Northen Lights Burn (Schmidt)

[aa_valkyrie]

As October crawls to November, the daylight hours in Svalbard condense in upon themselves in their inexorable march for polar night.

Two hours after the sun has set, the sky overhead is velvet darkness broken by a play of green northern light. At ground level, a solitary figure is silhouetted in his cross through headlights bleached over red-stained snow, looming stature and broad shoulders bulked by fur-lined leather. Two hulking bears are stiff with death in trenches of disturbed, one by the bullet and one by the blade.

Other bootfalls spread throughout the scene have come and gone. Schmidt is left alone to stoop for an iced over camera before he advances upon bear the first.

It happens in the periphery of the eye, the opening. A vertical slit that crackles through the air with a shiver of light. It is there and gone so quickly, it could be written off as a twist of light, a reflection twisted strangly, or simply a trick of a mind that is seeing things in the bends of the ice and snow that are not there. The cold nights can play with one's eyes. Especially when they are illuminated with the dancing waves of the Northern sky, bending and dancing with the play of unseen sound. A spectre in a clear, star scatted sky that makes those midnight gems look tawdry in comparison.

This is no trick of that light.

Valkyrie steps through, boots sinking into the snow with a crisp step. She looks every inch her heritage with her blade in hand and mottled cloak thrown over her shoulders. Narrowing her eyes at the sight of a man, silhouetted in the bleached light...she waits before making any motion.

A flicker of peripheral movement might be written off as insignificant on its own. It is the crunch of old snow underfoot that swivels the man's head head slowly over his shoulders. Breath drifting in an indistinct haze through the binding of a scarf about his mouth and nose, he is otherwise still while he zeroes in upon the source.

The slender camera in his hand is not a threat. Neither is the gun at his hip, for that matter.

Still, his being here at all is borne a certain arrogance further resolved in held ground. Either he has another means of self-defense or he has substantial faith in Valkyrie's restraint.

Wreathed in moonlight, Valkyrie looks as if she has no interest in his /threats/ and if there is arrogance in that, it echoes his own. Arrogance does not mean that she is not ready should it arise. "Strange land to walk so late," she offers, mouth thinning as her gaze slides over the camera in his hand.

"Earth," Schmidt introduces with an outward sweep of his hands. At its grandest. And perhaps its cleanest.

Deliberate ignorance yields to a more concise gesture to the nearest bear within the next beat, camera tucked away into his outermost layer along with a frost-stiffened scrap of harness still clinging to its end.

"Or were you referring to the crime scene."

"I wasn't aware," Valkryie drawls coolly, tone willfully sardonic. She is unclear as to weather her answer refers to either that there had been a crime or if she knows what realm she walks upon. Her gaze does not trace his path towards the bear, following the other.

"Valkyrie."

At this particular slant her title comes at a chide for her chilly attitude -- reproach coiling beneath a cloying veneer of black humor at both of their expenses. There is growling empathy buried there, also, or something like it. A near affectionate awareness of how easy he is to dislike in this realm at this time with his methods. And allies.

"Is everything really so terrible as that?"

Voice muffled behind the damp screen of his scarf, he snares paired fingers to hook it down under his chin on his way to side stepping out of flooding light and into darker snow.

"Herr Schmidt."

The Germanic taint to his name and title rolls easily from her tongue, chin inclined in the slightest of nods. Valkyrie lacks much of his slant, voice bleak and low as the placement of the sun in the skies. "Are we not to pretend we do not know each other, then? You seemed to make a game of it," she observes. There is a can...as if he is too slight for dislike, neutrality damning him gently.

"What terror am I to judge?" She wonders, watching his forward progress. The last time they were so mirror, they had other barriers between them. Once glass, once steel, and once the crux of a stage.

"You have chosen a side," says Schmidt, observation bare to its bones. Devoid of accusation for all that displeasure might find its way in. He does not blame her. Necessarily. All of Asgard is doing it. Why not the Valkyries also?

His approach is direct without hurry; there is a casual ease to the habitually formal set of his shoulders. Behind him, both bears stand out against the landscape like blood-spattered boulders, bleached white across one flank and blacked into shadow across the other. "You tell me."

"You attacked my allies, little mask, in a pact one will support as they are promised," Valkyrie answers plainly. It is likely not the answer to the question which he might have hoped, addressing his stabbing more than otherwise. This is totally about stabbing him, right? The choices of Asgard are not her own. She is not of Asgard in the same way, the Valkyries' claims are not her own.

She scoffs, timbre rolling with something that might be amusement were it not less dry. The blood and bone hues of this October night not blackening it in the least. "My allegiance displeases you?" Valkyrie cocks her head: a bird of prey in her poise and stance. "I have walked this earth long before you took your first breath, child. I will see that it is still there to walk and cull till Ragnarok breaks her folds and shatters from the ends of time."

'Little mask,' earns a crook at the corner of Schmidt's mouth. As a slight its accuracy is the source of some grudging tolerance. His respect for the speaker determines the rest.

He is garnering a lot of practice at being condescended by immortals, lately.

"Virtually every power I now possess was developed by your allies with you in mind."

His diction is clear and concise, temper on ice. Same as the bears. Presently, he is near enough that he does not need to raise his voice for it to carry.

"They lie and cheat and torment and kill and they are consumed by fear."

"Not counting your own, those not inconsiderable amounts of warfare that you gleaned by your own creation?" That is neither a compliment nor a condescension, merely a fact. Slights and diminutives aside, she is too frank to condescend quite so effectively as the proper immortals.

Iced bears. Iced tempers. All these things left to cool in the polar North. Valkyrie's ice is in her cold eyes, just barely clinging to the edges of her tongue. "Your words twist cleanly. Me in mind? Or just the other? There is no surprise to me that they shoot at the dark, there is more of it than of them. Is that what you wish to gain? A death to fear?" The angle of her attention sharpens quietly. "I find you an interesting man, Herr Schmidt. I do not presume to understand you."

For a time Johann stands and surveys her in silence, gaze of pitch briefly felled to take in sword in hand and then boots. Charmed that he is having this conversation at all. From a closed third-person perspective, the source of his pleasure is harder to pin down.

"I do not veil my intent or operate under heroic pretense. I prepare for war and it is power attainable through war that I seek." At length, Schmidt outlines his operation on Svalbard as he might any other business: in plain terms. Cause and effect. There is no shame or remorse in him to access for a more sympathetic presentation of his course.

"I wish to gain that which is beyond my grasp. Your understanding is not required."

There are aspects to her figure that might be counted as impressive, a creature from fairy tales with a sword that gleams in the moonlight. Perhaps, Valkyrie judges him not a threat for the moment -- or merely that she can draw her sword as quickly as he a gun -- but she sheaths Dragonfire while under his silent inspection.

"Then war you shall find if it is what you seek...that is not a difficult thing to find nor has it ever been." Cause and effect. If one seeks to claim through battle, they will be met with business. Valkyrie's mouth thins faintly. "That power will burn from within. It does not beget a glorious battle."

"I have burned," Schmidt is always quick to remind, irritation low key in a flex at the hinge of his jaw. He meters out a slow step nearer, reflected light cold off the hard angles of his face and the black of his eyes. "And glory is a luxury I have never been afforded."

"You are wise in the way of the world," he continues, earnest under an eerie green ripple across the sky, "but there are some things you do not know because you cannot know."

"So you would continue to burn, for glory, for madness, and for that unspoken potential," Valkyrie judges simply, voice quiet and harsh as the wind over the ice.

"For you."

The same twisted you on more or less the same subject, Schmidt reaches to set the bunch of his scarf back up over his face, eyes slitted against the sting of damp warmth against freezing flesh.

"Why have you returned?"

"No." The word is crisp as the fallen snow, Valkyrie denying her place Schmidt's twisting plans. Not for her. For them.

"You have your mortal goals, I have my task to the dead," she says simply.

Schmidt does not look immediately to the bears. He has to think about it first, focus tipped aside over his shoulder only once he has narrowed out any potential human alternatives.

Ah.

"You are beautiful," he decides, finally, midway through the swing of his first step back. "I am sorry you have chosen to associate with American degenerates and bourgeoisie."

A task to the worthy dead: to judge and to claim. The task of the Valkyries. Perhaps the bears proved themselves so by so fiercely marring an Asgardian or perhaps her task was more human bound to the city, not so far by ancient reckoning.

"If that is what you see me as, you lack vision," Valkyrie decides in turn, irony heavy in her tone. When he decides, taking that first step back, she turns to leave -- not by the flicker of light, but by grounding of her boot into the snow. "I am not."

"I have made no reference to the physical," Schmidt drawls on in his steady reverse, cadence listing lazily into more accented English as humor creeps edged into the lines around his eyes: "But now that you mention it -- " hands open, brows hiked, he mimes a universal not bad at her turned back as he passes back into the glare of his high beams.

One likely does not want to wonder where a Valkyrie learned the gesture, but the one that she flips him as she moves to go is unimistakenly 'the bird.' Did that have that in World War II? Perhaps not. Her boots crunch in the snow as she moves, slipping towards the shadows that fall and line the rocky fjord until she is out of sight.