a time to be so small {Beowulf}

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Sometimes Sunny felt almost self-sufficient. She was sixteen years old now. She could take care of herself in all the ordinary day to day situations a sixteen-year-old was confronted with. She could get food and buy clothes and get herself to class and not fall down and break an arm or anything going to class.

But sometimes, she felt like things were a little overwhelming. Like she couldn't quite deal with the pressure of everything. LIke something terrible was going to happen if she wasn't oh-so-careful. Because it had taken her so long to get the day to day things right, to get over the terror of looking over her shoulder every time she felt like she was being followed.

When she had met Beowulf she had, for the first time, been able to stop worrying a little bit about the not-normal things she had been scared of for so long, because she'd felt like someone had her back, someone who could really and truly protect her. Not that she'd doubted her brother and sister's willingness to protect her, but most of the time, Violet and Klaus had been in as much danger as she was, if not more.

And now she wasn't sure if she'd…done anything…to change her newfound protection, and it made her feel nervous, really nervous, like maybe she was going to be plunged back into her state of uncertainty. She didn't remember what she'd done at the dance after a certain point - mostly after she had felt herself fading into darkness and some other, fierce presence taking over her…and that was the last thing she could recall.

And she was still worried whether he would think she was freaky and artificial for having done what she did to her hair, and…just…

She needed hot chocolate. Or tea. Or something nice and warm to just…make her feel safe. She managed to acquire a cup of said hot chocolate after a near miss with a person traipsing through carrying a snowboard, and headed over to the fireplace, where she planned to just take a seat and hope nothing catastrophic happened.

And then…he was there, and she promptly dropped her hot chocolate all over the edge of the couch and onto her feet and the bottom of her skirt.

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Beowulf preferred to sit indoors on cold days. And he much preferred to sit by the fire and hear stories told by the skald in his village. But he had to keep reminding himself that they had no skalds here or bards or storytellers of any kind. Instead he had to settle for books and it was a lucky thing that Beowulf could read at all. Most Vikings couldn’t and it had just been his luck to be born as a prince of Geatland instead of the son of a farmer. The Fates had been watching over him.

But it didn’t seem to matter to anyone here that he was a prince of anything. He was merely a Viking, merely a man with a weapon which was just fine with Beowulf. If he didn’t have to interact with people then he was better off really. Others were often loud and boisterous, always needing to creative some kind of ruckus to fill the silence. They didn’t see what Beowulf saw in silence. He embraced silence and preferred it. Talking seemed so pointless because most people had nothing to say. And yet they talked anyway. They had to have their niceties and comments about the weather as if anyone really cared about that kind of thing anyway. It was all absurd. It was stupid really. People never said what they meant or meant what they said. And then of course they wondered why Beowulf was such a quiet fellow, why he never spoke. And then people didn’t seem to care about the answer either.

It was no wonder why Beowulf slipped off to sit quietly and alone in private corners. And it was no wonder at all why the young Viking would be sitting on the hearth very near to the fire, seat on his fur cape and wishing they had warm mead here. A book was in his hand, but it was unopened. Beowulf had meant to read, but he quite disliked most of the stories that were written down in these books anyways. They were far removed from the Viking tales they would tell back home and he didn’t like them, so what was the point in reading them?

Beowulf stared endlessly into the fireplace. But he heard something behind him and turned to look and there was Sunny. She was standing there looking like a deer in the headlights and Beowulf didn’t know what to do. Something had happened to Sunny on Halloween. She had been different. She had spoken to him in his own language. She had looked like Sunny, but she hadn’t been his Sunny. But this girl before him, though her hair was blonde, looked more like his Sunny than that other girl. But still, Beowulf couldn’t be sure. He had to be sure if this was the real Sunny or not. “Skor?”

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She didn't know what to focus on. The chocolate? The liquid dripping down the edge of the couch? The boy she was trying so hard to make proud of her? The scalding hot liquid on her ankles? Oh. Yes. The last one was probably the best idea.

"Ow." she said quietly, and leaned over to brush away the splashes of liquid remaining on her skin. As soon as she did, it didn't hurt anymore, it probably wasn't hot enough to have actually burned her, but it hadn't felt good for the moment. When she popped back up, he was looking at her. And he said something, something she didn't quite understand. Skor? The score of what?

She shook her head.

"No," she managed. "Not a score. That was the opposite of a score. That was…no points for Sunny." She shook her head again, and came around the couch to stand a little closer to him, not sure what to do with her chocolate-dripping skirt and now-empty cup.

There was a moment or two of awkward silence, then she bit her lip and told herself that if she didn't say something soon, he would probably never speak to her again.

"Book?" she said, which meant something like "oh, what are you reading, is it a good book? please let's discuss literature or something other than the fact that I've just splashed hot chocolate everywhere and have nothing to clean it up with."

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Beowulf watched her, carefully. She wasn’t the confident Sunny that he had spoken with at Halloween. And now he could see that she didn’t understand Norse at all, so she couldn’t possibly be the other Sunny, the fake one. This was the real Sunny. This was his Sunny.

He shook his head at her answer. “Skor is Norse,” he explained. “It means hair.” He had been asking about her hair, which was blonde now like it had been on Halloween. She had passed his test. He knew now that she didn’t speak Norse and wouldn’t have understood what he had been asking her. “Why did you change your hair?” He couldn’t help the question. The more he looked at her the more he wanted to know. He had liked her hair as it had been before. He wasn’t sure how he felt about her hair. If he said he didn’t like it that would probably hurt her feelings, but he wasn’t sure he liked it either. He had to get used to it.

He patted the floor next to him, calling her over and inviting her to sit beside him. He didn’t mind Sunny’s company. If he had he wouldn’t have agreed to teach her how to use an axe. He wouldn’t have volunteered to protect her. There was something about Sunny that was calming. He tolerated her more than anyone else here because she was quiet and didn’t ask stupid questions.

“Norse Poetry,” he told her in response to the question. It was his favorite, after all.

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Sunny looked down at the spilt chocolate and blushed again.

"Oh." she said quietly. She didn't speak Norse. Beowulf knew that. Unless this was the next phase of her Viking training or something, learning Norse, and she was doing miserably at it. Oh, no. What if he had been testing her and she'd failed terribly? Wait…hair…

"I don't know," she said, and she closed her eyes for a moment, pulling the right words out of all the cupboards in her mind and assembling them into different order in her mind, trying to put together a good sentence. It was like…making a necklace out of beads. There were so many little drawers in Sunny's mind, little drawers of words and phrases she'd read in books, picked up from quotes on the television and on the radio, and they were all stored away in such haphazard fashion that she had to dig through them all before she found the ones she wanted, the ones that would go together to make a good necklace - or in this case, sentence.

"Because…my hair was brown. And it didn't…disting…no, it didn't stand out. It made me feel like I was hiding and hoping no-one would notice me, and now it's…" she ran her hands through her hair. She could say what she wanted about it, but it was undeniably impossible to ignore now. "If people notice me, I have to learn to not be afraid of them."

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Beowulf was patient. He could wait for Sunny to find the words that she was looking for. He tolerated her more than any other person here at this absurd school so he figured he could wait as she searched for an answer. He understood to a degree. He spoke Norse first and foremost. This English was very different from Norse. There were moments when he couldn’t think of the right word in English, so he understood.

She was trying to learn not to be afraid of people. People wouldn’t ignore her now that her hair was so bright and she couldn’t hide from them. It made Beowulf want to protect her even more. He had told himself that he was going to be her protector anyway. He would protect her from the people she feared, but he couldn’t protect her from the fear. That was a battle she would have to fight alone.

He stood and crossed to her, reaching out to touch her hair. It was different than the Sunny he had first met, but it wasn’t a bad kind of different. She was still his Sunny. “I like it,” he said, then dropped his hand back to his side. “You’re not afraid of me,” he told her. Well, he hoped she wasn’t afraid of him. “You don’t need to be afraid of other people. I will always protect you.”

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Beowulf probably did understand Sunny's predicament about as well as anybody could have. He had grown up in a dangerous place too, she thought. It was probably not very safe to be the son of a Viking king or whatever, because people usually wanted to kill people who were in places of power. But Beowulf had adapted to his situation in an entirely different way than Sunny. When Sunny's internal flight-or-fight warning kicked in, her response was always flight.

But since Beowulf had come along, she'd been more inclined to consider standing her ground. That didn't mean that she didn't still want to run and hide beneath something large and solid every time a teacher called on her in class, and it didn't mean making long speeches out loud had gotten much easier for her, but it did mean that she took a moment now to consider whether she just might be able to not run for once.

Most of the time she still did. But not when it came to Beowulf. She reminded herself, constantly, that she could trust him, that he wanted to protect her, that there was no way he would ever betray her to Olaf like other people had done.

"I'm not afraid of you," she agreed. She was overcome with the sudden urge to hug him, but she knew from prior encounters that Vikings weren't so good at physical displays of affection, so she gave him a great big smile instead. "I'm glad you like it. I didn't like it at first."

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Beowulf didn’t want Sunny to be afraid of him. She was one of the few he tolerated in this absurd place. She had even made him those chocolate square things. Those had been very good. If Sunny was afraid of him then he might as well just go back to Geatland to kill monsters. What good was he here if one of the few people who didn’t mind was afraid of him?

“It’s different,” he told her, keeping himself from reaching out and touching her hair again. He didn’t want her to think he had some strange fascination with her hair. That would be absurd. Vikings didn’t have strange fascinations with hair. Hair was hair. As long as it was out of the way that was the only thing that mattered. It was not a good thing when it was in the way. Hair was absurd.

“Different isn’t bad,” he told her. Different wasn’t always bad. Different could be good and not at all uncomfortable. He wasn’t uncomfortable at all. That would be absurd. This was his Sunny, his Kettlingr. He was going to teach her to be a Viking just because he could. There was no other reason because that would be absurd. Not to mention stupid.

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Sunny's blush had just begun to fade, but it welled right back up, and she put her hands to her cheeks again in another futile attempt to scare it off.

"Lindring" she said, which meant something like "I am so glad you don't think it's horrible, I was so terribly worried that you would hate it and never want to speak to me again."

She shifted from one foot to the other and back again, then looked up at him uncertainly.

"Hungry?" she asked. She knew there was a kitchen around somewhere, and suddenly she had the urge to cook something - that seemed to be the case whenever she was uncomfortable or uncertain in a situation. It wasn't very practical, one couldn't just go through the real world cooking whenever one felt awkward, but it seemed to be an alright solution in her life at present.

Then, because he had touched her hair, she reached out and touched his…only it was more of a poke, and she drew her hand back immediately as if she were afraid he might bite her for it.

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Beowulf was finding this to be all very uncomfortable and he didn’t know what to do with himself. He didn’t even know what Sunny said, but it was probably something that meant something good. Well, he assumed that meant something good, but he really couldn’t be sure.

Beowulf shrugged at the question. He was a Viking and wouldn’t turn down food, but he didn’t want Sunny to go out of her way to make him something, though he did admit that she was a very good cook. He also didn’t want to hurt her feelings either. “If you want,” he managed after a moment.

The Viking completely froze when Sunny reached out and poked at his hair. He didn’t know what to do and he didn’t know why she had done that. There wasn’t anything wrong with his hair, was there? He wasn’t sure how to react to that, so he just looked at Sunny. He had no idea what to say to her either. This was strange and he didn’t like it.

Beowulf shifted awkwardly. Then, on impulse, the young Viking reached forward and grabbed one of Sunny’s hands and just held it.