Trigger warning: Mention of Eating Disorders
There were no new Draugr attacks for the next few weeks.
Why? Good question, next question.
What did Val and Maya do during that time?
They spent time together! (Though not in the sense you are thinking, I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE THINKING!)
Because of the recent attacks, Val stayed by Maya’s side as much as possible. She accompanied her to the university and stayed nearby the buildings in case of an attack. They went grocery shopping together, in case of an attack. And following her to the bathroom, in case of an attack.
Maya immediately shushed her out. She enjoyed spending time with Val, but there was a limit on how much effort she put into it.
Val also continued working out, though it became evidently too much for her and her condition. Maya sat on a nearby bench while Val did her laps, but grew worried when Val didn’t return after the first one.
She found the Valkyrie collapsed on the ground with a heavy asthmatic attack. Her lung capacity was dwindling with each day.
So when Maya found her old gym membership, which she bought as a New Year’s resolution but never used past day one, she promptly upgraded it.
It included a rehabilitation program focusing on increasing one’s lung capacity. Maya sheepishly held it against her lips before she was able to gift it to Val.
She elatedly took the gift, and her health improved during the visits, although it’s evident that Maya’s support was a much greater help.
Their casual touch increased where either’s hand would linger a few seconds longer on their arms, face, shoulder, or thigh. Maya’s face would grow heated every time, but she never could say no to it since she liked it just as much as Val did.
Although they had yet to kiss. Something which happened increasingly more where they would accidentally stay a bit too close to one another, look into the eyes, but never go through with the notion.
For any outsider, it was too obvious they wanted to, but had not the courage to go through it.
Regardless, Maya was happy about the past few weeks they spent time together. She enjoyed herself more than she did in the last stressful months and years of school and university.
“Someone seems to be happy.”
“Yap!” responded Maya with enthusiasm, irritating Austin.
“...could you stop? It’s annoying.”
“Never!” replied Maya as she and Austin exited the lecture. She was pumped with energy and had to watch her step when she took the stairs. “I’m just happy! You’ll never guess what happened this morning!”
“You finally slept with one another?”
“ALKljalfjf,” Maya sputtered, tripped, and held onto the railing from falling. “What!? No! We didn’t. Why would you say that!? We didn’t even kiss yet!”
“Please.” Austin rolled his eyes and leaned against the railing opposite of Maya. “You’re practically overheating whenever you talk about her. Your face is red a lot these days. I swear, I won’t mob the floor when you wet your pants from all that excitement– OWW!”
Maya kicked him against the shin, hard.
“Would you stop kicking me already!?” Austin complained, jumping up and down on one foot.
“What did I say about crass comments?”
“Oh please, I am not even interested in you, YOU KNOW THAT– OWW!”
Maya fist-bumped him against the shoulder, even harder than before.
“What was THAT for?”
“A punch for good measure.”
Austin hesitated. “...are you done?”
Pause.
Maya punched him one last time.
“Third time’s the charm.”
“Whatever!” grumbled Austin, rubbing his arm. “Geez, that hurts! Can we please go to the cafeteria before it gets swarmed, or YOU PUNCH MY ARM OFF?!”
“Ah, sorry, I can’t,” said Maya. “Not today.”
“Why? Are you on your diet again?” Austin squinted at her. “I’ve noticed your face looks rounder. You’re developing a double chin.”
“I AM WHAT!?” Maya panicked and panicked, pulling out her phone to check her face. “Where? WHERE!?”
Austin laughed. “HA! You fell for it!” he jumped out of the way before she could hit him again. “Sorry, I was kidding. You don’t have one, though I noticed you’re talking a lot about that woman’s food. Be careful because of your disorder–”
“Shut!” Maya clapped his hand over his mouth, shushing him up. “Don’t talk about it in public.”
Austin narrowed his eyes and bit into her hand, so she removed it. “Don’t tell me you didn’t tell her yet? You’re living together. She should know.”
“I- I’m not comfortable telling her about it,” confessed Maya. “There’s no easy way to tell her that.”
There was more to Maya’s eating habits than she liked to address. “How do I tell her I have an eating disorder?”
Ever since her childhood, Maya had an unhealthy relationship with food. She liked to eat and snack, and because of that, she was always slightly overweight and bad at sports—despite how much she and her brother caused chaos as children.
”She would grow out of it,” her parents told her. “Eventually.”
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“Fun fact,” Maya thought with a frown. “I didn’t.”
It got worse in her teenage days when she developed a Binge-Eating Disorder and became overweight. The other children bullied her because of it, worsening her condition.
Her mother tried to help her by setting up a diet plan, but it wasn’t always successful. The diets made her tired and lethargic throughout the day—or in the worst cases, stressing her out during her exam periods; leading to her least favourite thing—burnout.
Which then led to her gaining more weight than losing it.
After school, her growth spurt and puberty balanced things out, somehow, barely.
She regulated her diet and eventually lost weight but was prone to rebounds. Her episodes remained and returned at least once every week.
During those episodes, she would eat through her entire snack cabinet or a large family pizza in one setting—leaving her sickeningly full, ashamed, embarrassed, and, worst of all, feeling ugly and unattractive.
She wasn’t overweight anymore, at least not as much as she was in school, but the scars remained—and some stretch marks.
Maya pinched her belly fold and her thighs; She frowned, fearing what Val would think of her when she found out what Maya’s body looked like underneath her clothes—unappealing and chubby.
So far, she was able to hide her problem from Val, but she wondered if she gained weight from overindulgence. She enjoyed Val’s food and Val seemed happy when she cooked for her. Maya didn’t know what to do.
“No use thinking about it.” Maya faked an enthusiastic smile and balled her fists. “She’s out of my league, and I simply enjoy being with her. There’s no way someone like her will like someone like me anyway, right?”
Austin held his face in his hand and looked at Maya through its gaps. He was at a loss for words. He knew about Maya’s disorder and childhood, and how it affected how she looked at herself and subsequently blew her self-esteem.
It was true that Austin was not interested in her, but he could tell very well that Maya’s appearance couldn’t be described as ugly—it never could.
Maya’s black skin was pretty. Her coiled afro was something most people would die for and her blue eyes were startingly sparkling like stars.
She may be chubby, yes, but her long-sleeved and striped shirt alongside her jeans complimented her figure in ways Austin didn’t know how to describe.
If Austin was interested in women, he would have been unable to look away from her chest hidden in her shirt, or the jeans that complimented her legs and rear.
Sadly, he wasn’t, and he felt angry at Maya for how little she could see her innate beauty and bright personality.
“Everybody would be lucky to have someone like her. She should value herself more.” Austin’s grip on his face tightened, and veins popped on his fingers. The white scleras of his eyes turned black. “I swear, if this Valkyrie breaks her heart, I will crush her.”
—✶—
“Vaaaaal, I’m hooooome!” Maya called into her apartment and giddily got herself out of her shoes. She placed her bag on the chair in her corridor and washed her hands.
She practically skipped through the rooms, humming a cheery tune. It had been a long time since she last looked forward to getting home and having homemade cooking that wasn’t hers by someone she truly liked. The month since she first found Val was pure bliss—except for the Draugr attack.
Not even her projects and papers—piling up on her desktop like a little Mount Everest—didn’t pull her down as much as they usually would.
“Val, are you here?”
Maya popped her head into the living room. No one was there.
“Maybe the kitchen?” But there were no signs of the Valkyrie either. Maya couldn’t hear a single sound in her apartment—except for the long drawn-out pattering of the sink she used.
A nervous drop of sweat rolled down Maya’s face. “Maybe she went jogging, and she’s not home yet?” she checked her watch. “4 pm… I could work on my paper until she comes back.”
Maya set herself up with a cup of tea and went to her desk to work. She tried to cut back on caffeine as it worked up her hunger. Instead, she opted for a light biscuit, assuaging her appetite until Val returned.
She typed away fast on her keyboard, flashing from one page to the next and reviewing her notes. Maya visited the linguistic department of her university; it ran in their family.
Her mother and grandfather loved telling her stories about her famous great-grandmother. She was a Professor in New York despite being a foreigner and a black woman.
Not that Maya ever met her, but apparently Maya had the same talent for languages as her ancestor did.
Maya’s studies focused on the connections between old languages with their contemporary and modern counterparts. She specifically had a knack for Germanic languages and once visited Germany for a year.
However, her visit wasn’t as great as she imagined it to go. After a talk with her pen pal from Sweden, she switched to Scandinavian Studies in the latter half of her second year.
Though unlike Austin, who was an expert in Norse Mythology, Maya barely knew anything about it, only the most random and obscure details he shared with her.
Then she remembered something Val said to her a few weeks ago.
“‘Dúllan mín’,” Maya repeated the words, wondering what they meant. Some words still confused her, and after a quick look up at the local search engine, Maya was even more confused. Her head was steaming. “She called me ‘Sweetie’?”
A tingle wandered over her lips. Maya suppressed a squeal from delight.
“Ah, that can’t be right, right?” Maya rubbed her reddened cheeks; the smile persisted. “There’s no way she called me that, did she?”
Maya made the mistake of looking up the deeper meaning of the words. She heard from Austin and her pen pal that the Scandinavian language had peculiarities when they developed from their common root—Norse.
The word she looked up was Icelandic and more commonly used as a sort of endearment between girls—with a less romantic feel to it than Maya first thought.
“Ah, fiddlesticks, I misinterpret it.” Maya let out a strained laugh. The edges of her mouth twitched; the smile dropped. “Ah… I’m crashing. I need a coffee to keep working.”
The chair screeched as the legs ground against the wooden floor. Maya pushed herself out of the chair and briskly walked into the kitchen.
While the coffee maker made its typical annoying sound of half dying and half exploding, Maya checked her watch again.
6:30 pm.
“Where is she?” wondered Maya and took a quick look outside her balcony, hoping to spot the Valkyrie returning soon before the coffee was ready—she didn’t.
Maya took a quick sip and bit her lips, scrunching her nose. She felt agitated and peckish, a poor combination paired with her pent-up stress.
Checking her watch one more time and outside, Maya raided her pantry. She deliberately kept it locked with the key hidden to control her hunger so she wouldn’t check on her snacks every few hours.
It rarely worked.
Snacks filled up her work desk and drowned out all her lecture books and papers. She worked through half the mountain in under 20 minutes, grinding through at least four pages in a go.
Maya dreaded editing work. She could hook herself up on an IV with coffee, but would only for half as fast without something to nibble on.
By the time the clock hit 8 pm, Maya had finished one of her assignments, downed three cups of coffee and half her pantry of sugar, salt or whatever other grub she had at hand.
There was no accomplishment to have finished the assignment. Maya felt sick, awfully full, disgusted with herself and ashamed, and more than anything, she felt upset that Val was still not back.
“She had promised to make something special today. I came home earlier for her.”
Maya suppressed a sickened groan. She loved Val’s food, but she enjoyed her presence even more. She felt sad about her predicament and sighed. The blue screen of her laptop and finished assignment blinked back at her, humming a silent robotic tune.
“One more cup and I’ll be done with the last assignment of this month.” Maya groggily walked over to the kitchen and sickly held her bloated stomach, which grumbled at her angrily in defiance. “Shut up. I know my mistake… one cup, I swear… and maybe a leftover box of donuts before I—”
Suddenly, Maya heard the front door unlocking and creaking open.
There were only so many possibilities on who opened the door, and Maya could count it down on one hand and subtract it by three.
Heat rose into her face, and all the agitation dissipated when she saw Val return home, beaming at her when she saw Maya in return.