✍🏻 Bonds of Fear (Loki)

18 - Stayin' Alive

Loki

First, I needed to get her body temperature to normal.

I sat on the bed, resting my back against the headboard, and pulled her to me, her head on my shoulder and her breathing barely audible. I splayed my open palm on her stomach under her shirt, the center of her body, so the heat would get distributed as evenly as possible. With my other hand, I grabbed her wrist and tried to recall how exactly did she feel whenever I touched her. It took me almost an hour of trial and error, but eventually, her lips tinted with color again and the warmth of her skin under my fingertips felt just as when she was awake.

I kept channeling the heat into her and went through what Thor told me. It very probably might have been just an exhaustion and though the loss of her body temperature was worrying, I gained new hope she might wake up. It was also surprising and a bit saddening that nobody came to look for her. Nobody wondered where she was or if she was okay. Would anyone truly miss me if I expired for good? Would anyone care? Thor was the only one genuinely happy when he found out I didn't die.

"You better pull through, earthling," I whispered and brushed some hair from her face as her head lulled on my shoulder. "I still didn't figure out what your plan is and I hate unfinished business."

The morning sun started to cast its rays through the curtains and I reached for the remote control, flipping through the channels to find the one she watched the only time I saw her with the TV on.
The camera zoomed in on the Alps, right after followed by a shot of a woman on a train, wearing fancy clothes and reading a letter that she inherited a small hotel in some remote, Austrian village. Twenty minutes of cheesy, brain cell-murdering romance and I started to doubt Feer's intelligence. I considered switching to something more substantial but if that was something she liked, maybe it would reach her subconsciousness and make her wake up. With a sigh, I turned up the volume, contemplating suicide another thirty minutes later.

The end credits started to roll and I sighed with relief, groaning in despair a second later when a similar movie started right after. A young, clumsy girl, getting a post as a maid for some grumpy lord in an English countryside. "Woman," I growled, rubbed my forehead but made sure my hand on her stomach wouldn't move. "Why do they always put your gender into these helpless scenarios as if you couldn't take care of yourself? Is that how men view you on Midgard? Good for cooking, cleaning, and unable to fix anything yourself?" I looked down at her and shook her shoulder but there was no response.

Five movies later and there started to be a pattern. "So, if I get it right, as long as the guy is a widower, he can get away with being a dick, correct?" I asked her one of my many questions that I voiced out loud in the past hours, but I no longer expected an answer. "And a kiss is romantic only if it's during heavy rainfall and after a fight? Were you ever kissed during sunrise on Álfheimr? Or even better, during nightfall when the fireflies rise from the grass? I dare to say, in my centuries-old experience, it's much better than rainfall."

The hours were dragging, the day moving to the night, with no change to her comatose state. How long could humans go without food or water? It was now two full days. Several times, I tried to remove my hand from her abdomen to see any change but in a few minutes, her temperature quickly dropped. I stayed up the whole night, even going to the break room to make her one of those coffee drinks but the only result was that it took me a while again to warm her up and the fumes from the cup did nothing.

By 11 pm, the channel finally stopped showing the stupid movies with terrible dubbing, the screen going into a static buzzing that still had more depth than any of the plots I'd seen that day. I watched it in silence, my mind drifting to Ingrid. It has been a few decades since I saw her, wondering if she finally accepted one of the many marriage proposals. I couldn't fight the empty pit in my stomach that started to grow in size, grateful that at least I didn't have to bother with the shield since Feer was half-dead. Strengthening the shield in the past weeks and keeping it active all day long was exhausting me more than I expected. Though I appreciated each time she was asleep so I could drop the shield, now I wanted her to wake up, my desperation growing with each passing hour.