Vacant post

The combination of Emil's fever and Reynir being surprisingly good at chess had kept their second game from lasting very long. Emil decided to have a short nap after drinking a cup of water offered by Reynir. Next thing he knew, Mikkel was waking him up because dinner was almost ready. Once again, just about everyone felt up for an early bedtime after eating.

Reynir had put enough together from his own memories to get somewhat of an idea of the position in which Hildur must have been when the gods had chosen him, and decide that he had kept the reunion to the exchange of essential information for a long enough time. Now, all he wanted was to spend as much time with her as both of them could spare, have her explain some memories he hadn't been able to make sense of on his own, and talk properly about some of the things he had blurted out to her after finding out what she had done to him. Lalli's recovery seemed to still be going as smoothly as it could and the reports were now only getting to Onni via radio for some reason, so Hildur was able to come back as soon as she had given essential news to her crew. He already knew the first question he wanted to ask her:
-I've been using modifications of a rune I remembered seeing at home for my own work. It's the one that is supposed to keep sheep from wandering too far away from it. Are you the one who drew it, by any chance?
-Yes.
Reynir now felt even more foolish to have not connected the dots earlier. Hildur had stopped living in the house full time before Ólafur and Guðrún had, despite both of them being much older than her, because she had been accepted in a "special school" in Reykjavík. She had also been discrete about her studies, and later her profession, during her brief trips back home, but he had just mistaken it for being part of her personality. But bemoaning himself for doing stupid things had grown old during that trip that he had never been meant to be part of. There were plenty of other things that were better use of his mind right now.

The story Reynir was telling her wasn't exactly a happy one, yet had somehow managed to make it quite mesmerizing and make her almost wish she had seen its events happen. Hildur briefly found herself wondering when he had learned to report things that way, before realizing that Ólafur, Guðrún and Bjarni, who could let themselves be much more open about what had happened on the job when back at home, probably had something to do with it. As she listened to Reynir's story, she continued following that train of thought in the back of her head, until her mind clicked; her current position was that in which Reynir had spent more than a decade. How could a life of tending sheep compare to what seemed to be going on in the wider world in a young child's eyes? She felt even more foolish than before to have taken part in her parents' stop-gap solution to the fact that world existed outside of their small village, at a time at which she had been still somewhat of a child herself.

xxxx

Michael had obviously been bemused about what had happened the previous day. After sleeping on what to do, Mikkel had decided that the best approach was to see what explanation, even partial, Michael's mind had come up with and figure out what he could tell him from here. He had unfortunately been unable to prepare an explanation that wouldn't get Michael marked with one issue more than he actually had once he would get committed to the Mora mental ward. The truth would put him at odds with the usual Swedish attitude towards magic, which was similar to that of the Danes. Any explanation not involving magic could leave him convinced that some piece of advanced technology had been created when it had not. The latter possibility also begged the question of why their bare-bones expedition would have such a device, and why they would take it with them after abandoning the tank. Fortunately, Michael turned out to have been more observant about certain things than Mikkel had realized:
-Are circles on walls why I can't leave?
The correction of the few facts he had figured out would do for now. He however did his best to not give Michael any information that would let him find the rune keeping them all within the outpost on his own.

-I wasn't playing chess with him, I was just making the opponent's moves for him!
Emil realized how silly what he had just said sounded almost as soon as he finished his sentence. Especially considering it did nothing to counter Lalli's sparsely-worded point about chess being made for two people and that he'd rather watch two people play it rather than just one. Emil sat and started playing, having arranged a way to tell Reynir he was starting to get tired with Mikkel before he had gone off to see his brother. Sigrun spent the morning resting on her own bed, in the cat's company, with her most obvious sign of activity being blurting out a "you have a lame idea of fun, kiddo" that really could have been directed at any of the three people in the room besides herself.

In the dazed state her infection left her in, it felt like it took Sigrun the entire morning to notice what the "boys" had managed to do on their own, possibly without noticing themselves. Tuuri had done so many small things in addition to her actual job that reminders that she was no longer here sometimes seemed to be coming out of the woodwork. Yet, Sigrun felt she wasn't getting as many as she could have, simply because all three of them were keeping each other occupied in ways plenty of people would have considered constructive. She knew all too well it could be entirely a surface thing for any one of them, but surface things sometimes had their way of creeping into the inside. Being able to fake having it together convincingly also deserved credit of its own, even if it never felt as good as actually having it together. The was a situation where she needed to take what she was offered, and this was far from the worse she'd had to accept in her life.

Torbjörn had no more idea what to tell Onni than he did the day before, or the day before that. The possibility of someone dying had been on his horizon on a purely intellectual level, but he had never considered that that it would happen while the deceased person's older brother was comatose on his couch. Even less that he would get the news from a means that he didn't believe existed. The very nature of the news had also shattered his own deeply-held notion that some nations believed in magic as an extension of their religious belief, as something to hold onto in a world in which ordinary life was just as prone to sharp turns as any interaction with the trolls and their kin. He now knew that it could also mean being the bearer of bad news, and occasionally having someone who would refuse to believe it until it got confirmed via a harder to ignore channel. In spite of having seen a talking dog fade into thin air with his own eyes, the part of Torbjörn who refused to believe the news until he heard it from the crew members themselves over the radio was much bigger than he felt it should be. This was in no small part due to the fact that the children had been clamoring for news about Emil. If Torbjörn had received any good news about their cousin though the radio, reported by someone who had at least seen Emil in person, he would have told it to them, even if he had to withhold bad news about everyone else on the crew. He couldn't start telling the children that magic existed to explain where he got the news from, but he could also see various ways in which lying about getting first-hand or second-hand news of Emil on the radio could backfire, whether he was going to be actually doing so in the next few days or not. He realized that with the most recent incident that had allegedly involved magic, Mikkel had probably needed to provide an explanation to his brother much more urgently than he had to tell the children anything. Maybe he could ask him how he had approached the subject once they would get to talk on the radio. A random glance at Onni reminded him that he would have every right to go back to Finland with Lalli in tow as soon as the two of them would be reunited. Using him as a de facto babysitter any longer than that would be pushing it. Come to think of it, he was more than pushing it by asking him to do that now. Starting to look for a new baby-sitter felt a little more doable than finding the right words to apologize to Onni, and he could maybe keep an eye out for any work Mikkel could do during his brother's stay in the mental ward while he was at it.

Having been able to more or less properly speak with both of them, then seeing them playing the same game, confirmed something Lalli had started to suspect before his thoughts got occupied by Tuuri's inevitable fate. Those two were, in a way, the same kind of idiot: a childhood much easier than his that had left them oblivious to a lot of the world's cruelty and the mission being their first real brush with it. There were still some differences between them that he had trouble pinning down, and he would definitely be trying to do so if it weren't for a much more intriguing mystery concerning his feelings towards these two. They both did similar things that irritated him, yet he felt like he was just barely tolerating them from Reynir, while there was a part of him who kept asking for more when they came from Emil. He was brought out of his thoughts by Emil halting the game, and Reynir fetching him a glass of water. When Emil walked towards the bunks after finishing the water, Lalli expected him to go on his own bed to take a nap, but he instead came to sit on the floor next to Lalli. Lalli managed to conjure a little Swedish:
-Not sleeping?
-I don't feel like doing it quite yet. I need to rest my mind a little before being able to fall asleep and being with you is good for that.
It was another thing he appreciated in Emil. People frequently wanted him to "participate" more in the conversation, only to quite clearly want him to stop talking the few times he did find something to say about the subject. Emil, at least, was fine with him not talking and didn't make him promptly regret the few words he managed to put in. Emil glanced in the direction of Reynir, who seemed to have set his mind on finishing the game on his own. Emil spoke again:
-I hope you don't mind me asking this, but did Tuuri like chess? I just realized that I've been assuming she did for the last few days, but I don't actually know whether it was true or not.
-She did.
Emil glanced at Reynir:
-So him playing alone is as weird as I thought it was. But I guess it's a good thing that he didn't let the fact that he had to do it alone stop him. I know I was quite scared when I first realized I had to take both of us all the way up here on my own.
Lalli was about to tell him that he knew because he had been there, even if it had taken Emil an entire day to realize it, when he looked at Reynir again. He'd liked seeing Emil start playing with him in part because Reynir playing alone meant Tuuri wasn't here to play with him. But Emil was right: he hadn't hesitated to set up the board as soon as he had given up on reading the books. In scouting, one was eventually supposed to do all of the job's regular tasks alone, so there was no such thing as a two-person task that exceptionally needed to be done alone because of another person being absent. This had probably been the reason Lalli hadn't seen what Emil had seen for himself. That getting used to someone being gone involves a lot of continuing doing what needs to be done without thinking too much about the fact that some normally occupied posts are vacant. Emil started yawning, bid him farewell and climbed in his bunk. As he started drifting into sleep himself, Lalli realized that Sigrun had left her bed a while ago, and had been gone too long to have simply been using the bathroom.