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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

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.

Sif's entire body grows taut. The idea of getting this close to some sort of resolution between them, only to lose him again to the thorns -- it is unacceptable. It grips her core, leaves her with the desire to mark him, to claim him. Selfish.

In an instant, she closes in. Her knees rest against his thighs, and she darts her face under his. Her breath is light, teeth bared into something feral, when she says:

"And what else is there, Loki?"

He meets her gaze. And he knows his life has been in unprecedented tumult, in the past weeks. He knows he is unbalanced, that perhaps he has never been balanced and he never will be. He knows he will fight with the urge to do harm for the rest of his days, and sometimes he will give in, and it will feel wonderful.

"Everything," he breathes. "There is everything."

He wants this. And he does not know why he hesitates to take.

“Not here. I am not everything.” She reaches out, traces his jaw line with her calloused fingers. It’s different than before, when her actions could be recused, written off a side effect of an unfamiliar spell. She is deliberate, now. Aware, keenly, of what she wants.

“I am not everything. I don’t have everything. It’s just me, Loki. Nothing here but a refugee and a would-be kingslayer.”

"Then give me all you have." A greedy, twisted sentiment, but even that would not be enough to assuage the raw, gnawing need in his chest. "Give me --" And he cuts himself off, kissing now not with the faintness of before, not with the light, fleeting terror, but with something terrifying, deep, consuming.

Loki is not the only greedy one, here.

She returns the kiss with an urgency that does not shock her, as she might have imagined, but propels her forward. Every movement is hungry, written in the parts of war that drive those carrying its banner to action. From gait to deed, from the teeth biting at his lip to the nails on the back of his neck, convalescing into one thought: mine.

She hooks her leg across his waist, pulling herself onto his lap. She draws back, lips wet with them, and breathes out:

"Yourself in return. Give me all you are."

A hoarse laugh: "And what would you do, with a handful of broken shards? They're like to slice you deep..." The tree-bark at his back, her at his front; he has never been trapped so, never greeted entrapment with such satisfaction.

"Are they?" She runs her fingers across his forehead, the sharp curve of his cheeks, bringing them to rest at his chin. She pulls her hand back, holds it up in the light of the fire.

"I’m not so delicate as that."

If he is broken shards, here, then she is a blade without a hilt.

"Prove it to me." A hiss, a dare, and it is times like now that he remembers what it is to have a silver tongue, the scruples of a snake. "Prove it." As his fingertips drift over her throat, the hollow of her neck, as he slips up and kisses her pulse, again, the root of her life.

“And what would you do with such proof? Keep it locked away, somewhere secret?”

A low growl escapes her throat under his lips. She pushes him closer against the tree, hips rocking into his methodically, purposefully.

“Or carry it like a banner?”

"Why would I flaunt it?" returns Loki, breathless, eyes closed, feeling nothing but her, smelling nothing but her. "It is but for your eyes and for mine."

It's different, seeing him like this. Transfixed. There’s a corner of his brow smoothed out that’s normally knitted together. The thought occurs to her to kiss it, and there’s no earthly reason now why she can’t. Her lips go there, wet and chapped, and there is a tenderness cut into her actions.

"Your eyes are closed," she counters, murmuring into his skin. She rocks closer still, bringing her good hand down to rest at the pit of his stomach, fingers running back and forth over the fabric of his clothes.

He breathes in, softer and slower than a gasp but still trembling with anticipation.

"Because it is for our tongues, our hands, our hearts," and he turns his head and catches her lips again in a desperation that's painful to feel and exquisite to express.

Is this reward? Reward, for allowing himself to be weak (for the first time in as long as his memory stretches), for showing her the anger and the grief that split his soul. For revealing, perhaps, that there is something of good in him, while he spent his centuries trying to hide it away and break it and rub it out.

He has rarely voiced any hint of friend-devotion to the warriors that count him among their company. He wants to voice it now, but he cannot, so the tight grip of his hands and the way his tongue twists against Sif's must suffice.

She answers in turn, then. Pushing still -- always pushing, and for a moment she's not here, but in the forests of Asgard, the hidden passageways of the palace, the lonely distance from the gates of the city to the broken edge of the world. All of the things she misses, like a blade. Loki both soothes that longing and throws it into sharp focus in a way she has no words for.

And so: another language. Her tongue meets his, pushing, until the air she breathes is his own. Her hand flexes out, moving under the fabric of his trousers, palm hot against his skin. Her heart is in her actions, on display in a way she rarely allows.

Another language: I missed you.

He curls back against the ground, and then she is above him, in a posture that to him feels akin to worship. He would, he thinks; he would go down on her with slow, sly tongue and wait as she curses him to oblivion. He could master her.

He could...

But he is pliant in her grip, as his hands move to the laces of her tunic, undo with quick, sharp, hesitant motions.

There is nothing of hesitancy in Sif's motions. She unclasps her vest as Loki unlaces the tunic -- that is off soon enough, until all that remains up top are the long strips of cloth that bind her breasts.

She leans down, knees on either side of him, and it is intoxicating to see him like this -- laid out under her. She wants to see him, all of him -- naked, defenseless (if such a thing between them were ever possible), spread out in the moonlight. The hairs on her arm rise at the thought, and she breathes out, slowly. She reaches for his collar and draws a line down from it, undoing the bindings as she goes, hands reaching again for flesh.

Loki is not the sort to trust; he would rather strip another bare, would rather hold them close and undo them in bits and pieces before taking his pleasure himself.

It's shocking to him, then, that he wants nothing more than to throw himself to the wind. To trust her to catch him. A twitch of his throat, a swallow, and he tilts his head back, murmuring words of flesh like mist, and his clothes melt through him and settle on the ground beneath his bare skin. Better than the rough ground, alone.

(Another brief summon of effort, and she may see his skin ever-so-slightly blur, beneath her fingers; he pushes himself into a fully male form.)

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject