4. The Benumbed #3
“That’s it. You are good, Balder. Not perfect. Good . So good. Just as you are, you… are enough.” Saying words I had never heard spoken to me made tears prick my eyes, yet it felt a little like I had heard them for my sake too just by seeing the gratitude in Balder.
I reached back between his legs to begin circling his hole. It was more to test if entering him was how he wanted this, and his trembling at my tenderness, my caution to ensure he enjoyed what he was feeling, became an eager nod.
I rid us of what remained of our clothing, tilted Balder’s hips back to settle between his thighs, and rested one hand on his throat again. Just rested it there. With the other, I gathered some of our fluids and used it to open his passage.
I thought of Freyr circling my stretched hole, so with every thrust of a finger, I followed the intrusion with a grazing of my thumb around Balder’s ring.
“ Oh …”
“Yes, so good for me, aren’t you?” I said.
An errant "good boy" could be so belittling, as if saying, ‘what a subservient slave you are to be exactly what I want of you.’ But if said right, if intended right, it could mean the world. I’d only ever dreamed of Thorsten saying it as kindly as I spoke it to Balder.
“So good. More than enough for all those who love you. That smell of ash included.”
The sway of the bed returned, along with the haze, like the poison was passing between our fluids, but it wasn’t as overpowering. Balder needed to be purged of it.
I removed my fingers to align my cockhead, and like before, only barely, just on the right side of what Balder thought he wanted of my grip, I tightened my fingers around his throat.
He needed the reminder of his trauma, yes, but replaced with something kinder, with a sweet dream to rid him of the nightmares that plagued him.
“I know your weariness.” I pushed my tip inside him. “I know the sadness your brethren weather too. What peace it would bring them to know that even Balder can feel lost like they do.”
“You think so?”
“Yes.” I used only my tip at first to fuck him, going deeper with each thrust. My grip on his throat loosened to a mere circling of my thumb around his bulb, just like I had grazed his hole.
“You would not let them down to show weakness. You would ease them that, now, while they feel their weakest, their brother does too.”
Once I had fully sheathed myself within his passage, though the clenching in my gut urged me to snap my hips, I pulled out just as slowly.
“Do you believe me, Balder?” I circled the bulb of his throat again.
“I-I… I don’t know.”
“Then we are far from done.” I entered him again, so slowly that I shook as much as he did, and the bed rocked upon invisible waves. It had to be this way. He needed it.
Perhaps I did too.
Balder moaned with each retraction and slow slide in again. The gentle pressure I kept on his throat was accompanied by my other hand returning to his nipples, flicking them to become pert points.
“Do you believe? Hm? Do you believe you are enough?” I closed my eyes, pathetic in my own way, because the question was not only for him. This was my third god, of how many more, I didn’t know. I could still fail and lose my freedom. I could not falter. I could not believe I was less than enough.
“I-I…”
Balder was close. I had barely touched the arc of his cock, but he was close. I moved my hand down to curl around him with the same pressure as the hand on his throat.
I stroked.
“I—!” Balder turned his head, and a tear streaked down his cheek.
I stroked him as I rocked, in and out of him, as slowly as I could. I didn’t tell him he felt perfect, even though he did, because perfect was not necessary for good, or great, or enough . It never should be.
Not even for gods.
“ Oli .” Balder bit his bottom lip, and as his hips began to stutter—
I pulled my hand from his cock and pulled out with my tip barely in him.
“Oli!”
“Enjoy this as you come down from being so close to the precipice.” I dragged my thumb up and down his throat. “I will tumble you over it, but only once you believe. Only once you are quaking with such pleasure that to reach the apex makes you weep, and you finally admit… perfection is overrated.”
Balder laughed. He didn’t struggle. He let his breathing calm, and only once he was still, did I begin again, fucking him slowly, while gently squeezing his neck, and alternating my free hand from his nipples to down, down his stomach, wrapping around his cock.
I would return to press my nail to his slit, stroke him, fondle his sac, but once he started to pant, close to coming, I’d ask:
“Do you believe it yet? That you are enough?”
If he hesitated, and he always did, I started over, slower than before. “ Please .”
“Do you believe?”
Balder could barely move by the fifth time I asked, with so much prerelease coating my hand that a pool was gathering in his navel. “I… want to. I want to believe.”
“Good,” I praised, quickening my thrusts and strokes in reward. “Because you are enough, Balder. You are.”
“Thank you.”
The honesty made me pause, and in that moment, I thought I felt the eyes of Loki from the memory of Balder’s death.
I looked, but the scene was as it had been before.
“Please… please …” Balder was writhing now, fervently trying to fuck up against me where I had stilled, not to chase something he didn’t need, didn’t want, but to revel in feeling.
He was feeling, starting to feel again, to truly feel again…
Because of me.
“Do you believe?” I slid my hand from his throat to rest over his heart and bent to kiss him.
He moaned through the tangle of our tongues, and when I finally pulled up, he answered, “ Yes .” His smile grew, and he glanced around the room, prompting me to look again too.
The scenes had all changed. They were still of Balder, but simpler moments, feats that hadn’t required him to be perfect, just… being a good son, a young boy, nestled in his mother’s lap.
Being a good brother, stumbling alongside Hod and Thor, each drunker than him, but his presence between them kept them stable.
Picking a flower and presenting it to a young Aesir child rushing past him up a path, a child who clearly didn’t know who he was, but who skipped away with the flower in hand toward parents who bowed to Balder when they saw him.
He looked more pleased by the ignorant wave of the child than any fawning from her parents.
The scene of Balder’s death remained, still on the same wall, but it was different now, a different angle, a different moment, showing that, in his final breaths, his eyes had found Loki, and he had looked to him with forgiveness , making Loki’s eyes water with tears.
“Ah!” Balder came, and the scenes on the walls vanished.
It was in the tightness of his clenching aftershocks that I came too.
Balder looked at peace as we caught our breaths. The bed no longer swayed, no haze lingered, and though the bonfire scent did, it was only pleasant remnants.
I eventually unbound the fabric from his wrists, and still inside him, softening, but present, keeping our connection, I massaged the marks that had been left beneath his bracers.
“Tell me,” I asked, “since we are in Hel, can I will our mess away too?”
Balder laughed. “You can. But not yet. I like feeling you. I like… feeling again.”
I rubbed his wrists, soothing the indents from the bindings, and held his gaze as I said, “Balder, despite how you feel now, returning to your brethren might spur those sour feelings up again.
It is okay if that happens, but one way you can fight it is to be honest with your loved ones.
Tell them how you felt when you thought you felt nothing. Tell them everything.
“Maybe not the dirtier details of my involvement. At least not to your mother.”
He laughed again, just as I had intended.
I wished I’d had someone to confide in as he did.
“But truly, tell them of your sorrow, of the anxious feelings their expectations gave you. It might wound them, but all of them have suffered or are suffering too. Most are broken enough that they are trying to rebuild themselves just like you. Knowing that perfect Balder has felt similar sorrows might bring them more peace and rouse peace in you.”
Another tear streaked down Balder’s cheek. “Thank you, Oli.”
“You are welcome.” But it was easier to say such things to another.
You are enough.
Do you believe it yet?
Before we disentangled, I could have sworn I felt Loki’s eyes on me again from the memory of Balder’s death.
Once clean and lounging side by side, I asked him, “Only if you are comfortable sharing, but… might I know what it was that Odin whispered to you? Do you know?” He was dead at the time, after all.
“I know,” Balder said. “He meant well, but perhaps it was more than I wanted to hear. ‘You will rise again, my son, better than you were before’.”
“He was right. Because better does not mean perfect either. But it can mean whole.”
I let Balder snuggle close to me and held him until he was ready to be let go.
Leaving Hel was less dramatic than arriving. Once Balder was ready and bid me free to remove myself from him, we were dressed with nary a thought—and my tunic had new stitching again, sporting a sprig of mistletoe.
We left the room together, and while Balder headed for the gates to make his way back home the long way, Hel came to me, placed a hand on my shoulder with a quiet thanks, and in a breath, I was back in Loki’s dining hall with its kitchen and no door.
I almost felt a bit of Balder’s new peace in myself, like a warmth flooding me.
My chair tipped backward, and there was Loki, staring at me from upside down. “What a smile! Fell for the golden god like everyone else does, did you? Tacky . He’s the easy one to fall for.” Loki pushed me upright again to face forward.
I shifted to look at him, but he’d already turned from me, as if he had something worth fussing over in the kitchen.
I couldn’t smell more food. I wouldn’t turn down more ale, but that Loki wasn’t looking at me—when I knew, I knew he had been watching each of the encounters I’d had so far in some form or another—made me wonder.
I stood and moved up behind him.
“Jealous?” I asked.
“You dare—” He spun but faltered to finish when he realized how close I was. “Um, presume such a thing?”
“You said you needed me brave.” I stepped closer. “Bold. Someone unwilling to merely worship at the gods’ feet. I have no intention of worshipping. Or falling for anyone, whether to my knees or otherwise.”
“Unless part of services rendered?”
“Exactly.” I meant that, didn’t I? I’d only felt friendship, kinship for Balder. I couldn’t very well fall in love with one of these gods. I was barely getting more than an hour’s time with any of them.
Except Loki.
Loki, who I’d almost kissed. Whose unbraided side of his hair shadowed that half of his face always, so all I could see was profile and the sparkle of his hidden blue eye.
I reached to draw that curtain of hair aside, but he lurched away from me as if my touch might burn him. “Good. That’s all that is required of you.”
I felt the muscles in my jaw tighten, suddenly angry.
“ Good ,” I repeated. “Although there was quite a bit to want to worship about Balder. Freyr was appealing too, with that huge prick and always having been one of my favorite gods. Heimdall as well, handsome and clever and so pliant beneath my touch. I can hardly await my next god.”
“Is that so?”
“Of course. You wanted someone who can fuck , and I am ready for more. That is what you want from me, isn’t it? For me to keep fucking my way through your brothers?”
Loki crossed his arms. “What else would I want from you?” But before I could taunt him further, he asked, “Hungry?”
“I—” I stuttered from the change in subject. “We just ate. Didn’t we? I suppose I don’t know how long it was before I woke in Hel.”
“Your ass needed a rest, remember?” Loki grinned.
I was hungry again. I must have had the equivalent of a good night’s sleep before Balder. Maybe a nap before waking in Loki’s lap earlier too.
Even well-rested, I found myself longing to doze upon those thighs again.
“So quick to get rid of me?” I asked. “Or trying to keep me longer?”
“I thought you could hardly await your next god.”
Mocking aside, Loki wasn’t immediately sending me away. Was he stalling, honestly trying to keep me with him longer, loath as he was to admit it?
Maybe I wanted to stall too.
If all the gods were broken, in what ways was the trickster god in need of being fixed? Then I remembered the tears I’d seen in his eyes when Balder forgave him. He hadn’t meant for things to end that way. He hadn’t meant to be the catalyst for Ragnarok, no matter what he pretended.
“You’re staring again,” Loki said.
“Just looking for faults.”
Loki snorted.
“You know, I never thought to ask the best question of a god. May I?”
“Do tell.”
“Which of your stories, your adventures, your epics, is your favorite? I would hear it from the horse’s mouth, as it were.”
Loki laughed. “Easy! Thor dressing up as the blushing bride Freya. I doubt I could ever top that adventure.”
“I had a feeling you might choose that one. May I wager a guess why it is your favorite?”
“By all means, but if your answer is because Thor looked ravishing in a dress, you are correct.”
“ Because ,” I said, “in the end, I think the trickster god wants everyone to enjoy his tricks, to have fun in his company, to smile when it is over and want to remain with him, not to be annoyed or angry or… curse or hate you for something you can never take back.”
“Why would I need to take anything back?” Loki’s smile drooped. “All’s well that ends well. That’s why you’re here.”
Was it?
I reached for his curtain of hair again.
“And you are ready for breakfast, aren’t you?” He whirled away from me, keeping only the visible side of his face within range. “Since we’ve already brought him up, I think I know exactly who to send you to next.”
“Loki—”
“If you’re so interested in stories, no one tells them quite like—”
He tapped me in the center of my chest, and as the scenery around me changed yet again, I heard Loki’s final word:
“—Thor.”