Ask Me Anything December #7
Dec. 16th, 2018 05:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mhalachaiFor the Ask Me Anything December meme - Day #7
The question today is fromdimestore_romeo : I'm not sure if it's wip or rip, but its an old favourite nevertheless! How did you picture the rest of the plot for Hel's Bones turning out?
Ah, Hel's Bones, my one story that's been jossed to many times by canon that I might actually just say "screw it" and go with the original plot.
Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1961022/chapters/4241784
Which is this, so if you're not wanting spoilers, head out. But anyway, here's the big reveal:
Hel, daughter of Loki and Angrboða, is the Soul Stone.
And not like Vision had the Soul Stone; in the story so far we had seen that Angrboða had done some truly sketch things to her kids after their banishment from Asgard, so the big reveal was going to be that Angrboða had somehow taken the Soul Stone and woven it into Hel's bones (hence, title) and that was how Hel had gotten her powers (and that fulfilled Frigga's prophecy that Hel was the keeper of the dead).
In essence, this gives Hel the potential to be the most dangerous person in the universe.
Okay so now that that's out of the way: The plot!
We've done the revel of the characters, of the kids' paternity, but mind that Frigga was sensing gaps in the kids' stories. That gap shows up at the house a couple days later, when Hel and Fenrir are out at work and Jormungandr is working in the basement when into the house walks this tall blond man, who looks so much like Frigga's dead brothers that she's shook, shouting that he's back early, where is everyone, and when he sees Frigga he stops and asks who she is and why she's in his house, and once Frigga says that she's a guest of Hel's (no names, names are power), the man grins and steps forward and says,
"Nice to meet you. I'm Baldr."
And Frigga has a minor breakdown at seeing her dead son, all grown up and healthy, and then we have flashbacks to Baldr's death as a child (Frigga was in some kind of family council with Odin and Thor and Loki and Baldr, just a toddler, had been angry he had been put to bed for a nap instead of being able to watch the weapons training like he wanted to, so he went in search of his brothers and had fallen off a balcony onto Loki's casually placed mistletoe spear and had been dead for an hour when he was found, far out of reach of Asgardian medicine).
So Frigga's trying to handle this when in runs Jormungandr and he's all, "well shit" and Baldr asks what is going on and Jormungandr essentially has to explain to him that "hey this is your mother" and to Frigga "we were trying to figure out how to tell you about Baldr, he wasn't supposed to be back until Sunday."
Eventually it all comes out that the four kids have been living together since Hel resurrected Baldr, and that they have spent nearly 900 years moving around the earth (opening up the door for some wacky Highlander-type costumed flashback scenes), all while Frigga had spent centuries blaming herself for the death of her youngest son.
Fun, right?
When Hel gets home later, Frigga demands to know why she didn't tell her about Baldr and then we get into the conflict on motherhood – who's a child's mother, the one that bore him or the one who raised him? And that's going to linger a bit and be something that Frigga has to work through and that Hel's super touchy on, and the boys all sort of don't get it.
Okay that concludes Act One: Home of the story. Act Two: New York, is around Frigga getting out into the world, seeing what the kids all do. Hel's a cop, working out of the 5th Precinct, where her knowledge of languages comes in handy (that's in and around Chinatown and Little Italy); Fenrir runs a construction company, Jormungandr is currently working on art, though he dabbles in pretty much everything except actual crime, and Baldr is a jack of all trades.
(Tidbit: Hel taught Baldr magic and his primary magical focus is metal work. This comes in handy later in the end of Act Two)
So we get scenes of Frigga meeting Hel at the police station, where Hel's created a new identity for Frigga, that of Frieda Radolf, of whom no photographs exists as she comes from a Hutterite community in western Canada, and we see Hel interacting with her colleagues and we get a bit of background on what the Avengers are up to post Thor: Dark World.
Frigga also spends time with Jormungandr and Baldr as they're working on some art project, and sees how these two are the closest in age and interests, and are more like blood brothers than uncle and nephew. (from a writing perspective, they're useful for witty banter and byplay while they roughhouse, and for dropping tidbit of exposition useful for the story)
Where Frigga ends up is going to work more often with Fenrir, who is trying to run a business please, and we see him as quieter and more reserved than the others. Frigga ends up being around a few times when there are ruffled clients and she brings a level of diplomacy to the situation that is helpful, so she ends up doing that most days, to see the city and help out where she can.
Also, this gives her the space and time to flex her magic.
She is reluctant to try magic at the house, as it's warded to heavily with the children's blood, but outside at various job sites, or wandering around the city and in the parks, Frigga is able to focus her magic within the new world she's in, being able to pull of electricity, on the metals that surround everything, on the weather currents, etc.
Basically she re-invents her magic to her new surroundings (and to her new body).
Then, Captain America: The Winter Soldier happens.
And this, reader, is where I think I messed up in the plotting of this story. The addition of the characters you're about to read about made things overly complicated and made me hold back on writing it… and then I got sidetracked. So here's how it might have gone had I included a certain James Barnes:
I figure that the actual impact of CA:WS on New York wasn't all that high, relatively speaking. What the biggest impact that came out of it was that two months after the events at the Triskelion, Frigga and Fenrir swing by the construction supply depot before going out to the day's job site and while Fenrir goes in to pick up an order, Frigga glances over the men casually hanging around looking for a day's work and sees something different about one of them.
One of them has a metalwork arm.
(See? Bringing in Bucky at this point just makes things complicated, doesn't really further the narrative of 5 Asgardians on earth, but this is how the story goes)
Frigga ends up hiring the man for a day's work and Bucky Barnes (not that he knows that name) starts working with Fenrir's construction crew and ends up helping out around the office and gets woven in a bit with the Radolf crew, including set-up with one of Jormungandr's art shows and ends up hiding in the back when Steve Rogers walks in with Natasha Romanoff on one of their work breaks from Avengering.
(so it's obvious that Bucky sort of knows what's up, but see the problem is that this is making it into a Bucky story not a Hel story, so I am sure that's where I got derailed.
But the good news is, I can snip out the Bucky storyline and lose very little Frigga related plot. Let's proceed under that assumption:)
CA:WS happens and that doesn't have a lot of impact on the main crew in this story, and around this time was when the next big plot item was to happen, which I hadn't sorted out but it involved sabotage at the construction company and this brings in the police (incl. Hel and her close-to-retirement partner) and wacky hijinks ensue.
All of which is a distraction! You thought that that plot point would be the climax of Act Two, but then we have the fam together out at the end of that plot point and there's a crack and a bang and oh no! it's Angrboða and her terrifying ice wolves come to claim the Soul Stone in Hel!
(I obviously didn't have the "why now" for this part but maybe there was some canon reason. Maybe Thanos was up to some bullshit with the stones, who knows)
Big fight in the middle of a populated city, Fenrir and Jormungandr end up transforming into very large versions of their animal selves to stop the ice wolves while Frigga battles with her new Midgard magic to stop Angrboða from literally ripping Hel apart to get to her bones, and the key to the battle is Baldr (a blank spot in Angrboða's plan) throws a perfectly placed metal spear magicked from a stop sign pole through Angrboða, which gives Frigga the opportunity to trap Angrboða, which gives Hel the momentary space to rip Angrboða's soul out.
What remained of Angrboða's body dissolved like dust after that.
So, battle over, Frigga tells Baldr and Jormungandr to get the badly wounded Hel and Fenrir out of there, while she stays behind to Deal with Stuff.
I wasn't sure how this part would play out and how this stuff would get dealt with, but tl'dr somehow one of the Avengers (prob. Tony) spill what the currently absent Thor shared before he left, which was that after Frigga died, Loki was killed by the Dark Eleves, and when Frigga ends up getting home and finds the others healed through the power of magic and time and tells the kids, Hel knows that's wrong because she'd know if Loki were dead.
Shenanigans!
So Act Three: Follow the Yellow Brick Road, the fam heads home to Asgard and avoids Heimdall and through the blood magic Hel casts, she can tell that "Odin" in the throne room isn't related to Baldr or Fenrir, but to her and Jormungandr, while there's a blood tie to Baldr and Fenrir elsewhere in the castle.
Frigga, who is getting mighty sick of all this, wants to go find Odin first, but Hel's got a plan.
And that involves sending Fenrir and Baldr off after Odin while she, Jormungandr and Frigga go confront "Odin" – with Frigga playing the part of a ghostly projection, while Hel casts the fake shade of Baldr as he was when he died to distract "Odin".
There's a scene between Hel and Loki!Odin, with Hel getting a chance to vent her feelings of abandonment to Odin and underlying that to Loki (concluding Hel's character arc in this story), to distract Loki while the "ghost" of Frigga manages to activate a spell bomb that will strip away all illusion from the throne room, leaving a very much alive Loki and Frigga to face each other. In the very short ensuing fight, Loki is good, but he would never be able to defeat his mother's magic.
Loki defeated, and all the guards suddenly doing something to earn their salary, Fenrir and Baldr return with Odinsleep!Odin. Once Loki gets a look at Fenrir, who very much resembles Thor, he's all like "well shit".
There's a scene where someone's trying to figure out who the king of Asgard is at this point – Baldr died, while Fenrir was banished, and none of them want to deal with this, and in the ensuing melee, Loki illusions his way out of there and off Asgard, to fight again another day.
There's a scene of Frigga and groggy old Odin talking, with him apologizing for letting her die and stuff (uh, yeah didn't think how this would go much) and then Frigga and the kids all head back to Asgard via the Rainbow Bridge.
I should add that Thor is still off fighting trolls at this point and misses all the fun.
End of the story, Hel says Frigga can leave if she wants to Frigga says that she wants to stay with her family, together, and it's a touching scene before Hel straps on her badge to go back to work and Jormungandr starts calling Baldr "your highness" and things carry on.
Epilogue: Thor shows up to meet everyone (Jane's with him because) and to see his mother again and everything is super awkward on meeting his actual son and that son's siblings, and also his dead brother and dead mother.
Jormungandr decides that what this situation needs is pizza, which gets Baldr and Jormungandr into one of their stand-up routines and the tension is diffused.
and that's what I did on my summer vacation that's how that was going to turn out - I still like it better than bringing in Hela as an Odin child and making her evil - even if Thor 3 is one of my favorite movies :)
The question today is from
dimestore_romeo : I'm not sure if it's wip or rip, but its an old favourite nevertheless! How did you picture the rest of the plot for Hel's Bones turning out? Ah, Hel's Bones, my one story that's been jossed to many times by canon that I might actually just say "screw it" and go with the original plot.
Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1961022/chapters/4241784
Which is this, so if you're not wanting spoilers, head out. But anyway, here's the big reveal:
Hel, daughter of Loki and Angrboða, is the Soul Stone.
And not like Vision had the Soul Stone; in the story so far we had seen that Angrboða had done some truly sketch things to her kids after their banishment from Asgard, so the big reveal was going to be that Angrboða had somehow taken the Soul Stone and woven it into Hel's bones (hence, title) and that was how Hel had gotten her powers (and that fulfilled Frigga's prophecy that Hel was the keeper of the dead).
In essence, this gives Hel the potential to be the most dangerous person in the universe.
Okay so now that that's out of the way: The plot!
We've done the revel of the characters, of the kids' paternity, but mind that Frigga was sensing gaps in the kids' stories. That gap shows up at the house a couple days later, when Hel and Fenrir are out at work and Jormungandr is working in the basement when into the house walks this tall blond man, who looks so much like Frigga's dead brothers that she's shook, shouting that he's back early, where is everyone, and when he sees Frigga he stops and asks who she is and why she's in his house, and once Frigga says that she's a guest of Hel's (no names, names are power), the man grins and steps forward and says,
"Nice to meet you. I'm Baldr."
And Frigga has a minor breakdown at seeing her dead son, all grown up and healthy, and then we have flashbacks to Baldr's death as a child (Frigga was in some kind of family council with Odin and Thor and Loki and Baldr, just a toddler, had been angry he had been put to bed for a nap instead of being able to watch the weapons training like he wanted to, so he went in search of his brothers and had fallen off a balcony onto Loki's casually placed mistletoe spear and had been dead for an hour when he was found, far out of reach of Asgardian medicine).
So Frigga's trying to handle this when in runs Jormungandr and he's all, "well shit" and Baldr asks what is going on and Jormungandr essentially has to explain to him that "hey this is your mother" and to Frigga "we were trying to figure out how to tell you about Baldr, he wasn't supposed to be back until Sunday."
Eventually it all comes out that the four kids have been living together since Hel resurrected Baldr, and that they have spent nearly 900 years moving around the earth (opening up the door for some wacky Highlander-type costumed flashback scenes), all while Frigga had spent centuries blaming herself for the death of her youngest son.
Fun, right?
When Hel gets home later, Frigga demands to know why she didn't tell her about Baldr and then we get into the conflict on motherhood – who's a child's mother, the one that bore him or the one who raised him? And that's going to linger a bit and be something that Frigga has to work through and that Hel's super touchy on, and the boys all sort of don't get it.
Okay that concludes Act One: Home of the story. Act Two: New York, is around Frigga getting out into the world, seeing what the kids all do. Hel's a cop, working out of the 5th Precinct, where her knowledge of languages comes in handy (that's in and around Chinatown and Little Italy); Fenrir runs a construction company, Jormungandr is currently working on art, though he dabbles in pretty much everything except actual crime, and Baldr is a jack of all trades.
(Tidbit: Hel taught Baldr magic and his primary magical focus is metal work. This comes in handy later in the end of Act Two)
So we get scenes of Frigga meeting Hel at the police station, where Hel's created a new identity for Frigga, that of Frieda Radolf, of whom no photographs exists as she comes from a Hutterite community in western Canada, and we see Hel interacting with her colleagues and we get a bit of background on what the Avengers are up to post Thor: Dark World.
Frigga also spends time with Jormungandr and Baldr as they're working on some art project, and sees how these two are the closest in age and interests, and are more like blood brothers than uncle and nephew. (from a writing perspective, they're useful for witty banter and byplay while they roughhouse, and for dropping tidbit of exposition useful for the story)
Where Frigga ends up is going to work more often with Fenrir, who is trying to run a business please, and we see him as quieter and more reserved than the others. Frigga ends up being around a few times when there are ruffled clients and she brings a level of diplomacy to the situation that is helpful, so she ends up doing that most days, to see the city and help out where she can.
Also, this gives her the space and time to flex her magic.
She is reluctant to try magic at the house, as it's warded to heavily with the children's blood, but outside at various job sites, or wandering around the city and in the parks, Frigga is able to focus her magic within the new world she's in, being able to pull of electricity, on the metals that surround everything, on the weather currents, etc.
Basically she re-invents her magic to her new surroundings (and to her new body).
Then, Captain America: The Winter Soldier happens.
And this, reader, is where I think I messed up in the plotting of this story. The addition of the characters you're about to read about made things overly complicated and made me hold back on writing it… and then I got sidetracked. So here's how it might have gone had I included a certain James Barnes:
I figure that the actual impact of CA:WS on New York wasn't all that high, relatively speaking. What the biggest impact that came out of it was that two months after the events at the Triskelion, Frigga and Fenrir swing by the construction supply depot before going out to the day's job site and while Fenrir goes in to pick up an order, Frigga glances over the men casually hanging around looking for a day's work and sees something different about one of them.
One of them has a metalwork arm.
(See? Bringing in Bucky at this point just makes things complicated, doesn't really further the narrative of 5 Asgardians on earth, but this is how the story goes)
Frigga ends up hiring the man for a day's work and Bucky Barnes (not that he knows that name) starts working with Fenrir's construction crew and ends up helping out around the office and gets woven in a bit with the Radolf crew, including set-up with one of Jormungandr's art shows and ends up hiding in the back when Steve Rogers walks in with Natasha Romanoff on one of their work breaks from Avengering.
(so it's obvious that Bucky sort of knows what's up, but see the problem is that this is making it into a Bucky story not a Hel story, so I am sure that's where I got derailed.
But the good news is, I can snip out the Bucky storyline and lose very little Frigga related plot. Let's proceed under that assumption:)
CA:WS happens and that doesn't have a lot of impact on the main crew in this story, and around this time was when the next big plot item was to happen, which I hadn't sorted out but it involved sabotage at the construction company and this brings in the police (incl. Hel and her close-to-retirement partner) and wacky hijinks ensue.
All of which is a distraction! You thought that that plot point would be the climax of Act Two, but then we have the fam together out at the end of that plot point and there's a crack and a bang and oh no! it's Angrboða and her terrifying ice wolves come to claim the Soul Stone in Hel!
(I obviously didn't have the "why now" for this part but maybe there was some canon reason. Maybe Thanos was up to some bullshit with the stones, who knows)
Big fight in the middle of a populated city, Fenrir and Jormungandr end up transforming into very large versions of their animal selves to stop the ice wolves while Frigga battles with her new Midgard magic to stop Angrboða from literally ripping Hel apart to get to her bones, and the key to the battle is Baldr (a blank spot in Angrboða's plan) throws a perfectly placed metal spear magicked from a stop sign pole through Angrboða, which gives Frigga the opportunity to trap Angrboða, which gives Hel the momentary space to rip Angrboða's soul out.
What remained of Angrboða's body dissolved like dust after that.
So, battle over, Frigga tells Baldr and Jormungandr to get the badly wounded Hel and Fenrir out of there, while she stays behind to Deal with Stuff.
I wasn't sure how this part would play out and how this stuff would get dealt with, but tl'dr somehow one of the Avengers (prob. Tony) spill what the currently absent Thor shared before he left, which was that after Frigga died, Loki was killed by the Dark Eleves, and when Frigga ends up getting home and finds the others healed through the power of magic and time and tells the kids, Hel knows that's wrong because she'd know if Loki were dead.
Shenanigans!
So Act Three: Follow the Yellow Brick Road, the fam heads home to Asgard and avoids Heimdall and through the blood magic Hel casts, she can tell that "Odin" in the throne room isn't related to Baldr or Fenrir, but to her and Jormungandr, while there's a blood tie to Baldr and Fenrir elsewhere in the castle.
Frigga, who is getting mighty sick of all this, wants to go find Odin first, but Hel's got a plan.
And that involves sending Fenrir and Baldr off after Odin while she, Jormungandr and Frigga go confront "Odin" – with Frigga playing the part of a ghostly projection, while Hel casts the fake shade of Baldr as he was when he died to distract "Odin".
There's a scene between Hel and Loki!Odin, with Hel getting a chance to vent her feelings of abandonment to Odin and underlying that to Loki (concluding Hel's character arc in this story), to distract Loki while the "ghost" of Frigga manages to activate a spell bomb that will strip away all illusion from the throne room, leaving a very much alive Loki and Frigga to face each other. In the very short ensuing fight, Loki is good, but he would never be able to defeat his mother's magic.
Loki defeated, and all the guards suddenly doing something to earn their salary, Fenrir and Baldr return with Odinsleep!Odin. Once Loki gets a look at Fenrir, who very much resembles Thor, he's all like "well shit".
There's a scene where someone's trying to figure out who the king of Asgard is at this point – Baldr died, while Fenrir was banished, and none of them want to deal with this, and in the ensuing melee, Loki illusions his way out of there and off Asgard, to fight again another day.
There's a scene of Frigga and groggy old Odin talking, with him apologizing for letting her die and stuff (uh, yeah didn't think how this would go much) and then Frigga and the kids all head back to Asgard via the Rainbow Bridge.
I should add that Thor is still off fighting trolls at this point and misses all the fun.
End of the story, Hel says Frigga can leave if she wants to Frigga says that she wants to stay with her family, together, and it's a touching scene before Hel straps on her badge to go back to work and Jormungandr starts calling Baldr "your highness" and things carry on.
Epilogue: Thor shows up to meet everyone (Jane's with him because) and to see his mother again and everything is super awkward on meeting his actual son and that son's siblings, and also his dead brother and dead mother.
Jormungandr decides that what this situation needs is pizza, which gets Baldr and Jormungandr into one of their stand-up routines and the tension is diffused.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-17 05:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-17 06:44 pm (UTC)I'm so glad you like the fic, thanks for letting me know :)
no subject
Date: 2018-12-18 05:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-17 06:47 am (UTC)And yeah, I adored Thor Ragnarok but Hel mythologically is a character with such potential and I love what you were planning to do here.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-17 10:45 pm (UTC)If you ever get around to this again one of the tags should either be "Fuck Canon Sideways" or "Canon Whats Canon." You could also just call it a "What If" story.
This was interesting to read and see where that story was eventually going to go-ish. And this is where my unfortunate informal policy of not "liking/kudosing" in-progress stories bites me in the butt. I should have done so and I apologise for not doing so.