Thor Odinson (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
st_ormbreaker) wrote2018-09-25 05:04 pm
st_ormbreaker) wrote2018-09-25 05:04 pm
Now and then, hair and there
The most elven thing about Vax'ildan, ears aside, were the fancy braids in his glossy, back-length, raven-black hair, which he fashioned into new arrangements however he felt like on a given day. Since he'd got here and had more time than he might've back in Exandria for little indulgences, he had no reason not to practice his plaits and knots and ties. And he was a magpie for hair beads for sure, having collected them in all sorts of materials, different shapes and sizes, and then started crafting his own after that coraline he'd done for Corbie.
For the most part, it was only the girls who took notice and appreciated.
But if on a particular day (this very afternoon), at a particular time (right about now), a fellow was to come along and notice where Vax had set up on a blanket beneath a tree on a windless day and spent a while with the kit of tools Percy had made for him, just whittling and smoothing and shaping more of them like those already woven into his hair in places - he'd hardly mind.
Thor'd noticed Vax's hair within his first few days of arrival, and eventually, the person attached to it. Truthfully, Thor was envious of Vax's hair; more than once, he'd passed him in the inn and found his hand reflexively moving to his own hair, only to find it far more closely cropped than he liked it.
So when he comes upon Vax sitting by himself doing -- Thor squints from where he stands -- something, he deliberates the pros and cons of being in such close proximity to such beautiful dark locks (locks that reminded him a little of Loki's), then decides to make his approach.
"What are you doing?" he asks. "Are you making something?"
Vax blinks up from where he's been at work using a slender hand drill fixed in a special vice for small fiddly bits to put a hole in a pea-sized wooden bead carved with a rough whorl of a pattern. The big blonde fellow with the equally big blonde voice seemed jovial enough around the Inn, so Vax smiles at him before plucking the bead clear and offering it up to show him. "Beads," he explains, nodding to a tiny velvet pouch drawn open to reveal a handful more. Besides the ones he'd made were a few of stone or glass or metal that he'd picked up here and there across his travels. "I weave them into my hair, just for funsies. Or they could be for strands of jewelry or something, I suppose. They're not exactly in stock at the shop. I got bored enough to start making my own."
"I used to do the same thing when I was younger," he says, taking the offered bead into hand. He holds it up to get a better look of it; it's quite pretty. "Decorating my hair with ribbons and beads and braids and the like." Thor looks down at the other beads gathered in the bag, he finds that he feels similarly about those as well.
"But then this crazy old man shaved my hair off and you can't exactly braid hair you don't really have."
Thor offers the bead back to Vax. "It's fine craftsmanship," he says. "You'd have an easy time selling these in Asgard."
'Asgard' isn't a familiar-sounding place for Vax. But that isn't so strange here, with so many people from so many different worlds. What strikes Vax as far stranger as he takes back the bead is - "A crazy old man shaved your hair off?"
"Yes," Thor says, as if it's the most natural thing in the world to have a crazy old man shave your hair off. "I was captured and sold to this lunatic called the Grandmaster, who wanted to make me fight his champion in this gladitorial contest to the death. The haircut was easily the worst part of it."
Even worse than having his face slammed into by the Hulk repeatedly. That hadn't been particularly pleasant.
"At any rate, the guy I ended up fighting was a friend from work and we walloped one another and then we were roommates for a day or something." Was it two days? Thor wasn't sure.
Vax cocked an eyebrow high at him. He had his own share of nearly nonsensical anecdotes about almost killing one of his friends, but that was, as Steph sometimes cutely said it, very extra."I mean... I'm fond of my hair, too, but that's a lot to take in. I think if I were in your boots, I'd be a bit more put out about the whole abduction and gladitorial death contest where you have to fight your buddy thing. Or is that why the hair bothers you, because it's still a reminder of all that?"
"Hulk and I are friends," he says. "And neither of us died or were seriously or permanently injured so it's okay. The only thing that didn't come out intact at the end of all that was my hair, hence my distress."
Thor, God of Practicality.
"Hair was a big thing in Asgard," he explains. "It was part of our culture. It's rare to see an Asgardian with hair as short as mine."
Vex had shot Scanlan through the neck with an arrow. Grog had tripped him to make him eat shit. They'd all caught friendly fire now and then. So Vax understood insofar as long as you had healers around, it was hard to stay too angry over spilled...milk? He wasn't sure that made the abduction business any better, but who was Vax to tell someone he hardly knew how to feel about it?
"For elves, too," Vax replied instead, something a bit grudging in the words. He hated to admit they'd rubbed off on him at all, but it was the truth anyway. He thought about offering over some beads, but they'd be useless with such short hair as Thor had. "How are you liking it so short? Are you going to grow it out again?"
"The plan is to grow it out again," Thor says. "I'm thinking something around... here." Thor cuts a line in the air just below his shoulders. "I haven't had to grow it out since I was a child, and that was like, 1500 years ago."
Thor settles down next to Vax, his legs steepled. He gestures at Vax's ears.
"Are you some kind of elf?" he asks. Thor hasn't exactly had the greatest experience with the Dark Elves of Svartalfheim, but Vax didn't have the look or disposition to be one of them.
"I am half of an elf, by birth," Vax explains, though it's as if he has the taste of something unpleasant on his tongue as he does. "Which is no elf at all, the way most of them see it. But it was our mother who raised my sister and me, and she was human," he tucks the bead in with the rest. "Did you say 1500 years ago? ...You've aged well."
"Oh, yes," he says, as if just recalling it. "I'm Asgardian. God of Thunder."
He says this all very casually, as if discussing some lighthearted matter. To Thor, pronouncing himself as a God of Thunder comes as easily as a comment about the weather.
Which was, in fact, quite pleasant today.
Vax'ildan is fully aware that he has a contract of servitude with a death goddess that no one else seems to see or hear or feel. Most of the people he knows do magic, have slain dragons, have died and come back again or otherwise encountered some pretty incredible shit. So he tries not to judge too quickly.
But also, you have to stop and ask yourself how much you trust someone's word before you accept that they themselves are a god. And he doesn't know Thor at all really. ('Thor' doesn't even sound like a very godly name, does it?)
What all of that means is that it takes Vax a clearly conflicted moment to reply. "You are? A god? And you're stuck here with the rest of us chumps?"
Thor lets out an easy laugh.
"Trust me, I was just as surprised as you are," Thor says. "I'm trying to consider this a break from protecting the Nine Realms and enjoy it best I can."
A forced, but much-needed break.
If Thor was actually some kind of god, at least he wasn't being an asshole about it so far as Vax could tell. "Are the 'nine realms,' like... The different planes? The Feywild, the Elemental planes, the Shadowfell and the rest?"
"Different worlds," Thor clarifies. "Asgard, Midgard, Jotunheim, Svartalfheim, Vanaheim, Nidavellir, Niflheim, Muspelheim, and Alfheim -- all connected together by Yggdrasil, the World Tree. My father was the primary guardian of those realms until he died, at which point, the task was handed off to me."
He gives Vax a smile. "It's not an easy job." Especially not with the mess he was left with immediately after his father's death, and again after Asgard was destroyed. "I don't recommend it."
"I bet it's not," Vax offers, the very idea more than he wants to think about really. "Does that leave much time for a private life, being guardian of nine worlds?" Being champion of a goddess felt precarious enough. "Or maybe there's an equally strapping woman and a whole mess of bouncing blonde babes that Other-You's chasing after even now?"
Thor swallows. Nine realms were now eight. He didn't exactly have a private life to speak of, considering it was public knowledge that he and Jane had broken up. And of course, he had neither the woman he wanted nor her children he wanted, either.
"I had a human woman I was seeing," Thor says, thinking of Jane. It felt like it'd been a lifetime since the two of them had broken up now, but it still was painful to think about. Jane deserved someone who routinely existed on the same planet as her and didn't disappear for months on end in search of Infinity Stones, only to resurface sporadically just in time for human holidays or her birthday -- and sometimes, still miss those.
"But things didn't work out," Thor says, smiling thinly. "My responsibilities, her work on the convergence... it'd be tough on any relationship."
Thor directs a finger at Vax. "What about you?" he asks. "Are you married? Do you have any children?"
Whoa, what a judgey finger.
Vax gives a rueful smile, silent for a beat as he idly peers back into his pouch of beads, shifting the contents around a bit in one palm and watching them softly jostle. "I have a girlfriend who's a constant joy. My sister's here as well, and the better part of the misfit band of toys I knew from back home." It's a lot more than most people have. Not bad at all, considering he's living on borrowed time. So long as he doesn't stop to think about what he's lost or what he'll never be able to have, it's all around pretty great.
"And there's babies on the way, if you haven't heard." Zahra is due any time now, so he doesn't see any harm in saying so. He can keep the part about his sister's recent revelation to himself. (Mostly because she'll kill him if he starts telling everybody before she and Percival are ready.)
"I saw," Thor says, trying not to think of the time he inadvertently dropped in on Zahra in a most inopportune time. He'd stopped trying to use Stormbreaker to summon the Bifrost for him to escape days ago, and that particular incident (along with a few others) served as a warning if he thought to give it another go.
"I think it's nice. You've got a nice little ring of kids running around. I'm teaching the fire kid a few tricks."
The fire kid? Vax thinks of Jag first, but he's no kid. Does he know one of them that can do that sort of thing? He supposes he hasn't spent much time with the younger set. "You're teaching which of them what now?"
Thor's not sure he's supposed to say anything. Sure, Makoto was pretty open about him being a fire user, but sometimes, people were kind-of cagey about that kind of thing.
"How to control his powers, accuracy, that kind of thing," he says, waving a hand. "Gives me something to do. Like your bead-making."
Thor's pretty sure he'd be awful at it.
"Sure," Vax says after a long beat. He hasn't missed how Thor conspicuously avoided telling him much of anything about his student, and he can't say he has any better reason to ask who it is than curiosity. It does make him wonder what's the secret, the way a lock makes something otherwise mundane into a mystery, but it doesn't feel as if it's worth going in circles around. "Do you make fire as well?"
"No," Thor says, looking out at open area in front of him. "Not directly, anyway. A nicely-placed lightning bolt can set fire to something easily, but it's not like I'm humming fireballs left and right."
Fire? Not his thing. "It's mostly just lightning and thunder for me," he says. "Weather manipulation. Worked well when Jane and I had a kiss in the rain. People generally like not getting wet in the middle of your dramatic reunion."
He looks back over at Vax. "What about you?"
Vax thinks the idea of getting rained on in the middle of a reunion kiss is rather romantic, but maybe it's one of those things that sounds better in your head than it turns out in real life.
But that isn't what Thor means, he doesn't think. "Fire isn't really..." He starts to say, but then seems to reconsider. "Well. I've met a lot of interesting people, on my travels. So I've learned how to do lots of different kinds of things not especially well." It's true, just as what Thor said about teaching 'the fire kid' had been true - but also omitting a lot.
Putting his beads and the dainty tools safely aside, Vax mutters something under his breath and shapes his fingers with a purposeful wriggle. Then he cups the palm of one hand upward as if carrying something - and flickering flame wells between his fingers to fill his hand. It's not as impressive as it would be in the dark, of course, but the flame he's producing certainly dances as brightly and seemingly hotly as any dungeon torch, for all that Vax himself appears entirely uninjured. "Smoke 'em if you got 'em," he smiles at Thor.
Thor's face lights up at the demonstration. Despite having been exposed to many, many types of people all with a wide array of powers and abilities over the years, he still can't help but be delighted at the show of it.
"So you have the fire powers as well." Thor grins. "Can you throw it, like the Super Mario Brother?"
Thor had recently been exposed to video games by Quill.
"Is one of the Mario Brothers not as good or something?" Vax has no idea what it might be in reference to - he can't think of anyone here named 'Mario' - but he doesn't look phased by it either. Living in a world very unlike his own, and with Stephanie a non-stop wellspring of 'pop culture' references as she'd named them, he's learned to take them as novelties.
"I can, though." And a lot less clumsily since Regina first watched him try it, rolled her eyes, and shown him a much better technique. His fingers curl slightly, as if softly grasping a ball, and he aligns his shoulders, putting his elbow back - to pitch the fireball at a large stone a few yards away. The flame flares hotter and then bursts apart over the surface of the rock with a woosh, leaving a black mark where it impacts.
"No, both are good," Thor says solemnly. "I have played them both."
Thor watches as Vax as the fireball suddenly blazes from his hand and flies out to strike the rock quite impressively.
"That was amazing!" he says. He's seen such spells countless times before, but he never ceases to be amazed by the powers of others. "What else can you do?"
Clearly, Thor is entertained.
What 'having played both' means is well beyond Vax's understanding, but it also doesn't seem worth stopping to say so.
"Umm," Vax rather spends a beat thinking on the question of what he can do. "Not a whole lot that would look like much here and now?" The wings were always a hit, but he hasn't put on his armor for the sake of making a few beads. He has abilities to sense things, or aid allies in battle, or dodge when he needs it, but they aren't like Dorian's fireworks to look at. "Mostly I'm sneaky, is the thing. I do have throwing daggers, if you've never seen them before?"
"Absolutely," Thor says. "My brother -- daggers are his speciality. That and magic."
Thor pauses, and looks Vax over. Vex had mentioned when they exchanged messages that her brother and his had some glaring similarities. If he squints in just the right way, he thinks he can see it.
"You and my brother have some similarities," he says. "The dagger thing, the magic thing, the hair thing." A beat. "Your hair is much nicer than his, though. Little less greasy, more full."
Thor holds out his hands on either side of his own head as if to emphasizes the fullness of Vax's locks.
"...Thanks? I guess?" He leans back a bit from Thor's excitable hand gestures with an amused quirk of his lips, trying to think if he's met the man yet. "Does he look like you, your brother?" Vex and Vax, after all, looked exactly alike but for their assorted innies and outies.
"Oh no, definitely not. We're adopted brothers," he says. "Strangely enough, he looks a lot like our sister, though, and she's definitely mine biologically."
That did sort of weird Thor out. They had the same color scheme and everything. Part of him wondered if that'd been intentional when his father created Loki's Asgardian disguise. He hoped not.
"I don't think I've met him," Vax admits. "But I'll keep a look out. And no sign of your sister yet? Were the three of you close?"
Thor's shoulders shake with laughter at Vax's query.
"We didn't even know my sister existed until like, two weeks before I showed up here," Thor says. "My father imprisoned her in Hel, then when he died, she escaped, then broke my hammer, killed my friends, and slashed out my eye."
Thor says this all very easily, as if this were just a normal day for him.
"My brother and I were closer, though." Just in case Vax has any questions as to whether or not Thor has any sibling relationships bordering on normal.
"When gods have family squabbles, eh? What can you do?" Vax doesn't know what else can be said for something so surreal being taken as a given. "Does that mean your brother's a god too?"
"God of Mischief," he says. "My sister was the Goddess of Death. My father was the God of War and my mother, the Goddess of Love."
That always seemed appropriate for her, somehow. Out of all of them, she was the one who was most capable of showing it.
"I serve a Goddess of Death, but... I don't think it's your sister." Vax might not have said so, but for how matter-of-fact and casual Thor's talk of the gods was. "She ascended to godhood, but she was born a mortal. No godly brothers to speak of in the stories."
"Not my sister," Thor confirms. He doesn't know the other man particularly well, but Vax didn't strike him as the sort of person who'd worship Hela to begin with. Though truth be told, even if Hela's existence hadn't been hidden from the world, he still couldn't imagine anyone wanting to worship her. Asgard had made that clear when so many of her people had risen up against her and perished for their effort.
Still, Thor's interest has been piqued.
"What was your Goddess of Death like?"
"She is..." And it does feel important to make plain that she is present in this place, even if it isn't her world. Even if no one else sees or hears or senses her in the same was as Vax does. "She's immensely powerful, intimidating and mysterious. Quiet, hard to know, but there's also a kind of comfort and care in her. She tries to make the passage into death purposeful, and whatever comes after that peaceful."
So...not much like Thor at all.
Some of those things sound very much like Hela. At least the first few things do. But once Vax starts describing her as quiet, hard to know, and comforting, the differences become apparent.
Thor much prefers Vax's Goddess of Death to the one he knew. Not that it would take much for him to prefer any other over Hela.
"Have you ever met her --" he begins, twirling a finger. "-- your Goddess of Death?"
"Yyyyyyyyyyes?" It's a confirmation, but also a question. The Raven Queen doesn't exactly live in one of the rooms how Thor and his brother do. "She's more of a...presence, mostly. But she does speak to me from time to time, if it's something important."
"Do you just hear her?" he asks, tapping two fingers against the side of his head. "In your brain? Or do you see her, like in a vision?"
Thor's had experiences with both.
"I have seen her, like in a vision." Or a dream. "But more often, I just hear her, or feel her." Vax considers Thor. He isn't exactly what he would've expected of a divine being, but... "Does that mean anything, do you think?"
"I don't know what your gods are like," Thor says, looking out at the vastness in front of them. "The Midgardians -- the humans -- only worshipped as gods because of our great power and longevity. We are nothing like the classic gods of Earth. I do not know if your gods are like them, but it does not sound like your Goddess is anything like me. I don't communicate with anyone unless it's face to face like this."
For a second, it seems like Thor's going to stop there, but then he continues.
"In Asgard culture, we attribute great significance to such things. Dreams, visions, they all hold weight and meaning. But we're the only ones capable of finding that meaning."
Thor looks over at Vax.
"Do you think it means anything?"
"Maybe?" He supposes it is useless to compare the gods of one world to another when they seem so different. "...Pike followed Sarenrae, and I think what I've experienced is something similar to their relationship, but I don't know really. I've always tried to be more like Pike, to look to her as my example of faith and virtue and basically everything." But Pike isn't here anymore, and all his aspirations to become a follower of Sarenrae had gotten cocked up once he'd made his deal with the Raven Queen. "Having an experience is one thing, but then trying to make sense of it after the fact is totally another. I've been called a lot of things, but no one's ever charged me with being wise."
He glances back up at Thor. "If I sound at all confused, it's because I am."
And for whatever uncertainty he has in his own faith, at least it doesn't look like Kashaw's relationship to Vesh.
Thor lets out a little hum at that.
"I have visions, sometimes," he says, thinking of his father standing on that cliff in Norway. But it's not that vision that he talks about. It's another.
"Years ago, this woman triggered visions in me that I did not understand. I understand it now, but only because I have lived long enough to understand what the vision meant." The assertion he would be Asgard's destruction. The importance of the Infinity Stones.
"I took the one thing that I knew anything about and I decided to follow it," he says. "Even now, I am not sure if it was the right thing to do, but it was the only thing I understood about any of it. Is there anything about what she says that you understand, even if you don't understand what to do with it?"
"She talks a lot about fate, the natural order of life and death, and how certain lives and actions have a much bigger role in the grand scheme of things than we might realize." Wasn't that usually the way with higher powers, being vague about things mortals could barely begin to wrap their noggins around? "She doesn't usually deal in easy answers or specifics, not unless she feels she must intervene, but I think I get the gist of what you're saying."
So much of what Vax is talking about is hitting uncomfortably close to home.
"Fate and I have a complicated relationship," he says, smiling thinly. "I am sure your goddess has her reasons. It's all a matter of waiting and putting together those pieces yourself as she gives them to you."
Thor's giving him one of those world-weary smiles that Vax knows very well. He figures there must be more to the story where that came from, having to do with those years ago and the woman giving visions. It's a lot to unpack, that much he can see. But he's not sure it's his business, and they've been here chatting a while already, so he lets it lie. "That's too bad, about you and fate. 'Complicated' seems to mean loads of trouble in my experience," he suggests, reaching into his pouch of beads and rummaging around in there a few moments.
"Here," he calls as he finds what he's after. It's a round, bright red bead, that looks almost like a big fat berry at first, but it's got an uneven free-hand zigzag carved out from the stark white wood beneath the red paint. "I think this one's for you. For when you've grown your hair back," he explains, tossing it lightly to Thor.
Thor catches the bead and looks down at it. When he's done taking the sight of it in, he rolls it around in his hand. It's pleasantly smooth. Thor likes it.
"Thank you," he says, appreciatively. "If you ever need someone to braid your hair, let me know. Probably one of the biggest things I miss about having long hair."
Thor looks down at the bead again and rolls it in his hand again. "I should get going, though."
"Maybe next time on the hair-braiding. You've got important god stuff to do, I'm sure," Vax smiles at Thor and gives him a jot of a wave.
Maybe he isn't a god anything like Vax is used to, but he is definitely an interesting guy.
For the most part, it was only the girls who took notice and appreciated.
But if on a particular day (this very afternoon), at a particular time (right about now), a fellow was to come along and notice where Vax had set up on a blanket beneath a tree on a windless day and spent a while with the kit of tools Percy had made for him, just whittling and smoothing and shaping more of them like those already woven into his hair in places - he'd hardly mind.
Thor'd noticed Vax's hair within his first few days of arrival, and eventually, the person attached to it. Truthfully, Thor was envious of Vax's hair; more than once, he'd passed him in the inn and found his hand reflexively moving to his own hair, only to find it far more closely cropped than he liked it.
So when he comes upon Vax sitting by himself doing -- Thor squints from where he stands -- something, he deliberates the pros and cons of being in such close proximity to such beautiful dark locks (locks that reminded him a little of Loki's), then decides to make his approach.
"What are you doing?" he asks. "Are you making something?"
Vax blinks up from where he's been at work using a slender hand drill fixed in a special vice for small fiddly bits to put a hole in a pea-sized wooden bead carved with a rough whorl of a pattern. The big blonde fellow with the equally big blonde voice seemed jovial enough around the Inn, so Vax smiles at him before plucking the bead clear and offering it up to show him. "Beads," he explains, nodding to a tiny velvet pouch drawn open to reveal a handful more. Besides the ones he'd made were a few of stone or glass or metal that he'd picked up here and there across his travels. "I weave them into my hair, just for funsies. Or they could be for strands of jewelry or something, I suppose. They're not exactly in stock at the shop. I got bored enough to start making my own."
"I used to do the same thing when I was younger," he says, taking the offered bead into hand. He holds it up to get a better look of it; it's quite pretty. "Decorating my hair with ribbons and beads and braids and the like." Thor looks down at the other beads gathered in the bag, he finds that he feels similarly about those as well.
"But then this crazy old man shaved my hair off and you can't exactly braid hair you don't really have."
Thor offers the bead back to Vax. "It's fine craftsmanship," he says. "You'd have an easy time selling these in Asgard."
'Asgard' isn't a familiar-sounding place for Vax. But that isn't so strange here, with so many people from so many different worlds. What strikes Vax as far stranger as he takes back the bead is - "A crazy old man shaved your hair off?"
"Yes," Thor says, as if it's the most natural thing in the world to have a crazy old man shave your hair off. "I was captured and sold to this lunatic called the Grandmaster, who wanted to make me fight his champion in this gladitorial contest to the death. The haircut was easily the worst part of it."
Even worse than having his face slammed into by the Hulk repeatedly. That hadn't been particularly pleasant.
"At any rate, the guy I ended up fighting was a friend from work and we walloped one another and then we were roommates for a day or something." Was it two days? Thor wasn't sure.
Vax cocked an eyebrow high at him. He had his own share of nearly nonsensical anecdotes about almost killing one of his friends, but that was, as Steph sometimes cutely said it, very extra."I mean... I'm fond of my hair, too, but that's a lot to take in. I think if I were in your boots, I'd be a bit more put out about the whole abduction and gladitorial death contest where you have to fight your buddy thing. Or is that why the hair bothers you, because it's still a reminder of all that?"
"Hulk and I are friends," he says. "And neither of us died or were seriously or permanently injured so it's okay. The only thing that didn't come out intact at the end of all that was my hair, hence my distress."
Thor, God of Practicality.
"Hair was a big thing in Asgard," he explains. "It was part of our culture. It's rare to see an Asgardian with hair as short as mine."
Vex had shot Scanlan through the neck with an arrow. Grog had tripped him to make him eat shit. They'd all caught friendly fire now and then. So Vax understood insofar as long as you had healers around, it was hard to stay too angry over spilled...milk? He wasn't sure that made the abduction business any better, but who was Vax to tell someone he hardly knew how to feel about it?
"For elves, too," Vax replied instead, something a bit grudging in the words. He hated to admit they'd rubbed off on him at all, but it was the truth anyway. He thought about offering over some beads, but they'd be useless with such short hair as Thor had. "How are you liking it so short? Are you going to grow it out again?"
"The plan is to grow it out again," Thor says. "I'm thinking something around... here." Thor cuts a line in the air just below his shoulders. "I haven't had to grow it out since I was a child, and that was like, 1500 years ago."
Thor settles down next to Vax, his legs steepled. He gestures at Vax's ears.
"Are you some kind of elf?" he asks. Thor hasn't exactly had the greatest experience with the Dark Elves of Svartalfheim, but Vax didn't have the look or disposition to be one of them.
"I am half of an elf, by birth," Vax explains, though it's as if he has the taste of something unpleasant on his tongue as he does. "Which is no elf at all, the way most of them see it. But it was our mother who raised my sister and me, and she was human," he tucks the bead in with the rest. "Did you say 1500 years ago? ...You've aged well."
"Oh, yes," he says, as if just recalling it. "I'm Asgardian. God of Thunder."
He says this all very casually, as if discussing some lighthearted matter. To Thor, pronouncing himself as a God of Thunder comes as easily as a comment about the weather.
Which was, in fact, quite pleasant today.
Vax'ildan is fully aware that he has a contract of servitude with a death goddess that no one else seems to see or hear or feel. Most of the people he knows do magic, have slain dragons, have died and come back again or otherwise encountered some pretty incredible shit. So he tries not to judge too quickly.
But also, you have to stop and ask yourself how much you trust someone's word before you accept that they themselves are a god. And he doesn't know Thor at all really. ('Thor' doesn't even sound like a very godly name, does it?)
What all of that means is that it takes Vax a clearly conflicted moment to reply. "You are? A god? And you're stuck here with the rest of us chumps?"
Thor lets out an easy laugh.
"Trust me, I was just as surprised as you are," Thor says. "I'm trying to consider this a break from protecting the Nine Realms and enjoy it best I can."
A forced, but much-needed break.
If Thor was actually some kind of god, at least he wasn't being an asshole about it so far as Vax could tell. "Are the 'nine realms,' like... The different planes? The Feywild, the Elemental planes, the Shadowfell and the rest?"
"Different worlds," Thor clarifies. "Asgard, Midgard, Jotunheim, Svartalfheim, Vanaheim, Nidavellir, Niflheim, Muspelheim, and Alfheim -- all connected together by Yggdrasil, the World Tree. My father was the primary guardian of those realms until he died, at which point, the task was handed off to me."
He gives Vax a smile. "It's not an easy job." Especially not with the mess he was left with immediately after his father's death, and again after Asgard was destroyed. "I don't recommend it."
"I bet it's not," Vax offers, the very idea more than he wants to think about really. "Does that leave much time for a private life, being guardian of nine worlds?" Being champion of a goddess felt precarious enough. "Or maybe there's an equally strapping woman and a whole mess of bouncing blonde babes that Other-You's chasing after even now?"
Thor swallows. Nine realms were now eight. He didn't exactly have a private life to speak of, considering it was public knowledge that he and Jane had broken up. And of course, he had neither the woman he wanted nor her children he wanted, either.
"I had a human woman I was seeing," Thor says, thinking of Jane. It felt like it'd been a lifetime since the two of them had broken up now, but it still was painful to think about. Jane deserved someone who routinely existed on the same planet as her and didn't disappear for months on end in search of Infinity Stones, only to resurface sporadically just in time for human holidays or her birthday -- and sometimes, still miss those.
"But things didn't work out," Thor says, smiling thinly. "My responsibilities, her work on the convergence... it'd be tough on any relationship."
Thor directs a finger at Vax. "What about you?" he asks. "Are you married? Do you have any children?"
Whoa, what a judgey finger.
Vax gives a rueful smile, silent for a beat as he idly peers back into his pouch of beads, shifting the contents around a bit in one palm and watching them softly jostle. "I have a girlfriend who's a constant joy. My sister's here as well, and the better part of the misfit band of toys I knew from back home." It's a lot more than most people have. Not bad at all, considering he's living on borrowed time. So long as he doesn't stop to think about what he's lost or what he'll never be able to have, it's all around pretty great.
"And there's babies on the way, if you haven't heard." Zahra is due any time now, so he doesn't see any harm in saying so. He can keep the part about his sister's recent revelation to himself. (Mostly because she'll kill him if he starts telling everybody before she and Percival are ready.)
"I saw," Thor says, trying not to think of the time he inadvertently dropped in on Zahra in a most inopportune time. He'd stopped trying to use Stormbreaker to summon the Bifrost for him to escape days ago, and that particular incident (along with a few others) served as a warning if he thought to give it another go.
"I think it's nice. You've got a nice little ring of kids running around. I'm teaching the fire kid a few tricks."
The fire kid? Vax thinks of Jag first, but he's no kid. Does he know one of them that can do that sort of thing? He supposes he hasn't spent much time with the younger set. "You're teaching which of them what now?"
Thor's not sure he's supposed to say anything. Sure, Makoto was pretty open about him being a fire user, but sometimes, people were kind-of cagey about that kind of thing.
"How to control his powers, accuracy, that kind of thing," he says, waving a hand. "Gives me something to do. Like your bead-making."
Thor's pretty sure he'd be awful at it.
"Sure," Vax says after a long beat. He hasn't missed how Thor conspicuously avoided telling him much of anything about his student, and he can't say he has any better reason to ask who it is than curiosity. It does make him wonder what's the secret, the way a lock makes something otherwise mundane into a mystery, but it doesn't feel as if it's worth going in circles around. "Do you make fire as well?"
"No," Thor says, looking out at open area in front of him. "Not directly, anyway. A nicely-placed lightning bolt can set fire to something easily, but it's not like I'm humming fireballs left and right."
Fire? Not his thing. "It's mostly just lightning and thunder for me," he says. "Weather manipulation. Worked well when Jane and I had a kiss in the rain. People generally like not getting wet in the middle of your dramatic reunion."
He looks back over at Vax. "What about you?"
Vax thinks the idea of getting rained on in the middle of a reunion kiss is rather romantic, but maybe it's one of those things that sounds better in your head than it turns out in real life.
But that isn't what Thor means, he doesn't think. "Fire isn't really..." He starts to say, but then seems to reconsider. "Well. I've met a lot of interesting people, on my travels. So I've learned how to do lots of different kinds of things not especially well." It's true, just as what Thor said about teaching 'the fire kid' had been true - but also omitting a lot.
Putting his beads and the dainty tools safely aside, Vax mutters something under his breath and shapes his fingers with a purposeful wriggle. Then he cups the palm of one hand upward as if carrying something - and flickering flame wells between his fingers to fill his hand. It's not as impressive as it would be in the dark, of course, but the flame he's producing certainly dances as brightly and seemingly hotly as any dungeon torch, for all that Vax himself appears entirely uninjured. "Smoke 'em if you got 'em," he smiles at Thor.
Thor's face lights up at the demonstration. Despite having been exposed to many, many types of people all with a wide array of powers and abilities over the years, he still can't help but be delighted at the show of it.
"So you have the fire powers as well." Thor grins. "Can you throw it, like the Super Mario Brother?"
Thor had recently been exposed to video games by Quill.
"Is one of the Mario Brothers not as good or something?" Vax has no idea what it might be in reference to - he can't think of anyone here named 'Mario' - but he doesn't look phased by it either. Living in a world very unlike his own, and with Stephanie a non-stop wellspring of 'pop culture' references as she'd named them, he's learned to take them as novelties.
"I can, though." And a lot less clumsily since Regina first watched him try it, rolled her eyes, and shown him a much better technique. His fingers curl slightly, as if softly grasping a ball, and he aligns his shoulders, putting his elbow back - to pitch the fireball at a large stone a few yards away. The flame flares hotter and then bursts apart over the surface of the rock with a woosh, leaving a black mark where it impacts.
"No, both are good," Thor says solemnly. "I have played them both."
Thor watches as Vax as the fireball suddenly blazes from his hand and flies out to strike the rock quite impressively.
"That was amazing!" he says. He's seen such spells countless times before, but he never ceases to be amazed by the powers of others. "What else can you do?"
Clearly, Thor is entertained.
What 'having played both' means is well beyond Vax's understanding, but it also doesn't seem worth stopping to say so.
"Umm," Vax rather spends a beat thinking on the question of what he can do. "Not a whole lot that would look like much here and now?" The wings were always a hit, but he hasn't put on his armor for the sake of making a few beads. He has abilities to sense things, or aid allies in battle, or dodge when he needs it, but they aren't like Dorian's fireworks to look at. "Mostly I'm sneaky, is the thing. I do have throwing daggers, if you've never seen them before?"
"Absolutely," Thor says. "My brother -- daggers are his speciality. That and magic."
Thor pauses, and looks Vax over. Vex had mentioned when they exchanged messages that her brother and his had some glaring similarities. If he squints in just the right way, he thinks he can see it.
"You and my brother have some similarities," he says. "The dagger thing, the magic thing, the hair thing." A beat. "Your hair is much nicer than his, though. Little less greasy, more full."
Thor holds out his hands on either side of his own head as if to emphasizes the fullness of Vax's locks.
"...Thanks? I guess?" He leans back a bit from Thor's excitable hand gestures with an amused quirk of his lips, trying to think if he's met the man yet. "Does he look like you, your brother?" Vex and Vax, after all, looked exactly alike but for their assorted innies and outies.
"Oh no, definitely not. We're adopted brothers," he says. "Strangely enough, he looks a lot like our sister, though, and she's definitely mine biologically."
That did sort of weird Thor out. They had the same color scheme and everything. Part of him wondered if that'd been intentional when his father created Loki's Asgardian disguise. He hoped not.
"I don't think I've met him," Vax admits. "But I'll keep a look out. And no sign of your sister yet? Were the three of you close?"
Thor's shoulders shake with laughter at Vax's query.
"We didn't even know my sister existed until like, two weeks before I showed up here," Thor says. "My father imprisoned her in Hel, then when he died, she escaped, then broke my hammer, killed my friends, and slashed out my eye."
Thor says this all very easily, as if this were just a normal day for him.
"My brother and I were closer, though." Just in case Vax has any questions as to whether or not Thor has any sibling relationships bordering on normal.
"When gods have family squabbles, eh? What can you do?" Vax doesn't know what else can be said for something so surreal being taken as a given. "Does that mean your brother's a god too?"
"God of Mischief," he says. "My sister was the Goddess of Death. My father was the God of War and my mother, the Goddess of Love."
That always seemed appropriate for her, somehow. Out of all of them, she was the one who was most capable of showing it.
"I serve a Goddess of Death, but... I don't think it's your sister." Vax might not have said so, but for how matter-of-fact and casual Thor's talk of the gods was. "She ascended to godhood, but she was born a mortal. No godly brothers to speak of in the stories."
"Not my sister," Thor confirms. He doesn't know the other man particularly well, but Vax didn't strike him as the sort of person who'd worship Hela to begin with. Though truth be told, even if Hela's existence hadn't been hidden from the world, he still couldn't imagine anyone wanting to worship her. Asgard had made that clear when so many of her people had risen up against her and perished for their effort.
Still, Thor's interest has been piqued.
"What was your Goddess of Death like?"
"She is..." And it does feel important to make plain that she is present in this place, even if it isn't her world. Even if no one else sees or hears or senses her in the same was as Vax does. "She's immensely powerful, intimidating and mysterious. Quiet, hard to know, but there's also a kind of comfort and care in her. She tries to make the passage into death purposeful, and whatever comes after that peaceful."
So...not much like Thor at all.
Some of those things sound very much like Hela. At least the first few things do. But once Vax starts describing her as quiet, hard to know, and comforting, the differences become apparent.
Thor much prefers Vax's Goddess of Death to the one he knew. Not that it would take much for him to prefer any other over Hela.
"Have you ever met her --" he begins, twirling a finger. "-- your Goddess of Death?"
"Yyyyyyyyyyes?" It's a confirmation, but also a question. The Raven Queen doesn't exactly live in one of the rooms how Thor and his brother do. "She's more of a...presence, mostly. But she does speak to me from time to time, if it's something important."
"Do you just hear her?" he asks, tapping two fingers against the side of his head. "In your brain? Or do you see her, like in a vision?"
Thor's had experiences with both.
"I have seen her, like in a vision." Or a dream. "But more often, I just hear her, or feel her." Vax considers Thor. He isn't exactly what he would've expected of a divine being, but... "Does that mean anything, do you think?"
"I don't know what your gods are like," Thor says, looking out at the vastness in front of them. "The Midgardians -- the humans -- only worshipped as gods because of our great power and longevity. We are nothing like the classic gods of Earth. I do not know if your gods are like them, but it does not sound like your Goddess is anything like me. I don't communicate with anyone unless it's face to face like this."
For a second, it seems like Thor's going to stop there, but then he continues.
"In Asgard culture, we attribute great significance to such things. Dreams, visions, they all hold weight and meaning. But we're the only ones capable of finding that meaning."
Thor looks over at Vax.
"Do you think it means anything?"
"Maybe?" He supposes it is useless to compare the gods of one world to another when they seem so different. "...Pike followed Sarenrae, and I think what I've experienced is something similar to their relationship, but I don't know really. I've always tried to be more like Pike, to look to her as my example of faith and virtue and basically everything." But Pike isn't here anymore, and all his aspirations to become a follower of Sarenrae had gotten cocked up once he'd made his deal with the Raven Queen. "Having an experience is one thing, but then trying to make sense of it after the fact is totally another. I've been called a lot of things, but no one's ever charged me with being wise."
He glances back up at Thor. "If I sound at all confused, it's because I am."
And for whatever uncertainty he has in his own faith, at least it doesn't look like Kashaw's relationship to Vesh.
Thor lets out a little hum at that.
"I have visions, sometimes," he says, thinking of his father standing on that cliff in Norway. But it's not that vision that he talks about. It's another.
"Years ago, this woman triggered visions in me that I did not understand. I understand it now, but only because I have lived long enough to understand what the vision meant." The assertion he would be Asgard's destruction. The importance of the Infinity Stones.
"I took the one thing that I knew anything about and I decided to follow it," he says. "Even now, I am not sure if it was the right thing to do, but it was the only thing I understood about any of it. Is there anything about what she says that you understand, even if you don't understand what to do with it?"
"She talks a lot about fate, the natural order of life and death, and how certain lives and actions have a much bigger role in the grand scheme of things than we might realize." Wasn't that usually the way with higher powers, being vague about things mortals could barely begin to wrap their noggins around? "She doesn't usually deal in easy answers or specifics, not unless she feels she must intervene, but I think I get the gist of what you're saying."
So much of what Vax is talking about is hitting uncomfortably close to home.
"Fate and I have a complicated relationship," he says, smiling thinly. "I am sure your goddess has her reasons. It's all a matter of waiting and putting together those pieces yourself as she gives them to you."
Thor's giving him one of those world-weary smiles that Vax knows very well. He figures there must be more to the story where that came from, having to do with those years ago and the woman giving visions. It's a lot to unpack, that much he can see. But he's not sure it's his business, and they've been here chatting a while already, so he lets it lie. "That's too bad, about you and fate. 'Complicated' seems to mean loads of trouble in my experience," he suggests, reaching into his pouch of beads and rummaging around in there a few moments.
"Here," he calls as he finds what he's after. It's a round, bright red bead, that looks almost like a big fat berry at first, but it's got an uneven free-hand zigzag carved out from the stark white wood beneath the red paint. "I think this one's for you. For when you've grown your hair back," he explains, tossing it lightly to Thor.
Thor catches the bead and looks down at it. When he's done taking the sight of it in, he rolls it around in his hand. It's pleasantly smooth. Thor likes it.
"Thank you," he says, appreciatively. "If you ever need someone to braid your hair, let me know. Probably one of the biggest things I miss about having long hair."
Thor looks down at the bead again and rolls it in his hand again. "I should get going, though."
"Maybe next time on the hair-braiding. You've got important god stuff to do, I'm sure," Vax smiles at Thor and gives him a jot of a wave.
Maybe he isn't a god anything like Vax is used to, but he is definitely an interesting guy.