Loki is silent for a pregnant interval, licking slim lips and waiting for the right words to come: words that are both honest and kind. It’s difficult.
“No, darling. I haven’t pressed, owing to my … well, keen understanding about the grief and the shame, however misplaced on your part, true heritage can conjure.”
Loki tucks Sigyn’s fiery plait over one shoulder, and conjures a dozen white wildflower blossoms into it.
A childhood spent as the brunt of “good-natured” jokes about his frailty, pallor, shyness and sensitivity, has taught Loki both how to weaponize words to deflect harm from himself … and to be kind to loved ones, when the opportunity to mock them arrives.
Loved ones, or potential loved ones.
“Ehm, you’re getting … a bit of tea on the table,” he volunteers gently.
Loki’s smile is soft and uncharacteristically indulgent.
“Sigyn, my dear friend, you make such a noble pursuit sound so easy. I haven’t been a desirable entity, within my family or our shared culture, since I was very young. More practical, and useful in terms of long-range survival, to play the role I’m dealt by those who have power over my welfare. And dearest, I am afraid that there is no such thing as freedom, in the sense of having no one in charge of your destiny. Tis better to operate within the confines of a given system, and slowly usurp it, than outright declare one’s deviation from the norm.”
Sigyn cannot argue with his view, as much as she wishes for his sake that he were not right. She succeeds in being herself, more or less, only because that self is quiet and disturbs few; if society’s expectations were a net, she would be the minnow that is too small to catch.
“My question was naive,” she admits. Her gaze falls from his face to her knitting for a moment, as she turns it around to begin a new row, and then she looks up at him again and smiles. “I hope you know that you are always a desirable entity to me.”
“Well you know …”
Loki begins to speak far more brightly, his whole countenance warmed by Sigyn’s soft proclamation; whispers are the real truths, for they are spoken without hope of glory or gain, and so, Sigyn’s whispers are highest truths to Loki.
“Naivety is so often derided as a character flaw, but I have never seen it thusly. I do believe we could all do with more people who still possess an innocent candor, though I be oft slandered as the God of Lies.”
Loki cradles the bundle of blue skin that warms rapidly to beige; it seems Vali, like his father, displays Jotun blood, while capable of shape-shifting into the form of the fuzzy, loving, warm entities holding and feeding him. As for Loki, the Trickster’s leaned across his wife’s cot aboard the stolen Sakaaran spacecraft, protective, attentive, brimming with pride at the work Sigyn has undergone with little medical aid. He pets wet hair from her forehead and kisses it.
Loki approaches Sigyn quietly, and affords her a small cluster of white Norwegian primroses. He extends a pale, slender finger toward her arm, and scratches it gently up and down, to draw her focus away from seemingly bottomless, dark ruminations.
“How do you fare, my lady, in this time of transition?”
icyxmischief 