within the time limit, and the third and fourth are already up ( Hero and Orpheus). But then I found a copy of this, which I thought I'd lost when my hard drive got wiped in December, and I realised how much I like it, so I decided this would be my entry for the week. After editing, of course. ^-^
This is almost a synopsis of the novel I started with NaNo, really, which is a more extended retelling of the same myth (with even more angst; I seem to revel in torturing Hothr, for some reason).
You can find more info about Baldr by wiki'ing it.
Anyway! I'm in danger of my A/N getting as long as the story, so I'll just wrap it up quickly;
I find it amazing that, with a theme which I know more about than any of the others I've seen, and with so much potential, I seem to be determined to stick with retellings of myths. =/ Ah, lack of imagination, you are my only companion now.
Concrit is loved.
--------------------------
I grew up with him, and yet he was less my brother than the others. Hothr, silent, blind, and wise as our mother. While we rolled around on the hearthstone like hound pups until we were black with soot and screaming with laughter, Hothr would simply sit there, cross-legged, staring at us with his blind white eyes. Bragi, my half-brother, taught us all to write when he was nine; Hothr was four, and Bragi, patient and by far the most willing to make accomodations for my poor, blind brother, taught him to trace the runes by feel, and for the rest of his life, it was common to see the youngest son of Odin squatting in the dust around the World Tree, scrawling his name over and over again in the earth.
I have to remember these things, you see. I have to remember my brother as he was. I have to remember that I loved him then, despite the prophecy made long ago that he would destroy me. So I will close these tired eyes and remember us, on those rare occasions that I deigned to leave my habitual companions and mentors to talk to him, to play a few word games, or to teach him what I myself had learnt.
He was always pathetically grateful, I remember that. But when he was done with his heartfelt thanks, he would always return swiftly to his old habit of staring into the fire with those unsettlingly milky blue eyes, and nothing I could say or do would shift him from his thoughts.
And then there were the darker times.
I remember when our half-brother Thor grew angry at Hothr's constant silence, and threw him into the fire that always smouldered at the centre of the longhouse. Thor was twenty, already a man but still prone to violent fits of childish temper, as fiery in temperament as the fiery colour of his hair and beard. Hothr was six, and on the day it happened, I remember him sitting peacefully on the hearthstone as Bragi and I played chess on a board we had scratched into the dirt of the floor, and I remember Frija, our mother, weaving calmly on the bench beside us.
I remember the sharpness of Thor's tone as he asked Hothr something, but not what it was. I remember Hothr's resolute, stolid silence, and the lines of pain on his stony face, which Thor did not see. I remember thinking that Hothr might almost be doing right in not speaking, given how clear Thor had made his distaste for the youngest of our brothers.
I remember how the fragile calm broke when Thor cursed loudly and kicked my brother into the fire, then cursed again, spat, and strode away. Most of all, I remember the bitter, acrid smell as the ends of Hothr's hair crinkled into glowing embers, and the earsplitting sound of the silent boy's high, pain-filled scream, as we all lunged forwards at once, stumbling and shocked, to grab him out of the embrace of the fire.
Later, when my mother was cleaning tears off Hothr's face and fussing over his burnt, blistering skin - I think that was the moment that I knew I had lost all respect for Thor.
Odd.
I, the perfect, flawless Baldr, the favourite son of Odin, the darling of all three worlds - I held that grudge against my elder brother forever. But the despised, weak Hothr, who had been most hurt that day, never mentioned it again, nor looked at our half-brother with anything but the greatest respect and love. Always, in a world of violence and feuding, he could forgive.
And always, in that same world, I could not.
But I remember the good times, too, and in that moment, they seem so much more important to me.
I remember long after that day, when I was eighteen and Hothr fourteen, we visited Thor's brother Heimdall at the Bifrost Bridge, the rainbow that crosses the boundary between Midgard, which is your world, and Asgard, which is ours. It was the first time in all those fourteen years that I had ever seen him laugh.
I dragged him onto the brightness of Bifrost's surface, and we danced like madmen under the falling rain; me, comfortable in my renowned beauty and grace, dragging Hodr over the dancing colours of the rainbow as we swung and whirled around and around, hair flying out behind us, in the carelessness of an autumn's afternoon. And then Hothr was smiling, and then he was laughing, and then it was he, gangly and skinny, who was suddenly tugging me around after him, slipping and sliding on the polished surface and onto the churned surface of the ground beyond. The lights of Bifrost glittered and spun over us as we collapsed, laughing hysterically, in the thick, cloying mud.
But Hothr, of course, could not see them. Hothr was blind.
And Hothr, though he never showed it, was ashamed of being so.
At that moment, though, it didn't matter. It was our abandon - our total, wild abandon - as we danced there on the bridge between the worlds; even Heimdall, unsmiling, dedicated Heimdall, was chuckling in the end. We had never seen Hothr as being beautiful; I was the handsome one, the perfect one. But at that moment, with mud and rainwater flying up around him and onto the glittering, iridescent surface of Bifrost, with his shoulder-length chestnut hair loose and clumped by rain and earth, with his skinny face split into a lopsided smile, he was radiant. Even his featureless blue-white eyes lost their horror on that bright autumn day. Later, Heimdall confided that he had seen a shadow of my own looks in my brother that day.
But then Loki came. Loki, who ruined everything. Loki, who we all hated.
Loki, who took one look at me and Hothr rolling in the mud, and wrinkled his nose disdainfully.
And Hothr, being blind, could not know why I stood up, fists clenched, and walked away.
I remember Loki. And I remember him with hate.
It is odd that he was so totally opposite to Hothr, when their situations were so similar; both were outcasts from our little gang of brothers and half-brothers, sons of Odin. But Loki was beloved of my father, outcast though he was, and Hothr was beloved of nobody - which only seemed to prove to me, once again, that everything my father touched turned to shit.
He never extended that touch to the youngest of his sons, though, and alone of all of us in Valhalla, Hothr was free of Father's spell.
More than once, that resentment my father felt towards him boiled over from the long, simmering rage that roiled and stung inside him, and all of us in Asgard felt it. Had it not been for Mother's stubborn defence of him, I do not doubt that Hothr would have been cast out to die as a babe.
After all, why should his father love him. He was incomplete. He was blind. He was silent. But worse than those, worse than any humiliation or horror that Father's brain could ever have devised, Hothr was fated to kill me, Father's favourite, his most beloved, his Baldr.
There was a time when I agreed, before Hothr's birth. A time when I wanted only to be rid of that black spot on my fate. But when the cold sun rose on that November day nothing was further from my mind than my new brother - until, at noon, I stumbled on my mother in her chambers, the tiny blind child sitting quietly on her lap with his thumb in his mouth.
As I drew near, trying to hold back my nausea at the thought of the child's destiny, he raised his head to me, face solemn and calm, and held out his arms to me. And suddenly he was no longer my murderer, my enemy. He was Hothr, my brother, and I could not help but love him.
And that was when I grew up. That was when I stopped blindly trusting Father. And nobody ever knew it but me.
I remember his eagerness to help when they chose how to protect me from doom. Nobody ever worked so hard, so tirelessly, as Hothr did, blind though he was. He extracted a solemn promise from the oak and the birch, the sun and the seas, a hundred beasts of forest, a thousand of field, never to harm me. He gained the same oath from the hounds at our hearth, from the beams of our home, and even from Jormandugr, the World Serpent himself. All of them swore to protect me.
None of them ever swore to protect Hothr.
I remember his return from the last of these errands, alone and silent. His arm was clenched under his shirt, and he would not let any of us see it. Although even Thor was interested as to how he had forced such a promise out of the notoriously sly Jormandugr - especially Thor, in fct, as he had been thwarted by the wily Serpent on many occasions - Hothr simply returned to his spot on the hearth, sitting down cross-legged on the bare ground as he had for the last sixteen years. If it hadn't been for the fact that he loathed leaving jobs unfinished, we would never even have known that he had succeeded.
Eventually, it was Bragi who discovered the wound Hothr had been hiding. As he was sitting by the fire, playing his harp, he noticed areas around the fire where something cloyed the dust together - something which, on closer inspection, turned out to be blood, clotted in patches ranging from fresh crimson to a black crust. As soon as he could gain some relative privacy with Hothr, he asked precisely what had happened to leave the blood there. He had expected Hothr to bear witness to some fight, maybe even as trivial as a scuffle between hounds.
But instead, Hothr simply pulled up his sleeve. I never saw the wound myself; Bragi bandaged it up, replacing Hothr's own shambolic attempt. But from what I was told, Jormandugr's tooth had laid his arm open from elbow to wrist. The poison had left him vomiting for days, he told me quite calmly when I pressed him to it, and it was that poison which had stopped the blood from clotting as it should have. He had been racked by pain for over a week before he was found out. But he had never even whimpered.
A long time later, he explained the bargain he had made to gain Jormandugr's pledge. For my life, he pledged Jormandugr as much blood as the serpent could draw in a single breath.
I am inclined to think that Jormandugr was lenient. After all, a body large enough to coil twice around Mitgard must be more than large enough to drain a man of blood in one breath. Perhaps it amused the cunning old serpent to know that Hothr, so well-intentioned and so earnest, was fated to be my downfall.
But I knew, even as he told me of the deal, that Hothr would have gladly let himself be consumed entirely if it would let me live that little safer.
I have to remember that. I have to remember how much Hothr loved me. He sacrificed himself so that I could be immortal.
And he went through life with that silent smile that I saw in his blind white eyes, and never knew that I feared him more than the worst of the giants.
There was one thing that served to fuel my irrational fear of a doom the Aesir had banded together to protect. And his name was Loki.
He hated me. He feared me. He loathed me.
And that he hung always so close to the man fated to kill me?
That frightened me. And rightly, as it turned out.
But I remember Hothr. I remember him as a chubby child, crawling around the dirt floors of Valhalla; I remember him as a well-built lad, tracing runes over and over in that same dirt; I remember him as a gangly teenager, never at home in his own skin.
And now, as the mistletoe dart flies from his outstretched hand towards my heart, trailing with it all the threads of bloody fate...
I remember the day when we danced on the rainbow.
Genre: Um... ^-^' Sorry, my brain isn't really working today.
Warnings: Besides the ladlefuls of angst, not much. xD Mind you, angst seems to be pretty much par for the course with my stuff, so...
Summary: When a boy is fated to kill his brother, there's bound to be a few stresses. But there are other bonds, which cannot be broken, and they are still brothers. Baldr remenisces.
(Essentially, a prelude to the Norse myth)
A/N: This was written in response to the brigits_flame theme for this week, which was 'Myths', and made me squeeble by virtue of being what I am most interested in. I wrote no less than four entries for this; the first was terrible and I scrapped it, the second (based on Hercules' 12 Labours) is still in the works and probably won't be finished within the time limit, and the third and fourth are already up ( Hero and Orpheus). But then I found a copy of this, which I thought I'd lost when my hard drive got wiped in December, and I realised how much I like it, so I decided this would be my entry for the week. After editing, of course. ^-^
This is almost a synopsis of the novel I started with NaNo, really, which is a more extended retelling of the same myth (with even more angst; I seem to revel in torturing Hothr, for some reason).
You can find more info about Baldr by wiki'ing it.
Anyway! I'm in danger of my A/N getting as long as the story, so I'll just wrap it up quickly;
I find it amazing that, with a theme which I know more about than any of the others I've seen, and with so much potential, I seem to be determined to stick with retellings of myths. =/ Ah, lack of imagination, you are my only companion now.
Concrit is loved.
--------------------------
I grew up with him, and yet he was less my brother than the others. Hothr, silent, blind, and wise as our mother. While we rolled around on the hearthstone like hound pups until we were black with soot and screaming with laughter, Hothr would simply sit there, cross-legged, staring at us with his blind white eyes. Bragi, my half-brother, taught us all to write when he was nine; Hothr was four, and Bragi, patient and by far the most willing to make accomodations for my poor, blind brother, taught him to trace the runes by feel, and for the rest of his life, it was common to see the youngest son of Odin squatting in the dust around the World Tree, scrawling his name over and over again in the earth.
I have to remember these things, you see. I have to remember my brother as he was. I have to remember that I loved him then, despite the prophecy made long ago that he would destroy me. So I will close these tired eyes and remember us, on those rare occasions that I deigned to leave my habitual companions and mentors to talk to him, to play a few word games, or to teach him what I myself had learnt.
He was always pathetically grateful, I remember that. But when he was done with his heartfelt thanks, he would always return swiftly to his old habit of staring into the fire with those unsettlingly milky blue eyes, and nothing I could say or do would shift him from his thoughts.
And then there were the darker times.
I remember when our half-brother Thor grew angry at Hothr's constant silence, and threw him into the fire that always smouldered at the centre of the longhouse. Thor was twenty, already a man but still prone to violent fits of childish temper, as fiery in temperament as the fiery colour of his hair and beard. Hothr was six, and on the day it happened, I remember him sitting peacefully on the hearthstone as Bragi and I played chess on a board we had scratched into the dirt of the floor, and I remember Frija, our mother, weaving calmly on the bench beside us.
I remember the sharpness of Thor's tone as he asked Hothr something, but not what it was. I remember Hothr's resolute, stolid silence, and the lines of pain on his stony face, which Thor did not see. I remember thinking that Hothr might almost be doing right in not speaking, given how clear Thor had made his distaste for the youngest of our brothers.
I remember how the fragile calm broke when Thor cursed loudly and kicked my brother into the fire, then cursed again, spat, and strode away. Most of all, I remember the bitter, acrid smell as the ends of Hothr's hair crinkled into glowing embers, and the earsplitting sound of the silent boy's high, pain-filled scream, as we all lunged forwards at once, stumbling and shocked, to grab him out of the embrace of the fire.
Later, when my mother was cleaning tears off Hothr's face and fussing over his burnt, blistering skin - I think that was the moment that I knew I had lost all respect for Thor.
Odd.
I, the perfect, flawless Baldr, the favourite son of Odin, the darling of all three worlds - I held that grudge against my elder brother forever. But the despised, weak Hothr, who had been most hurt that day, never mentioned it again, nor looked at our half-brother with anything but the greatest respect and love. Always, in a world of violence and feuding, he could forgive.
And always, in that same world, I could not.
But I remember the good times, too, and in that moment, they seem so much more important to me.
I remember long after that day, when I was eighteen and Hothr fourteen, we visited Thor's brother Heimdall at the Bifrost Bridge, the rainbow that crosses the boundary between Midgard, which is your world, and Asgard, which is ours. It was the first time in all those fourteen years that I had ever seen him laugh.
I dragged him onto the brightness of Bifrost's surface, and we danced like madmen under the falling rain; me, comfortable in my renowned beauty and grace, dragging Hodr over the dancing colours of the rainbow as we swung and whirled around and around, hair flying out behind us, in the carelessness of an autumn's afternoon. And then Hothr was smiling, and then he was laughing, and then it was he, gangly and skinny, who was suddenly tugging me around after him, slipping and sliding on the polished surface and onto the churned surface of the ground beyond. The lights of Bifrost glittered and spun over us as we collapsed, laughing hysterically, in the thick, cloying mud.
But Hothr, of course, could not see them. Hothr was blind.
And Hothr, though he never showed it, was ashamed of being so.
At that moment, though, it didn't matter. It was our abandon - our total, wild abandon - as we danced there on the bridge between the worlds; even Heimdall, unsmiling, dedicated Heimdall, was chuckling in the end. We had never seen Hothr as being beautiful; I was the handsome one, the perfect one. But at that moment, with mud and rainwater flying up around him and onto the glittering, iridescent surface of Bifrost, with his shoulder-length chestnut hair loose and clumped by rain and earth, with his skinny face split into a lopsided smile, he was radiant. Even his featureless blue-white eyes lost their horror on that bright autumn day. Later, Heimdall confided that he had seen a shadow of my own looks in my brother that day.
But then Loki came. Loki, who ruined everything. Loki, who we all hated.
Loki, who took one look at me and Hothr rolling in the mud, and wrinkled his nose disdainfully.
And Hothr, being blind, could not know why I stood up, fists clenched, and walked away.
I remember Loki. And I remember him with hate.
It is odd that he was so totally opposite to Hothr, when their situations were so similar; both were outcasts from our little gang of brothers and half-brothers, sons of Odin. But Loki was beloved of my father, outcast though he was, and Hothr was beloved of nobody - which only seemed to prove to me, once again, that everything my father touched turned to shit.
He never extended that touch to the youngest of his sons, though, and alone of all of us in Valhalla, Hothr was free of Father's spell.
More than once, that resentment my father felt towards him boiled over from the long, simmering rage that roiled and stung inside him, and all of us in Asgard felt it. Had it not been for Mother's stubborn defence of him, I do not doubt that Hothr would have been cast out to die as a babe.
After all, why should his father love him. He was incomplete. He was blind. He was silent. But worse than those, worse than any humiliation or horror that Father's brain could ever have devised, Hothr was fated to kill me, Father's favourite, his most beloved, his Baldr.
There was a time when I agreed, before Hothr's birth. A time when I wanted only to be rid of that black spot on my fate. But when the cold sun rose on that November day nothing was further from my mind than my new brother - until, at noon, I stumbled on my mother in her chambers, the tiny blind child sitting quietly on her lap with his thumb in his mouth.
As I drew near, trying to hold back my nausea at the thought of the child's destiny, he raised his head to me, face solemn and calm, and held out his arms to me. And suddenly he was no longer my murderer, my enemy. He was Hothr, my brother, and I could not help but love him.
And that was when I grew up. That was when I stopped blindly trusting Father. And nobody ever knew it but me.
I remember his eagerness to help when they chose how to protect me from doom. Nobody ever worked so hard, so tirelessly, as Hothr did, blind though he was. He extracted a solemn promise from the oak and the birch, the sun and the seas, a hundred beasts of forest, a thousand of field, never to harm me. He gained the same oath from the hounds at our hearth, from the beams of our home, and even from Jormandugr, the World Serpent himself. All of them swore to protect me.
None of them ever swore to protect Hothr.
I remember his return from the last of these errands, alone and silent. His arm was clenched under his shirt, and he would not let any of us see it. Although even Thor was interested as to how he had forced such a promise out of the notoriously sly Jormandugr - especially Thor, in fct, as he had been thwarted by the wily Serpent on many occasions - Hothr simply returned to his spot on the hearth, sitting down cross-legged on the bare ground as he had for the last sixteen years. If it hadn't been for the fact that he loathed leaving jobs unfinished, we would never even have known that he had succeeded.
Eventually, it was Bragi who discovered the wound Hothr had been hiding. As he was sitting by the fire, playing his harp, he noticed areas around the fire where something cloyed the dust together - something which, on closer inspection, turned out to be blood, clotted in patches ranging from fresh crimson to a black crust. As soon as he could gain some relative privacy with Hothr, he asked precisely what had happened to leave the blood there. He had expected Hothr to bear witness to some fight, maybe even as trivial as a scuffle between hounds.
But instead, Hothr simply pulled up his sleeve. I never saw the wound myself; Bragi bandaged it up, replacing Hothr's own shambolic attempt. But from what I was told, Jormandugr's tooth had laid his arm open from elbow to wrist. The poison had left him vomiting for days, he told me quite calmly when I pressed him to it, and it was that poison which had stopped the blood from clotting as it should have. He had been racked by pain for over a week before he was found out. But he had never even whimpered.
A long time later, he explained the bargain he had made to gain Jormandugr's pledge. For my life, he pledged Jormandugr as much blood as the serpent could draw in a single breath.
I am inclined to think that Jormandugr was lenient. After all, a body large enough to coil twice around Mitgard must be more than large enough to drain a man of blood in one breath. Perhaps it amused the cunning old serpent to know that Hothr, so well-intentioned and so earnest, was fated to be my downfall.
But I knew, even as he told me of the deal, that Hothr would have gladly let himself be consumed entirely if it would let me live that little safer.
I have to remember that. I have to remember how much Hothr loved me. He sacrificed himself so that I could be immortal.
And he went through life with that silent smile that I saw in his blind white eyes, and never knew that I feared him more than the worst of the giants.
There was one thing that served to fuel my irrational fear of a doom the Aesir had banded together to protect. And his name was Loki.
He hated me. He feared me. He loathed me.
And that he hung always so close to the man fated to kill me?
That frightened me. And rightly, as it turned out.
But I remember Hothr. I remember him as a chubby child, crawling around the dirt floors of Valhalla; I remember him as a well-built lad, tracing runes over and over in that same dirt; I remember him as a gangly teenager, never at home in his own skin.
And now, as the mistletoe dart flies from his outstretched hand towards my heart, trailing with it all the threads of bloody fate...
I remember the day when we danced on the rainbow.