OF HEAVEN

Her breaths come in short, rapid bursts, chest heaving. She holds Alear’s gaze until the other woman drops her hands, conceding.

“I am sorry,” she croaks out, for good measure, since Alear had demanded it of her. She scoots back on her hands a bit, putting a bit more distance between them—if Alear wanted to try her tricks again, she’d have to lunge, and Baldr would be ready for her. Between them lay the bouquet of lilies, miraculously still in one piece even after the rampaging chaos.

Baldr looks at the bouquet, then back at Alear, then back at the bouquet.

“I am sorry,” Baldr says again, voice hoarse from all the shrieking and squealing and giggling. She rises, swaying, on unsteady feet. Takes another step back, hand finding the edge of the drink table (also trapped in the bubble with them) for support.

Looks at the bouquet. To Alear. To the bouquet. A silence stretches between them. It is so quiet in this little world of theirs. Peaceful, almost.

Her hand, the one clutching the edge of the table, slides backwards a bit. Baldr watches Alear intensely, gold and red eyes tracking wherever Alear’s blue and red ones went. They both had a red eye. Baldr hadn’t noticed that before. Alear did look quite pretty; some part of Baldr is almost sorry that she had so thoroughly ruined that perfect prettiness.

But the rest of Baldr is angry. Angry and humiliated. A dirty trick had brought her to heel, but Baldr had no intentions of letting Alear win, especially not like that.

Perhaps it was a dishonorable thing to do, but Alear had already struck a low blow—Baldr saw no quandary in going lower.

“I am sorry,” Baldr says once more, a true smile stealing across her face, as wide and tight as the one she had worn when Alear had nearly made her laugh to death, “that you are such a foolish, foolish girl.”

In one swift motion, Baldr grabs the punch bowl that had been right at the heel of her hand—filled to the brim with sparkling red drink, slices of citrus fruit, and a mountain of ice—and flings its contents at Alear, dousing her completely from head to toe.

With a great shriek of delight, Baldr swoops down, plucks the bouquet of yellow lilies from the floor before traipsing away.

She wishes she could laugh, but she thinks she is sick to death of laughter now—a shame, since this might’ve been the most fun she’d had in millenia.

She's at a physical disadvantage, but that's just fine. Baldr's right where she needs her-- at least, she thinks she is. It's still a gamble, but it's better than nothing. "AHA!" When her hands grab Baldr's sides, it's done with a deft motion that's aimed to disarm her in the most foul manner possible. An embarrassment, a shame-- a completely uncontrollable reaction that Alear hopes and prays will show. A tickle fight MASTERFULLY initiated, if she does say so herself. An unstoppable assault that aims for carefully calculated (not really) weaknesses up and down Baldr's sides, brows knit as she feels like a damn fool in the moment. WHAT IF THIS DOESN'T WORK? SHE'LL LOOK LIKE A PERVERT OR SOMETHING! "Give.... it..... BACK!"

“St-st-st-st-st—” she gasps, a drinking down a great lungful of air. She can barely get a coherent word out, she’s still making that godsawful sound. She squeals like a stuck pig, her arms dropping as her hands fly to try to pry Alear’s probing fingers off of her, the bouquet of lillies wholly forgotten. 

“E—nough!” she manages to screech out. She is laughing—why is she laughing? This isn’t funny at all. No, quite the contrary, it hurt. What was Alear doing to her? Her chest feels tight and her head spins. Great peals of laughter spill forth from her lips stretched upwards in an unwilling smile. What is wrong with her? Blindly, she claws at Alear. “E—nough—! I—I—I—I—hehehe—haha—HUAHUHUAHUAHUAHUAHAUHA—” 

It hurt terribly to breathe. It hurt to laugh, and yet she could not stop. She could not control her limbs, her face, her voice. She tries to get away, clinging to her last remaining shred of sanity, her head pounding as she worked her best to clamber off of the madwoman.

“I—please—I—heh heh ah ah hah—I cannot—I cannot—” She keeps clawing. At Alear, at her hands, at anything she could reach. “End this torment, I be—e—e—g—!” 

The first insult was the screaming, shrill and incessant, at her, like Alear in all her hard-headed stubbornness had not been the one to send them down this barbaric road. The second is when Alear hits Baldr with the bouquet. Baldr makes some inhuman, bird-like noise—half squawk, half screech, all fury—nose scrunched up and eyes closed tight as the stems smack against her lovely face. The final insult is when Alear keeps doing it.

“Stop—” SMACK. “—that—” SMACK. “—this—” SMACK. “—blerrrrgh—!”

Baldr spits out a lily petal. She feels a tugging by her bosom as Alear makes a move for one of her flowers, gloating about how Baldr will have nothing to show for this farce save for some ripped seams and a wild head of hair. Baldr grabs Alear by the wrist and bodily shoves her off, reversing their positions as she slams Alear onto the ground beneath her—now, Baldr looms above her. She snatches up the bouquet and hits Alear with it, square in the center of her face.

OH.

They teeter again, heels clipping and clopping like horse hooves, legs as steady as a newborn foal's before they both—by some folly of Alear's, Baldr is sure—go toppling to the ground in a squawking, undignified heap.

She grabs Alear by the shoulders once more with such force that her knuckles go white, pushing her as far back as she can at the awkward angle she is laying in.

"Wrong with me?" Baldr shrieks in reply, all sense of propriety loss in the sheer ridiculous embarrassment of the moment. She is as red as her left eye. "What is wrong with you, girl?! Twisting and writhing like an eel—if you had not been so stubborn and just given me a lily, would you—we—you are the most difficult, insufferable person I have ever had the displeasure of knowing!"

(Never mind that Baldr knew very few people; the denizens of Ásgarðr have always given Heaven's Judicator a wide berth, her sisters were lovely, and Heimdallr could be a mite taxing in her own right but Baldr had never minded her much...)

Her lovely golden gown has been hiked up her legs, a stitch or two popped and loosened by Baldr's wide-legged position. Her shoulders burned with the effort of holding Alear at an arm's length.

"Get up," Baldr hisses, trying to dislodge the other woman. Her hands drop from Alear's shoulders to her hips and under her thighs, her heeled shoes sliding uselessly along the tiled floor. "Get up, damn you, have you taken leave of your legs as well as your senses?"

It would not matter to Baldr one whit if Alear was from a beautiful and prosperous kingdom, in actuality. She would not even care if Alear were empress of all the earth—Baldr is the princess of heaven! (Was, really. Soon to be again, she tells herself.)

"I am the princess of a great, powerful land," she says smugly, swiping for the bouquet once more. She totters and teeters forward and for a moment she thinks she might fall but she staggers upright and stays standing. "A beautiful land, a large land, a powerful land—far greater and far more spectacular than anything you could have ever even seen, let alone begin to imagine."

Her mind wanders, for the briefest of moments, to Ásgarðr. Oh, Ásgarðr, the Celestial Realm, her beautiful citadel in the sky, the font from which all nine realms were poured and shaped from. Ásgarðr, the final rest of the exceptional, of the worthy, of heroes, of joy. She thinks of the endless blue sky, the lush rolling greens, the great woods, the white marble spires. Her father ruled there, Father-of-All, Maker of Man and First of the Gods—she was his sword, his most faithful sword, sharp and sure—til he cast her out for her own folly.

"And? What of the one or two times you extended your favor to me?" Baldr asks waspishly. "I never asked for your aid, and I am sure I never needed it! Unsure of yourself, are you? Need me to sing your praises, soothe your ego? Shall I rub your feet next?"

Baldr gives a valiant little hop. She does not jump very high. Oh, what she would give to float up and snatch the whole damned thing from Alear...

Oh, gods, not this again.

"Royalty only need exchange courtesies with those alike in status," Baldr snaps, reaching forward to snatch a flower from Alear's bouquet. "And last I knew, we were no equals, Alear."

She swipes at the lilies, but the childish girl keeps them just out of her grasp, and the tight gown constricting her steps was doing her no favors.

edain blanches immediately. she hadn't been 'on the market' as some would say for quite some time, so to say she shows utterly no interest would be an understatement.

"has anyone told you that you are like the sun?" yes, plenty when she was young. she opens her mouth to speak her disdain for such surface compliments when another woman barges back into the conversation.

the man freezes, turning to baldr. "now now, my sweet. is there not room for two beautiful ladies to outshine the sun? haha..." he laughs nervously.

"are you courting each other?" edain frowns, glancing between the two of them. while he offered honeyed words he wasn't anything pleasant to look at— and he seemed to switch attention to someone else so easily.

“Two?” Baldr barks. “You had swore to the sun, moon, and stars that I was the only one who would compare!”

The tips of her ears burn red in her embarrassment. She pivots on her heel, chewing the inside of her cheek. Loathe as she is to admit it, the other very beautiful woman is right. Someone with true devotion in their heart would not have his attention stolen so easily by… other worldly pleasures.

But Baldr is not so humble as to admit to that.