When she slips back into her bed, falling into dreams, she finds herself in a great hall reliving a memory that isn't hers. The woman is unfamiliar, but she recognises Loki as she hovers in the background. For a moment, she's simply an outside observer until a pull and a whirl of the scenery puts her in the point of view of the woman as she watches him pace.
"What do you see when you look at me?" He's in one of his moods, darkly angry and scowling at everything that moves. The lights seem to dim as he walks past, as if there's something sinister about him that smothers the light with his proximity. He closes his hand around her chin, forces her to look him in the eye, at the faint scar that runs down the side of his face so that it looks like he's always on the verge of a smile. His eyes are darker than anything she's seen, as if someone had created his face from cracked marble and two perfectly formed darkened galaxies, the kind that twinkle despite never having any light. "What do you want from me?"
These, she knows, are the days when she wants to hear the truth, doesn't want any of the meaningless platitudes and the fake smiles that she gets from everyone else, so she looks him directly in the eyes as she talks. "I see an angel that was created to be the most beautiful thing in existence. An absolute warrior that even the strongest of men shall tremble at the sight." She pushed him, now, trapping him against the wall with a firm hand against his stomach, and forced him to look at her as she spoke, "I see a man who hides his heart behind placating words and crafted lies for fear of getting it broken, but who let me close enough to hold it in my hands because he knows that I would never let anything happen to it. I see a man that any father would be proud of, even yours. I see perfection. And you are so perfect that it hurts." And that, she thought, was the problem. She knew his worth, a prince with more cunning than anyone in all the realms, but she also knew her own. She was not royalty, or the wife he had been urged to take by his family, and he chose her anyway. She was not beautiful, like the ladies of court, or diplomatic, or skilled at any of the jobs that were considered a woman's duty. She had never been able to sew no matter how much her mother had tried to teach her, and the dresses that were the standard for the other girls working around the palace weren't to her liking at all. She didn't take place in their idle gossip about the latest scandals, nor did she pledge her heart to the first man who took a liking to her. Her first love had always been the sword, and she had worked at mastering the weapon on her own time, stealing away in the dead of the night to train until her hands were aching and cracked, so unlike the smooth and unlined hands of the women of the court. He could have had anyone she wanted, the beautiful prince, and yet he had overlooked them all to take her as his bride, thrusting her into a world that she had never wanted.
"Does it hurt you, to be with me?"
Immediately, she shook her head, taking his head in her hands and pressing a soft kiss to the smooth skin of his forehead, looking him in the eyes to make sure she had his attention before she gave her answer. "Does it hurt me, to know the words that they call me when they think I cannot hear? Yes. I know what they think of me, that I was poorly chosen to stand beside you, that I am nothing but a plaything that you will eventually discard. Does it pain me to know that I will never be accepted as one of them, that I will forever be less because I am not of royal blood? Yes. Does it hurt me to know that I am yours just as much as you are mine? Never. I have never had much I can call my own. You are the one that I know I can always count on, and there is no treasure in all the universe that could be half as precious." She had let him go, before she had started speaking, and watched as he approached her now with his features full of a wondrous awe, his fingers trailing down her face so softly the touch felt like the falling of flower petals. His hand glittered in the lamp light as she drew closer, tilting her chin up to look at him as she slowly stood her up from her seat on the gilded bench and took her in his arms. "What do you see when you look at me?"
Her voice was a whisper in the almost-darkness, weighted with hopes and fears as they stared at each other in their proximity, and she closed her eyes against the soft brushes of lips along her cheekbone that stood out in contrast to the strong hand that cradled her throat. Not constricting, never painful, but heavy and warm nonetheless, like an anchor to reality when sensations threatened to pull her away. "Tell me a secret." The lines of his body were rigid and strong underneath hers when he pulled her close, brushing the stray strands of hair back behind her ears and sliding his fingers along the scar that curled around the back of her neck, lifting her arm to slide a metal cuff around her wrist that shifted and glimmered under the low lights. "I have never needed you to protect my heart, and I have never needed you to hold it in your hands. Don't you know that I've no heart without you?"
The memory isn't hers, she would've remembered this, but something in the set of his face and the way he speaks almost makes her wish it was. She loves her family, of course she does, but there's always been a faint glimmer of something else in the cards for her, something bigger than all of them, and she wonders if this was it. The thought should repulse her, scare her, considering what the man had done to her family, but it doesn't. There's only a faint sense of relief, underlaid with something that feels like reassurance.
She blinks away suddenly, opening her eyes to the rough stone wall, and looks down at her hand. The cut on her palm has stopped bleeding by now, and the pain is gone until she flexes her hand, but none of that is important as she stares down at her wrist.
The metal there shifts and glimmers under the low light of sunrise coming through the windows.