Title: Hospitality
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Dirty talk and sexual innuendo; graphic violence; TW for past torture.
Summary: Written for a Norsekink prompt asking for a retelling of the lay of Geirröd, from the Thorsdrapa. I normally like my villains to be at least a little more three-dimensional than this in terms of having motivations and depth and such, but in the myths, Geirrod is really just a straight up bag o' dicks.

The giant reached over his back and heaved out a wooden handle vast as a tree-trunk, bound with tight iron bands and topped by an iron cap. A chain rattled and slithered down the length of the mace, and at the end of its length swung a cruel, barbed head of jutting metal spikes.

"Is it revenge you seek, then?" Thor gritted from between his teeth, his eyes flickering right and left. He edged sideways along the wall, angling towards the open space between the pillars. The giant had reach on him, with a vengeance - each of the giant's arms was as big as Thor himself, even without the deadly range offered to him by that chain. It seemed a simple, crude enough weapon, with none of the craftsmanship of the dwarven weapons nor enchantments of the Aesir, but it needed none of those to crush him to a pulp. "Vengeace for those slain by my hand?"

A snarl crossed those huge, brutal features, and the giant spat into the grate over the heartfire, which sizzled and hissed. "Nay," he sneered. "What care I for the chittering, witless descendants of Ymir Frostborn's brood? I would have killed them myself had they dared cross my threshold, chopped their bones to keep my wine cool in the summertimes.

"But you, little prince-worm - you had the presumption to raise hand to those born of frost and storm. Aye, and you had the presumption to claim dominion over the power of the storm, and you were arrogant to think yourself its master. For that alone I would kill you, Thor Odinsson, and I shall take great joy in it." The giant grinned - revealing a mouth full of disturbingly sharp and gleaming fangs - and started forward, bringing the flail down from his shoulder towards Thor.

He wasn't just big, he was fast - even with all his reflexes Thor barely managed to dodge, to throw himself to the side and roll when that massive barbed head of iron landed where he had been standing but a moment before. He started to get to his feet, but the growing bullroar of the weapon's chain coming back at him made him drop flat to the floor again as it whistled deadly overhead.

Thor feinted left, then rolled to the right, made his feet and bolted like a rabbit for the only cover available to him - the huge stone posts spaced out among the hall. Even these massive pillars of rock might not be enough to stop the swing of that terrible weapon - a blow with all the giant's force behind it might shatter it like brittle ice - but he hoped that the giant would at least hesitate to break down the supports of his own hall, lest he bring the cavern roof down upon his own head.

It galled him to run, to scurry like a rat from one cover to another when every instinct howled at him to turn and meet his enemy, to bring him to bear and chastise him with a mighty blow. But that would be suicide; he was hopelessly outmatched and he had wit enough to know it. On an open battlefield, encased in his mail and with Mjolnir to hand, he would have had every confidence in facing the mightiest of foes and emerging victorious. But here, trapped in this hall with the leviathan hunting him, without a weapon or even his armor to strengthen him, he had less chance than a cricket on a hot iron griddle.

Thor was strong for his kind, which was strong indeed; he could wrestle any ten men of Asgard into submission in any given day, and still lift a cask or two in celebration afterwards. But he was still only a man, and without the enchanted, individually tailored armor that fit to him like a second skin and shielded him, buoyed and energized him - he had only the strength of a man. Compared to the brutal, elemental strength of the giant before him, he might as well be as weak as a mortal.

Geirröd came at him again, emerging from the hazy smoke of the hall at Thor's left and charging at him with a bellowing laugh. Once again Thor barely managed to dodge that wicked flail, but this time he was not quite quick enough; one of the long curving tips of the iron barbs pierced his leg, armored by no more than fine cloth, and ripped a great ugly gash down the side of his thigh.

Thor snatched himself hurriedly out of the way and dodged behind a pillar, crouching down momentarily out of sight. His teeth clenched hard enough to crack as he pressed his hands to the wound, willing the flow of blood to settle and cease before the hot red tide bled away what strength remained to him.

"You can duck and weave, but you cannot escape, little Aesir!" Geirröd called, his voice rolling around the stone hall and seeming to pick up strength and volume with every echo. "I have marked you; It is only a matter of time!"

Bent double over the wound on his leg, Thor ripped a hurried, jagged swatch of linen from the edge of his jerkin to use as a makeshift bandage. It would mark his trail, now, wherever he tried to run or hide - and it would be foolish to try, in the giant's own lair where he no doubt knew every rock and crevice. Storm giants were known to be violent and cruel even by the standards of their kind. Frost giants were equally monstrous but at least could be reasoned with, and had their own cold-hearted sense of honor; those born of the thunderheads had none.

Yet what choice had he? Even without this new injury, he had no chance if he tried to match the giant's raw strength against his own. His mind raced desperately to come up with some other way, some strategem that would let him turn his enemy's strengths to weakness, and thus turn the tide of the battle in his favor. His tutors had tried to teach him such things, in the many years that he had studied warcraft, but he'd never really had the head for them. His own might had always served him well enough, rarely requiring any more subtlety than a rush into the battlefield and a bellowed war-cry to heat the blood, to drive the chaff of common warriors aside and draw the strongest opponents to meet Mjolnir's fury.

He'd never been good at tricks and cunning and never thought he'd need to; for all that, he had Loki. Loki was ever the master of clever plans, subtle ruses to draw the enemy out of position or trick them into spending their strength at shadows. If Loki were here with him, no doubt he'd have come up with some clever plan to have the giant skewer himself on his own weapon before he'd turned around twice.

Loki. Thor ground his teeth together, blind fury momentarily driving out the panic and pain. His own brother had betrayed him, led him here and left him to die, and worst of all was the knowledge that he'd let him. He'd seen the uneasiness in him, sensed the lies and deceit and had still walked along blithely and stuck his head in this noose like a lamb being led trustingly to the slaughter!

Thor could not believe now that he'd ever been so blind; he knew his brother's reputation, knew all the names that the Nine Realms had branded him. Loki Lie-smith, Loki Trickskin, Loki the Sly, the untrustable. For years upon years Thor had ignored the warnings, let them slide and never sought to call his brother to task for his shiftiness. Only because he'd never thought that Loki would turn his wicked wiles on him.

"Loki, you coward, vile and accursed," Thor spat aloud, his hands flexing as though to close upon the trickster's wretched neck. "Should I leave this hall alive, I swear on Yggdrasil's crown that I will revenge this betrayal on your traitorous head!"

But, an inner voice whispered, drowned and almost deafened by the fury pounding in his head. I cannot. He would not. There must be some mistake. There must be. He is my brother...

He had no time to think further on his dilemma; Geirröd was stalking the hall again, the heavy flail sheathed for the moment in favor of a wicked metal blade. In his hand it was barely a pocket-knife, though long enough to serve as a sword for any Aesir; and the edge of it was jagged and serrated, wrought to hack and tear at toughened meat. "Come now, little prince, why do you lurk at the fringes like a stray cat away from a fire?" Geirröd chuckled. "I shall call for dinner, and carve for you of my finest dish: trespassing Aesir." He laughed at his own cruel wit.

"I'd not share a table with the likes of you," Thor replied hotly, temper getting the better part of discretion. "You've made a poor host so far, storm giant."

Geirröd turned sharply in the direction of his voice, whipped his arm back and threw; a huge chunk of stone whistled across the distance and smashed into the pillar behind which Thor sheltered. He ducked backwards, almost thrown from his feet by the reverberations of the shockwave when stone met stone. A chunk of the pillar tore off and crumbled as though bitten clear through, and Thor took advantage of the haze of dust and tiny pieces of shrapnel that clouded the air to run and leap to the safety of another pillar.

"It is a grave insult you put upon me, to say so," Geirröd called out, his voice heavy with mockery. "Why, I am the finest host you will find anywhere in these mountains. Just ask your brother, and I am sure he will tell you."

"I'm sure he would," Thor muttered sourly, but he wasn't quite quiet enough; the giant turned with terrifying accuracy and threw a missile at him again, this time a gigantic iron pot that rang like a bell as it crashed against the pillar and then smashed against the wall behind. Thor crouched down and shielded his head with his arms as razor-sharp splinters of stone flew everywhere.

"You think I jest?" the giant roared. "Then look!"

Thor looked up, barely in time to avoid being crushed behind when a solid iron chest came tumbling across the floor towards him. It missed him by a hairsbreadth and smashed against the wall behind, rebounding and springing open to lie on its side with its lid wildly canted.

It was a large chest, iron-framed and inset with heavy wood panels with metal bands running around them for reinforcement. It was not too different from the clothes-chests Thor used to store in his chambers at home, save only a little larger. But that was not what gave Thor pause, seized him with a sudden foreboding. It was the smell that rolled out of the open casket towards him from the sullen blackness within, a palpable miasma of blood and sweat and terror and utter despair.

"Never did fortune smile upon me so much as the day that a prince of Asgard alighted upon my threshold, putting himself within reach of my arms," Geirröd boasted. "Only the lesser prince, and not the one I sought; but I knew he could bring you to me, if he could be but persuaded. At first he refused to speak a single word - he was quite wroth, and in an unseemly hurry to depart my company. And so I abjured him to stay, and laid hands on him when he sought to shift into another form and flee, and I did grant to him the full measure of my hospitality."

"What is that thing?" Thor asked, his mouth suddenly dry.

Geirröd let out a booming laugh, merriment etched on his features as he played up the game of the genial host to the hilt. "Why, it is your brother's chambers, of course!" he exclaimed. "His resting place for the three months past, which I so generously provided to him. A fitting accommodation for a lesser prince of Aesir, I thought, since you are after all so very small."

The lid of the iron chest sagged open, yawning onto a dark pit. Thor felt drawn to it, transfixed despite the slowly growing horror. It seemed too small to hold a full-grown man, and yet Loki was slender, and could be unbelievably flexible at times. With his arms drawn to his chest and his legs bent double yes, he just about would fit in so constricted a space.

"What did you do to him?" Thor demanded, and what should have been a bellow of fury came out as little more than a strangled whisper. The foul reek that rose up from within was a mix of the worst of savage battlefields and midden heaps; sour sweat, stale urine, but above all Thor could smell the cloying stench of rotting blood. Loki's blood.

"I? I did nothing to him," Geirröd denied. "He did it all to himself, pounding and scratching in vain until his hands were all a bloody ruin. He raised such a racket, it left us all quite unable to sleep through the night - a more inconsiderate guest I never have known.

"For the first month after I put him in the crate he shouted and cursed and pounded his fists on the lid - the noise fit to raise the dead from Helheim. For the second month he screamed and begged and long clawed scratches on the inside of the lid, a most unpleasant grating noise. For the third month, much to all our pleasure, he was at last silent.

"And when at the end of the third month I pressed him to give his sworn oath to me, that he would grant my boon as ransom for his life - he at last gave in. I opened the door and lifted him weak and stinking from the casket, limp and wretched as a dying weed. And he crawled on his hands like a beast upon my good floors, before the use of his legs returned to him. Then he swore to me, upon the sun and the stars and his name as an Aesir, that he would bring to me Thor Odinson, the so-called Thunderer, and yet without his armor or the mighty Mjiolnir, giants' bane."

There was no conscious thought behind what Thor did next. A red mist had been rising over his sight all throughout the giant's boasting rant, as his words called inexorable visions to Thor's mind. Of Loki, trapped and choking in the dark, cramped and breathless and unable to move. Of his brother, pounding and scratching on the unmoving casket lid, as day followed night unchanging in the smothering darkness and no one, no one appeared to give him succor. Of Loki, starved and weak and broken on the floor at this monster's feet -

The berserker rage snapped into him like water gushing over a broken dam, the scarlet heat of battle that drove him onward fearless of danger or pain or death. The wound in his leg seemed a trifle now, and it did not hinder him as Thor seized the closest weapon to hand - a jagged chunk of rock, strewn on the floor from the shattered pillar - and charged out at his enemy with a furious roar.

Geirröd turned to face Thor as he emerged from the shadows with his arms raised. The giant reached across his back to the massive flail that had been slung there, but to Thor's battle-drenched senses he seemed to move slowly, so slowly. Thor gave a howl of triumph and leapt into the air, his focus narrowing down in exultant anticipation of another successful kill. With the memory of a thousand more like it fresh in his muscles, his arm bunched in preparation to bring the hammer down on the giant's skull -

One giant arm, thick as a tree trunk, lashed out across his chest and batted Thor out of the air. With no solid ground to brace himself against Thor was helpless to counter the strike; he went flying sideways until he smashed into one of the hall's great stone pillars, the impact slamming the breath from his lungs in a strained wheeze. Pain flashed through his joints and his bones, and he thought he felt several of his ribs crack, although there was no time to stop and be sure. The jagged piece of rock jolted out of his hand and tumbled to the floor, useless.

Geirrod's massive hand wrapped around his chest, and the giant lifted him into the air as though he were only a child. The giant was smiling, once again showing those disconcerting diamondine teeth. "I knew that would fetch you out of hiding," he growled, and shook Thor like a ragdoll.

"But what's this?" the giant continued, and that note of cruel jovality was back in his voice. "You are shivering, son of Odin. Perhaps your cruel words about my failings as a host have some merit after all. For you have ridden far to be here, through the cold mountain air at night, and I have not yet offered you the warmth of my fire."

He lifted Thor in the air and slammed his back against the metal grille covering the hearthfire, with enough force to rattle the metal bars in their housings. The maybe-cracked ribs were definitely broken, now, and he would have howled in pain had the unforgiving weight crushing into his chest allowed more than a wheezing gasp to escape. He smelled his hair and the linen clothes he wore burning, and felt the searing pain as the red-hot iron bars dug into his back and shoulders and legs.

Geirröd leaned down towards Thor, a gloating sneer on his face as his weight boredown on Thor to crush him against the metal framework. "I must put my mind to proper accommodations for the Prince of Asgard," he growled. "You are larger than your spindly runt of a brother; I doubt you would fit in the same berth unless every bone were crushed.

"Perhaps I will cut off your head, and mount it on a spike above my hearth; the rest of you should fit well enough. That cask I will send to your father in his silver-roofed hall, to prove that Geirrod, Master of Storms, had got the better of the so-called giant-slayer!"

Black spots swam before Thor's eyes; he gasped for breath and writhed against the burning pain of the metal grate beneath him. Pain and breathlessness combined to make him dizzy and light-headed; Geirröd's face seemed to waver between being close and being very far away, and his voice droned and grated in Thor's ear. He felt an odd sense of deja vu; had it been only earlier that night - that morning - that he had dreamed of being crushed to death? Of the chair rising inexorably against the looming stone ceiling with nothing to fend it off except for a pole.

A pole -

Thor moved; he bucked in the giant's unforgiving grip and lashed out with his feet, kicking the giant's chest with a solid enough thump to make him momentarily loose his hold. Thor wasted no time twisting around to grope about behind him, wrapping his hand firmly around one of the iron poles of the fire-grate. The burning hot metal seared his palms, and now Thor didbellow with the pain, but he did not let it stop him, he would not let anything stop him. He wrenched the iron pole against its mooring and with a crunch of rock it gave way, coming loose from its brethren and becoming a weapon in his hand.

Geirröd had made a mistake; in his arrogance he had let Thor get too close, leaned in near to gloat at Thor's helplessness. The pain doubled from one hand to the next as Thor brought the pole around to grip it two-hand; and with all the strength in his mighty arms he brought it whistling down from overhead to smash into the giant's face. Geirröd roared in pain, dropping Thor against the grating as he reared up and stumbled backwards, clutching at the burned welts on his skin.

Thor had no intention of letting his enemy escape. He reached out with one hand and grabbed a lock of the giant's coarse hair as it whipped by him, letting it carry him upwards through the air. His legs lashed out and found the giant's neck, locking around it with an unbreakable grip as he pulled the glowing hunk of iron back and slammed it point-first into Geirröd's eye.

The noise that left the giant's lips was incredible, not just a scream but a rockslide, thunder loud enough to crack stones and bring down the sky. Thor's ears went numb and soundless after only a second; he blocked out the reverberating roar, the trembling of the stone hall around him and shaking of rubble, blocked out the pain in his hands and concentrated on nothing but driving the makeshift spear through his enemy's brain.

Geirrod fell and the mountain shook as he hit the ground, nearly jarring Thor from his perch. His warrior's training warned him not to let up for an instant, not until the body grappling with his own was well and truly dead. The giant's body continued to twitch and jerk for minutes more afterwards, blood and less savory fluids flowing out hot and sticky around the point of the iron pole to flood over Thor's still-burning hands.

Gradually the giant's body stilled, and Thor at last released his makeshift spear and slowly climbed to his feet. Now that the fight was over and the battle-lust began to lift from his eyes, Thor became aware of how much pain he was in; the wound in his leg still bled, draining warmth and strength from him. His ribs screamed with each movement, on fire with each breath, with a faint ticking gurgle in his lungs that warned him that aggravating the broken edges of the ribs would be a verybad idea. Yet all of these pains were as nothing compared to the throbbing agony of his hands, burned black with bright red edges where he had gripped the red-hot metal.

Thor was an experienced enough warrior to know how serious his wounds were, and more importantly, how serious they were not; as painful and inconvenient as they were, they were nothing that threatened his consciousness nor his life. He would survive, and he could move on his own power to leave this place and return to Asgard, where he could find healing.

Before he did that, though...

He looked around for a blade, and finally found Geirröd's cruelly barbed knife flung into a corner. Much to his annoyance it was not sharp, and the dull blade and the giant's leather-tough skin made heavy weather of the job. Finally he managed to sever the giant's head from his body and looked around for a suitable container to transport it in; no doubt it would continue to leak for hours, and Thor had no desire to ride back to Asgard with it dripping from his saddle.

In the end all he could find was the ironbound casket that Geirröd had thrown at him during the fight; dented and scratched from the fall, with the lid twisted on its hinges but otherwise intact. Thor stood staring down into it for long moments, his brow twisted and his thoughts as black as the yawning shadows, before in the end he shook his head and tipped the giant's bloodied head into its dark interior.

With that done, Thor turned and limped towards the great metal doors at the end of the hall.

It was time to settle matters with Loki.

~to be continued...

Author's notes: Like with many other older societies before Holiday Inns were invented, hospitality was considered a BIG DEAL in Norse culture. The host had an obligation to his guests to provide warmth, shelter, food and drink, and guest and the host had a very strong obligation to not harm each other. Violating host-guest etiquette was a MAJOR faux pas, the sort of thing likely to get you skinned from the feet up or I don't know what they all did in those days. So Geirröd's behavior is doubly outrageous; not only did he do horrible things to Loki, he did them to a guest. When Thor calls Geirröd a bad host here, he's not just practicing his command of the obvious; that's an insult on the level of calling Geirröd's mother a whore.