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Loki doesn’t know he cries in his sleep.
No. Cries is too strong a word. It’s nothing dramatic and Verity initially thought it was allergies that caused his eyes to leak. Indeed, rubbing gummed up lashes in the morning, he complained about dust or dirt or something in the air and muttered to himself to get someone in to check it. However, she cannot reconcile herself to the thought of a god with allergies and, indeed, after the first few times, she witnessed the effect herself and the changes that accompany it: rapid breathing, restless sleep, and fretting with the blankets, which are eventually tossed aside.
She doesn’t know if it happens every night, but it happens nearly every night that she’s there, which could mean that it’s a regular occurrence, or that she’s the cause.
She doesn’t think it’s her – it’s what she’d like to believe – and she’s never been asked to leave. Her relationship with Loki is a bit… odd, at least to her. She supposes the current term is ‘friends with benefits’ although even that’s too specific a description for what they are. She stays over frequently, but seldom for sex, even if sex is sometimes involved. It is, by agreement, an open relationship, ostensibly because she shouldn’t be tied down by someone so terrible for her and because he’s a god with a known libido, but Verity doesn’t see anyone else – only partly because she loses patience quickly with anyone who tries, and lies, to woo her – and neither does Loki. He could, she knows, and he would, he just hasn’t and doesn’t.
Nor does he push her when she stays, although he makes advances if he’s uncertain of her mood. She’s become adept at turning them down without making them seem a bother when she doesn’t feel up to it. He never complains, but that might be because she lavishes attention on him even when physical intimacy is not involved. It isn’t a conscious thing; she just knows when people need a kind word, a thoughtful gesture, or a meaningful touch even when they deny it. It grates on her, so she compliments, offers drinks, and holds hands for the sake of her own comfort.
Mostly, though, she listens, and talks, and listens. Loki is a god and full of himself and full of words about himself that he likes to hear spoken with grand gestures, and so she listens. But he’s also genuinely curious, and so she talks while he watches her, taking in not only her words, but her posture and her tone, sometimes cocking his head like the world’s largest puppy, sometimes folding in on himself, limbs intertwined, like a hunched and ancient serpent.
And then she listens again because Loki is a god and full of words, but not always words about himself. What he says about the world is both transcendent and naïve and, in her presence, true. Strangely skewed, too, especially on the nights that he wakes in the dark to salt crusted eyelids and twisted blankets cast aside. He sits by the open window and looks out over the restless city, whispering to himself in canted views no less truthful despite being dark reflections of the sunlit world. Sometimes she approaches him, a stranger from the shadows.
“What the hell are you doing? It’s freezing out,” she says and he looks on her with unfamiliar eyes unseeing or, perhaps, declining to see.
“You’ll get cold,” he tells her. “Go back to bed.” And, “You’ll get cold,” again, if she insists.
Once – only once – he stood and turned her around by force. Not harshly, or she would have protested, but firmly, insistent.
“You’ll get cold. Go back to bed.”
“Come back with me,” she said. His fingers were like ice.
“No. You’re burning. You burn.”
“Then let me sit here, too.”
He hesitated, then, a moving shadow among many, took up the discarded blankets and wrapped them tight around her. She sat by the window for hours, but he did not speak again or look to her or touch her, but only watched the nighttime traffic far below, its lights reflected in his darkened eyes, face white and sharp and smooth, a sculpted glacier in vaguely human form. She sat by the window in her warm cocoon and woke in bed to the smell and sizzle of frying bacon, sausage, and eggs, these mundane things a mask for all that had gone before.
She doesn’t intervene again.
Instead, at night, she lies in bed and lets its warmth surround her, keeper of the home fire, as the room grows cold with frost. She lies in bed and waits and wonders how to cross the fields of snow and bring back that which rejected her and her blood, human, hot, and salted, held within, forever burning.
I need a drink, she thinks and creeps into the bathroom, the water from the faucet cold, freezing her inside out.
The tub, deep and shadowed, a yawning maw of darkness fills the corner and she reaches into its depths to seal the drain and spins the tap to its fullest extent, leaving it to fill. She pads after the shadows that race across the walls, dark deer in the headlights of passing cars, entering the kitchen to dig in the depths of the freezer for the bag of ice she knows is there, pre-crushed, much easier for drinks than making one’s own. This she carries with her to the bathroom where the air grows damp and chill from the endless stream of water filling the tub. What she cannot conquer, she will become and close the gap between them.
This could kill me, she thinks, and the ice goes in, a floating crust on an arctic pool. Remembered warnings of hypothermia tease her along with the threat of frostbitten fingers and toes, dead and blackened. They are lies in the forms of old movies, but no less evocative and she shudders, for all that she doesn’t believe in them, even as she turns off the tap and steps into the frigid water.
It’s cold enough to hurt, but the hurt doesn’t last, fading into numbness as she descends. The trembling begins at the surface, travels up her spine. She’s shaking violently, but this does not dissuade her. Below the water, the trembling ceases, flesh inert and slowly freezing. She takes a deep breath and slides forward, submerges, and her heart stops, or seems to, shocked by the intense cold. When she can breathe again in the open air, the flesh of her face feels like wax and her eyes mere marbles in their sockets.
She gasps and leans back, sinking all she can beneath the water. It’s easier to die numb than needled with a billion pins of cold, driven by the cool, moist air above.
“Verity? What the fuck?”
Verity is half-blind with cold, but there’s no mistaking the silhouette in the doorway, a figure drawn by the unusual sounds drifting out through the bathroom door or, perhaps, by the chill in the air. There is almost no mistaking the hands that grab her bodily or the arms that haul her out of the water. Their shape is familiar, but now they are hot to the touch, scalding limbs too stiff and numb to unbend until the pins and needles become unbearable and she kicks out, nearly causing an accident.
Loki drops her on the toilet lid, wraps her in towels, hands shaking. He tries to form coherent questions. He tries… and fails.
“Am I burning now?” Verity asks in his stead, lips numb and words malformed.
“What?”
“Am I burning now?”
“No. Fuck, no.”
She drops the towel and slips her arms around his neck, cheek to cheek, chest to chest, leeching his heat slowly, inexorably. He’s holding her too, and soon she’s warm enough to shiver.
He picks her up easily – she often forgets how very strong he is – and carries her back to the bed where he wraps them both in blankets. The covers are cold from the open window, but not as cold as Verity, and Loki holds her close, trying to touch every inch of her at once, both rescuer and casualty of an unknown war, fever cooled and restlessness calmed. He falls asleep first as she traces patterns on his skin with her fingertips, not yet warmed, and numbers his breaths, deep and even.
And his eyes, when she presses her lips to them, are dry.