Chapter Text
Valka rolled off her top bunk with an empty stomach and emptier mind. Except there was one thing on her mind.
The Queen. Again.
“Stoick,” She had been groaning and complaining all morning. “End my miseries, please.”
Stoick stood there at the bottom, watching Valka dangle her legs off the side. He already looked ready for the day, one could see his cheeks already tinted rosy from his morning routine. Valka once tried to follow along, but where Stoick had structure, she was simply too free. She also simply could not hold a plank for as long as he could. Bastard.
“For all y’ know, it’ll be just for today, lass,” He always says it the same way. “Think of it like when we were in training and had that pretty little miss watching you.”
Valka hopped off her bunk to immediately grab Stoick by his puffy big nose between her thumb and middle finger.
“We agreed then and after that we’d never speak of her!” She scolded as he hissed in faux pain. “Besides, she was different. We never once spoke, and I’d never even gotten her name let alone her face.”
Admittedly, that girl did live quite rent free in Valka’s mind, even past her hormonal preteen years. It was a childhood crush, a fruitless one. It was probably a good thing, she doubted she was ever nor would ever be emotionally available for anything like a girl way past her standards. She always did wonder what happened to her admirer, now. Probably married off to some clan lord, or worse.
Valka did not want to consider what ‘worse’ could’ve possibly meant.
Shaking the thought away, Valka grunted, letting go of Stoick with a shove. Despite their close, almost familial bond, there were some things even he couldn’t solve just by listening and advising. Getting advice was the last thing the fierce lady viking needed right now anyway.
Snatching her gear off the wall, the heavy metal clanked in a rhythm familiar. It would bore a reader to describe the lengthy process of strapping the pieces of armour to herself, for Valka had done it so long it had become the air she breathed. This second skin her strength, yet a constant unforgiving reminder of her ancestors’ lost battle.
Her bulbous boisterous companion finished his preparations a long while ago, he might as well have slept in his steel. “Ready, lass?”
With her last bracer secured, Valka had half a mind to ignore him, alas she had to ask anyway. “You work the evening shifts, what could you possibly be here for at this hour?”
An irritating shrug, “Breakfast.”
“You can do that without your armour.”
Another, somehow even more irritating shrug, “Discounts.”
With a final huff, Valka pulled her helm down. The world narrowed small, down to the slit of her visor and the pettiness of the previous day. The two marched out of the barracks, amongst the other last stragglers who had shuffled out the door. Steel boots thudded and scraped and echoed through her childhood corridors, enough to give an unaccustomed one a headache.
As her comrades marched forward, Valka knew her task for the day, as she stopped short before one hallway.
Before her, the Queen’s chambers.
She did not need debrief.
What she did need was the blessing of every God that she didn’t end up at Hel’s gates by the end of this shift.
>~ ⚔️👑 ~<
Elinor stood tall by the stained arched glass of her chambers, the morning light weaving its way within to speckle her nightgown in a plethora of hues. Smoothing her hair back, she felt this urge to fiddle with something, such as the tassels of her half-drawn curtains or the itch of a thread come loose. Alas, composure must be retained, even at this lonely bedside.
She stepped away, smoothing back her hair. Oftentimes she didn’t let another soul into her chambers, not the maids nor even her husband when he was… If anything it gave her a little semblance of normalcy, to have control of how much dust could collect on her nightstand. It was the closest she could achieve to the word — she barely knew a life without her crown and jewels, anyway.
The nightgown fell, placed haphazardly on the arm of a chair. How she wished she could stay this barren, a child smooth and fresh from its mother’s womb. Elinor sauntered her way to her closet, though for a moment she only stood there.
Her hands reached up, she found she now cradled herself. A slight caress, how small she could've made herself feel in mere seconds. How she craved even this poor excuse of a calm reassuring touch.
What would her mother have said, seeing her this way?
The late Queen once ruled over this kingdom with the same iron fist she used to rule her. Even now, not a single dress she wore was her own. It was a museum of every time she wasn’t allowed to cook or clean or learn for herself how to be a human being.
The late Queen would say these were not where her responsibilities lay.
She stood there for maybe a moment longer than expected, letting the minutes she had alone keep her company as they gradually faded away. What nonsense, to be human. It was a feeble feeling she should’ve left behind as soon as her first born came to be. To be vulnerable this way was to be everything she wasn’t raised to be, so spoke the faintest scars that came from her several punishments.
She reminds herself she won’t be doing that to her own children, at the very least.
With a sigh and a roll of her shoulders, Elinor willed herself to open the closet. Her mind turned off a moment, as she’d managed to pick out some dress for herself for the day. Presentable, poised, powerful, all the things her mother raised her to be.
Knock, knock, knock.
“My Queen?”
Rudely pulled from her thoughts, Elinor’s head whipped towards her chamber’s doors. A moment too long did her heart race, how too familiar she was to that feeling. It was not fear. She knew this much to be true.
“Enter.”
The door creaked open, and in stepped her knight in not-so-shining armour. Did the thing ever bother to buff out its steel? At least it wasn’t rusting. Elinor watched as the other surveyed the room through her visor, to inevitably land on her.
“Your Majesty,” Valka bowed, her position deep enough a keen listener could hear the creaks of her spaulders.
Elinor did not move, at first.
Instead she remained still, stood bare as the dawn that traced her shoulders without ceremony. She felt like a wild deer at the wrong end of an arrow, or a sheep stalked by a starved dragon. If Valka had noticed, she seemed to give no sign beyond lowering her gaze to the patterned tile by Elinor’s feet.
“Ye may rise,” She said evenly.
Valka did as she was told, though her eyes did not seem to follow suit.
It did not harbour any outward feelings from the Queen. It did, however, send butterflies a flurry, though they were ignored as Elinor turned back towards her closet.
With deliberate ease, Elinor retrieved the dress she mentally selected moments earlier. She slipped in without haste, her movements practised and economical. It made her feel like a child again.
It was hard not to act like dressing in front of her knight was no more remarkable than breathing.
Only when the bodice was secured did she finally look to Valka again. They’d met eyes, and for a moment the two women stared at each other. Elinor wondered if Valka ever thought of her the same.
“Aih trust ye slept well, Sir Valka,” Elinor’s voice was devoid of yesterday’s supposed fury. “Ye’ll need to ‘ave, Aih don’t appreciate the yawning and faffing about.”
Valka shifted her weight by the doorway, it was endearing how someone so arrogant seemed not to know what to do with herself. “As well as a knight such as I could, Your Majesty.”
Elinor smiled.
“Though I do find myself wondering if my presence was required in the preparation of your attire, or if you simply believed I would have enjoyed the view.”
Then Elinor frowned.
Choosing to ignore the knight’s impertinence this time, she turned to focus on the final, necessary stages of becoming Queen for the day. Somehow, though, her knight’s crude wordings always made her feel so fiercely… normal. Could she even remember what it was to have a peasant’s normalcy? Clicking open a box that sat nearby on her dresser, she pulled out ring after ring from within. She hesitated a moment at her wedding band, as she did every morning since Fergus passed.
It had happened quiet in the night some time months ago, he was here and then he was gone. The throne was heavy now that she carried the sole burden, at least until the children came of age.
No DunBroch nor Berkian knew he was gone.
With a barely noticeable tremble, she slipped the ring on anyway amongst the rest, in a poor attempt to return to the tenor of today. It felt cold, the weight a cry, that no matter how hard she tried death seemed to follow the ones she should've been holding closest. If it wasn’t for Valka standing guard, the proud shadow of a conquered race, maybe she wouldn’t have bothered with maintaining her facade today.
The other rings followed and soon it became like any other day. One was a gift from her daughter, who unlike her took her youth with pride to master arts of all kinds. It meant her princess grew unsheltered, that despite Elinor’s protests she still found a way to mingle with Berkian blacksmiths and Dingwall musicians. Merida should’ve been like Elinor, yet it seemed she became everything the Queen never got to be.
Another ring was her late mother’s, it was simple and ornate and so unforgiving with its steel. If only the Queen mother cared enough to give gifts, instead this piece was of a dozen heirlooms which she picked herself. Without it, without the pressure and command it brought, Elinor was certain every lie of her regal life would crash unto her.
With one more turn, she was faced with the final, most important part of her Queenhood. Was it so wrong, that despite the fact she had to wear it every day of her miserable life, Elinor had hidden her crown so deep inside her clothes storage? She knelt, not in supplication to a god but rather to retrieve the heavy circlet from the dark recess of a chest. It was always placed upon her head last, her most critical piece of armour. The very cage her mother forged around her, of which she would place upon her head willingly every morning.
The weight settled, an immediate familiar pressure that smoothed away the last fleeting cracks of vulnerability.
Closing the closet door, she saw herself in the polished wood. Not a flicker of the private thoughts in this composed, formidable ruler.
This was the Queen she was meant to be.
>~ ⚔️👑 ~<
Valka wasn’t someone known to be too observational, but that’s solely because there are some things she knows to keep to herself. Such things as the way her heart had initially leapt out of her chest and stuffed itself down her throat; the way she did notice a tremble in the Queen’s hands as she sorted herself. There was always an appropriate time for rude remarks and banter, except when it came to love and warfare.
As far as the knight was concerned, she’d been the first in a long time to have entered these chambers, thus it was, in fact, quite difficult to keep an eye from wandering. It was plain to see that this place did, in fact, belong to someone important, yet somehow it looked barely lived in, or that whatever once lived here crawled into the canopy bed to die.
With a sidelong glance, she noticed a tapestry, she presumed it unfinished though she couldn’t be too sure. A cloth hung over one of its sides, hiding away the faces and figures of the supposed royal family. It seemed to Valka it were a physical manifestation of the secrets this stone keep housed, draped deliberately to shield what the Crown did not wish to be seen.
“Ye’d be thinking right,” Valka was caught staring, and she’d jumped when she found Elinor in front of her. “Perhaps. Aih’ve not the heart to see a piece of Maih own past woven into a shroud, Sir Valka.”
In her defence, Valka often didn’t notice when she turned her head when wearing this blasted helm.
Here they both stood stiffly, for once Valka had nothing but silence to offer the Queen. Valka knew pain, no matter how hard she knew the other tried to hide it. There were cracks, ones she was far too familiar with.
“Your Majesty-“ Valka was stopped by a simple dismissive raise of the hand. No more.
She bowed her head low, not for duty but instead in acknowledgment. After all, all she was to her was surely a pressed dead flower forgotten amongst the pages of her story.
“Follow,” Elinor spoke, as she passed Valka towards the chamber’s doors. “We have much to attend today.”
Every image of the Queen was burned into Valka’s mind, how certain she despised her so. Once they’d made their exit, there was only one uncertainty in the knight’s mind.
If grief was love with nowhere else to go, why did it make her feel like this?