Sorry I'm a little late on this one! I'll be back next Monday for the next part!
For now, we're on Asgard again. This chapter is slightly longer than some of the others, but I hope you like it nonetheless!
Since Thor had shown up and pulled his attention away from the path of the moon, Loki's sense of timing had fallen askew, only to be restored at the changing of the guard. As the guard changed next at dawn, it would then be too late.
He wanted to pace his cell like an angry tiger, but he couldn't bring himself to move, instead clenching and unclenching his right hand and drumming a quick, staccato rhythm on his knee with his left. He couldn't pay attention to how his fingers trembled as they struck the kneecap like it was a musical instrument. He chose to ignore the way his fingernails dug into his palm, leaving purple crescents when he released his grip on nothing. It wasn't important, the way his eyes darted around, always landing on the barred door, though he tried to keep them distracted.
She had given her word.
He had no idea why it bothered him so; if she didn't come, it would hardly affect the decision in the court. It would have no bearing on his punishment or his conduct at the trial, and it certainly would not offer him any sort of release.
But, upon hearing the hurried footsteps coming his way, he tensed, anticipating the new guard, preforming his rounds as was custom at dawn. His heart sank to somewhere more near his stomach, but his stomach made room for it by climbing into his throat; he felt like someone had just stuck him with a pin, causing all of his hopes to rush out of him like air from a balloon.
He sighed, resigned, but not moving from his corner. If they wanted him, they would have to take him. He would go peacefully, but he refused to initiate the act.
"Let it not be said that I have broken my word, Odinson."
At the voice, his head jerked up like he had been given a shot of electricity to his bones.
"Sif!" he said, voice hoarse and a bit raspy from disuse. He had not uttered a word since she had left the last time, except for when Thor had come. The thought struck him; he had not done such a thing consciously. He had simply had no reason to speak when there was no one worth speaking to keeping him company. "I thought –"
"I know," she interrupted, her voice the most welcome sound in his head. She was already so close to the bars that he could have touched her, had he reached out, though he dared not do it, lest she vanish in a swish of the cloak of time and space, an image conjured from his own latent mind. And hallucinations would not have been a surprise to him at this point.
He blinked at her once, twice, and said, "Thank you, Sif."
She waved his gratitude away, though he could see the miniscule smile that held onto his words, locking them away in the vaults of her mind in case she ever forgot that he was capable of appreciation. "I brought you something," she stated, holding up the large book she had carried from the palace. When Loki's eyes widened in recognition, she added, "I figured you might like to hear a story or two."
Before she could say anything else, he cocked an eyebrow at her over a disapproving eye. "You snuck into my chambers?"
"Of course not," she answered, sitting on the ground as she had the last time she had come to the dungeon. He saw a shadow cross her face briefly as he joined her on the flagstone floor. "Nobody has gone into your chambers since—well, since we thought you'd died. You had left it in the library, hidden in the usual place, accompanied by some other volume that looked exceptionally unexciting." She dismissed the matter with a wave of her hand, cracking the book open on her lap.
Loki felt his face sear at her simple act of opening the thick, leather-bound book. "Nobody was ever meant to read this," he muttered.
"Then you should have put it someplace I can't find," she said, flipping through the pages. "Now what would you like to hear?"
He just stared at her. "What are you trying to do, Sif?
She shrugged as she skimmed page after page. "Nothing, aside from passing the time" she told him with the sort of casualness that most often comes along with lies.
"You're not trying to lure me into repentance with the glow of childhood stories, then?"
"Absolutely not," she said, the twinge of mistruth gone.
He leaned closer to scrutinize her face, wondering where the lie went. She looked up, meeting his eyes as she would meet a challenge on the battlefield. He just stared at her.
Eventually, she rolled her eyes. "I should like to see you smile again, if that's allowed," she snipped. "And, since there's nothing happy enough to discuss at present –" Without giving him a chance to protest, she cleared her throat and propped the book up on her thighs, reading. "'The moral of today: avoid Sigyn.'"
Loki cringed, but only faintly. "This one?" he asked "Sif, this one won't make me any happier."
"Well it does me, and it's short," she said.
"There are others –"
"Yes," Sif acknowledged, "and all quite amusing I am sure." Still, though, she refused to turn the page or even consider reading another tale to him, instead resuming her current story, unable to entirely hide the grin on her face. "'We had barely moved past introductions when she tried to kiss me! Honestly, what could she have been thinking? Is that how she introduces herself to every boy she meets? She was pretty, yes, but she didn't know a thing about kissing.
"'Essentially, what happened was this: I was out in the gardens alone, walking and thinking and generally enjoying myself, when I saw this blonde girl on a bench. At first, I thought it was Sif. But when she looked up, I knew I was mistaken. She introduced herself and I did too, and she reminded me that she already knew who I was. Then, she asked if she could walk with me. We walked for only a short time before she was pulling me into the bushes under the claim that she had found an intriguing secret pathway. The next thing I knew, she was all over me, and it was all I could do to get away.
"'Sif blackened Sigyn's eye that afternoon, once the gossip reached her. She didn't even try to pass it off as an accident! I did not see Sif hit her, but Sif clearly wasn't happy about the whole thing; who else could it have been? Thor kept me fairly busy with nonsense training so that Sif and I wouldn't cross paths; I guess she meant to blacken my eye as well – potentially both of them, and she possibly might have broken my nose too if she'd had the chance.'" Sif shook her head in mock offense. "Loki, you make me out to be such a violent little creature!"
He merely shrugged. "I can't think of a time when that notion has been proven false."
"Just for that, I wish I had tracked you down and done to you what I did to Sigyn," she told him, flipping more pages in the book, looking for another good story to reminisce upon. As she did, she asked, "Did you really find Sigyn to be such a poor kisser?"
Loki watched as leaves of parchment, hand-bound by him and covered with his spidery handwriting, riffled past, suddenly feeling a bit mute with regards to her question. He, unlike many other men of his age, disliked boasting about his romantic escapades. The ladies would say that he didn't "kiss and tell." After his silence stretched on for longer than she liked, Sif shot him a pointed glare, as if she could scorch the answer from the depths of his memory. He answered her with a glance.
"Would you do it again?" Sif asked, her eyes back down on the pages before her, comment as idle as her page-flipping. "Kiss Sigyn?" she clarified, not looking up.
Loki just scoffed and rolled his eyes; even if it had been a pleasurable experience the first time, he had since found others he would rather kiss instead. Sigyn was not on the list.
"Good," came Sif's response. Before Loki could make sense of what she could possibly mean by that, she stopped turning pages, saying, "This one is from a rather long time ago."
"Oh dear."
"'Sif was being especially insufferable today during training, feeling some need to thoroughly injure anybody who dared to fight her. I myself walked out of the ring with a cut on my forehead, a wrenched neck, a massive bruise covering most of my left thigh, and an impressive number of broken toes. In between rounds, I had to knock my own shoulder back into its socket. Twice.'"
Loki grimaced at the memory, but Sif merely raised her eyebrows and read on. "'We all assumed that she was dreadfully cross about something, though we didn't know what. After training, I went to one of the more secluded clearings in the forest to practice some of my magic and hopefully get my mind off of Sif. I was working on a new spell that I had achieved on accident yesterday when she found me. At first, she was just as angry as she had been in the ring, but soon, she sat down on the rock beside me, slumping over like a wounded animal.
'She told me of the harsh stares and cruel comments she received daily. She told me of the growing unease with her status as a warrior-in-training. She told me that she felt like an outcast in her own home, forced to choose her paths to avoid as much ridicule as possible from onlookers. I understood—far better than she could ever know, actually—but I didn't tell her so; she didn't want to hear it.'"
Sif's voice hitched a bit as she recalled the incident, though she pressed on. "'I felt sorry for her, so, when she asked me to cut off her hair, I did it. I will never let her know, but I cried a little bit when the last of it came off and she was left with nothing but skin, the ground at our feet covered in blonde. It was only one tear, but she can never know.'" She paused, glancing up at Loki's somber face. She did not need to ask if what was written was true; the facts were present in his very face as she finished the entry. "'I think I'll give her the knife I used to cut her hair as a gift. She'll probably never understand why, but I want her to have it because I am proud of her decision, and, though I plan on charming her head so that her hair will grow back more quickly, she showed me today that she has what it takes to become a warrior.'"
When she had come to the end of that day's narrative, she looked up at the man who had always been the best friend she could ever have asked for; he could see the guilt in her eyes, and, when she said, "I had no idea," he knew that she was being purely honest.
"I know," he told her.
Her brow creased as she looked down at the book in her lap, as if making certain that the words were penned down exactly as she had read them. "I always thought," she said, "that you had given me the dagger to mock me. So that I'd never truly forget the rashness of my decision."
"And I always thought that that would be precisely why you would get rid of it immediately."
Sif scoffed and looked away. She took a breath before saying, "The story is rather different from my perspective."
"I would imagine so," Loki replied, lacing his long fingers and resting his chin on his knuckles. He hesitated a moment, and then asked, "May I tell you one?" When she made to begin searching through the journal again, he stopped her hand with one of his own, flat against the pages. "No," he said, "this one will not be among those."
Mildly surprised, she closed the book with a dull thud, though she did not remove it from its place on the cross of her legs. "Please," she invited quietly, watching, waiting for the Silvertongue to spin his tale.
He breathed in, and, on the exhale, he began. "Today, I fell from the Bifrost. As the whole of the nine realms rushed past me in a burst of darkness, though, I could not shake my father's face from my mind – so disappointed he was. I had only tried to please him with my short and temporary reign as king. Killing Laufey and destroying Jotunheim – I was so certain that it might make Father love me as much as he loved Thor, as I had always been second. Second-born, second in line for the throne, and second in his heart.
"I have never felt so lost and angry in all my life.
'It mattered not, for I landed quite painfully on a dull moon somewhere in the cosmos, though I knew not where. I soon learned that it was home to the Chitauri. They were nothing to be taken seriously, I thought at first; then I met the one who controlled them, and it was he who was worthy of my attention.
'He wished to know why I had seemingly dropped out of the sky and onto his planet. I did not explain fully, instead limiting myself to saying that I fell from Asgard. He somehow knew that I was not Aesir, though – a bewildering fact, considering that I had only recently learned as much myself. It stabbed to hear him say it.
'He called my bluff and threatened me with a most painful and lengthy death if I could not prove my merit for living. I was bent by my own fury to challenge him, telling him to name the task which I must do. I cannot say I was much repelled by his answer.
'I was to be the leader of a Chitauri army in a battle against Midgard, for they were the current possessors of something called the Tesseract: a supposed source of unlimited power that would grant its holder dominion over more than just a realm. I, in my bloodthirsty and battered state, found this to be a rather attractive token. Not only was it enticing in its own right, but it would also serve as a trophy to prove my merit in the eyes of my realm and father. I knew that I could cheat them out of the thing once it was on my person, but obtaining it would require some tricks.
"So, the Chitauri sent me to Midgard to learn all that I could about this Tesseract. Now, I traipse about the realm, searching for the thing. I seek the Midgardians with whom Thor found solace during his banishment, as, through their contact with him, they would be the most likely to know of the artifact which maintains my fascination. I have yet to find them, but, when I do, I shall be that much nearer to my achievement of power that had never been granted to me in days gone by, and perhaps, if I do this, Father will finally be able to look upon his second son with all the love that he shows the first."
When he stopped, Sif remained quiet for a moment longer than he had anticipated. Finally, her troubled face broke and she spoke. "Loki, you must tell this to the court," she said. "If you were threatened, they may be lenient."
He shook his head, regarding his own story grimly. "Why should they be, Sif? The selfish thoughts and actions were still my own. I lashed out in rage."
"But you're not the same now," she said.
"You might be the only one to think so."
"And when has that ever stopped me from thinking anything before?"
Loki smiled at her—grateful, sad, and genuine. "The story of your kindness to me would go well in that book," he said, touching her cheek for just a second before pulling his hand back through to his side of the bars.
Sif looked down at the book, distractedly running her finger along the weathered and well-loved binding that peeled in places and cracked in others from a careful-yet-amateurish job of sewing in the pages. "Are you frightened?" she asked stiffly, as if voicing the words brought her pain.
For a long moment, he didn't reply, wanting to answer her but not deigning to tell her the truth. Eventually, he gave a half-hearted shrug. "What more could they do to me?" When she just looked askance at him, he continued, answering his own question. "They could always bind me to a boulder with the entrails of my own kin and wrap a viper around my head to drip venom into my eyes for all eternity."
She stared at him.
"I have had a fair bit of time to think about this, and not much else to occupy me," he explained, a slightly lighter note to his voice that chased away some of the revulsion in her expression.
"Yours is a curious mind," she told him, running a hand through her long hair, disrupting the newly-uneven ends that Loki regarded with a strange sort of possessive fondness.
He gave a small nod of acquiescence, though he undermined the gesture by saying, "No more so than yours."
At this, she almost grinned in spite of herself, crooking her fingers around the edges of the book. Any mirth in her face died quickly, though. "Dawn is fast approaching," she muttered, looking as if she would rather have not spoken.
He knew she was right, but he had no desire to face the sun – the guards, the court, the retribution – as yet, so he took the book from her lap and spun it around so that it faced him. Then, hands through the bars, he turned the pages quickly, knowing his way around the contents better than she had. "One more, then," he said, stopping on a favorite of his, "while there remains time."
Trailing a pale finger down the page, he glanced up at Sif, feeling better than he had in months. "You will undoubtedly remember this one," he said. Then, he began to read. "'Fitting Thor into a bridal gown was not unlike fitting a bilgesnipe into a wineskin.'"
Sif was already starting to smile.