Actions

Work Header

you wear me out

Chapter Text

Loki does not question when she appears before him. After all, she is the keeper of many of his secrets, including the abilities to move through reality and bend space and time to will. The easiest is through dream walking, and even the weakest in seidr can do it if they know how. She does, and so he is not surprised.

Sif trails curious fingers over the bookshelves in his Midgardian apartment. It’s several stories up from the streets of New York City, and the lights from all around, so fond these mortals were of their technology and lights and the city that never slept, plays over her sharp lines. The blackness of her hair turns raven-blue, the swell of her breasts underneath the red tunic she wears, the long curve of her waist and her legs encased in simple leggings. She is a stunning image.

Her voice even more so when she speaks. “So this is what the wicked-Loki spends his time doing?”

In this dream Loki sits on the low couch. He tilts his head to her. “Sometimes.”

She turns to him then, away from the shelves, her eyes bright underneath her winged eyebrows. Displeasure is written across her face. “Sometimes? You think we do not hear on Asgard of the deeds of one Loki Odinson?” Her red lips curve in a smile, so like his dagger he knows she carries in her boot. “Or should I say Loki Laufeyson?”

“My Lady does not visit kindly, I see.”

Red lips draw back into a snarl, and she faces him like she’s prepared to throw herself to hit him. “You play at things you should not.”

“I play with things I want. Because I can,” Loki’s answer is a snarl that matches her own.

Sif shakes her head, wide eyes looking at him with something akin to disgust and pity. “These mortals are beneath you. They are nothing compared to you. Compared to—” Her teeth close together with a click, swallowing the end to her sentence.

Compared to me, is the end and it hangs in the air.

Loki frowns. He will not have that. He sends her from his dream, flings her out with all the care of a child throwing a toy down on the ground in displeasure. His eyes open, and he stares at the bookshelves where she had been till the sun rises.

-

 

She visits again the next night.

Loki blinks open sleep-eyes and finds hazel ones staring straight into them, phantom pressure of weight and gravity on his thighs and stomach where she’s perched herself.

“You will not throw me out,” she snarls into his face. A command, an order, as if they are on the battlefield instead of his bed.

Loki casts Sif from his dream because he can. And because he finds the rage on her face as he does so very delicious to behold.

 

-

 

It is on the third time Sif appears in his dreams that he asks her what she is doing here.

“What are you doing here?” Loki looks at her from where he’s seated himself in the living room again.

She sits on the unused kitchen’s counter, flicking a knife over and over again into the wall. She has hit the same spot all twenty-three times. There’s a gash in it now from her force. “Where else would I be?” She does not look at him when she answers with that question.

He finds his tongue has nothing to respond with; and isn’t that a turn of the table, one he does not particularly like, he thinks.

“Wrong question, though.” Sif stretches forward and pulls the knife from the wall, long fingers curving around the hilt. “You’re slipping, Loki.”

And then she turns and throws the knife straight at him, a quick flick of her wrist she learned from him so many dying stars in the cosmos ago.

 

-

 

He does not see her for a fortnight after that. Only once does he think about intruding upon her own mind. After all, it would be easy, and no doubt she would not be able to send him from her dreams like he does to her. He doesn’t though.

And then she comes on a night where he’s had a foul day with the so called Avengers. One moment he’s sleeping off the pain of his body and the next she’s stretched out beside him on the bed.

“You still play with them,” Sif says. Her eyes trace over his form, stopping on the places where he hurts the most. As her mouth purses in annoyance, he wonders if that emotion is because she disagrees or wishes that she’d been the one to hurt him in the first place.

Loki looks to the ceiling, away from her heavy gaze. “I do.” She unsettles him, being here.

“You play with them like a cat does a mouse. You could be done with them now and instead you waste time like some cruel—”

“Monster?” Loki asks, cutting her off and finishing her sentence.

Her eyes narrow, he sees them from the corner of his own.

“If you are a monster, it is because you’ve made yourself so.”

He does turn to her then, spitting rage behind a twisted mouth and clenched teeth. “I am a monster.”

Sif laughs, a tiny sound in the emptiness of the dream. “Perhaps the greatest trick is that the liar lies even to himself.”

 

-

 

“Your mother misses you, you know.”

“She is not my mother.”

“Still lying to yourself, I see.”

“It is hard to love a traitor.”

A beatific smile. “That’s the humorous thing about traitors. They don’t always have to do in action in order to be one. Some are supporters.”

A beat.

“Why are you here?”

“Still not the question you want. Still I will tell you, where else would I be? And still not the answer you want.”

He wonders when she became better at words than he.

 

-

 

“Your hair is disgusting.”

She sits on the glass table in front of the couch, boot tapping on the floor as he ignores her.

Behind his book, Loki raises an eyebrow. “Would my lady care to cut it herself.”

Sif’s grin is a wicked thing. She reaches down and pulls forth the curved dagger from her boot. “And return the favor you gave to me so many turns of the suns ago?”

Loki smirks. “If you so wish.”

She flicks the blade back into her boot, along her calf, and looks at him straight on. “Ask me again when I see you next.”

In actual body, she means.

 

-

 

“You do not ask of Thor.”

Sif looks at him over her shoulder where she is peering through the window at the city below. “Why should I?”

“You do not want to know of his being?”

She shrugs and goes back to looking out. “Thor is fine. This I know. Thor is not my concern.”

Loki scowls and sends her from his mind for the first time in weeks.

 

-

 

He waits till she tries again.

He bars her entrance once, twice, a third, even a fourth time.

He relents on the seventh night.

 

-

 

“What is it you want of me?”

Sif smiles and bends closer to him where she hovers over his prone body in bed. Her smile says he has asked the right question. And now he waits for an answer he is not sure he wants.

She places a hand on his chest. “The same as always.”

Her teeth shine white and her wide eyes gleam in satisfaction. “Everything.”