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“You got me out of my cell for this?” Loki turned up his nose, scuffing his boots in the rocky gray surface of the planet they'd been deposited on. The cuffs and chains that bound his wrist and ankles jangled obnoxiously when he did, and she was sure it was on purpose.“Take me back. Nothing here is worth my time.”
“You get no say in the matter,” Sif told him, and pushed him out of the glowing design left by the Bifrost. “Walk.”
Loki grinned over his shoulder at her as they made their way from the Bifrost site toward the crumbling ruins a few miles off. “So, to what use is Asgard's little tool being put to? I think I at least have the right to know that, even if I am little better than a slave to the whims of the Thing.”
“A slave, Loki, truly?”
“If you pretend it's anything but the truth...”
“I doubt you'd know truth if it boxed your ears and called you mother,” Sif mumbled, but drew in a breath. The air here was thin, and she found it difficult to maintain an air of calm superiority when she was panting. Not that she would be able to regardless...
“The Avengers are friends to Thor, and thus they are friends to Asgard,” she said. “They requested aid in matters of magic, and as you are the foremost expert on Asgard, it was decided you would fulfill some small part of your debt to your realm by resolving the issue.”
“My debt?”
“Don't pretend you don't know what I speak of.” She felt a sense of satisfaction, throwing Loki's jab back at him, but it was followed by irritation that she had to, and a barely- acknowledged feeling of loss. Once, they had been more to each other, they could have been more still if their timing had been better or if Loki had been less bitter and prone to seeing slights when they weren't there, if she had just gone after him...
As she had to many times since, Sif reminded herself that by that point, she'd been through chasing after Loki. Asgardians had formidable strength and stamina, but the emotional exhaustion of trying to be with someone who saw insult in the shadow of every word was more than she could bear. Still, after his fall she'd spent a lot of time wondering what their path would have been like if she'd been a bit more flexible, and after he'd been found on Earth, she'd spent a lot of time wondering why she hadn't put a knife in his heart when he'd been on the throne.
Oh, she knew the answer to that, but... well.
“I was only trying to claim what was rightfully mine,” Loki muttered darkly. “What was denied me.”
“If it had been rightfully yours, you would have had it without having to deceive and murder to get it.”
“My way was more fun.”
“Fun? Fun? Loki, what in the name of the Nine Realms--” she stopped, grabbed the end of the chain linked to his bonds, yanking him to a stop as she stopped to get her bearings back. She hated that this duty had fallen to her, hated that he knew all her weak points (whose fault was that, Sif). She hated the way he smirked back at her as he waited, all patience and good behavior now that he'd gotten a rise out of her.
“I do not want to put this on,” she said, turning her hip to show him the silver and gold muzzle that the Thing had brought her. She hated it, too, and it was only by the strength of her wavering discipline that she kept her own disgust off her face as Loki's eyes fell to it, his jaw working before he nodded.
“I take your point, Lady,” he said, and turned back toward the ruins. Sif released the length of chain in her hands so he had some slack.
“Onward, then,” she told him. “We will do as asked and then you will be returned to your cell.”
“Oh, joy,” Loki said mockingly, but continued on without a word, and Sif hated herself at that moment then, too.
It hadn't always been this way. Before, long before that thrice-cursed trip to Jotunheim or before Loki's smiles had become sharp-edged and rare and before she'd thrown up her hands and walked away from him, saying she was fed up with having her actions scrutinized and her loyalty questioned - a sentiment which he had, infuriatingly, not understood in the slightest, which was almost funny if it hadn't been so enraging – before all of that, she had enjoyed standing at his side during feasts, goblets of wine in their hands and wine-warmed lips whispering little jokes to each other. Before she'd seen Loki in Frigga's well, clad in tarnished gold with a strange scepter in hand, there had been their own little code written in the brushes of fingers and the subtle glances of two young lovers wanting to meet behind the curtains in the grand colonnades of the palace. Before Loki had ever been led back to Asgard bound and gagged, there had been Sif and Loki, loyal to their friend and brother and loyal to each other in their unusual paths.
Sif missed it. She missed it, but she didn't know if it could ever be regained. She had stopped chasing him long ago, and pride refused to let her start again even though she missed their closeness, their intimacy almost as much as she missed the (admittedly really, really good) sex.
There was a blocky-looking vehicle in front of a set of crumbling stairs, and as they approached the cluster of people at the foot of it broke apart. She recognized Thor, his expression tight and tense at the sight of his wayward brother, but he smiled warmly enough at her.
“Thank you for coming, Sif,” he told her. “I hate to impose in this way, but...”
“I apologize for being inconvenient,” Loki began, but Sif and Thor gave him a sharp look. The archer was fingering an arrow he'd nocked to the string of his bow, and the rest looked uncomfortable to have Loki in their midst again.
“Come,” Thor said to both of them. “The door to this place is bespelled somehow.”
With Loki taking every opportunity to make his chains rattle loudly against the stone, they climbed the stairs until they stood before an ancient door. There was writing upon it, of a kind that Sif had never seen before. She had not made as extensive a study of language as Loki had, but more than one language was spoken throughout the Nine Realms, and Sif had learned at least enough of several to get by. This one she did not recognize.
“Can you open it?” Thor asked Loki after they'd all studied it for a moment. Loki gave him the most patronizing look that Sif had ever seen.
“I can,” he said simply. There was a moment of silence before Thor sighed in exasperation, and Sif took it upon herself to shift so that the muzzle on her hip was apparent.
“Open the door, Loki,” she said warningly.
“It's a quite old spell,” he said, looking back at the door appraisingly. “Honestly, Thor, if you hit it with Mjolnir like you usually do, it'd probably break. The enchantments on your hammer are much stronger.”
“Loki.”
“The language is a variation on the words of a certain race of celestial beings, they say something quite fascinating, actually--”
“Loki! Enough stalling!”
With a dramatic roll of his eyes, Loki flicked his fingers, sending green and gold lights sparking outward. They spun toward one of the little circles on the door and flew inside it. Something inside rumbled, the doors slid slowly into the walls, and Loki obligingly spun up one of his little mage lights as the group of them walked inside.
“What is all this junk?” the man in a suit of armor – Tony Stark, Thor had told her of him – said, kicking a dust-covered pile he passed. It collapsed a bit, revealing shiny metal under the dust, and he paused to pick up a strange, oblong container covered in intricate designs. “This looks like that stuff that Coulson was scribbling—“
“As I would have said,” Loki spoke up as Sif let him lead them deeper into the first chamber, “This was a kind of storeroom for things that a race known as the Kree collected from other beings throughout the universe. They were not known for their generosity in letting those they found... interesting... keep items of their own cultural heritage.”
Sif realized that a pile she'd been examining was rotted clothing and soft items, and that a strange dusty blob was obviously meant to be a child's toy. She stood up and continued on, in the back of her mind thinking of the dozen times that she and Loki had led the way into some abandoned place in the Nine Realms, in search of some ancient bit of knowledge or legendary weapon or some other treasure. They had been so young, she thought sadly. So young and full of hope for the future. What a disappointment that had turned out to be.
“What you seek is most likely through there,” Loki said, pointing at a doorway off to the left. “Also, I can feel it.”
“What do you mean?” That was the one Thor had described as Captain Rogers, a man of honor. If she hadn't had to mind Loki, Sif would have liked to have a talk with this one, she thought. “'Feel it'?”
“I spent quite a lot of time around two Infinity Stones,” Loki said idly. “They have a way about them.”
Captain Rogers eyed Loki warily before heading for the door. Right as he was about to push it open, Loki said, almost as an afterthought, “I would have a care, Captain. It's more than likely trapped... but it's not magical, so my responsibility ends. Perhaps we should check for traps of a more arcane nature, my lady?”
Sif smiled tightly at Thor when he gave her a questioning look. “We made it here without my blade finding his throat,” she said. “I'm certain we can survive a little exploration.”
They split off, heading down a corridor so thickly covered in dust that clouds obscured their feet, and Loki kept shooting off little green flames to burn off webs that cross the corridor. The space was massive, and yet there was nothing to be seen in the gossamer strands, which was fine with Sif. She didn't want to meet the kinds of creatures that could make a home so large.
“Ah, nostalgia,” Loki said as they poked through rooms full of broken bits of trash and old, crumbling furniture. “Do you not remember, Sif? We would do this often, you and I.”
“There were others there betimes, too.”
Loki waved a hand, stretching to the end of his chains as he leaned round a corner to peer into a room before deeming it uninteresting enough to continue on inside. “Our guard.”
“Our friends. Or have you been so long in your little delusions that you forget what friendship is?”
“I forget very little. In fact, Sif,” and Loki grinned at her in a way that would have had her seeking a private alcove if it had been a century before, “I remember quite a lot about our adventures. But I sense that you've tried to forget. You don't visit me. How unbearably rude of you.”
They came to another room, and this time Sif dragged them in, hoping that the items within would distract Loki somewhat. It was some kind of special display room, she saw, one item per lit pedestal. Apparently it was supposed to be some kind of museum, for the letters in the holographic plaques shifted into the Allspeak as she looked upon them. It was at least a good distraction to keep her irritation in check.
“Have you really tricked yourself into thinking that it is my fault that I don't want to spend time verbally sparring with someone who cannot recognize his own fallacies?”
“Oh, I recognize them quite well enough. Hm, interesting—this item, Perspectiva, has quite an enlightening effect... But I have no fault in this case, I think.”
“Of course not,” Sif snapped. “No faults in Loki's view of things. The problems lie with everyone around him.”
“You're quite clever when you decide to see things my way.”
“I was mocking--”
“I know, but that doesn't make you less correct.”
“Gods damn it, Loki, if you but accepted responsibilty--”
“Why should I?” Loki spun to face her, his eyes narrowed and his brow set. “Why should I take responsibility for things that were done to me, without my consent? I never asked to be taken off Jotunheim, I never asked to be lied to my whole life about what my station would be--”
“Are you honestly finding fault with your father for saving you from freezing to death on a war-torn realm?”
“He's not my father!”
Rage bubbled over finally, and Sif snatched up the Perspectiva from its lighted pedestal. It was a device easy enough to operate, not unlike the guns she'd encountered before while on Midgard. She dropped Loki's chain and leveled the Perspectiva at him, pressing the trigger button with her finger once
A globe of white light shot out the other end of the Perspectiva and struck Loki full in the chest, hard enough to knock him back a few steps. A look of surprise on his face, eyes unfocused, Loki began to speak.
“He's my father because he raised me and was there when I needed him and the fact that I choose not to remember is the most frustrating thing that you can imagine, because before you ever swore loyalty to Asgard, Odin was practically your father and Frigga--” his voice cracked a bit on her name and Sif felt a grim triumph that something made him show emotion thus “--your mother, and us your brothers, because your own family had no use for a girl who would rather wield a sword than a sewing needle...”
His eyes began to refocus and he gave himself a little shake, but Sif wasn't done. She fired again, and Loki jerked.
“You were so glad when you found Thor and I because you finally had supporters, and when I started studying magic you were even happier, because at last you had an ally in someone else not following the path laid out for them, and that was why you were attracted to me when we grew older, too, because I understood what it was like to have to fight expectation and how we both had to be twice as good at what we did just to get ahead, and when you found out that I felt the same about you, you couldn't imagine happiness greater. And that's why you are so angry with me now, because I used to understand and refuse to now...”
Another shot, and it hurt Sif as much as it obviously pained Loki to hear her own thoughts from his lips, but it was satisfying too in a way, to think that at last he would be able to see plainly how she felt. “You remember the man I used to be, the man you swore loyalty to in your heart, and you remember the man I became and you see the man I am now and you wonder if the man you loved--” his eyes jerked to her face, wide, but he was unable to stop himself from continuing “--is inside anymore or if he's gone, dead and buried beneath this hateful thing I became. You know I'm hurting from the loss of my mother and from other things that you want to be able to share with me like you used to, but now you're forced to treat me as little better than a common prisoner when your heart aches for the closeness we used to have. More than anything physical you miss the knowledge that you have a confidant, someone who you can be close to, and that is a wound you're worried will never heal and you don't want to face Ragnarok with an open wound...
“You hate that you have to lead me about in chains, you hate that you have to threaten me with the muzzle, you hate that from being friends and lovers and trusting each other we have become this, and you hate that you feel like your loyalty is being tested every time you have to look at me, because there's a part of you that remembers everything before that tells you to free me because you want to believe that there is still good in me somewhere, and that part is in war with the self that tells you that I tried to bring harm to the home you swore your blood and breath and blade to and that there's nothing good left in me and that it isn't your duty to save me, that has to come from within and you're tired of always chasing after me just to see me run faster away from you. You wish at night that things could go back to how they were and wake in the day to what they are, and it tears you apart, but you know that you will do your duty no matter how much your love for me hurts you, and it hurts a lot—ah, Sif, I feel it, I know—“
She started firing and kept up the barrage, walking toward him and firing every step, her fingers white-knuckled on the Perspectiva, until Loki tripped on a stray block and fell onto his back. Sif watched him a moment, then set the device back on its lighted pedestal and picked up his chain. She was shaking, and as he sat up she could see that Loki was paler than usual.
“Let's go,” she told him, her voice flat. “The others will doubtless have retrieved whatever it was that they came here to find.”
They walked in silence back down the corridor. Loki kept glancing at her the whole way, but was mercifully silent for once in his life, and if Thor or any of the other Avengers noticed that the two of them seemed far more reserved than they were before, there were no comments on it. When they returned to Asgard, Sif brought Loki back to his cell, a specially secured one. The golden interlaced enchantments parted as Loki approached them and he paused on the threshold, holding his hands out so she could take the manacles off his wrists.
Sif studied his hands for a long time. She had known great pleasure at the tips of those long fingers, and great heartache from the works of those same hands. But the Perspectiva... she had seen something as they had left the ruins, the Avengers talking about where they would take this Infinity Stone to make sure it was safe. Something had changed in Loki's eyes, and she looked up, watching him for a long time before she reached forward, waving her hand over the release runes. The manacles opened, and their fingertips brushed as she collected them and tucked them away. Loki looked up at her suddenly, his eyes wide, and she had to work to keep her face impassive at the faint, tentative hope she saw there now.
Remembering himself, Loki took a step backward so the cell's enchantments could slide back together before him, but their eyes remained locked on each other.
“By your leave, my lady,” he said quietly. “I do not forget these things.”
Sif smiled, glad that he did remember the little codes they had come up with. She had brushed against his hands in an old sign of theirs, one that had communicated longing, a wish to see each other.
“I don't forget either, Loki,” she replied, and turned, thinking that it would not be such a long time before they saw each other again.