of shadows in darkness that i used to own

v. high water

The still of Sif's bedchamber unsettles her, sinew and bone.

The still steeps into her skin and lingers, a stain—every bit as one as the face in her mind. She inhales sharp as her stomach distends, as though to reject this depraved aberration of fingers—too short, too warm, far too undisciplined to be his. Her heart thunders. Shadows taunt. In this blood-sport theater, she arches like a archer and readies her quiver, her body pulled taut like a bow.

(Her blood runs thin.)

His hands obfuscate her breasts, make a rope of her tongue and a noose for her neck. His eyes glow green as grinning ghosts, clouded jade and burnished ink-dark with lust. More cryogenic than freezing, more wild than living. He burns like a funeral pyre.

Sif's pace has increased now, fingers working rapid at her core. Her movements are unerotic and primeval, base—designed to debase her, to bring relief quickly, so unlike Loki's own drawn and dark gospel. She maps him to her membranes, encrypts him in her cells. She violates herself on his virulent vapor.

When Sif reaches her limit she bites back a wanton cry; she spears herself onto her fingers as to swallow them alive. She bucks against the sacred rage, sucks her lip into horned-steel teeth. Her hand comes away wrecked, an offering of filth. Even the most grievous of gods would avert their gaze.

(Your blood runs thin.)

The mirror reveals to her what she really is: white-blood and red ash, encased in a sickly gray skin. Perhaps he taunts her so because she is the perfect vessel—carved out hollow, only black meat left inside. Sif looks as broken as she feels—as broken as she loathes that he knows her to be—because Loki is Hel itself and Sif a splintering pile of marrow and bone. Loki is even now her weapon of choosing, and Sif in absence of all sense would flay herself alive.

Her bottom lip splits; the blood trickles down. It tastes like molten steel. (It tastes like Loki's mouth.)

(Think. Think of what you are—)

The drowning river of regret consumes her. Sif allows herself to be engulfed.

- x -

Loki trapped her often beneath the weight of her words. Sif lacked decorum and flustered as easily as she betrayed her own feelings through stance and speech. Frequently he caught her in such sensitive moments, waiting with barbs ready-perched on his tongue. They could often be found thus quarreling, and none thought to question it. Such was their opposition: patent, loud, and diametric. Loki lived to provoke her combat.

On one such evening, he cornered her just outside the feasting hall. "I saw Fandral clip you today." His eyes caged her where she stood; her face invoked a grave. "A lucky shot?"

As always, she stumbled headfirst into the trap. "Never have I been grazed in a battle, mock or otherwise, before today," Sif snapped. She wrenched up her head, refusing to decay under his derisive stare. "And never shall I be again."

"What's become of you? You've grown even more reckless of late." His abrupt deviation of cadence surprised her; if she didn't know better, she'd think this an expression of disappointment. She opened her mouth to protest; but no sooner had the words left Loki's lips than did a clap of laughter shudder the floors. (A consequence of one of Volstagg's more riveting anecdotes, no doubt.)

"I haven't—" she huffed; and then, becoming at once acutely aware of her stance, drew up her body into a firm line. "I think you'll find I am far more composed than are those others who share my station." The statement needed no elaboration; they both knew full well of whom she spoke. The so-called Warriors Three were carving quite a name for themselves in Asgard's ranks; and Sif had become something of a de facto leader. They flanked her like cattle, delighted by her every bellow. And where they flocked, Sif too followed. "I am a mountain of calm."

"You are an avalanche." He thought that if he only plucked, she might snap in two like a glittering string, so tightly was she wound. Oh, to flay her so beautifully, to wound her as she wounded. Would that she could see how she wounded him. Her vexation would be his trifling revenge, and his petty delight. "I see you on the grounds with those three, Sif. With my brother. Brandishing your sword about as would an oaf, or an untrained child too eager to prove. Have all these years in the soldiers' barracks taught you no discipline?"

Untempered rage jolted her fingers, guiding them swift to the daggers at her hip. That glistening, immolating, intoxicating rage—the very same that surged in Loki's own veins.

"What is this—another show of unbelieving?" Sif seethed, eyes glazed, inciting the curl of Loki's petulant mouth. He recalled a time when she would have borne fists; the memory pricked. "Have I not done as I have sworn, and become a warrior? Have I not risen to the fore of Asgard's ranks?" A dagger-tip, thrust to the stretch of gold above Loki's head; the shriek of screeching metal. "I have. I have done nothing that I said I would not do. Does it vex you? That I, by my own merit, I have won the All-Father's favor—an honor afforded so few, even among men!"

Sif's fingers were darkened from the sun now and calloused. Her arms bore new muscle. The body mantling Loki's was no longer fragile, but strong from days spent besting men twice her stature. Those shaking hands betrayed her true feeling, just as something of Sif's always did when it mattered. Sheathing her weapon, she held those fingers to Loki's throat. Trembling, naked, white-hot and probing: a slow, aching attrition. He growled in kind, low and longing: the sharpest sword in his arsenal.

"Oh—is this envy? Does it vex you, Loki?" she snarled—fire and venom from the nostrils of dreki. Grafvitnir's teeth. Fáfnir's acid. Guarding her treasure—rage. Rage, the cataclysm that followed Sif, that was Sif—a force so inflamingly untamable, unleashed now unto his quaking form. Quaking them both. "Do you envy that I have done this? Despite my sex, and despite your words?"

It might have been the lure of that treasure, or the potent threat of falling further to her mercy; or, it might have just been the calamitous beauty of her feral face that stayed him still when she took him by the hair (though he still possessed the faculties to bite back with a grin). But in truth, it was her spirit—that dark, devastating, indomitable spirit—that slew him that day. (Her spirit, and the ghosts of her flame-tip fingers that still haunted his lips every waking, aching instant since the night she had pinned him to the dank autumn earth.)

"If sex is such a fixture of pride for you, then why," Loki spat, in a penultimate act of defiance, "do you so endeavor to act like a man?"

As soon as Sif silenced him with her mouth, Loki shredded what remained of his dissent like scrap in her hands. She caged his weapon-sharp tongue in her teeth, and swallowed it down, knowing nothing of finesse. She consumed more than kissed, kissed as to steal, to suck up his very soul: one more prize for the hoard. Loki didn't dare open his eyes. Fleetingly he wondered how he must look to her, how he must taste: perhaps of death and desire in equal measure, paralyzed between the impulse to love and the instinct to kill. He wondered if, behind all of the trickery and the distortion, she could see him—feel him—silently beg for her pain.

He let her stab her wyrm's nails into his thin shoulders, and she let him reach for and defile her hair—he groped at it loosely, ever the object of his fixation, saturating his wanting fingers; she crashed him to her, field unto tide, his Hel to her high water.

"You'll speak of this to no one," she whispered harshly when she prised off him at last, her fingers pulsing—yes—that perfect, profane rage to his lips. "Or I will kill you where you stand."

instead of answering, he released a long, shuddering sigh. Sif blanched; then, as she did always, she fled. She did not look back to see his face.