eswareinmal | Action: 14th of the Rebirth

Entry tags:

↓loki,
↓sif

Action: 14th of the Rebirth

Characters: Loki, Sif, attitude
Open? No
Where: The road to the thorns
When: Day 14th
What: Sif wants to beat the hell out of Loki. No one's sure what it is that Loki wants.
Warnings: ~~None, yet?~~End of the thread veers into NSFW territory!
Under the best circumstances, the Aesir were not a calm people. Even Sif, who prided herself on being a more mindful fighter than most – mindful in a daily way, which colored every movement, which left no doubt that her name had been earned in deed and oath – could be provoked to a blood rage, in the heat of battle.

She had been in such a rage for almost a day now, with no end in sight. After her failed attempt on the king’s life, she’d at least had mind enough to clear herself of the castle, of her friends and allies.

The man she rode towards now was neither. Usually more careful with her animals, she kicked at her horse, urging it faster still. She would find Loki before this day was out.

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He weaves several intricate traps. Solidifies ice in lines across the path, weaving them back and forth until it makes a net of magic and ice and snow, slippery and treacherous. He ties it to a string that cuts across his palm, and he waits; Sif has taken his bait, and she will arrive soon enough.

Several people pass before her, slipping and sliding on his trap, but it does not spring.

And then, thundering hooves from the distance. He scries and sees a flash of dark hair, and he pulls the string tight.

When she steps onto the ice of the path, he snaps it closed.

The ice forms into a net, scooping her up, releasing the horse and dangling Sif like a piece of fruit from a tree. Loops of it are tight around each wrist and each ankle.

Loki slips out of his cover, exhilarated and victorious.

"And so the snake strikes," he calls. "You should have watched your step."

She yells out his name as she is caught in the net, because no one else would be responsible for this. She curses him, and her own judgment -- there are alternate roads, but she didn't see a need to take them. Didn't that he would actually meet her face-to-face, even with a trap between.

"Coward!"

She pulls at the bonds the same way that she would were she at home, at full strength. But this place has taken even that from her, and there is a sharp intake of breath as she hears her wrist snap. The pain of it is sharp, but she cares little, her gaze trained wholly on Loki.

She would tear his heart out.

"I thought you were hiding in a cave over hurt feelings. Just like a broken thing."

He steps out into the road. His ice has left little cross-hatched marks in the road's surface.

"Struggle if you wish," he says. "The ice will not relinquish you." His eyes are cold and curious on her. "What has taken you so, Sif? Have my words affected you so?"

"Nothing has take me. I only strive to do now what I should have done the moment I found you alive."

She starts off strong, but there's something -- a waver to her tone, a small shift of her brow, willing it away.

She tried to kill a king. But the king deserved to die. Given the choice, she would cut his neck on the throne room, for all to see.

He holds up a hand, and his fingers curl.

The ice dissolves around her, and she falls, caught by a tendril around her ankle. She dangles several feet above the ground, yet.

"Say you're sorry," he says, "for your traitorous acts, and I will release you."

"I will not," she says, red faced, each word punctuated by a breath. If were only a few feet closer, she could end him.

"There was no treason. This land declared war on us the moment it sent those damned books. I would see the castle and everyone in it burned in return. I would see their lands stripped and their children enslaved, until the name of Asgard struck such fear into the hearts of these people that they would never think of stealing from it again."

"And did they not do so in the hope of survival?" he asks her. "They did wrong, yes... and as we all know, Asgard has never done wrong." He steps around her, keeping a wide distance from her reach. "Asgard has never deceived a builder, in order to have a wall for their own safety. Asgard has never acted in deceit. Asgard would never..."

He stops.

"You look down at me," he tells her, "but if not for me, everything you hold dear would have been lost a dozen times over, because I never hesitated to do wrong in service of right. Fault him for his incompetence; fault him for his irreverence. Do not fault him for trying to save his land."

"You killed what I held dear."

She hangs, very still.

"You run. You hold no one sacred. You stand so weak and blame Thor for it, tie your life to his death, and then presume to tell me what is right?"

Sweat rolls down her neck in the mid-day sun, dropping onto the ground below. She remembers the king's words in the throne room -- how carefully he seemed to stand for nothing at all.

"I should not be surprised that you support such a king. A king of no ideals and a deserter prince. What a fitting pair."

"And after a thousand years, you still know nothing of my heart," he accuses, in return. "I planned to murder the king myself, until I realized that I know better. As should you, my lady."

He takes a step back. "So shall I leave you here, for the next vagabond to find?"

Edited 2012-03-19 07:09 (UTC)

"That you've seen to it that no one knows your heart is no fault of mine," she spits, back. That he saves her life one day and curses her the next, names her as enemy, lays out traps -- she is done discerning the meaning of it all. If he wants so badly to be taken at silver-words and evil deeds alone, so be it.

She is about to cry out: You should have murdered the king. What stayed your hand?

But she stayed her own blade as well. Did she not flee the castle, for knowledge of what she would do to those who stood in her way? Her mind starts to wander away from here, from this dirt road, and she flexes her wrist in return. The sharp pain of it brings her back to the present.

"You did not trap me for vagabonds."

"I trapped you for me." There is a touch of possessive jealousy in his voice, that of a hunter when faced with the loss of his prey. His voice goes softer: "And for you."

He pulls a knife, and steps closer to her.

"Shall we see if I can bleed this curse from your veins?" he asks.

Teeth bared in something of a grin, Sif does not break eye contact. Does not cower. Not before Loki, of all people.

“Come close enough for that knife to break skin. Then, I shall show you a curse.”

"Do you forget, Sif?" He balances the knife in his hand. And, with a flick of his wrist, he throws it.

The blade grazes her arm, drawing a bloody line. Just deep enough to drip as it bled.

He speaks in a low, magical tongue, and crouches down out of her reach to catch her blood.

"Show me your curse," he murmurs.

There's a sparkle of something; a glitter that's frozen, its seething cold irritating all that it touches.

He had suspected there was a curse, but knowing it, feeling it is shocking. Someone has placed Sif under a spell. And that -- that is absolutely, unequivocally wrong.

Loki picks out that sparkle of a spell, holds it carefully on his palm. It seems like ice; this is his element. Far easier than blood magic, in a place like this.

So he summons his own ice, letting his palm frost over, seeing if he could overwhelm this spell with his own. If this fails, he will draw a rune of breaking and cast that, with all the force of his magic behind it.

Her blood drips into Loki’s hands, and while he might probe it, whisper to it, ask of its secrets, Sif knows exactly what it is her blood contains. Blóðughadda, the one with blood red hair, borne of Ægir, the oldest of them all. Name writ in crimson waves after a battle. A ninth of Heimdall*, the sentry, who sits at the edge of the universe.

“I will kill you for this.”

When Sif was a girl, she waited seven years for her name, as was the custom of those born in between ranks. Her mother’s lineage was unquestioned. But her father was a farmer. One day, her grandfather, whose name she never said aloud, dropped out of the sky and caught her hunting rats in the garden. He asked who had given a young girl such a knife. She asked who had seen fit not to give him one.

“I will cut you from stem to sternum.” She declares it clearly, can see herself performing the action. “Your blood will turn the road crimson and muddy. The last sound you ever hear will be my footsteps, as I leave you to the wild things. The last thing you ever see will be the coal-black eyes of crows, as they come to feast upon you.”

Ægir laughed, and asked what business she had with a knife. Should she not be inside, learning to cook and clean for a husband? Sif dug her toes into the soil and declared that she would sooner marry the rats she was ridding the garden of, because they knew well enough how to prepare their own meals. Or even better, she would marry the very knife that cut them.

Ægir assented, and thus she was given her name. Sif. Wife of rats and blades.

“You should not have caught me, Odinson. I am nothing to put in a trap.”

[ooc: There are two different versions of the mothers of Heimdall (Heimdallr). Most have him borne of nine jötunn maids -- no big deal in the myths, where the Aesir and frost giants hook up all the time. A much bigger deal in the comics and movies, where they all hate each other. So I went with the less popular interpretation of Heimdall being borne of the nine daugthers of Ægir. One of those daughters is named after the blood the stains the water after naval battles, so NATURALLY, that is Sif's mom. I apologize for my life.]

And Loki gasps, with the pain of casting break, the power required to crush the spell. And yet he had not eliminated it, just turned a large splinter into small. Sif would have to overcome the rest on her own.

The frost around her ankle cracked and released her; Loki had not the strength to keep it up. He took to his knee, his hand covering his heart.

Her blood is lit with fire, or ice – something sharp that is trying to escape through every skin cell. She rolls onto the ground as the trap breaks and stalks over towards Loki. No weapons. She will not need them. She can use her own hands well enough to see if red still flows in his—

”Do you think I planned to live, when I fell from the Bifrost?”

She stops, briefly, but it’s like trying to light a candle in the height of a fog.

—veins. His pose mocks her, and she stops short of him.

“Get up.”

He hisses in pain, inhaling sharp as he can. Out of breath.

And he decides to gamble.

When he lifts his eyes to hers, they're wet with tears. He draws his collar from his throat, and bares it to her.

"Kill me, then," he says. (Knowing that this might be the only way to bring her honor to the surface, and inside, he is cold and calculating as a snake.) "Kill me, though all I wanted was to help you. Kill me, and prove you are no better than I am."

"Get up," she screams, gutturally. She swings her leg out savagely, kicking the liar where he sits.

"You do not help me. You do not help me when you run. You do not help me when you throw my words around like things without meaning. You do not help me when you die so willingly." Another kick, and she wants to--

Stop. The day has gone on for years, from the moment that her father caught her training with Thor. She stands outside of the throne room, ears pressed to the door, and she can't breathe. She hears footsteps and flees before she can think better of it. She runs until she has no idea where she is, and barricades herself behind a large, wooden door. Behind it is the smaller prince, the quiet prince, with a stack of books.

"Don't say anything. Please."

stop. She wants to stop this (stop what?) and she screams at him again, eyes red.

"You do not help me, Loki!"

"Then kill me!" he shouts back. "I have spent all my strength on you. I am powerless. If I am such -- anathema, then strike me down!"

The air is thick, taut, full, as though the spaces between all the swirling molecules have been packed tight with emotion and memory. A thousand years, a thousand of friendship and rivalry and distaste, of bitterness that has swung to something near love and then back again. She is near as much a part of him as Thor is, as much as he struggles to be separate, as much as he wishes to be set apart.

He pleads with her, silently, wholeheartedly: come back to me. Break free of this fell presence in your blood, and come back to me.

It feels like walking through sand, every step of it a memory that comes up through her throat -- thick, cloying -- and out through her skin, holding her to the ground and making each step the weight of lifetimes.

The wine stain in the great hall that they covered with an elm tree.

Notes she'd written in the margins of his favorite books.

The air on her neck one morning, her once golden hair now short and black as night.

A space carved out for him, the lost one, as they walked in the hallway and pretended not to notice.

She marches through all of it, the thrumming under her skin becoming sharper, louder, with the weight and height of silence. She reaches him, finally, and crouches down with wide eyes. Her hands trace his face and it is so wondrously cold that she thinks she might drown in it.

“Loki?”

For a moment he is convinced -- convinced, beyond doubt's shadow, that she is under no curse. He believes this to be nothing but her own rage, her true rage, finally revealing itself. He has deluded himself into believing that something remains of them, that he has not destroyed everything in his agony.

And then her hand touches his face with heat like reddened iron, and he flinches away. "So it was a curse," he breathes, and he wills himself to stand and pull away, wipe the tears and mock her with the effectiveness of his mask. Look, how I have manipulated you.

Instead, the world reels around him, black spots in his vision, and he catches himself on his palm. He is all too tempted to let himself fall.

She stands up, quickly, and that in itself is no easy task. But the next moment seems very important, somehow. Still coming back to herself, she reaches out and grips her hands on his shoulders, buries her fingers in the fabric of his cloak. She doesn't care if he flinches, he if feigns disgust.

In the next few seconds, she'll lose him. She can feel it to her very bones. So now it is her turn to be laid bare. Her throat before a knife.

"Know that I love you. Even now."

In what way, she does not know. To what degree, to what meaning, she honestly can’t say. It always became so fluid around them -- like trying to catch rain with a cupped hand. But it is still there. A thousand years between them doesn’t disappear with one terrible act.

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Akjdhsf edited, sorry!

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