Work Text:
The same gray light filters through the high windows of the cafe, but it is gentler this time, unobtrusive and forgiving. Outside, thunder rolls in a velvet baritone and she is suddenly heavy with sadness, the absence of a once-familiar booming peal of laughter cutting her like a wound.
She blinks, the warm wooden walls and plushy chairs sliding back into focus, and with them, a man in the corner, slouched at one of the little mismatched tables, his long legs almost comically spread out before him. Chin resting on his palm, he stares distantly at nothing in particular, or perhaps at the light drizzle that mists the parking lot in a soft fog.
His hair has grown out slightly, she notices, though it resembles a shock of wild flames more than a deliberate style. He’s dressed much in the same manner as their last meeting: worn black leather jacket, torn black jeans, and a rather moldy-looking dark green scarf. His boots are ridiculous--gleaming black pikes with cruelly-glinting buckles. She wonders how much they cost. (Who is she kidding? He probably stole them.)
He does not notice her immediately, and in his unguarded contemplation, he almost seems harmless, if not a bit ill. There’s something worryingly fragile about him, something painful in the thin wrists and bony fingers and the slow, mindless way he stirs his coffee. His eyes look almost milky. Vacant.
But in an instant, his gaze snaps to hers and sharpens with a fierceness she remembers all too well--
--and then it softens and blooms into verdant warmth, the fine lines at the corners of his eyes gathering as he smiles, unguarded and guileless.
“Hi,” he says brightly as she approaches his table. The voice belies his weathered appearance--he sounds... young.
“Hello,” she replies, tucking her hair behind her ears and shifting her bag on her shoulder.
He stands and, like a dutiful teenager on his first date, pulls out the chair opposite his for her. His smile--a real smile--is still firmly in place, and one of his missing teeth in the back has been replaced with what looks like a gold crown. It flashes at her like a fang. Or a wink.
She studies him, expression now carefully blank. His smile falters slightly.
“You want something?” he asks, scratching the back of his neck and then jerking his thumb towards the counter.
“I can get it--”
“No, let me,” he insists with strange solemnity. She does not see him move, but suddenly, a second drink sits across from hers--frothy and light green and steaming.
She stares at it. “Did you pay for that?”
“‘Course,” he says, and for once, there is no smirk, no satisfied smugness. His gaze is direct.
“This is...weird,” she says honestly as she sinks down into the chair. He joins her.
“You don’t like it? Matcha frappu...whatever? Figured you would--”
“No, no, it’s…” She blows out a sigh. “No, I...do. Like it, I mean. It’s my favorite, actually; how did you know? Lucky guess?”
“You can call it that.”
The corners of her lips twitch and she wishes they wouldn’t.
“Well. Thank you,” she says, feeling as if she’d missed a step going down the stairs.
“Sure.”
Silence stretches before them for a few moments, tense and awkward. Once, they’d filled it effortlessly with mindless chatter or furious rows or flyting that always ended in their bodies pressed desperately together.
There was a silence at the end, of course, yet it wasn’t this curious blankness; it was fit to burst with rage and a maw of loss and the ever-unspoken, thrumming why?
It should have ended there. It was supposed to end there, wasn’t it? All of them gone, the book closed, the last page burned and finished. She’d watched him burn in it, mouth wide in a howl, tongue aflame, eyes white with fire. She’d felt herself dissolve in it. Gone.
But on it went.
Unanswered.
“You know, I should have looked here first,” he says.
“What?”
“I should have looked for you here first,” he repeats. “It suits you. It’s...active enough but removed. Pretty. Quiet if you need it.”
“I need it,” she says dryly.
He breathes out a little chuckle and looks off to the side, arms crossed. She follows his gaze.
Her throat catches.
Two boys, no more than three years old, sit at their mother’s feet, chattering indistinctly as they push toy trucks about on the floor. They are very clearly brothers--twin shocks of dark hair, matching dark eyes, identical little giggles. Dimpled hands, petaled lips.
Amma, Amma...
She grips the edge of the table and stares fixedly into her drink, the green liquid frothing like seafoam.
Sharp inhale across the table.
He stares raptly at the two boys, and when one of them reaches up towards the mother’s scalding cup of coffee, he is suddenly there, scooting it out of reach. The mother looks up from her laptop, bewildered--she hadn’t heard anyone approach, how--?
He gestures to the cup, to the child in explanation. Flashes that old, charming smile. The woman puts one hand to her heart and laughs in relief, picking up the boy and ruffling his hair. The other quickly begs for the same and she obliges, offering her thanks to the tall stranger. With a polite nod, he saunters back to his seat--but woman does not see his expression fall, his eyes glittering too brightly, his mouth pressed too firmly closed.
He sits. Rakes a hand through his riotous hair. She feels the full, raw weight of their last meeting and does not know whether to leave or to wrap him in her arms. The ambivalence almost infuriates her.
With a sniff, he roughly downs the last of the black dregs in his cup.
“What are you doing?” she asks quietly.
“Trying not to gag,” he says, wincing as he glances at the empty cup. “Needed cream.”
“You know what I mean. What are you doing? What do you want?”
He stares at her, expression blank for a moment. And then it erupts into those fine lines as he laughs, low and hollow.
“I don’t know,” he says, shaking his head and crossing his arms across his thin chest. “I don’t fucking know.”
“You always used to know.” She can’t completely purge the acidity from her voice.
“That’s the tragedy of it all, isn’t it?” His face is a curious mingling of bemusement and desolation. “I was always ten steps ahead. It was so...nothing was ever ambiguous. I mean it was, of course, but only because I wanted it to be. Ambiguity by design. And now it’s just…”
He closes his eyes briefly and sighs.
“I’m tired, Siggy. I can’t...I’m just so tired.”
He says it so simply that something in her breaks. She hasn’t heard that name in a millennium…
She wants to reach out and take his hand in hers, to lean close, to weep with him again in a brief approximation of their former closeness.
Rain drums on the window to their right. White noise.
She sips her drink.
He seems to expect this now, her aloofness. Or perhaps he is too far gone to care, for he absently watches water trickle down the windowpane and with that same youthful directness, asks, “How do you do it?”
She surveys him over the rim of her cup, the warm, earthy liquid filling her mouth and coating the walls of her throat.
“I have to,” she answers.
“Do you, though?”
“Yes,” she answers firmly. “Resignation isn’t an option. I’ve tried.”
His expression sharpens. Concern?
“What?” She cocks a brow as she takes another sip. “You made a Hollywood production of it; the least I could do was follow it up with a Broadway spinoff.”
His mouth works wordlessly for an instant, and then he lets out an incredulous chuckle.
“I… why? It -- never mind. That’s a stupid question.”
“It is a stupid question.”
“I guess I just...never thought--”
“I’d do it? Why not? You tried.”
“ Tried being the operative word,” he says wryly.
When she does not respond, his demeanor grows uncharacteristically grave...then again, perhaps it’s not uncharacteristic for him now.
She truly does not know this figure, she realizes, this worn shadow with a cracked voice whose silver tongue has long since turned to ash.
A part of her--a very naive and very ancient part--feels immeasurable sorrow over the loss of those quick smirks and quicker words, expertly slick in the spring air as he shot irreverent barbs at whoever would listen.
She’d been listening. And he was absolutely spellbinding. A walking abomination: elegant yet untamed, tender one moment and vile the next. Something predatory had lurked beneath his wiry beauty, a sinister brilliance in his sharp nostrils and keen eyes and the knowing set of his mouth. There was nothing of the massive brute strength of the others in him, nothing at all. He was serpentine. Mercurial.
His hair had hung to his waist then, a great mass of fire woven with leaves and trinkets and braids. She’d loved it immediately, loved the way it fell past his corded bare shoulders and swung pendulously as he walked, loved the way the sun lit it ablaze.
She hadn’t immediately loved him, of course; he simply fascinated and repelled her, a mythos beyond her understanding. She’d thought herself beyond his notice. She often went unnoticed and told herself she preferred it that way. Dutiful. That was what she was best at, wasn’t it? Duty, honor, fidelity.
“Oh, fuck that,” he’d told her that night beneath the ash tree, and then for the first time, he'd pressed his wicked lips to hers.
She’d never felt anything like it, that urgent need; she’d thought him a conqueror like the others, that he would demand to own her, silence her, command her, but he simply...wanted. Needed.
“Why me?” she’d asked him later as they lay beneath the tree’s massive branches.
Hands behind his head, he studied the stars that winked conspiratorially between the leaves.
“You listen,” he said so simply that every bit of malice he’d ever orchestrated seemed inconsqeuential. She’d kissed him again then, deeply and truly, and she loved the rich sweetness of his breath, loved his tongue flicking hers in an invitation.
They were done for after that, of course. She began to crave the secrecy of it--the furtive glances in the mead hall; his tricks erupting at the most inopportune moments (she quickly learned to stifle her laughter with a handkerchief); his boundless energy and his loud cackling--the purest sound she knew.
His zest was infectious, and he took particular delight in her increasingly inventive additions to what he called his “blueprints”--elaborate schematics for ruses and tricks.
“Vanish the boar every time Thor tries to cut into it at the feast,” she’d said offhandedly as they reclined by the hearth. Loki blinked up at her, so comically flummoxed at the abrupt suggestion that he’d burst into hysterics.
“What?” she’d said. “Listen, it’s a viable solution. Every time he tries to carve it, it will just disappear. Except--ooh! Make it so only he can see that it’s disappearing; everyone else will just think he can’t carve a boar. That his aim’s off. Asgard’s mightiest warrior can slay the beasts plaguing Midgard but he can’t cut off a piece of a dead pig for dinner. And then--” she’d had to raise her voice over Loki’s howls of glee-- “when he finally cuts into it, it should just...explode. We won’t hurt him, of course, but make sure to get the guts everywhere-- yes, even on me, otherwise it’ll look suspicious. God, you’d think you’re new to this.”
They hadn’t stopped laughing for two hours.
And the boar had exploded quite nicely, much to Thor’s thundering fury.
Sigyn was drunk with love. Kisses, nectar-sweet or burning like fire beneath the ash tree, in the gardens, in the rivers; their hands insistently roaming, entwined and slick with sweat. Every insult the others hurled his way cut her like a dagger, every recompense they demanded for his slights sent her rushing to his defense--though of course, their anger was justified. A “foul deceiver” he might have been, but she couldn’t find it in her heart to care.
He listened to her. That, perhaps more than anything else, proved a wonder. Very few cared to listen--she was not a shieldmaiden, nor graced with Freyja's legendary beauty, nor gifted with great wealth. She was simply “faithful, dutiful, obedient.”
“I am bored out of my mind,” she’d told him as they lounged by a shore in Alfheim. Cherry blossoms filtered gently down into the lake, the tiny pink petals bobbing in the water like merry little fae.
“I know,” he said. He caught one of the drifting flowers as it floated by on the breeze and twirled it between his thumb and forefinger. “So why stay?”
She shook her head, feeling foolishly helpless.
“Siggy, you can tell me, you know,” he’d said gently.
“I suppose I just...it’s always been expected of me.” The sun was warm and gentle on her exposed skin but she felt only heated frustration. “My mother is a handmaiden; so are my sisters, my cousins. The Norns fated us to serve and to serve well. But it’s…”
“Dull?”
“ Oh, dull doesn’t even begin to…” She huffed and flopped down on her back. The sky was a vivid, forceful blue. If she stared at it long enough, it felt like a blanket pressed against her face. “I might as well wear a muzzle, for all they care to hear me.”
“Why do you care?”
She shot him a sidelong glance. “What?”
He studied the twirling pink blossom between his fingers. “Why do you care what they think?”
“I...well, I have to, don’t I?”
He cocked a brow. “Do you?”
“Yes! I’m Frigga’s handmaiden. I have to care. I have to remain in their good graces.”
“Who says?”
She let out a decidedly unladylike snort.
“No, no, I’m serious,” he’d continued. “Who says you have to give a damn about what they think?”
“I...it’s just how things are done!”
“But why?” He sounded almost petulant. “Who writes these rules? Who has the final say? The old man?”
She couldn’t help but sit up then, surveying the surroundings with no small amount of paranoia. “Loki--”
He waved one hand dismissively. “He’s off gallivanting in Midgard, he can’t hear us. Tell me, Siggy. Why do you care? What’s stopping you from telling them all to fuck themselves?”
“It isn’t as if I hate them, Loki, I don’t want to--”
“So don’t hate them,” he’d said as if it was the simplest solution in the world. “Or do. It’s up to you. That’s the point, isn’t it? There’s no seidr binding you here, is there?”
“No, of course not.”
“Then why bother if you’re miserable?”
“I’m not miserable, I’m only--”
“Yes, you are.”
“No, I’m not!”
“Yes, you are. Unless you actually enjoy waiting on them hand and foot so they can continue preening for all eternity.”
“You’re making it sound like I want...I don’t know, revenge or something--”
“I think a part of you does --no, wait, listen to me--I think a part of you resents them for expecting you to lose yourself for their betterment. You can’t stand their self-glorification, their waste and extravagance, their arrogance. You want to be noticed; you want something of greater significance. But they care only for themselves.”
She raised her brows, mouth quirking in a grin. “Projecting much?”
He flashed one of those quick smiles that was at once delicious and vaguely sinister. Too many teeth, she thought.
“Possibly,” he said. “But am I wrong?”
She considered this quietly. “No.”
“Then why stay?”
“I…”
“You’re scared.”
“No, I’m not!” she said indignantly.
“Of course you are. I would be.”
She balked at that. Absolutely nothing frightened him--not the threat of banishment, nor of torture, nor of death (Tyr threatened him with the latter at least once a day), and most especially, not of judgment. He was unapologetically, ferociously himself.
“Well, why not?” he asked her with a shrug. “Suppose I’d been raised like you--to serve, to keep my mouth shut, to stay in the shadows so another sun could shine. But all along I knew I’d had enough, knew I had to leave, to...stop it, somehow. It would fly in the face of everything I’d ever been taught. More frightening still, I would know I could. At any minute, I could just...go. That’s what real power is, you see. Agency. Free will. It’s terrifying, really.” He paused, studying that too-blue sky. “Like you’re mid-air and you’ve suddenly lost your wings and no one can keep you afloat but yourself.”
She stared at him, feeling both unmoored and moved.
“You can do it, though,” he said quietly.
She scoffed. “Because it’s just that easy.”
“It is. Well…” He cocked his head to the side in consideration. “Actually doing it is. The leaving, I mean. You leave. Simple. It’s the aftermath that’s difficult.”
They studied each other, her mouth dipped in a frown, his betraying only a hint of his usual smirk. He looked impossibly alluring then, all twinkling eyes and fiery hair ablaze in the sunlight.
“...Fine,” she huffed out. “Suppose you’re right--”
“I am,” he chirped.
“--and I do it.. Leave everything. I can’t just...I don’t know... wander for eternity. Where am I supposed to go?”
He was silent for a moment, studying the delicate flower between his fingers. When he flicked his gaze to hers, he almost looked...anxious.
“...With me,” he said finally.
She stared at him, dumbstruck for a moment before she managed, “With--what?”
His eyes locked onto hers. Vivid, crystalline green.
“Come with me,” he said softly. “I want...Siggy, I want to be with you.”
She let out a breathless, stuttering laugh-- at the intensity in his unwavering expression, at the blooming sensation that erupted in her chest.
“What--what are you--you can’t be serious--”
“I’m completely serious,” he said. “...For once.”
She blew out a breath and shook her head. She wasn’t upset, exactly, but something about the openness of his gestures threw her off-balance; he was silver-tongued, speaking always in circles and jests, wit as sharp as the tip of a blade. But never, never this sweet, open simplicity.
He meant it.
“Why?” she asked.
“Because--Siggy….I...” He shook his head. “You’re better than this! You’re better than waiting on the others hand and foot for the rest of your life. You’re interesting. You’re honest and--and quick, and you make me laugh, and you...you listen, you actually listen... and….you’re patient and little things delight you. Anything can delight you. It’s--I--”
She felt a traitorous knot in her throat. She’d never once seen him like this--tongue-tied, fidgeting, nervous.
He let out one of those breathless laughs, almost helplessly. “I’ve never met anyone, anywhere like you. I...I want to be with you. I want you to come with me.”
Her eyes stung, and that maddening voice of wisdom that sounded suspiciously like her mother yelped in protest.
You know what is expected of you. You know your duties.
She did.
He is dangerous. Flighty. Absolute chaos.
He was.
There is no turning back from this. Go with him and you’re branding yourself an outlier. You will betray your family, your realm, yourself. You will never again have the life you have now.
It was true.
Don’t. You. Dare.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
He exhaled in disbelief, took her face in his hands, and kissed her fiercely.
“You mean it?” he asked when he pulled away, suddenly cautious.
Afraid.
She couldn’t bear it. Pressing her forehead against his, she nodded. Let him feel it, this oath. He needs to feel it.
“Yes,” she said firmly. “I mean it.”
His eyes swam, breath shaky and stuttering. That, too, seemed off --she had never seen him thus, unmoored, fragile--
“ I love you, ” he whispered reverently.
“And I love you,” she echoed at once, burying her face in his hair. He smelled of rain and wet pine and hearth smoke and she never wanted it to end.
“Where are we going?” she asked again. His fingers dug into her back as if he feared she would vanish.
“Anywhere,” he said reverently. “Anywhere.”
“...out of here?”
She starts as if torn from a deep sleep. Like waves whispering against the sand, the cafe slides back into focus, and the vibrant figure she’d just been embracing on the shores of Alfheim dissolves into rag and bone. Gaunt of face, thin of limb, withered, wasted.
Gone.
But no. The eyes…
...There he is.
“I’m sorry,” she manages. “What were you saying?”
He stands and jerks his head towards the door, a line of worry between his brows.
“I asked if you wanted to get out of here,” he says. “Go somewhere else?”
She rises, and if her answering smile is small, it comes of its own accord.
“Yes,” she says, “But I’m choosing where this time.”
He grins, lopsided and scarred, but for a moment, she swears it resurrects something monumental.