A/N: Pls.

Truthfully, though, Hannah did not go to sleep. She retreated to her small sleeping quarters after her conversation with Steve, but she found that sleep would not come easily when placing her head down on the hard pillow. For a government-funded secret agency, S.H.I.E.L.D couldn't do better than the equivalent of a college dorm. Hannah sighed, sitting up in the uncomfortable twin bed dressed in starchy sheets, and glanced towards her charging phone. It'd been one of the few personal possessions she'd had time to bring when the agents showed up at her doorstep. The carrier had no signal whatsoever, go figure, but she still had free, government-funded wifi. She reached to unplug the phone from its cable.

A quick Google search led her to an archive on Norse mythology. She scrolled through the directory to find what she was looking for- a page on Norse deities. The list, organized alphabetically, was full of names she couldn't pronounce. A tight, nervous coil bunched up in her stomach as she scrolled past the H's, I's, J's, and K's till she found what she was looking for.

In Norse mythology, Loki was known to be the god of trickery. Hannah supposed this was pretty close to what Fury described him, if not a little too nice. She skimmed through the information, raising a brow when she came across something weird. Which was, to be fair, all of it. Loki was apparently a piece of shit in the myths—what with the kidnapping and killing—but she couldn't exactly assume any better. Still, though, as she read, she could only picture the same man who'd looked at her with all the vulnerability in the world.

She got to a part about Loki's relations. His father was Odin, his brother was Thor, and… His wife was Sigyn.

Sig-in. Oh my God.

Hannah felt like she were watching a car crash as she kept reading. The phone shook in her hands as she processed the words on the screen. Sigyn was the goddess of fidelity. Loyalty. Fealty. She was the dutiful, loving wife to Loki, supporting him even after he'd killed and lied his way through Asgard. She suffered through his punishment with him, collecting poison in a bowl to keep it from reaching his eyes, despite having been completely innocent herself. Simply because that was her job, that was who she was.

She set the phone down. Loki had called her Sigyn at Stuttgart. Somehow, in some way, she hadn't been killed by that blast of energy. And then he lowered his staff, and he looked into her eyes, and he reached out and touched her, and Hannah felt as if she'd known him her entire life.

What did this all mean? Honestly, she hadn't a clue. All that she knew was that she had to get answers.

Loki had a visitor that following morning.

He looked up when he heard the doors sealing him off from the rest of the carrier open. He rolled his eyes, expecting it to be that damned man with the eye patch again.

But it wasn't.

Walking towards him was the Midgardian girl from Stuttgart, the one with the golden waves and eyes the color of Vanaheim's sky. The one that looked like Sigyn, the one that he'd reached out for in the city. She walked towards the glass calmly, but her quivering hands betrayed her fear. As much as he wanted to tell her that she didn't have to be afraid of him, he couldn't fall prey the misgivings of his own mind; even if he refused to come to terms with it, Sigyn was dead, and this Midgardian girl was nothing to him.

Deep down, though, he knew that even if magic couldn't bring her back, other forces most certainly could.

He straightened his posture when they were finally face-to-face. "Ah. The girl who refused to kneel." He said.

She hardly flinched. She seemed to fight herself when meeting his eyes. "You know who I am."

"A stupid human wench?" He nearly forced himself to spit out. It was difficult to fire obscenities when the curve of her lips called for his to stay silent. "That's all the relevance I can attribute."

"You called me Sigyn." She said. Her hands clenched at the seam of her pants. "At Stuttgart."

Only she could make him tongue tied in a conversation. Faced with the girl's—Sigyn's—scrutiny, Loki almost wanted to tell her what he thought was the truth, to confide his thoughts in her. But then he remembered that he couldn't let his still-boiling grief control him.

But she was persistent.

"You reached out to touch me." She continued. "You… You looked at me as if I weren't a target. In that moment, I felt like I'd known you all my life. And I wasn't scared."

She wasn't scared.

"But now I'm terrified." There's a sharpness, a poignancy, to her voice now. "Because Sigyn is the goddess of fidelity and your wife. And you're kind of crazy, and I'm mortified by you, but I can't stay away. And I want to know why before my life spirals further out of control."

All the maelstroms of the nine realms now seemed to pool in her eyes. That was a gaze Loki had not seen very often, but found familiar still. Her lower lip trembled, but she stood her ground nonetheless. This girl, this human girl, looked so much like Sigyn that it pained him.

"You look like her." He said aloofly, giving his intimate thoughts a detached, shallow life. "You look like Sigyn."

"Is that it?"

"You were not scared of me." He continued. "And you intercepted my powers with some of your own."

She blinked. He quirked an eyebrow.

"Did you not know?" He inquired. "Did you not feel the magic coming off your fingertips, did you not see the white glow that enveloped you? If not for it, you would have died. A human could not have claimed that."

"So, what are you trying to say?" She asked, taking some time to process his words. "I don't understand what you're getting at. Do you... Do you think I'm Sigyn because of all that?

"Do I?" He suggested, though his heartbeat felt caught in his throat. Her eyes seemed to be drawing confessions, foreboding, out of his own mouth. "You say you were unafraid of me, but you dread the notion of being at my side. Even then, you are compelled towards me. Look at you. I abhor you, but yet you are still here."

She frowned. "I still don't understand."

"Dense girl." He said, but dreaded having to acknowledge what seemed to be the inevitable truth. "You are under the impression that Sigyn is the goddess of fidelity, yes?"

She nodded.

"There is so much that the humans leave out." He mused. "Even if there are some things that they guess correctly. They oft forget that we are as susceptible to Death's grip as they are. And that sometimes we are reborn. Reincarnated. Oddly enough, the Norse excluded that from their dogma. But other peoples adapted that same concept. It serves as consolation. Hope."

Her eyes were wide. "So, you're saying that I'm your dead wife's reincarnation or something."

"Seemingly so." He said. Suddenly, he felt lighter, but he still had to give her the impression that she didn't matter at all to him. He practically trembled, though, because if his speculations were true, his Sigyn was once more back at his side. That alone dissipated his negations about this human girl. "That would explain why I simply couldn't bring myself to stop thinking of you. Not only do you look like her—you are her. And that means you are loyal to me."

A/N: pls.