She can't sleep.
Often, she sifts through the promised land of slumber, senses the silk weaves of its cloudy surface at the blurred edge of consciousness, but never dips her hands beneath. They feel like water against the skin of her mind, her weary thoughts, and they seem to sigh against the touch, but keep to themselves their wants, their desires, for the colored moving images the night may render. Her eyed are closed, moonbeams pressing upon them, whispering stars breathing their silver-light breath against them. All the night is alive with the want to put her under, anesthetize her with black dreams, will her to fall under. But her body won't give. It won't relent, it won't surrender, and it won't fall.
Her eyes open. The clock burns green fire letters into her awareness. 3:16. It's the most arbitrary of instances to look up from utter blackness and realize the world still turns, that time still passes her by. She sighs, releases from her being the last of her will to try for sleep in that one breath of finality, and she waits. Hands threaded through her hair, eyes half-lidded and heavy, elbows at their posts and flat against her knees. She waits for clarity, for a call, for anything but the heavy cricket symphony of restful nocturne that plays outside her window. It mocks her, christens her insomniac with their stiletto beating of wings, and then it's all silent again. Her eyes crack open. Lucidity blooms like a cold flower pushing against the brink of spring.
The light flickers on, steadily at first, growing more radiant as the bulb recovers from a startling awakening. Darkness creeps out of the room, and the moonbeams and the starlight seek shadows in the corners to hide within, their eyes still wide and glassy with intent to fill her head with anything less than sanity.
But she doesn't feel them, doesn't seen them, and the eyes of the night go on staring into the sleep-creased face, the weary silence that follows her every footstep throughout the room. She doesn't dress in her scrubs; she will only be sent home if they picked up on her even the slightest scent of stale coffee and bright resolution against death and sorrow. She's a master of the art of bedside manner, but handles poorly her own emotions, pitted, dried out driftwood in the sea of all this sadness and decay. They all worry for her – no relationships, no family, not even a dog to wring the loneliness out of her colorless life.
Practically dead at 27. Pathetic, isn't it? Wasted her youth sitting next to corpses and holding their hands as they go.
She throws on her jacket, warding off the nosy chill of a late autumn night in New Mexico. Perhaps they wouldn't accept her as a dutiful nurse, her hands fisted with coffee and determination, but maybe – just maybe, though her luck is painfully thin – they might let her in as a wayward visitor, searching for answers, for solace, for distraction away from the sleeplessness of night.
Her mind reels back to the new one, the pale mountains and hills and shadow-carved valleys of angled features – the face that she had thought lovely and cold and cast in white wrought-iron sorrow.
At the hospital, when she steps out onto the threshold of it, a familiarity sinks in like a kind knife. She can feel it, the sharpness of its purpose, how the double-edged sword existence it leads plunges into every heart scathed by its sterile white walls and humorless pale inhabitants. Her eyes slither shut against the feeling, letting it go in fully to the hilt, absorbing every inch of this place into her half-bleary cognizance. She doesn't even have to be awake to know her way through here, through the double doors, automatic, that swing open when you get too close.
And the receptionist, her eyes grayed and baggy with sleep luggage and her mug half-full with rusty coffee too near old age to be any good. Sometimes, if she's awake enough, she'll say hello, to gauge you, to make sure you're really all here. Then she'll let you pass without another word, her job done, the gentle will of her concern forced upon the blank walking slate of another.
When her sight returns to her, she's standing in the waiting room, a few drowsy security guards and anxious loved ones worrying their hands and slumping into the backs of their chairs as if they're the only things keeping them from collapsing entirely. She can hear the private supplications to God guarded by the careful, hair-covered skull and the downward cast eyes - to be somewhere far off and quiet and free of all pangs of passion.
She can only imagine what they're feeling, what they're trying not to feel, trying not to hope for. All too often she's had to make them realize their worst fear for them, take their lives and tear them apart and hand them back the shattered pieces of what had once been hope and light and the innocence in the face of the specter of loss. She can never stay and help them. She always has to be pulled away, before she can utter even the most careless and casual I'm sorry.
She's come to avoid all human faces, all eyes brimming full with heart and breath and soul. And now, like all the times before when she could've said something, she passes them by. No consoling touch, no word, not even a look their way.
"Naomi?" She says, the half-conscious receptionist, and their gazes meet half-way. Hers seem to be overflowing with coffee and exhaustion. "What are you doing here?" she pauses, checks the upside down watch on her starved wrist. "Yeah, just what I thought. It's not your shift."
"Overseeing a patient. His PCP called me in – had to leave a little earlier than planned and wanted me to look in on him, check his vitals," Naomi explains, fingers of her brain deftly weaving the tendrils of a lie. "I'll be out of here in no time. Promise."
It's as if she spoke the safe word, the secret code, and all the invisible locks on the passageways into the empty halls peel back. She walks through them, underneath the steady buzzing hum of the lights. At the end of the hall, in the ICU ward, the man with the noble features lies in wait for the world to remember him, to rouse him from his dangerous sleep.
The lights are low in his room, almost not there at all, and she could mistake any illumination as the moonbeams flooding the cracks in the blinds. And he's there, as cold and still as death himself. The groping hands of a shiver disturb the calm of her own body, waking it from its dormant station at his side. And she wonders how long it's been since she looked down at him, touched the segmented hollows of bone and flesh between his knuckles with the tips of her fingers, and sat down. Wonders, idly, how long it will be before the need to be here, to breathe in the same air as this strange and pale creature, is sucked away with the time and the stirring dawn outside the thin sliver glass of window.
"What is so special about you," she murmurs aloud, tracing the face, imprisoning it to the shackles of her memory, where it will live on in solitude and never decay. There are so many faces, myriad expressions, ones that are coated thinly with dust from so many years passed, and others that are so stark and cruel and painful to perceive that they make her tear away in surprise, make her spirit writhe with the angry red river hurting of them. Even after all these years, so many of those memorized people haunt her, and she knows – yes there is no escaping – that this one will be one of them too.
When she looks up again, the minutes graying with the coming hours, it's there, that moment.
And it comes in the form of a new need – cigarette.
Out the back door, it's sort of like a haven. It smells of lipstick stained cigarette butts and old smoke and no one ventures out there unless it's to satisfy a need – for solitude, for fresh air, for a smoke, a talk, a moment away from it all. Here, it's a sanctuary designated for every kind of stilted confidence, riddled with the thick putrid smell of garbage drifting in from further down the alleyway.
Naomi never truly needs any of the rest, just the smoking part is required of the asylum. Once outside, she digs into her purse, fingers outlining everything inside of it in a revealing form, and finds the rectangle of smooth cardboard and the hard cask of lighter fluid and drags them into the shape of her palm. She pulls out a cigarette, ignites the end of it, and draws in a long sucking breath teeming with poison and nerve-soothing white smoke. Overhead, she looks up, and the sky is peeling in places. It's growing, the old figure of night too small, and it sheds the nocturnal skin like an unwinding celestial serpent. New starless flesh appears, and it's only a tinge of gray-blue color, nearing birth, until the cries of the morning break free, and for a moment humanity can glimpse heaven in the wreathed gold flame that leaps forward from the womb of night into the sky.
With morning broken, and the night forgotten, she can breathe a little easier. Especially with the cigarette poised in her hand.
Her head snaps, eyes bright and wide and overwhelmed by the whites of them. Behind her, she thinks she heard something, a rattling of the tin garbage cans, and at first she thought it was only mice, maybe a slinking cat. But no sooner had she turned away from the origin of the sound, assured it is nothing, she's pulled back to it, the noise erupting again and shaking the foundations of pure, post-dawn silence.
"Hello?" She says, calling to the faceless clamor, the hand with the cigarette dropping to her side. Her eyes scan the entire alleyway, narrowing when she finds herself peering down at a large, shapeless shadow sheltered behind a mound of piled up trash. "You must think I'm stupid or something. I can see you."
No answer. Not even the slightest hint of reply.
She steps forward, but not too much, and her free hand slips into her purse for the pepper spray she's never careless enough to leave at home. "Why don't you come out? I've got a smoke. I'll share with you. Come on out, won't you? I won't bite. I won't hurt you."
Weapon in hand, she's armed and ready, and she ventures forth into the barricade of filth that rises up all around her like a fortress. A maze of shiny black trash bags lie in disarray all around her. Her fingers tighten over the spray, her hopes all dashed and lying bleeding at her feet - something has surely been through here, something bigger than a mouse, than a cat.
She pulls the spray out of her purse.
"Come on, now. I don't like games," she raises her shaking voice, keeping her line of vision on her surroundings, ears so sharply in tune with them that they twinge at the smallest disturbance.
She steps on something, something squashed and yielding to her weight. At first, she thinks it's only an escaped banana peel, but then the groan spills out of the refuse, and she pauses, taking her foot off the thing. Beneath it is the ice-white structure of a hand.
"Shit," she bites the word, spits out the cruel taste of it, hurrying to kneel down and crumble to her knees. "Hey. Hey. If you can hear me, I'm here to help, okay?"
She follows the trail of the hand that thins out into the sun-flecked length of ashen, bare arm. Releasing her grip over the softly curling fingers, she reaches for the trash bags, pulling them off the prone body. It's enough proof for her the someone is there, someone who needs fluids and an IV chock full of morphine fast, and she turns a little toward the side door leading into the back of the hospital, bracing herself against the mild push of gravity weighing down on her.
"Hey!" She screams at the door, the surface of it crawling with green and rust, but otherwise untouched and remaining stubbornly closed. "We gotta live one out here!"
It's so fast, so rushed a movement, that she doesn't see it, doesn't even see it coming, and when she returns to the body, the figure buried beneath the garbage, she finds herself staring down the silver-blue length of an icicle. Not a gun, not a knife, an icicle. And it's protruding, she realizes with no small degree of horror, from the man's bunched up fist.
"Silence."
She can't see his face. All she can rely on is cold and skin and the pain of her hair being slowly torn from its roots as the hand grips bunches of it tight, holding her head back, pinning her beneath his control. A voice is in her ear, twirling into the greasy air and mingling with the smell of the garbage all around them. It coils around her senses and softens her fear, if only a little, as the tremulous timbre of it breaks, sloping downward from its first inflection of force. She knows he can't fight back, too weakened by blood loss maybe - if only she could tell, take a look. If only she could find a way out of his - it's - hold on her.
"Listen carefully," speaks the creature, the being, and staring at the icicle lying in hungry wait at the base of her throat, she knows it's not human. "I will not harm you. I wish not to. I only need your help."
"I will -" she chokes out, and the sound is strangled, bound and made taut by the throat arched back and pinching her words. "I will help you. If only you would let me go to them inside and-"
"No." It seethes into her ear, throttling her, tearing her head back even more until the tendons in her neck scream for mercy, and she does not struggle against it. Only prays. Only hopes.
"There's nothing I can do if you won't let me go," she explains.
"Oh, but there is something you can do," it counters. "You may listen. That is all I ask of you. Is it so difficult a task?"
She knows better than to answer such a question dipped in black, coiling malice.
"I require only your aid," it says, voice descending into a deathly thin whisper, like a wraith - an icy wraith. "You will hide me. You will care for my wounds in secret. Only you, you understand, it can only be you. No one must know…should they find me, they will destroy me. You are the only one who must know of my existence. No one else. Call for them again and I swear that I will deliver you unto the hands of your maker myself."
The last threat is a hiss. It sends shivers down her spine.
"Accept the terms and I shall let you go," it promises. "As I have said, I do not wish to harm you. I should not wish for you to force my hand."
She blinks against the white blotches of pain that have begun to swim before her haze-stricken eyes. "Yes – yes, I accept."
The hand releases her. She's been let go.
A/N: I do apologize for how long it took for me to update this. However, it is here now - I hope you enjoy it. Everything that has happened here that has not been explained will be explained in the next chapter. Yes, my updates will be fairly short, but hopefully that will allow for more in between. Thank you for reading and for waiting so patiently.
Disclaimer - I don't own Loki. Only Naomi belongs to me.