Marked, 2/2.
Title: Marked
Series: #10 in Walking Yggdrasil
Author: Eustacia Vye
Author's e-mail: eustacia_vye28@hotmail.com
Rating: PG-13
Author's Notes: Not mine! Characters you recognize belong to Marvel, and I've incoporated some comic back story and mythology into the movieverse.
Summary: Apparently, the Norns had been right when they told Loki that there were things other than Thanos to be concerned about. Now he can actually see what they're referring to, and he was never the type to sit idle.
chapter 1 on LJ | chapter 1 on DW | On AO3
Two - In The Runes
Loki supposed that there was some kind of superstition on Midgard about leaving a man alone after he was exposed to such awe-inspiring magicks. Someone was constantly with him, especially as he began to chart and draw some of the things he had seen or thought might refer to Those Who Sit Above In Shadows. His scribbles were mostly in Asgardian, his handwriting a crabbed, rushed and bastardized form of his usual elegant script. He had to write it all down, had to make sense of it, had to spread out the notes across his floor and rearrange them as the pattern emerged more clearly. He supposed he looked like a madman or one possessed to those that didn't understand. Wanda bit her lip and frowned uncertainly, not understanding the script or symbology. But that didn't matter; he could explain the staves in her language later, could craft something simpler as a way to show her how the seidr and galdr fit into the larger shape of magic.
This was fascinating and important, something that he had never been privy to before. Perhaps this was seeing the ørlög of the wyrd.
Every thread of life and action and fate extended outward from the primal plane set out by the Norns. It was fluid and could be changed, but affected everything and wove its way throughout the cosmos. Every decision could alter the course of the ørlög.
You have a choice, Natasha kept telling him. You have the ability to choose your future now. You don't have to be whatever you thought you had to be.
She might not understand magic, but she was quite capable of guessing at its rules.
Much of his writing seemed to circle around the rune Sól, which he had always been so dismissive of as a boy. What use was it to learn about the sun when Asgard had none? Why bother focus on things only lesser worlds needed?
His recent years had introduced more abstract forms of the word sun, as well as the fact that some people considered souls to be like the sun or moon or stars, items to gravitate toward or around. And if that was the case, Natasha had become a sun for him of sorts, and it was her assurances that he was worthy of something the Norns had planned that he definitely gravitated toward.
When she curled up at his side at night, falling asleep in the midst of his rants about the runes and the patterns between the threads of magic, Loki finally stopped speaking. He drew her fiery red hair between his fingers, drawing his hand back and letting the strands fall from his fingers like a waterfall.
"Sun is the light of the world; I bow to the divine decree," he recited, suddenly remembering the old rune poems that Frigga had him memorize as a boy.
The light of the world. Such a thing had to be allegorical, like the name Those Who Sit Above in Shadows. Those creatures would hide in the dark, pulling strings, avoiding the bright lights from the world. Were they the creeping things he had sensed when he fell through the Void? Were they the monsters Frigga had always warned him about?
He had certainly changed, acknowledging limits and knowing when it was time to stop pushing past them. The divine decree had to be the ørlög. He had never followed his before, had never wanted to bow to anything. Natasha would say that he was growing up, that he was becoming someone that his parents and the Norns could be proud of.
Natasha burrowed deeper into his warmth, an arm looping around his torso in a possessive manner. He could tell that she was slipping through a lighter stage of sleep, closer to waking than sleeping. That she could sleep at all with him was a sign of faith and trust, one Loki wasn't about to abuse. It was a startling change from the start of their adventure together.
"I love you," he murmured in Asgardian, then in the language of runes. Perhaps it could weave around her like a protective spell, perhaps it was nothing more than his own whimsy. She held a deep affection for him, perhaps it could even be the same love that he felt for her. Still, it almost didn't matter. In this moment, he could accept what she was able to give him, that she could be the Tsarina he needed and the Natasha he wanted, as well as the friend and ally he had to have to survive in Midgard. It didn't hurt to share her affections, and the seething, roiling emotions didn't bubble or burn inside of him. Perhaps eliminating that foreign thread of magic had gotten rid of a contaminating influence on him.
"What's that mean?" Natasha murmured sleepily.
"I love you," he repeated in English for her.
Her lips curled into a smile, and her arm around him tightened. "Good."
She didn't return the words, but her trust was harder to earn and he clearly had that at the moment. Loki continued to run his fingers through her hair, finding himself humming softly. It was a protective galdralag, and he could almost see the spell settling onto her skin. His magic seemed to come more easily to him, without any effort at all. Had Those Who Sit Above In Shadows siphoned off his magic for their own nefarious purposes? Did they feed off the energy of the Asgardians?
If they did and eventually turned their attentions to Midgard, Natasha would likely survive the predations. No foreign threads of fate would attach to her, and would simply slide off the protection spell he had woven over her.
To his surprise, her eyes opened as he finished the spell. She shifted position to press a kiss to the underside of his jaw, a gentle butterfly's touch. "You're different," she murmured against his skin. "Whatever that last seizure was, that magic you're scribbling like crazy - and don't think you're not explaining it to Wanda, because you are - you settled into your skin by now. I can feel it. No trembling, no fear. You've got the best parts of Leikr incorporated into yourself."
"Is this a good thing?" Loki murmured. Didn't she like controlling a broken version of him?
Natasha gave him a sensual, secret smile as she straddled him. "Very much so."
"Do you think to reward me with your body?"
She snorted. "You had a seizure. After several of them. You might call yourself a god, but you have limits, Loki. I can hold you and touch you and kiss you, all of which you enjoy just as much." She ran her fingers through his hair, letting the pads brush down the nape of his neck. "Maybe even more, sometimes. You're so touch starved."
He looked at her, a troubled expression on his face. "Is that a bad thing?"
"No. There's something about touch in Asgardian culture, isn't there? A measure of closeness? And otherwise, there strictly is no touching, not even accidentally. I see the way you move, and it's very tightly controlled. Very nuanced."
Loki blinked in surprise. "You watch me that closely?" Something about that was pleasing.
She pulled back and smiled at him before kissing his forehead. "It's important, you know. To see how you move, how you react. Not just as the Black Widow, but as the Tsarina."
"And as Natasha?" he asked, realizing that she seemed to categorize all of her skill sets separately. He recalled from their time in the galaxy that she slipped through different masks and identities easily. Perhaps this was how she did it. Loki found the concept odd and disturbing, especially now that he felt more settled and less full of aimless rage.
Now her smile was a bit rueful. "Maybe."
"Because you cannot admit that you care," Loki guessed. Perhaps he saw into her as much as she saw him. Giving away even little clues and pieces of herself was a sign of trust, and there were so very few people in the entire galaxy that she trusted.
He was one of them. For all the magic in Yggdrasil, he never would have thought it would come to this when he approached her to come with him after the Stones.
She traced a line down from his forehead along the bridge of his nose, then down to his lips. Her thumb swiped across his lower lip, and she had a gentle, almost sad smile. "Maybe," she said after a moment, and flicked her eyes to him when he caught her wrist.
It felt almost like magic in her touch, as if she was trying to trace a rune onto his face. That was silly and impossible; she had no magic, and the Time Stone hadn't changed her so much to give her any. No, she was simply harder to kill now, ageless and hopefully deathless. She was like a super soldier now, like Steve and the Winter Soldier.
One day, she would have to watch at least half of her friends grow old and die. It would hurt her, a knife deep in her heart. The ache would bring her to her knees, and even thinking of the possibility now was generating a similar ache in Loki's chest. He knew that kind of loneliness, the rage that simmered just behind it.
Bringing her palm to his lips, he brushed a featherlight kiss against her skin. This tie between them, whatever name they would give the emotion, was tangled and complicated and stronger than he expected it to be.
"You and your people aren't tainted by the magic from Those Who Sit Above In Shadows. I don't know what it means yet."
Natasha ran her other hand down shoulder in a comforting caress. "You will."
"Such faith in my skill."
"You found them, didn't you? Now that you know they exist, you can find out what they want and why. It's all about finding their motivation. Then you have the lever to twist them with."
"As if it could be so simple."
"Even powerful people have the same motivations as unpowered ones," she said mildly. "And I know how to find and manipulate those motivations."
He breathed in deeply. Oh, yes, she certainly did. But she wasn't playing him now, and this tie between them wasn't a game. She was as honest with him as she knew how to be, which was quite the gift between a set of liars.
"Then I will find them. And we will lever them out of the way."
Natasha's smile carried a terrifying edge to it. "Absolutely."
***
Wanda sat crosslegged on the floor of Loki's suite, dressed in black leggings, black T shirt and red cardigan. Her fingernails and toenails both had that dark nail polish she favored, though her fingernail polish was chipped and in need of repair. She was holding a carton of beef lo mein and digging into it with chopsticks, the cheap kind that had to be broken and edges filed to remove any splinters. Her kohl-ringed eyes lifted from the carton to take in the spread sheets of paper all around her, and she chewed slowly and thoughtfully.
Loki was also barefoot, in indigo jeans and a forest green button down shirt that Natasha had gotten for him. It was soft and comforting, and he liked to think of it as a tie to her even if she wasn't present. Wanda had requested that Natasha go to her library; in the five years before Loki had arrived, she had studied briefly with Dr. Strange, Illyana Nikolievna Rasputina, Madelyne Pryor, Nico Minoru, and Shang-Chi. She had taken extensive notes and used some of the magic she learned from them, but for the most part had been content with her own skill set. "I know I've seen some of these symbols before, but I don't remember exactly where," she had said. "The kind of magic they did isn't exactly the same." Not needing to know what Loki was working on, Natasha had gone to look for the corresponding notes.
"I'm thinking," Wanda began, "that we're looking at different dimensions."
Blinking in surprise, Loki stared at her. "You say that so casually."
"All the magicians I studied with here and there had experience with other dimensions. Some of them are ruled by magic, I think. So, if these creatures you were talking about are from one of them, that could be why you never knew about them before."
He sat heavily on the floor beside her and took up a different carton with a frown. "I don't like this idea," he admitted.
"Because you didn't know of them?" she asked.
"Mostly. Partly," he amended, frowning a little deeper. "There are a number of magicks I was not overly familiar with. But to feel so blinded by another being? I had thought Thanos was bad enough before, and he couldn't curb my magic."
Chewing thoughtfully, Wanda looked at him in curiosity. "Should we try to walk Yggdrasil to talk to Norns about that?"
Loki shot her a scornful look. "That's rather like a child running to its mother to solve its problems. We have more than enough clues to solve this puzzle for ourselves."
"You think so? My training is haphazard. A month here or there. And even learning your magic? I can't even say that it's gone very far."
He glared at her. "Not for lack of trying on my part."
She waved her hand with the chopsticks about in a negligent wave. "You were seizing left and right. I wonder if the spells we were doing interfered with whatever Those Who Sit Above In Shadows were doing. The one blood spell was to absorb magic, after all-"
"That's what I was missing!" Loki said suddenly, cutting her off. He nearly dropped his carton as he lunged across the floor to a scattering of papers covered in glyphs and runes. "I'd forgotten about that damned spell that started this!"
Wanda put aside her food more carefully and then knee-walked her way to Loki's side. "So what are we looking at?"
"You recall what I taught you of the ørlög, yes? The lines of fate, the basis of the weavings that create the wyrd?"
"That it wasn't your forte," she supplied with a shrug. "We were doing more of the spá, remember. That's closer to what I do with my magic."
"The things I have seen, the threads that I severed and the shape of the runes in the magic that I almost understood with perfect clarity... I was looking at the wyrd. I could not comprehend it outside of the Norns' realm without the Time Gem, but I caught a glimpse of it. I was trying to write it out, but I was missing a piece."
"So?"
"So?!" Loki huffed, distressed that she couldn't follow his logic. "That damned blood magic draining spell attempted to sever my ørlög. It touched off a series of catastrophic changes in the wyrd as it applied to me."
"Oka-a-y," she said slowly, still not following.
"What happens to spells you cast over another?" he asked, an irritated edge to his voice clearly indicating that he was questioning her intelligence.
Wanda bristled and pointed a finger at his face, tendrils of her red magic coiling around it. "You augment its effects. It becomes stronger-" She cut herself off and dropped her hand, eyes wide as the magic bled from her. "Oh."
"Exactly. I reacted badly, yes. Anyone would have. But the sheer magnitude of what was done made no sense for whatever that idiot mortal caster could do. But this... I had forgotten about that, and the stave I thought it was..."
Loki called over the fountain pen he had been using, and corrected the runes and staves that had been scrawled across the pages. He was still scribbling a few minutes when Natasha arrived with Wanda's notebooks. Ink was on his fingers and the carpet, and some of the pages had puncture marks from the force of his writing. Wanda was pointing out some blotches of his prior writing, either questioning or comparing it to what she had learned before.
"I guess you two didn't need me to get this stuff after all," Natasha remarked dryly.
"Those Who Sit Above In Shadows are bleeding Asgardians dry," Loki told her, a crazed look in his eyes. "No Midgardians as far as I can tell, but that's what's being done. Those spells-" He eyed the notebooks in her hand and then greedily snatched them up. "I see what they meant now, the Norns, the thing I was shaped to be and the thing I am becoming. I can almost see the shape of the wyrd, and it's just so... There are no words, Natasha, none."
Natasha reached back over and grabbed the notebooks back. "You still need to eat."
"I need to find-" he began, reaching for the notebooks.
Wanda twitched her fingers and her magic shot them up to the ceiling and held them fast. "If you collapse again, we're all lost."
Scowling at them both, Loki pulled his lips back in a snarl. "I am no paltry child to toy with. I have the means and the knowledge to save this wretched realm!"
"Which is all well and good," Natasha said firmly, pushing on his shoulders. He fell back onto his haunches and looked up in surprise. "But I can do that and you can't stop me. So eat something and take care of yourself until you can."
"This is a horrible reality," Loki grumbled. "I should find one of those other dimensions and escape there. I had seen a number of more favorable ones."
She smiled at him sweetly. "But none of them are the right ones, are they?"
He shot her a surly look, then snatched up his discarded carton of Chinese food. "I am a god," he told her petulantly.
"And I am your Tsarina," she reminded him. "Should I mark you as my property to remind you?" she asked in a haughty tone.
Something shifted in his eyes. "Markings."
"What is it?" Wanda asked, frowning.
"The staves and runes and lines, all of them fit a pattern. A marking of a kind. I need to find it," he said, putting down the carton again.
"Eat first," Natasha said firmly in her Tsarina voice. "You're ready to fall over, and this is not productive if you can't think straight."
Loki shot her a look that was at once resentful and frustrated. "There's too much to do!"
"Maybe so. But you can wait ten minutes while you eat," she said mildly, taking up her own carton from where she had left it behind. "Clint, Laura and the kids are with Sam and Vision in the gardens. I think they're playing hide and seek with Scott."
"That's just cruel," Wanda chuckled.
"Must we talk of inane things?" Loki snapped around a mouthful of food.
"Yes. Because if chance words we say trigger ideas, think of what a whole conversation could do," Natasha told him firmly. "It's called free association."
"I simply need to work."
"I can appreciate the need to constantly work and study," Natasha said with a sigh, "but this is ridiculous and going to kill you."
"I am a god. Mortal concerns won't kill me." He fell silent as she shot him a pointed look, then looked at the bed where he had convalesced several times already.
"I didn't die," he grumbled, stabbing at his food with chopsticks in a surly manner.
"That was a near thing," Natasha replied. "And silly me, I'd like to actually keep you around for a while longer."
Loki looked up abruptly, an expression of wonder and hope on his face. "Truly?"
"Of course. I wouldn't have said it otherwise."
"Then I shall endeavor to continue being of use to you."
Natasha smiled at him. "I appreciate that."
Wanda rolled her eyes at them both. "And Sam said he didn't understand how you two worked."
"His sarcasm is quite different," Natasha agreed with a nod. "He's nice. We should fix him up with someone. Most of the people I knew were SHIELD agents, though. I don't think they would do for him. He needs someone with priorities outside of saving the world."
"How about we save the world first?" Loki said, interrupting Wanda.
"We'll plot later," Wanda assured Natasha with a smile. "His Highness here might have some ideas for saving the world."
Loki shot her an unamused look. "Why do I surround myself with mortals that have no concept of how awe inspiring I am?"
"Keeps you honest," Wanda told him flatly. "Reminds me of Pietro, a little," she said, her smile taking on a sad edge. "Confidence bordering on arrogance. But sometimes, a stilling hand is enough to help you succeed."
He snorted and took another overlarge mouthful of food. After swallowing it down in a painful lump, he pointed at her with the chopsticks. "Yours is hardly a stilling hand."
"I wasn't referring to my own," Wanda replied with a teasing smile, glancing at Natasha. "The eminence grise that you refer to as your Tsarina. Fitting, I suppose, since she's a Romanoff." She laughed at Natasha's eye roll and Loki's glower. "Oh, it's not a big deal with me, what pet names you have for each other. It's cute. Like I should get one for Vis. But it feels odd, too, so I haven't."
Natasha shot Loki an amused glance. "If it happens, it happens. The biggest thing we have to worry about is figuring out how dangerous these spells are."
"Terribly, I would guess," Wanda murmured.
Loki frowned slightly, thinking. "I'm missing something. Perhaps something in the staves..."
"Listen. The runes are complicated, you said," Natasha murmured, patting his arm in support. "It could be one meaning or another, or the arrangement of them, or how they're placed in sequence, or maybe it has nothing to do with runes and everything to do with timing. But you know they're there. You know what their magic is like."
He looked at Wanda. "Had you seen it? When I broke the threads?"
She shook her head. "I didn't even know what you were doing."
"So I'm the only one that can stop them," he mused. Then the enormity of his words crashed into him. "By the Tree, if they realize it..."
"You'll find them first," Natasha insisted. "If anything, your self interest would demand it."
There was no point to even be upset with her words, not when they were true. He glanced at the scores of notes scattered all over his quarters. Somewhere in that chaotic mess was a clue to unlocking the identity of Those Who Sit Above In Shadows. He just had to find the key sooner rather than later.
***
Loki took his silver knife and sat on the roof of the facility again, feeling hollow and uncertain. This magic wasn't his forte, and he felt like a child tugging at Frigga's skirts begging for her help in getting his studying done. Closing his eyes, he tried to listen to the music of the air, the lilting way the wind moved around him. Listen to the way the realm tries to speak to you, Frigga used to say. There are ways it reaches out to those sensitive in the ways of magic, to those that can manipulate it. There is power out there, spirits and beings in the realm. More than just the wights. Some don't even have names for what they are...
She had known all of the ørlögs of the wyrd, so she must have seen the hints of Those Who Sit Above In Shadows. She must have known something was luring within the fabric of space and time, reaching through the branches of Yggdrasil from the Void.
When he had fallen through the Void, the fractured bits of memory and mind and knowledge hadn't been able to make total sense of what he had seen. What if they hadn't been stars but eyes and grasping hands, gaping mouths to devour the magic twisted within the very fiber of his being? What if they thought he had been cast out and ready to be absorbed?
His eyes shot open when he felt a piercing pain in his left palm and arm. Without realizing it, he had carved the sól deeply into his palm, and doubled it on his arm. The doubled rune on his arm seemed almost like a shielding spell, worked with his blood and the whispers of air of Midgard. Almost in a trance, he took the grit of the rooftop and worked it into the wounds, sealing the dirt and earth into his blood. Hissing, he blew out his breath, and focused on the lines and shapes of the rune. Blood magic, cementing the vague thoughts as he let his mind drift, as he thought of the shape of the wyrd, the webbing and weaving that the Norns had let him glimpse. For a moment he had understood it all, had seen the possibilities within the weaving, the potential of thousands of tiny choices, each fracturing out into different realities, different dimensions, different personalities.
Loki lifted the blood from his wound so it wouldn't drop to the rooftop, the brilliant green of his magic taking on a rusty red glow. It looked close to Wanda's bright scarlet, if a bit toned down in hue. He saw something, a shape taking hold, eyes and a gaping maw, grasping fingers, the shape of a figure hungering for something more.
I see you, Little One. Did you think you could remove my marking? Did you think you could erase the ties that bind you to us? Did you think your baby's skill could be our undoing?
Swallowing down the spike of fear rising in his throat, Loki merely grinned. "You're afraid," he said aloud. The smile he gave them was as sharp as a razor's edge, a mirror to Natasha's deadly smile as she brought her Black Widow skills to bear.
The gaping maw faltered for a moment, but that was more than enough.
If it was afraid, that meant Natasha was right. Loki could hurt Those Who Sit Above In Shadow, could stop whatever it was that they did. Thanos had only wanted to kill, but this being seemed to want to feast on magic and the lives of others. A vampire, to use the parlance of popular fiction on this realm.
As quick as he felt triumphant, it bled out to fear of his own. He hadn't grounded himself. Not planning to actually cast anything, Loki hadn't prepared. He had come with the knife mostly as a meditation focus, not as a means to do blood magic. This left him open to the realm, to the grasping hands of Those Who Sit Above In Shadow. And those hands were reaching through the bubble of magic holding his blood, a window into whatever dimension they came from. The ghostly hands were trying to widen that hole, desperate to feed, to consume, to devour whole, to take on everything as fuel for their otherworldly works.
Scarlet red magic tore apart the circle of his blood and pulled him backward and away from the fissure between universes. The markings on his left hand and arm flared white hot, as brilliant as burning magnesium, blinding him. Loki could hear Wanda's panicked Sokovian behind him, could imagine the messy finger gestures of her magic, the wild gestures as she ripped apart the working he hadn't realized he was making.
"Are you stupid?!" she cried in English when his blood finally collapsed to the rooftop in clots. "Or is it just a death wish to impress the rest of us?"
He turned to follow the sound of her voice; he was still blinded by the light emanating from his arm, and apparently it still gave out light strong enough to make her squeak in dismay. "I did not intend to do a working," he said simply.
Wanda said something that was no doubt derogatory in Sokovian. "As if meditation would lead to anything else with all of this on your mind," she said, closing her hand over his forearm. The healing rune she sketched with her other hand channeled her scarlet magic and into his skin. "I felt something wrong in the air," she said tersely as he felt his skin knit back together, closing the white-bright light inside of him. "Even Thor felt it, though he didn't know what he felt. He said his hammer spoke to him."
Loki snorted. "And what did the hammer say?"
"Danger was near," Wanda replied. "I could have told him that."
His laughter was hollow. "I did not intend to do a working," he repeated. "I meant to ponder the wyrd, what the Norns told me in dreams, the meaning of the threads I severed."
"You made someone dangerous very angry," she said quietly, both hands now over his forearm. "Should I call in the other magicians I tried to study with?"
Something in him quailed at that, and he gently disengaged himself from her grasp. He blinked at the livid scarlet scar on his pale skin, sól on his palm and the doubled sól on his forearm. Loki touched it with a finger, but the flesh wasn't tender to the touch. If anything, it felt warm, as if the magic of the rune was sealed into his skin.
The light was inside the scar. The white-bright and blinding light, the thing that Those Who Sit Above In Shadows could not tolerate.
He tilted his arm to her view, taking in her confusion. "I think we already have the means to defeat them," he said slowly. "If I can understand what this means."
The Norns had said he was changing. He was becoming something else. He was growing, but that didn't mean that he understood what was happening to him.
As if she realized how adrift he suddenly felt, Wanda wrapped her arms around him in a tight and protective hug. Rather than push her away with nasty words as he would have done months ago, Loki wrapped his other arm around her and shut his eyes.
He was changing, he was marked, and somehow he was again the pivot to change the scope of the wyrd. Oh, how Frigga must have been laughing in the afterworld, or how amused the Norns had to be. They had crafted his fate and let him run loose, and he had moved precisely where they thought he would go.
Adrift as he was, he wasn't alone. And in that, he could at least find solace.
The End
Series: #10 in Walking Yggdrasil
Author: Eustacia Vye
Author's e-mail: eustacia_vye28@hotmail.com
Rating: PG-13
Author's Notes: Not mine! Characters you recognize belong to Marvel, and I've incoporated some comic back story and mythology into the movieverse.
Summary: Apparently, the Norns had been right when they told Loki that there were things other than Thanos to be concerned about. Now he can actually see what they're referring to, and he was never the type to sit idle.
chapter 1 on LJ | chapter 1 on DW | On AO3
Two - In The Runes
Loki supposed that there was some kind of superstition on Midgard about leaving a man alone after he was exposed to such awe-inspiring magicks. Someone was constantly with him, especially as he began to chart and draw some of the things he had seen or thought might refer to Those Who Sit Above In Shadows. His scribbles were mostly in Asgardian, his handwriting a crabbed, rushed and bastardized form of his usual elegant script. He had to write it all down, had to make sense of it, had to spread out the notes across his floor and rearrange them as the pattern emerged more clearly. He supposed he looked like a madman or one possessed to those that didn't understand. Wanda bit her lip and frowned uncertainly, not understanding the script or symbology. But that didn't matter; he could explain the staves in her language later, could craft something simpler as a way to show her how the seidr and galdr fit into the larger shape of magic.
This was fascinating and important, something that he had never been privy to before. Perhaps this was seeing the ørlög of the wyrd.
Every thread of life and action and fate extended outward from the primal plane set out by the Norns. It was fluid and could be changed, but affected everything and wove its way throughout the cosmos. Every decision could alter the course of the ørlög.
You have a choice, Natasha kept telling him. You have the ability to choose your future now. You don't have to be whatever you thought you had to be.
She might not understand magic, but she was quite capable of guessing at its rules.
Much of his writing seemed to circle around the rune Sól, which he had always been so dismissive of as a boy. What use was it to learn about the sun when Asgard had none? Why bother focus on things only lesser worlds needed?
His recent years had introduced more abstract forms of the word sun, as well as the fact that some people considered souls to be like the sun or moon or stars, items to gravitate toward or around. And if that was the case, Natasha had become a sun for him of sorts, and it was her assurances that he was worthy of something the Norns had planned that he definitely gravitated toward.
When she curled up at his side at night, falling asleep in the midst of his rants about the runes and the patterns between the threads of magic, Loki finally stopped speaking. He drew her fiery red hair between his fingers, drawing his hand back and letting the strands fall from his fingers like a waterfall.
"Sun is the light of the world; I bow to the divine decree," he recited, suddenly remembering the old rune poems that Frigga had him memorize as a boy.
The light of the world. Such a thing had to be allegorical, like the name Those Who Sit Above in Shadows. Those creatures would hide in the dark, pulling strings, avoiding the bright lights from the world. Were they the creeping things he had sensed when he fell through the Void? Were they the monsters Frigga had always warned him about?
He had certainly changed, acknowledging limits and knowing when it was time to stop pushing past them. The divine decree had to be the ørlög. He had never followed his before, had never wanted to bow to anything. Natasha would say that he was growing up, that he was becoming someone that his parents and the Norns could be proud of.
Natasha burrowed deeper into his warmth, an arm looping around his torso in a possessive manner. He could tell that she was slipping through a lighter stage of sleep, closer to waking than sleeping. That she could sleep at all with him was a sign of faith and trust, one Loki wasn't about to abuse. It was a startling change from the start of their adventure together.
"I love you," he murmured in Asgardian, then in the language of runes. Perhaps it could weave around her like a protective spell, perhaps it was nothing more than his own whimsy. She held a deep affection for him, perhaps it could even be the same love that he felt for her. Still, it almost didn't matter. In this moment, he could accept what she was able to give him, that she could be the Tsarina he needed and the Natasha he wanted, as well as the friend and ally he had to have to survive in Midgard. It didn't hurt to share her affections, and the seething, roiling emotions didn't bubble or burn inside of him. Perhaps eliminating that foreign thread of magic had gotten rid of a contaminating influence on him.
"What's that mean?" Natasha murmured sleepily.
"I love you," he repeated in English for her.
Her lips curled into a smile, and her arm around him tightened. "Good."
She didn't return the words, but her trust was harder to earn and he clearly had that at the moment. Loki continued to run his fingers through her hair, finding himself humming softly. It was a protective galdralag, and he could almost see the spell settling onto her skin. His magic seemed to come more easily to him, without any effort at all. Had Those Who Sit Above In Shadows siphoned off his magic for their own nefarious purposes? Did they feed off the energy of the Asgardians?
If they did and eventually turned their attentions to Midgard, Natasha would likely survive the predations. No foreign threads of fate would attach to her, and would simply slide off the protection spell he had woven over her.
To his surprise, her eyes opened as he finished the spell. She shifted position to press a kiss to the underside of his jaw, a gentle butterfly's touch. "You're different," she murmured against his skin. "Whatever that last seizure was, that magic you're scribbling like crazy - and don't think you're not explaining it to Wanda, because you are - you settled into your skin by now. I can feel it. No trembling, no fear. You've got the best parts of Leikr incorporated into yourself."
"Is this a good thing?" Loki murmured. Didn't she like controlling a broken version of him?
Natasha gave him a sensual, secret smile as she straddled him. "Very much so."
"Do you think to reward me with your body?"
She snorted. "You had a seizure. After several of them. You might call yourself a god, but you have limits, Loki. I can hold you and touch you and kiss you, all of which you enjoy just as much." She ran her fingers through his hair, letting the pads brush down the nape of his neck. "Maybe even more, sometimes. You're so touch starved."
He looked at her, a troubled expression on his face. "Is that a bad thing?"
"No. There's something about touch in Asgardian culture, isn't there? A measure of closeness? And otherwise, there strictly is no touching, not even accidentally. I see the way you move, and it's very tightly controlled. Very nuanced."
Loki blinked in surprise. "You watch me that closely?" Something about that was pleasing.
She pulled back and smiled at him before kissing his forehead. "It's important, you know. To see how you move, how you react. Not just as the Black Widow, but as the Tsarina."
"And as Natasha?" he asked, realizing that she seemed to categorize all of her skill sets separately. He recalled from their time in the galaxy that she slipped through different masks and identities easily. Perhaps this was how she did it. Loki found the concept odd and disturbing, especially now that he felt more settled and less full of aimless rage.
Now her smile was a bit rueful. "Maybe."
"Because you cannot admit that you care," Loki guessed. Perhaps he saw into her as much as she saw him. Giving away even little clues and pieces of herself was a sign of trust, and there were so very few people in the entire galaxy that she trusted.
He was one of them. For all the magic in Yggdrasil, he never would have thought it would come to this when he approached her to come with him after the Stones.
She traced a line down from his forehead along the bridge of his nose, then down to his lips. Her thumb swiped across his lower lip, and she had a gentle, almost sad smile. "Maybe," she said after a moment, and flicked her eyes to him when he caught her wrist.
It felt almost like magic in her touch, as if she was trying to trace a rune onto his face. That was silly and impossible; she had no magic, and the Time Stone hadn't changed her so much to give her any. No, she was simply harder to kill now, ageless and hopefully deathless. She was like a super soldier now, like Steve and the Winter Soldier.
One day, she would have to watch at least half of her friends grow old and die. It would hurt her, a knife deep in her heart. The ache would bring her to her knees, and even thinking of the possibility now was generating a similar ache in Loki's chest. He knew that kind of loneliness, the rage that simmered just behind it.
Bringing her palm to his lips, he brushed a featherlight kiss against her skin. This tie between them, whatever name they would give the emotion, was tangled and complicated and stronger than he expected it to be.
"You and your people aren't tainted by the magic from Those Who Sit Above In Shadows. I don't know what it means yet."
Natasha ran her other hand down shoulder in a comforting caress. "You will."
"Such faith in my skill."
"You found them, didn't you? Now that you know they exist, you can find out what they want and why. It's all about finding their motivation. Then you have the lever to twist them with."
"As if it could be so simple."
"Even powerful people have the same motivations as unpowered ones," she said mildly. "And I know how to find and manipulate those motivations."
He breathed in deeply. Oh, yes, she certainly did. But she wasn't playing him now, and this tie between them wasn't a game. She was as honest with him as she knew how to be, which was quite the gift between a set of liars.
"Then I will find them. And we will lever them out of the way."
Natasha's smile carried a terrifying edge to it. "Absolutely."
***
Wanda sat crosslegged on the floor of Loki's suite, dressed in black leggings, black T shirt and red cardigan. Her fingernails and toenails both had that dark nail polish she favored, though her fingernail polish was chipped and in need of repair. She was holding a carton of beef lo mein and digging into it with chopsticks, the cheap kind that had to be broken and edges filed to remove any splinters. Her kohl-ringed eyes lifted from the carton to take in the spread sheets of paper all around her, and she chewed slowly and thoughtfully.
Loki was also barefoot, in indigo jeans and a forest green button down shirt that Natasha had gotten for him. It was soft and comforting, and he liked to think of it as a tie to her even if she wasn't present. Wanda had requested that Natasha go to her library; in the five years before Loki had arrived, she had studied briefly with Dr. Strange, Illyana Nikolievna Rasputina, Madelyne Pryor, Nico Minoru, and Shang-Chi. She had taken extensive notes and used some of the magic she learned from them, but for the most part had been content with her own skill set. "I know I've seen some of these symbols before, but I don't remember exactly where," she had said. "The kind of magic they did isn't exactly the same." Not needing to know what Loki was working on, Natasha had gone to look for the corresponding notes.
"I'm thinking," Wanda began, "that we're looking at different dimensions."
Blinking in surprise, Loki stared at her. "You say that so casually."
"All the magicians I studied with here and there had experience with other dimensions. Some of them are ruled by magic, I think. So, if these creatures you were talking about are from one of them, that could be why you never knew about them before."
He sat heavily on the floor beside her and took up a different carton with a frown. "I don't like this idea," he admitted.
"Because you didn't know of them?" she asked.
"Mostly. Partly," he amended, frowning a little deeper. "There are a number of magicks I was not overly familiar with. But to feel so blinded by another being? I had thought Thanos was bad enough before, and he couldn't curb my magic."
Chewing thoughtfully, Wanda looked at him in curiosity. "Should we try to walk Yggdrasil to talk to Norns about that?"
Loki shot her a scornful look. "That's rather like a child running to its mother to solve its problems. We have more than enough clues to solve this puzzle for ourselves."
"You think so? My training is haphazard. A month here or there. And even learning your magic? I can't even say that it's gone very far."
He glared at her. "Not for lack of trying on my part."
She waved her hand with the chopsticks about in a negligent wave. "You were seizing left and right. I wonder if the spells we were doing interfered with whatever Those Who Sit Above In Shadows were doing. The one blood spell was to absorb magic, after all-"
"That's what I was missing!" Loki said suddenly, cutting her off. He nearly dropped his carton as he lunged across the floor to a scattering of papers covered in glyphs and runes. "I'd forgotten about that damned spell that started this!"
Wanda put aside her food more carefully and then knee-walked her way to Loki's side. "So what are we looking at?"
"You recall what I taught you of the ørlög, yes? The lines of fate, the basis of the weavings that create the wyrd?"
"That it wasn't your forte," she supplied with a shrug. "We were doing more of the spá, remember. That's closer to what I do with my magic."
"The things I have seen, the threads that I severed and the shape of the runes in the magic that I almost understood with perfect clarity... I was looking at the wyrd. I could not comprehend it outside of the Norns' realm without the Time Gem, but I caught a glimpse of it. I was trying to write it out, but I was missing a piece."
"So?"
"So?!" Loki huffed, distressed that she couldn't follow his logic. "That damned blood magic draining spell attempted to sever my ørlög. It touched off a series of catastrophic changes in the wyrd as it applied to me."
"Oka-a-y," she said slowly, still not following.
"What happens to spells you cast over another?" he asked, an irritated edge to his voice clearly indicating that he was questioning her intelligence.
Wanda bristled and pointed a finger at his face, tendrils of her red magic coiling around it. "You augment its effects. It becomes stronger-" She cut herself off and dropped her hand, eyes wide as the magic bled from her. "Oh."
"Exactly. I reacted badly, yes. Anyone would have. But the sheer magnitude of what was done made no sense for whatever that idiot mortal caster could do. But this... I had forgotten about that, and the stave I thought it was..."
Loki called over the fountain pen he had been using, and corrected the runes and staves that had been scrawled across the pages. He was still scribbling a few minutes when Natasha arrived with Wanda's notebooks. Ink was on his fingers and the carpet, and some of the pages had puncture marks from the force of his writing. Wanda was pointing out some blotches of his prior writing, either questioning or comparing it to what she had learned before.
"I guess you two didn't need me to get this stuff after all," Natasha remarked dryly.
"Those Who Sit Above In Shadows are bleeding Asgardians dry," Loki told her, a crazed look in his eyes. "No Midgardians as far as I can tell, but that's what's being done. Those spells-" He eyed the notebooks in her hand and then greedily snatched them up. "I see what they meant now, the Norns, the thing I was shaped to be and the thing I am becoming. I can almost see the shape of the wyrd, and it's just so... There are no words, Natasha, none."
Natasha reached back over and grabbed the notebooks back. "You still need to eat."
"I need to find-" he began, reaching for the notebooks.
Wanda twitched her fingers and her magic shot them up to the ceiling and held them fast. "If you collapse again, we're all lost."
Scowling at them both, Loki pulled his lips back in a snarl. "I am no paltry child to toy with. I have the means and the knowledge to save this wretched realm!"
"Which is all well and good," Natasha said firmly, pushing on his shoulders. He fell back onto his haunches and looked up in surprise. "But I can do that and you can't stop me. So eat something and take care of yourself until you can."
"This is a horrible reality," Loki grumbled. "I should find one of those other dimensions and escape there. I had seen a number of more favorable ones."
She smiled at him sweetly. "But none of them are the right ones, are they?"
He shot her a surly look, then snatched up his discarded carton of Chinese food. "I am a god," he told her petulantly.
"And I am your Tsarina," she reminded him. "Should I mark you as my property to remind you?" she asked in a haughty tone.
Something shifted in his eyes. "Markings."
"What is it?" Wanda asked, frowning.
"The staves and runes and lines, all of them fit a pattern. A marking of a kind. I need to find it," he said, putting down the carton again.
"Eat first," Natasha said firmly in her Tsarina voice. "You're ready to fall over, and this is not productive if you can't think straight."
Loki shot her a look that was at once resentful and frustrated. "There's too much to do!"
"Maybe so. But you can wait ten minutes while you eat," she said mildly, taking up her own carton from where she had left it behind. "Clint, Laura and the kids are with Sam and Vision in the gardens. I think they're playing hide and seek with Scott."
"That's just cruel," Wanda chuckled.
"Must we talk of inane things?" Loki snapped around a mouthful of food.
"Yes. Because if chance words we say trigger ideas, think of what a whole conversation could do," Natasha told him firmly. "It's called free association."
"I simply need to work."
"I can appreciate the need to constantly work and study," Natasha said with a sigh, "but this is ridiculous and going to kill you."
"I am a god. Mortal concerns won't kill me." He fell silent as she shot him a pointed look, then looked at the bed where he had convalesced several times already.
"I didn't die," he grumbled, stabbing at his food with chopsticks in a surly manner.
"That was a near thing," Natasha replied. "And silly me, I'd like to actually keep you around for a while longer."
Loki looked up abruptly, an expression of wonder and hope on his face. "Truly?"
"Of course. I wouldn't have said it otherwise."
"Then I shall endeavor to continue being of use to you."
Natasha smiled at him. "I appreciate that."
Wanda rolled her eyes at them both. "And Sam said he didn't understand how you two worked."
"His sarcasm is quite different," Natasha agreed with a nod. "He's nice. We should fix him up with someone. Most of the people I knew were SHIELD agents, though. I don't think they would do for him. He needs someone with priorities outside of saving the world."
"How about we save the world first?" Loki said, interrupting Wanda.
"We'll plot later," Wanda assured Natasha with a smile. "His Highness here might have some ideas for saving the world."
Loki shot her an unamused look. "Why do I surround myself with mortals that have no concept of how awe inspiring I am?"
"Keeps you honest," Wanda told him flatly. "Reminds me of Pietro, a little," she said, her smile taking on a sad edge. "Confidence bordering on arrogance. But sometimes, a stilling hand is enough to help you succeed."
He snorted and took another overlarge mouthful of food. After swallowing it down in a painful lump, he pointed at her with the chopsticks. "Yours is hardly a stilling hand."
"I wasn't referring to my own," Wanda replied with a teasing smile, glancing at Natasha. "The eminence grise that you refer to as your Tsarina. Fitting, I suppose, since she's a Romanoff." She laughed at Natasha's eye roll and Loki's glower. "Oh, it's not a big deal with me, what pet names you have for each other. It's cute. Like I should get one for Vis. But it feels odd, too, so I haven't."
Natasha shot Loki an amused glance. "If it happens, it happens. The biggest thing we have to worry about is figuring out how dangerous these spells are."
"Terribly, I would guess," Wanda murmured.
Loki frowned slightly, thinking. "I'm missing something. Perhaps something in the staves..."
"Listen. The runes are complicated, you said," Natasha murmured, patting his arm in support. "It could be one meaning or another, or the arrangement of them, or how they're placed in sequence, or maybe it has nothing to do with runes and everything to do with timing. But you know they're there. You know what their magic is like."
He looked at Wanda. "Had you seen it? When I broke the threads?"
She shook her head. "I didn't even know what you were doing."
"So I'm the only one that can stop them," he mused. Then the enormity of his words crashed into him. "By the Tree, if they realize it..."
"You'll find them first," Natasha insisted. "If anything, your self interest would demand it."
There was no point to even be upset with her words, not when they were true. He glanced at the scores of notes scattered all over his quarters. Somewhere in that chaotic mess was a clue to unlocking the identity of Those Who Sit Above In Shadows. He just had to find the key sooner rather than later.
***
Loki took his silver knife and sat on the roof of the facility again, feeling hollow and uncertain. This magic wasn't his forte, and he felt like a child tugging at Frigga's skirts begging for her help in getting his studying done. Closing his eyes, he tried to listen to the music of the air, the lilting way the wind moved around him. Listen to the way the realm tries to speak to you, Frigga used to say. There are ways it reaches out to those sensitive in the ways of magic, to those that can manipulate it. There is power out there, spirits and beings in the realm. More than just the wights. Some don't even have names for what they are...
She had known all of the ørlögs of the wyrd, so she must have seen the hints of Those Who Sit Above In Shadows. She must have known something was luring within the fabric of space and time, reaching through the branches of Yggdrasil from the Void.
When he had fallen through the Void, the fractured bits of memory and mind and knowledge hadn't been able to make total sense of what he had seen. What if they hadn't been stars but eyes and grasping hands, gaping mouths to devour the magic twisted within the very fiber of his being? What if they thought he had been cast out and ready to be absorbed?
His eyes shot open when he felt a piercing pain in his left palm and arm. Without realizing it, he had carved the sól deeply into his palm, and doubled it on his arm. The doubled rune on his arm seemed almost like a shielding spell, worked with his blood and the whispers of air of Midgard. Almost in a trance, he took the grit of the rooftop and worked it into the wounds, sealing the dirt and earth into his blood. Hissing, he blew out his breath, and focused on the lines and shapes of the rune. Blood magic, cementing the vague thoughts as he let his mind drift, as he thought of the shape of the wyrd, the webbing and weaving that the Norns had let him glimpse. For a moment he had understood it all, had seen the possibilities within the weaving, the potential of thousands of tiny choices, each fracturing out into different realities, different dimensions, different personalities.
Loki lifted the blood from his wound so it wouldn't drop to the rooftop, the brilliant green of his magic taking on a rusty red glow. It looked close to Wanda's bright scarlet, if a bit toned down in hue. He saw something, a shape taking hold, eyes and a gaping maw, grasping fingers, the shape of a figure hungering for something more.
I see you, Little One. Did you think you could remove my marking? Did you think you could erase the ties that bind you to us? Did you think your baby's skill could be our undoing?
Swallowing down the spike of fear rising in his throat, Loki merely grinned. "You're afraid," he said aloud. The smile he gave them was as sharp as a razor's edge, a mirror to Natasha's deadly smile as she brought her Black Widow skills to bear.
The gaping maw faltered for a moment, but that was more than enough.
If it was afraid, that meant Natasha was right. Loki could hurt Those Who Sit Above In Shadow, could stop whatever it was that they did. Thanos had only wanted to kill, but this being seemed to want to feast on magic and the lives of others. A vampire, to use the parlance of popular fiction on this realm.
As quick as he felt triumphant, it bled out to fear of his own. He hadn't grounded himself. Not planning to actually cast anything, Loki hadn't prepared. He had come with the knife mostly as a meditation focus, not as a means to do blood magic. This left him open to the realm, to the grasping hands of Those Who Sit Above In Shadow. And those hands were reaching through the bubble of magic holding his blood, a window into whatever dimension they came from. The ghostly hands were trying to widen that hole, desperate to feed, to consume, to devour whole, to take on everything as fuel for their otherworldly works.
Scarlet red magic tore apart the circle of his blood and pulled him backward and away from the fissure between universes. The markings on his left hand and arm flared white hot, as brilliant as burning magnesium, blinding him. Loki could hear Wanda's panicked Sokovian behind him, could imagine the messy finger gestures of her magic, the wild gestures as she ripped apart the working he hadn't realized he was making.
"Are you stupid?!" she cried in English when his blood finally collapsed to the rooftop in clots. "Or is it just a death wish to impress the rest of us?"
He turned to follow the sound of her voice; he was still blinded by the light emanating from his arm, and apparently it still gave out light strong enough to make her squeak in dismay. "I did not intend to do a working," he said simply.
Wanda said something that was no doubt derogatory in Sokovian. "As if meditation would lead to anything else with all of this on your mind," she said, closing her hand over his forearm. The healing rune she sketched with her other hand channeled her scarlet magic and into his skin. "I felt something wrong in the air," she said tersely as he felt his skin knit back together, closing the white-bright light inside of him. "Even Thor felt it, though he didn't know what he felt. He said his hammer spoke to him."
Loki snorted. "And what did the hammer say?"
"Danger was near," Wanda replied. "I could have told him that."
His laughter was hollow. "I did not intend to do a working," he repeated. "I meant to ponder the wyrd, what the Norns told me in dreams, the meaning of the threads I severed."
"You made someone dangerous very angry," she said quietly, both hands now over his forearm. "Should I call in the other magicians I tried to study with?"
Something in him quailed at that, and he gently disengaged himself from her grasp. He blinked at the livid scarlet scar on his pale skin, sól on his palm and the doubled sól on his forearm. Loki touched it with a finger, but the flesh wasn't tender to the touch. If anything, it felt warm, as if the magic of the rune was sealed into his skin.
The light was inside the scar. The white-bright and blinding light, the thing that Those Who Sit Above In Shadows could not tolerate.
He tilted his arm to her view, taking in her confusion. "I think we already have the means to defeat them," he said slowly. "If I can understand what this means."
The Norns had said he was changing. He was becoming something else. He was growing, but that didn't mean that he understood what was happening to him.
As if she realized how adrift he suddenly felt, Wanda wrapped her arms around him in a tight and protective hug. Rather than push her away with nasty words as he would have done months ago, Loki wrapped his other arm around her and shut his eyes.
He was changing, he was marked, and somehow he was again the pivot to change the scope of the wyrd. Oh, how Frigga must have been laughing in the afterworld, or how amused the Norns had to be. They had crafted his fate and let him run loose, and he had moved precisely where they thought he would go.
Adrift as he was, he wasn't alone. And in that, he could at least find solace.
The End