Let's Assume that Class Sucks

[tanarill]

And go from there. If anyone has a list of questions to ask during a formal interview, they would be greatly appreciated. On the other hand, the Environmental Presentation went well. Urgh. Too much to do this weekend.

And on the other other hand, we have a dwarf.


Title: for Life
Rating: G
Warnings: Slash. No, I'm serious, they're a happily gay couple although they still have some Problems to work out.

The world had changed.

Of course, the world always changed, that was its nature. But it wasn’t until Baldr saw the huge field-hospitals, neat rows of metal and canvas, smelling of sweat and antiseptic, that it really hit him. While he had been alive, an army was a thousand men, dressed in boiled leather or chain mail if they were rich, armed with swords of more commonly battleaxes and knives, who fought in close quarters with their enemies. There was no difference between a war and a battle. And if they were hurt in battle, they were almost certainly dead, either from the wound or from disease later on.

But these people had found waya around all of it. These hospitals were quiet and orderly, nurses moving quickly and efficiently among their charges and changing drip-feeds–Loki explained that these were food, already digested into a liquid so that it could go straight into the warrior’s blood–and blood feeds. He found it odd that they were willing to become blood-brothers with total strangers until he realized that they were brothers-in-arms, and it would really have been odd if they hadn’t been willing to share their lifeblood.

He was still trying to get over the fact that the army was so large that no one soldier could hope to know all of his brothers personally. Or sisters. In this strange age, women fought, women commanded, women took their men into battle and carried them back when the men could not carry themselves. He was beginning to suspect that if women had been allowed to fight back when he was alive, there wouldn’t have been wars; there’d have been massacres.

Fighting was different now too, and not in a good way. When he had fought, when he did fight, tooth and nail against his beloved while he learned how not to die, he saw his enemy, looked into their eyes and saw himself. As he understood it, there were different weapons now, new and terrible ones, and one of the most terrible thing about them was that the attacker didn’t have to be anywhere near the defender to kill him. Small, lead pellets or noxious gasses–Loki called them bombs, and laughed in that too-sharp way of his–did it instead. You were no longer your enemy, and he no longer had to be human.

And armies went on and on and on, stretching toward the horizon like a creeping cancer. There could be no land so fertile that it was worth this effort, and indeed what they seemed to fighting for was not the land, which was desert, so much as thoughts. Thoughts, as if they were worth more than human life. Baldr did not believe that one in a hundred who died in this kind of war could be reaching Valhalla, battle-death or not.

Into this mire of wasted effort, then, waded Loki. He seemed at home, but then, Loki was at home wherever he went. Bared to his soul and dropped naked in the Sahara or the Deccan, anywhere from the Andies to the Arctic, he’d adapt. But he changed entirely when he looked at Baldr, because with Baldr he was not merely adapting but growing.

Currently, he was looking for his mother. The conversation had happened after they made up, and had started with him leaning into Loki and smiling because finally Loki was ready to love him back and because of the way Loki’s name felt on his lips, “Loki, Loki.” Still smiling, now sadly. “I love you, but why did you kill me? Was it really out of jealousy?”

Loki had responded, very small and quiet, “In a way . . . I was drunk off my ass and they were playing the "Let's kill Baldr" game and I always worried that someone would figure out how to do it eventually–” and he’d smiled, that sand-and-ashes smile. Baldr knew it was because he could admit to himself that he cared, now, “–so I decided to do it myself. Because if you were dead, no one else could kill you.”

“That is sweet, in a way, but Loki . . . ” he’d sighed. He did not remember most of nearly one thousand years being dead because he’d been drunk for most of it, trying to forget how happy Loki had looked while killing him. He’d kissed Loki’s cheek. “Don't do that again, please.”

“I won't.” Just that. No attempt to hide what he’d done or how he felt about it. But he switched the moment from melancholy to amused with a snicker. “Although only you could think that the worst alcohol-induced plan in the history of Midgard was, in any way, sweet.” And again, that sudden switch, cheerful-to-serious. “But the first thing we're going to do is make a list of all the things that can hurt you, and go get them to pledge not to. Second. I have to go find Thokk first.” Baldr hadn’t understood why at the time; now he’d seen the weapons and knew that he wasn’t immortal anymore, and wouldn’t be for a while yet.

But then he had just blushed and rubbed the back of his neck in embarrassment. “Heh, that's me, god of purity and peace.” And then the name caught up to him. “Everyone had told me you were disguised as Thokk, Loki. I thought that was an attempt to hide your hand in killing me.”

Loki, God of Fire and Mischief, had looked down, embarrassed. It was novel. Baldr knew right then that he was going to spend a large portion of forever trying to embarrass Loki. “Yeah . . . Thokk’s my mother.”

Which had confused him even more. “You disguised yourself as your mother? I thought your mother was Laufey.”

Loki had sighed. It as not just a sigh, but the noise emitted by any person whose mother has ever been a pain and in some ways has never stopped being one. The kind of sigh that invited sympathy. “My mother is . . . unconventional. Very open in some ways, secretive in others. Her name isn't Laufey. As far as I know, it's not Thokk either, but that's what she always insisted I call her. She was the one who didn't mourn you. If she's on one of her journeys, tracking her down is going to be a bitch.” He’d sighed again.

“Oh.” And he was frowning then, because Loki appeared to have been punished, for a millennium, for something that was, despite all evidence to the contrary, not his fault. “But why, if she was the one, did you let yourself be accused in her place?”

“Because she's my mother. And because telling would have forced me to wonder why I killed you. And because I deserved it.”

That had brought it home to him again–how hurt his Loki was, and even now, clean inside, there was still a lot of work for them both. “But–” he’d begun, and then shook his head. Loki wouldn’t believe it. Instead, he asked, “How are you going to find her? And then, how will you make her mourn for me? Hel's deal hasn't changed yet.”

At that, Loki rolled his eyes. “It doesn't have to. I--oh, well. She didn't mourn for you because, quote, ‘That boy needs to stop making you miserable.’” He’d smiled and leaned into Baldr. “Which you have. No, the problem is going to be finding her.”

He’d pouted at the water, steam gently rising from its surface but so clear he could see the rock this spring was carved from, “What did she expect me to do, walk up to you in the middle of a feast and proclaim our love for each other in front of all the other gods? That would have been worse, I think. Anyway, do you have any idea where she might be?”

Loki had smiled again, a smile of genuine amusement. He’d gotten the distinct sense that Loki’s mother would have expected him to do just that. Loki said, “Head for the largest land conflict currently taking place. She'll be somewhere.”

And so here they were, the largest land conflict currently taking place. It wasn’t in Asia, because very few people were stupid enough to get involved in a land war in Asia, but in was quite nearly at the Asian steppe. Loki walked through the camp with a jaunty half-step that seemed to Baldr to be his natural state of movement, despite having never seen Loki move like that before. And then he turned and smiled, and it was falling in love all over again.

People kept walking through him. He wasn’t quite sure why, as they were both currently disembodied spirits, but people for no apparent reason moved two feet to the left to get out of Loki’s way and kept walking through him.

Loki kept walking ahead of him, all smiles as bright and flickering as a wildfire, and turning back to wait for him. He moved more slowly; it had been a long time since he’d been on earth, and he kept stopping to marvel at how much had changed. He had been dead, but that was no excuse for not keeping up with the world, albeit days to decades late. Loki had managed to do it, and he had had less contact with the world than Baldr.

Loki was dancing on ahead again, throwing out power like a trawl net, when Baldr felt the energy spike, off to his left. Maybe two tent rows and down near the end, where a field was kept open for the loud flying things that were nothing like the sleek black ones he’d seen earlier, all clinical impersonality and destruction. These other loud, awkward flying things were made to move in and out of somewhere fast; as he now realized, they saved life.

And Thokk too, of course.

Once they knew where she was, getting to her was a short sprint to the end of that row and then to the critical tent where the new arrivals were being treated. Here, there were so many people rushing everywhere that they were walking through Loki too. But it was organized chaos, and it revolved around a voice:

“He dead?”

“Yes–”

“He getting any better?”

“No–”

“Then get him out of my hospital.” And she dismissed the orderly without another word, moving on the next patient. He had a very nasty wound–the kind of wounds these “gun” things left–and he was going to die if nothing was done about it soon.

“Well,” she said, not turning to look at him, “are you just going to stand there staring, or are you going to help?”

Baldr started. “Me?”

“Well, obviously not my son. Loki, be a dear and go get rid of some trouble.”

“But Thokk–”

“Loki.” And that was it; as strong and quiet as a whisper, a tear, a butterfly’s wing, and Loki did something and the amount of chaos abruptly began to decrease. “You, get over here and give me some power.”

Baldr had to walk through several people to get there, and he was standing half in a doctor when he reached the gurney. The woman–Thokk, the mother of his beloved, the one who had kept him from life for a millennium–put a very solid hand though his insubstantial body and pulled. He gasped as the power moved down her arm, into the dying person. Strengthening his heartbeat, repairing ripped and bleeding tissue. Saving life.

It hurt for a moment, if “hurt” meant “being assaulted with a gut-wrenching pain that was almost but not quite as bad as that horrible moment when he realized that his Loki had killed him.” Then he adjusted, automatically finding balance as he adapted to give Thokk the right kind of energy. Still, it was a lot, and he was panting by the time he finished, which was far earlier than he would have thought.

“Is he all right?”

“She’ll be fine,” answered Thokk. “Over here, please. And you’re never going to last if you keep throwing around power like that–” she reached through him again, to pull some out. “You have to use only a very little, applied specifically. Watch me.”

So he did, while the chaos around them began to sort itself out and the fact that these people weren’t just warriors became apparent. There were warriors, in their dull mud colors, but most of these people seemed to be ordinary. Thokk waded amongst them, not particularly quickly, but she made sure that the person she was helping was going to survive before moving on. He quickly realized that other people were hooking them up to drip-feeds and blood-injectors–that Thokk was only healing what their medicine could not.

He caught on to what she was doing very suddenly, on the sixth or seventh person; he’d given up counting by then. She wasn’t receiving even half the power he was sending, but what she did receive she was using more thoroughly than he could. It took some trial and error for him to align and narrow his energy spread so that she was getting most of it, but it was like a lock clicking when he finally did.

He couldn’t have said how long it took, but the shadows were long when they finished. They hadn’t managed to save everyone, but by that point the people, victims and soldiers, were either dead or safe and there was no point trying to save people that weren’t going to last the night anyway. He was soaking in sweat that didn’t actually exist, although he felt the wind against his skin.

Thokk straightened up, and he got his first good look at her. White hair, a legacy of her giant stock, and the red eyes of a true fire giant. Generous proportions, but a sense of twig-thin about her. Energy like fire and frost wrapped tightly about her, but alive and flowing in a constantly moving stream. And suddenly he understood why Loki had become the person he’d been, when a young mischief-maker had run in with t he patriarch of Asgard an age earlier.

“Thanks,” she said. Short, clipped, efficient, like everything about her. “You’re strong, to have lasted like that, and especially with no training. What’s you’re divinity?”

“Um,” he said, “Peace.”

“Oh, you are, are you?” Baldr felt very young and very outclassed, even though he physically towered over her and there was no way that he could beat her anyway without a body.

But, as it turned out, he didn’t have to. “Yes Thokk, he is.”

They both turned to see Loki, orangey eyes flickering in the heat, approaching. He walked slightly oddly, as if he were dancing on a tightrope miles above the ground. He performed one final leap, flipping through the air and landing lightly on his feet with a small flourish.

Thokk pursed her lips. “I see you haven’t grown up at all.”

“On the contrary,” Loki folded his arms and leaned back into Baldr’s solid weight, “I’ve grown a great deal in the last few weeks.”

A moment of silence passed between them before Thokk said, “Ye-es, I suppose you have.” Then she turned her penetrating gaze back to him. “You had better take good care of him.”

The “Yes, ma’am!” had escaped his lips before he realized the command had been sent to his brain.

“Well, then,” she walked forward, placing a hand on either side of his head to pull it down for a kiss on the forehead; he felt something cool and wet and very, very real hit his eyelids, and opened his eyes to the sight of comforting red eyes looking back. “A blessing, Baldr Wodenson. Let me know when the grandchildren arrive.”

And bustled off, to see to the comfort of her charges. He turned to Loki. “Your mother is . . . ”

“Yeah,” said Loki softly. “She is. Let’s go find my daughter.”

They were halfway to Helhiem before Baldr even thought to ask about hat grandchildren Thokk had been talking about.


Thanks to Emmy for Beta'ing.

The story behind the grandchildren is this: Loki can turn female and get preggers. Baldr wants kids. Loki isn't enamored of the idea, but he had an odd upbringing and his previous kids either kept the love of his life imprisoned in the afterlife for ages while he got acid dripped on him, were killed to make to only kind of bonds he couldn't slip, or are destined to destroy the world. So he's got reason. But there will still be oodles of little cross-between-mischief-and-peace godlings running around in a few years.

EDIT: I almost forgot to mention that today is the eighteenth day of the Omer, which is two weeks and four days into the Omer.