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The key scrapes in the lock as Sturm steps back across the threshold of her newly rented business front. The soon-to-be coffee and tea shop she's planning to establish in north Philly. It might be in the low thirties outside, but she's still just wearing a ratty old tank top -- a Judas Priest shirt from some concert she saw in the mid-aughts -- with her ripped jeans tucked into mid-calf steel toes.
She drops the toolbox, and extra supplies off atop the bar, and leans against the countertop with a long sigh. Teagan should be around here somewhere, right? They were here when she left, at least...
Teagan isn't as handy as Sigrún - not by a long run - but he's good for picking things up and putting them down again in a different location. Taking things down and putting them up again. That sort of thing.
He's also good for ordering pizza. Once he finished pulling down the water-stained drywall and putting up new sheetrock, he ordered the sort of greasy, belch-inducing pizza which tastes like a king's feast when you've been working your ass off all day. The smell of it permeates the place, emanating from the kitchen, where it, and Teagan, are sitting on the counter. "Doll," he calls.
Sigrun is late to the party, having work at the firehouse to conclude. What being sitting around in a room, staring at the ceiling, waiting for something to happen. But! When her watch concludes, she hops into the truck, loads up her truck with gear, and starts for North Philly, up the Kelly.
When she arrives, she begins hauling in gear to assist with the break down. Wrecking bars a go-go. And of course, she's arrived just in time for Teagan to be taking a break. She drops her burdens, thump thump, and then heads for the pizza like a pregnant lady.
"Hey, you two."
"Forgot I left some of my shit in the Hollow," Sturm calls out before flipping the deadbolt behind her, and heading back behind the bar. "Fuck, that smells so goddamned good. Gonna have to change the stovetops in the kitchen over to electric, because -- as it turns out -- sometimes when you're made of fuckin' ice, fire... uhh. Well, it fucking hurts." She flips the bird in the vague direction of the sky, and mutters a "thanks asshole" under her breath like a good recovering Catholic.
She reaches up and scratches the back of her head. "Not going to lie, I'm fuckin' craving a cigarette, but a shitty fucked up pizza can probably scratch that itch." She nods at Sigrun, smiling. "Hey you."
"Damn. Look how lucky I am." Teagan is being a terrible monster, putting his butt on a counter in the kitchen. In his defense, he also has a boot propped up on a counter. Wait. That's not a defense. Teagan sets down his pizza slice on a chunk of brown paper towel he ripped off of a roll and stretches his arms out towards the incoming women. "Too much hotness in one room, I may die." His deadpan is as flat and cool as, well. A mirror. But he smiles lopsidedly at both of them. "Hello, Wife. Hey, doll."
"Hunh," they grunt towards Sturm. "Well, electric is better for you anyway. And yeah, let's not... burn you. Fire, or gas, or... ?"
"That's not a real big problem, is it? Electric lets you dial in the temperatures, which I thought was a big deal for tea steeping and all that! I mean, might be a little bit of a financial knock on the nose, but I'm happy to throw in and help pay the difference! It's okay!" Sigrun, of course, focuses on the part of the problem that she can deal with herself, and in fact starts tromping off to where the gas lines are to check for a power box to see how much hassle it's going to be to run power to electric ovens.
"Might need to swap out your fuse box, too, but honestly? That's not a bad thing at all, because it'll make the fire department real happy when it comes time for the inspection. Electric ranges will, too. So. Thumbs up, there." Sigrun stubbornly ignoring Sturm's frailties for the win!
"Fire. Open flame, specifically. Another brilliant gift from the storyteller of all storytellers." Sturm offers an exasperated shrug, propping her butt up against the counter. She seems reluctant to sit on it properly, but she grabs her own sheet of paper towel, and a piece of pizza, and starts to stuff her face. "... but yeah. You're right about the tea thing, so yeah. It would be super hepful."
She reaches up and scratches the back of her head. "Thanks for helping out, you two. I really appreciate it."
Their open arms win them zero smooches, because Sigrún is distracting herself from frailties with things she can fix and Sturm is talking about said frailties, and thus Teagan drops their arms onto their knees, looking at Sturm. "Wow, what a fucker," he opines, his mirror-dark nose wrinkling up some before smoothing out again. "Yeah, we can get you new stoves. It's not a big deal." He picks up his pizza again and takes a bite from it, waving off the thanks as he chews down the crust. It's very chewy, in the way of the best cheap pizza. Just this side of so tough it makes your jaw ache. "It's part of the job," he answers her. "Easier than splitting a cord of wood." Their broken-mirror eyes glitter amusement.
Sigrun is realizing she missed a step somewhere in all of this, and squints back over her shoulder at Teagan with a small frown. Oh right. "Sorry, babe." Her attention returns to Sturm as the full implication of the frailty is explained. She located the fuse box and starts to check out what lines are running where, double checking all the little labels.
"So you're injured by open flames now, is what I'm hearing?" She pulls out a pen light and plops it into her mouth, making little notes on her scribble pad. Can't talk more with a pen in her outh, so there's that at least.
"Sorry," Sturm leans over and gives Teagan a proper smooch on the cheek. "Little bit distracted with all this bullshit. I'll pass along Sigrun's, too." There's a follow up smooch on the other side. Then she reaches up and wipes off the grease smudge with the pad of her thumb. "Sorry. Pizza. You know how it is."
Sturm clears her throat. "Yep. You know how it is. Now I'm just like everyone else. Flammable. Only moreso, I guess."
He kisses his spidery opalescent fingers and blows Sigrún a kiss. Teagan isn't fussed, apparently. "You're solving a problem, Wife," he points out. "It's incredibly sexy." Hopping up from the counter, he heads for the fridge - he helped clean it out earlier, even - and grabs the cold two-liters from it. One Coke, one Sprite. A moment later he realizes that there are no cups yet - you don't bring the china in until later, lest it get broken - and he shrugs, setting down the Sprite and cracking open the Coke to take a swallow of it.
Two greasy kisses and Sturm wiping the schmutz off of his cheek, and he reaches to pat her cheek approvingly before straightening out her necklace and settling how it lays on her throat. "Well. You're ice. So. It makes an annoying amount of story-related sense."
Penlight put away. "How bad is it? Do I have to turn Hlevangr and Sighall into flameless places? It would take some doing, but I could do it. The hardest part would be fixing the hearth and fireplace to work without flame, but it's the hedge. So. You know. Anything is technically possible, I suppose." Sigrun finishes her notes and then slides her pad of paper into her back pocket and pulls out her phone to do some googling.
"It's pretty bad. Don't even like to be near the stuff. Start to get all sweaty and it feels like I'm melting and--" Sturm waves a hand through the air, cutting herself off mid-complaint. "... plus, bright sunlight hurts my eyes real bad. Like. Requires actual grit and determination to keep 'em open without sunglasses on. Good thing we live out here, and I never go outside without sunglasses anyway. Dunno how Johnnie deals with this bullshit, it makes me feel vulnerable and reminiscent of a time I'd rather not reminisce about."
She crosses her arms over her chest and turns back to Sigrun. "... actually I'd really appreciate that. All these changes started popping up in the past week or so, and I haven't even really even started to process how it's going to have to change my life."
"I had a real problem with sunshine when I first came back." Teagan scratches his cheek, but kinda stays out of the problem-solving after that. Those are, after all, Sigrún's places and she should sort them out. "I think Downtime should be okay, yeah?"
"I don't know how to have a hall and a hearth without a fire. I'll have to think on it. This is just a riddle, not an obstacle, Sturm. I'll figure it out. But I can trade out the torches and candles for little floaty magical lights or similar. Foxfire, perhaps. Or glowing fungus! That won't be difficult at all. The hearth, though, will be the trick. Is it naked flame that's the problem? If I put in screens, does that help? If I put in polarizing glass and have you wear polarizing shades in an opposing polarity, you'll just see gray there. So. Would that do it, you think?"
Sigrun's googling is going well, judging by the growing list of items in the Home Depot cart.
"... do you not still have a problem with Sunshine? Or are you just a bona fide night owl?" Sturm tips up the corner of her mouth in a mischevious smirk, and nudges Teagan with her elbow. "It does mostly seem to be an open flame thing. I hang out in places where people smoke all the damn time, and that smolder doesn't bother me so much? Then again, I'm not really sure how you'd have a hearth without flame... and I'm not sure being unable to see the flame would matter so much as the fact that I'm close to it with nothing between us."
There's a little pause. "... but glowing magic mushrooms would be a really cute solution to the torch problem."
Sturm's brow furrows, and she polishes off her slice of pizza before tucking her hands into her pockets.
"Hey, I got a dumb question while we're here. I know I've been in-and-out for a while, and thus out of the loop, but..." She waves offers a mighty shrug as if unsure of how to phrase the question without sounding completely insane. "Damn, did everyone go and get married while I wasn't looking?"
"Actually, no, I don't. It wasn't like... it wasn't a prohibition, I just... didn't like it. It made me feel vulnerable, and the person I was with at the time ... didn't help that feeling. June and Sig helped me like light again." Teagan scratches the back of his head, but he nudges Sturm back with his shoulder, on account of she's so much taller now. "You could look for mushrooms that look like fire, but I dunno if that would be cool if you want to like... cook on it."
He opens his mouth, and closes it, at Sturm's question, taking a long moment to look at the Snowskin. One hand comes up to rest at the small of her back, not pulling at the hands she's so defensively tucked into her pockets. It just rests there, that scarred palm, those fingers spread across the back on her shirt.
"Just me and Sigrún, at the moment, really." He pauses. "You feeling some kinda way about that?"
"Well, Sturm said naked flame and not heat, right? So if I create a convection oven that uses filaments or a similar and forced air, then illusory fire would probably work just fine. Actually. Though the exterior torches and stuff being incandescent mushrooms is too cool not to pursue now. Especially if it will make Sturm feel safer walking about the village." Sigrun seems happy to natter on about her hollow, and probably would have but for the change of topic. She falls quiet here, turning about slowly to watch Sturm and Teagan by turns, staying out of it for the moment.
"I dunno, I'm maybe just a little sensitive about this sort of thing, because before I took this gig that put me out on the road all the time, I was the one who knows things. I was doing legwork practically every night to keep the Freehold supplied with intelligence, I coordinated taking out our Oathbreaker, and I knew damn-near everyone in this whole city and how to break into half their houses in the event I had to and..."
Sturm tips her shoulders up in a big, mighty shrug and exhales. "Then I sold it. Or sold something in exchange for something else, and now I feel like I don't know shit about fuck beyond that you two are married," she gestures to Sigrun, "and then you called me and June and Johnnie your wives. Or maybe it was Teagan's wives, or. I dunno. I heard you call Jack his husband at some point, too and..."
Sturm catches herself gradually descending into being less and less comprehensible about this whole talking thing, which only further seems to embarrass and flummox her until she takes a big, deep breath.
"I guess that I'm very confused. This is the first Motley I have trusted enough to join. This is also then first polyamorous relationship I have been in... and while I used to think I knew everything, I am finding out that maybe I got hit in the head a few too many times by Falon Fox when she beat my ass a few months back." (edited)
When Sturm starts talking, and keeps talking, Teagan dusts his free hand off on his jeans reflexively and reaches it out towards Sigrún, flexing his fingers toward her in beckoning. Now is not the time for her to be all the way over there, or at least that's what Teagan thinks.
"That sounds like an awful lot of complicated feelings," the Mirrorskin begins. "So thank you for telling us. I know it isn't easy at all for you to admit when you feel scared or vulnerable, doll, and I'm really, really proud of you for bringing this to us so that we can talk about it together and make it better together." His scarred palm soothes over Sturm's back in slow circles. "I'm sorry that you felt surprised by how things changed while you were out of town, and that we didn't make sure that you didn't feel ambushed by that news. I could give you a lot of reasons, including that my Clarity was fucked up at the time, but at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter to your feelings. We hurt you, however accidentally, and I'm sorry for my part of that. We love you, and you belong here. With us. Always."
A small glance to Sigrún, then, a tip of his head towards the Valkyrie to check in, perhaps. "Sigrún is my wife. We're having a child together. That doesn't make you belong less. Can we start there? Is that a good foundation to start with?"
Sigrun would, strictly speaking, prefer to finish the task of putting together the shopping list to defray the entire cost of Sturm's refit from gas. But she looks to Teagan with a small, guilty little frown and lowers her gaze from his as she starts putting her phone away. She disguises her retreat to Teagan as an excuse to grab a pizza slice, and she sidles in beside him to take a bite of the cardboard with cheese on.
"I always told you that the reason I was summer was to keep the hearth safe. To give us the safety to be a family. Well, fuck, Sturm. Some day I will die. When? When is it my day?" Sigrun shakes her head just a little. "In the end the only thing stopping me from having the kind of family I have truly always wanted was me. And my cowardice. And my pride. And my--" Sigrun trails off, because of aforementioned pride. She's beat red, and it isn't from pride.
"I want to live the life I want to live for as long as I may, and then die with no regrets. And I call you all my wives in the hope you understand that is what you have always been to me. And the only thing stopping you from having it now is..." She shrugs. "Whatever it is that stops you. I know what mine was. And if you don't want it, then don't have it. Don't take it. I will love you no less for it."
"It's not that--" Sturm pinches the bridge of her nose, and a deep line of worry crosses her brow as she closes her eyes in an attempt to capture the words. "I am not trying to say I don't want that and I'm certainly not saying I won't take it, I'm just--"
It has been so long since she's been bad at talking about these sorts of things. Perhaps it's the sudden influx of wyrd taking her closer and closer to true giantdom. Ironically, the flare of her oppressively strong winter Mantle probably holds the truth. When she exhales, the breath crystallizes in the air. "I... didn't know that, and I am very flattered that you would say it, because I am worried about--"
Sturm grumbles, and walks back around the bar to start messing with her drywall tools, pulled from the back. Its giving her something to focus on, at least.
"Thank you for apologizing for that, Teagan. I now understand the context, and I get it... and. I am glad to hear that I don't belong any less, because I don't know where I would belong if it wasn't here. I'm just... jealous isn't the word I want to say, because on paper the situation is no different than it wa-- Fuck it. I don't know. I don't know why I'm feeling so frazzled."
The look that Teagan gives Sigrún is not one of his more subtle ones: he's pleased. He's proud. When he's in public, so much of his emotions are hidden beneath the smooth surface of his mirror-dark skin, but here, with the two of them? He has actual expressions. He smiles at Sigrun and wraps an arm around her while she noshes on pizza, leaning to kiss the corner of her mouth. There was sauce there.
He follows up with a kiss to her temple before keeping his arm around the Valkyrie and turning them both more fully towards Sturm.
"Because you got surprised. Because you came home and things were different. Because we are your solid ground, your certain place to stand, and you felt the earth shifting, and it scared you. Because if you don't have us, what do you have?" Everybody Talks To The Mirror, and some days, the mirror talks back.
"Doll," Sturm is gently addressed, "you need to come down here. You're very tall now. I'm going to need you to kneel for me." There isn't a please, there, just his calm demeanor, a steady certainty that if he says things just so, they'll be done. And until Sturm does, their hand stays on her back.
"Life went on without you, and there's nothing more horrible than that." Sigrun says it with the cold familiarity of someone who knows and no longer lives in New York City about it. But she leaves it there. She has her shitty-therefore-perfect pizza to chew like cud, and a Teagan shoulder to lean her head on, which she does. The fact that she's perfectly happy to just lean on him while he deals with another partner's hurts better than she can really ought to be encouraging. She takes another chomping bite, because she's a delicate fucking flower.
Growth and adaption are the purview of a different season. There is a stillness to winter that Sturm embodies. Especially the glacial pace at which she moves in regards to this sort of thing.
"Yes," she places all her shit up onto the counter before walking back around to the interior. She's going to wear a groove into the floor at this rate. "... and that isn't bad its just that -- yes, you're right -- something changed that I didn't expect and--"
She finally finishes mussing about, grabs a last slice of pizza, and sinks to her knees on Teagan's other side, leaning back to rest her head on the counter. As it turns out 8+' tall is still tall even when you're kneeling.
"I wasn't expecting to be called anyone's wife, and it's not... unwanted by any means. Quite frankly it makes me feel very included in a way that makes this entire thing feel silly. I just-- I don't know that I've earned that? I worry... I haven't earned it."
Teagan waits it all out - the chewing on the pizza, the wearing the groove in the floor, all of it. He's patient. The mirror is always just there on the wall when you come back, isn't it?
"It is pretty terrible," Teagan agrees quietly, with what Sigrún says. "Fortunately, that's the kind of pain we know how to deal with."
Sturm has to say her piece. She has to feel all of her feelings. And when she stops talking again, Teagan reaches a hand out to gently pet over the Snowskin's ice-white hair, watching the Jotunn's hair shift under their hand, shimmering like fiberoptic cable.
"You don't have to earn being loved, Sturm." Those words are laid carefully into a silence only otherwise broken by the sound of two people chewing on the cheapest, greasiest pizza crusts in Philly.
His shimmering fingers gently pet over her braided hair once more, and - his arm still loosely around Sigrún - he leans to kiss the base of one of her horns. "Through all kinds of violence and all kinds of silence, hmm?" As if the Jotunn will know what that means. For that matter, Sigrún has surely heard Teagan listening to the song in question when he had Missing Sturm days while she traveled.
"But you do deserve to be asked," he offers, straightening up. "Sabrina Kelly. Sturm. The sole Winter of Direct Action, my favorite mountain to climb... will you make us both just... unbearably happy... and consent to be our wife?"
"You were my beloved enemy and war-wife before I ever knew these people or my husband, Sturm. We simply forgot the words." Sigrun murmurs that down at the crust of her pizza which she is picking at in search of cheese. "No one tells me what to do. No one tells me where to stand. I stand for and do only those things that I wish to do. And just as I choose to love you, you cannot make me stop. I defy you to try. You will only fall back in love with my stubborness. Surrender. Submit. Join the household. Do so now, or do so later feeling silly and sad. But if you don't, I will die with my hand around your ankle calling you a coward."
Sturm's face gets all scrunchy, because that is truly a deep cut. The kind of thing one only remembers after reaching into a box full of old, misplaced things, and finding a memory. She sniffles a little bit, which is totally normal for someone in January and not at all indicative of anything else that might be going on.
There's a small pfffbbbt of laughter and she shakes her head before reaching up to pinch the bridge of her nose. Or, wait-- a clever ruse. She's drying her eyes with the pads of her index finger and thumb. Sneaky winters.
"Well," she clears her throat, and sighs. "I'm not going to fuckin' fight a pregnant lady. No winning that one, and I'll gonna look like an even bigger dickhead dragging you around with your hand around my ankle. Which would definitely happen. So."
Sturm sniffles. Again. Definitely because it's winter outside.
"Yeah. I consent to being loved, and I would be honored to be your wife."
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