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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"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.

His heart leaps in his chest; what once was flesh and solid bone is now a whirlwind, a thunderstorm of water warm on the skin. He would, he thinks, he would -- he would break this world in two to hear that again, and this thought stuns him in its truth. How long has it been since he's thought without lying to himself?

He supports himself on her, folds into her arms, and his palm cups her jaw.

Carefully, gently, he shifts close to the other side of her neck and presses one kiss there, a dry brush of lips to the pulsing vein at her throat.

Oh, she thinks, and the clarity of it is like a shock, the heady weight of the air in her lungs dissolving into something lighter. She exhales, and slings one arm fully against his back, ignoring the throbbing in her wrist. Her other hand, she brings to the base of his neck, fingers resting in his hair. She shifts her head down, lips ghosting over his cheek.

Her entire body draws him in closer, every part of her screaming out one thing: stay. For a moment, stay.

He turns his head and inhales the smell of sweat and blood and chase from her skin. He thinks of her lips, and the desire is a blade so keen it would slice through the remainder of his heart. He should flee, with angry words or a sharp tongue or a bird's wings, but instead all he craves is this: less than forgiveness, but more than need.

He realizes now that he was afraid. He had taken the risk that she would kill him, had known that a part of him would not have objected to a clean death. But the rest of him, the whole of him, wants to survive.

"And my life is yours," he breathes. "Again."

She can feel his breath on her cheek, warm. A comfort. A reassurance that there may be parts of them not yet erased. And that is one root of her anger, is it not? Outside of the spell, outside of Eswareinmal, going back to the moment he let go of the edge of the world: that he’d been broken so completely. That he had willed himself never to mend, rather than move forward.

She closes her eyes – something she would not have done in front of him yesterday, but that now seems natural. She has never been this close to him, never held him in this manner. But a thousand years has led her to know the angles of his face well enough. She inches closer still, the sweat and dirt on her brow mingling with his.

“It seems to be a mutual inclination,” she whispers, and closes her lips over his.

Loki keeps his skin as a boundary. Even more so, now that it is revealed that this is not his true form. His skin keeps him separate from the world; it is shield and armor. What emotion he reveals is whatever he wants to -- his lies are carried by skin.

But then her fingers map his face and he shudders, because his skin has turned transparent. No longer does it keep the world out, no longer does it shield him. Instead, it is open, the shivers of her touch raw against someplace deep within him.

Loki is one who flits from moment to moment, never settling, never lingering. Today, it seems that the instant before their lips touch lasts a lifetime, perhaps two, and he would drag it on for more if only he could.

He thinks of Sigyn, the chaste and sweet kiss that sealed their marriage, the reluctant and dutiful ones that followed. Even when the air was harsh with desire between them, duty ever-remained.

Angrboda, and her chaos, her feral passion. How she had swept Loki along in a torrent, and he felt consumed with every kiss. Then, the joy was in abandonment, in the violation of precious duty, in the meadow's wildflowers and the wolf's wild-hunts.

Svadilfari was when Loki's body was torn with need, when he would shake and quiver with the slightest touch, and yet he had been seduced with courtly care. He was fond of Svadilfari because Svadilfari was fond of Loki's pleasure.

No, and no, and no; he is not thinking of Sif's pleasure, not truly. His lips move the right way on distant memories, in ingrained motions, but his heart flutters against its cage of tendon and bone and he cannot think. Every touch flares and burns, and he thinks -- this is the first time I have been touched. The first time that I, as a Jotunn, as myself, as traitor and monster and sorcerer, have been touched.

His hand tightens in her hair and he kisses her with a roughness not borne of carelessness but of too much need.

Sif cannot separate the parts of herself – warrior, lady, friend, rival. They all meld together in action and thought. In battle, in silence, in contact: she is on alert, ever pushing for more, ever craving completion. This has kept as many lovers away as it has drawn in, and she would have it be no different.

Warrior, lady, friend, rival. There is nothing gentle of her kiss – it explores, it challengers, it asks for more. It does not coddle. She breathes into him, the pressure of her lips hot upon his, searching him out with tongue and teeth and movement.

With her good hand, she runs her nails down the back of his neck, scratching under his shirt collar, seeking him out. All of him – skin and bone, flesh and heart. All that she can. All that she will. Warrior, lady, friend, rival. The selfish Lady Sif.

He would not trade any piece of her. The rival challenges, the friend soothes, the lady suits him, in demeanor and gentleness, and the warrior fights alongside. Loki, too, is a many-faceted creature, shining one way and staining blood-red another.

The strain of his spell and the strain of his emotions catch up with him at once. He breaks the kiss, breathes sharp and his fingers go tight on her. "Sif, I..." and the world retreats from him, goes grey and distant, and he starts to fall.

Her arms are around him in an instant, though she's clumsier handling him than she would be at full power. She half walks, half drags him over to a nearby tree. She sinks to the ground and brings him with her, resting her back upon the tree and positioning his head in her lap.

She looks down at him, letting out a low breath. Willing herself only to think of the present -- not unlike a battle. She knows well enough how he looks after a particularly exhaustive spell. But worry creeps in (that's the danger here, isn't it? A new kind of blade), and she shakes his shoulders.

"Loki," she says, tilting her head down and whispering into his ear. "If you have need of a fainting couch, I can procure one."

He swats at her, sourly, his mind throbbing in his skull. "Leave me be." His voice is more of a croak. "I have no strength for this." And his hand seeks out hers, tangles their fingers together and grips weak. Shreds of unconsciousness, exhaustion, low and simmering pain.

Sif has half a mind to remark that she thought she was in the presence of a prince and not a grumpy cat. But his fingers lace with her own, and the words die on her lips. When she looks down at him and says:

"Very well, then."

It is in a space between begrudging and affectionate. She sits with him for some time, and leaves only to hunt down dinner when the sun starts to wane. When he wakes up, he will find her roasting a rabbit.

Any by-the-hearth comments he has may very well leave him knocked unconscious again.

He has not slept so sound in ever-so-long. -- No, not so long, was it? Only since the coronation. Has it even been a month? Jotunnheim, Thor's outcasting, Loki's fall. And then his time here, where he never quite learned to trust anyone. Not even the ones who learned to trust him, though affection had just started to swell in his breast, before Thor arrived...

But he sleeps sound and exhausted and unafraid, because there is a part of him that knows Sif is near. There is a part of him that trusts her to allow him to come to no harm. It is an enchanting, strange feeling.

He awakens at the smell of cooking meat, with a wrinkled nose, not sure if he wants it, if he is hungry, or if his stomach would rebel at the reality of food. He hasn't eaten well, of late, and a spell tends to unsettle his system for a time. Especially a spell as draining as that one.

"Have you any thought on what managed to curse you?" he asks, hesitantly, not knowing if she's noticed him awakening.

In truth, she did not see him stir. Her attentions were turned towards setting up camp, wrapping her wrist, the root of the earlier spell -- almost everything aside from what transpired between them in the moments before he fell unconscious. But the moment he is awake, speaking, she finds she can think of little else.

"You're awake," she obverses, dumbly. And then, turning the rabbit in its makeshift roast: "Yes. There was an orb about it while you were asleep. The reigning theory is that it was the unnatural snow, two evenings before. I saw fit to go for a walk that evening."

What she does not mention: the root of the cure. Letting someone know that they are loved.

His throat is dry. He wishes for a canteen.

Curls his knees and shifts up, leaning back against a tree. "How unfortunate," he murmurs. "I favored the snow." He had felt so powerful, for that day. The cold had lent him strength like he'd never felt before.

No; more like he was aware of it, now. Now that he knew.

"And you are cured, now. There is nothing of it left."

"No." She looks down at her hands -- the ones she tried to kill the king with, the ones she had very nearly used to rip his throat out. "No," she repeats, softly. "It has passed."

Brushing her hands on her trousers, she slings a water pouch over her shoulder and goes to him. She crouches down, knees to her chest, a few inches in front of him. Closer than the reach of an outstretched hand. She offers him the water.

"You could have died at my hand."

"Would have," is what he says, a correction, as his fingers close around the water. Could have, would have, and perhaps he did, in another universe, an endless permutation of this one. Thick branches like Yggdrasil spiraling out in fractal-patterns of choices, consequences, choices again. He drinks, and the water is warm and a hint sour, but it quenches his thirst well enough.

He shifts away from her. "Think nothing of it," he says. "Naturally, the breaking of a curse would have led to another extreme -- it is a process of establishing equilibrium." The words spill free, but he isn't quite conscious of what he's saying. He's trying to get back that slippery memory of her lips on his cheek.

Anger coils in her stomach as he speaks, as he makes it sound like she is some sort of item in a...process. But she isn't under the spell, now, and is able enough to set it aside in favor of looking at the situation before her. Which is: she would have killed him. Gladly, if the curse had not been broken. And yet he came.

When Sif was a girl, there was a small lake behind her home. When she got frustrated, which was no small amount of the time, she would swim to the bottom of it and look up. Outstretch her fingers, and see the world from that angle -- half there, and half not. Blurry and muted.

She looks and him now, and it's like that. It seems he is here in body only, the other parts of himself commanding his speech from some hidden space. She moves closer to Loki and rests a hand over his. It's clumsy, but there's tenderness in it.

"How are you feeling?"

"You are not bound by what we have done," Loki insists, more coherently. "No honor must be satisfied. We should think no more of it."

He can smell her. This close, he can -- the smell of the fight, of woodsmoke and blood, of ... pain?

And he reaches out without thinking and lifts her wrist in his delicate fingers, moving it with as little pain as he can. Ice wraps it, cools the swelling tissue he can feel around the broken bone.

A look of pain crosses Loki's face.

She inhales sharply as he moves her wrist, but it says volumes that she doesn't second guess his intentions.

"Loki, you don't have to -- if you're weak, still, it's just a broken bone. It will heal soon enough."

Were she at full strength, it might already be healed. She wonders, abstractly, how it is human manage to build cities when they break so easily.

"I can only take the pain." Though it is flattering, at least, that she thinks he would be able to heal it. He, too, is weakened in this place. He turns away, though, his jaw tightening.

"I feel," he whispers, "as though I have lost one too many things." He never had her, he reminds himself. This is nothing but a silly, brutal temptation. "Would that another could steal mine away." His pain, he means.

With alarming clarity, Sif thinks that if she were able to hold his pain, she would. It goes against everything she believes: that people grow from their trials, that pain is there as something to work through. That fighting someone's battles for them is a disservice.

All the same, she would. She moves to look him in the eye.

"All I can offer is supper and my company. Would that do for now?"

Loki isn't like that. When he feels, he feels too deeply and too well; his emotions sweep him in uncontrollable tides, fury to joy to hate to mirth. He blocks nothing out; he forgets nothing. His emotions do not make him stronger; they either make him well or they wear him away to nothing.

"If that is all," he says, softly, "then I will leave you, and find my way to the thorns." Because -- no. It will not do. It is not enough.

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Akjdhsf edited, sorry!

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