Chapter Text
„You’re bored, my Queen.”, Sigrun whispered and Freya... Freya had to agree.
She was bored. She was more than bored. She was slipping into an existential ennui that only the mortals should actually get to experience. She’d never felt like that in her life and she had been alive for a very, very, very long time. But.
But she had also not ever lived in times of peace. When she’d been born and then all throughout her childhood and young adulthood, her land had been in a constant tug of war with Odin. Or with the Light Elves. Or with the Dark Elves. Or with the Dwarves. Or with the Giants. Or just with themselves. Never with the Midgardians. And then she had married the Allfather and the war had been over.
What a joke. What a farce.
The war hadn’t been over, it had simply moved inside her bed chamber and inside her heart. Odin hadn’t been hard to care for, but he’d never cared back for a young and fierce and obstinate goddess from a land that he wanted to subjugate. But her husband had been a brilliant actor and she had believed his ruse for a while. A long while. A good while. Her people had hurt, feeling forgotten by their goddess and being drained dry by Odin’s greed. Her child, her heart, her sole purpose in life, had been taken from her and twisted into a beast that she hadn’t been able to save. Not when it mattered. Not from himself.
Not when she had been the one to wrong him first. Baldur. Her precious boy. Her beloved, precious, gone for a hundred winters already boy. And still. Still, she had hoped until the very last moment of Baldur’s life, she had hoped that he would be hers to reach. That he would look at her with the same love he’d once felt for his mother one more time. That she could see in her son’s eyes her son once more and not Odin’s puppet. She’d been cast out of Asgard and Baldur had been left behind, already so obedient of his father and already hating her so much. Too much. But she’d never stopped loving her child, her only child, blood of her blood and her sole heir and he had been so much hers when he’d been a babe and so much Odin’s when Baldur had grown. She’d loved Baldur until his dying breath. And then she kept on loving her son, a part of her gone with that last flicker of light in his eyes. Even then, with her son’s fingers wrapped around her throat and with him trying to end her life, she’d loved him.
But Kratos had cared for her far more than she had cared for herself. And Baldur ended up dead by the Spartan’s hand and Freya had been...
Vengeful.
„My Queen. You’re also prone to slipping into your own head lately. Flights of fancy, not of wings. You need... Freya. I speak as Sigrun. As your friend. Not as the Valkyrie Sigrun, your subordinate. My friend. You need to get out of here. For a while, at least.”, the younger warrior snorted at Freya’s raised eyebrow and pulled her helmet off, lowering it to the dais next to the throne on which the goddess was sitting. Straight backed. She didn’t like lounging on seats of power. They weren’t for relaxing. They were for respecting and for serving the people. „You don’t take an entire season off. I know you won’t. But you can’t continue like this. You’re bored. You’re exhausted. You have almost fallen asleep in the Valkyrie Council chamber this morning. Gunnr had to fish your braids out of the mead.”
„It was just one braid and Gunnr is exaggerating as always. It wasn’t in the mead.”, the goddess sighed, standing up from the throne and letting herself take stock of... Of her own body. Of her own mind. Of herself. She was exhausted, but it wasn’t an exhaustion of the flesh. No. More an exhaustion of the mind. Of the minutiae of living. She wasn’t a goddess of war. Except how she was the Queen of the Valkyries and how she’d never been meant to be a leader in times of peace. She didn’t know how to strive when the only thing that she was fighting was a new reform that her advisors wanted to implement, but that her people hated viscerally. And she wasn’t even being ungrateful for the peace. No. She’d fought for it. Bled for it.
Sacrificed Baldur to it, in a way.
Sacrificed Freyr to it, quite directly. Not by her hand, of course not, but her twin had killed himself while stopping Ragnarok from obliterating all of the realms and. Thus. Freyr had also died for the peace.
Odin had too. Loki had taken Odin’s soul and had trapped it. Then Sindri had destroyed the little ball that held the Allfather and that had been that. Gone. In a puff of smoke, Odin, her nightmare and her husband, gone in an instant.
She had been free. Alone. But free. But alone. But free. Free to be. Free to roam. Free to rebuild Vanaheim. Free to broker her own deals with Sif and free to help with the search for the Giants’ souls that Loki had started on, a hundred winters back. She had. Sometimes, the young boy who’d grown into a man and then into a god had called upon her to help him retrieve a particularly tricky soul from a particularly tricky spot.
On her and on his father.
Kratos.
She licked her lips, her mouth suddenly drying out. It had been doing that a lot around that particular god of war lately. If by lately, one meant the past decade or so. They had only been in the same space twice and both times had been when Loki had asked them for help. But still.
Kratos.
She smiled and nodded.
She knew exactly where she would go and what she would do.
Or whom, better yet.