of shadows in darkness that i used to own

ii. come on you hermit

He hears before he sees her, heavy footfalls pounding her arrival, a wardrum. Loki's heart beats in eighths. He can feel the guards nod their assent as they part to let her through, allowing her to handle the door herself. Sif's disdain for chivalry is secret to none.

She approaches Loki in a line drawn orthogonal to that of her mouth, toting a platter of stale bread and water. This time, she is armored: a full display of steel plates and sharp frets and tough leather-hide, gauntlets with unyielding creases. The knives she wears decorate her body like precious stones.

"It has been decided that I will be the one to deliver your meals." Autarchic, approximating a statue, perfectly formed—betrayed only by her living, libidinous eyes. Her voice, formed of frost. Loki recalls a Midgardian word: 'clinical'.

The torches crackle as she releases the prisoner, not without difficulty, from the restraints that bind his hands and mouth. As Loki feasts on open air, his shadow sentinels debauch Sif's face. Painting her with wicked want—revealingly open, sublimely illustrated. Loki longs to touch, but does not; he knows, as does she, of the guards who wait braced and just out of sight.

(Look, sneer the shadows. How her fingers twitch.)

Sif watches as Loki eats half of his portion of bread without tasting, but savors the water, tipping it into his throat with a dripping slowness. It coats his arid tongue with moisture. Deeply, he sighs his relief; Sif's fists curl into knots.

When he has finished, she snatches up the fetter and cuffs (the shadows snicker) and crudely bind his face and hands. She sweeps the emptied platter from the floor as it it burns her; the goblet clangs to the floor. Loki's jaw curves; he knows that she can see his teeth, even behind the mask. Sif, who only ever deals in absolutes, wears a look of inviolable enmity.

Loki doesn't watch her leave, this time.

- x -

War, to Asgard's people, was not a condemnable evil but a beloved custom, championed by all. Thus Thor, with his bestial strength and his hunger for glory, was favored. A child of Loki's scholarship and sense would be writ away to such violence.

Loki thought often of war, and injustice, when he stalked the castle grounds at night. Seeking the pleasant company of trees, he forged familiar pathways from the palace to the warriors' stations, which housed the barracks and weaponshouses that sustained Asgard's forces. They sprawled over vast swaths of plain that fed to ancient woods. Though Loki loved the forests, he detested the grounds, where the basest of brutes were hailed as heroes. The strong choking the weak, brutalizing their talents, which might have so beautifully bloomed if just given the option.

Loki was never missed; he was far too quiet (and Thor much too loud) to be missed. In spite of Loki's station, he could come and go as he pleased.

Loki craved the still, the solitude, the slow passing of time. He felt at ease among the sea of green, the frost-chill of night air.

It was on one such night that she burst from the trees: the scrawny twig-child with flame-gold hair, swimming in her overlarge tunic, like a star plummeted from the heavens. Her fierce windstorm feet kicked up a flurry of leaves. Loki, caught under siege beneath an unsuspecting tree, bolted upright; the girl shrieked. Clutched tight in her tiny hand was a small dagger, unmarked, ostensibly pilfered from a weaponshouse. She brandished it before her in a pitiful fist.

"You stole that blade," Loki remarked, taking three paces backward. It was the first thing he thought to say to her—not what are you doing or how did you find me or are you an apparition?. If his still-pounding heart had yet recovered from the shock, he might be bemused.

Instead of outright denying, she tightened her grip. "Borrowed it," she huffed, her face bloated into a comical scowl. Like broken wings, her arms pinioned from her sides. "Oy! I do not need to explain myself to you," she sneered.

Loki laughed, keening and sharp. Any attempt at a glare was lost on such a diminutive face. She invoked a fledgling bird.

"And why are you here, on the warriors' grounds in the dead of night, with a borrowed blade?"

"I told you before, book-shadow-prince—I shall become a warrior!" Sif's voice pitched higher on every word; Loki stared with incredulity as she whipped her blade into the body of his tree. Shingles fell brusquely to his feet. "They refuse to let me fight 'til I prove myself worthy. But they won't let me near the training grounds. So I have been coming here, in the night, to practice my form. I care not what you think of it."

Loki had never beheld such defiance. Unadulterated; distilled to the purest form. He found himself compelled again to laugh at the delusion of it all. The very notion that this lanky, undisciplined, female child would someday protect the realm—what a feverish, fanciful farce. And yet, even as Loki opened his mouth to guffaw...something dark in him wished to believe.

"Oy, shadow-prince," Sif remarked. Tiny fists plastered to tiny hips; but there was something in her eyes that stirred him. "What are you doing here?"

The silence fermented for a while before he replied: "I enjoy the darkness." In that very instant, a soft waft of moonslight drifted through the canopy to disclose his face. Traitor, he thought bitterly, even as the beams touched his cheek in contrition.

"You truly like to stare at shadows?" Sif wrinkled her little nose; her voice dropped lower. "Don't you think that's...strange?"

The ludicrous notion of this walking, breathing anomaly thinking of anything as strange was enough to send Loki from his body. Laughter, not barbed but earnest, bubbled from his mouth. As the perplexed Sif watched, Loki laughed and laughed. It might have been the sincerest thing offered up by his mouth in a very long time.

"There are some who think me wicked," Loki told her, when the fit had subsided at last. Blinking, the girl inched closer to him; her hair streamed behind her as if to channel the sun, in this time when the stars reigned supreme. As though the sun slept in her, safely concealed in each brilliant strand. As she stepped sidelong into the eye of the moon, Loki thought to be subsumed by that hair—gold gossamer that would drown him, crown him, wrap his every shadow in an effulgent embrace. Every beam flocked to her, cloaking her in splendor, this girl who was like a calamitous spirit, strewing chaos wherever she went.

That spirit stared. Her lip puffed. She wore an expression Loki had never seen.

"I don't think you are wicked."

Loki could barely hear for the stardust in her eyes, the spun-gold strands flared wild about her face, corrupting his hands with the desire to touch, to feel, to pull and yank those threads, as hard as he possibly could. Would they burn when he made contact, as touching the sun? He nearly surrendered to it, reaching in close—and then, like a knife careening, Sif's cry pierced through the veil.

"Oy—what are you doing?!" she gasped, clawing that hair down, snatched back from the place where his fingers just ghosted. He recoiled then, cracking like fire, like he had touched to the sun after all; then took to his feet, fast as the wind. The girl who stole the sun screamed after him—come back, come back!—but did not follow.

In the dark safety of Loki's bedchambers, he bored holes in the palms of his hands.

(The shadows cannot reach it, he thought. And then: I will have it for my own.)