Suddenly Darcy is cold, she is freezing, and she starts to shiver so hard that her fingers slip on the book. It falls to the floor with a heavy thud, the sound echoing through the house.
Loki turns sharply at the sound. For a moment, everything stills as they stare at each other through the cracked door.
The magic within her stills, becomes a solid, dark thing. Not ice this time, just an inert blackness. It feels as though nothingness has become something real, lodged deep within her, both utterly heavy and weightless at the same time.
An echo of that voice courses through her. Tells her to run, to hide, to be anywhere but here.
Almost without being conscious of it, Darcy takes a step back. A piece of broken glass slices into her heel, a sharp bright pain. And it hurts, hurts in a way that she can't remember anything hurting that much before. She leans against the wall, lifts her socked foot. The cut is tiny, barely bleeding at all. The blood is bright red, clotting quickly to brown. She pinches out the piece of glass. It is a slender as a needle, tipped with red. Like a tiny arrow.
When she looks up, Loki is standing in the now open door. He is dressed in a slim fitting suit, a green scarf looped around his neck. He looks well, the gauntness that had marked him in New York filled out now. His hair is still long, though it's neatly groomed now instead of neglected. He looks alive. More alive than anything here.
Darcy sets her foot down gingerly. There's a small twinge of pain, then nothing. There's no other glass on the floor here, but she stays where she is, half afraid that she'll step on another shard. She's still shivering, her fingers going numb.
Loki's brow is furrowed. "Darcy?"
When she starts to answer, her teeth are chattering so much that her words come out only as broken syllables. She doesn't remember ever being this cold before. She didn't even know it was possible to be this cold and still be alive.
Loki sweeps her up in his arms, and his body feels almost feverish against hers. He sets her down on the couch in the living room, piles blankets on her. The radiators creak and pop as he switches them on, and he lights the fire that has been set in the fireplace. Edith's work, Darcy presumes, though she's not noticed it before now. There's a pile of split wood beside the fire, too, which she also hasn't noticed.
Darcy is still cold, so cold that her shivering has gone to a deadly stillness, when Loki brings her a mug of coffee. She looks down at the dark liquid, waiting for her stomach to rebel. There's no nausea, and so she takes a hesitant sip. It stays down, and she gulps the rest of the coffee scalding, small pinpricks of pain shooting through her fingers where they're pressed against the warmth of the mug.
Finally, she feels a little of the cold thawing.
The sound of broken glass being swept up comes from the kitchen. The microwave beeps, and when Loki returns, he's carrying a tray holding a bowl of soup and crackers, another mug of coffee.
Darcy's stomach twists with almost painful hunger, and she falls on the soup, barely chewing each mouthful before she swallows. Only when the tray is empty does she finally stop shivering.
Loki takes the tray from her, sets it down on a table. He pauses, scanning the room, and then takes the chair furthest away from her, despite the fact that there is more than enough space beside Darcy on the couch for him. Something in her retreats, curls up.
He sits formally, back straight and fingers laced together. He is not wearing his ring. "Do you need me to speak to someone?"
Darcy blinks. "What?"
"The radiators, the fire. These should have been explained to you. This is not intended to be-" He breaks off. One of his fingers worries the nails of his opposite hand. "People have been known to freeze to death out here in winter."
"And I thought I was on a tropical vacation." Darcy is aware of the caustic note in her voice, and she does not care. "I haven't been well, that's all."
Loki's eyes flick, just for a moment, to where her right wrist is tucked beneath the blankets. The scar itches, and Darcy has to curl her other hand into a fist to stop herself from scratching at it. Loki shifts his weight, and the sleeve of his jacket rides up just enough to reveal the edge of a black cuff on his wrist. He noticed Darcy looking at it. "It is part of the bargain," he says.
Darcy is glad for the blankets which cover her, for they mean that Loki cannot see that she's removed her own cuff. A thin thread of panic rises in her. She remembers seeing into the metal, seeing how to remove it. She doesn't remember what she did with the cuff once she removed it. Was it on the kitchen floor with the broken glass?
A particularly strong gust of wind buffets the house, whistles through invisible cracks and chinks. It sounds as though the house is singing, or that it is an animal howling into the emptiness. Through the window, Darcy can see that it has started to snow again.
Loki is looking at her, his fingers rubbing over his cuff. Darcy grasps for the first thing that she can think of to distract him.
"How did you get here, anyway?" she asks. "I thought all the roads would be snowed in."
Loki smiles thinly. "Snow isn't really an issue." His eyes are veiled.
Darcy looks over at the fire. The flames are preferable to the chill she sees in Loki's eyes. "Should I assume that they gave you permission to be here? Or have you pissed them off enough to be banished to the butt end of nowhere, too/"
"Banished?" Loki starts to rise from his seat, then, seeming to think the better of it, rearranges his weight instead, folds his hands in his lap. "This is no banishment, Darcy."
"Then what is it?" There's a thread of anger in Darcy's voice that even she can hear, and beneath the piled blankets, she's growing too warm. "What else can you call being flown to the other side of the world and locked away here? They fucking gave me crafts, Loki, like I'm a crazy person. And you know, basket weaving has always been high on my lists of hobbies to cultivate, but I'd kind of like to be able to pick the colour of my own damn baskets." Her voice is rising higher, cracking, and she makes herself pause, take a deep breath. "You tried to take over the fucking world, and all I did was save you."
Loki is the one who looks away then.
"Look, can you ask them if I can exchange all of this for a nice cosy prison cell? Because you know, as far as tropical vacations go, this one kind of sucks."
Loki is worrying his fingers together again, and all she wants is for him to stand up, to cross the room, to take her in his arms and tell her that everything was going to be okay.
But he does not stand, and he does not even meet her eyes.
Darcy tosses off the blankets, stands. A small part of her mind cheers when she manages to stay standing. "Why are you even here? Because if you're just out to soothe your own conscience about something, then fuck you. Fuck all of you."
She turns her back to him, stalks to the bathroom. Outside, snow is falling in a soft sussurus against the window, and she curses it, curses that once she had looked forward to snow days, to snowballs and snowmen and snow angels. Because the snow means that, even without the cuff, she can't physically leave. She's stuck here, for at least until the thaw.
She takes her time showering, shampooing her hair and blow drying it. Red lipstick, concealer which does little to hide the deep shadows beneath her eyes. Her glasses, though a slight headache begins as soon as she slips them on. Probably time for a new prescription.
"Well, I'll just pop by the mall and see to that as soon as I can," she says to her reflection. "Fuck you too, eyes."
She goes back into the small bedroom, stares at the tangled sheets and blankets on the bed. The whole room smells sour, and when she thinks of the days she spent in bed, drugged with Fionnula's tea, they blur together. Maybe she really had been sick. Hallucinating, probably, from god knows whatever the woman had put into that tea. She resolves to throw out the other tins as soon as possible.
She dresses in layers of wool, stamps her feet into her hiking boots. Strips the sheets from the bed, then moves into the large bedroom and strips that bed, too.
When she passes through the kitchen on the way to the laundry, she scans the floor for any sign of the cuff. It's nowhere to be seen.
Fresh sheets wait in the linen cupboard, and she makes up both beds. Both of the rooms hold that sour, sick scent, and she wishes that she could open the windows to air them out. She makes a mental note to search for candles or anything to scent the rooms.
When she finally goes back into the living room, she's not certain if she hopes that Loki will be there or if he'll be gone.
He's still there. He's unlooped his scarf and draped it over the back of his chair. His hands are still twisted together, and he's staring into the fire, though she suspects he's not seeing a thing.
Darcy sits down in the same seat she had been in before. She tucks her legs beneath her, folds the blankets just to have something to do with her hands.
"Is there a reason that Jane isn't answering my emails?" she asks. "Is she okay?"
Loki flinches slightly. "Jane is well."
Darcy's hands tighten on the blanket she's folding. "So she's just glad to be rid of me, then?"
Loki stares into the fire.
She tosses the blanket aside, not caring that she undoes the folding she just did. "Why am I here? I thought everything was going to be okay. Things were supposed to be okay."
He looks up, and she sees that vulnerability in him that she'd glimpsed several times before. Like the boy looking out of the man's eyes. "The things I did, Darcy…there has to be penance."
"But Asgard, Thor. The council-"
"This is Midgard, Darcy. It is Midgard that I wronged. That I owe penance."
"Penance? Do I owe penance, too? Everything with Hel, I never meant for any of that to happen. I was just so alone, and things were falling apart and I had nothing and I had no one. And here I am in the middle of winter, alone again, and you don't exactly look as though you're starving. What penance are you doing?"
The flames of the fire flicker in his eyes. He rubs his finger over the place where the twisted ring had been; in the firelight, she can just see a faint scar there, as though the twisted metal had been ripped away. "Being away from you."
And then he is gone, vanished, teleported away, leaving Darcy alone once more.
#
Darcy stays where she is for a long time, staring at the empty seat where Loki had been. The green woollen scarf he had been wearing is still slung over the back of the chair. She's afraid to touch it, afraid that it will dissolve to a shower of light beneath her fingers.
Finally she makes herself get up, turn her back on the scarf, go into the kitchen. The broken glass is gone from the floor, even the smallest shards cleared away. The coffee pot is humming, electronics working to keep the half full coffee pot warm. Abruptly, Darcy is aware of the weight of the soup and coffee in her stomach. It feels too warm, like a sun burning inside her.
The magic within her is moving again, that frozen ocean lapping slowly to and fro. It soothes her, and she feels its chill sliding through her veins, freezing everything. She is ice, and ice cannot feel.
She finds a bucket beneath the sink, fills it. Goes back into the living room and douses the fire. Smoke fills the room, thick and grey, but she breathes it in and in, feels like she could swallow all of the darkness in the world.
The green scarf is just a scarf, the wool thick with smoke now, no scent at all of the man who had worn it. Maybe he hadn't even been here at all. She had a wardrobe of clothes that didn't belong to her, who knows what it contained. She turns off the radiators, tosses the scarf into the basket of hand washing that she knows she will never get around to doing.
She's whistling when she goes back into the living room, though she doesn't recognise the tune at all. It's assonant, notes that climb over one another, clash together. It reminds her of breaking glass.
An electronic beeping cuts across the tune, fracturing the notes. The last few fall from her lips, small broken things. It takes her a few minutes to realise that the chiming is coming from the computer.
An application she's never seen before has popped up a dialog box asking if she wants to accept a call. Darcy hesitates, her hand hovering over the mouse, then clicks to accept.
The screen goes white, then dissolves to an image of Jane. She's sitting against a white background, the white so bright that it yellows her skin, makes her look ill. She's wearing a bright red scarf knotted around her throat. The colour only washes her out more, ruddy reflections catching in the hollows beneath her eyes.
"Darcy?" Jane asks. She looks down at what Darcy presumes is her keyboard, presses buttons. "Can you hear me? The connection isn't good."
The magic has stilled in Darcy again, become that black nothingness. Something rises in her, and her body settles back in the chair, feels her face form into the kind of sardonic expression the old Darcy had so easily worn. "Can hear you. See you, too. Did you snaffle Thor's cloak while he was sleeping?"
Jane touches the scarf at her throat. She smiles, a fleeting, fragile expression. "The video isn't working from your end. Some kind of interference."
A gust of wind rattles the house, whistles through the cracks. "That would be a metric assload of snow, I'd say."
Jane frowns. "Still, Stark said that the weather shouldn't matter. Even the audio keeps breaking up." She presses more buttons, then thumps the side of her monitor. The image of her breaks up, bleeds white, then reforms.
"I suspect that a calibration tap isn't going to fix anything," Darcy says. She shrugs her shoulders, taps her feet on the ground, feeling her body shift around her. There's a weight against her ankle, and when she looks down, she sees the tracking cuff back in place. A thin thread of cold rises up her spine. She'd taken it off, hadn't she?
"Darcy? You still there?" Jane asks.
Darcy pulls her attention away from the cuff. "Just going cheerfully mad, that's all." She wiggles her hand so her sleeve rides up, darts glances at the scars. Still white. Just scars, just blood, that's what the doctors said. Normal. "How have things been? And if you say fine, I'll find some way to reach through this screen and poke you."
Jane looks quickly off screen, then back. "Things are…complicated. I'm sorry that I haven't been able to call you before now. I'm…we're…things are complicated."
Darcy shifts her weight, feeling the cuff move against her skin. It had been a dream, that was all. Part of whatever sickness she'd had. This was real. "Complicated, as in, a megalomaniac is trying to take over the world? Or more like my boyfriend is a gorgeous hunk of god and we don't get out of bed much?"
Jane flushes. "You know that Thor and I…we're not Thor and I."
"Oh. Yeah. I forgot." Darcy grips the edge of the desk, curls her fingers against the wood. Real. This is real.
Jane leans closer to the camera. "Darce? Are you okay?"
"Oh, just peachy. The end of the world is fine, too, if you were wondering. Lots of snow."
"Do you need anything? The woman we sent, she said you hadn't asked for anything. Not even chocolate."
The thought of chocolate makes Darcy's stomach twist. She swallows hard, hoping that she's not going to have to make an undignified dash to the bathroom. "You're been talking to Edith?"
"You don't think we'd just leave you there, do you, Darce?"
"Well, considering that that's exactly what happened, then yeah." Darcy's fingers tighten on the desk, and she hears the wood creak. "Why am I here, Jane?"
"It was…convenient." Jane glances off screen again, looks back. She looks almost as unhappy as Darcy feels. "You just have to trust us. Okay?"
Darcy forces a smile, just in case Jane can actually see her. "What about…" Her throat is dry, and she swallows hard. "How is…" His voice catches in her throat, rasps out past her lips. "How is Loki?"
Jane's eyes harden slightly. "He's under control."
"Under control? What does that mean?"
"It means that you don't have to worry about him, Darce. You're safe."
A crack splits the air. Darcy looks down, sees that she's managed to sink her nails into the wooden desk. One long splinter has pierced the skin beneath her thumb nail, a bead of blood welling. In the pale light coming from the computer screen, it looks black sheened with blue.
"You really don't have to worry," Jane continues. "Asgard even figured out some kind of magical cuff for him to wear, so he isn't able to do anything more than basic magic. You're really safe. You don't have to worry about him hurting you again."
Darcy wrenches her fingers out of the desk. Several of her other nails are broken down past the quick, blood beginning to ooze from the raw skin. She doesn't feel anything but numbness. "You realise that we walked into the Bifrost together, right? That I walked into Hell to bring him back? He was supposed to teach me how to-"
"Teach you how to what?" Jane is leaning closer to the screen again. So close that Darcy can see that her eyes are bloodshot. Jane hasn't been sleeping.
The magic is still within Darcy, a vast echoing nothingness. Before they had stepped into the Bifrost, Loki had promised Darcy he would teach her how to use her magic. Loki had also promised to stay at her side.
"Nothing," Darcy says. "Nothing."
"Darce, are you sure you're okay?" Jane asks. "Loki's influence is strong. Just look at Erik-"
"Bullshit." Darcy curls her fingers into her palms. Splinters bite deeper into her skin, and blood flows in thin trickles. "What Loki went through, wasn't that enough for any of you? What are you doing to him? Why am I here?"
"Darcy, I-" Someone speaks off camera, their voice muffled, and Jane starts. "I have to go. I'll be checking in weekly, okay? If you need anything, let me know."
The connection is severed abruptly, and Darcy is left staring at a pure white screen. She sits there for a long time, watching the blood drip from her fingers, still feeling nothing at all.
It had all been supposed to be okay. When she had stepped into the Bifrost, hand in hand with Loki, she had been so certain that everything was going to be okay, in the way that nothing had ever been okay for her ever before.
The magic thaws within her, rocks slowly to and fro. It's soothing, like being rocked in her mother's arms. She closes her eyes, wraps her hands around herself, sways with it.
What had she been thinking, anyway? People like Darcy didn't get the happy-ever-after ending. SHIELD would use Loki, as they used everyone, and eventually he would go back to Asgard, take his seat on the Council, and he would forget all about Darcy Lewis, stupid little mortal.
Except she remembered him standing before the fire, remembered him saying that his penance was being away from her, even as she rocked with the tides of the magic. Remembered also that he hadn't been wearing his ring.
God of lies. God of mischief.
She unwraps her arms, uncurls her hands. The broken pieces of the ring have cut her skin again; she feels those injuries as little as she does the ones to her nails. Slowly, she pulls the ring off, waits to feel something. To feel anything.
The weight of the cuff is gone from her ankle again. Maybe she's going truly mad.
She drops the ring to the floor. It makes no sound as it falls, then rolls away into the shadows.