Work Text:
Then said Gangleri: 'What shall come to pass afterward, when all the world is burned, and dead are all the gods and all the champions and all mankind? Have ye not said before, that every man shall live in some world throughout all ages?"
THE GYLFAGINNING
She's on the bus when she sees him for the first time: a tall man, lean, his black hair combed back from his face, green scarf tied neatly at his throat, gloved hands thrust into the pockets of his overcoat. He is swaying with the motion of the bus, feet apart, as it lumbers slowly through the rush-hour traffic and there is something to the set of his shoulders that is so familiar to her she almost rises from her seat and calls out to get him to turn his face back to her, so she can know for sure, but when she tries the syllables tangle on her tongue and she bites the inside of her cheek with frustration. She knows him; she would swear it by great Odin's raven on her mother's grave.
Police lights flash red and blue beside the window and she glances aside, just for a second, to see what's happened, and when she looks back the man is gone.
By the time the bus reaches her stop, she's forgotten about him completely.
She's working as an overnight security guard in the parking lot at one of the city hospitals in what was supposed to be only a temporary job but which seems, at this point, two months later, frighteningly permanent. It's not the other guards she minds, or even the work, which is mind-numbingly boring and punctuated only rarely by brief bursts of excitement. And she likes the radio at her hip, the weight of the flashlight in her hands, the lonely winter smell of the city at night. But when she rolls over in bed during her mornings off and her hands close on faded cotton sheets rather than the heft of (something metal and lively and deadly) whatever it is she's looking for, the sharp ache of longing that digs into her chest tells her she's doing this all wrong. (Doing what all wrong? a nagging voice in the back of her head asks her, but she pushes it away.)
She is doing her rounds when she hears a soft scratching in the distance. She freezes, her shoes crunching on gravel, and listens: someone is trying to jimmy open a car window. Quietly, she threads her way through the rows of cars, rolling her flashlight into her hand, and she waits until she is nearly on top of him before she flicks it on and barks, "Hey!"
"Shit—" the thief says, face pale in the beam of the flashlight, and he makes as if to run but without a second thought she takes him down in a flying tackle, slamming him to the pavement so hard she knocks the breath out of them both. The thief—a boy, really—writhes beneath her, cursing wildly when he can finally draw breath, but she wriggles up and drives a knee into his lower back and twists his arms behind him until finally, panting, he gives up and goes limp.
"Good boy," she says, patting him on the shoulder and rolling off him as her fellow security guards run up beside her.
"Jesus, girl," Tommy says above her head as Luc drags the thief up, pinioning his arms at his sides. "Where'd you learn how to do that?"
The real answer is throttling her throat but she coughs to clear it and says, "Wrestling team, back in high school."
Luc whistles. "Glad I'm on your side."
"Ass," she says affectionately, and she pulls the zipper of her jacket back up to her chin and wipes her hands free of gravel and lets him help her to her feet.
As Tommy pushes the thief on ahead of them she hears a low chuckle somewhere in the darkness and a whisper that hisses "liar" in her ear. She shines her flashlight in the direction of the noise, but there is no one to be found.
Her heart goes sick and leaden with the weight of something half-remembered, and the breeze ghosting at the back of her neck is almost like the press of someone's ice-cold lips on her skin (leaning out on the railing of the balcony with Asgard spreading out glittering beneath them, her shoulders bared in the fine drapery of her robes, his clever fingers drifting up over her skin, the way she tightened her fingers in the collar of his tunic so tight her thumbnail scratched his throat).
She shakes her head sharply and hurries after Tommy and Luc.
When she gets off work at six in the morning and stumbles her way home she pulls the curtains tight against the morning light and falls into bed.
When she sleeps, she dreams of
fire and death, of the great reaching branches of Yggdrasil trembling with horror as the battle rages around her. Sif lifts her sword and braces herself for the new onslaught but as the enemy smashes into their line someone falls beside her, spraying hot blood across her neck and cheek, and she forces back a sob and pushes her shaking shieldarm up again against the battering foe and thrusts with her sword, feeling her blade slice into flesh—
She wakes in a sweat, tears wet on her face.
Breakfast—dinner—is eaten at her favourite diner down the block. The line cook, a jolly man with a huge red beard and an even bigger appetite, knows her and her tastes and exactly how much spice she likes in her potatoes, and there is coffee on the counter in front of her before she even sits down at her stool.
"The usual," she calls, and gets a cheerful roar in return. The diner is almost empty, silent and still in the winter-pale sunshine but for a businessman at the far end of the counter. She ignores him and passes her hands over her face, just once, still shaken by her dream, before she props her fists under her chin and waits, feet dangling idly; but on a whim she flits her eyes sideways to look at the other customer.
"Oh!" she says with surprise. He is the man from the bus—she would know him anywhere—can't imagine why she forgot him in the first place. Her stomach uncoils, hot and spreading and giddy, and she has no idea why.
The man turns his head to her, slow, deliberate. He smiles, thin-lipped and slow, heavy lids lifting lazily over pale eyes. "Beg pardon?" he says, and her breath catches.
"Sorry," she says, fumbling over the words. She colours, and splays the fingers of the hand she's still leaning on across her cheek to hide the blush. "Sorry. Just thought you were someone I knew."
"Seems to be a lot of that going around lately," he murmurs. When he tilts his head just right, it looks as though the silhouette of his head thrown into shadow on the wall behind is graced with two tall curving horns. A trick of the light, no doubt.
"Hmm?" she says, and he shakes his head nevermind and turns back to whatever it was he was doing, but she finds she cannot look away from him.
He is playing with a deck of cards. They flash in his hands as he shuffles them and spreads them across the counter, moving them in some arcane combination that seems to make sense to him, flipping them over and dealing more cards out from where they seem to be hidden up his sleeve.
"You're good," she says with some surprise. When he glances back up at her, half-smiling, she realises she's not supposed to be staring at random strangers in diners and turns hastily to the plate of waffles the waitress has left in front of her and begins to load them with syrup, plying her knife and fork industriously. She is, she discovers, absolutely ravenous.
The man leaves soon after that, tossing a few bills onto the counter, twining his green scarf around his throat. He takes his cards with him, slipping the deck back up his sleeve, but she sees out of the corner of her eye as he leaves (his shining shoes clicking against the linoleum) that there is one card left on the counter, half stuck under his still-full mug of tea.
She waits until he is gone before she gets up from her stool and snatches it up, sliding the card facedown into her syrup-sticky palm.
When she turns it over, the jack of spades grins up at her.
Since she has tomorrow off she takes her clothes down to the laundromat when she's done her dinner. She's too sleepy to sort them so she shoves as big a load as she can into the washer and slams the door shut, but when she goes to put her quarters into the machine the mechanism sticks and she jams her fingers trying to force the slider in.
She swears and slams the flat of her hand into the dryer nearby. "Ow," she says indignantly, sucking her fingers as she sits in one of the chairs by the wall, but at least the damn thing is running now.
She doesn't notice that she's left the metal lid of the dryer buckled and twisted with the force of her palm.
As the washing machine rumbles she pulls her knees up to her chest and watches the muted TV across the room. It's an emergency news report about the latest crisis averted by the Avengers. They've been sort of aimless these days, she thinks, still recovering from the loss of [ ]; good for them, then, if they're back to business. The world needs some bright shining thing to look up to, these days—
But the news report ends and flicks back to an old episode of Wheel of Fortune and her eyes begin to drift closed, lulled asleep by the whir-THUR whir-THUD of the washer, and she dreams that
she is alone on the floor the Allfather's empty echoing throne room, her sword on the cracked tiles at her side and her shield strapped to her back, scrambling to get her metal cuffs off her wrists as her body screeches in pain. Stupid, she tells herself, stupid; stupid to get caught in the blast of fire from those fell creatures that are swarming the palace halls, stupid to let her hands get burnt. She needs them, needs them to fight, needs them to help, but now the metal is half-melted into her flesh and won't listen to her scrabbling fingers to get off—"Lady Sif," someone says, kneeling before her, but she is blind with pain and his freezing hands are closing around her forearms and stripping away the metal before she even realises who it is.
"Loki," she breathes, shuddering out a sigh of relief as she lifts her eyes to his.
"As you see," he says. There is a glimmer of scarlet in the furthest reaches of his gaze. His fingers still encircle her wrists, sending blessedly soothing tentacles of cold up her arms; his lips are blue.
And then he smiles, and his face flushes back to normal.
"What are you doing here?" Sif asks tiredly, disengaging his hands and sitting back away from him; his lips press together for a second, and she sees something like disappointment on his face before it shutters closed to her again.
"Same as you," Loki says smoothly. "What are you doing in here?"
"Trying to find your brother," she says, cradling her still-smarting hands in her lap. The ceiling creaks ominously above them, and dust settles in her hair. She spits blood. "Or the Warriors Three. I lost track of them hours ago. Have you seen them?"
He hesitates and then says, "No."
She goes still. Something booms outside; she hears screams of agony and the grating screech of one of the creatures. "Loki," she says.
He looks down.
"More lies?" she says, but he doesn't answer.
"Loki," she says pleadingly, and he looks at her, and his hands rise to cup her cheeks; Loki Silvertongue made speechless, Loki Laufeyson with his eyes full of grief and terror.
The washer bangs violently to announce the end of its cycle and she jerks awake. The sun is setting outside and the television is playing Jeopardy now. Her heart is cold and small.
She sees the man this time when she is waiting at her bus stop for her next shift, standing by the lightpost, his hands in his pockets again and his face tipped skyward. She rips her earbuds out of her ears and flies at him, snagging the crook of his arm and dragging him backwards; he seems content to be dragged. She shoves him up into an alcove in the bank façade beside the ATM and snarls, "Who are you, and who are you to me?"
"Oh, Sif," the man says, lashes low over his hungry pale eyes. "You already know, don't you?"
His hands brush over her chin, her cheeks, and
he kisses her and it is more like a bite, here at the end of all things, his tears mingled with hers, her blood in his mouth. His fingers rake through her singed and tangled hair and then pull, sweet and sharp; she shudders, and the soft soles of her boots slip once on the tiles of the stairs to the throne before she finds purchase and is able to lift herself over and into him, one of her still-aching hands fisting into the wide folds of his green cloak where it is spread across the steps, the other sliding up his chest. His eyes are bright and wide and fixed on hers as his hips thrust flush up into hers and her eyes sting with smoke and the edge of the step cuts into her knee but she fits herself against him as the columns at the far side of the throne room begin to crumble and collapse and she buries her face in his neck and the twinned thrumming of their hearts as they move in tandem is almost, almost enough to drown out the groaning roar of destruction as Asgard falls around them.
Sif gasps, head snapping back so fast it almost hits the brick wall, but Loki's hand is gently cradling her skull in anticipation, his other arm snaked around her waist to hold her upright.
"Loki," she says, and he is smiling.
"Hello," he says.
She presses a hand to her chest. "That was," she says. "Did we – "
"Mmm," Loki says, his smile now a grin.
"The poets never wrote about that," Sif says.
"Well, they wouldn't, would they?" Loki says. He sighs, but his eyes are sly. "We are not pretty enough for them, I'm afraid."
"That is one way of putting it," Sif says, and then she punches him in the arm as hard as she can. "What did you take so long for?"
He shrugs and does not answer, saying, instead, "This won't be easy."
"It never is," she says. "Thor?"
"Thor," he agrees.
"Your brother," she says, and they shake their heads together. She looks up at him, their bodies still pressed together, and she says, "Can I trust you, then?"
"Yes, of course," he lies. She bites her lip against a smile, and he says, brows lifting, "Onward?"
"Yes," she says, and then she flexes her fingers, and says, "Do you happen to know where my sword's got to?"
Loki laughs, a merry peal that rings in the air. "First things first," he says. "We have a few more stops to make."
"Ominous," she says,
"Not for the Lady Sif," he says, and she says, "Onward, then."