"She took me to her elfin grot,

And there she wept, and sigh'd fill sore,

Ad there I shut her wild wild eyes

With kisses four."

His.

The thought scared him. The great Viking King was scared of the prospect of another young women belonging to him. He has known the compassion of love and the ecstasy of a lover but both times the last feeling he was left with was bitterness. He had loved and lost and Ragnar did not wish to do it again, especially not to this young lady, especially not to a women who had never loved before.

Yet it felt to Ragnar that she knew love, that she knew what it was like to share the lifeblood of someone else. He just didn't know that she shared his.

"Mine?"

His laugh came out awkwardly,

"I think you can do better than that."

La Belle Dame felt a lump rise in her throat, it was as sticky as burnt honey and filled with bile. The thought was vile; she didn't want anything better than him - that wasn't even possible - she wanted him.

Looking at La Belle Dame it is easy to see or interpret the love she felt as naive or even juvenile; a short lived fixation of lust for a man everybody admired. But it wasn't, despite what any spectators would have thought, La Belle Dame had been waiting for this moment since she could remember because he is all she could remember.

And it was that fact that guided her instincts, ones that turned her youthful mind into a women. She rested her palm on his collarbone, feeling the bone and wrapping her fingers around his shoulder, it was broad despite his fatigue, a ghost of muscles that have only recently fell into decay. She wrapped her other hand around the other side of his neck, his skin was warm to the touch and the tips of her fingers scratched against stubble.

She breathed in, she wanted to be human and she was about to do one of the most human things possible; kiss Ragnar.

They did more than simply look at each other. They saw the other person and read their thoughts. It had only been a matter of time, La Belle Dame could not face the nervous anticipation any longer. She knew it was coming, coming since the moment she was able to talk to him.

Her lips were dainty and soft before the taste of poison could creep in. The kiss became desperate and craving. The connection was anything but pure; it was a kiss without mercy. And it drove Ragnar insane.

No other lover had kissed him like this before, or maybe it had just been too long that he had gone without passion. But emotions that he had repressed were now demanding to be felt.

Placing his hand on the small of her back and feeling the shivers run through her body was a drug, and Ragnar had an addictive personality.

Maybe it was because he didn't think, maybe he didn't care or most likely; he couldn't think.

He squeezed her closer to him, and the slight gasp the women leg off broke their kiss. He chuckled under his before trying to restart his sin again but La Belle Dame had other ideas.

She put a finger to his lips. She then walked away, she could not picture the place but her limbs carried her there anyway.

With the taste of her on his lips, Ragnar could only follow in a love fuelled trance.

"Where did you learn how to do that?"

He asked the figure ahead of him, he remembers one of the first kisses he shared with a lover, it was not as mesmerising as that.

"Can't women be born with such virtues?"

She replied.

"Or such sin,"

He whispered, thinking of the Christian God. His mind flicked to Athelstan and he put his hand instinctively to his head. It hurt to think of the monk, although the pain was always more in his heart than anywhere else,

"You would be the first women I have met to be born with such, the Gods must have big plans for you."

After thinking of Christianity the plural God has a sting of foreignness on his tongue. The guilt of thinking about two different religions at the same time was a burden on his shoulders. But he knew one thing that related to both.

La Belle Dame was an angel, to him she had fallen from Heaven or Valhalla. And he was half right, she hadn't fallen, she was sent.

"Or maybe you brought it out of me."

She lied whilst smiling innocently which seemed out of place after the kiss. Ragnar ignited the feeling within him but the Gods has given her an appetite for power and lust.

"I think there is something that you are not telling me,"

Despite the damage he had been through, the drugs and the blemished skin, he was not broken. His mind was untampered by the physical strain of years and years of fighting,

"Besides your name, of course."

He smirked playfully at her.

"What's in a name Ragnar!"

She suddenly exclaimed loudly. The surprise upset in nature forced birds to fly from their perches in the tops of the trees. Immediately she felt almost embarrassed, she had tampered with her one true home; nature,

"If you want me to have a name then let me have yours!"

She did not know if she was serious or not, she only wanted to love him.

La Belle Dame said it in exasperation and without thinking so it even surprised her when she said it.

Everything concerning Ragnar until this point had been planned; either by by the Gods or her. This was unexpected, the consequence of this action had not been factored into the equation.

A dainty yet sticky hand flew to her mouth to stop any other irrational yet truthful confession being said. It was also because she saw Ragnar's reaction; one of blue wide eyes, mouth partly open showing his teeth and eyebrows furrowed creating small wrinkle lines around his ageing face.

The overall expression did not have a dominant feeling, but it lacked the one the women wanted to see; love.

Ragnar opened his mouth but he couldn't fathom one coherent thought, his lips moved but no words assembled themselves.

Then La Belle Dame felt salt in her eyes, she took a shallow breath in from her nose, the skin on her neck tightening making the ridges of her petite anatomy more vibrant yet harrowing at the same time.

"I,"

She stammered the single syllable, prolonging it and her pitch wavering as she swallowed down the bile in her throat.

She ran, her footsteps barely audible as she pushed away thorns and branches that blockaded her in. Her porcelain skin reddened and bruised instantly so within moments she could rival the war torn body of Ragnars.

The King didn't think twice about running after her in a trance like state, his only goal to make the mysterious girl - who somehow thought she loved him - happy again.

He met a clear path carved before him and the sound of scratching on her dress was close.

The chase did not cease until La Belle Dame reached her elfin grot. She did not command her feet to take her there as she did not know of its existence.

But there she was and it was there where she collapsed. Each of her limbs turned heavy, unable to carry the burden of her situation any longer and they dragged the women down with them.

It was exhaustion, mental and physical, along with the will of the Gods; they wanted her gone from Ragnar's life as quickly as she appeared. She had disobeyed them, the one thing they never thought was possible.

Unlike last time the Viking could not catch her. He had watched her fall and could only cringe himself as he heard a bang from her knees clicking together.

Instead he heaved her body on top of his knees as he sat down. She lay in his arms as he parted her long elegant hair so he could see her features; eyes that were wild with an array of emotions and salty lines of tears still on her rosy cheeks. He wiped them away with his thumb, conscious of the callous skin against her pale and soft skin.

"You do not want my name."

He told her finally as even Ragnar Lothbrok was beginning to dislike his own name.

He loved the power that went with it yet it had been impossible to separate Ragnar, the man, from Lothbrok, the warrior. Everyone knew his achievements, they knew how he screamed in warfare but somehow they also knew how he screamed at his wife. They knew his list for blood but everyone was aware of his addictions for herbs. .

"Do you not want me to have it? What is so wrong with it?"

She wanted to keep lying on his lap but Ragnar slyly began to push her off. She sat opposite him.

"Because those who have it suffer," He thought of his wives, Lagertha now is an even more fearsome warrior who fights with nothing to lose because she has nobody to love.

The constant fights and brawls with Aslaug, the burden and the responsibilities Bjorn carried on his young back, the lost childhood. His only daughter dead. His brother gone from Viking society.

His last thought was of his other sons - his children were the only people he could truly say he loved- and their life fated to be without their father,

"I do not want you to suffer."

"Yet you gave it so freely to Princess Aslaug and took it away without remorse from Lagertha. Why not me? Must I be with child for you to marry me?"

She looked him in his blue eyes, again shocked at the unladylike thoughts she had suggested. He tried to look anywhere to avoid her gaze, because he knew it was true.

"I do not know you..."

He shook his head and rose up to create space between him and her. He staggered a bit getting up. Ragnar had met this women just after the sun had risen, yet she asked for his hand in marriage. Reality was encroaching on La Belle Dame's fabricated life.

La Belle Dame had stopped her tears and she saw Ragnar's mind making its way over her blockade and the shadow of her heart began to beat. If he brought his mind back to reality then she would lose her fantasy.

She stood up and closed the gap between them, she gently kissed his cheek and whispered,

"I am sorry,"

She did mean it, she didn't want to have Ragnar spiral back into his depression not because of the void in him but instead because of the realisation of his life,

"I just want to love you and I fear I cannot without offering you my hand."

Ragnar's mind slowly stopped.

His mind tentatively allowed the fog of La Belle Dame sans Mercy to entrance his thoughts, his memories and most importantly; his sense.

It made him forget his past as he stared into the eyes of what could never be his future. It made him kiss the manipulators soft lips, and let him whisper,

"You may love me."

La Belle Dame did not see how she could be anything but Ragnar's salvation, she could only be an aid in his resurrection.

Yet her actions today only proved what the Gods had always known, a women who lusts for love will see the destruction of the very same emotion in their lovers heart.