Midgard wasn't actually as strange as Hearthstone expected.

He was expecting that he'd have to buy a pair of tights (fashionable tights, if Blitzen had anything to say about it, but tights none the less), and he'd have to grow his hair out, both of which he was not looking forward to. He also expected that there would be a lot of debilitating facial hair involved, which meant understanding people would be very difficult, like on Nidavellir, where outlandish beards were the norm. He also expected that humans would have strange dialects, what would make it very difficult to understand them. In fact, it had taken him a while to be able to read Blitzen's lips, because they moved in such peculiar ways, and his beard was always in the way. He'd never had a lot of decent experience with other dwarves, because he'd mostly stayed with Blitzen, huddled next to that life saving sun bed he'd made, but Hearthstone anticipated that human lips would move differently around their words, and that would make it difficult to understand. He had expected that humans would not know ASL at all, that he simply wouldn't be able to communicate with anyone but Blitzen. If he was being honest, he almost expected they would want to hurl him off some mountain for being disabled, but he figured Blitzen would probably do everything in his power to make sure that didn't happen. In his mind, it would sort of be like living a thousand years ago, with bows and arrows, and swords, and magic, and that strange way of talking that only period pixie dramas used, that he'd never been able to fully understand. He expected it to be very exciting, but with all of the icky things that would come with a lack of modern conveniences. Like indoor plumbing. He hadn't expected indoor plumbing in Midgard.

Hearthstone was happy to be wrong. Midgard was actually very much like Alfheim. It had a beautiful, glowing sun, that strangely hung low in the sky. It was thankfully unlike Nidavellir in this way, so Hearthstone didn't anticipate needing the flashlight he always kept in his pocket. He also wasn't afraid of running out of batteries for it. People didn't introduce you to chairs around their bushy mouths, and their clothing, mostly, was sensible. He also didn't feel like a scrawny giant in Midgard, which was a nice feeling he hadn't realize he'd missed. He was still pretty tall, but he wasn't abnormally tall by Midgard standards. Skin tones also varied widely. There were people as light as he was, and dark as Blitzen. It was strange, but the more he walked around that first day, the nicer it was to find a world where neither of them stuck out like a sore thumb. If for nothing else, Midgard was a very nice place for that reason; neither of them were freaks.

Or, at least they weren't until he realized Blitzen was moving much slower than he was. Hearthstone turned to find out why, only to see that Blitzen was having a difficult time moving. He still tried to keep up, and worked hard at it for that matter, but his limbs moved less fluidly, and the skin of his face had started to turn from a healthy earthy brown to an unnatural grey. Blitzen was petrifying. Hearthstone had never seen that before. The stories about dwarves had said they petrified in sunlight, but he'd thought they'd been one of the parts that they'd gotten wrong. Like how dwarves were all ugly little worm people, which Blitzen obviously was not. Blitzen was overly stylish, sensible, and kind. He wasn't anything like the myths that elves told about dwarves. But his nice earthy skin was turning an alamrning grey, and if Hearthstone didn't do something, Blitzen might stay that way. He couldn't let that happen.

To his credit, Blitzen was hobbling along as quickly as he could, his mouth moving quickly from one word to the next, in the way he sometimes babbled when he was nervous or worried. Babble was harder to read than most things. Hearthstone thought about picking him up, but he wasn't very strong, and he doubted it would do much good, especially with various important parts of Blitzen's anatomy turning to stone. He'd save his strength until Blitzen couldn't walk on his own, but he did swoop back, and loop one arm under hardening arms and a warm back. They stumbled forward together, trying to make better time with both their efforts.

They did manage to find a nice hotel, because despite the nature of his impending doom, Blitzen refused to be found in a place with subpar decorating. Hearthstone almost walloped him the second time Blitzen snubbed a place, but they found one to his specifications not long after, so Hearthstone didn't dwell on it. Once they'd gotten into the room, he watched in the dim light as Blitzen made his way over to one of the two beds, and carefully pulled off his shoes and socks. In the dark, Hearthstone couldn't make out much in the way of lips, but once Blitzen's blue eyes met Hearthstone's, he began to sign.

M-A-G-N-U-S C-H-A-S-E. Find?

Hearthstone nodded in confirmation, before signing his reply. Will come back here.

He was sure Blitzen said something after that, but the room was quite dark, and the beard got in the way. If he stayed in the dark too long, he'd start to get tired, and he still had work to do. Whatever it was, Blitzen hadn't signed it, so it probably wasn't too important.

Hearthstone slipped out the door, back into the well lit hallway, and headed towards the stairs.

Midgard suddenly didn't seem as nice.

The good news, was that Midgard, or Boston, as he was told, did know that ASL existed. The bad news, was that not a lot of them knew it. Most of the people he ran into were very apologetic, once they realized he couldn't speak, but almost all of them told him they couldn't help. It wasn't anything particularly new that people didn't know it, but it was strange to hear them apologize about it. Most elves just looked at him with a strange combination of pity and disgust, as if he was contagious. The humans were comparatively nicer, though they did seem to have their downsides as well.

He ended up in front of what a nice old lady said was the police station, and that someone in there should be able to help him. This would have been wonderful, if his attention hadn't been almost exclusively on the sky. Something was very, very wrong with it.

At first, Hearthstone had just thought it was a strange Midgard thing. The way the blue sky had started to change colors. The changes had been small at first, slightly deeper shades of blue, the clouds darkening, and then things had started changing more rapidly. Half of the sky seemed to completely grow dim, while the sun seemed to just run to the end of the sky, as if it was being chased by something.

Then, everything had been cast in red and oranges. The sky itself, had turned red and orange and pink, like blood and flesh and fat oozing out of the sky. The nice woman had been holding his arm, and leading him (something he particularly hated, because physical contact wasn't something he liked at all, but maybe it was a human thing. Elves weren't much for touching each other) when the sky had seemed to just split open, and the sun had started to be eaten by the horizon. By the time she'd left him, the sun had been completely swallowed by the dark horizon.

There was no great vibration to signify that anything loud had happened. No humans had stopped to gape and stare and cry at the loss of the sun, but perhaps it was a glamour, maybe they couldn't see. To him, it looked like the great maws of the earth, of some horrible beast, of Fenris Wolf himself devouring Midgard. It looked like the world was ending, in an agonizingly slow blaze of gore and violence.

How had they failed so quickly?

Hearthstone ran. He ran as fast as his legs would carry him back to the hotel where he'd left Blitzen, because if Migard was the first world to go, he needed to make sure Blitzen got to a safe one, if that was possible. He was still breathing, still there, but he imagined that things would start to go wrong fast. He had to get to Blitzen.

The trip was impossibly long, every second dragged into hours and hours. By the time he raced into the hotel, he was breathing heavily, and the darkness had started to reach out for him. His body was already crying out for sleep, he wouldn't be able to handle the dark for long, he had to reach Blitzen before that, and tell him what he'd seen.

He took the stairs, and though they were on the 9th floor, he found himself in front of their room in very little time, the card key he'd been given shaking in his trembling hands. He flung the door open with such force, that it quickly rebounded off the wall, the sound of it making small tremors up his arm.

Blitzen jumped, and missed the bed on the way back down. He flopped onto the carpeted floor of the hotel room, while Hearthstone frantically signed to him, reaching down and yanking Blitzen back up to his feet, and all but dragging him out of the room. Whatever burst of adrenaline that had gotten him here, was starting to fade. He could still feel it pounding in his head, but dizziness was starting to take over, and that was an altogether bad sign.

Then without any notice, Blitzen yanked his hand back, and the action made Hearthstone stagger forward, since he'd been putting so much effort into getting Blitzen forward. He turned, to see Blitzen signing at him, asking what was wrong, what was happening.

Hearthstone frantically signed back about the sun being eaten, about how they needed to leave, before pointing to a window in the long hallway. From here, the darkness outside was inky black, and imposing. It was one thing to expect darkness, like in Nidavellir, but to see the sun just vanish, and for darkness to creep across the sky like a nightmare made real, that was something entirely different.

At the flailing of Hearthstone's signs, Blitzen looked entirely confused. Maybe he was too worked up, and his hands were flailing incoherently. Regardless, this was no time for Blitzen to be confused and concerned about him. They needed to go. Hearthstone reached down for Blitzen's hand again, but this time, Blitzen was prepared.

It was not surprising that Blitzen was much stronger than he was. Despite their obvious height difference, Blitzen was built like a dwarf, with strength all over. Hearthstone was not, which was perhaps why it was so surprising when despite Blitzen's obvious advantage in strength, Hearthstone still managed to drag him all the way to the stairs before Blitzen got a good handle on the situation, and started dragging him back to the room.

He was sighting, trying to convince Blitzen that they needed to go because the apocalypse had already started, when Blitzen just reached over, and sighed as clearly as possible.

Trust me.

And Hearthstone did, so he stopped.

The first thing Blitzen did, was drag him back into the hotel room, shove him so that he was sitting down on the bed, and then go back to shut the door. As the door closed, the darkness overtook the hotel room, and the combination of darkness and the dizzying fall of adrenaline made him overwhelmingly sleepy.

Then Blitzen clicked on the light, and it didn't really help, but it made it so that he could see Blitzen more clearly, which was a relief in and of itself. He was starting to feel boneless. If the world was ending, he just wanted it to end, but the look on Blitzen's face told him that he had gotten something wrong, missed some crucial detail, but that everything would be fine. He was smiling in the same way he had when Hearthstone had firsts met him, panicking in what he thought was sort of a coffin. When he'd banged on the lid, Blitzen had let him out with that same smile on his face. Hearthstone only to found out later that it wasn't a coffin, but instead a tanning bed, and that Blitzen had made it to save his life. It was that same soft smile, the one that was going to tell him that everything was alright, that he was safe and that there was nothing to worry about.

Just the sight of it was enough to calm him down. Before Blitzen could even say anything, the last of Hearthstone's adrenaline leaked out of him, and Hearthstone let himself collapse on the bed, suddenly to tired for even the explanation he so desperately wanted. If the world wasn't ending, it could wait.

AN: Sorry, this is pretty half baked...