Chapter Text
It is in the wake of the battle that Sif comes to him, and Loki expects her to.
They are not friends. Sif has always been too much like everything that Loki hates about Asgard, consumed with war and games and bloodsport. She delights in mead and merriment, and worst of all, she's smart enough to see through him far too often. Loki, for his part, has always been too wily and deceptive, too given to pranks and a kind of merriment that leaves room only for himself, and Sif's brand of honor has no patience for such things. He finds her too honest and she finds him too dishonest, and there will never be a middle ground for them.
No, they are not friends. But they are allies.
"Ullr," is all that she says, choked up in a way that she was not in the court, her breastplate still stained with her younger brother's blood. She is more barren here, her face a desert in anticipation of rain, and she stumbles, something Loki has not seen her do since she was but a girl trying to heft a polearm more than half her weight.
He rises from his chair the moment his door bangs open, the guards there already moving in to pull the intruder out -- Lady of the court and part of Thor's hirð though she may be, no one simply barges into the rooms of a member of the royal family -- but Loki waves them off with a short gesture, striding over to the door behind her. This is not a face that Sif means for the world.
Loki shuts the door with a quiet snict, his hand resting upon the cool metal of the handle even as he turns to look at her.
She has cleaned herself. She has taken off the armor of war and she has combed the dark hair that Loki had gifted her long ago(when she had been frustrated with the attention her pretty blonde locks had called to her, when she had asked Loki to use his magics to change it so that the warriors would take her seriously), has dressed herself in a plain silk tunic and leather leggings, the blood and dirt washed from her countenance. Anyone who had seen her in the court that morning would have called her more composed.
Loki knows better.
"Ullr," she says again, as if it is the only word she can reach, and perhaps it is. Loki is no good at comforting -- not because he does not care to be, but because he has never found the words, never found the correct combination of sounds and touch that his own mother seems to have so perfected. He and Sif are not friends, are not close, but this day Sif has lost a brother, and it goes well beyond the normalcy of their dislikes.
She is in pain.
Loki thinks of the condition Thor had been in, burns from the invading fire demons scoring his flesh and his armor, thinks of the oaf's pained but genuine grin of idiotic self-confidence, and feels a familiar pang, the knowledge that his own brother had very nearly not returned as well. He knows not how to comfort, though he wishes to. But Sif is not here for comfort.
"They said that you found him," Loki starts, already knowing they are the wrong words. He has a silvertongue only for lies. The truth is much more difficult.
Sif nods and her red eyes spill over.
"They wish to celebrate. They will-- They will take his body to the boats with the others. They will set fire to wood and tinder and Ullr, and they will send him out into the mists, as if he wasn't alive just a day ago. As if he had never been a boy and a child and a brother." Her hands press to her chest, a blind measure to hold in the ache that threatens to burst out from within. "I sung of valor and glory, I dreamed of such a death -- to fall in battle, full of rage and beauty-- I sung of how wonderful it would be to die thus. They tell me he is in Valhalla and I know I should feel joy, but I-- But I--"
Loki's hand catches against her breastbone.
"You do not have to tell me what it is to feel the outsider," he reminds.
Ullr's death will be celebrated, along with all those others who fell holding back the Muspelheim forces. He will be toasted and sung of, his corpse drunk over until the morning came and he was sent to his glorious rest. His parents would stand proud and Sif would be congratulated for having such a brave brother, and they would not see the way that she would take back every song, take back ever inch of glory and pride, to have her brother home and hale.
"He choked upon his blood," she says, disgust and pain in her voice. "It was not-- There was nothing grand. It was...horrible, and dirty. It was ugly and I couldn't-- I couldn't--"
She shakes her head, something wild in the motion, a creature overwrought, and Loki begins to reach out, seeing the way she falls.
"Sif--"
"I couldn't save him!" And she wails. Her body is a broad wall of muscle made from thousands of afternoons spent sparring and wrestling, her skin a canvas of cuts healed only through her godhood, but she collapses against him as easily as any creature with a broken heart.
Loki remains stiff and still and holds her as best he can.
Later, when her sobs have quieted to a deathly silence, and the first winds of a storm flutter through the windows of Loki's chambers, she stands by the archway to the balcony and stares out at the stars.
"...you can do something, can't you," she says, not asks. There's no question in her voice. "I do not know what it is, but I know that you can do something."
Loki pauses before replying, a certain wariness to his tone.
"You shall have to be more specific, Lady Sif."
She turns away from the storm front to look at him.
"You can save him," she says, and already there is the demand in her tone, the straight-forward need that Loki has always disliked in his brother and his companions. The way that they always wish to take and take and never notice what withers right in front of their eyes.
If it were Thor, Loki would not do it. He loves Thor far more than Sif, but he owes Sif in a way that he shall never owe Thor.
"You must know how much you ask of me," he says with some incredulity. It is almost too much.
But she shakes her head.
"I know little of the magics that you wield, but I know that you can-- I know that you can do it." In her eyes the expectation is already there.
Loki stands up, folding his arms behind his back as he begins to pace, his expression a scowl. He has sworn things such as this into his past, has wiped away the shame and the denial, has hidden the pain that Sif thinks she can understand but cannot. This is something that Loki has promised himself he would never do again, never go through again, and the emptiness of his bed these last few centuries holds testament to that. He gives her a measured look, disliking that she dares to play word games with this.
"You may not know how I shall perform the feat, but you know what you ask of me. Do not lie to me, not in the chambers of the god of lies." He stares at her straight, his pacing coming to a still. "If you ask this of me as weregild, I shall pay it, but do not do me that disrespect."
Sif watches him, her jaw clenching, and she swallows with a soft click. Loki has seen her face down monsters many times her size and stand still as a stone, but now she wavers. Now, she trembles, and he realizes that she thinks that he will say no. And oh, how he wishes that he could.
Finally, she lowers her gaze, deferring to him in a way that she has never done before and will never do again, deferring in a way that even Thor does not receive. Loki can see the painful shame upon her face, and she has never had to do this before. She has never had to lower her head and ask a snake to do something that all her people would hold in contempt. She has never been on the outside.
Death was not something to be cheated, to their people. It was a friend to be greeted with open arms. To run from it, to deny it, was a dishonor.
"...I apologize," she says, finally, and from her lowered face her eyes tick up slowly. "I should not have--... I am sorry." She presses her lips together momentarily. "...but you will do it?"
Loki scowls. This is a price he never thought to be asked to pay, a price upon his body. Upon his soul.
He thinks of his children, of the three lives that none know of, that are hidden even from Heimdall. The children that fed upon his blood, that lived upon his breath. He thinks of the children that he loved more than he loved anything in all the worlds, and the children he had to leave behind. He thinks of the pain and he thinks of the gall she has to ask this of him, she, who is the only person who knows.
But she is the person he came to, when he was young and confused and feeling life stirring within his belly. She is the one he came to, not Eir or his mother, and certainly not Thor or his father. It was Sif, the only person who knows what it is to be not what others thought you, the woman who dressed as a man, who could understand what it meant that Loki wished to learn magic and not the sword. It was Sif that would keep such a secret, would know without even having to ask why Loki had to hide this.
And it was Sif who had suggested Midgard and saved his child's life.
He does not like Sif, and she does not like him. They are not friends.
But they are allies.
He feels the pain and the weight of this already, feels it press against his shoulders, and he wonders if he can bear up under this much, under this much more. He thinks of Thor and of his family and how it will be many years until he sees them again, and he looks at Sif and says:
"...I will do it."
-----
Except Loki stands in an empty hallway filled with corpses that do not stir. Instead they wait beneath their white sheets, wait upon their pedestals and altars for the morning to come, and for the fire and the dawn to take them to Valhalla.
Ullr is not difficult to find. Of the fallen, he comes from the most noble house, and while young, his family connections are more than enough to warrant his place upon a golden bed, carvings of his house motifs and patrons interwoven with curling vines and the proud wings of Valkyries. He rests beneath a silken shroud, dotted with his mother's tears, and waits for his final day to come.
But whatever day that is, Loki knows that it will not be tomorrow.
"You must understand," he'd said to Sif. "It will not be your brother. I cannot bring new life to the dead, such magics are beyond even I."
"But you can bring him back," she'd insisted.
"...yes. His heart and his soul shall live on. But he will not remember you. He will not remember any of this. He shall be born new and untouched. He will begin a new life and not call you sister."
The pause then had been painful, a goodbye that Sif had not been fully willing to make. But she'd nodded. She'd accepted, even if she did not yet fully understand how difficult that would be.
Ullr will not pass to Valhalla tomorrow with the other warriors felled and fallen. His life here on Asgard will end, but his life will not.
Loki draws a dagger, beautiful and sharp, a gift from his brother a long time ago, a cherished tool for him, and one of the few weapons that he has not discarded in his quest for knowledge. The handle is smooth, worn from use, but the edge still perfect, even after centuries, but even such a blade will not be enough to saw through bone, not the breast bone of a god, at least. Loki imbues it with his fire, hot as stars.
He will have to work quickly, to not be seen, and to not raise suspicion. Even as a prince his excuse to the guards outside that he wishes to view the bodies will not hold for more than candlemark.
It is gruesome work, ugly work, by Asgardian standards, but Loki has never let such things hold him back. Magic is made of the gut and the mind, made from the blood, and this is not the first cadaver he has broken into -- but this time not with the curiosity of boyhood, wishing to know the truth of things. This time the face of the dead man is one he knows, and he tries not to look. As cold as some find him, he is not made of ice. Ullr was naught more than a casual friend, but it was not but a whisper of time ago that he held the boy's sobbing sister.
And in the end, Loki finds little joy in death, bestowed or taken.
When he is finished he closes the wound with magic. They will not be looking too closely tomorrow, but he still can leave no signs of blood. A corpse bleeds little, though, and besides Loki's hands, there isn't much to worry about. The boy, of course, has little to worry about anymore. That his chest is broken and vacant inside matters not. He has enough wounds already that none shall notice that one has been widened slightly, that his ribs have been disturbed. They will merely think it the result of the spear they removed from his side.
Loki cleans one hand with water he conjures into being, then shifts the shroud back over the body, leaving it just as he found it.
Well. Mostly.
Loki looks at the precious heart that waits in his palm, cradled carefully, and he can feel the pulse of its life energy, the careening light that spreads through the threads of the universe, glints off of the edges of the stars. The power that such a heart, true and good and brave, holds.
The magic that Loki could wield with such a sacrifice would be great. But that is not his intention.
He glances around before gently slipping the organ into his otherspace. He washes his second hand and takes a steadying breath, preparing himself to walk past the guards once more and return to his chambers.
He will not join the feasts tonight. He will not join the drinking. He knows already that his brother will plead to know his reasons on the morrow, and he knows that the Einherjar will look at him as if he insults their mothers, but that is not his concern. He will go to the shores of Ífingr tomorrow with all the others. He will stand by the waves and he shall watch the boats cast out into the endless sea of the cosmos, watch them burn their way into the sunrise, and all the while none will know that one of those bodies is naught but flesh and bone.
None will know that one of those warriors goes not to Valhalla, or that Loki carries a secret within his belly, just as he has carried them before.
And in a few days, when Loki disappears and does not return for many years, none will think anything of it.
After all, he has done it before.