Loki draws his lips inside his mouth, a telltale tic of both the earnest and the furtive. He peers over his shoulder and turns to scoop his queen into his arms, with a playful flourish.
“Nothing you cannot mend just by being with me,” he murmurs in her ear, before tenderly kissing it, and then her lips. “Do not fret so, my love. That task is mine.”
He’s tall for his age, but otherwise waifish, with tidy inky hair and porcelain features, and eyebrows that seem perpetually sad. He peers up at the lady who approaches him, and sits on the floor hesitantly beside her chair.
“Hello, Lady Sigyn,” the princeling murmurs, in a voice like a flute, as he places a Cat’s Cradle concoction on her lap. The gesture is shyly hopeful. “Mama has asked me to experiment with string … she says that it prepares the mind for mastery of the Seidhr. That magical strands are rather like weaving and knitting. Is that not a diverting notion? E-ehm, or if I am bothering you, I shall take my leave …”
“Hello, Lord Loki,” Sigyn says pleasantly, her voice soft, and a little higher pitched than it would be if she were speaking to somebody she knew well. No matter how gentle or young the stranger (save in the case of a baby or toddling child), it takes Sigyn a while to feel at ease with them; but she does not need to be at ease to enjoy someone’s company. She looks at the complicated string admiringly, carefully picking it up as she listens to him; but when he says that he might be bothering her, she looks up.
“No, you aren’t bothering me,” she says with a smile, brushing fawn-colored hair that becomes golden in sunlight away from her pale face. “I think it is an interesting notion, indeed; and not something I knew.”
She can cast runes, and considers herbs’ healing powers to be magic; but the illusions and wards of Asgardian Seidhr are something she only knows of from hearsay and sagas.
“I would be glad …! To further discuss the idea. Ehm … ! When you cast, if you can visualize your magic as many woven strands, and you pluck on each one that you wish to … what is the word … manipulate? Then you can do so with greater ease!”
The child does not seem deprived per se, but he is clearly starved for the positive attentions of a peer or elder with like-minded interests. He scoots closer to Sigyn, on his scrawny rump. A moment of quietude passes, as he picks at a loose thread on the golden collar of his tunic.
“I like to sit in silence with my friends sometimes,” he ventures, after a moment, with a subtle flush in his cheeks at the implication.
Sigyn thinks that he is a statue, at first glance; but in a moment she realizes that he is alive. He is most definitely not Odin, and not somebody that she knows or has even seen; a nobleman, she guesses. She wonders why he is in the throneroom at this hour; he does not look lost. But her foremost feeling is cautious embarrassment.
“I am, my lord,” she replies quietly, clasping her long, fragile-looking hands together as she usually does when talking to strangers. “I apologize for intruding.”
She is relieved that he seems neither angry nor overly familiar, and looks up at him with interest; people have always fascinated her, and she wishes she could see him better; but the light is dim.
“Nornheim, my lord. I’m Sigyn Narisdottir, and I’ve come to wed the Einherji Theoric.”
Usually she would have smiled and blushed when she said his name; but tonight she simply looks quietly troubled, and brushes golden hair out of her face.
Until the stranger started walking toward her, he didn’t frighten her. But the way he is walking seems unnatural, as if either she is prey or he is wary of her. And, Sigyn thinks, it can’t possibly be the latter; she’s fairly certain that she’s the least frightening person in Asgard, other than the small children. She takes a step back, but pauses when he speaks. His words aren’t threatening, and she tends to be trusting unless given a strong reason not to be, so her fear leaves.
“It’s as you say,” she admits, with a smile that curves more on the left side than on the right. She likes guessing, and when people are good at it. “I couldn’t sleep.”
He looks young to be a widower, she thinks. Perhaps there has been a tragedy; or perhaps the marriage ended because he thought it was tiresome, or because his wife didn’t like that he thought it was tiresome. Sigyn rarely asks nosy questions, but she always wonders about people.
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.”
The occasion to celebrate fathers has ever been fraught with volatile mixed emotions for Loki. It is far simpler, and infinitely more justified, to celebrate the matriarchs in his life, from his mother to her witch-friends, his fellow mentors and elders in the Seidhr, to his own time as a mother of four children preceding Vali and Narvi.
But since becoming their father, he has learned to fight the sobriety of the day, to mask his misgivings, and give his children the happy gratitude they deserve. For they are not Odin; indeed, they are the antidote to that beast of an old man.
“Why, how thoughtful, my loves,” he murmurs, drawing his twins close against his chest, to tenderly kiss their foreheads, as a wolf mother hoards her offspring at the ever present sound of danger. “Clearly you’ve labored long and hard upon this beautiful artwork.”
“ … .It is my wish that you refer to something which might inspire hope. Soft strength suits you, Lady Sigyn. Not desperation, or … despair. Please tell me that I have not caused another kind person pain.”
The touch may be gentle but it is sudden; Loki’s hide prickles with panic at all the traumatic neural scars that signify oncoming violence, and his back arches sharply and involuntarily against Sigyn’s grasp. Once he’s caught himself showing panic, and by extension unforgivable frailty, his cheeks flush. His jaw juts. Still he does not pull fully away. His skin only grows clammy and his joints taut.
“You cannot fathom what real danger is, because you’re indeed not privy to … !”
He swallows and hedges. Do NOT let pride place this woman who has given her all in harm’s way.
“Sigyn, I know you think my reasons are selfish and mad. But I am protecting you by keeping you in ignorance of matters that changed me, and matters that drive my deceitful strategies. If you … if you really must know everything, know that it means I am willing to respect you more than I am willing to protect you from dark powers too great to fathom. Is that noble? IS it, or is it only selfish of me?”
She jerks her hands away almost immediately at Loki’s reaction, curling her hands to herself as if burned. She WANTS to help, to heal, but she doesn’t know HOW.
“Shutting me out does not protect me, but it harms you. All I ask is you CONSIDER letting me share your burdens. I am not afraid of darkness; let it come.”
“All I know is what I see of you. This … this madness and darkness that consumes you and I WORRY. I see it, even now – I may not understand it entirely, but I understand enough to see what it’s doing to you — and I WILL NOT lose you because you have condemned me to ignorance!”
There’s a passion to her tone that she cannot hide. It seep into her words, through her eyes, flowing like invisible warmth from her very being. She longs to reach to him, but fears he will reject her again. Instead she draws her cloak further about her, fisting great handfuls of the emerald fabric.
“You are noble and selfish both, Loki. But you are NOT alone in this. Please, my love. Let me HELP.”
“ … 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.”
It’s another of the irrevocable changes since his time in Thanos’s clutches, that nobody, not even Sigyn, an avowedly compassionate being, seems to understand: Loki’s need never to hold still, for stillness is danger, stillness is to be comprehended and therefore controlled, stillness is to be identified and stripped of the guises that protect you from scorn, shame, humiliation and harm.
And if you’re not prepared for the unseen hazards around the corner, you’ll be starved and parched, left in your own filth for days, weeks, months, to “test your mettle,” to see what sort of servant you’d make to yet another abusive surrogate father. You’ll be taunted with promises preying on your self-hatred and envy, tinted in blue, shaped like a cube. Blue, blue, isn’t it always blue, like your dirty secret skin, that causes pain.
And how can you begin to share these things with a creature who deserves nothing but softness and kindness? How can you begin to rob her of still more peace of mind?
“It is … no longer in my nature to … stay in one place. I meant you no ill.”
He swallows. It’s usually around women Loki’s consoled; women are Seidhr masters, and they privilege wit over brute force. It was his mother, not his father, who granted him the opportunity to flourish as a child. But he finds himself judged in Sigyn’s presence: disconcertingly naked.
He licks slim pink lips.
“You know … if you could … just find it in yourself to consider …”
The Silvertongue is daunted. His hands flex at his sides.
“My love, I too am changed. I did not expect to survive my fall from the Rainbow Bridge, and I did not expect to survive rescuing my brother from Kurse. I did not ask for my many enemies, only to be granted the dignity owed any member of the royal family … .owed any living thing. I am sorry that I left you first in total despair, and later, in an attempt to save Thor and avenge my mother, but you must know that in my right …”
A swallow. Oh, this is difficult. It is such a concession of pride even to broach the subject.
“ … my right mind … I would not have left you.”
He comes close, very close, to snapping that he is sorry to inconvenience her with trauma that has been in no way his fault or prompting, but he bites his tongue and waits.
“Loki, look at me.”
She stands, immediately grabbing his arms in a gentle, yet firm grasp that will root him to her long enough for her to say her piece. Long enough for him to LISTEN.
“I understand. You do not have to explain it; I’ve never asked that of you. I will not dictate your actions even if I do not agree. You have your reasons, and I UNDERSTAND.”
Because she does. And has. And always will, when it comes to him. She LOVES him, her ice prince. She is the last who will judge him, and the first to defend. Surely she’s spent most of their marriage proving this.
“I worry you don’t share more with me. That I wasn’t able to HELP you. YOU are my family – I have little else left in this realm and I will defend it with every fiber of my being; the sentiment extends to Thor and your mother. I just don’t understand WHY you wouldn’t come to me.”
She never raises her voice; Sigyn is nothing if not patient. She can’t bring herself to be angry – not when others have driven Loki to this madness. It only makes her rage they think they’re capable of doing such. Twisting him away from her, forcing his hand.
“This path is dangerous, Loki, and I will follow you to the end of it. Whether you like it or not.”
The touch may be gentle but it is sudden; Loki’s hide prickles with panic at all the traumatic neural scars that signify oncoming violence, and his back arches sharply and involuntarily against Sigyn’s grasp. Once he’s caught himself showing panic, and by extension unforgivable frailty, his cheeks flush. His jaw juts. Still he does not pull fully away. His skin only grows clammy and his joints taut.
“You cannot fathom what real danger is, because you’re indeed not privy to … !”
He swallows and hedges. Do NOT let pride place this woman who has given her all in harm’s way.
“Sigyn, I know you think my reasons are selfish and mad. But I am protecting you by keeping you in ignorance of matters that changed me, and matters that drive my deceitful strategies. If you … if you really must know everything, know that it means I am willing to respect you more than I am willing to protect you from dark powers too great to fathom. Is that noble? IS it, or is it only selfish of me?”
Not visibly, of course, but Loki’s ‘deaths’ have done their damage. Even watching him now, tracking his frittered movement, the goddess feels as if it’s a ghost before her and nothing more. Figments of an imagination unable to accept fate. She hates him all the more for causing it, for being unable to TRUST her with his plans and motives.
She shivers.
Asgard is in the dead of winter, and Sigyn is a creature of warmth. Slender fingers drag Loki’s emerald cloak more tightly about her as if she can impart a fire from it’s fibers to warm her very being. The warm mead in front of her is doing little in that regard.
It’s another of the irrevocable changes since his time in Thanos’s clutches, that nobody, not even Sigyn, an avowedly compassionate being, seems to understand: Loki’s need never to hold still, for stillness is danger, stillness is to be comprehended and therefore controlled, stillness is to be identified and stripped of the guises that protect you from scorn, shame, humiliation and harm.
And if you’re not prepared for the unseen hazards around the corner, you’ll be starved and parched, left in your own filth for days, weeks, months, to “test your mettle,” to see what sort of servant you’d make to yet another abusive surrogate father. You’ll be taunted with promises preying on your self-hatred and envy, tinted in blue, shaped like a cube. Blue, blue, isn’t it always blue, like your dirty secret skin, that causes pain.
And how can you begin to share these things with a creature who deserves nothing but softness and kindness? How can you begin to rob her of still more peace of mind?
“It is … no longer in my nature to … stay in one place. I meant you no ill.”
He swallows. It’s usually around women Loki’s consoled; women are Seidhr masters, and they privilege wit over brute force. It was his mother, not his father, who granted him the opportunity to flourish as a child. But he finds himself judged in Sigyn’s presence: disconcertingly naked.
He licks slim pink lips.
“You know … if you could … just find it in yourself to consider …”
The Silvertongue is daunted. His hands flex at his sides.
“My love, I too am changed. I did not expect to survive my fall from the Rainbow Bridge, and I did not expect to survive rescuing my brother from Kurse. I did not ask for my many enemies, only to be granted the dignity owed any member of the royal family … .owed any living thing. I am sorry that I left you first in total despair, and later, in an attempt to save Thor and avenge my mother, but you must know that in my right …”
A swallow. Oh, this is difficult. It is such a concession of pride even to broach the subject.
“ … my right mind … I would not have left you.”
He comes close, very close, to snapping that he is sorry to inconvenience her with trauma that has been in no way his fault or prompting, but he bites his tongue and waits.
Sigyn hesitated in a space with an unexplainable number of golden curtains and pillars, trying to work out in her mind the way back to her uncle and aunt’s rooms, and regretting her attempt at inducing sleep by walking about this dark palace. She was hopelessly lost now, and feared that she would accidentally walk into some forbidden part of the palace, or somebody’s private rooms, while trying to return to hers.
Surely, she could remember which way she had come…. She seated herself on the floor, in the nearest corner, tucking her feet under the edge of the golden yellow coat she had knitted last autumn, and tried to think of it. There had been a corner, a hallway–yes, and gold embossing that had reminded her of Theoric’s armor.
Theoric. He was why she was awake, because she had been wondering if she truly wished to marry him, wondering if, now, she had the option of not doing so.
He’d been furious about her knitting gloves for Erik, the young Einherji who had helped her the last time she had been lost, in the gardens. She had never imagined that Theoric would fear the gloves were a gift of love; they were a gift of thanks. Theoric had held her arm hard enough that she had dark bruises. But then, she bruised easily, and he had stopped being angry, after she had explained, unable to help crying because she hated for him to be angry with her. She couldn’t seem to learn how to not make him angry… But he had kissed her arm to make it better, and said he wished their wedding were sooner.
Sigyn pushed wisps of hair away from her face, and began again thinking of how to find her room.
A few minutes later, she thought she knew how to return to it. She rose and walked through the curtains–oh, dear. She had never been here before. What room was this? The floor was inlaid with gold, in beautiful knots. Entranced, she wandered towards the middle of the room, looking at the pattern.
And then she remembered her aunt speaking of the inlaid floor of the throneroom. Her large eyes widened, and she looked up quickly, hoping that the king was not here this late.
“My Lady.”
No such luck comes to Sigyn’s aid this evening, dreary and mystical and bright all at once, in a palace that resembles a well worn yet exquisite illuminated manuscript sprung to three-dimensional life.
But Loki, standing beside the throne, uncannily still, hands clasped behind his back in a tell-take gesture of polite distrust, has always been more at ease with women; indeed it is a physical form he often prefers to assume. This is simultaneously Frigga’s legacy, and Odin’s, respectively for kindnesses done, and slights incurred. So it is with something vaguely like gentleness, in the dim torchlight, that he looks upon the Lady Sigyn, with her awe and bewilderment. Curiosity always was endearing to one as intellectually prone as the Trickster.
“You look lost.”
Jade eyes are half hooded with thick black eyelashes; his smile is wry and nonjudgmental.
“Eheh, though, quite pleasantly so. Do I assume correctly when I place you as the youngest of an entourage from … Vanaheim? Here to recite your nuptials to a member of the Einherjar?”
He advances on her in slow, calculated, lupine strides.
“I have been wed before. Tis tiresome, even at its happiest hour. Perhaps you hope to exorcise some nerves?”
I adamantly reject the relationship between classic Marvel comics!Loki and Sigyn, not only the circumstances by which he forced himself on her by pretending to be her betrothed Theoric and only revealing his true identity after they said their wedding vows, but also the toxically masculine aggressively heteronormative nature of their dynamic, in which she dresses and acts as a reflection of his will, with no personality of her own. Even though at more than one juncture Loki is protective of Sigyn and declares openly that he loves her, it’s pale comfort; he not only threatens her, but also sleeps around on and cheats on her regularly.
Contrariwise in Norse mythology, we know many more encouraging things about Sigyn and Loki’s relationship. First of allSigyn is not just the “Goddess of Fidelity,” she is the Goddess of Constancy. Meaning steadfast commitment. She is steely strong, and part of her name translates to “victorious.” Some sources put her as Freyja and Iwaldi’s daughter, which makes her a resident of Vanaheim, which is also pretty cool because whereas Asgard is a realm of the sky and the cerebral and the spiritual, Vanaheim exists with it in a dichotomy as the place of earth and and and fertility and strength. It is the body to the soul. So that gives us Sigyn the strong, faithful goddess of all things bountiful and nurturing. She is an entity in her own right, around who, Loki, a mercurial Trickster, orbits. Not the other way around. SHE is the mantle and the hearth in which the Fire God places his fire. She is the core. She is the foundation. This is why I prefer to portray Logyn based on Norse mythology and would hope that MCU would do the same.
We know that Sigyn survived unbearable pains. We know that the Aesir turned her son Vali into a wolf to butcher her son Narvi, both her children by Loki, as a means of exacting their continued grudge against Loki. We know that she further volunteered to stand vigil over her husband when he was bound by chains magically transmogrified from Narvi’s entrails beneath the dripping scalding venom of a huge serpent, and she holds a cup over his face so that, until she has to empty the bowl, the venom doesn’t burn him.
I believe that Loki would be attracted to a person like Sigyn because she is forthright and, in a sense, predictable. Not that she is boring, but she is also the opposite of someone deceitful or flighty. She has substance. Loki has been treated so abysmally by Odin and sometimes Thor for their whimsical and capricious tempers, their judgments and their LIES, that a mate for life who is composedly forthright seems exactly what would heal his wounded psyche. Or rather, what would empower him to heal himself.
icyxmischief 