CONSTELLATIONS (A Loki fanfiction)

Chapter 1: Andromeda

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COLD.

It encompassed her entire being.
Her muscles grew frigid and her bones grew tight. She grit her teeth in frustration.

Her toes were going from white to grey by now, and her eyebrows knitted together in irritation.

"Fuck this!" She threw her hands in the air, hurling herself off the couch and paced to the thermostat, turning on the heater, her fingers twitching from being suddenly moved, "I'm just gonna have to call him, I can't go without heating for this long!"

Her lips were slowly regaining colour as the heaters blasted, and her teeth gnawed at the cracked skin in the left corner of her bottom lip.

Her silver eyes darted across the room to her black snake, Baphomet, that was happily lazing under the lamp, and she grumbled under her breath at him, "Lucky bastard, getting a constant heater and not needing to worry about electricity bills."
His head tilted a tad towards her, and he seemed to smirk impishly at her.

She rolled her eyes, heading towards the kitchen and pulling out a mug.

It was getting into the colder months now, and it was slowly approaching the one year anniversary of 'The Battle of New York' or "The Time Iron Man Saved The Day By Shoving A Nuke Into A Giant Glowing Asshole Of Death" as Tony Stark so pompously preferred.

The electricity bills would be going up for Valentina these next few months. As much as she loved the winter, Valentina wholeheartedly loathed the expenses that came with it.

More food, more electricity.

It was exhausting.

You would think that after living for so long, she would have accumulated a fair stash of money, and she had, but it was scattered all over the globe.
She didn't want any suspicious links to her bills and life being up for grabs by any pesky organisations.

Valentina still had to work to keep her living expenses manageable, as she wasn't exactly living in a hovel.

Her 'humble' abode was located miles away from the closest store, buried within the forest of pine trees and high-reaching birch trees.

It was a large brown and green house, similar to that of a cottage, but much larger. It had two floors, the first floor containing the entrance, the kitchen, the loungeroom and the office, and the second floor containing the master bedroom, spare bedroom, bathroom and library.

Although there was a main room dedicated to books, the winding staircase that spiralled up from the first floor to the library area was walled with bookshelves too.

Most rooms withheld at least one bookshelf (minus the bathroom), the kitchen with cookbooks and whatnot, the loungeroom with Valentina's favourite series, the office with lots of technology, science, and mathematical textbooks, the staircase with historical and fantasy, her bedroom with 'currently reading' books, more of her favourite series, and her oldest, most precious books, the spare bedroom with the 'classics' with Shakespeare, Edgar Ellen Poe, J.R.R. Tolkien, George Orwell, F. Scott Fitzgerald etc.

In the loungeroom was a large flatscreen above the fireplace, Valentina's collection of movies on either side of the fireplace in drawers, above the drawers short bookshelves, and above the bookshelves hung a collection of animal skulls that she had scavenged in her walks through the forest.
The skulls were a constant reminder of how she must live her life; cherish the lives around you, and never let their memories fade.

Her snake, Baphomet, a beautiful black water moccasin Cottonmouth, was in a large tank behind the couches, lazing his life away like a no-good freeloader.

Valentina loved Baphomet, she had found him half-dead on the side of the road, attacked by some disgusting men with a shovel.

She managed to stop the men from murdering the poor reptile, but he was still badly injured.
One of his eyes was gouged out, and he had plenty of broken ribs.

Valentina had been in tears as she commenced surgery on the poor creature, her tears mixed with the blood stained on her hands.

She stayed away from town for a while after that, as she couldn't stand to face anyone after seeing such a horrid sight.

Nobody really cared about Valentina, save for the old man Strickler, who had been quite close to her in his younger years.

He stopped seeing her as often once he had met his wife and gotten married, though.
Valentina still liked to visit him every once in a while, just to make sure he was still doing well.

He always said that she was a sight to behold every time she visited, with her 5'8, petite stature, heart-shaped face, full, cupid's-bow-less, rosy lips, porcelain skin, silver eyes and long, silver hair.

She really did stand out.

It was back when she first started approaching the years of 80 that her hair started turning grey, along with the hair of her friends around her.
It seemed to stay that way for the rest of her years.

The rest of her years being the last 947 years, of course.

The young skin certainly did look strange with the naturally silver hair, but lately it had become less questioned, due to hair dyeing becoming a more popular beauty fad.

Her frame never seemed to change, always lean, but toned, petite yet firm, pale and never-changing.

She was an anomaly amongst men, and had been for the most part of her life.

She had long accepted this fact, and worked her lifestyle around it, preventing as much heartbreak as possible; getting close, but not too close, making friends, but never having attachments.

She cherished the lives of others, but had accepted that the light would eventually fade from their eyes and leave her alone once more.

Alone, always alone.

Her life had become a haze of standing on the sidelines, watching people's lives streak past her in a daze of overflowing emotions, filling as much emotion as possible into each moment, cherishing each second before their inevitable cease of existence.

She watched as empires rose and fell, people came to power, were overthrown, then spoken about as if they were partial fantasy, when she had met those people when they were children, or traded goods and services with their mothers.

She was an anomaly among men, and anomaly that was barely teetering on the line of existence and living.

She was alone.