Darcy backs away and away, but no matter how much physical distance she puts between herself and Hel, she can still feel the chill of Hel's touch on her shoulder.
Within her, the magic is cold and dark, a vast ocean of nothingness.
"You're…you're supposed to be in Helheim," Darcy says. Her voice wavers, childlike and uncertain. She curls her hands into fists, straightens her spine. In the depths of the black ocean within her, a dull sapphire light shines. "You're not supposed to be here."
Hel laughs. It is a sound like fracturing metal. "And your soul is supposed to belong to me, supplicant." She extends a hand, her claw-like nails clacking together. Something tightens in Darcy's magic, that sapphire light fading instantly. It feels as though Hell has hooked an invisible line between herself and Darcy. "We do not get the things that we deserve, do we? Perhaps some other things should be taken away."
Hel twists her hand, and that invisible line tightens, pulls. Pain explodes through Darcy, pressure rising within her rib cage, so intense that she cannot breathe, that she feels her heart still. She drops to her knees, curls around herself, presses her fingers into the spaces between her ribs, pulls against her own ribs in a futile effort to ease the pain.
With a cold smile, Hel lets her hand fall to her side. The pain ceases instantly. Darcy's heart lurches back to life, and she takes a deep, shuddering breath.
Hel walks a slow circle around Darcy. Where she treads, the snow melts instantly beneath her bare feet, and the ground beneath scorches black.
"You believed yourself clever, didn't you, supplicant?" Hel asks. "Offering me that which you knew already belonged to another. You thought you could outwit me. Steal that which was mine."
"I didn't steal anything." Darcy pulls herself up, stands. Her legs shake, but they hold her weight. Just. "You said that I could take him."
"And you said that you would give me your soul." Hel raises her hand, clacks her nails together again. She pauses, one corner of her mouth curving into a half smile, and Darcy feels her magic growing darker again, so cold that she feels that it will freeze her from within. "I think perhaps I can still make use of you, supplicant. And take back all that was mine."
Darcy closes her eyes, bracing for another bout of pain.
It never comes.
When she dares to open her eyes again, she is alone. All around her, the ground is seared black. The trees have become bone, charred at the edges, utterly dead. Their branches moving together make the same sound as Hel's nails clacking together.
Even the snow has ceased to fall. Instead, ash rains down from the grey sky, drifting slowly down in the thin air to cover the world entire.
#
Blackwood House stands open.
Every window is open, the curtains billowing out into the day. Light spills in through the open front door: it flickers, as though it falling through shifting leaves, though there is nothing but thin cloud through which for it to fall.
Darcy stands motionless before the door. She can't remember how she got here. She just remembers the clacking of Hel's nails, that deep twisting pain. The dead forest: tree become bone, snow become ash.
There are vines creeping around the edges of the doors and windows of Blackwood House. She doesn't remember seeing them there before. Even as she stands here, she thinks she can see them grow, small green tendrils unfurling, suckers seeking out new holds. Small white flowers release a heady perfume into the air.
She reaches out and touches one of the flowers. The petals instantly bruise beneath her finger, and a dull pain throbs through her wrist. She turns her hand to see that the scarred flesh is inflamed. The pain tightens as though something thorny has been laced beneath her skin, and someone unseen is tugging at it in a rhythm that makes mockery of a human heart beat. The rhythm is not that of her own heart; that is racing, pulsing in an erratic beat that she can feel behind her eyes. It feels like the beating of a deer's heart when it knows that it is within the sights of a hunter.
"Darcy?" Fionnula's voice comes from behind her, heavy with concern.
Darcy turns - or tries to turn, her knees folding beneath her. In her peripheral vision, she sees that the vine twining around the door is blackening, withering to nothing.
Strong arms catch Darcy, scoop her up easily and carry her inside. Darcy closes her eyes, allows herself a moment of fantasising that Loki has finally come, that Loki will save her.
She doesn't need to open her eyes to know that it is not Loki who carries her, but Bran. His scent is earthen, while Loki is all leather and musk and ice.
Loki is not coming to save her. No one is ever coming to save her.
She opens her eyes as Bran lowers her to the bed in the master's bedroom. Fionnula stands behind Bran, her eyes bright.
"Who was it, lass?" Fionnula asks. She moves past Bran, pulls a blanket up to cover Darcy. "Morrigan? Arawn?"
The blanket makes Darcy too hot, but she lacks the strength to push it away. Her whole body feels heavy, as though she has been drugged. "What?"
Bran presses his hand to Darcy's forehead. "She's feverish." His fingers move down her arm, press lightly at the scarred flesh. Even his gentle touch sends a bolt of pain through Darcy. "An infection, do you think, Fionnula?"
There are black lines radiating from the scar on Darcy's wrist; they look like lines of infection, but darker, gnarled, as though living shadows are writhing beneath her skin. They are nothing like the delicate curlicues that Hel marked her with before. Those were seduction, a promise. These are a curse: violent, like chaos captured beneath her flesh. She doesn't need to look to know that the same lines radiate from the scar over her heart. They're probably inside her, too, bleeding into the muscle of her heart, into the marrow deep in her bones.
Everything she is is going to bleed black.
Darcy closes her eyes, concentrates on the twisted ring on her finger. Nothing happens, the metal is inert, too heavy against her skin. Hoping that maybe somehow her connection to Loki still holds, she focuses, sends a mental cry for help to him. Counts the beats of her heart, trying not to focus on the counterpoint of pain from her scars.
One - Loki be here.
Two - Please be here.
Three - I walked into Helheim for you.
Four - Come here for me.
Five - Please.
Six - Please.
Seven…
When she opens her eyes again, only Fionnula and Bran are there. They stand on either side of the bed, the names of gods and goddesses rolling from their tongues.
"A war god or goddess, perhaps," Fionnula says. "Or…" She breaks off, shakes her head. "Go and make some strong tea, lad. Add plenty of honey. And see if you can find some plain food." Bran nods, and leaves the room. "You're not going insane, Darcy," Fionnula says. "And you're not alone."
Through the window beyond Fionnula, Darcy sees the sky. The clouds are high and amorphous, the colour of ashes.
Fionnula hesitates, then pulls off her shawl, rolls back the sleeve of her dress. At first Darcy thinks it is a tattoo she sees inscribed on Fionnula's thin wrist, but the colours are shifting and moving beneath the older woman's thin skin. The green of new leaves deepens to emerald, then fades to amber, then brown. The colours delineate a delicate pattern of vines that curl up around Fionnula's wrist; it looks as though a vine is growing beneath her skin.
"My mother worshipped the old gods," Fionnula says. "I grew up knowing the equinoxes, the full moons, the solstices, almost more than I knew the common calendar. She was a midwife, and she took the goddess Brigid as a patron. She died when I was young, and I followed in her footsteps as best as I could. I became a midwife, and I worshipped Brigid. Even when I was the only one who lived in the valley, I celebrated the festivals and the full moons. Two moons ago, Brigid appeared in the circle that Bran and I had cast. There, as real as you or I. She marked me as her own." Fionnula traces the lines of the vine, a small smile curving her lips. "Magic is waking up. Real magic. And the gods are walking amongst us again. There are legends that said that they have before, in a time before that which anyone living can remember. They're going to make the world the way it was always meant to be." Fionnula holds her marked hand over Darcy's wrist; not touching, but close enough that Darcy can feel heat radiating from Fionnula's skin. It feels like the sun burning her. "This is not a new scar, is it?"
Darcy shoved her hand beneath the blanket. It's too hot, and the pressure of the wool on the scar makes it throb more, but she keeps it there all the same. "I didn't worship her. I didn't ask her to come."
"Even if it was…" Fionnula shakes her head. "There's no judgement here, Darcy. Some people walk darker paths than others. Without shadows, we wouldn't be able to see light, lass. War and death, they are part of us, just as they are part of the gods." She rolls her cuff back down, shrugs her shawl back on. "This valley, it called to you for a reason. It has been home to witches for generations. My mother and grandmother. The Blackwoods. Bran has uncles who lived here."
"But I didn't choose to come here," Darcy says. "They sent me here. To get rid of me, I suppose."
Fionnula pats the side of the bed, her fingers carefully kept away from Darcy's body. "Callings can come in many guises, lass. Bran woke one morning and knew that he was being called. He walked clear across the country to come here, knowing nothing, knowing no one. He was a mathematician and an atheist before this, and he knew nothing of magic, of belief. But now it feels more natural to him than anything he has ever known."
The scar on Darcy's wrist throbs harder; it feels as though a spike of ice is being driven in between the bones of her forearm over and over. "Wait, you said the Blackwoods? There was a family who lived in this house? It's not just the name of the house."
Fionnula pulled her shawl a fraction tighter around herself. "They were the oldest family in the valley, lived here for generations. They mostly kept to themselves, but we knew they were kin, that they walked the same paths."
"I knew a Daniel Blackwood. In New York. I suppose it's a common name, but he…" Darcy looks to the ashen sky. She tastes something like soot in the back of her throat, black and thick as tar. Daniel Blackwood had worked for Stark Industries. He was the one who had ordered Darcy to watch over Loki in his cell. He had known what Loki was, had known how to torture him. Daniel Blackwood had worn Hel's marks, and he had vanished without a trace.
Fionnula nods slowly. "The last of them, I believe his name was Daniel. He had the blood, all right."
"But he wasn't like…" Darcy waves a hand vaguely at Fionnula's covered wrist. "He wasn't worshipping nature or delivering babies or any of that."
"Shadows and light, lass." Some expression that Darcy cannot fix on crosses behind Fionnula's eyes. "Does he still live?"
"I don't know. After everything…they couldn't find any record of him having been there at all. He just disappeared."
Fionnula almost looks disappointed. Before she can say anything more, Bran appears in the doorway. His arms are laden with a tray holding a mug of what smells like peppermint tea, a plate of crackers and sliced apple.
Darcy is almost absurdly grateful for the food and drink, for all that Fionnula has to help her with most of it. Eating, drinking, these are normal things, even if neither the tea, apple or crackers totally take away the taste of char in the back of her throat.
"It was Hel," Darcy says when all the tray holds is empty crockery. "We called her that, anyway, to make it easier. She was just Death. In New York, they raised her. There was a labyrinth, and everything…" She swallows hard against that black taste rising in her throat. "We raised her. I didn't know what I was doing. I was just…lost. I hurt, and I didn't want to anymore."
Fionnula looks at Bran. Her face is turned away from Darcy, so Darcy can't see her expression, but Bran nods, leaves the room with the empty tray."
"It's human to run from pain, lass," Fionnula says. "When I was younger, I would have given anything for a child of my body. But every time I quickened, the child just slipped away like water. Time and time again, until my husband could bear no more, and slipped away, too. If a dark goddess or god had appeared to me and offered me a child, I would have taken that path. We all contain dark things, Darcy. In some of us, they run close to the surface, but even in those where it runs deep, it is always there." She holds her hand over where Darcy's wrist is hidden beneath the blankets. "Does it hurt?"
Darcy nods.
"I can make up a salve, see if it helps."
Darcy looks at Fionnula's covered wrist. "Does yours?"
Fionnula's lips curve, and she looks away. "I wish for your sake that I could say that it does. But it feels like standing in the sunlight on the first day of spring. Like knowing everything is going to be alright, now and forever."
Something twists hard inside of Darcy. She had felt that way, standing on the edge of the Bifrost with Loki.
"The godforms that rise are nebulous at first," Fionnula says. "We shape them as much from our own belief as from what they inherently are. You're not an evil person, Darcy Lewis, and death is sometimes merciful. Even shadows have a little light in them, lass." She stands, smooths down her skirt. "Do you want Bran or I to stay here, or would you prefer to be alone?"
Darcy shakes her head. "You always seem to come by when I need you."
Fionnula smiles, a maternal expression that makes that thing in Darcy twist even harder, for she recognises that her own mother never looked upon her thus. "We look after our own, lass. And Brigid herself looks after this valley, and those who live in it." She rests her hand briefly on Darcy's forehead. Her skin is too hot against Darcy's, but the gesture, at least, is comforting. "You rest, lass. We'll come by and see you tomorrow?"
Fionnula leaves. The sound of footsteps moving through the house, and then Darcy sees Fionnula and Bran pass the window. They are murmuring together, their voices too low for Darcy to catch anything of their conversation.
The food she ate is an uncomfortable weight in her stomach. It is all too easy to imagine those black threads of infection bleeding into it, turning it to poison. Maybe the black will seep out of her pores, ooze through her skin, stain the whole words the colour of a starless sky.
Something like an electric shock moves through her at that thought. Not because she is horrified by the thought of a world gone black, a world gone dead. But because - for the first time since she and Loki stood hand in hand before the Bifrost - there is a small thrill of want in her.
Darcy deliberately grinds the heel of her palm against the scar on her chest. The pain that spikes through her is strong enough that she can see it as a tide of red behind her eyes.
"I do not want the world destroyed," she says. "I don't. I just want to go back to Darcy Lewis. Coffee, iPod, college credits. Goofing off because I have so much time on my hands. Nothing more than that."
The clouds outside shift, and a thin beam of sunlight pieces the gloom in the room. In the small pool of light on the wooden boards is the key to the hidden panel.
She launches herself out of bed, scoops up the key. As she stands again, she notices that the twisted metal ring on her hand has darkened. When she slides it on her finger, she sees that the skin beneath is dark purple, the top layers of skin sloughing away as though it has been scorched. There's no pain, just numbness.
The key feels lighter than it did the last time she held it, as though it is only a shell of metal filled with breath. She finds herself squeezing it hard between her thumb and forefinger. It's only when the metal gives an ominous creak that she makes herself relax.
A key to a hidden door in Blackwood House, home to the Blackwood family for generations. Fionnula knows Daniel Blackwood, knows more about him that she's saying, Darcy is certain. Did Daniel grow up in this house, part of a coven of witches? As Fionnula worshipped Brigid, did Daniel and his kin worship Hel?
Shadows and light.
Darcy's scars throb with a deeper pain; it feels as though her tendons and ligaments are being twisted and tightened beneath her skin. She wonders if anyone ever really gets a choice as to which side they choose, shadows or light?
Loki had walked in shadows, and had chosen to move towards the light.
Or had he?
Darcy looks at the blackened ring again. It feels utterly inert, as not there as the magic within her. A hole in the world.
There's a candle and matches on the table next to the bed. Darcy doesn't remember placing them there, though she supposes she must have at some stage. She lights a candle, holds it in her fist as she slides the key into the hidden keyhole.
The panel swings open easily, and she sees the space beyond. It is as it had been the first time she saw it: the wallpaper beyond, leading to the stone walls carved with that odd swirling pattern. To her right is the plain stone wall. To her left: three steps down, then another wall.
The candle light wavers as she steps into the small space. The last time she stepped over this threshold, she had laughed as she imagined Loki folding his fall frame into the space. Now, she cannot image him being there at all. This part of the world is hers alone.
The wooden steps creak slightly beneath her weight as she steps down. She can hear the faint sound of dust falling from the staircase onto whatever lies below; it makes her wonder how long it has been since anyone stood here. She wonders why Fionnula never came in here. She had the key, and Darcy doesn't see something like a locked front door keeping the old woman from anything,
The air grows warmer as she descends, and though she only steps down three stairs, it feels as though she has traversed a far greater distance. When she stands before the stone wall, the air is so warm and thick that sweat springs out on her temples, dampens her hair.
This close to the stone slab, she can see that the same swirling patterns that marked the wall continue on here, too. They are denser, but carved more lightly, their edges worn as though the slab of stone has been washed by the ocean. When she leans close to the stone, she can small salt, and something darker, something like decay. The ocean is far from here, but she remembers Fionnula mentioning a loch beyond the Blackwood forest. She has no idea if that would be salt- or freshwater. It seems like the kind of thing she could ask Loki, if he was here.
In the candlelight, the twisted ring on her finger looks even darker, like shadows. Loki is not here, she tells herself. Even if he had projected that once, he had no deigned to do so again. No matter what anyone said to him, no matter where they put him, he was always Loki, and he would always find a way to do what he wanted. If he wanted to be here, he would be. And he was not, and so he did not. And can she blame him, really? Her human lifetime is the blink of an eye to him, nothing more.
The magic within is stirring again, moving in that soothing rocking rhythm. Everyone has abandoned her. Her father only ever wanted to use her in whatever sick fantasies filled his mind. Her mother didn't even love her enough to offer her the shotgun she held to Darcy's brother's heads and then her own. Jane never wanted her as an intern, and Darcy knows that she only ever irritated Erik. She's not strong, she's not smart, she doesn't have any super powers or money or power. She's just Darcy Lewis, easy to not need, easy to tuck away in some forgotten corner of the world and be forgotten herself.
She traces the curving lines on the stone. And blinks, because where she has touched the lines, they have filled with a faint sapphire light. It looks something like the illumination at the base of a flame, but it does not waver, does not fade. She pinches out the flame of the candle, and does not feel anything when the flame burns her skin.
The darkness that comes after the flame is quenched is total, as though she pinched out that sapphire light at the same time. When she glances back, she cannot even see any light falling through the opening in the wall. She could be anywhere. She could be nowhere.
Once upon a time, Darcy would have felt panic, being in such utter darkness. This Darcy - the one with pain beating like a heart beneath the skin of her wrist and chest, the one who walked into Helheim and back again - this Darcy almost glories in it. It feels like she is surrounded by potential, as though she is standing in a vast expanse of something that could become anything. All she has to do is reach out and direct it, tell it what to be.
The magic stirs again, and she lets it guide her hand back to the stone. Watches as her fingers trace shapes in the carved lines. They look like words, like a language that she has never seen before and yet knows in some place deeper than her bones and blood and memory.
A thread of magic rises in her throat, and she opens her mouth. The words that spill from her lips are like nothing she has heard, and yet, like the written language, they feel familiar. Like something she once knew, but has grown to forget.
There is a deep, grinding noise, and more dust showers down into the space between the stairs. Everything shakes, and the sapphire lines blink out.
Then, still.
Darcy reaches out, and her hand moved into unimpeded darkness. The stone slab is gone, vanished as though it had never been there at all.
A faint, colourless light bleeds from nowhere, lightening the darkness. She can see the stairway continuing, turning inwards and spiralling in towards the centre of the house. She cannot see from where the light originates; it is like the memory of starlight, like an afterimage imprinted on the world.
Another deep grinding noise comes from below, and this time she feels a tightening in the pit of her belly. She recognises it only belatedly as fear. The same feeling had moved through her before she had walked into the labyrinth in Central Park. She had joked, then, about the minotaur in the centre of the labyrinth, but she had walked in all the same.
Then, she had no idea what she was doing. Then, Loki had appeared, tried to stop her from entering.
He is not here now, and she knows what she is doing. Knows that Hel is down there, waiting.
The twisted ring on her finger is loose. She eases it off, turns it over and over between her fingers. Once, this ring had felt like salvation, a light in the darkness.
Once, Loki had stood at her side, and she had been certain that he would remain there.
The ring falls easily from her fingers. It chimes once as it tumbles down the stairs, and vanishes silently into the shadows.
She is choosing this. For there to be light, there has to be shadows. Maybe she was always supposed to be part of the shadows.
Darcy skips down the remainder of the stairs.
They curve down and down, spiralling in until she feels that she must be deep below the earth. Finally, they open out onto a space larger than the house above, everything illuminated with that same eldritch light that comes from everywhere and nowhere. Floor, roof and walls are all packed earth, the black broken here and there by colourless roots. Where the roots have poked too far from the dirt, someone has cut them back, seared the ends so that they do not grow any further. In one corner, the floor has been stamped down, the upper layer of earth scorched black and hard. There is no source of ventilation that Darcy can see, and yet the air is fresh and crisp.
Darcy breathes in, breathes out. Waits.
Once, when she was possibly no older than three or four, her father had locked her in the basement for some infringement which she cannot remember the details off. All she can remember is formless black, stifling air thick with the rot of the potatoes her mother had stored. She remembers screaming until her throat was hoarse, being so frightened that she had wet herself. She had been so certain that no one was ever going to come to let her out.
She should feel that way now. Just being underground should spark off something of those old memories. But there's only a feeling of lightness, of freedom. Of release.
"Of course there is," Hel's voice says. It comes from all around Darcy, from everywhere and nowhere. "You belong here, Darcy. You have always belonged here."
She emerges as particles of dust that congeal out of the air, spinning in and in to form a tall figure of bone and shadow. She steps out of the blackened corner; shadows swirl in her wake and become a group of black-robed people. Their hoods are drawn forward, so Darcy cannot see their features. And thought she cannot hear them, she knows that they are chanting. They are the Blackwoods, and they are invoking Hel.
"For generations, they worshipped me," Hel says. "And none of them were strong enough to give me true form." Her face is younger, her skin smoother than Darcy remembers, like marble made pliant. When she steps forward, her skirt parts, and Darcy can see that both of her legs are whole. "Just as none of the other supplicants were strong enough." She moves closer to Darcy, bringing with her a scent like dry musk, like bone dust and earth and blood. "No one is going to come for you, Darcy. They put you here to forget about you. Even Loki." She smiles at Darcy's startled look. "Oh, I know all about him, my supplicant. He and all of the other pretenders." She tilts her head to one side. "Even now, he dances with another. He wears a gift from her about his neck."
Darcy's heart squeezes painfully tight. "I don't believe you."
Hel arches one eyebrow. "Have I lied to you, supplicant? Even when you bargained with me to take him out of Helheim itself, I let you take him, did I not? I took your pain when you asked. I chose you."
Darcy doesn't want to believe Hel, but it makes sense. Of course Loki would find someone else. Someone smarter, prettier, someone stronger. Someone better. Why would he ever choose Darcy Lewis?
"You have a choice, Darcy," Hel says. She lifts a hand, and the hooded figures array themselves around the room. The strange light slides into their hoods, and Darcy sees their faces. None of them is Daniel. "You can choose to become something else. Something more. Something that no one will dare hurt, something that never needs to be afraid of anything, ever again. Something that you have always been meant to be."
The air is vibrating with the still-inaudible chanting of the Blackwoods; Darcy feels it moving in waves against her skin, the pain pulsing through her scars increasing with each wave. Hel's hand is still raised; she turns it palm up, then slowly curls her fingers inwards.
And just like that, the pain ceases. Darcy is aware, for the first time, of all the other pains that she always feels and is barely aware of: the strain of muscles in her shoulders and back, aches in her knees and hips. And deeper, the darknesses that always pull at her: the memories of her father, of her mother, of New York, of Vinh and Beth and Ravi and Ozymandias, all the times that she has never been good enough, all of those weights are gone, and she is free.
"Is this…is this what most people feel like?" Darcy asks, almost giddy from the lack of pain.
Hel shakes her head. "This is what gods feel like." She lowers her hand, and all of that pain and weight descend again.
Darcy crumples beneath the weight of it, falls to her knees.
"The choice is yours," Hel says. "You are free to leave, to return to your life."
Darcy glances up, sees that thin light is spilling down the staircase from above. When she focuses it, she feels the magic within her receding, the tide moving out and out. Without it, she feels empty, as though she is made from straw, nothing inside her but pain.
If she goes up there, she will be free from Hel. But what else will she have? Months, maybe years, in the middle of nowhere. Maybe forever. And Hel is right: no one is coming for her.
The chanting has ceased, the Blackwoods standing motionless, their features shadowed again.
Darcy pulls herself to her feet with difficulty. It feels as though every muscle and joint is screaming in pain, and her whole body feels impossibly heavy.
She closes her eyes, sends a silent thought to Loki: Come now, be here right now.
She counts her heartbeats. Makes it to a hundred before she knows that he is not coming. No one is. And she is so heavy and so tired, and everything is full of pain.
She holds out her hand to Hel. "I don't want to live like this any more."
Hel's hand closes over Darcy's. The magic floods back into Darcy, washing away all of the heaviness, all of the fatigue, all of the pain.
Hel smiles, and it is the kind of smile that Darcy always wanted from her mother, never got. "Welcome home, daughter."
#
The light that falls into the windows of Blackwood Cottage is the indistinct violet that speaks or either dusk or dawn. Darcy locks the panel in the wall, then looks out of the window for a long time. She cannot tell which time of day it is, just knows that it is one of those between times.
The scars on her wrist and chest no longer throb. Neither are they black, or radiating lines of infection. They look the same as they had when she arrived in Scotland: the flesh gnarled and slightly reddened. They just look like scars now.
The magic stirs within her, and she draws on it. She has no idea how she does, or how she focuses it, it just feels like instinct. Through the magic, she can see the faint lines of Hel's original touch, as well as the newer scars, both of them shimmering like dark oil beneath her skin.
There is no pain, and even when she thinks about her father and mother, there's nothing but an odd detachment, as though she is watching a film of someone else's life.
She's on her way to the kitchen when she hears the sound of a car engine outside. Coffee instantly forgotten, she runs through the house, opens the front door in time to see a sleek black car drive away. All she can see of the driver is red hair.
It takes her a long moment to focus on the man who stands at the end of the path leading up to the house. At first, she sees him only in snatches. Dark hair cropped to just above his shoulders, green eyes. Hands thrust into the pockets of a heavy black wool coat, green scarf knotted around his throat.
He walks up the path slowly, his boots making a solid sound against the paving stones. He stops on the other side of the door, at a distance that would be just out of her reach, should she stretch out a hand to him. There is uncertainty in her eyes.
Some instinct in Darcy folds the magic over onto itself, rendering it as inert as it had been when she had first arrived here. "Loki?" she asks. "Are you really here?"
He says nothing, swallows hard. She moves forward, reaches out and touches his sleeve. Solid. Real. Not a projection.
The car drives past the house again, slow enough this time that Darcy can see Natasha in the driver's seat, Hawkeye at her side. Natasha nods at Darcy, and Darcy can see wariness in her eyes. There is a new scar on her cheek, livid and red.
Darcy looks back at Loki. When he breathes in, the layers of his scarf part slightly, giving her a glimpse of gold beneath. Her hand is still on his sleeve, and she can feel the scant heat of his body bleeding through the wool.
Loki is here. Loki is really here.
