Welcome to Gaia! ::

He was warm and soft and kind. It felt, for a while, like coming into a warm room after a long hike through the snow, to find the walls bathed in flickering gold cast off in a glow from a crackling fireplace. It was the feeling of a mug of hot cider, a bowl of red soup and a heel of brown bread. It was being curled up in a pile of warm blankets and watching the frost gather in patterns on the windows. It was seeing chimney smoke on the distant horizon, and knowing you were heading home. That was the feeling, if it could be described. She could have curled up by the warmth of his hearth forever, if it always felt this welcoming.

At first, she cried harder, sobbing and listening to his thoughtful reassurances. Not, certainly, because he was doing a bad job -- but because he was doing a very good job, actually, and comfort proved its own sort of a release valve on one's emotional waterworks. She wrapped both arms around Titan's midsection, as much without permission as ever -- her fingers barely met to touch, around his broad ribcage -- and stole warmth and stability from him like a person who knew she shouldn't be doing what she was doing, and probably shouldn't ever do it again, and who'd therefore decided to get as much of an emotional stockpile out of this one hug as she possibly could before letting go.

Eventually, her tears trickled off and she nodded into his shirt (which was probably the least inconsiderate thing she'd done to his shirt in the last five minutes). "You're very wise, you know," she said between sniffles. "Your heart speaks to you with a clear voice. Has anyone ever told you?"

Hvergelmir laughed self-consciously at this assertion. "What, me? I wish!" She unwound one of her hands and started swiping at her runny nose, having completely forgotten about the tissue that Titan had offered her earlier. "No, I'm -- " sniffle -- "as easy to lie to as anyone else, probably." Sniffle. "The only trick to it's really just guilt, I guess. When people can tell you're being sincere and honest with them, they feel bad lying. Some people do, anyway."

She dropped both her hands to her sides without stepping back. "I'm sorry about all this. You're a mess, I -- sorry."

Titan's lighthearted teasing easily hit its mark, bringing a smile to her face and a sweet laugh to her lips -- or, well, it would have, anyway, if not for a minor complication.

The minor complication was that Titan's joke involved tearing his own oversized black shirt right off of his also-oversized torso, to the end result that Hvergelmir was suddenly treated to a very close acquaintance with the particulars of that particular torso. The particulars were very . . . Very detailed. Very muscular. Very, um, big.

Hvergelmir took the offered remains of shirt in her hands and brought it to her face, staring with wide gold eyes at Titan's unacceptably perfect chest. Her face burned, beet red -- and it was obvious that she'd forgotten any pretense of wiping her nose and was just smelling the fabric that had been against his skin a few seconds before.

Having lost the thread of the conversation entirely, she replied very concisely with, "Oh. Wow."

Titan's shirt smelled warm and earthy. So had he, when she'd been standing with her nose pressed against his chest a few moments ago. It was one more facet of his bright, caring presence, so evident and so keenly at odds with the ugly aura that hung around him at all times. Hvergelmir had rarely liked a person so much or so instantly. He was free with himself; he had a way of caring, without reservation or compunction, nor any counting pennies about the cost of doing so. Hvergelmir was only a little more than a stranger to him -- but it didn't occur to him to treat her that way. He would have offered -- no. He literally had offered her the shirt off his back.

She pressed it to her chest. It was still warm with the heat of him, and so was she.

"Hygge," she said in response to his offer, nodding and lowering her lashes with a secretive little smile. She remembered writing that word on an index card for herself, in her youth, and adding it to her flash card pile, puzzling over its definition. It had been oddly fascinating, even then. As a child, she would've killed for something like the simple pleasures of hygge. Now something resembling an adult, her heart still yearned for them. Laney, after all, didn't come from a very pro-hygge family. She bit her lower lip delicately and said, "Yes. I'd like that very much."

Hvergelmir made a mental note to start learning Norwegian. What Titan had said -- a greeting, judging by his gestures, which she responded to with a polite curtsy -- was certainly more of the language than she knew. Learning the language would be a good gesture, though, she thought -- a good way to show that she cared enough to try. And the prospect that she knew even a single word just seemed to make him so happy, and it was hard to deny that he had an absolutely killer smile -- it would be worth it, learning a few more words, if it made him smile like that again.

"That's okay -- I don't need candles or any of that." She let herself be ushered over by the elbow, settling down into a seated position along the lip of the well, feet tucked up on the ledge in front of her. "Tell me about . . . " She smiled, using the remains of Titan's shirt to wipe her face clean. "Tell me the days of the week. Then I'll tell you them how I learned them."

She relaxed, sitting there as he loosed her hair from its french twist and it fell around her shoulders, then started running her haircomb through it to pull out the little tangles. By and by, Hvergelmir slipped off her shoes and set them on the ledge in front of her, letting one bare foot dangle in the waters of the well. "Mermaid tail!" she answered enthusiastically, pressing her hands together. "I only know how to do the other one."

Hvergelmir listened with barely-restrained pleasure as Titan explained each of the days of the week to her in turn. It was such a rare joy for her, to spend time in the company of another person without feeling like there had to be an agenda attached to it or a schedule to be kept to. Few people, other than Tara, had ever made her feel that way -- she relished it now, for however briefly it might last. Just simple human contact with another person.

It was easy to sink into the illusion of timeless companionship, too; back on Earth, dawn was approaching, and they couldn't stay as they were forever. Here, though, the island was fixed in space, never spinning toward or away from its star -- there was no dawn and no sunset, no night and no day: only the stars in their innumerable congress, eternal and calm. It was peaceful. Restful.

"Mmmm," she offered approvingly at the sensation of his fingers against her scalp (which to her previous knowledge was one of those skills reserved only for hairdressers and was the real reason anyone paid to have someone else wash their hair for them). Through the rest, she was calmly silent -- aside one quiet echo of the words of madness and wisdom in his missing eye, which she found to be a lovely bit of prose.

When Titan had done his version of the days of the week, Hvergelmir supplied the ones she'd learned in counterpoint. "Monday's child is fair of face," she recited. "Tuesday's child is full of grace. Wednesday's child is full of woe; Thursday's child has far to go."

Is that you? she thought. A little Thor-child, perhaps, born on some stormy Thursday somewhere. Do you have far to go?

"Friday's child is loving and giving," she went on. "Saturday's child works hard for its living -- but the child that is born on the Sabbath day is bonny and blithe and good and gay." She smiled to herself. "Basically, apparently it stinks to be born on a Wednesday."

His question about the well, and about people doing their wash, was probably more of conversational departure than he realized. She could feel her cheeks heating pink, considering his question, and was glad he was sitting behind her where he couldn't see. She could still recall the little snippets of memory she'd had about this place in the past. She remembered vividly the sight of that other Hvergelmir, the one of a thousand years ago that she'd apparently once been, rising from a bath in this same well, bare as a newborn, and pulling on a long white robe to go and meet some newly arrived group of travelers stopping through. "This is the only water on the island," she said vaguely. "I wouldn't be surprised if they did. But it's alright -- the water's always very clean."

When Titan declared the braid finished, and folded it over her shoulder to see, she bent forward over the ledge of the well to peer down into it, trying to catch her reflection in the black-bottomed waters. Her face wobbled over the surface, but it was otherwise a fairly true mirror -- she could see the pretty way the strands of hair in the braid tucked into each other. "It's beautiful," she marveled, in her mind trying to reverse engineer the process using only a shifting reflection of the bottom section of the braid and failing. "Thank you so much."

Hvergelmir twisted in her seat to look back at Titan with a very genuine smile. "I'm glad you came," she said -- and then a little more quietly, "and I'm glad you came back."

What Titan was asking for was somewhat outside of Hvergelmir's realm of experience. Oh, she'd had one or two visitors to her bench mention they might come back -- for more information, she assumed -- but people didn't tend to want to seek out more of her company. Not when she'd been a kid, and certainly not anymore.

"That would make me very happy," she promised.

His hair was loose, and it occured to her why; she slid a hand down her braid to run her fingertips over the tie in her hair. Was it part of his uniform, like his shirt, she wondered? Would it fade away as surely as his torn tunic, leaving her braid to slowly unravel when he left and powered down somewhere -- or would it stay after he'd gone, a peculiar little souvenir for her to keep? She wondered.

Hvergelmir set the now-superfluous gold haircomb off to the side, resting on the edge of the well, and then got to her feet, torn black shirt still scrunched in one hand. Titan had beautiful hair. He must take really good care of it -- Laney's was usually all snarls.

"It'll be dawn soon, at home," she acknowledged, waiting for Titan to rise to his feet so they could depart as agreed. It was easy to lose track of time here, if you weren't careful -- but she didn't think they'd been gone overly long. "I'll take you back."