#it's at like ....2.5 k for this section but 60k overall and this section relies on some longer running plot threads and themes

[rotzaprachim]

happy saturday besties! I’ve been working on my nina/helnik Hell Fic (tm) for a year now and felt. like i needed to have at least some of it up, for public record, for my own personal accountability that this is a body of words that exists in some fashion aside from in my head. (we’re clocking at about 60k rn and no where near finished.) so enjoy this spoiler-tastic, rough and marked-up section from square in the middle, which I slammed out in an afternoon while on an essay crisis and which convinced me there was an interesting story here I actually wanted to tell. TW for this being based on a YA novel, but very very adult in a lot of themes and implications 

              They stopped to eat the lunch Gudrun wrapped for them in waxed brown paper. Brown bread slathered thickly with fat and some oily, salty fish that filled Nina with the gloriously human smell of smoke. She had handfulls of dried berries in her pockets and dried lamb in her pack and she did not wish to think of the fact that here she was living of enemy kindnesses. They ate in silence and then dipped quickly into the water they melted down in the morning. Nina carefully licked all the crumbs from her greased fingers.      “We need to talk,” she says.         “We need to move so that we don’t turn cold,” Matthias said. He pulled himself to his feet and started to walk in his long, bow-legged strides, leaving Nina sputtering over her own feet to catch up. Her shawl flapped about her shoulders with a surprising degree of noise and stinging force.             “Wait, wait,- oh for fuck’s sake, Lars.”          This caused him to pause, at least momentarily, and look at her.            “Do you always try to run when people want to talk to you? Honestly, Djel only knows why you still haven’t a wife.”        “Mmph,” grunted the king of social graces.         “What we’re going to do, mister, is walk through who Lars Solverson is.”        “Why aren’t we doing this for Mila Jandersdat?”       “Because Mila Jandersdat is a real fucking person already. This isn’t even my country and Mila Jandersdat’s not the problem.”          “You… you made her up.” “And?”       “She isn’t real.”       Nina shrugged her shoulders. As if that mattered a whit.

      “Go on, then. Ask Mila anything. Make polite conversation with Mila. Interrogate her, if you wish.”        He thought for a moment. It was probably very taxing on him to use every one of his five brain cells. “What is Mila’s… favorite color?” “Pink.” He nodded squarely, satisfied. “Go on then, ask another.” “What is Mila’s favorite supper?” “Stewed elk and putrified shark. But if neither presents itself, I am more than satisfied with cold blueberry soup, with cream.” “A woman of good Fjerdan tastes,” he says appreciatively before suddenly pausing. “Wait-“ She smiles sweetly and batts her eyelashes. Bless the poor lad, although he’s becoming quickly keener to her devious nature. She hopes he doesn’t get too quick-witted, though, or else she’ll loose the best craic she’s got immediate access to, fucking around with the motherfucker who’se never been fucked. “Is every question you ask Mila going to be so dull? Does Mila have no hobbies or desires?” His eyes immediately flick away from her face. “A Fjerdan man with any sense of decency would never ask an unmarried woman he does not know such things. An unmarried Fjerdan girl would not even think of such things to begin with.” “Indeed. But Mila Jandersdat has not in a near decade’s time been an unmarried woman, and Lars knows her very well.” “Why-“ “Go on. Make it a question for Mila.” “Where is your [hejmland], Mila?” “A [vik] of medium size, downriver from the centerlands.” Matthias flinches, and Nina smiles inwardly at what a job she’d done with placing his accent. “Mila is just a simple farming girl. Her family grew potatoes and sugar beets, and fished, and had a cow called Rose-Maret who it was Mila’s job to take to the out-pasture with two or three of the younger brothers and sisters.” He weighed the story as rounded another snow-packed crest. Guðrún had given them extensive directions towards the next vik which Nina had understood none of and was now again reliant on the in no way tender mercies of Matthias’s navigational skills. “If Mila had such a humble origin, then why does she speak and write in Fjerdan like the Djerholm [gentry?]” Nina’s mind went blank. Every time Matthias revealed a brain under all that muscle, it was a more unpleasant surprise than anything. “Mila’s mother did laundry and washing in the house of the strong-holders such that Mila be taught something of arithmetic and geography, for Mila has so clever a child as learnt by heart the entire [Djelsprayer] hornbook at the tender age of eight, so wickedly clever  is this woman Mila Jandersdat.” “And so dainty and humble as well.” “Indeead, the strong-holder’s wife became so taken by the wit and charms of Mila Jandersdat that she became very dear to the old woman, such that with no daughter and the all the sons gone off to war, she began to think of Mila as something of a niece and taught her what she knew of pincushion-embroidery and delicately plucking “Onward Fjerdan Soldiers” on the mandolin.” At this Matthias guffawed loudly. “And what of it?” “Mila would never sweetly play anything, let alone the mandolin.” Nina pursed her lips, suddenly shockingly cross at how this doltish soldier without an ounce of good culture to his name was judging the ladylike refinements of Mila Jandersdat. “Mila is a delicate Fjerdan flower.” At this Matthias guffawed still louder. It was a sound that shook his whole body and that she might have liked to hear more of if it had not been directed at her. “Mila may be a treacherously beautiful woman, but she is no delicate flower. She’s like the lurid blue wood-lichen that makes the bread-flour last a winter or else the arctic heather that nothing can stop from growing, not even the frost.” “All of this you know of Mila,” she huffed. “As you said, Lars know her very well.” In this way it continued. It gave them both something to do that felt like a more acceptable category of treason. In falling grey evenings and around campfires Lars and Mila came to increasingly fleshed life, and by laughing about it Nina could do what she’d always done when faced with the dizzyingly difficult, which was treat the task as a game. Mila Jandersdat was a woman of clever wits and a few human foibles for which she was all the more charming. She could dance a reel and tell a dirty joke and won blue ribbons for her cloudberry jam recipe. She was a big sister to all and the sort of friend with whom one might uncork a bottle of currant wine for a long chat in order to feel better about the world. “A good Fjerdan woman would not drink wine or brandy, or that which contains such spirits as may possess a soul.” “A bottle of honeywater,” Nina corrected herself, glaring. She assumed this would mollify him, but he then elaborated, “neither would she have the coin to buy such strong drink.” “Fine. Mila Jandersdat always has coffee and something sweet and a good bit of conversation for the guest who may darken her doorframe. There’s bread dough rising on the counter and some cider cake under a dome to keep the flies out and there’s a pie cooling on the windowsill with the fluttering lace curtains. There are always good things for the unexpected stranger to eat. And no one in Mila’s household is ever hungry. No one.” Her mouth felt dry. She huffed in breath. “What a marvel of feminine hospitality is Mila Jandersdat! What a wife does Lars have!” “A good Fjerdan housewife would never waste so much pay on sugar and trifles.” “Would not Lars the good Fjerdan husband provide for his wife so as to keep her in comfort?” And so it went. The found the next farm stead, and the one after, and worked several days in each place at the weaving and haying in exchange for a pile of gloriously warm blankets on the floor and the Kvöldvaka  light. Everywhere it was immeidately known how they were breaking the most clear-cut of wartime laws and ever time the wordlessly provided excuse was understood in full sympathy and some variety of spell, prayer, or enchantment was cast upon Mila’s womb so that it may take her husband’s seed and bear his family fruit. “Maybe Lars has a low sperm count,” she groused as they walked off. The housemistress told them they had at least another week through the blackrock but that there would not be more than a lone overnight camping between farmsteads and Nina breathed a sigh of relief before realising that meant trading the danger of open landscape for the more specific domestic dangers of the people that wanted to burn her kind to ashes. “Lars does not have a- what that is,” Matthias said defensively, before more trepiditiously asking, “what is that?” “You’re not ready.” According to Matthias’s fictions, Lars Sølverson was pious, self-sufficient, sturdy, moral, dependable, reliable, and altogether decent. He provided for his wife in way that was comfortable and yet economically prudent as befits the sort of upstanding man who is not in debt and neither will pass on a debt to his children. He did not partake of strong drink. His eyes did not wanter off to strange women, and as such he had not brought home diseases of an indiscrete nature or begotten any bastards, He always did a day’s honest work except for on Djel’s Day, which he spent in prayer and fellowship. He was well-liked among men. “How lucky was Mila to have found such a man,” said Nina before she belatedly remembered that the word she had used did not mean “lucky” so much as “blessed.” “Every well-suited match is a blessing from Djel, but Mila was not particularly singular, for that is the sort of Fjerdan man who can be found in any farm, or meeting-house, or regiment-camp. There is nothing (unique) about Lars being an upstanding and  morals-driven Fjerdan man.” {INSERT BRIDGE-EXPLANATION OF HOW LARS AND MILA MET)

“Her brother wanted to marry her to a blacksmith whose work shoeing carriage horses meant there would always be bread on her plate and fire enough to keep her warm in th, e winter, and what man in Fjerda could offer her more? The blacksmith had a braying, crass way of speaking about “his woman,” and he looked at her a if she was a dressed leg of lamb, but her children would likely never be too hungry nor too cold. And so she was happy with her lot as she might be, and one day was buying new dress-hooks to fix her mother’s wedding dress when she saw him walking in the marketplace, and wanted him.” “So he knocked upon her father’s door-“ Matthias tried to jab in sideways. “So he made her a wedding ring of dentist’s gold and they ran off into the night.” “Lars would never have ruined her like that.” “Mila Jandersdat is a woman, not a broken platter. She isn’t ruined.” “He would never have broken her honour in front of her family or her community so that she could never have returned home. Lars knew a woman worth more than rubies what he saw one, even staring boldly-“ “I was not staring boldly! I was making eyes in a lavicious, untoward manner-“ “So he asked of her name, and learned it was Mila Jandersdat. That very evening he knocked at her father’s door. He was invited to dinner as any a wandering soul might be. He dined with her family three times before he was left alone with her and before the courting could begin. He took her father to meet his and see the sort of place he would have to his name and if were a godly sort of people he had come from.” “Mila’s mother and sisters dug through the scraps bin to start the Hringsa quilt,” she said. They would have taken the drinking glasses and candlesticks off of the dining table to pin out the little pieced-out triangles into the trunk and roots and leaves of the Tree of Life, and then they would have stitched it together in a winter’s worth of Kvöldvaka [Kvoldvakar?] after they’d done their National Service, spinning from their own sheep the sails of druskelle ships. Mila cut into strips the nut-brown tablecloth to make the trunk of her tree, for the living, and unravelled her too-small childhood mittens into the yarn with which stitched a spinning fractal of strong roots for the ancestors. She cut up her own baby blanket for the good green cloth with which to stitch the leaves. When it was done Mila folded the blanket and put it into the carved wooden chest of her bridal troseau and when she and her mother unfolded it over her marriage bed on the morning of her wedding, it would have been a sort of marking of territory. A national flag for a different sort of nation. And in the evening, jittered from cake and nerves, Mila would have run her index finger over the sturdy interfitting of triangles- the blue calico of her aunt’s apron, the red triangle of her other’s kirk shawl- while she waited on the bed for her husband to come in from the party, and have her. Lars and Mila fucked on that quilt. When she pinned the thing on the line to air out during the spring cleaning and everyone passing by could see, it was also a sort of declaration. When a fortnight after her marriage she woke to find her belly cramping and blood sticking to the insides of her thighs, she cried. As she rubbed out the stains with baking soda and river water she thanked Djel there was no child yet twisting inside of her. When five years on she did the same, she railed against her wretchedness, her godless condition, because that was an easier thing to stomache than the notion that the All-Source of All-Water had closed her womb in punishment for her sinful being. {insert something to return back to main narrative} Nina looked up, which was somehow a struggle. Mila was the full rushing force of a tidal wave pulling her under the water. She was as real as anything. “He must have loved her a lot,” she said, her tongue heavy. “To keep her as his wife. Mila. Lars’s wife. After eight years and no sons unto his name.” [Lars was not real. Lars was as real as the cardboard cutouts Kerch pleasure-piers stuck outside bordellos to advertise the enticements inside. Nina did want to think about what you’d find if you tipped Lars over.] “No honorable man would leave a woman he had made his wife to the cold like that.” Nina shrugged. “Even if she slept in his bed and ate his bread off his hard earned soldier’s wage and gave him no issue?” Matthias’s fingers worried at the hem of his trousers. He did not want to talk about this, she supposed. He wanted to talk about this more than anything. “Only a cruel man would blame the hand of Djel upon a woman.” “Then we live in a world full of cruel men.” All of the breached babies and ectopic pregnancies and angry, angry husbands. Sometimes it felt like more of a battle to serve in the domestic wards than it had been to dig out bullets from shoulders a half-hour from the front line. And more direct threats on her life, besides. Everyone knew that witches killed babies, and baked cakes from their blood, and cursed them to be born early, and quickened women with seven at home already and too-eager husbands, and everyone knew that witches turned sons to daughters with the flick of a wrist and a few esoteric sayings. Everyone knew. Matthias looked into Nina’s eyes. He did not try to tell her that Fjerdan men were not cruel. Not even the honorable Fjerdan men.