For the meta ask: This may be self-absorbed, but how does Hel feel about denying Baldr his return to the living? Did she know Frigg's messengers would fail at their task of gaining oaths of love from all living things? Did she actively work in tandem with her father Loki, who secured through a disguise that *one* being would refuse to swear to love Baldr? Or was the wager's failure a surprise to Hel as well?
For two months, this has lain in wait in my askbox. I have nurtured it, kept it hidden from light lest it fade, held it in my arms and raised it as my own child. And now, at last, as my 6,666th post, it’s time to talk about The Baldr Incident, and Hel’s one act of true cruelty.
Let’s begin.
Hel, for her part, will forever feel shame and guilt about Baldr. What she did was monstrous, and for reasons entirely beyond his control. She has returned many creatures the chance to return to life for sensible reasons, bloodless and passionless logic that says if she releases one petitioner, a thousand more will swarm her hall and demand to know why they are not worthy. It’s a slippery slope, and she simply does her job in refusing them, in refusing those living petitioners that arrive to plead the souls of their loved ones.
And then there was Baldr.
Hel could have answered Frigg’s rider in that same way – No, I cannot, it is not mine to defy Death. I rule, I do not barter. But she saw a chance to get back at her own wounds, to hurt Asgard as deeply and cruelly as they hurt her family. She had been her father’s most beloved, too, and Odin would hear no petition for her return. So she made a terrible game of it, being in the death throes of her girlhood and eager to act rather than think. If the messengers could succeed in this task impossible, Baldr would be returned. She knew as soon as she spoke they would fail. She wanted hope to turn to ash in Odin’s mouth so he would know her father’s agony, so he would know her as no friend of his.
She did all of these things to get back at Odin, but Baldr paid the price. She wasn’t at a point to realize how horrible an action that was.
And she came up with it all on her own. There was no midnight scheming with Loki, no whispering form beyond the veil to guide her. She was the sole parent of this scheme, some part of her she now fights to keep buried guiding her to take blood for blood the way her father had in sending Baldr to her to begin with. She knew exactly what would happen because she designed it that way while pretending to be magnanimous, like she was giving Asgard a chance to see their golden son returned.
No one knows the blade of it. They speak of her as fair, that she gave that chance, and she wants to scream her throat bloody that they didn’t see through it.
But it’s too late to do anything about it now. She and Baldr sit hand in hand in Eljudnir, unreachable by either father. They are victims of the schemes of their sires, and of Hel’s wickedness. How many bodies did she create by refusing Asgard? She thinks, often, that Sigyn’s sons could have been spared if she had been able to act on the mercy that she now preaches.
There’s blood up to her elbows now. The bones lie where they fell. All she can do now is try to be better, because there is no atonement for this, not in her eyes. She just has to make sure her youthful sadism cannot grow, and that’s the end of it for her.
Baldr just… has this way of making her very self-aware and sick with herself. But she’s old enough now to have just accepted what she did and what it caused. She lives with it the way others died for it. And if she has any hate for herself, he’s the deep seated root of it.
aggressive or forceful kiss w/ deimos please? :))) not in a poor consent situation, just like... deimos being very very intense about offered intimacy?
birthday memes.
—Kiss me. It’s not often he hears words like these, offered up with the lightest of touch against his skin, sometimes feeling sharp like petting a shark backwards. He curls his fingers into his palms which cut like talons into his skin, pooling gold dripping over his wrists and to the floor. He’s got poison inside of him and when he pulls Baldr close, he leaves smears of this gold poison anywhere his desperate hands find themselves.
His mouth falls open with the sound of a creaky hinge on a door, wider than should be possible, and he sighs like a scream two miles away in the dead of night, a rush of air and voice through his lungs and out of his mouth. His eyes are full of warmth as he presses his mouth to Baldr’s, but they won’t stop looking like television static, even as his curved smile reveals a mouth of mismatched teeth.
He doesn’t mean for it to be so intense, for his fingers to pull Baldr closer and harder as he tries to devour him whole, his mouth growing wider and more desperate. He aches for intimacy like the twist of a knife in the gut, moans like Saturn with his mouth so wide it can’t be considered much of a kiss anymore.
💔 or 💜 (progressing into straight up hateship as the plot of AG nears its end)?? maybe?? i can only endure so many bdsm jokes until i kinda start to ship it in earnest -- @ law. and 💟 'your husband might Literally Be A Divine Facet Of Me' / the weird affection baldr has for all dead rotten things, being a god who embodies tragic death himself -- @ laura.
CANON !!! CANON ! law and baldr’s weird bdsm love to hate eachother ( on law’s side ) ship is so canon my dudes. they definitely had a thing going on in the past, and a little of it is still there i think. they don’t gravitate toward eachother but when they’re together it’s THERE. Laura is the vulgar angry corpse wife everyone needs in their life and I’M HERE FOR THE SHADOW IS A FACET OF BALDR LIFE
“I don’t feel lost now that I’ve found you.” @heimdall :')
To be loved by all, what does that make you? Do you feel loved, or lost?
To be loved by the one that is loved by all, how does that make him feel?
He is no Bragi, but he usually has a knack for words, even if he is a man god of few actually spoken aloud. This time though, the words catch in his throat, ‘I watch you die.’ Watched, will watch, am currently watching. All these are true. He looks at Baldr in Dream, where fire and diamonds fall like rain,. He looks at Baldr and sees the mistletoe, sees constant death. Sees his own death reflected in Baldr’s irises, like a perfect mirror to the prince’s death.
Still he smiles, and holds Baldr’s right hand in both of his scarred branded ones. Heimdall brings Baldr’s hand to his lips, meeting it halfway. “And you’ll have me,” not always though, fate would not allow it, “my dear.” Eventually you’ll lose me.
Heimdall looks at Baldr and sees constant death. But — and this earns a much more genuine smile — he also sees his constant rebirth.
the words crack wednesday’s bones, a spearhead coming for him the way it came for baldr in another time, in another land. he can feel fragments of it stick to him, embedded like shrapnel.
for a moment, he actually looks like an old man: grey, tired, and carrying more than he’d like to admit, hunched under the weight of his own greed.
i can’t lose you. like they’ve already lost so many, never to be seen again, wandering off the beaten path into places even wednesday himself cannot peer into.
“you won’t,” he tells baldr, but the lie pricks his tongue and makes his mouth bleed.
