Summary: It is said that the Snake and the Wolf will bring the end of the world. This, of course, is true. Regeneration, Romance, and Ragnarok. What more could a girl ask for?
Sequel to Shadow of your Heart and the Drabble Series.
Stolen Stars:
Chapter One
You say you wanted more
What are you waiting for?
I'm not running from you
(The Kill-30 Seconds to Mars)
0o0o0o0o0o0
"Did I not tell you Nornheim was a place of cowards?" Thor muttered as silence followed their wake into the dark and stony realm.
Loki grinned. Magic and destiny were concepts his brother was unfamiliar with, considering he relied on brute strength alone. Nornheim was the center of both, and he could only imagine it made the so-called Thunder God nervous.
"Yes, well, the sooner we get Hogun and Fandrall away from said kidnapping cowards the better," he replied. The two had come as emissaries of Asgard, and apparently some rogue sect of lesser norns found it necessary to hold them for ransom. The Greater Norns had yet to address this issue, so Odin allowed Thor, Loki, Volstagg, and Sif to conduct a rescue.
The four of them froze as the sound of movement came from one of the dark and shadowed stone buildings they were passing.
"What was that?" Sif hissed. Thor gripped Mjornir tight, a muscle twitching in his jaw.
"Allow me. Even if it is empty, we know not what wards or curses the norns leave behind," Loki warned. Thor glanced at Volstagg, who nodded in agreement. Loki slowly approached the doorway of the structure, dagger ready.
He narrowed his eyes as he entered, feeling out for any whisper of magic.
A cracked stone basin was the centerpiece of the only room. Loki recognized some of the runes on the walls, and identified the place as one of the many sacred wells of the norns. This one appeared abandoned. He stumbled to the left as rocks tumbled from the vaulted ceiling. He let out a breathless chuckle.
"There is nothing," he said over his shoulder. "Only loose pebbles."
"Alright, let us move on."
Loki was slow to exit, his eyes still tracing the crumbled walls and the faded images painted on them. He stopped when he saw something shining from underneath the rubble.
The eyes of the metal serpent glinted at him invitingly. He could hear his brother calling him from outside the broken temple, but he did not respond.
Loki knew he would come home beside his brother, triumphant as always. However, he also knew that the blessings of victory would be bestowed upon Thor because he was the one to lead their misfit band. So what was this little trinket?
The pad of his thumb brushed over the engraving, and a chill went through him followed by a delicious rush of magic. Loki could feel the power surge through him and knew instantly that he had to claim it as his and his alone. He pocketed it and hurried back to join Thor and the others.
He eventually molded the metal into his personal subspace, and he found it surprisingly receptive of the many protective wards he placed on his armor. The image of the snake would appear on the underside of the All-Father's medallions regardless of the royal blacksmith's reshaping and repairs over the years. It was not until he fell and rose again in Midgard against the Avengers that the magic of the norn medallion etched itself into the metal of Loki's armor to be seen by all.
The Fates smiled and the Spool turned.
0o0o0o0o0o0
"Halt! Stop!"
Thump-thump. Thump-thump.
"Sorry, mate. I've got a flight to catch!"
Thump-thump. Thump-thump.
Human vascular system, hyped up on vortex particles, sustained by god-only-knows-what magic—still got the old kick for running.
Rose's new legs relished the stretch and push of the chase, and that delicious shot of adrenaline mixed with victory as she spotted good ol' T-Too made her whoop as she rounded a corner.
She was giggling to herself as she slammed the door shut behind her, cutting off the angry shouts on the other side as she caught her breath.
"Just like old times," she murmured to the empty console room.
Sometimes she would forget, though, how loud her own solemn heartbeat sounded in her ears. Everything was a bit sharper; just a tad tweaked in the direction of super-human but not enough to bench-press a truck or even a small elephant.
A hand reached out to carelessly drag across a coral. The room was so much like the original's she could almost imagine the Doctor's laugh echo from the corridor on the far side.
With practiced ease, Rose sent the green TARDIS back into the Time Vortex.
Apparently the locals didn't take kindly to their archives being broken into. It wasn't like she was trying anything nefarious; time was of the essence and this planet had a weird thing about bureaucracy that would have kept her waiting for weeks.
She would have been wasting her time, anyway. They had nothing on jumping universes, or any known civilization that even had the slightest contact with a neighbor universe. The only knowledge in the Doctor's vast library was a vague reference to supernovas. She had asked him long ago if it had even been viable to use that energy to cross back through the rip between the 'verses. They never really liked to talk about that day, but Rose's curiosity only heightened with her journeys across the stars in her new universe.
The Doctor had pursed his lips and shook his head. "It would most likely fry the TARDIS and me in it if I tried. Besides," he had told her. "The rip was only in that one place. We can't find another."
Rose had a feeling he knew that she would always keep one eye open for a way back. He mentioned, once, how he could feel how the air was different there. That he understood her persistent anxiety against the world that wasn't hers. In a way that only brought them closer, the way they silently acknowledged their own otherness. Rose appreciated him for that, too.
But the Doctor wasn't there anymore.
Rose swallowed the grief down and focused on getting coordinates for the next star system, pushing T-Too (he always hated that she called their TARDIS that) further into the black.
T-Too hummed contentedly around Rose and lulled her as the blonde levered the ship's engines to drift in the Vortex.
It was a creak behind her, the slight lift of the hairs at the nape of her neck that alerted Rose to the sudden, impossible presence of something else in the room.
A young woman stood by the door to the TARDIS. Dressed in long white robes and a veil covering her flaxen hair, she looked as if she was perfectly content to be standing in a foreign time machine.
"How did you get in here?" Rose asked, her voice abnormally shrill. "Who are you?"
"A visitor," the woman said, her voice echoing oddly around the TARDIS.
"I'm sorry, did you wander in here back on Hark?" Rose asked, trying to compose herself. "I can turn around, get you back home—"
"That will not be necessary. I am not from the planet Hark, Rose Tyler of Midgard."
Rose swallowed, her fingers brushing against one of the controls on T-Too's panel. A strange woman who stows away on her ship and knows her name? Probably in the category of not good.
And then her stomach dropped when she finally analyzed what the woman had just called her.
"Who sent you?" Rose demanded. She tried, and failed, to shove out the desperation in her voice. It can't be, it can't. No, it's too easy…
"How strange that you should go there so soon after the Last Gallifreyan," the woman commented in an off-hand sort of way, looking off to the side as if she was seeing something Rose couldn't. "Even the Greater Ones cannot fix all happenings within the chaos of circumstance, I suppose."
The Last…What the hell is going on?!
"A-Are you talking about the Doctor? Where is he? Can I see him?"
"You do not know this face, nor will you ever. Like I said, it is only coincidence that you will fall into his footsteps."
"Listen, I don't know what the hell you're goin' on about," Rose snapped, frustrated with the lack of answers she was getting. "Are you from Asgard? What do you want? What are you doing here?"
"I am simply here to observe and report. And no, I am not of the Aesir. Please continue your work as if I am not here. The time comes."
Rose was about to tell the woman what exactly she can report and where to send it when the TARDIS faded from her sight.
It took her breath away, the light that swarmed her vision. She vaguely sensed herself fall back onto the console as she struggled against the deafening buzz in her head. It passed as quickly as it came, and she blinked to find the stranger gone and her TARDIS's moniters going haywire.
Pushing down her growing panic and confusion, Rose decided to deal with T-Too first.
Gallifreyan was the most difficult language in the universe to read and understand, according to the Doctor. He tried to teach her decades ago, but gave up when her human mind couldn't wrap around anything beyond memorizing the most basic number system and his name. Rose attempted to teach herself, and had more success than she ever did while completely…normal (she hated thinking of herself as not human), but it had only been a year. And now completely illegible Gallifreyan was passing across the monitor in multicolored lights.
"English, please? Yalksik, even barking, something you can translate for me?!" Rose shouted as she tried to ignore the groaning metal around her. Whatever attacked her brain had apparently affected the TARDIS as well. The screen flickered as T-Too tried to acquiesce. The best she could do was show the Gallifreyan symbol Rose understood as the equivalent to "SOS" and a dizzying set of coordinates. "Right. Great."
Fiddling with the knobs on the side of the monitor, Rose managed to lock on to the location of the signal. What appeared on the screen then made absolutely no sense at first, until she recognized it from the one book that mentioned supernovas and rips in universes. The Doctor once explained the phenomenon as "like one of those little cleaner fishes that attach themselves to sharks. Well, maybe not exactly like that.Well, not at all like that, really."
The woman knew about Midgard, and me, and the Doctor, Rose thought, trying to sort out how all of this was connected. And now I am getting a signal from a bubble universe from god-knows-what about god-bloody-knows what. Oh, this is just a lovely bushel of nonsense, isn't it?
Rose hesitated over the levers and knobs and buttons that would send her and T-Too to the registered location.
"Could be a trap," she mused aloud to an empty control room. Of course, no one responded.
But if the Doctor was there she knew exactly what the two of them would do.
"So," she muttered, pushing up the sleeves on her old blue jacket. "Let's see what mess we can get ourselves into now, shall we?"
0o0o0o0o0o0
Author's Note: The "All Father's medallions" are those circular metal pieces of Loki's and Thor's armor in Thor; the same things that Odin ripped off before banishing Thor.