#ill maybe do falling down and winter of rebirth tomorrow

[elle-p]

Some nice art from the Midsummer Knights Dream pamphlet!

[acenancy]

bending too far backwards to say i didn’t try

Fandom: American Gods Pairing: Mad Wife Rating: Idk, T?

AN: Anyway, I misunderstood the prompt physical hurt/comfort from an anon and wrote this for them. Like, i 100% misread the ask lmfao I’m sorry. Also, this is just kind of pointless banter? But whatever, I wrote this at work (shh) and it’s half-assed, anyway. I owe you a proper one, anon!

(ao3)

It's twenty below in Michigan and the ice cream truck's AC is blasting. Sweeney shivers in the passenger seat, body shaking, teeth chattering, glaring at Laura with enough heat it could melt the snow bank they've crashed into.

She doesn't pay him any mind. Her attention is glued to a point in the distance, to a beacon of something Sweeney has yet to see for himself. Laura calls it Shadow and love and her newfound reason for living. Sweeney calls it a pain in his ass, and that’s on the good days. On bad days, Laura pinches his lips between her fingers so hard he can't speak ill of anyone, much less her husband, for the next two weeks.

"We can walk there," says Laura, still fixated on the horizon. "It'll only take, what? 6 hours?"

"You're out of your skull if you think I'm leaving this ice cream truck to prance through a fucking blizzard."

"If we don't, we're stuck here. All night. Probably all of tomorrow. Until this snow clears. Do you get how much time we'll be wasting?"

"Oh, I get it.” Sweeney tugs the blankets swaddled around his body tighter. “I got it when you insisted your puppy needed us to go after him again,” he snarls. “I got it when you turned the air on in the dead of winter because you felt the meat sliding off your bones. I get that you have no regard for my life whatso-fucking-ever. But this, I refuse to get. Walk your six hours in this hell storm all you want, Dead Wife. I’m staying here.”

"You're such a fucking wimp," Laura sighs. She falls against the back of the driver’s seat, her fight on the backburner for now. "It's not even that cold."

"Tell that to my snowballs."

One of Laura's eyes gets stuck in its socket when she rolls them at him. Casually, she pulls it back into place with her pointer finger.

"Why are you in such a hurry this time, anyway?" asks Sweeney. "It’s not as though this is anything new. Your husband is always in trouble as long as he's Wednesday's man.”

Sweeney doesn't expect Laura to answer. Snow falls heavy against the windshield in the silence that follows, obscuring the gray winter light of day and Laura's Beacon of Bull until all they can see is a blanket of white. She does speak though, eventually, quietly. "Because I feel…a shiver."

Sweeney's eyes flicker to Laura's chest where she keeps his coin, the only thing animating her corpse.

Laura feels her bones grinding to dust; she feels her skin disintegrating like wet toilet paper and her hair whisping away; she feels the maggots and bile eating away at her organs; she feels formaldehyde sitting heavy in her veins. Not air swirling in her lungs or blood pumping from her heart or every other sensation humans take for granted.

Laura does not feel what a living person feels. Laura does not shiver.

"A shiver," Sweeney parrots, disbelieving.

"Or, like, I'm about to shiver and can't," Laura elaborates. "Like my skin is aching to shake one off."

"Are you saying you feel cold?" Sweeney slips his hand out from the pile of blankets he's buried himself beneath, pointing viciously at the AC. "Because I’ll fuckin’ tell ya why you’re cold-”

Laura turns the air off so hard she snaps the knob off the console. She throws it onto Sweeney’s lap where not even the blankets can cushion the blow to his groin.

“You bitch,” he wheezes.

“Take me seriously,” she demands. Sweeney doesn't make another peep, so Laura continues. "I know I'm feeling whatever the hell this is,” she gestures to her body as if there’s anything interesting to see other than a woman who should be six feet below the dirt, “because of Shadow. Anytime I feel anything it's because of him."

She says this simply, matter of fact; the same way you would say “alternate side parking is in effect for today.” Sweeney doesn’t think Laura realizes the weight of what she says most of the time. He does, because it sits heavy in his gut, dragging it to his knees without his permission. It feels a little like anger or disappoint or longing. Maybe it feels something like missing your chance.

Or being in love with a dead girl.

Same thing.

Sweeney clears his throat, schooling his features into some semblance of unbothered. “Okay,” he drawls, “and how do you know something bad is happening to your husband?”

“I dunno. Is shivering a good feeling or a bad feeling?”

“Uncomfortable, mostly. Are you sure your husband isn’t just a tad chilly? That he’s forgotten to close the refrigerator, perhaps?”

“It’s a bad feeling, asshole.”

“Debatable. But fine, I suppose it isn’t particularly pleasant.”

Laura’s nostrils flare. A centipede curiously pokes his head from one’s depths with the motion. Furiously, Laura yanks it out, throwing it on the floor at Sweeney’s feet. She pulls her bony legs up to her chest then, wrapping her arms around them and rolling her head to stare out the frost covered driver’s side window.

Sweeney conks his head against his headrest, cursing his immortal mortal flesh for not being able to withstand the cold for her. Then he curses Laura for making him curse himself in the first place. But as much as he loathes the notion, if he could, Sweeney would help Laura climb Mount Everest in a speedo and flip-flops if Shadow were at the top, only because she’d want to.

And it’s always about what Laura wants, isn’t it? She wants to feel again, so they go after Shadow; she wants to come back to life, so they track down the goddess of rebirth; she wants to set Salim free so they steal a fucking ice cream truck. This journey was never about helping her husband – it was about hunting him down across this American wasteland in the off-chance Shadow could make her heart beat again. Then, when Sweeney promised her resurrection, it was about finding the queen who could breathe life back into her veins. Now they’re back to square one, chasing the scraps Shadow leaves her, and it still is not about him. Laura never loved Shadow; she only loves what he does for her.

They’re both dumb fucking suckers, in Sweeney’s opinion, but he’s still the dick hanging on for the ride.

"You can go, if you gotta," Sweeney tells her. "I'll hold down the soft serve while you're gone."

"No. I'm not going to leave you," Laura tells him. Always, such heavy words thrown around light as rice at a wedding. Then, "I don't trust you won't steal my truck."

Sweeney shoots Laura a severely unimpressed side eye and catches her running hands up and down her biceps, trying and failing to rub heat into her arms. It’s not possible for her to actually be cold, he knows, but nonetheless, Sweeney finds himself staring, waiting for goose bumps to rise along her skin, for any indication she could possibly be regaining some likeness of life.

Nothing.

It’s pointless, the hoping and waiting and pretending he doesn’t long to touch her icy dead flesh, so Sweeney decides to fuck it all and hold open his blankets. “Get under if you’re so shivery,” he tells Laura, and doesn’t even bother sounding like he doesn’t want her to.

She barely spares him a glance before looking back out the window. “I’m married,” she reminds him.

“Never stopped you before.”

She snorts. “I’m dead.”

“Do I look like a fucking necrophiliac to you?”

Amusement flickering in her eyes, Laura returns her attention to him with a slick smirk.

“Don’t answer that,” snaps Sweeney. “Just get under the damn blankets.”

“I’ll only make you colder,” Laura warns him.

“You won’t,” he lies. Then, because she’s hesitating, he adds “as long as that godforsaken air conditioner stays off.”

Bored of his complaints, Laura only blinks in response. Then she climbs from her seat to his, jabbing him with her blade sharp elbows and pushing him halfway off the seat to make room for herself.

Annoyed, Sweeney huffs into her hair, ignoring the smell of death in his nose, and wraps his arms around her middle. Holding her is the equivalent of hugging a block of ice, but something in his chest heats and melts, and he’s never felt warmer in all the centuries he’s been alive.

Laura curls into him, short legs thrown across his lap, arms folded against his chest, and rest her head against his fast beating heart. She places her hand over it, staring at the spot with something like longing. “Let’s just go to sleep,” she whispers. “We have a long way to walk tomorrow.”

“Perun strike my down if I’m walking in this shit.”

Through the fabric of his shirt, Sweeney can feel Laura’s cracked lips break into a smile. He watches her veiny eyelids flutter shut against him.

“Don’t be a little bitch,” she murmurs to his heart.