Displaced

Chapter 12

Ivar walked across the room, turned, and walked back again. With his hands clasped tightly behind his back, he repeated the action a few times, taking slow, measured steps, and concentrating on the act of placing one foot in front of the other.

He wasn't even sure why he was pacing. It wasn't doing anything for him, but he had seen people do it when they were feeling agitated, and so it made sense that it should help. Frankly, it was a bit of a disappointment that it did not.

While it had been good to see Floki and Helga, and wonderful to be recognised for who he really was instead of being forced to answer to the wrong name, now that the visit was over, he found himself feeling even worse than he had before. Or perhaps he felt just the same, he had only forgotten just how bad it was. Regardless, he wanted to go back, and forget his troubles for a little while longer.

He would have stayed with them for more time; he would have stayed with them for the rest of the day, if Floki had let him, but the boatbuilder had insisted that he return home, eagerly shooing him away, as though he genuinely believed that what was happening was a good thing, and that Ivar was wasting time that would be better spent enjoying it.

He was definitely not enjoying it. He didn't want to enjoy it. That way lay danger.

Floki was right though, in a way. The gods had given him a gift. It was one that he had not asked for, and one that he did not want, but he still could not shake off the feeling that he was squandering it, and that that was something he would regret later. Because there would be a later; a day when he was himself again, and on that day, he did not wish to regret all the things that he had not done.

But at the same time, he did not want to regret the things that he had done, either.

He exhaled through gritted teeth, a familiar feeling of frustration and anger rose up from within him, mingling with the sense of helplessness that he had been battling since waking the day before. It was not fair that the gods had done this to him. It was not fair for it to have been thrust upon him, upon both of them, with no explanation, no reason that he could see, and that they had simply been abandoned to figure it out for themselves.

He had spent his life watching his brothers and the other children run and jump and climb, and do all the things people did and took for granted, and he had hated them for it sometimes. He had wanted to do those things too, but he had wanted to do them. Him. As himself. No matter the potential benefits, he did not want to be Sigurd any more than Sigurd wanted to be him.

What was more, to his surprise, he found that he did not want to experience all those things at the expense of somebody else. Even if that somebody else was Sigurd.

"Will you stop that?" Sigurd snapped suddenly. His words were tinged with the same anger that Ivar was feeling, and they pulled him unexpectedly from the thoughts that were beginning to spiral in his mind.

Partway across the room, he stopped mid-stride and turned to look at his brother. Sigurd was sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall of Ivar's bedroom. One of his elbows rested on the seat of a small wooden stool next to him, and his legs, no longer tethered together by the leather straps that he had been wearing when Ivar had left to visit Floki that morning, lay slightly apart on the ground in front of him. He was sitting very still, following Ivar's progress back and forth across the room with his eyes.

He noticed now that Sigurd had changed out of the dirty, stinking clothes from the day before that he had still been wearing earlier in the day. He had even washed. His hands and nails had been meticulously scrubbed clean of the encrusted dirt from the journey home. Even his hair was clean and damp. He had really gone all-out.