So, over on tumblr there's a Lokane archive (the link to which is on my author bio!), and they recently ran a prompt event. This is my response to the prompt 'Regrets'.
Never fear, I AM back to writing, and chapter 18 of To Cleave the Stars is imminent. ;) Until then, enjoy this little warped bit of ficlet.
He doesn't know why he's here.
There's a woman in shapeless pastel clothing bustling about the small room, entirely oblivious to its third occupant. He's bending the light and the shadows until her eyes slide right past him, seeing only what she wants to see, only what she expects is there. But the one in the bed is not so easily fooled, and that fever-bright stare pins him more easily than a butterfly to the bland beige wall.
Only after the busy woman has left does either of them break the silence.
"I was wondering if you might come." Her voice is soft and dry. The whisper of fallen leaves blown across a window.
He drops the veil of illusion, useless thing that it's become. She's already poked a thousand holes in it anyways. In the mercilessly buffed floor his own reflection is marching vanguard before him as he drifts closer to the bed. More cage than a place of repose it seems, made of metal and bars and clear brash ropes that nestle around the slight figure. Sharp points of bone poke up like snow-capped mountains through the thin coverlet, mapping a landscape of infirmity. Was she always so perilously thin?
He doesn't remember, and for some reason that bothers him.
Beneath the reek of bleach and the sour-sad scent of death lingers the pungent bite of ozone.
"Thor has been here, then?" He tries for innocuous, is fairly sure he achieves it. He knows the answer already, he just wants to hear hers.
The slender white spiders of her hands wander aimlessly over the sheets, spinning nonsensical patterns, and the unbroken fall of her hair is a wall between them. "He has."
His lips curl in a sneer that is second-nature by now. "And left again. No doubt to seek out some way of playing the hero once more."
"I sent him away." She turns towards him then, her head rolling bonelessly across the pillow as if even lifting it is too taxing. Time and exhaustion has dulled her glare, blunted the blade that once so easily cut him. "No quests, no miracles. I'm not afraid to be what I am."
"What, weak?" There's a burr of anger in his voice he never gave permission to, one he can't quite explain. The leather of his armor creaks faintly as he crosses his arms.
Her sigh scarcely carries. "No, Loki. Mortal."
He's always known it, but never really known. Now he can see it written all over her, in the poetry of years that crease her eyes, the silver script that traces through her dark strands, the punctuation that brackets her mouth - a life story penned while he'd glanced away.
Had he really been gone so long? "So it is true. You are dying."
"Well...we all are, aren't we? Just some of us faster than others." She falls silent and her attention wanders out the window, where the last smears of twilight are fading.
"Jane." But that's as far as he gets. He always has words, the right ones at the right times, only now they're scattered like beads from a broken necklace he's forgotten the pattern to.
"Get me out of here, Loki. I can't spend another night in this place. Please?"
He stiffens automatically at her imperative tone, bristling at her impertinence until she tacks on the soft imploration. His skeptical eye is drawn to the tubes and strands that root her to the machines nearby ."But won't you…"
"Die?" she finishes for him, the first hint of humor stealing onto her face and flicking sparks into her eyes. A ghost of the woman he once knew perhaps, but it was more than there had been moments before. She's right of course - this charade of healing is the real illusion, a pretty lie told to smother an uncomfortable truth. Merely slowing the inevitable.
Wordlessly he slides his hands beneath her and lifts her from the mattress. She's nothing but thistledown and twigs, scarcely enough to keep body and soul together. Alarms begin to bleat angrily, but he's deaf to everything save for the seashell sigh of her breath in his ear as she wraps her arms about his neck. And if the hole he tears in the universe to step through is a little more jagged this time, ripped a little more carelessly, the only one who will notice is the staff when they find an empty frost-laced room.
On the top of a peak in Norway, high above the treeline where Midgard stretches stony fingers towards the sky, no one notices their arrival. The fierce wind lashes Jane's hair and thin gown, plucking gooseflesh from her bare skin immediately, and he is suddenly insulted on her behalf. A moment of effort, a flexing of will, and the gown becomes something thicker and fuller. Green, of course.
He has often wondered what she would look like in that color.
Wrapping a scrap of sorcery about them to ward off the chill is child's play, and as he settles onto a rock she nestles into his lap, her head tilted back against his shoulder and her eyes fixed on the stars overhead. They hang like glimmering fruit waiting to be plucked, and he can feel her joy in the way her breath hitches.
Pale echoes of the last time he held her, when she fractured and reformed a thousand times over beneath him.
"I might have loved you once, you know," she whispers at long last, as if she can read his thoughts, and the wind doesn't dare steal those words. He recognizes the silver-bright certainty of them, for one cannot understand deceit without knowing its opposite. But he's known this truth for longer than he'd admit...since he first tasted it in her salt-rimed kisses when she crept into his bed so many lifetimes ago.
"And I might have let you once," he tosses back, but he can't shore up the plaster of this sly grin enough to keep it from crumbling. "I should have."
A finger is lain over his mouth to cut him off, replaced eventually by a brush of lips so faint he might have imagined it. "Don't. Don't ruin this."
So he holds her, silent as the stars cartwheel about them, watching their reflections in her gaze. And when the first pink slivers of dawn begin to splinter the sky, when she turns to him with those same spangled eyes - timeless, untouched by the creased skin and softened face they were surrounded by, forever-Jane-eyes that always saw him...how can he deny her anything?
"Chase them?" she asks, jerking a chin towards the fading constellations. Only, he hears the veiled meaning behind her words. (For secrets are just another sort of lie, really.) And what she's actually asking, the truth that hides behind her query, is terribly simple.
Love me?
Free me?
...Save me?
"Why didn't you ask Thor?" he grinds out, resenting her ever so briefly for asking this of him.
Her smile is somehow warm as she threads trembling fingers through his own, and with a start he realizes the sorrow that laces through her voice is not for herself or his brother, but for him. "Because he isn't strong enough, not for this."
The irony isn't lost on him now. That only by being the one willing to do the wrong thing can he finally do the right thing.
But no matter how it feels this nod might shatter him, he can't say no.
The ground fades beneath them as they rise ever higher, through the wet silk of a cloud and above. In the circle of his arm he can feel the frantic flutter of her pulse, her lungs desperate for air in this nonexistent atmosphere, and convulsively he crushes her closer. As if he can keep the soul in this frail fragile cage through sheer brute strength alone. But that's what it is really now - a cage, broken weight she's desperate to shed, and he's no longer cruel enough to be selfish.
At the end, she smiles.
It's not right, not exactly, (she deserves a queen's funeral) but he can make do. Stars for her pyre, his magic the bier, her own ageless beauty for a shroud. The dance of planets for a eulogy, and the raw sort of immortality that can only come from being mourned by gods.