the black heart of magnetic north (midsommar | dani/pelle)

[fiachairecht]

the black heart of magnetic north. midsommar, deni/pelle. may queen responsibilities a year on, ft ghosts. 944w, rated t. for psychomachia in writingrainbowexchange black.

Summer has come again by the time Dani notices them — grey-blue figures wavering at the edges of the long not-night that spilled in through the barn doors. They are waiting for her when she comes in from the meadows, her arms aching from the work; they sit next to her when the young people gather in their circles for music to welcome the beginning of the harvest season. Always at the edge of her vision, always not — quite.

Not quite there. Not quite noticed by the others.

She pushes them out of her mind, at first, the tricks of light that they surely are, and it is easy — easier to ignore them than it is to call it ignoring, even. Ignoring had been for the empty days before, when she hadn't noticed the world spin past her. Ignoring is not for the full days now, when she cooks and plants and comes home (home, home) to listen to Henrik's stories and tell the spring-children stories of her own, to sew stuffed toys for Maja's babe and learn how to carve runes from blocks of wood, to sing in her new language and watch Karin's face light up when she finishes a conversation without a single word of her old. 

Dani is not ignoring the shadows, she is choosing the light.

It is all she has. For a week, she doesn't think that her family, her light might have created the things in the doorway.

Until they are undressing for bed — Dani already in her long thin nightdress, Pelle just beginning to unlace the boots he had worn into the woods — and Pelle says, "You should give them something, by now, if you are not going to follow."

"Vad pratar du om, älskade?" Dani murmurs without thinking. She rolls over to bury her face against his back, and the pushed-together beds creak under her body weight. The others in the barn are drifting to the other end of the room, upstairs, leaving them with the closest thing to privacy Dani ever wants anymore.

"The ones in the doorway," Pelle says. Still in English, and the words curl cold against her, though the season has yet to fully turn. "You have been Queen for nearly a year, Dani, and tended only to the living."

Dani breathes in, blood and cedar needles, and breathes out, warm again. "I hadn't thought," she says, and then, as he reaches back to rest his hand on top of hers, "Aren't the dead simply for the earth?" The ättestupa has been empty since last Midsummer, and part of her is still relieved.

"Their bodies are," Pelle says. She sits up as he turns around, lets her eyes fall shut as he cradles her face in his hands. "Dani, älskade, you must tend to their wraiths until they can rejoin us."

She tilts her head up to meet his kiss, which is long and deep and tastes of the strong tea they had drunk with dinner. No matter how she tires, of work, of life, she will never tire of this reminder that she is seen, that she is once more present in the world. Of course the dead would miss that.

"Come with me?" Dani asks against his lips, when her mouth is free once more.

He nods, and lifts her to her feet with ease.

Pelle leads her through the shadows, the blue shading into black that has grown to cover the doors. They emerge into a true midday, the noon of morning's end rather than the noon of a night that never fell, and into the wheat fields where Ylva and Dan are waiting for them.

The stalks between them are flattened, the sharp lines of dagaz keeping them apart.

"Give them what they need, Dani." Pelle's voice in her ear, calm and quiet. Wind whips past after his words, but the field doesn't move. Only the wraiths do, the tattered edges of their skin and hair lifting for the dance.

There are crushed flowers bleeding white into the flattened wheat. "Give them their gift," Pelle says.

And it's easy, then. In the sudden absence of the wind clarity floods her instead and the shadows given their true form watch as she approaches, walks a circle around the wraiths and reaches through them to run her hand over the dry stalks. They let her, smiles wide across their ruined jaws.

Wheat tears through her palms until her Queen's blood is dripping on the wraiths, until the wheat is growing up from the parallel lines again, green and bright. Until all that is left is the cross of gebō, and the wraiths begin to stand.

"You can come back now," she says, and though Pelle is at her back she knows his approval is as bright as the sun.

Ylva is in her own bed when they return — the bed that she had slept in all her summers. Her face, too, is summer's face, whole and bright. "Thank you," she says, fading towards the stairs, and, behind her, thank you, thank you, murmured by the walls, by the family coming forward to press flowers into Dani's mended hands.

Pelle's arms are around her waist, drawing her towards their bed as the others move back. "She needs sleep, now," he says, and Dani thinks — perhaps I was sleeping this whole time. Ylva was dead,  Dan was dead, Ylva is beaming at her from the upper floor of the barn and in the summer Dan is stringing a nyckelharpa.

But she curls into Pelle's side and knows that asleep, awake, she is home, and that is what she can always return to.