Archive of Our Own ^beta

Mare can’t sleep, but then again, she rarely can. There are exceptions to this rule, of course. Overwhelming battles or training blend so easily into exhaustion, especially boring slideshows on positivity and forward thinking from Odin are usually a good way to have her half asleep on her boyfriend’s shoulder, and his body heat has always been a good way to soothe.

She shuts her eyes against the pressing ceiling. It’s been a few nights since she slept in her own room, all the way up here on floor 93. Yes, it’s even true that a number of her possessions have migrated down a couple dozen floors and into his room, and vice versa. At this very moment, Mare wears one of his many jackets. TJ has always favored his blue union coat, but he wears the forest green hoodies and cardigan sweaters provided by the HV every so often.

And, of course, now she’s thinking about him again.

She folds her arm across her eyes to push away the darkness of her room and replace it with the smell of him. He doesn’t insist on wearing colone, and she likes that about him—a lot. It’s all him, pine and sea salt and a tiny hint of gunpowder. If she could though, Mare would bottle that scent so she could breathe it in completely on nights less fortunate than this, when she doesn’t have the opportunity to wear his clothes.

She didn’t mean to snap at him. She knows that it’s common for Valhalla’s couples to break up time and time again—just look at Mallory and Halfborn. Forever is a large request, especially when everyone knows that, healthy romance or not, all single and love lives here come with an expiration date.

It isn’t his fault. He wasn’t trying to push. It’s funny, almost, that Mare is thinking these things now, when not an hour ago, she was thinking the reverse. It’s not my fault. I didn’t mean to yell. Just the memory of kicking responsibility aside like that, even for something relatively minor, makes her feel low and chilly, not unlike the river where she and Vlinder died together.

Before she really realizes it, Mare is standing. In her bare feet, she pads across the carpet to the center of her room. Similarly to how Magnus’ room, hers is open to the sky. Not like his, however, she doesn’t have any grass or trees. A plush rug whiter than the snow of her homeland sits underneath a perfectly clear, open sky. Through Valhalla’s innate magic, she never has to worry about rain destroying her telescopes or even cloud coverage blotting away her view.

She tilts her face up toward the starlight and shuts her eyes. Since she can’t see the moon, she imagines one—a series of them, actually. The full moon that she and the other Amazons used to dance under each month. The way it had been waxing when Runa first asked Mare to call her mother. The sliver of a crescent that she’d seen as she and Vlinder fell, still trying to kill one another, to the half frozen river below.

She can imagine what Vlinder would say if she brought this to her, can hear it so clearly in her reedy voice. “He should be apologizing to you. It was him to push you too far.”

Mare might want to hear those words right now, but they’re not what she needs to hear. She needs to think about their fight line by line, if that’s what it’ll take for her to really settle down and realize again that it was she who snapped first, not TJ.

It was nice earlier, when they were in his room. He was playing some new horror video game Alex introduced him to, and while listening to the text to speech voice of the main character, Mare laid her head down in TJ’s lap. He played with one hand and ran the other one through her hair. That was nice.

“If you could only eat one food for the rest of time, what would it be?”

“Huh,” TJ said, “That’s a hard one.”

“You mean it isn’t hardtack?” Mare teased, shifting so she could lie on her back and look up at him.

TJ smiled and shook his head. She loved it when he did that. He’d begun growing out his hair so he could put it into braids—or have Alex put it into braids—and they swayed with the movement. “I think that’s more of a treat,” he said, voice only slightly louder than the game’s idle music, “If I have it too much, it won’t taste good anymore.”

Mare considered that, then shrugged. “I suppose committing to anything for eternity would be difficult.” The thought reminded her uncomfortably of the fight Mallory and Halfborn had gotten into in the food court that afternoon between Italian cooking to the death and watercolor painting to the death.
“Maybe,” TJ said, “but a lot of people do get married, so we could just be biased since we’re already past ‘til death do us part.”

Mare tensed slightly at just the referencing of the wedding vows. She didn’t want to talk about it, and she didn’t want TJ to ask her, so she rolled back onto her side in order to look at the flatscreen television on the stand across from the oversized sofa they were lounging on. “You should say Saehrimnir Beast meat.”

“Smart,” TJ said as he flicked through the onscreen keyboard to type in her suggestion, “Just something about you that I love.”

Mare’s heart pressed painfully upward toward her throat. It wasn’t the first time TJ had said that he loved her. It also wasn’t the first time he didn’t complain when she clammed up instead of responding in kind. She wondered what eternity meant for him, wondered if he planned to commit to it, wondered if he wanted her to do the same.

She sat up, her hair sticking up on one side of her head and a bit in the back from laying down for so long. “I’m going to get a drink from the food court upstairs,” she said, bracing her hands on the sofa cushion beneath her, “Would you like anything?”

“No thanks,” TJ said, then placed his hand very lightly against her wrist, “but wait a second. You’re tense—what did I say?”

Mare averted her eyes, looking instead at the slightly bouncing image of the pink axolotl on the television screen. “Nothing,” she said, “You didn’t say anything wrong.”

“Mare, hey,” TJ said, and his voice turned three notes gentler than it had been, “You don’t have to tell me whenever something bothers you, but if I did something, I want to know so I can avoid doing it again. So can you tell me?”

“I said you didn’t do anything,” Mare insisted, pulling her wrist from his incredibly loose hold, “I’m serious, Tom, it’s fine.”

TJ set his controller down, and that’s how she knew he was really serious about this. “Mare,” he said, and she adored how her name sounded in his voice, “can you at least tell me something? I don’t want us to end up being as bad of communicators as Mak and Halfborn.” He spread his hands in a silent gesture of pleading, both for her truth and for peace between them. “I know that we won’t end up fighting like they do, but I don’t even like verbally fighting with you.”

Mare wrapped her fingers around the thick braid her hair was woven into and tugged. “We aren’t fighting,” she insisted. She wasn’t oblivious to how, despite her words, her volume was a tick or two higher. Judging by how he winced, TJ noticed it too.

“I think we are now,” he said, still calm and collected, more so than many soldiers she’d met over the centuries, “and if you can just say what I did wrong, then we can stop.”

Mare was on her feet then. “Fine,” she said, her voice cracking like glacial ice, “You brought up marriage and then said you love me. Happy?”

TJ blinked in confusion, before his dark brown eyes filled with understanding. “Mare,” he said, “Mare, honey-”

She put up her hand to call for silence, and when TJ followed the wordless instruction, she felt like she was back in the role of her father, with her lover in her own old shoes. That pit opening up low in her stomach didn’t keep her mouth shut though, and she hated herself for it.

“Stop,” she said, “Stop, Tom. Don’t apologize. I’m—I’m just going to get water.” She didn’t tell him not to follow, but her expression said it enough, and TJ didn’t come looking for her.

Mare exhales slowly through parted lips and opens her eyes. She needs to be the one to say she’s sorry. TJ might know of her background and of the marriage she just barely managed to escape having to endure, but she knows that he genuinely didn’t mean to trigger her like that. They come from very different places, times and backgrounds, so naturally marriage is different for either of them. She would never ever want to marry anyone ever. Perhaps the ceremony and the party, but only if it isn’t binding, only if she doesn’t have to... do anything with anyone the night after.

She draws the unzipped jacket tighter around herself. Valhalla has no set curfew. She knows she won’t get into any trouble if somebody finds her walking the halls at this hour. Even so, Vlinder would definitely get a kill in if she happened to also be awake. Mare can’t risk that. She has to do this now.

Crossing back over to the offshoot of her room with her far too massive bed and its even farther too many pillows, she lifts her phone from the mahogany nightstand. She isn’t very good with technology of any kind. The more recent, the worse she is at using it for its intended purpose. Alex insisted though, that all of the older folks learn how to use at least semi-modern cellphones. She and Mallory struggle the most with theirs. Seriously, how is Halfborn Gunderson better with a touchscreen than they are?

Even with her struggles though, Mare does know how to make a basic phone call. Just with a flick of the 8 on the keypad, she can call TJ. She picked that number in particular because of the displayed, ‘TUV,’ beneath it. T, for Thomas Jefferson Jr. T, for TJ. T, for Tom. With a deep breath, she calls and presses the phone to her ear.

She expects it to ring twice, three times, all the way to voicemail. It does none of the above though. Not even a ring and a half, before TJ answers. His voice is a bit raspy from, Mare guesses, sleep when he says, “Hey.”

She swallows dryly. “Hej,” she responds. Hey, like an echo of his greeting. Hej, hello in her mother tongue. “Did I wake you?”

TJ yawns. “Yeah, but it’s alright,” he says, “Did you need something? You’re usually not up this late.”

She nibbles her lower lip, twisting the streak of white in her hair between her fingers. “Yes, actually,” she says.

TJ’s quiet for a moment, apparently waiting for her to continue. When she doesn’t, he asks, “Well, what is it?” The words would sound demanding from Halfborn, impatient from Alex, threatening from Mallory and anxious from Magnus. From TJ, they’re somehow encouraging, just like most everything he does.

Mare tries to start, stops, tries again, stops again. She wants to say that he shouldn’t mind her and that she’s sorry for waking him up. She doesn’t. She says she’s sorry for something else.

“I am... sorry for snapping at you the way I did earlier this afternoon—or yesterday, I’m not sure what time it is.”

TJ chuckles, and a knot uncoils in Mare’s chest. “It’s past twelve, so yesterday,” he says, all gentle playfulness. She hears his blankets shifting on the other end of the line and can imagine him rolling onto his back, his braids splayed out on the pillow beneath his head. “I’m sorry too,” he said, “I know you’re sensitive about weddings and marriages and—everything associated with them. I blanked for a second today, err, yesterday. It won’t happen again.”

“Tom, I understand,” Mare says. She wonders how long her shoulders have been tensed as they loosen up just like that. “I know you weren’t trying to upset me. I need to be more aware of that.”

More blanket shifting, then the telltale creak of boxspring that tells Mare he’s sitting up now. “Well, I think I’m awake now, at least for a bit,” he says, “I haven’t gotten much farther in K-Pet. Think you feel like picking up where we left off?”

Mare’s cheeks pinch, and she realizes that she hasn’t stopped smiling since she first apologized. She feels so light already. “Do I get to wear your coat?” she asks.

“Only if I get my hoodie back,” teases TJ.

“Deal,” Mare says, “I’ll be there in five or so minutes.”

“Great,” TJ says, “I might be in the shower still when you make it, so just come in.”

“I’ll get snacks on my way down.”

“Awesome! You’re the best, lover.”

“I’m aware.”

A breath of laughter. “See you soon.”

“See you. I—I love you, bye.”

Mare clutches the phone after hanging up with shaking hands. Her smile wobbles slightly, but doesn’t drop and only gets wider. She looks up toward the sky again as she presses the phone to her racing heart. She can see the moon from this angle, and its crescent shape looks like an approving smile.

She smiles back.