Disclaimer: You all know I don't own Thor or anything except my words. If words are in fact ownable.
Author's Note: Written for damalur on AO3 for the 2013 Mischief and Mistletoe holiday fanwork exchange. Takes place during The Dark World.
The second time, she is running through dark passages where fire blinks from the eyes of the walls, dark shadows reaching for her hands, her neck, her hair.
She goes to see him in the darkness, ragged and limp in a glittering cage, charging eyes and shadows rushing from the magicked barrier which contains him. The cell is silent white and blushed gold, and inside Loki fingers a book-spine with bruised fingers and wears a hollow smile. Sif stands outside the enclosure, her mouth twisted with malice, demanding.
"You've come at last," Loki remarks dryly, turning to address her from where he leans easily against a solid panel. "I had nearly thought myself freed from vindication."
"It is not my vindication which you face, but all Asgard's."
His lip curls. "A gallows littered with gold. This is retribution?"
He is sallow, but also proud; Sif is an audience. Her hands, at least, are steady. Behind his hair Loki's eyes look jaundiced; his feet are bloodied and torn, his clothing battered. Sif wonders why he does not hide himself from her.
"You know well the punishment you deserve," she says icily, and he laughs.
"I," he snorts, and gestures with his palms; but they are empty, like the violence of his eyes. "I, who would salvage this realm from savage oafs like my brother? Like my dearest father?"
Her hands are calm, calm. "It does not do you well to speak of savagery."
"The humans of Midgard are but insects."
"You are no better!" She presses her fist into a palm, clenches her teeth. "You live. You grow and die. You are the same as the humans, as the Vanir, as all of us."
"How foolish you are," Loki snarls, anger in the shift of his jaw. "How very like your pitiful king, who would seal me in chains for three thousand years and call it mercy."
She doesn't hear the spine of a book snap in two, but raises her hands to frame his face, if only to keep from the sword resting sharp against her shoulder. Only to breach the prison, a blade swift to the heart, and she might kill him, after all.
"I have something for you," Loki says quietly. A knife takes shape under his fingers, curved steel with a metal fixture that winks black and cold. He holds it to her, outside the cell, and smiles. "The trinket you stole from me."
Loki doesn't flinch when Sif lunges toward him, a clean line to the gold screen, and screams high when she slams into it broken and loud, louder even than the furious roar of her heart. She can feel Loki watching her, calm yellow eyes and long fingers sketching shapes into the cold gilded barrier that should have admitted her.
"Ah," Loki says, nails white like flame-tips, like little knives against the screen. "It seems I have power even here. I had wondered."
Her eyes flash like light on a blade. Loki smiles.
"Why did you take this knife from me, Lady Sif?"
The barrier is gone then, gone, and her fingers scar his face and his mouth is raw and red. She doesn't kill him, except with tongue and teeth and lips, suddenly and forcefully in a violent kiss. Remember.
Then she takes the knife and runs, lips gone, words gone, cold. And screams when she's again alone.
The third time, she charges Thor with swords in a skirmish between warriors.
They glister in the gold throes of battle, an angry thunder of twisting metal and steady-paced feet. Sif catches Thor's torso; he cuts a line to her forearm. The air swirls and clouds gather - there's no thunder yet to break the spell, but static crackles behind Thor's eyelids like tiny daggers.
He turns to her with his great shoulders and wheat-gold hair, and Sif nearly loves him like she's wanted all the time. She laughs with him, speaking of spring and sun and anything but the prisoner that taxes their minds.
He leaves her when the sky blushes pink-gold, leaves her to wander with her swords and her frustration and the taste of sky on her lips. She comes to a great ash tree, tall and with stark-bare arms that weep with melting snow.
Sif whispers to the tree that she loves Thor. That Loki is mad. That Loki is wicked.
She screams because she can see him in the ash's branches, in shadows, small dark eyes and thinthin lips. The branches sound like wings when she shakes them, like raptor's wings, and Sif screams because she knows that she will go to him again.
The fourth time, she relents.
Loki's mouth tastes like stale wine, like the iron flakes of an old and rotting sword. She probes her tongue to his teeth, frosted breath and savage little growls. He moans like she does, tongue curled around the bitten mess of her lip, little sighs turned to stars.
He guides her fingers to his lips, and it occurs to Sif that he might be lulling her under a spell, even now. That she's become enchanted yet again.
She pulls him under her. Loki will cross her back with knives; Loki is kissing her now.
He hides them with magic, a feint to mask motion and sound, and they whisper into each others' mouths like war; Loki is filthy beneath her fingers, ratted hair free and frayed. She breathes.
"See how you sigh for me," he sings.
"I'll have that wicked tongue," Sif clips, and raises a hand to his throat. She thinks he laughs, but the sound is muffled by the roaring in her ears; she moves rough with her hips, gasps when it burns like she remembers, burns like it should.
"Fine silk and silver-tongue," Loki appends, but arches his neck nonetheless. "We all of us have our titles, do we not? Lady Sif."
She snarls, because it's thrilling to wage a war she cannot win, because she loves the sting of attrition and hates that she does; and she swats his hand away, shifting her body to rest above his. "You will surely smite me with those words of yours," she murmurs bitterly, and he lowers his eyes. "Words which brought you here, to rot."
"You love my words," Loki whispers into her hair. She can feel her life trembling under his hands, his lips, the points of his hips - cold and liquid like his skin against her thighs. Shadows. "You love my wicked tongue."
His thumb is cold, cold, and wet against her cheek. "There is nothing about you that I love."
"You lie."
"I would see you killed-" she braces her hands on his thighs and sinks down at last, drives him deeper, spilling her hair over his chest, a spell-dark curtain. "I would kill you, coward, traitor, if not for the All-Father's mercy-"
"Ah," he says, ah, and he laughs, and so she yanks on his hair until he gasps, cries, and burns her fingers to his heart.
They say nothing after, and Sif leaves him quickly in a storm of rage and regret that turns to hunger before she can smite it. Her heart beats, the only sound in her still and quiet room (except his breath, except skin on skin, the echoes of their sighs). The furs on her bed twist with malice, and Sif clutches the stolen blade in one hand.
Shadow-kisses taste like ash and longing, and Sif screams instead of sleeps.
Sif berates herself for it.
She seeks him at odd and fleeting moments. A glint of silver on the battlefield; a ghostly shadow; a child's green-gold eye. She comes to him on cold and quiet nights, dark and with the promise of violence, and he whispers to her careful, you'll get burned. She burns him, too.
She wants to leave, wants to leave, but she knows him - the sharp of his hips and the sting of his teeth and the low dark silver of his words. He's night, and night comes always.
His thumb brushes against the base of her neck, into her hair. He's scarred, and she can feel the ice seeping in because she is, too. He tastes like heat and dry lips.
"I thought you dead," she says to his white wrist, slipping the cloth back with slow fingers. Loki's horned steel blade gleams in her other hand, halfway to his chest. "I stole it so that you might live to take it back."
"We are so very alike," he croons, and she very nearly kills him there. "Perhaps the warrior-thief might learn to match me with words, as well."
"Nothing comes from your mouth but vicious lies," Sif says.
"Fill it, then, with things besides."
She screams war cries into his mouth. She's not counting anymore.
It's dark when Sif hears that Loki has fallen - muttered words from the mouth of a soldier that stinks of mulled wine and despair. She presses a blade to his throat and demands truth.
Sif doesn't scream when she confirms him dead, but her body hangs limp and cold. She breathes and runs and swings her swords, again, again; but she doesn't scream. When she and the other traitors are sentenced to repair Asgard's fallen foundations, she works and builds with her hands and lets the dirt and ash hide her face. She prays to Frigga, to her queen, her mother's spirit also gone.
After many days, she goes to Odin.
The king of Asgard, marvelous in golden armor and wizened sagacity, does not look to her from where she stands before his great chair. He sits grandly, stiff in the shoulder but straight at the spine, a clever hint in his eye. "Lady Sif," he greets her, but briskly.
Her fingers flinch at her side, but still she holds her gaze, true and baleful at that one watchful eye. "Father," she says, cursing the swords in her throat, "I've something to ask of you."
"So it is. Yet I think you heed my answer."
"Please," she whispers, her breath a strongbox in her chest, "allow a pyre for Loki."
Odin looks to her, surprised, a quiet mass of judgment. Her hair streams wild; her lips move without sound. She's already lowering her head, offering with shaking hands. Her lips are painted white.
"I cannot oblige your request," the king says, and Sif's like a thread splitting, fallen to her knees with her hands just touching her heart. He holds light in his hands, light in his eyes, thin and yellow and laughing.
"Father, I beg you. Send his soul to rest." Her hands clench white into fists, and the king of Asgard twitches once, twice, on his great throne.
"Your words are mired in forgiveness and in love." Odin's shadow reaches before Sif closes her eyes, spider-fingers and grave lips. "Death touches all, young Sif. But traitors do not see Valhalla."
She straightens and bows like a sharp blade, and is gone before Loki can blink. (But Loki hears her scream at last.)
Sif isn't there when Loki seizes the world with magic.
He sits on Odin's throne and watches his kingdom - a mass of stone and soil, a palace entombed in rock, a crop of trees feeding from the water, great fish dancing and cervids craning their necks to the grasses which connect lake and sky.
Asgard is not a realm of glory and gold. Asgard is the voices of shadows and crows and warrior-men.
Beyond Loki's walls warriors fall against each other in anticipation of day's end, swords clacking in splendid sheaths. Fires spring to life. Water rushes with renewed vigor, and stone comes to pieces as men in tents uncover their goblets and sing to drown their sorrows. Loki sees all, through his illusions; he hears all, through the whispers of his shadows.
Sif hacks at a tree with his horned blade and screams.
There can be no funeral for Loki. Odin lies incapacitated, and Odin would not have allowed it. The people will not sing. No flames will rain from the heavens, no spark be set to water. Loki will be remembered, but not as a god.
On Earth there had been a little girl who'd thought him a spirit, green and gaudy, cloaked in black like a marauder yet stenciled in gold. She'd held out her tiny hands, offering kindness, or perhaps seeking it (he's cold like winter and burnished ice; she yanked back her fingers as though he would bite) - he had stared at her lily-fair face as if he'd never seen such a thing before.
Loki knows the dark world is waking. Darkness births spindly shadows, eyeless figures which carry swords and move like warriors. Loki counts the nights in battles waged among ghosts, where he sees Frigga's face and memories become too much.
She isn't there when he seizes the world with magic, and Loki laughs bitter, his mother lost and Sif as well. The silence has a woman's voice, red and harsh and bitter-tasting like her kiss. It whispers to Loki, soft, soft: scream.
He does, and his throat boils with the rage of loss and love, his eyes in the dark like dying stars.
Loki can see Sif, dancing beneath her tree. She screams to say I love you, I loved you, I'll destroy you, come home.
Loki screams, too. He screams until it hurts.
Spring approaches silently, bringing a melting of blue winter snows and none of the usual merriment. The last of winter's misted rains blankets the rock spires that frame Asgard in spires, swallowing light and mirth. Thunder, low and rumbling, strikes her ears. Thor, too, mourns.
Sif doesn't scream anymore. She builds with the Warriors in cold crystal rain. She eats and talks with Thor, who tells her of the woman he loves, who cheers her with his fronted grin. But sadness settles over the land like a squall, final and frozen.
The queen is dead, she with her quiet wisdom and clever smile. And Loki - Loki, too.
I didn't want to love you, she whispers to his spindly shadows in weakness; and doesn't scream, but clutches his knife tight in her hands. I didn't want to love you when we were children and chased ravens. I didn't want to love you when you left. When you returned with hollow eyes. (I don't want to love you now.)
She almost believes it.
As she builds a young boy tugs on her armor and Sif takes him in her arms, telling him watch for the flowers, they'll grow again here soon. They'll grow and you'll be one year older, and a warrior besides. He laughs and tells her she's the strongest and his eyes are green, green, like magic, like a dream. Child's eyes.
The first time, she is a child.
On the day that Sif finally bests Thor, it snows. Loki, childlike and thin, lingers around the grounds like a wraith until her supporters thin out and away. She peers at him on a glance, a whim that rises like diamond dust, ash beneath her boots. It's cold this winter, but there's angry life in his cheeks, his red-raw lips. She opens her mouth to boast, a hand on her hip.
"I love you," Loki says, breathlessly, defeated.
Sif is still for a long time. She only refrains from hitting him because she knows he expects it. Instead she sheaths her broadsword like lightning, stumbles to her left, and runs.
Then, she screams.