Author's Note: This work invokes some relatively pertinent trigger warnings, the most striking of which being its slight parallels to a rape narrative. While no rape occurs here, there is some argument that the emotional turmoil faced by the characters in this story may lend itself to somewhat dubious consent. The story is rated 'M' for non-graphic sexual content and for the abovementioned reasons, as well as general adult themes.
This work also involves some shifting between "past" time and "present" time, as it takes place both before the events of Thor and after the events of The Avengers depending upon the section. Sections taking place in the past are written in past tense; those taking place in the present are written in present tense.
UPDATE: as of 6 April 2013, I am dividing this work into chapters for easier reading.
Disclaimer: I own nothing. Nothing at all. Not even my own sanity.
Shadows are frightfully common phenomena in Asgard.
It is a logical thing, in truth. Within a kingdom rich with gleaming metal furnishings and singing with light, the presence of shadows is only natural. Expected.
To the prisoner Loki, the shadows are invaluable tools: tools by which to gauge the passage of time, each shift a second to be hoarded like precious gold and smelted into usable information. They are something which he, muzzled and bound and stripped down to the barest rags, can claim as his own. Instruments of a plotting mind.
Yet numbers, and the focus of mind required for their use, are a luxury for the free and well-fed: inconsequential in the face of an empty stomach and a roaring head.
The captive sits with spine arched against the limpid crystal wall that encloses his circular holding cell, hands clamped in metal bracers and held stiff before his body. He rattles the short length of chain connecting them, if only for the noise, and releases a long breath. Loki's punishment was decided even before his brother led him home.
He eyes the chamber containing the enclosure, small and laden with dust. Its walls are rimmed with scarlet-flamed torches situated in stone brackets near to the ceiling. Loki watches them flicker with a kind of hushed malice, birthing an army of shadows which ghost across lifeless surfaces. They flock to him readily, like so many sheep.
A friend to the shadows are the whispers, low tones uttered by well-armed guards who stand just outside the metal doors of the room; and Loki thinks they, too, might be of use to him, if not for the maddening idleness of their owners.
During the short periods he designates as 'night', the voices cease. Sound itself diffuses into the dark, leaving only the throb of a pulse in the prisoner's neck.
He measures three such cycles of thrumming chatter followed by stark-noiselessness, three days which dissolve seamlessly into three nights, before a disturbance breaches the pattern. A tiny, abrupt screech of grinding chrome, succeeded quickly by the unmistakable creak of an opening door, the soft patter of footsteps.
His loyal shadows storm the intruding figure with such vehemence that he cannot distinguish its features. It eases the doors shut, treads lightly to the enclosure and frees the lock with a mild click; then steps up, up, into the torchfire.
Loki freezes when he sees her. The great warrior Sif, towering before him, her face livid in the aura of flame. For a fleeting second he thinks to move, to spring up; it's futile. With a brutal flourish, she rips him from the wall by the hands and throws him into the floor.
Sif approaches the prisoner again, curled on his side against cold ground. The plates of armor which are her trademark have been abandoned for simpler garments appropriate for sleep, sparsely threaded; and in that moment Loki finds the will to smirk, behind the metal, behind the pain. They are leveled at least in one way, here within this cell.
Yet still his hands remain clasped, while hers freely roam: a finger traced down the fabric clothing his side, another worrying the base of his spine. She trails her nails into the cloth, twists, and Loki's pulse races in his throat, beheath her claws. She meets his eyes.
Loki's countenance is clear, slated clean of emotion, even as she rakes lines across his chest. Even now, Sif cannot discern whether the behavior is a trick.
He cannot fight, cannot escape the reality of his bindings; but Loki could never submit to Sif, to any challenger, even in so cruel an arena. He does not struggle or thrash, but instead adopts a hollow look, a more subtle weapon.
A stray shadow stalks her face and captures it. Anger blooms rouge across her cheeks, and then she's scraping a dagger pulled from nowhere across his sleeve, snapping thread and grazing skin in one flawlessly executed streak. A warning.
Sif shoves him back against the wall, into a seated position; mounts him, sweeping his arms over his head in a fluid motion. He growls into metal, nose bent to cold air, as she slams her hips into his own.
Loki's arousal presses into her thigh, and he curses. Her breaths are already short.
She is shadow.
Sif's hair is a wraith, a curtain of darkness, brushing the planes of his chest as forceful hands scale the fabric of his tunic upward, revealing pale skin dappled with bruises. Wafts of torchborn shadow splinter the flesh, swarm her fingers as they glide across the surface. She captures his gaze, holds it, determined to at least maintain the charade of control.
Her discipline is slackening now. She doesn't bother with his boots, and injures a fastener when she tangles one hand into the band of his trousers, lurid and lost. She strives against him, her leggings having been discarded some time ago, unaccounted for by either party. It is cruel and it is licentious and it is desperate, and Loki is painfully hard but can do nothing except watch the blur of her fingers as they chafe, critically working at a furious pace.
She seems to swallow the unheard sounds he makes, choked by metal. He can see the sweat that pools at her temples because her head is thrown to the ceiling, cast in dim torchlit flame that bewitches her hair alive. Furious thrusts. Sif's throat flutters with perverse shadows at play, shudders with the force of her breath, and it requires every reserve of control he can command to keep from ramming his bounded hands into the ground.
When she releases she does so breathlessly, unhinged, and Loki can taste the lust lying thick upon her tongue like honey. She collapses against him as though felled, a vital error which remains unamended for several seconds.
Then she bolts off of him, her body like lightning, scraping her cloth pants from their listless position some distance from his head. Her eyes bore into his the color of charcoal. He does not think for their ferociousness.
Sif leaves without a word, his traitorous erection pulsing against his stomach in the exact rhythm of her footsteps.
The first time Loki approached her, she was lying upon the earth.
He had seen her encroach upon the training grounds a number of times previously, a thin, towheaded little girl in boyish clothing. She roosted in a different spot each day, daring closer and closer to the main facilities, bright eyes wide with the desire to learn.
On this particular day the child Thor, in a rather uncharacteristic display of awareness, had noticed the girl creep too close to an overzealous boy brandishing a sword. The boy swung quick and true, as had been instructed of him, and knocked the poor girl back with the force of his elbow.
Loki, who had been idling his time near the outskirts of the projectiles quadrant, managed to peer up from the book in his hands long enough to witness the boy in a panicked frenzy, rushing over to the scene with his face bunched up like a drying grape. A most humorous sight.
"Brother!" Thor called, swinging his arms with something Loki might distinguish as concern. "Come here! There is a young girl in need of aid!"
The child lay splayed out, limbs akimbo, before the fiercely apologetic young boy who had knocked her down; she struggled to sit upright, raising a hand to rub at her now-swollen nose.
"Are you well, fair girl?" Thor asked her with some pause. She nodded, looking cross.
"It is rare to come upon a lady on these warrior's grounds," the young prince thundered, extending a hand to help her along. When she refused, springing herself up, he laughed at the feat. "What calls you here, Lady...?"
"Sif," she proclaimed, and extended her chest in a manner so pitiably laughable that Loki struggled to conceal his sneer behind the withered pages of his book. "And I was observing the fighting, of course."
"How marvelous!" he laughed, his hair shaking with the force of it. "I am Thor, and this is my brother Loki."
She shifted her gaze between the two of them. The whole of the kingdom knew the faces of its princes, the hearty blade-brandishing son of Odin and his dark foil who even in that moment stood with a disinterested flair, thumbing the spine of his tome before sinking his nose into its crease once more.
"Ah, brother!" Thor cast his golden head to the sky in laughter, bracing a hand on his knee. "Your face kisses that book like a hog its slops!"
The girl frowned. "I have seen him often, there in the shadows with a book in his hand while yourself and the other boys practice form," she told Thor snidely, who inclined his head and smiled in acquiescence. When Loki gave no reaction, she narrowed her eyes.
"Spar with me, book-prince!" she exclaimed, by all counts a child, one hand gesturing to Loki's forearm and the other sported on her hip.
"I'll refrain, Lady Sif," he said curtly, and looked with annoyance to his brother. Thor's grin spread larger than his face.
She appeared insulted, crossed her arms over her chest. "I will become a warrior," she informed the darker prince stiffly, "and protect this land."
Thor stamped his approval happily into the rock, his grin-bared teeth outshining even the steel of his sword; he grasped the girl's hand in excitement, commending her 'most honorable' and jabbering on about how no enemy would expect a female to come at them with knives and that the prospect was brilliant.
"You fancy yourself a fighter?" Loki asked suddenly, surfacing from the text to administer a critical glare. "Your future lies within the meaning of your name*."
The anger blossomed on her cheek quick and powerful, splotching her pale face. Thor looked alarmed at the feral brace of her teeth.
"Pay him no heed, my lady!" the golden boy laughed nervously, shooting his brother an exasperated glance. "He is only sore because training occupies his reading time!"
"Moreso your constant prodding than the training," Loki muttered, but provoked the matter no more.
The time that elapsed from those words to the moment when the projectiles trainer collected the young princes was short but distinguished, consumed with the rowdy prattlings of a young girl and the boy warrior who so captivated her wishful spirit that she never noticed his brother slip away.
* 'Sif' is an Old Norse word meaning 'Wife' or 'Bride'.