Part Twelve: Wherein Arrangements are Made and a Message is Sent

Sigourney had decided to shut the shop early so she could go to the bank before closing. She'd had a great many questions to ask and a plan to put in place. On the bus over, she'd finalized the details of that plan as best she could. At the bank her questions had been answered by a patient woman in a teal pantsuit who explained the math side of things nearly as well as Lavender would have. By the end of the meeting, Sigourney had made the necessary adjustments to her finances and put in place a system for the future that looked like it would work well enough.

The bus on the way back home had been packed full of people. Sigourney spent the ride squashed between a businessmen talking loudly on his cellphone and a frazzled nanny who hadn't been able to collapse her stroller. The businessman was obviously trying to look as much like Tony Stark as was humanly possible and smelt strongly of aftershave. But the two-year-old in the nanny's stroller was cute and very fond of making faces.

When Sigourney finally got home, the apartment was empty. She ignored the knot in her stomach by clearing up the abandoned tea-mess that was still on the counter from that morning. The mug clanked against the inside of the sink while she washed it, the soft sound filling the emptiness of the apartment. Putting the mug away in the cabinet, she turned to her kitchen table and set to work on the next phase of her plan.

Sigourney's tightly looped handwriting filled her notepad, a letter of recommendation for Lavender slowly taking shape. She hunched over the notepad. Her urgency brought the words to her mind far more quickly than her hand could write them down. But she fought to capture her thoughts all the same. It had to be perfect. It was important. Lavender was important.

It was dark outside by the time she finally sat down to type up the letter. The well worn keys of her secondhand typewriter clacked steadily as she diligently copied down her nearly illegible handwriting. Twice she had to white out a mistake because she couldn't distinguish the difference between her own b's and d's. But she didn't think anyone would notice. She had always meant to invest in a proper laptop. But they were so expensive she had always put it off. Besides, she had a phone and the library for anything that might require a computer. But the library had closed hours ago, so Sigourney sat at her kitchen table clacking away on the typewriter Mrs Hult had given her after finding it in storage.

When the letter was typed out, Sigourney clipped it together and tucked it into a large manila envelop along with a cheque for the whole of Lavender's pay for the following month. She had written it out at the bank preemptively, just in case she began to forget things like she had that morning. Sigourney set the envelope, labeled 'Lavender', on the counter next to her tea kettle. That way, if she did forget during the course of the night, she would be reminded.

Then and only then did Sigourney let herself fully indulge in the unsettling fact that Loki still hadn't come back. The edge of every second was filled with the possibility of there being a knock at the door. But somehow she knew that waiting for him would only prolong his absence. The universe, she was beginning to understand, was tricksy like that.

'Watched pots...' She thought, turning away from the door.

She retrieved the note he had left her that morning from where she had stashed it on her bookshelf, tucked into her copy of The Perilous Gard. Reading it again Sigourney noted the part that said he would be 'back as soon as he was able.' With Loki that could mean anything from a few hours to a few days. Or even more. She thought back to the first time he disappeared and how distraught she had been. Surely he wouldn't put her through that again? Not now that he knew what it had done to her. Not after they had only just patched everything up between them. As she thought about it Sigourney realized again that he had only just come back the day before last. Somehow, it really did feel much longer. So much had changed since then.

She had remembered half a life time.

Sigourney slowly paced up and down the length of her apartment, still clutching Loki's note in one hand. She kept her eyes fixed on the floor as she went along. If the mother Sigourney remembered from her ordinary life had been there, she would have joked about wearing a trench through the floor with pacing. Would her real mother, the one out there in the universe somewhere, have done the same? Sigourney didn't know. So she kept on pacing, thumbing her gold bracelet as an endless list of questions raced through her mind again. She needed answers. She needed to leave with Loki and learn who she really was.

Eventually, Sigourney abandoned pacing as a method for summoning Loki. She sat on the edge of her bed and stared at her bookshelf. Her copy of Norse Myths stared back at her, it's dark teal spine daring her to pull it off the shelf. It had been a gift from her grandmother. Or at least, that's what she had always thought. Where it came from didn't really matter. It was just another piece of the jumbled up puzzle of her memories. What taunted her were the stories that lay inside. They were the stories she had known all her life. Stories she had grown up with and play-acted with her friends. Stories she knew inside out.

When Thor saved that town in New Mexico from being flattened everything changed. Sigourney remembered with perfect clarity how she and her parents had watched the news together. How that larger than life figure, who called down lightning from the sky, was suddenly on their too small television screen. That night, under the covers of her bed, Sigourney had re-read every myth by flashlight until the sun came up. She spent the summer she was sixteen wondering how much of those stories were actually true. And every time a thunderstorm rolled in across the prairies or came down from the mountains she had watched for that same figure among the flashes of lightning.

When Loki attacked New York almost exactly a year later Sigourney had been visiting both sets of her grandparents in rural Scandinavia. When she came home and learned what had happened, she re-read the myths again. She watched the news footage from the attack and tried to rationalize how the laughing face on the screen could belong to the mostly harmless trickster in the stories. It seemed impossible that they could be the same person. The Loki she had known all her life, the Loki in the stories, was different. Sigourney spent the year she was seventeen looking for that laughing face in crowds, just in case. Who could have imagined that she would be waiting with pounding heartbeats for that same face to walk in through her front door?

The temptation to read the myths again made Sigourney's fingers itch. But she couldn't bring herself to pull them off the shelf. Not this time. She had grown up with the figures in those pages. Not just as characters in the stories she knew by heart, but as people. They had been her friends. She remembered playing Valkyries with Sif and Thor, running wild through gardens while wielding toy swords. And she remembered watching from behind bookshelves as Loki studied. She had been too shy to speak to him. If Sigourney read those stories again... would she find herself there too? The thought paralyzed her.

Who was she?

If she just concentrated long enough, perhaps she could remember. Sigourney closed her eyes as she let out a slow breath. She was standing in an airy bedchamber looking out of the long, open window. A breeze coming in from the orchard caught the gauzy curtains. They billowed like the sails of a long-ship, playing with the afternoon light. Out the window she could see Loki wandering about in the orchard. She had smiled to herself. Turning to the door, she stopped to look in the mirror. But her reflection was blurred. The figure staring back at her was watery and out of focus, a vaguely human shape smudged across the surface of the mirror like an impressionist painting. She couldn't see her own face. Just the haze of her ash-blonde hair and the dark blue of her gown. Sigourney took a slow step towards the mirror. If she could just concentrate hard enough then she could-

Searing pain flared behind her closed eyes. The memory melted away with the heat of it. She bent double, pressing the heels of her hands against her eyes. The world shifted off its axis and Sigourney fell to one side. She lay motionless among the blankets on her bed, the force of her hands against her eyes the only thing keeping them from oozing out of her head. Or so it felt. The pain rose to a crescendo and a cry broke from Sigourney's lips. She would die. She knew she would. This was it.

She waited for the end to come, but it never did. The pain faded slowly. It eased enough for her ragged, gulping breaths to turn steady and even. After a few more moments, she felt confident enough to try taking her hands away from her eyes. They didn't ooze out of her head. Instead, the pressure she had applied made her vision go fuzzy. She blinked it and the last of her pain away. What had she just been doing? The pain had come on so suddenly that Sigourney couldn't remember. She blinked until her bedroom came back into focus. Then she sat up slowly. Her head spun with the motion, threatening to send her right back down again.

For several moments Sigourney could do nothing but sit hunched on the edge of her bed, waiting to either be sick or pass out. Fortunately, neither happened. She brushed a trembling hand through her hair, pushing it back from her suddenly clammy forehead. She shook all over. Still hunched over the edge of her bed, Sigourney ran through everything she had done that day. It had been nothing special. She'd gone to the bank, worked at the shop, woken up late. Why had she woken up late? She couldn't remember. Sigourney pressed her still shaking hand to her brow. She had been with someone that morning. They had...

Loki.

A small wave of pain made her gasp, but she managed to hold on to the thought. Of course. Loki. She had been with him the night before. And that was why she had woken up late. A cold sort of fear hovered around her, settling softly on her shoulders. She had forgotten everything so quickly. So easily. One flash of pain and it was all gone as though it had never been. She couldn't risk that happening again.

Sigourney forced herself to stand. Then she fought her way to her kitchen table by way of holding on to every piece of furniture between her bed and it. Once there, she grabbed the note book she had written her first draft of Lavender's letter in. She flipped to a clean page and began madly scribbling down everything that had happened to her since the day Loki first walked in to the bookshop. She wrote as much as she could. Some things she remembered with perfect ease. Others she hardly remembered at all beyond a vague sort of notion. But if she could put enough of it down on paper it wouldn't be lost if she forgot it completely. She could remind herself of everything that had happened. Of everything she had learned.

When Sigourney finished, she read over the pages she'd filled. She was just amending a line when a shimmering green light caught the corner of her eye. Her head snapt up in time to see Loki materializing out of thin air in the middle of her kitchen. She leapt to her feet, nearly knocking the table over in her rush.

"Loki!" She cried, relief and surprise forming a heady mixture within her.

He looked different. His face was too perfect again, the scars and flaws hidden behind a mask of illusion. It didn't matter. Sigourney threw her arms around his neck, but they closed around empty air as they passed through his body. She didn't understand. And when she looked up to his face for answers she found only a deep rooted sadness upon his perfect face.

"Siggy." He said softly.

She tried to touch him again and her fingers created pale green waves that rippled across his body where her hand passed through his chest.

"You're not really here." She breathed.

"No." He replied, "Siggy, something has happened."

"What? What is it? Where are you?" She stared up at his face, the feeling of dread that had built in her all day rising to its full measure.

"Siggy, they've found me." He told her softly, "I'm being held at their camp."

Ice ran through her veins.

"They're going to take me back to Asgard." Loki went on, calm and composed despite what he was saying.

"When?" She went to take his hands and her fingers passed through him again.

"Tomorrow night." Loki replied, glancing at where she had tried to touch him.

"I'll find you." Sigourney said in a rush, plans flooding her still aching mind, "When I saw them, they were in the park. That must be where their camp is. I'll come find you and-"

"Siggy." He pleaded, making her stop short, "Siggy, there's nothing you can do. I've... I've sent you this projection so that we can say goodbye."

"No." She shook her head, resolve replacing the ice in her blood, "No, I'll find you. I can't just let you go. Not after everything. Not after I've started to remember."

He looked as though her words were an arrow straight through his heart, but his voice retained its calculated composure when he said, "Siggy, I haven't much time. There's nothing you can do. It's too dangerous. Now, please, just listen."

She chewed the inside of her lip and waited.

"I love you." He told her, his voice catching, "And I will find a way back to you. I promise."

His shape began to flicker with pale green light.

"Siggy, I love you." He said, more frantically as his projection faded, "I love you."

And he was gone.