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Loki stands with one foot braced on a deep red boulder, resting his knee out of habit as he flips through the thin book in his hands. Aeslin is a few feet away, hand to her forehead to block the sun as she surveys the view. Her knit cap is pulled down over her ears, a heavy braid swinging from beneath; Loki wears a similar hat, his hair pulled back into a ponytail in an effort to thwart the chilly wind that occasionally whips past.
“From what I can tell,” he says, tucking A Guide to Sedona’s Vortexes into his back pocket, “they’re supposed to be all over up here. I don’t know that it matters where we stop.”
“Anything look familiar?” she asks, hopping down from the rock on which she’s been standing to come over toward him.
“If you mean a portal,” Loki responds, “no. Nothing formal that I’ve recognized. I think it’s too exposed, in any case. Doesn’t mean there aren’t any informal ones.” He turns a slow circle, indicating a flat spot a few meters up the path. “What about over there?”
“Lead the way.”
They decide to sit back to back, a few inches from each other, to minimize distractions. Loki closes his eyes, letting his mind wander and pick up things that the eye cannot see. He realizes almost immediately that it’s a futile endeavor; Odin has made sure of that. He cannot decide if it feels more like an absence or trying to listen through cotton wool, but the result is the same. Unwilling to cede so soon, he recenters and tries again to no avail.
“Anything?” she asks a little hopefully.
“My backside’s cold.”
A patient sigh. “Anything else?”
“I love whatever scent it is you’re wearing today. Very soothing, with an undercurrent of delightfully inappropriate possibilities. Not that I’m going to tell you what to do, but if you could see your way to keeping a bottle or two around, I’m not going to argue.”
“It’s hotel shampoo. The same stuff you use, in fact.”
“Ah. Then my evil scheme has come to fruition, and you’ve been indelibly marked with my scent. Gods, no wonder you’re so intoxicating.”
“Beast.”
“Minx.”
“Man-trollop.”
“Siren.”
“Excuse me. I’ve never once tried to lure you to your death.”
“Says you.”
A nudge at his back, and he grounds his foot and shoves firmly against her for a few seconds in retaliation.
“Not a thing,” he admits eventually. “What about you?”
He feels a slight pressure of her magic against his spine. “Not especially. Nothing that stands out, anyway, but maybe I’m not pulling as much as I should. I can try harder, if you’d like.”
Loki glances back over his shoulder at her, the conversation before the meteor shower fresh in his mind. “No,” he tells her. “I didn’t realize it hurts you.”
“It doesn’t,” she replies. “I mean, it didn’t. I honestly haven’t used it since New York, except for during the star party, and then it barely stung.” There is a thoughtful silence. “Everything’s got a price, though, and maybe that was mine. I honestly think I just asked too much of it. I pulled too fast and too hard all at once, and I was already so drained. All I could think of was that I couldn’t black out, no matter how much it hurt, because I wasn’t finished.”
His voice is harsher than he’d like. “It could have killed you. You know that, right?”
She scuffs her boot against the ground. “I know. I think that’s why I’m leaving it alone, for the most part. It stays in its corner; I stay in mine, and we’ll sort it out later.”
They sit leaning against each other, watching the hawks above them. When she speaks again, her voice bears hints of both meekness and curiosity.
“Am I really intoxicating?”
“Norns, girl,” he answers. “You have no idea.” A gentle laugh. “Which, oddly enough, makes it all the worse.”
***
Theirs was the only car in the parking lot, and Aeslin stopped at the rear of the vehicle to change her boots. She put her foot on the rear bumper, bending a little to unlace it, and her braid slipped in front of her shoulder. Beneath the collar of her jacket, barely visible, Loki saw what looked like the edge of an injury. He placed one hand gently on her back, pulling down just a little with the other hand to see the abrasion disappear into the neck of her hoodie. She pulled off her boot in silence, putting it on the plastic in the back and stepped into her other shoe, then repeated the gesture. Loki sat on the bumper next to her foot, tugging off his hat and smoothing a hand over his hair. When she had finished with the other shoe, he pulled her toward him, linking his hands around her waist with one leg on either side of her.
“You should be gentler with yourself, elskan,” he told her. “Otherwise I’m going to start supervising your showers. Much as you’d love to, you can’t scrub the nightmares away. Not like you've been trying to.”
“I’m fine,” she said. “It will be gone by tonight.” She leaned forward against his chest and kissed him, lips warm on his and nose cold against his cheek. After a long moment, he pulled back slightly, tapping her nose softly.
“This is serious. Stop distracting me.”
“I’m not,” she said, moving his finger and punctuating sentences with tiny pecks on the edges of his lips. “I’m stalling you. The difference is small, but significant.”
“Stalling until when?”
“Until we get on the road and a little warmer,” she answered. “We’ve got a whole afternoon ahead of us. You can talk about it all you want. Might as well make the most of the time; Malibu’s coming up fast.”
“Meaning I’m going to have to share you again. Our time has been spoiling me rotten, you know. My very own best friend, one I’ve had all to myself for weeks. How does one recover from that?”
She grinned. “When I figure it out,” she said with a last kiss, “I’ll be sure to let you know.”
***
“It’s not the nightmares,” she told him a while later as the scenery flew past. “I thought it was, but I haven’t had them the last few nights, and it still hasn’t gone away.” She tapped her fingers on the steering wheel, a little agitation showing through. “It’s because of Fury. Sort of.”
“What do you mean?”
She shrugged. “I feel… used. Dirty. Like I can’t get it all off. It’s been happening off and on since New York, and I wish it would stop. I mean, it’s not like he…” she trailed off, teeth worrying her lower lip as she stared out the windshield.
“Whether it was within the law or not, little one,” Loki told her, “he used your body without permission. He betrayed your trust. It was enough. You have every right to feel angry, or hurt, or however you want to. But please believe me when I tell you it’s in no way your fault.”
“That’s what they always say.”
“Then ‘they’ are right.”
“He could have asked,” she said, her voice a little plaintive. “I might have helped him, if his reasons were good. Why don’t they ever just ask?”
“I don’t know.” He studied her profile, a cold gnawing beginning somewhere within his ribs as he processed what she’d actually said. Loki found himself choosing his words carefully, the silver tongue he had honed over the centuries uncharacteristically dulled.
“You once told me your brother had hurt someone in anger.”
Her lip was a little puffy where her teeth had repeatedly scraped across it. His own lip ached, whether in sympathy or something else. “He did. Just once.”
“Who was it?”
“A friend of my roommate’s. Not Maris. Another one.”
“How old were you?”
“Old enough to know better.”
Loki closed his eyes. “Aeslin.”
“Almost twenty-one.”
“Did he-”
“Tried.”
He reopened his eyes; the skin on her lip had broken at last, and she showed no signs of even noticing. Her fingers were white around the steering wheel. “You don’t have to-”
“No secrets,” she told him. “If this is going to work, we can’t have secrets. I’m sick to death of them, and I’m pretty sure you are, too.”
“None.”
“It didn’t go as far as he wanted,” she continued evenly. “But it went past far enough. Phil found out. He never told me what happened, not exactly. He just showed up on my doorstep several days afterward with band-aids on almost every knuckle and spent the entire weekend teaching me how to kill somebody with my bare hands. Then he got on a plane and went back to work without batting an eye. I found out from Maris a while later that the kid spent a week in the hospital and ate through straws for almost two months. He never could identify his attacker. I graduated a few months later and moved home to New York. That’s why I started living at headquarters. I didn’t move out on my own for years after that, until I got the house in DC.”
“The security system.”
“It’s a Jarvis clone. Someone’s going to love it very much, I think.” She let out a breath. “I was okay. It was over. Almost forgotten. But then I found out what Fury did, and suddenly it was no different. He’d just done it first, that’s all.” Her voice grew a little quieter, but somehow less burdened the more she talked, and Loki finally reached out and touched her split lip, soft and careful. She didn’t shy away as he had feared she would. She merely ghosted her lip across the pads of his fingers, and he wiped the drop of blood from her skin.
“I’m sorry, love,” he said, not knowing what else would help. “I’m so, so sorry.”
She drove in silence for a moment, her eyes carefully not meeting his as she watched the road and the landforms around them. He barely heard her when she spoke again.
“Do you still love me?”
“With every fiber of my being.”
Her brows knit for a long second. “Do you still want me?”
Loki exhaled through his nose, slow and sharp. “Stop the car.”
“I didn’t-”
“I said stop the car.”
She did so, pulling well off the largely-deserted highway and kicking up a cloud of dust, and he turned her head to face him, fingers on her jaw.
“Every second,” he said, holding her gaze. “Do you understand me? Every second of every day, and it doesn’t matter. I told you I would wait. I want all of you, Aeslin. Heart, mind, body, soul, maybe not always in that order, but all of you. Nothing held back, and you can’t give that to me yet. We need to figure this out - us out - little by little and piece by piece, and we need to make sure that as you heal, as the hole inside you finally starts to close, there’s still room enough for me. If all those things happen? Then we’ll act on it. When you’re ready. Not a moment before.” He shifted his hand to the back of her neck. “Know this, little one. I love you. I would kill for you. And if something like that happens again?” He stroked his thumb below her ear. “A stranger. A friend. Fury. I don’t care who it is. I will. They won’t need a hospital. They’ll barely need a box. And that’s a promise I will keep. Am I clear?”
She searched his face.
“Tell me again,” she said after a moment.
He blinked, a little thrown off. “Which part?”
Her fingers traced his lips; her voice had a slight hitch. “The part where you love me.”
Loki wasn’t able to get the sentence out around the lump in his throat. He tried, he really did, but before it had even worked its way free, her lips were on his, and words didn’t matter for a minute or two. He told her when they were back on the road, and then again when he caught her studying him from the corner of her eye (still love you) and once more, perhaps twice, as they played games long into the night, sprawled like children with cards and tokens spread on the bed between them (nope, still love you, hand over the dice and we’ll pretend that round never happened; not against the rules if we both agree to it) and one last time across the narrow divide between the beds as she curled beneath her covers, wrapped safely in his hoodie (won fair and square) and asleep almost before her head hit the pillow. He wasn’t sure she heard that one, but then the smile started at the corner of her mouth, slow and content, and he realized that she had, after all.
Her side of his bed was undisturbed the next morning, and as he listened to her singing in the shower, blissfully heedless of the fact that she didn’t know half the words to the song she’d chosen, he’d never been happier to wake alone.