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“Hill trolls are not to be taken lightly,” Loki had said at the start of this expedition, and Sif had answered him with laughter. Her laugh always sounded to him like braying trumpets, or rolling bells, or the screaming of eagles. Proud and triumphant and untameable and always dangerous.
Sif was not laughing now, with the troll’s sword still embedded in her middle. She would not have had the breath for it, her lungs pumping shallowly as her blood gushed red and mixed with the churned mud and snow of the battlefield. In the short seconds since the fatal blow, Sif had gone alarmingly gray.
Loki watched, paralyzed and helpless, time stretching out impossibly long as the troll grinned and thrust his sword further into Sif’s abdomen. Loki fumbled, clumsy-fingered, for a knife not yet returned to his grasp.
In an instant, all his cleverness failed him. Always Loki had to hand a plan, a quick-thinking way out of any situation, but at the moment when it mattered most his mind drew on nothingness.
Sif’s scream was a creature of pain and rage, bursting from her chest and echoing into Loki’s frozen heart. She surged into the blade in her abdomen, pushing it a few inches deeper and swinging her sword.
The troll’s head came off with one clean swipe.
Sif staggered. Loki’s knife returned to his fingers, his wits returned to his mind. He looked around a battlefield strewn of troll parts, and Sif kneeling at the center of it. Her fury was gone, passing over her face for a glazed and faraway look that scared Loki more than all that had come before.
Five paces was enough to take him to Sif’s side, a cry of her name wrenching from his lips. “Sif!” Only when he touched her shoulder did Sif acknowledge Loki with a smile. A weak chuckle escaped her lips, accompanied by a froth of her own blood.
“Spare the ‘I told you so’, if you will,” she murmured, her pupils contracting as she tried to find his face. “It would be a great boon to me.”
“I will not,” Loki said, crisp with fear. “You will live my Lady, and face all deserved recriminations.” A quick inspection of her wound left Loki’s hands and arms covered in red blood. There was no thought of removing the sword, for fear of hastening an oncoming death.
Sif ignored his words. “I hope to see you in Valhalla, Loki,” she said, with barely enough breath for the words.
Loki panicked. Nothing in his bag of tricks could help her, and if he did not help then Sif would bleed out in his arms, and the only thing he could think was that he could not lose her. In the blink of an instant wrapped his magic around the both of them.
Darkness screamed around Loki, pressing in on him from all sides. He held fast to Sif, gone alarmingly limp in his arms, and endured the press of that space that was not quite space, thinking only of shelter, safety . It was dangerous to do such magic blindly, but a spell once cast could not be safely uncast and so Loki poured his whole self into maintaining the spell and hoping that his panic would not doom both of them.
His magic spat them out onto the cobblestone streets of a village, the sudden appearance of two blood-drenched Aesir shattering the placid calm of an ordinary day. Sif slumped in Loki’s arms, dragging him down to the ground with sheer weight, eyes closed and fast fading. He pressed against Sif’s bleeding wound, with all the effectiveness of a small dam against a tidal wave.
“Help!” Loki screamed to the shocked crowd, desperate. “Please help!”
She cannot die. Not before--
--
Sif was warm, content. Her dreams were hazy wisps, tiny fleeting memories of childhood. The warm stone of the palace walls, the pool where she and Thor and Loki used the play, the way the light glinted off their hair in the summer, the feeling of her mother’s steady hands plaiting her hair. Good things to remember, at a time like this.
She was dead. She had died well, she knew, in battle as she had always dreamed. Soon she would wake and be in Valhalla, and what greater end was there for a warrior like her? That should have satisfied, only it didn’t.
She dreamed still of those golden memories of childhood, and the thought of leaving them behind ached deep in her gut. Hot and searing and physical, in a way none of the dreams were. Sif shifted, uncomfortable, and pain blazed through her.
She opened her eyes.
The room was unfamiliar, the ceiling too close, dark broad beams lit by globes of witch light looming over her providing the only light. There were no windows. At one corner of the room was a small table, at the other was a small wooden door, and at the third was another door. The only other piece of furniture the expansive bed she lay in, covered in furs. Sif’s breath quickened, and the pain in her side escalated with it into a fierce burning. She bit back a cry, looked around for anything familiar.
A figure slumped at the end of the bed. Loki lay there, his arms and the front of his robes covered in blood. Sif remembered dragging him from the palace, full of the promise of adventure and glory. She remembered his arm around her shoulders as everything faded into blackness.
Had she killed him with her folly?
Loki stirred, blinking off sleep. Sif leaned towards him-- then winced as pain crippled her.
“Loki,” she said, breathing shallow to stave off agony. “You saved my life?”
“I suppose I did,” Loki said. “As much surprise to me as you.”
“I’m not surprised,” Sif said. She leaned back into the pillows of the bed. Their softness dulled the pain somewhat. “Thank you.”
Loki’s eyes danced away from hers. Sif reached out blindly and caught his hand, though dried blood flaked off on her fingers. Her blood. “I’d have died back there, and it would have been my own stupid fault. So thanks are well in order.”
A smirk crossed Loki’s lips. “At last the lady speaks sense,” he said. “I was beginning to think it impossible.”
Sif winced. “I deserved that,” she said. It stung to think that she had been so stupid-- and almost paid the price for it.
“That and more,” Loki said, perversely cheerful. “They will sing no songs of your glorious death in the halls of Asgard now, I’m afraid.”
Sif sighed, her relief at that fact overwhelming her. Shame, too, at her relief. “I suppose they won’t,” she said, closing her eyes to suppress the sudden heat of tears. Once she knew she was not going to cry, Sif opened her eyes again and looked to Loki. “Where are we?”
Loki shrugged and gave her a helpless look. “I haven’t the slightest idea,” he said. “I used magic to flee the battlefield, and it dumped us here. Wherever here is, they were nice enough to save your life and rent us a room.”
Sif frowned at Loki. “What did you pay?” she asked him.
Loki lied so often with his mouth, but not always with his eyes, which would not quite meet hers. “A trinket,” he said, the smile that touched his lips glib. Sif furrowed her brow but did not press the point. “Now that you are awake and not going to bleed out in your sleep, however, I would like to take a bath.”
He gestured to the bloody front of his armor. Sif squirmed uncomfortably to see it. All of that blood had come from her body. Sif was no stranger to blood and battlefield, but this was the closest she had come to seeing her own lifesblood drain out of her, and it unnerved her to look at for more than a few moments.
It was strange too, to see Loki so mussed. He was vain as a bird, and just as fastidious with his grooming.
He must have been exhausted, to sleep in clothing so bloodied.
“Go,” Sif told him. “I think I’ll sleep some more.”
She closed her eyes, and did exactly that.
--
Loki proved himself an attentive nursemaid, bringing Sif mild foods and ensuring that she did not move too much. This swiftly irritated the warrior, who hated spells of forced inactivity and spent most of her time drowsing in protest or complaining. Loki’s answer to her grumpiness was a perverse sort of cheerfulness, and he answered all of her complaints with glib nonchalance.
“Have you heard yet from Asgard?” Sif asked, when she set aside yet another bowl of mild broth. She’d not found a single thing to chew on, and had informed Loki irritably that her mouth was not broken and she didn’t want to drink her food. (“Yes,” Loki said then, “but your innards were, so drink up my lady.”)
Loki shook his head. “Not as yet,” he said. “I have sent communication to my lady mother and the spell took so to my knowledge it should deliver, but I know not when.”
Sif sighed and sank into the pillows she was beginning to hate. “Then we stay here for the night.” The prospect of staying in this stuffy room was not an enticing one.
“You sound thrilled,” Loki remarked dryly.
“I’ve not moved from this bed in hours,” Sif said. “With no entertainment save to study the wood grains on all four walls. I’m a warrior not an invalid.”
“You’d think warriors would learn to be better patients, for how often they seem to be injured,” Loki said. Sif scowled at him, but Loki did not appear to notice. “So? What is it you’ve learned?”
Sif looked down at the furs bunched up around her. “That I should not fight hill trolls with only you for backup.”
Loki’s countenance shifted, from amused to guarded, and Sif wondered if she had offended him in some way. It passed, a fleeting shadow gone in a moment from his eyes. “I meant about the wood grain. How go your studies?”
Sif stared, words failing her for the moment as Loki looked on with keen amusement. “They are-- well, my lord.”
“Close your eyes, and point to me every knot in the wood your hands can reach,” Loki challenged. “If you can manage I’ll find you a pear. Something you can actually chew on.” She would be a fool to let him bait her into such a silly challenge, but she was so bored and Loki knew her well, to know that Sif could not resist a challenge.
Sif closed her eyes. The wall she had been staring at for hours now seemed vague in her mind’s eye, and the swirls of the wood that she’d thought burned into her memory now shifted under the weight of her uncertainty. Sif reached out and touched the wood, which revealed none of its secrets under her questing fingertips. Had the wall four knots or five in easy reach? Sif could not count them. She reached out once more and opened her eyes.
Plain wood met her fingertips.
“A long way to mastery yet then,” Loki said. “I think you need more study.”
Sif scowled again. “I’ll get you back for this Loki, just you wait.”
Loki headed for the door, his smile amused. “When you can walk under your own power, Sif, I look forward to it.” He gave her a bow, and then slipped out into the unknown beyond.
--
Night fell. Sif knew only because the globes of light above her head dimmed, prompted by some magic to promote sleep in the occupants of the room. Loki made no move towards bed, or even to retiring to his own room to sleep, instead summoning a witchlight to hover over his shoulder while he cleaned and polished his knives.
Sif, bored at least if not tired, closed her eyes and dozed. Her dreams were strange fitful things, stumbling through darkness, knowing that with each step her life was ticking away. Sif could not stop the slow march forward towards death, and no matter how she tried to scream at herself to stop, her voice fell silent.
“Sif!” Loki cried in the dark, and when she turned to look his eyes were full of panic. Sif smiled, heartened to see him and his hand outstretched. She reached out for it-- and fell and fell and fell…
Sif jerked awake, sweat beaded across her brow and down her front. She breathed hard, slowly remembering that she was not falling to her doom. She looked up, around the room, at the four walls she’d started to hate. Anything was better than that consuming blackness.
Loki remained in the room. He’d nodded off in his chair, the witchlight extinguished and the knives still dangling in his fingers. His face had gone slack with sleep, open and unguarded in a way Sif had rarely seen it of late. He could not be comfortable sleeping in that chair.
“Hey!” Sif called. “Loki!”
Loki startled, nearly falling off the chair in an undignified heap. Fortunately for his easily bruised pride the chair did not topple, as he blinked sleep out of his eyes.
“What?” he demanded, irritable.
“There’s plenty of room on the bed.” Sif shifted off-center from the bed, ignoring the pain in her abdomen as she demonstrated. “There is no need for you to sleep in a chair.”
Loki stood up, and carefully put each of his knives away in their sheath, not meeting Sif’s eyes. She watched his hands instead, which she had always admired for their skill, handling each piece of steel. One sheath was empty.
“Did you lose your dagger on the battlefield?” Sif asked.
Loki’s gaze flickered to her, surprise and a touch of delight at her noticing. “It was the price paid for our stay here,” he said, as though this were the simplest thing in the world.
Sif stared. He showed no reaction to the loss of the knife, when Sif knew well the way he had crowed with pride upon receiving the set. “Loki,” she said, soft. “Those were a gift from your mother.”
Loki’s eyes found Sif’s face with a piercing keenness that prickled over her skin and down her spine. “One dagger was not a high price for your life,” Loki said, for once in his life so achingly sincere that Sif wanted to pull away from it and go back to his previous glib nonchalance.
She swallowed down the lump in her throat. “Thank you,” she said.
Loki’s gaze swept down, and that strange and uncomfortable feeling-- too big for her own skin, too profound-- subsided from Sif’s body. She reached out and turned down the covers on the other side of the bed. “Come,” she said. “You’ve paid a high enough price for this bed, and there is room enough for the two of us.”
Again Loki made no move towards the bed.
Sif sighed. “I would sleep better, I think, were you to join me. My dreams have been troubling of late.”
At last Loki broke his stillness with the edge of a smile. “Then I must oblige, for the lady’s comfort,” he said. “You need all the rest you can get Sif.”
“And I am not getting it now, so hold your tongue and join me,” Sif grumbled.
Loki’s chuckle swept over Sif’s body in much the same way that look in his eyes had. Here in the darkness of the room it sounded intimate and close, and an unfamiliar heat followed close behind. Was this strangeness the effect of so nearly dying?
Movement caught Sif’s eye. Loki stripped off his tunic in one fluid motion and folded it over the chair, leaving his upper torso bared. This was a rare sight, as even on the practice ring where warriors often bared their skin Loki was vain and fastidious as always. Or perhaps it was the strange quiet of the darkened room that had Sif peeking at the lean grace of her companion’s torso.
Aethers but Sif had been addled by coming so close to death, to let lust for Loki of all beings overtake her.
Loki raised one eyebrow at Sif, a silent question. She only shuffled over to give him more room in the bed, which he gracefully clambered into.
The bed, which had before seemed so expansive to nearly dwarf Sif in its size, now seemed small and close. Silently she and Loki shifted, searching out the most comfortable position with their bodies.
Something cold brushed along Sif’s back and she tensed, all of her muscles contracting. Pain spiked in Sif’s middle. “Ah!” she said, looking for the source and finding only Loki’s arm. “You’re cold.”
Loki, head on pillow, opened his eyes and looked at Sif dryly. “Apologies are in order, I suppose.”
“It’s fine,” Sif murmured. “It surprised me, that’s all.” Under the furs which had been warmed by her body for the past day or so, it was actually a bit pleasant to feel his ice cold skin. Her skin still tingled where his ice cold arm had brushed. “It’s too damned warm in this bed anyways.”
Even though Loki had again closed his eyes, the smile on his lips clearly spoke his amusement. “How fortuitous,” he said. “We should hear from Asgard by the morning, so we should sleep while we can.”
Sif settled into the bed in a position that was, if not comfortable, at least not painful and closed her eyes. No sleep was forthcoming it seemed, after several minutes of lying quiet and still. All of her earlier lethargy seemed snatched away with her earlier restless dreams, and now it seemed she was plagued with sleeplessness.
Or perhaps it was that her restless dreams had been replaced by restless thoughts.
Sif was a warrior before all else. Her skill and battle prowess was hard-won and Sif had always taken her pride in it. Too much pride, she thought ruefully, for it had near killed her. It had been so simple riding out. Hill trolls were threatening Asgard’s borders, and it was a warrior’s job to kill them, and so Sif had gone to do the deed. Dragging Loki along had been an afterthought, and it was that bit of luck that had saved her life.
Was her own life really that fragile, that her survival could come to a whim of fate? Sif had always proclaimed loudly that she was not afraid to die, loudly enough that she’d come to believe it herself, but faced with the possibility of her own mortality she’d found herself gripped by fear. And what good was a warrior who down in her deepest self had proved a coward?
Sif had no answers.
She opened her eyes to the darkened room. Loki lay beside her, pale as moonlight, a lock of his hair a slash of dark shadow across his face. Sif reached out as if by instinct to brush the hair away, and then pulled back, surprised by her own tenderness.
When had such a thing happened? Sif was a warrior, who had made love as foreign an emotion as fear. Now they both had penetrated her heart, and she began to wonder just who she was in their wake.
Loki stirred at the touch of Sif’s hand on his brow, his eyes flickering open and reflecting the pale light. “Is something wrong?” he asked, looking up at her. “Are your wounds bothering you?”
Sif shook her head, feeling foolish for being caught, and guilty for waking Loki when he needed the sleep. “Not as such. I couldn’t sleep.”
Loki sat up in the bed. “Ah,” he said. “You have been sleeping most of the day.”
“It’s not that,” Sif said. Could she tell him what bothered her? Only she had to tell someone, or the words would weigh on her heart. “Do you think that I am a great warrior, Loki?”
“Greater than any in the Nine Realms,” Loki said, without hesitation. He peered at her, seeming to see something of her quandary. “It is unlike you to be so uncertain Sif. Is this because of what happened earlier?”
“Yes,” Sif said, looking down at her hands wrapped up in the fur coverlet. “I suppose so.”
“Even a great warrior can fall to a mighty foe,” Loki said. “Or have you listened to none of Asgard’s stories? Next time you will not be so foolish as to go hunting hill troll with only a silvertongued trickster.”
Was that how he saw himself? Or was he merely twisting his words around for some game Sif did not know the rules to? “You saved my life. That action alone proves you more than just some trickster.”
Loki demurred. “True,” he said, smug. “And you are no less a warrior for nearly falling in battle to hill trolls.”
“It is not that,” Sif said, her hands bunching up into fists, crushing the furs between her fingers. “When I thought that I was going to die-- I knew fear.”
“And?”
“And I have never thought myself a coward!” Sif said, sure that he was deliberately teasing her. “Who ever sang songs of a great warrior who was a coward?”
Loki’s laugh was sharp and penetrating and Sif flinched away from his mockery. “Stay your cruelty,” she said, not wishing to be laughed at by him here and now.
“Peace, Sif,” Loki said. He reached out and his hands covered hers, his flesh still pleasingly cool. Sif looked up into his eyes, surprisingly earnest. “I did not mean mockery. It is only that I know of no man whose heart has never known cowardice, and yet you profess to have found yours only on death’s doorstep.”
Sif shook her head, for all his apparent sincerity still convinced of his mockery. “The warriors in all the greatest tales never speak of cowardice.”
“No, they would not be cowards, would they?” Loki said dryly. “And you know as well as I, that warriors never boast of greater achievements than they have earned once they sit safe by the hearthfire.” His light fingers pressed against Sif’s chin, bringing her gaze up, in a touch that lingered on her skin. “Trust a simple trickster who preys on cowardice to know it well.”
Sif smiled, not sure he was right but feeling cheered all the same. “I suppose I needn’t worry then,” she said.
“I have known you since we both were young,” Loki said. “I would wager none could know the Lady Sif as I do and think her a coward.”
Sif smiled and closed her eyes, the weight of Loki’s esteem warming her through. And that was another problem as well, one she was even less equipped to deal with.
“Have you ever been in love, Loki?”
In the bed beside her Sif felt her companion go rigid. Sif searched his expression for any sign of deception and found only a bitter amusement that she did not know the meaning of. “Yes,” he said at last. “Once.”
“What happened?”
Loki looked at Sif, eyes full of bitter amusement. “She never once looked upon as I did her,” he said. “Her heart was too full with the joy of duty to ever consider what affection I laid upon her.”
Sif could understand. She knew well the feeling of devotion to duty to the exclusion of all else, even love. Still it was sad to think of Loki longing for so long and never finding happiness. “You sound as if you still love her.”
A chuckle from Loki. “Perhaps I do.”
“Perhaps you should tell her,” Sif said. Perhaps Loki had already confessed himself-- but Sif knew that he hadn’t. He was too secretive and guarded with his closest feelings. For as long as she had known him, Sif could not begin to guess the woman who held his esteem. Perhaps it was only in the dark quiet of this small room that he could speak of it.
“I’m afraid that’s not possible,” Loki said.
Sif shook her head. “I do not think you are a coward either, Loki,” she said. “Any woman would be lucky to have your heart.”
Loki sighed, a long exhaling of breath into the quiet. “Ahh,” he said. “But I am a craven one, my lady, and the one we speak of is not for me.”
She would not convince him, Sif knew. Loki would guard his secrets jealously if he wished and no amount of coaxing from Sif could make him give them up.
“What is she like?” Sif asked instead. “Beautiful I suppose, and she must be clever or you would soon get bored.”
“Hmm,” Loki said, steepling his fingers together. “Beautiful and clever yes. And fierce, stubborn. It gets her into trouble sometimes, but without that stubbornness she would not have become who she is.” Sif found herself failing to imagine such a woman as Loki described, for surely no woman in all the Nine Realms could measure up. “Quick to temper, I suppose-- but always fair, always just. She would fight all of Asgard to do what she believed was right.”
Loki’s eyes sought out Sif’s, so bright and piercing that they cut right through her to the core. Sif shuddered, overwhelmed by the look in those eyes. She had never in all her years seen such intensity from Loki.
“She’s lucky then,” Sif said quietly. “To have inspired such devotion.”
Whatever blossoming tenderness had warmed Sif’s heart was but a candle compared to the inferno of Loki’s devotion. It could not hope to measure up.
“Sif…” Loki said, soft and tender.
“You should tell her,” Sif said. “The way you told me. I cannot imagine any woman seeing even a glimpse of what I just saw and not being moved.”
Loki scoffed. “My lady, you are not given to cruelty off the battlefield.”
Sif looked at Loki sharply. “What about what I have said was cruel, Loki?”
Again that intense piercing look, full of longing and heartbreak and a twist of irony. “Surely you can’t not know by now.”
Sif’s brows knit together, as she tried to comprehend this newest mystery. “What do you mean?”
“Then let me tell you more of the woman I have loved for longer years than I can count,” Loki said, his eyes shuttering closed and his face turned away from hers. “Her hair is as dark as the night sky without stars, and is the most lovely in the light when she practices with her sword. When we were young she pushed me in the mud, and I’ve seen her fight and fight to become a warrior at last. And earlier today I almost lost her and I realized--”
Loki stopped speaking, choked off. Her turned towards her, eyes wide and full of fear and hope.
“Oh,” Sif said, understanding striking the words from her lips. What should she do now, with this bubble of strange warmth rising in her heart? She had seen through to the depth of Loki’s feelings for her, and now at last she understood them, and such a confession demanded a response. Only her own affection was so new. “What did you realize?” she asked, hoping and dreading the answer.
Loki flinched away. “Do you seek to mock me, then?”
Sif caught Loki’s chin with her fingertips. His eyes flickered open in surprise when she leaned in and pressed her mouth to his. His skin was pleasantly cool against her mouth, like a cold treat on a hot summer’s day, melting against her mouth. Sif opened herself to the fire catching inside her, starting in her mouth and filling up her lungs, her belly, her tingling skin. She reached out, hands exploring for the first time the bare expanse of Loki’s chest, the softness of his flesh and the way he reacted to her questing pleasing to the touch.
Sif broke away, unsure.
Loki only stared openmouthed.
“I think I like this expression on you my lord,” Sif said, fighting the urge to laugh for fear of aggravating her wounds. “You look as though I’ve slapped you and not kissed you.”
Loki’s expression morphed several times, from blank surprise through to consternation to confusion and then to suspicion. “Are you-- was that-- did you mean that?”
“Yes,” Sif said quietly. “I think I did. I nearly died and you saved my life. I’d never considered love before, or death or any of those things, but now I have.” She looked and met Loki’s eyes shyly. “I’m sorry to have kept you waiting so long.”
Loki brushed Sif’s hair from her face and kissed her again. “My only thought when I saw you fall was that I could not bear to lose you,” Loki said.
“Then I am glad you did not,” Sif said. “Would you have told me, if all this had not happened?”
“Eventually,” Loki said, but Sif knew it immediately for a lie. “Would you have changed your mind then?”
“Eventually,” Sif said with a smile.
Loki’s answering grin was sharp. He leaned in to taste Sif’s lips again.
When they slept at last, Sif curled one arm around Loki’s shoulders and he curled close, pleasantly cool in the night air, one hand pressed to her heart to feel it and know it was still beating. They woke late in the morning to the brightening of witchlights and Loki’s breath on Sif’s neck, only to find that word from Asgard had come.
Sif with help from Loki hobbled out of her room, and when the Bifrost came for them she held tight to his hand.