“Why, My Lady Sigyn, it would be my very great pleasure. Nothing churns a Seidhr Master’s blood quite like the mysterious hallows of the night. All those shapes and forms conjured by the bright flames, shadows cast just like the ever-shifting illusions magic itself creates. Just like the shifting nature of identity, for those of us who feel dispossessed.”
Loki smiles down at Sigyn, and it is a warm smile, lacking force or pretense.
“Yes. I love fellowshipping with the ancient woodlands, in an obliging clearing beneath the stars. The shadows and embers speak to me often.”
“My Lady Sigyn, are you familiar at all with the ancient lore of Nornheim, or rather, with the battle which involved a certain meadbrained Thunder God who only escaped because of a veil of expertly cast dark mist?”
“ … very well. What I tell you will surely diminish your opinion of me, and yet, it’s clear now that withholding knowledge will achieve ends just as dismal.”
Loki brings both of Sigyn’s little hands–deceptively small, yet strong–to his lips. He kisses each individual knuckle, eager to prove his softness and his sincerity.
“ … I was … . ill-used, my love. When I let go and fell from the Bifrost … when I hurtled into an abyss in deepest space. I was not alone long. I fell through a wormhole, and was snatched up by the creatures with whom I would later attack Midgard. They took me to a being of awful, unfathomable power. A being who collects … ‘children’ to strip of selfhood and render appendages of his own empire. His ‘family’ was as heterogeneous as a mosaic, but each of us …”
His breathing is shallow and labored, his skin clammy, ashen, gray. His pupils draw wide and nearly swallow the green of his irises. Still he speaks in an automaton’s tone. The coldness, the detachment, are all that stand between him and hysteria.
“Each of us was tampered with to our breaking point, which was recorded in a kind of ledger, before we were shipped off to our respective ‘duties.’ His agent, a thing called The Other, told me he had never had an Asgardian to play with before. But I was not an ordinary Asgardian, was I? How would I like to be subjected to extreme heat? To chemical and biomechanical experiments, implants? How would I like it to go on forever, unless I had something of use to offer? So I did.”
Glazed and hunted eyes meet Sigyn’s.
“I offered him the Tesseract. I hunted it down: taken from Odin’s Vault, apprehended by a human organization called S.H.I.E.L.D. So this powerful despot agreed to provide me my freedom, and an army for conquest of Midgard, in exchange for the Tesseract: An Infinity Stone. I did what I did in order to survive. To see daylight again … ! And yet not a moment passes I don’t feel the lure of that thing, like a DRUG, calling me from withdrawal, or the filthy touch of the beasts that tampered with my mind and my body like a laboratory specimen. It is with me every. Waking, Moment.”
She listens. And she hurts – for him. And she rages – for him.
There is nothing more important to her in the universe, and now she wants to tear these CREATURES limb from limb for causing Loki his turmoil, the PAIN that reflect on his face as he speaks of it. It angers her in ways she can’t even begin to fathom until the hands he holds are trembling with her efforts to keep it contained. She is not a vengeful person by any means, nor a violent one, but she CANNOT SIT IDLY BY knowing these things have done this to him.
But he is her concern, here and now. The paleness of his face, the darkened eyes — he is hurting and oh, how Sigyn wishes she could take it away. He deserves better than this, and despite his faults and their bickering, she LOVES him more than she can put into any Midgardian words.
She draws her hands free, and takes his face between them. Her thumbs brush across his skin gently, but her grip is firm enough to make him look at her, to SEE ONLY HER.
“Then I will help you heal.” She isn’t foolish enough to think she can just rush off and slay monsters in the night to protect him, to help him. Her place is here instead, to help him FORGET. Her voice is quiet, and she’s cautious now of her words. “You are more than what they’ve done to you. You are stronger than them – you’re the strongest person I know, Loki. And you’re a SURVIVOR. You’re here, now, and I can’t imagine what horrible things — but you’ve come back to me. Your mind is fragile, I understand. But I will help you HEAL. We’ll come through this together — I just need you to know I am here for you. Only you.”
“I think … I think you fundamentally misapprehend how much you help me already.”
He’s gnawing on his nails, stroking his own face with his fingertips, as though the act will stimulate his senses enough to keep him from falling into ashen, clammy silence. He does not want his wife, his beloved, honey and chamomile scented skin and softly contemplative yet sturdy humor, plait of golden hair, gods, he does not want her to feel spurned again because of the demons that bay like starved wolves inside his head.
“Sigyn, I’ve known no one but you who can show me kindness without the pall of obligation, or love without the strain of forced reconciliation with the family that has ill used me. You give me peace like no other. You cannot carry my burdens but you can stand within my line of vision, a soul I can look to as proof that those burdens are worth continuing to shoulder.”
He speaks hastily, furtively, into steepled fingers. He hopes she can hear the admissions of the weak and ugly, the vulnerable, that he is halfway ashamed to confess.
But he juts his jaw and he knows:
She deserves more.
So his hands, at his mouth, holding hers, part to give his lips a pathway to her knuckles. He adorns them with kisses.
“I know that you are here for me. I know that you will help me heal. Let me help you heal, as well, my fair haired girl.”
Loki extends a hand so fair that the blue of his veins stand out against the snowy near-translucency of his skin.
The only blue he’ll ever divulge: save, perhaps, to the woman standing before him now.
One day, she will see his Jotun form, and she will know how profoundly much she means to him, because of trust.
“I will never abandon you again. The Loki who lived for no one has perished. I live in his stead.”
She takes the offered hand, her skin warm against his own. She lifts it to her lips, kissing the back of it and holding it between both of her own. There are few who see this side of Loki, and Sigyn cherishes it all the more because she is one such privileged to see. There is no better honor.
“I hold you to that.” Sigyn says, because she will. Because she will wage wars should he leave without return again. She will storm worlds and battlefields and realms alike. “I, nor your sons, would ever forgive you.”
Her kiss ignites prickles of warm thaw up the veins of his hand, through his forearm–the very forearm that turned blue and betrayed his whole schema of existence mere years past–all the way up his shoulder and through his body. She is the bonfire after weeks of roving a lone wolf in sunless winter. She is relief, both gratifying and painful, like heat to frostbitten fingertips.
“Never forgive me …” Loki very softly echoes his wife’s words.
He understands it is a means of motivating him, but it feels like an all too familiar threat.
“My love,” he all but whispers, “you needn’t issue ultimatums. I would tear a thousand realms asunder to come home again.”
“I am quite well, my love, tis but a twisted ankle.”
Loki stumbles to a chair in the Healing Room, dark hair haloed by the golden light of the many Soul Forges, rendering him more otherworldly even than usual. He takes his wife’s hand and kisses her knuckles reassuringly as, gingerly, he lifts his injured leg to rest on another chair’s seat.
Sigyn smiles and kisses his cheek as she helps him settle in, adding another cushion to the back of his chair so that he could sit more comfortably. Coming closer, she holds out her hands, a faint white glow escaping her fingers. allowing her to examine the injury in better light.
She wiggles her fingers again, using her magic to feel the injury without touching it. After a moment, she looks back up at him.
“This should heal easily, my love, that is the good news.” She raises her eyebrows at him. “How in the Nine did you manage to twist your ankle?”
“Ehm, well. That … is a long and dull tale, indeed.”
Loki gnaws on a few black lacquered nails, and then offers Sigyn his most winsome smile. It’s clear from the dazzling expression and the somewhat frantic glint in his gaze that he hopes his wife will be pacified.
He knows it’s highly unlikely.
“Really, my love, tis nothing eventful in the, ehm, grand scheme of my various misadventures.”
Her healing magic brushes against the flesh of his swollen ankle and faintly tickles. He squirms, almost indeterminably.
“And you’re going to press until I tell you, aren’t you?” he sighs.
Loki tilts his head, licks thin lips and holds up a pale palm.
“Forgive me. I am exceedingly quiet and prone to startling others.”
That wan, slim mouth curls up into a guarded smile as the woman called Sigyn introduces herself.
“A bold name for a tempered lady,” he observes, and then dons a second-nature impishness. “I should hope you are given to sharing your mind decisively with one of the Einherjar, who are rather too pompous for their own good. May your espoused be a kind- hearted soldier.”
It is difficult to say what prompts the God of Mischief to be so warmly inclined, at least for Loki, toward an intruder upon his innermost machinations. But something about her is incontrovertibly gentle, pensive, measured. It soothes his skittish psyche.
Yet Loki cannot quell his own hyper-honed skills of observation. He spots the misgivings in the fair-haired girl’s eyes, and his heart is resigned to the same state as ever: an untrusted creature, thought somehow wrong-footed and bizarre. A thing of deep woodlands and shadow, fey and weirdly, dangerously alluring. Nothing wholesome. Nothing like the woman whose momentary fear reminds Loki to double down on his caution.
“I trouble you. Do not concern yourself; I have that effect upon everyone. Allow me to take my leave that you might enjoy your late night stroll unencumbered.”
If he knew Theoric, he wouldn’t recommend sharing one’s mind decisively, Sigyn thinks. Sharing one’s mind with Theoric, if said mind is not the same as his, is an operation requiring great gentleness and many apologies, and often
ending in a judicious silence which the Einherji thinks means her mind
has changed to be the same as his. But that is not the sort of
information Sigyn would reveal to anybody about her betrothed.
“Thank you for your good wish,” she replies softly, smiling. She would have
appreciated such a wish under any circumstances, but especially
tonight, when she is disturbed because Theoric was hard-hearted toward
her. No doubt it was but a mood.
A flush rises into her pale face at her new acquaintance’s statement
that he troubles her. He must have noticed her brief fear, and found
it insulting–no, hurtful.
“Indeed, my lord, I intruded, not you,” she says softly but quickly,
trying to make amends. “I’ll leave you in peace.”
She nods courteously and smiles, and has taken two steps away when she
recollects that she hasn’t an inkling where to go, and turns back.
“Could you please tell me the way?”
She is well aware that she’ll have trouble finding it, even told; her
intelligence lies in other areas than remembering directions. But
asking him to guide her is not possible. Besides the damage it would
do to her reputation and betrothal if she were seen walking at night
with a man, she would hesitate to ask for a favor after insulting him
as she believes she unintentionally did. Even asking for directions
makes her turn a deeper pink.
Loki’s eyes narrow in scrutiny at his unanticipated guest.
“ … I mean not to pry, my lady, but you are rather obviously troubled. Or obviously, at least, to one schooled in the study of microcosmic nervous tics. It is not in my nature to speak bluntly, for often painful repercussions follow. But you seem … an uncommonly kind soul, so I am inclined to worry.”
Why he involves himself in business without direct fruitfulness for himself or his small-knit circle of loved ones, Loki cannot fathom. In the presence of this rather plain and quiet creature, however, it’s a curious compulsion. Perhaps she reminds him of a less self-confident, younger variant of his late mother. Perhaps, even, himself, when he was small, and timidity was an expedient way to avoid his father’s severely critical eye. He cannot know.
But when she flushes, flustered to request aid, he is all the more certain that he appreciates her. He, too, despises asking for help, and calling his own competency into question.
“I shall gladly show you, if indeed you take no offense to my company.”
“I am quite well, my love, tis but a twisted ankle.”
Loki stumbles to a chair in the Healing Room, dark hair haloed by the golden light of the many Soul Forges, rendering him more otherworldly even than usual. He takes his wife’s hand and kisses her knuckles reassuringly as, gingerly, he lifts his injured leg to rest on another chair’s seat.
“Oh dear. It seems my unscheduled nap is thoroughly over.”
Loki slides upright from his cat nap on the window ledge of his study to find wife standing amusedly over him, and sons Vali and Narvi climbing on or reposing with coos and gurgles of approval in his lap.
“Good afternoon. How am I to run an empire when my lovelings are far better company than scheming alone over maps and potions, hm?”
icyxmischief 