Written to: The River - Imagine Dragons, crosspost from AO3
Heliophilia: Desire to stay in the sun; a love of sunlight.
"Aw, don't be like that," Darcy says, trying to hold in a giggle as Helblindi pouts at himself in her floor-length mirror. It had been a lovely, hot summer day in New York, and unfortunately, Helblindi did have rather delicate skin, as he was wont to remind Darcy at every possible moment.
He'd let his glamour fade a little bit, and he examines his patchy blue and violet skin with a frown that reminds Darcy of Loki. He prods one of the purple patches with a tentative finger, hisses a bit as it stings and burns.
"How is it that you are not burnt?" he questions her, his eyes meeting hers in the mirror. "You Midgardians are so fragile, how is it that you have not burnt away to a crisp by now?"
Darcy laughs, steps around him to rifle through her bathroom's medicine cabinet for a tube of aloe vera.
"Here. This will help," she says, handing it to him. He takes the tube of lotion from her, pops it open with a little frown, and begins slathering it over his face. Darcy squeezes a blob of the gel into her hands and reaches up on tiptoe to rub it into the back of his neck.
"I dunno," she muses. "I guess I'm just used to it. I bet it doesn't get very hot back home. You know, you being a frost prince and all."
Helblindi snorts, as if that were the understatement of the millennia. "Perhaps," he admits. "I haven't been out of Jotunheimr often. It's only been recently, because I have been visiting you."
Darcy blushes and hides her grin behind Helblindi's back.
"Come oooonnnnn," Darcy whines, tugging at Helblindi's hand. He's all bundled up like he is ready for a blizzard, and only an inch of skin is showing between his scarf and sunglasses. "You're going to melt if you go outside like that. And the sun wants to see you!"
Helblindi only shakes his head firmly, and tells her, in a muffled voice, that the sun is not his friend, that in fact, they are the worst of enemies.
Darcy rolls her eyes and pushes him back into her apartment, insists that he definitely cannot go out like that, he will embarrass her and probably frighten small children. Helblindi eyes her for a moment behind his sunglasses before carefully unwinding his scarf and unbuttoning his coat as she putters around in her bathroom, opening and closing cabinets.
She returns with a another bottle of lotion in her hand, and Helblindi just barely has a chance to catch a glimpse of the number "45" emblazoned in colourful, blue font before Darcy commands him to close his eyes. He obliges, and she rubs the lotion into his skin.
"All done," she tells him after a few minutes, when she has finished emptying the contents of the bottle over his arms and legs and neck. He stands up, feeling oily and slippery and sticky. "Come on, let's go, I said I'd take you to the state fair."
He reaches out for the coat again, but she shoots him a look that Helblindi would have been proud of if he hadn't been so suddenly cowed. "Leave the coat. And the sunglasses. And the scarf."
They spend the day walking around, holding hands, eating all manner of greasy food and playing trivial games (Helblindi really could not understand the difficulty in knocking down three metal bottles); at the end of the day, when he finally unfolds himself beside her in her bed, much to his surprise, he finds that it doesn't hurt at all.