Tag Archive | character: fridmar

Love Meme: Doug and Fridmar, Cxaidin and Zizny

Feb15

The meme is here: Give me the names of two characters and I will tell you why character A loves character B.

Here are rix_scaedu‘s and kelkyag‘s first prompts. Doug and Fridmar are from Addergoole; Cxaidin and Zizny from Dragons Next Door. To quote Zizny in an earlier piece:

“For a grown adult dragon, the pronoun is ‘thez.’”

“Theza” is the possessive.

Doug and Agmund Fridmar

Some people went into battle like a well-oiled machine. Doug’s father, for example; he moved with sparse, sharp movement, did what needed to be doing, and drank afterwards with the same mechanical precision.

Some people fought like it was sex: with ridiculous intensity, angry, wild, some strikes almost like caresses, some like orgasms. Of the Thorne Girls, Massima fought the most like that, and she fucked like she fought. Afterwards, she drank as if she was going to take the bottle to bed with her, too. Sometimes Doug felt as if he envied the bottle, and other times he pitied it.

But so very few people fought like a dance, like every move had a place and yet was beautiful. So few people fought such that you could choreograph your movements around theirs and they would notice and do the same right back at you.

Agmund Fridmar, big, fierce, bearish Agmund, fought like a ballet, like a symphony, like a dance, and afterwards, when they drank, his movements had the same precision.

Once, once, Doug had thought of an old and awful quote on dancing bears: “The marvel is not that the bear dances well, but that the bear dances at all.”

That proverb had it wrong, Doug was sure. The marvel of Agmund Fridmar was definitely in how well the Bear danced.

Cxaidin and Zizny

Zizny had fire.

In a literal sense, of course, all dragons had fire. It was their birthright, their gift, their curse.

But dragons were a long, long-lived race, one of the oldest, and they tended, after a few times of setting their nest alight, to be calmer, more thought-out creatures than their flamey breath would suggest.

Zizny was not calm.

Zizny questioned resolutely. Not only the assumptions of others, not only the writings of dragons and other-creatures of the past, but theza own assumptions, theza own truths. Zizny would ask one day why the sun was rising as it always had, and then the next day ask exactly why the dragons got along with humans – or, perhaps, why they shouldn’t get along better with said humans. Thez would question the entire stork arrangement and then snarl at a passing centaur for some comment about dragon history and its habit of going up in smoke.

(This did happen, sadly, but most of the very important dragon records were carved in stone or etched in metal. Very heat-durable metal).

Cxaidin loved Zizny’s fire, the sparks that seemed to fly off whenever Zizney was involved in a new quest, the way thez made Cxaidin question even thezself. Above all, and after all, and in spite of all, Cxaidin loved Zizny’s heat.

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Helping a Friend Out, Part Two

Dec20

Part One
Addergoole-verse, Early 2012 (in the middle of the Apocalypse)
Written to [personal profile] rix_scaedu‘s commission.
I do not have an Agmund icon. But here’s Luke looking uncomfortable about the whole thing.

The boy was not happy about Agmund’s presence, but he was more than willing to lay out the details of the attack. The Nedetakaei nest had at least ten human hostages, was in the middle of what had been a very populous area before the gods came to town, and had been lain with booby-traps, Worked wards, and at least three explosive trip-lines.

“They don’t want anyone coming in to them, but they’re not going out much, either. They come out just after dark, about every fourth day — no set pattern, but it’s been three days with nothing, so hopefully today’s the day — but they always bring at least two of their hostages, and they go out in two-person teams. If we want to wipe out all three, we have to get the two when they’re out —”

“And then beard the third in the lair or hope they come out. Da. Roof attack?”

“Booby-trapped.” Dominic smiled grimly. “It’s almost as if they expected combat-ready opponents with wings.”

“Always said, Mara’s greatest failing was predictability. But you.” Agmund tapped the boy’s shoulder. “You are not a Mara, no?”

The boy folded up a bit. “Don’t need to rub it in,” he muttered.

“Who is rubbing in? I am not a Mara, either.” Agmund dropped his Mask for a moment, letting the bearishness of his features show through. “So we are not so predictable. What about up from underneath?”

“Under… never thought of that.” The boy’s wings twitched in a habit he’d probably picked up from Luke. The fliers that didn’t study under him didn’t get that habit of nervous telegraphing in quite the same way.

“Then we should look, no, and hope they did not think of it either. Think of it this way,” Agmund offered, with a large grin, “it is much cleaner now than it would have been a year ago.”

Dominic made a face. “Sewers. I hate sewers, even clean ones. But it’s not a bad idea.”

“If back-up had come, what would your plan have been then?”

“Like I said, wait for the two to come out, then storm the place. I don’t want any hostages to die… but the Nedetakaei have to be taken out. They’re too dangerous otherwise.”

“Willing to try it my way, this time?”

Dominic studied him. “Well, you’re the grown-up, and you came to back me up.”

“You are a grown-up too,” Agmund reminded him. “I was there when you received your name, Shifting Shield.”

“But you’re the one with the experience,” Dominic countered. “So your plan wins this time. We go from below?”

“We go from below,” Agmund agreed. “And we go quietly, when the first ones leave.” He growled an Idu out, sending his senses through the street below, and was pleased to hear Dominic do the same.

The boy didn’t appear to have the words for Earth or Worked things, but with a mutter to himself (“Everything has air and water;” he sounded as if he was quoting someone), he did a Working to Know the air and water beneath their feet. The two patterns together would tell them where they were going.

“There,” they pointed at the same time. The manhole cover was just a few yards from their feet. And, as if on cue, the back door to the warehouse opened and two Nedetakaei exited.
Agmund nodded to the boy, and they got to work. It might be messy, but the Bear could go back to Addergoole and tell Luke that one more of his Students had survived. That, in Agmund’s opinion, was worth far more than wading through a sewer.

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Helping a Friend Out, Part One

Dec10

Addergoole-verse, Early 2012 (in the middle of the Apocalypse)
I was thinking about Luke during the apoc, his oaths, and… his friends

Agmund Fridmar was, of course, not unaware that his cy’ree, his Students, and those called cy’Luca, Luke Hawk’s Students, were in a bit of a cy’ree battle, and had been since there were more than three of them to glare at each other across the Dining Hall.

But his Students’ animosity toward Luke’s Students – and, sometimes, he supposed, towards the man himself – did not mean that Agmund had to feel anything of the sort, nor did the cy’Luca’s animosity towards cy’Fridmar and towards Agmund mean that he couldn’t help out Luke in a tough spot.

And the fact of the matter was, Luke was in a tough spot right now, although he would probably have preferred that Agmund and the other professors didn’t take notice. There was a war raging – or, at least, there were dozens and dozens of battles raging, and if you shook them all out, you could see two or three sides that were relatively consistent. There were cy’Luca, former cy’Luca but still the same wide-eyed, eager Warriors for Good, out there fighting against ancient would-be gods. They were losing, on average, but there were doing far more good than one might imagine they would have, and their wins were spectacular.

They were, however, dying, slowly and quickly, in singles and en masse, and Luke was trapped here, in Addergoole, staring at the walls and pacing like a caged tiger. Regine had him wrapped up in orders, and she had no sympathy nor concern, it seemed, for all of those cy’Luca out there dying in a battle she herself had seen coming, had planned for, had engineered them conceived for.

Agmund had his own oaths, but Agmund had always been better with words then Luke, their ins and outs, particularly their outs. His oaths left him a lot more room, and today, the room he was taking from them was a field trip of sorts.

This particular cy’Luca had no fondness at all for him. Dominic, the Shifting Shield. His demonic-looking Change — purple skin with black points, horns, claws — had led the cy’Fridmar during his time to try to recruit him, aggressively. But he’d always been cy’Luca material, and he’d gone to the winged White Knight side in earnest.

Tonight, he was going up against three Nedetakaei who were taking over a neighborhood under the aegis of a chaotic would-be god who’d taken over a northern city, and Agmund had reason to believe his expected back-up wouldn’t be showing up. One of them was dead, one of them had gotten captured, and the third one had been lying.

Agmund walked up to the young man. He didn’t bother to try to be sneaky. He was not here to test Shifting-Shield; he was here to aid him.

“They’re not coming,” he said, before Shifting-Shield could say anything. “So I am here. Stand down,” he added, and let his accent thicken. They did believe him more when he sounded like a bad Russian Boris and Natasha imitation. “Am here for backup, not to fight you.” He gave his best scolding-professor expression. “Nedetakaei is the enemy, da, not me?”

The boy relaxed and bristled at the same time, shifting from ready for a battle to ready for an argument. It was good he knew the difference. “Yeah. The Neds are the enemy, yeah.”

“Very good. Now tell me what we’ve got.”

Part II: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1215458.html

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Hurt/Comfort Meme Answer 1: Drunk, Admund/Doug

Apr25

To Rix_Scaedu‘s prompt to my H/C prompt here. After Into the History of Addergoole.

When he wanted to really, really get shit-faced, when he wanted to puke until his stomach was empty and then drink more, Doug didn’t go to Maureen and he didn’t go to his father.

He and Luke emerged from the sub-basement of the school quietly, and just as quietly went their separate ways. Doug scrubbed quickly, washing the ichor and gore off his skin, threw on the first thing that came to hand, and went to Agmund’s.

The Bear opened the door without question. He took in Doug’s expression and poured two glasses of vodka. “Sit,” he said, tilting his head at the big leather couch. “Sit, I will get the bottle and the bucket.”

Agmund never asked questions, and he never told Doug it was time to stop. And when it finally came to drunk tears, when Doug sat leaning over a bucket of mostly-clear vomit, sobbing shamelessly, Agmund passed him water and patted his back.

“…They were kept alive,” Doug muttered. “Alive down there. And we never knew.”

“We never knew,” Agmund reiterated, and passed Doug another glass of vodka.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/927174.html. You can comment here or there.

A Beginning

Mar29

Written to Rix_scaedu‘s question here: Who were Agmund Fridmar’s parents and who was his Mentor?

1841

Artyom looked to his father, to his mother, and back to his father. Neither of them had shown any surprise when, four weeks ago, Artyom had woken in the middle of the night to find himself a cubit taller and four hand-spans wider. “Aren’t you a great bear,” Artyom’s father had said, but he’d been smiling. Artyom’s mother had just said “I’ll write to Magnus.”

Magnus, it appeared, was a Norseman a hand-span again taller than Artyom and quite a bit broader. He had bowed deeply to Artyom’s mother and called her Star-Catcher, a name Artyom had never heard before. His bow to Artyom’s father had been polite but much less deep, and he’d called him Gospodin Ivanov.

Artyom’s mother was not a gentle person, but she was using her soft voice now, the one she used for hard things. “Artyom, this is Magnus, called the Winter Hound, and he will be your Mentor. He fought by my side, in the days when we were warriors.”

There was a story there, Artyom knew it. But there was also no room for argument in his mother’s voice. “Gospodin Winter Hound,” he said, instead of arguing, and bowed deeply. He’d always known he might have a Mentor, if things turned out one way or another. It seemed gaining a cubit in height was one way for things to turn out.

“It will be a long voyage, young warrior. Say goodbye to your parents now, and, should all be well, you will be saying hello to them in some years as a new person.”

Artyom nodded again. There was no point, he could tell, in saying that he didn’t want to leave, that he had no wish to be a new person. Things had been decided. He bowed to his mother and to his father. “Good-bye,” he said. His voice cracked, but he ignored it and, politely, so did they. “I will return.”

His mother’s hand landed hard on his shoulder. “You will return to us, my son. Go now into the hands of your Mentor, and may the gods guide your steps.”

Artyom turned to the gigantic Magnus. “Sir. I am yours to teach.”

see obsolete Russian units of measure.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/916027.html. You can comment here or there.

About That…

Dec25

This story is in response to Guesty’s request for “more sexy/romantic Fridmar” in my December Drabbles post here (and here).

It follows directly after Fridmar and Love and And Then There’s You.

Damn the Daeva, but it didn’t let go once it had something in its teeth. Agmund had, in the end, had to make promises to get Mikhaíl to leave.

As if Agmund was the only one who needed in his life some companionship. As if Mikhaíl was not staring woefully like a dog who could not have its bone. But no, it was into Agmund’s life that there would be meddling.

He had made the promises he had to, to get Mikhaíl to stop… being so very Mikhaíl all over his office. And now he was sitting in that same office, wondering how one could not be awkward about such things. How had Doug handled it? Indeed, how had any of them handled it? Agmund knew things about his fellow teachers that he did not think they knew anyone knew.

“You wanted to see me, Professor Fridmar?” Fairuza flopped into the chair with insouciant grace.

“I did say when time allowed.” You couldn’t very well call a student to the office for this.

“Yeah? Well, time allowed.” She smirked at him. Unafraid. Agmund liked that about her. “You have something on your mind?” She shifted into Farsi. “Is there something your Student can do for you, Professor?”

“The name is Agmund, please.” He managed to find his voice, although it took more effort than it should have. “It’s your fourth year here at Addergoole.”

She leaned forward, both feet on the floor now and suddenly not nearly as casual. “I didn’t know you had a first name, Professor. Agmund. Or is that your Name?”

“It’s the name I was given.” He tilted his head at her. “Do you not wish to call me by it?”

“It sounds serious, if we’re doing first names. You’re not usually this serious.” She tried a smile. It only made it as far as her lips. “If you’re here to yell at me about not having a second kid yet, Professor, you can save your breath. I’ve got a few months. I’ll figure it out.”

Agmund cleared his throat. “Actually…”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/620966.html. You can comment here or there.

And Then There’s You

Dec6

To [personal profile] rix_scaedu‘s commissioned prompt in the My-Hobbies-Ran-Into-Each-Other-And-I-Blew-My-Gas-Money-Budget Emergency Fundraiser

After: Fridmar & Love
“That was a lovely speech you gave Ana.”

“You were not intended to hear it. Come in, then, Mikhaíl, rather than keep talking in the hallway.”

“Oh, but that’s all I wanted to say.” Looking innocent and entirely unbelievable in it, Mikhaíl the Linden-flower stepped into Agmund’s office and shut the door. “It was a lovely speech.”

“It was what she needed. Sit, then.”

“Woof.” Mikhaíl levered itself gracefully into chairs that had not been designed for its tail. “Yes, of course. What she needed, what Doug needed. A pity she doesn’t trust me, but, considering her antecedents, I’m not surprised. And I am Doug’s grandmother, as much as he glowers and tries to forget it.”

The Daeva wanted something, and Agmund would have no peace until he gave it. Whatever it was. “Doug glowers because he hurts. He glowers less when Anastasia is around.”

“You’ve noticed that, too? Of course you have. But yes, your answer was good, perfect for the situation and for both of them. All three of them, but that’s another story.”

Agmund did not rise to the bait. For one, he knew what the Daeva was talking about. For another, it wasn’t why Mikhaíl was here. “Da. It makes them happier.” Twist that one, horn-head.

“And a happier teacher is, in general, a useful teacher. Better for his Students. Better for his co-workers.”

“Maybe Luke we should be getting a girlfriend next.”

“Mmm.” And now it was the Daeva’s turn not to show anything. “Maybe. But it was not Luca I was thinking of.”

“Never it is Luca you are thinking of.” And if Mikhaíl could read the sarcasm or not, there would be a message there.

“Mmm.” The Daeva’s eyes focused on the wall for a heartbeat, and then back to Agmund they swung, undeterred. “What about you?”

Agmund had been expecting the attack. “And what about me? Doug is not my type, nor I his.”

“Of course not. Men.” Mikhaíl’s hand wave covered all of the gender in one dismissive gesture. “Agmund, when is the last time you loved, yourself?”

Agmund had been expecting this, and still didn’t want to answer it. He tried a dodge, knowing that in this form of combat, Mikhaíl was more skilled. “I do not ask you about masturbation, Mikhaíl. Do not ask me.”

“Very cute, Agmund. When’s the last time you loved someone else?”

“This is also not your business.”

“And here I am asking.” The Daeva leaned forward, undeterred.

“I am not in love with you, Mikhaíl. You are not my type, either.” Drop it, his tone said.

No way, Mikhaíl’s eyes said.

“Of course not. But there was Xanthia…”

“No, there was not. There was never Xanthia, because there was Hemlock for Xaviera.”

“What about Penstemon?”

“Rather occupied, and not interested. And again, you presume.” He leaned back and pushed against his desk. Go away, nosy Daeva.

“I know you, Agmund.” Mikhaíl leaned forward. Not going anywhere, grumpy bear.

“You know what you choose to see, what you think you see. There is nobody, Mikhaíl.”

“And if there truly was, I would go away.”

“This I will believe when I see it.” Agmund wanted to relax, but it felt as if Mikhaíl was circling for another angle of attack. Did the Daeva know?

“And then there is Fairuza.” Yes, damn its eyes. It knew.

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