of shadows in darkness that i used to own

x. when we were made

When Sif comes to him the following morning, the temperature in the enclosure has harshly fallen.

She makes quick work of the fetter and cuffs, sets before the prisoner his morning bread and water. When Loki makes no movement, Sif surveys him with sleepless eyes, the words he had spoken like ice in her throat.

Crossing her arms brutishly, she makes her refrain. "You wish to say something else?"

"How clever you must think yourself." Loki's voice is quiet. "How delightfully brazen."

"You cannot provoke me," Sif attempts. Her breath mists. The shadows, thick about her, sneer.

"You lie." Sif's heart freezes in her throat. "I will tear that lying tongue from your mouth," he hisses, "and your pride along with it."

"You would so hastily put out my tongue," she begins, knuckles folded white against the unyielding wall, "when it has drawn so many sighs from your lips?"

It is a crooked play; she knows it, and knows that he craves it, the weapon of her darkness, the choke of her light.

As Loki tosses his head back and laughs, his eyes burn bright as any sun.

A trio of guards rush then into the chamber, spears held to conceal their panicked faces. They look to Sif for an order. She gives none.

"Do you think that you have won?" he snarls, his mouth contorted in rage. "You, who dances for me even now? You, who gave yourself body and soul, mocking me with your presence, taunting with your flesh in the name of defiance? You think that you can outwit me? That you can outrun me?"

Sif does not speak, does not move to touch her knives. When three more armed guards surge into the space, she does not turn to look at them, but heeds their thunderous footfalls.

"Stop," she commands (and doubtless curses the unsteadiness of her voice).

"You think you may defy your fate," Loki breathes. "You are a fool."

"You were never fated to this," Sif says quietly, carefully. "It was by your own decisions that you ended up here."

Loki clutches a fist to his chest. The laughter abruptly halts.

"You know nothing of fate," he spits, and with a hand braced against the floor, moves to stand. The two guards flanking Sif's either side brace their weapons. A third moves to leave, perhaps to sound an alert; he halts in his tracks by a single glance from Sif.

"Wait," she orders. "Please."

"Was this not inevitable?" Loki addresses her alone. "That the golden son of Odin would rise to many-splendored greatness, despite every inanity, every act of brute stupidity, and that the cursed, wicked Loki would fall? Was this not the very outcome against which you so rebelled? The very reason for your ever-enduring disappointment?"

He would smite the pity from Sif's face.

"Oh, yes, you know nothing of fate—" he lurches forward, and suddenly five facsimiles, five dark gods of mischief had descended upon the enclosure; between their howling and Sif's shouting, Loki's voice echoes: "and you know nothing of who I really am, or of the power I possess!"

The five Lokis circle, barricading them all; and then from the five there are ten, and from those ten more, until Sif's eyes are filled with Lokis that are not truly Lokis but splinters and specters of shadow and pain. Swirling tendrils—black death and silver frost and green eyes, smoldering like emerald coals. Helplessly, a guard cries out before the horde sets upon him. Sif hears but not sees as the dark closes in, the dark that is his and his alone; all her senses give way to the pull of his shadow, the vertigo as everything swallows and shatters, blurs and fades.