fic: bound (thor movieverse)
loki/sigyn, implied loki/darcy; pg-13, ~4800
He is smiling, bland and pleasant, only the spark in now always-green eyes betraying his glee, and she realizes he’s finally managed to leave her speechless. As soon as the thought crosses her mind, he reminds her, “I told you I would do it.” myth-based au; movie-compliant
Her body bears no sign of their child yet.
They settle and move, settle and move, and Loki is stubborn against his own knowledge.
“Only you try to win an argument with yourself,” she reminds him without much kindness at all, and his look is such a mix of disgust and devotion that she chuckles, thumbs the corner of his mouth as she leans forward to kiss him.
Behind him, his shadow fragments, struggles invisible bonds, and Loki sees nothing where Sigyn sees all.
Their marriage, when all is said and done, happens thusly:
His fingers grab the cord spun from the nothing that birthed him, yank in a fit of fury and hunger and calm madness, and he hesitates only when the binding tangles in his fingers like a serpent, eyes lifting to study her face with an emotion she will share with no one.
There is a heartbeat, an eternity, and she waits.
Until Loki says, with the cord curled loose around his wrist, “You know what to call me,” and her heart beats within her chest, her fingers drifting soft over his wrist.
Sigyn is silent, triumphant but not very excitedly so, uncertain about nothing.
Then: “I knew you” and she looks upon him fully one last time, acknowledges his final offer to undo her own binding for her.
In his eyes, a cold burns like a blaze and darkness rolls in as a wave from the depths of what was and what will be. There are stars behind the stars and shadows unfolding from themselves like cloth that no one has thought to cut, and it had been traumatizing, to speak a language that no one else could even understand before she’d found him.
-he unfurls the cloth, green spilling from chilled fingers as fires light the dark-
Loki waits, watches with careful blankness, and she brings his hand up to her mouth possessively.
Sigyn feels the loose end of the binding curve into metal around his finger beneath her tongue.
Her husband tastes of ash and frost, and she traces his name into his skin with teeth and tongue until he burns inside her.
Sigyn is laughter when no one thinks there should be, when the night is darkest and coldest beyond the fire.
She is contrast and common sense, a cause of uncertainty and bewilderment among her own people, and until she is a traitor, there is an understanding that no one understands her. They know her as the one always stealing Frigga’s finest work to warm her feet when she’s cold, and informing them all that the necklace is actually very ugly, really, and that she’d rather be mortal than bored.
Midgard speaks of her with the devoted wariness felt only by children too alike to their mothers for their own comfort.
“He’s like an angry babe.”
Her fingers move over her needlework without pause but she’s smiling already, the large open-mouthed smile that is not acknowledged as a grin because it is improper when there are treaties being spoken and the “creature” is wandering the halls.
Jötunn, his chosen body promises, but there is a wariness felt by all in accepting even that shape for him, even for purposes of protocol.
And today there are no attempts even at protocol.
No, he’s a little creature today, long-limbed and delicate, wings flitting vaguely as he circles her the way he has since he’s stopped hiding his curiosity. He (male today, and he usually is but she pays enough attention to realize there is a reason it’s usually and not always) reminds her of a carrion bird and a little ape all at once, and moves like her shadow around her.
“There’ll be no treaty until you-”
A buzz, soft but furious, and there is that should-be-frightening (but isn’t- to her) impression of images bleeding together as he holds his shape together through his anger, yellow eyes glittering green- red- red- green. “Names cause chains,” as if she can understand a word he’s saying (and she can and he knows she can and they do not need to have this conversation), and she watches him blur inside himself and then fold back together to glare at her working fingers, tongue flicking a little urgently over the slit of his mouth. Then, as if he cannot stand it any longer: “What are you making?”
“What color are your eyes?”
There is a sensation of the world dropping for a moment, the yellow- red- green burning with offense, exhilaration-
Her needlework skitters from her hands, spiders and snakes spilling from her fingers, and the little creature is gone.
Sigyn banishes the little bastards with a roll of her eyes, and begins the work anew.
(Frigga draws green deeper into the tapestry that never finishes.)
Odin grows more stubborn, always, and the Not-Jötunn spends more time tormenting him than assisting either side.
But the Jötunn refuse to send anyone else, certainly not one that is truly one of them, and Sigyn starts and undoes her work again and again and again as the floors tremble with Odin’s frustration.
“His skin is far too thin to be anyone’s father.”
“Why do you think Thor is Thor?” Sigyn is very close to shredding her needlework project with her bare hands. “What do you think of sculptures?”
Silence, the man sauntering around her chambers in Odin’s shape glancing at her. “Sculptures bore me.”
“Everything that is not you bores you.”
Not-Odin’s eye fragments with colors that don’t belong: “Not everything.”
The new shadow is a mirror.
Sigyn is unsure whether even she means one way or another, but this shadow is as different from her husband as it can be, the shape of him solid but his insides unsettled, a wild wave of uncertainty and distress that struggles to burn into rage.
The opposite of all she’s known since they had found one another for the first time (only the next time after the last).
She murmurs affection to the shadow once as her husband sleeps beside her, and he screams and shakes the world in the dark where he exists as if he can block out all words that threaten to undo him even more.
Loki sighs and rolls closer to her under the covers, tucks his nose into the spot between her shoulder blades and whines for her to go back to sleep because he’s tired, why are you keeping me awake?
Sigyn smooths a palm down his arm until he sleeps again, and searches the shadows.
Stars only glint before they wink back out of existence and she sighs and forces herself to sleep.
Odin is still unsure whether he wants Sigyn’s husband under his blade or at his side.
From the start and to the end that has not yet come, Loki finds the concept hysterical.
The Jötunn demand absolute in all things, and Loki drifts to and fro from the beginning for the fun of it.
Once he wears the simple metal band, his drift becomes more of a lean.
Sigyn is as much an object of dismissal as she is of suspicion.
As a child, she is an orphan raised beneath Frigga’s gaze, the closest thing she has to a mother also the most understanding of them all (Frigga forces her to spin sometimes, and Sigyn’s work spirals out blue and brown and gray beneath her fingers) and does nothing while doing everything for anyone who may need something. She curses the Jötunn who took her mother, her father less than those who have lost nothing to them, and she tosses Thor’s finest armor down a well when he calls her a little rat.
She tells Odin once, when he expresses the sincere but vague care for her that he always does, that the stars are not blazing and fading the way they usually do and it is the first time she learns that, to all others, they do not change very much at all. He says, quietly and with no anger, “Keep these truths to Frigga and myself, Sigyn, keep these things quiet” and she obeys.
Sigyn is complete but skewed, does not belong even as she does, and she accepts what she is as quickly as she accepts the constant punishment she receives for it.
When her time becomes swallowed more and more by the Not-Jötunn, she shifts from abnormal to treacherous.
“You can avoid this,” he says once, twice, three times and then four, watching her with eyes that bleed green without stop now but she only smiles, the pit of uncertainty inside her gone at last, and fiddles with her woodcarving.
“I’d rather enjoy myself.” She considers and, because there has never been a reason to hide her thoughts from him: “But I would like a friend one day, if you would ever like to give me a gift to make up for it.”
There is silence as pale skin surfaces beneath blue, as the green deepens, brightens; then: “One day I will find you one.”
Sigyn believes him.
The gods have their own story of Loki’s birth, of his multiple births.
That there was a shadow in the dark and thoughts gathered like storm clouds where there was no mind to hold them, and that there was a shape only when there was an interest in shaping one. They say that he birthed himself through all that exists or has existed somewhere, from worms of the earth and fleas on the cat through solidly built apes that begin to select tools from the world as he leaves them, and that he lived each because there was an interest in each.
The Jötunn think, in the beginning, that his taking their shape is a compliment to their kind.
In this, at least, Odin has never been so foolish.
Birds use their wings because they have them, is a saying on Asgard, and pity the person who tries to bend the universe to its will by convincing them not to do what they were formed from the earth to do.
Sigyn fails with sculpting, with wood carving.
“You could try some type of… interpreting dance,” the Not-Jötunn offers one night when he seems too tired to even taunt her, and she pauses in her current disastrous attempt at drawing that she had not wanted to try at all since she is awful at it.
He’s sitting opposite her in the almost quiet of her sitting room and she studies him as limbs lengthen, curve and collapse again.
Finally: “I would only hurt myself.”
He stares back, for a moment genuinely baffled by what she means, and then he chuckles (the low rolling noise that is only heard around Sigyn) and leans forward to tug lightly at the now-smeared paper in her hand. “That would come closer to capturing me than any of this.”
Frigga forces her to spin one morning before the sun rises, and blue deepens almost immediately into black, the strand heavy and cool as she at first struggles with it.
Her almost-mother says, quietly, urgently, “You already know this” as the strand becomes too heavy and unpredictable, and she fights it a little more before something inside her settles and the spun nothing begins to slide from the fiber like liquid.
Color returns, glints at green a promise beneath the nothing, and then Sigyn is fine again.
Sigyn kisses him, in one of the halls where he’s lurking and mocking and fascinated as he is fiddling with her braid as if he's never seen it before, and he chills beneath her mouth, freezes her breath in her lungs as she swallows his.
Color refracts behind her eyes, sparking green from blue- red- the black-white of the stars too far away to count even for their kind, and he presses assurances into her lips before he tears himself from her grip.
Scales and feathers, fur rippling across skin that fractures back into the blue-white-black of death and winter.
The Jötunn that does not exist curls heavy hands around her throat, fingers twitching before they sweep to grip roughly at her braid, and she grabs him again with a sound she herself can only describe as a mocking little laugh.
The Not-Jötunn loses the barely-constructed shape in her arms, breaks apart and twists into himself- she breathes, “I already know this face, I know you-” into the mouth that slants possessively across hers-and the Not-Jötunn is gone.
She wakes the next morning to an itchy spot between her shoulder blades.
“I will name myself in honor of Thor.”
If there were not thread already worked, the spindle would have tumbled right to the floor.
Sigyn is left staring at him, mouth opening in confusion, eyes widening so much they begin to hurt as the spindle dangles from the delicate thread and her fingers hover in the air, her body frozen. “What?”
He is smiling, bland and pleasant, only the spark in now always-green eyes betraying his glee, and she realizes he’s finally managed to leave her speechless. As soon as the thought crosses her mind, he reminds her, “I told you I would do it.”
“You-” Sigyn fiddles very valiantly with her fiber, fumbles twice, and breathes out something that she will admit to anyone but him may very well be a muffled growl. “Tell me what it is then, so I can tell you how you’ll suffer for it.”
Without preamble, or any shame at all: “Loki.”
Sigyn pauses in the midst of attempting to restart her work, lifting her head to gaze at him. “Why would you name yourself after air-” She stops, straightening in her chair as he studies her with half-closed eyes. “You realize they’ll never figure it out.”
She doesn’t bother to hide the delight in her voice, the simmering of pride, and he stares back at her like a satisfied cat.
Basking in her pleasure.
She restarts her work as he continues to watch her with half-lidded eyes, black and green blending together and apart like life itself between her fingers. “Loki is still not your name,” she reminds him, and heat rolls through his eyes as his Asgard name slips from her tongue so easily that she almost repeats it twice just to do it.
“It is the name of this,” and the body shifts, ripples through with pale skin and dark hair that fades quickly into fur.
She tries and fails to hide her smirk, heated by his stare as she watches him from beneath her lashes: “No, it’s not.”
Loki watches, and when he asks innocently, “What are you making now?” she merely curves her fingers easily over the fiber and keeps the motion going once it starts again.
Loki is shapeless, bound only by what he thinks is interesting at the time.
Still, Loki’s form surfaces throughout the day now, taller than her, dark-haired, skin pale and body lean, and she has no shame at all when the body’s image begins to appear in the thoughts she has of the shapeless movement that no longer leaves her side.
Her fellows are no longer hiding their stares, no longer muffling their words, but Odin is loosening at last.
Has a name to speak, and a shape he can finally steady himself with.
If the Jötunn are growing angry at a betrayal that does not truly exist, Loki does not seem to care.
Threads are gathered to ply, and Sigyn cares even less.
“He’s become too used to summoning me.” Loki eats like he moves, his actions careful and quick but sometimes losing interest as he pushes the torn bits of bread into the soup and lifts them to his mouth. “How long until he wants you to start darning his socks?”
“Frigga forces him to darn his own socks.”
Loki glances at her, curious, and then looks downright intrigued when she simply stares back because, yes, it’s true.
“The things you know…”
Her husband finishes his meal quickly and pushes to his feet while still talking, but she’s only barely listening.
Instead Sigyn is glaring at the food, already knowing what’s in store for her but hoping he’ll take pity on her. “… at least the giants were honest when they used me like a dog.” She makes a small noise of defiance as he refills the mug and approaches her where she hides in their bed, drawing the blankets up tighter to hide most of her body from him.
She can hide from him, of course, of course she can.
“Stop glaring at me and come out from under there.”
Sigyn might whine, just a little, in response.
The soup is set down as he wraps an arm around the lump of fabric covering her and pulls her bodily closer to himself. She stubbornly mumbles a threat for him to stop or else and he… ignores the threat completely.
“You have to eat.”
“I don’t want to. It’s so awful when it comes back up, it smells…” Loki brings the mug close to her nose and her stomach clenches, nausea blending sharply with hunger. “Ugh, it’s-” Sigyn pauses, uncertain, and takes a slightly braver breath. “What is that?”
He just stares at her, single finger turning the spoon slowly in the food.
She can’t see what it is, her eyes keep blurring. “You stop that, that’s not fair, I never know what you put into anything-”
“Oh, don’t tell me that, it just makes me want to do it more.”
“If you don’t give it to me-”
Loki spoons an impressive spoonful into her mouth, and she sinks down into her blankets with a little sigh of relief, immediately opening her mouth back up for more. “Mm, that looks familiar-”
She kicks him, and he grunts in genuine pain even as he obliges her silently order.
Their child delicately shifts inside her, the first of the movements that are starting only now, and Sigyn pointedly ignores the chill that Loki cannot seem to feel approaching from the dark.
(His shadow spits and seethes and points at her from his madness, young and wounded and still caught in a trap that he was not meant to experience. In the nights, Sigyn merely waits warily for others to hear his shrieks.)
There is more violence in Asgard as the years pass after she leaves Frigga’s chambers, and she does not ask Odin for sanctuary.
Not for any reason of pride, but because she has her own reasons, and Loki knows some and others he does not.
As far as he is concerned, Loki has them hidden well enough that his old fellows have never been able to find them, and it is an unspoken fact that they will eventually be drawn back among her people sooner or later. She has never been a creature of regrets, and Loki has only a vague concept of the meaning of the word even as old as he is, so they do not care one way or another.
He will stand beside and against Odin in the end, and help him find his way back after.
This, it is known but unspoken, is how it always is, the cold swallowing the warmth until the fires are lit to drive back the dark.
Their child will be showing soon.
The movement inside her is something that one from Midgard would soon be able to feel, and the cold sinks deeper into the air as Loki complains readily but continues to offer what loyalty he has to Odin. Loki loves none other than her, is incapable of it in some ways, but the closest he comes is with Odin and they do not need to have the conversation to have discussed it.
When his reflection curses her today, mood swerving wildly from monstrous rage to cool disgust, Loki sees nothing.
Sigyn only rewraps herself in her blankets, and stands on her toes to kiss the first curve that traces the back of Loki’s neck.
“Will he be done with you by tomorrow morning?”
Her husband glances at her in the glass, and there is the image of two for a moment as both reflections focus on her.
When he turns to push and smooth dark hair from her face, the not-smile is protective but his eyes are sharp.
“You’ll stay inside until I return.”
The question is not a question and he trusts her, has no fear and no envy of what she knows and cannot describe, of things that he does not know despite having seen the movement, the build, of everything he remembers.
Time flows for her like she is outside of it, and while he has experienced it in some ways, he knows better than to think he has ever seen anything with her eyes.
She lowers her gaze to his hand when she feels a touch against the slow-showing swell of her belly, and touches his knuckles with the smile that Frigga’s more mean-tempered maidens had always accused of idiocy.
Frigga had never been so foolish, had understood possibly from the beginning that she was merely considering something those around her… simply did not understand or were stubbornly avoiding. When Odin had banished her the morning after her marriage, Frigga had watched with sharp eyes, empty fingers moving to spin invisible fibers, and Sigyn had been unshaken.
Watch how it spins but do not dwell or the thread will come apart, she had always told all of the girls beneath her tutelage as she taught them the spinning wheel, and only Sigyn had ever understood what she was saying.
“Sigyn.”
“Your girls will be here when you finish up,” she informs him, and presses more firmly against his hand as she leans forward to kiss him. The returning kiss is heated, mouth insistent against hers, and she opens to him as he cups the back of her skull, for a moment seems to vanish into her. They break for air for a moment, a heartbeat, and she tastes salt before she pulls him back down to herself, drinks him in without shame or fear or anything but enjoyment, as always, of being able to do so.
She does not bother to think on who is weeping.
“Sigyn,” he mutters, and she smiles into his lips as she pulls back, not far enough to let his hand drop but enough to adjust an edge of his armor with her free hand. “Sigyn... Sigyn, do not make me wait again for so long, not now,” and it is the closest that he will ever come to a plea that is always so useless to voice.
Many times, she knows without the memories, she has begged the same.
And now Sigyn says only: "Go keep Thor from making a mess of his work" and there is another kiss, a flurry of heat and heart between them before he finally draws away. The lines of moisture are drying already on his face as he checks the house they’re living in this half-year, looks over it like it is an enemy he had been attempting to avoid.
But Sigyn had chosen it, and he had obeyed.
“I will be home by tomorrow.”
The shadow behind him tries to strike at her, wild and unfocused, uncaring that he cannot reach, and Sigyn does not care herself.
“I’ll keep our little beast safe until you return,” is all she can promise.
Her husband watches her, eyes wet and dark and murky like they have never been, and she only smiles until he leaves.
The shadow is watching her from a corner when she wakes in the middle of the night, impossibly cold.
The fire is somehow only a handful of dying embers in the ash.
He’s calm now, unable to strike at anything but himself and she does not bother to wonder if he realizes his reach is not far because it is himself he wants to punish so badly- and she does not have enough blankets, it’s so cold just outside the walls.
“She will punish you for this,” she feels the need to inform him and he dismisses the words, sure the babe will die as well, wishing nothing more than mercy's blood on his hands.
Hilarious, how easily this shadow misses that she is not talking about any child.
But it may be for the best, lest he decide to focus such rage on one still too weak to defend herself.
Sigyn edges out of the bed with her teeth already chattering, moves in the dark to gaze outside the windows- but there’s too much ice to see what lies beyond, and the shadows blend into the night anyway.
She feels the movement of them instead, the biting cold curling around the figures as they wait to fill their role.
None of the three knock, and she draws back for a moment, gazes down at the floor as tears fill her eyes before she can even realize she wants to cry. The tears are fat and ugly, and beautiful a part of her is sure, and the embers are dying too fast in the gray.
“You won’t know my name,” she promises in a voice rough with power and grief, a curse she has no interest in seeing him suffer from, and she moves to unlatch the door.
The cold rolls in before Sigyn can warm herself one last time.
Sigyn ties the cord around her waist like a chain of gold, and pretends it does not exist when Loki watches it with narrowed eyes.
He treats it like an annoyance for the first two days, and then it becomes a blatant enemy.
When the vein beneath his left eye tics one night as they sit in an almost quiet, she knows that he’s realized that no spell he possesses will have an effect on it. “You’ll hurt yourself,” she advises and he makes a little noise like a snarl.
“You weren’t supposed to actually do it.”
Warning her to rethink her decision.
Sigyn stares at him blandly, eyebrow lifted in amusement. “You shouldn’t inspire me so easily.”
Loki watches, fingers flexing against the wood table beneath his hands, and she waits.
Loki and the gods find her body in the coldness of their frozen home before the sun next rises.
Her husband wraps blankets around her in a moment of wild unreason, and Odin looks anywhere but at them as Loki gathers her against himself with feral eyes and shaking arms. “I have ways,” he pants out as his breath clouds white, and “you cannot stop me” and then, voice pitching wildly: “Stay, stay with me, follow the line back, stay, stay, Sigyn-”
If Thor hides behind Odin in the night, he will not admit it when the sun rises because now the trickster is simply rambling, face buried in her neck as he strokes the fingers still locked so tightly across her stomach.
Odin is staring carefully into the dark, single eye shuttered as Sigyn's fingers are pried apart and the weeping becomes ragged breaths, as they hear the words become calmer, as Loki steadies himself.
“I will,” they hear as he clears matted hair from Sigyn’s face, presses his lips against her cheek, “I will, I will,” and a white-knuckled fist presses into his own gut as he breathes into her neck roughly, shakes and shudders and finally carries her from the wreckage.
The sky is clear, the stars are dim, and Frigga waits with bloodshot eyes when Loki reaches Valhalla.
Frigga cares for him through the next five months, and cuts the twice-carried child from him herself.
He has a name that she remembers when he returns to her once and twice and forever, one that is the same in any language they have ever spoken, one that is the same whether he is husband or wife to Sigyn in any reflection of themselves.
Mine, she mouths into his skin when they marry and they are thusly bound.
Here his suffering is eternal.
And Sigyn is as ruthless as she is merciful but she aches inside and she has bound him as badly as he has bound himself.
Her death, her murder, is proof enough of the truth of this reality.
Fragmented from all that he is and has been and will never be, son of Odin and brother to none, this not-husband tears himself in two and then four, splits himself apart from one reality to the next. Stars die in the distance as he roils against himself, and nothing rises from the ash.
"You will not be incomplete forever," she assures one of the shadows that drifts around her between the in-betweens, and he shudders and fades like smoke.
There are none in any heaven who can punish him as he can punish himself in this false Valhalla.
Somewhere she is home with Loki, sometimes in the halls of Odin and sometimes in the open wilds of Asgard; somewhere she is at home on Midgard drinking too much of the black liquid flavored with sugar and milk, or on any of a million worlds that have existed or will exist. She is beast and bird, and Loki waits at the crossroads of it all, restless until the wheel catches their threads and winds them together again.
In a corner Loki weeps without shame, and down a hall he rages, screaming words of filth at her but too afraid to even look upon her face as he hides himself away.
The quieter shadows speak of Thor and of Mother (and she misses Frigga nearly as much as her not-husband, knows the sharp pain that cleaves into this not-husband's bleeding heart) and of Odin and the world he does not belong to.
Without counterweight, Loki spirals without stop and is now too great to find a balance.
A shadow curls against her when she almost-sleeps in this ever-changing, always-different world between worlds, and she combs fingers through his hair until he calms and relaxes against her body.
"It will be over soon," she lies, and he shudders with the truth of her deceit.
01. there is pretty much nothing recorded in regards to loki's "canon" wife sigyn. of course, we know far less about certain aspects of the germanic pantheons than we do about, say, the greek or egyptian. there is of course the pretty infamous image of her caring for loki during his punishment but that's about it. her name translates pretty clearly as "victorious girl-friend" and the rest, unfortunately, has been lost to time and assholes.
02. it's actually unknown currently exactly the roots of loki's name. but one variation seems to come from "air" and considering all aspects of his character actually makes quite a bit of sense.
03. as mentioned to a friend, there is a level of physics/spirituality in how i have laid these two pieces out. one of the things that didn't make me twitch about the film was how seamlessly they handled that aspect. if anyone would like me to go into it deeper, drop me a comment and i'll go ahead and do a skim over it.
04. i have a lot of ~thoughts about how much of a contrast darcy is in the film and i love her for it. if you know how to look, you'll understand that darcy was all over this fic. if not, eh, i'm writing a little bit of porn for darcy/loki so, you know, that'll be fun, :-D
He is smiling, bland and pleasant, only the spark in now always-green eyes betraying his glee, and she realizes he’s finally managed to leave her speechless. As soon as the thought crosses her mind, he reminds her, “I told you I would do it.” myth-based au; movie-compliant
Her body bears no sign of their child yet.
They settle and move, settle and move, and Loki is stubborn against his own knowledge.
“Only you try to win an argument with yourself,” she reminds him without much kindness at all, and his look is such a mix of disgust and devotion that she chuckles, thumbs the corner of his mouth as she leans forward to kiss him.
Behind him, his shadow fragments, struggles invisible bonds, and Loki sees nothing where Sigyn sees all.
Their marriage, when all is said and done, happens thusly:
His fingers grab the cord spun from the nothing that birthed him, yank in a fit of fury and hunger and calm madness, and he hesitates only when the binding tangles in his fingers like a serpent, eyes lifting to study her face with an emotion she will share with no one.
There is a heartbeat, an eternity, and she waits.
Until Loki says, with the cord curled loose around his wrist, “You know what to call me,” and her heart beats within her chest, her fingers drifting soft over his wrist.
Sigyn is silent, triumphant but not very excitedly so, uncertain about nothing.
Then: “I knew you” and she looks upon him fully one last time, acknowledges his final offer to undo her own binding for her.
In his eyes, a cold burns like a blaze and darkness rolls in as a wave from the depths of what was and what will be. There are stars behind the stars and shadows unfolding from themselves like cloth that no one has thought to cut, and it had been traumatizing, to speak a language that no one else could even understand before she’d found him.
-he unfurls the cloth, green spilling from chilled fingers as fires light the dark-
Loki waits, watches with careful blankness, and she brings his hand up to her mouth possessively.
Sigyn feels the loose end of the binding curve into metal around his finger beneath her tongue.
Her husband tastes of ash and frost, and she traces his name into his skin with teeth and tongue until he burns inside her.
Sigyn is laughter when no one thinks there should be, when the night is darkest and coldest beyond the fire.
She is contrast and common sense, a cause of uncertainty and bewilderment among her own people, and until she is a traitor, there is an understanding that no one understands her. They know her as the one always stealing Frigga’s finest work to warm her feet when she’s cold, and informing them all that the necklace is actually very ugly, really, and that she’d rather be mortal than bored.
Midgard speaks of her with the devoted wariness felt only by children too alike to their mothers for their own comfort.
“He’s like an angry babe.”
Her fingers move over her needlework without pause but she’s smiling already, the large open-mouthed smile that is not acknowledged as a grin because it is improper when there are treaties being spoken and the “creature” is wandering the halls.
Jötunn, his chosen body promises, but there is a wariness felt by all in accepting even that shape for him, even for purposes of protocol.
And today there are no attempts even at protocol.
No, he’s a little creature today, long-limbed and delicate, wings flitting vaguely as he circles her the way he has since he’s stopped hiding his curiosity. He (male today, and he usually is but she pays enough attention to realize there is a reason it’s usually and not always) reminds her of a carrion bird and a little ape all at once, and moves like her shadow around her.
“There’ll be no treaty until you-”
A buzz, soft but furious, and there is that should-be-frightening (but isn’t- to her) impression of images bleeding together as he holds his shape together through his anger, yellow eyes glittering green- red- red- green. “Names cause chains,” as if she can understand a word he’s saying (and she can and he knows she can and they do not need to have this conversation), and she watches him blur inside himself and then fold back together to glare at her working fingers, tongue flicking a little urgently over the slit of his mouth. Then, as if he cannot stand it any longer: “What are you making?”
“What color are your eyes?”
There is a sensation of the world dropping for a moment, the yellow- red- green burning with offense, exhilaration-
Her needlework skitters from her hands, spiders and snakes spilling from her fingers, and the little creature is gone.
Sigyn banishes the little bastards with a roll of her eyes, and begins the work anew.
(Frigga draws green deeper into the tapestry that never finishes.)
Odin grows more stubborn, always, and the Not-Jötunn spends more time tormenting him than assisting either side.
But the Jötunn refuse to send anyone else, certainly not one that is truly one of them, and Sigyn starts and undoes her work again and again and again as the floors tremble with Odin’s frustration.
“His skin is far too thin to be anyone’s father.”
“Why do you think Thor is Thor?” Sigyn is very close to shredding her needlework project with her bare hands. “What do you think of sculptures?”
Silence, the man sauntering around her chambers in Odin’s shape glancing at her. “Sculptures bore me.”
“Everything that is not you bores you.”
Not-Odin’s eye fragments with colors that don’t belong: “Not everything.”
The new shadow is a mirror.
Sigyn is unsure whether even she means one way or another, but this shadow is as different from her husband as it can be, the shape of him solid but his insides unsettled, a wild wave of uncertainty and distress that struggles to burn into rage.
The opposite of all she’s known since they had found one another for the first time (only the next time after the last).
She murmurs affection to the shadow once as her husband sleeps beside her, and he screams and shakes the world in the dark where he exists as if he can block out all words that threaten to undo him even more.
Loki sighs and rolls closer to her under the covers, tucks his nose into the spot between her shoulder blades and whines for her to go back to sleep because he’s tired, why are you keeping me awake?
Sigyn smooths a palm down his arm until he sleeps again, and searches the shadows.
Stars only glint before they wink back out of existence and she sighs and forces herself to sleep.
Odin is still unsure whether he wants Sigyn’s husband under his blade or at his side.
From the start and to the end that has not yet come, Loki finds the concept hysterical.
The Jötunn demand absolute in all things, and Loki drifts to and fro from the beginning for the fun of it.
Once he wears the simple metal band, his drift becomes more of a lean.
Sigyn is as much an object of dismissal as she is of suspicion.
As a child, she is an orphan raised beneath Frigga’s gaze, the closest thing she has to a mother also the most understanding of them all (Frigga forces her to spin sometimes, and Sigyn’s work spirals out blue and brown and gray beneath her fingers) and does nothing while doing everything for anyone who may need something. She curses the Jötunn who took her mother, her father less than those who have lost nothing to them, and she tosses Thor’s finest armor down a well when he calls her a little rat.
She tells Odin once, when he expresses the sincere but vague care for her that he always does, that the stars are not blazing and fading the way they usually do and it is the first time she learns that, to all others, they do not change very much at all. He says, quietly and with no anger, “Keep these truths to Frigga and myself, Sigyn, keep these things quiet” and she obeys.
Sigyn is complete but skewed, does not belong even as she does, and she accepts what she is as quickly as she accepts the constant punishment she receives for it.
When her time becomes swallowed more and more by the Not-Jötunn, she shifts from abnormal to treacherous.
“You can avoid this,” he says once, twice, three times and then four, watching her with eyes that bleed green without stop now but she only smiles, the pit of uncertainty inside her gone at last, and fiddles with her woodcarving.
“I’d rather enjoy myself.” She considers and, because there has never been a reason to hide her thoughts from him: “But I would like a friend one day, if you would ever like to give me a gift to make up for it.”
There is silence as pale skin surfaces beneath blue, as the green deepens, brightens; then: “One day I will find you one.”
Sigyn believes him.
The gods have their own story of Loki’s birth, of his multiple births.
That there was a shadow in the dark and thoughts gathered like storm clouds where there was no mind to hold them, and that there was a shape only when there was an interest in shaping one. They say that he birthed himself through all that exists or has existed somewhere, from worms of the earth and fleas on the cat through solidly built apes that begin to select tools from the world as he leaves them, and that he lived each because there was an interest in each.
The Jötunn think, in the beginning, that his taking their shape is a compliment to their kind.
In this, at least, Odin has never been so foolish.
Birds use their wings because they have them, is a saying on Asgard, and pity the person who tries to bend the universe to its will by convincing them not to do what they were formed from the earth to do.
Sigyn fails with sculpting, with wood carving.
“You could try some type of… interpreting dance,” the Not-Jötunn offers one night when he seems too tired to even taunt her, and she pauses in her current disastrous attempt at drawing that she had not wanted to try at all since she is awful at it.
He’s sitting opposite her in the almost quiet of her sitting room and she studies him as limbs lengthen, curve and collapse again.
Finally: “I would only hurt myself.”
He stares back, for a moment genuinely baffled by what she means, and then he chuckles (the low rolling noise that is only heard around Sigyn) and leans forward to tug lightly at the now-smeared paper in her hand. “That would come closer to capturing me than any of this.”
Frigga forces her to spin one morning before the sun rises, and blue deepens almost immediately into black, the strand heavy and cool as she at first struggles with it.
Her almost-mother says, quietly, urgently, “You already know this” as the strand becomes too heavy and unpredictable, and she fights it a little more before something inside her settles and the spun nothing begins to slide from the fiber like liquid.
Color returns, glints at green a promise beneath the nothing, and then Sigyn is fine again.
Sigyn kisses him, in one of the halls where he’s lurking and mocking and fascinated as he is fiddling with her braid as if he's never seen it before, and he chills beneath her mouth, freezes her breath in her lungs as she swallows his.
Color refracts behind her eyes, sparking green from blue- red- the black-white of the stars too far away to count even for their kind, and he presses assurances into her lips before he tears himself from her grip.
Scales and feathers, fur rippling across skin that fractures back into the blue-white-black of death and winter.
The Jötunn that does not exist curls heavy hands around her throat, fingers twitching before they sweep to grip roughly at her braid, and she grabs him again with a sound she herself can only describe as a mocking little laugh.
The Not-Jötunn loses the barely-constructed shape in her arms, breaks apart and twists into himself- she breathes, “I already know this face, I know you-” into the mouth that slants possessively across hers-and the Not-Jötunn is gone.
She wakes the next morning to an itchy spot between her shoulder blades.
“I will name myself in honor of Thor.”
If there were not thread already worked, the spindle would have tumbled right to the floor.
Sigyn is left staring at him, mouth opening in confusion, eyes widening so much they begin to hurt as the spindle dangles from the delicate thread and her fingers hover in the air, her body frozen. “What?”
He is smiling, bland and pleasant, only the spark in now always-green eyes betraying his glee, and she realizes he’s finally managed to leave her speechless. As soon as the thought crosses her mind, he reminds her, “I told you I would do it.”
“You-” Sigyn fiddles very valiantly with her fiber, fumbles twice, and breathes out something that she will admit to anyone but him may very well be a muffled growl. “Tell me what it is then, so I can tell you how you’ll suffer for it.”
Without preamble, or any shame at all: “Loki.”
Sigyn pauses in the midst of attempting to restart her work, lifting her head to gaze at him. “Why would you name yourself after air-” She stops, straightening in her chair as he studies her with half-closed eyes. “You realize they’ll never figure it out.”
She doesn’t bother to hide the delight in her voice, the simmering of pride, and he stares back at her like a satisfied cat.
Basking in her pleasure.
She restarts her work as he continues to watch her with half-lidded eyes, black and green blending together and apart like life itself between her fingers. “Loki is still not your name,” she reminds him, and heat rolls through his eyes as his Asgard name slips from her tongue so easily that she almost repeats it twice just to do it.
“It is the name of this,” and the body shifts, ripples through with pale skin and dark hair that fades quickly into fur.
She tries and fails to hide her smirk, heated by his stare as she watches him from beneath her lashes: “No, it’s not.”
Loki watches, and when he asks innocently, “What are you making now?” she merely curves her fingers easily over the fiber and keeps the motion going once it starts again.
Loki is shapeless, bound only by what he thinks is interesting at the time.
Still, Loki’s form surfaces throughout the day now, taller than her, dark-haired, skin pale and body lean, and she has no shame at all when the body’s image begins to appear in the thoughts she has of the shapeless movement that no longer leaves her side.
Her fellows are no longer hiding their stares, no longer muffling their words, but Odin is loosening at last.
Has a name to speak, and a shape he can finally steady himself with.
If the Jötunn are growing angry at a betrayal that does not truly exist, Loki does not seem to care.
Threads are gathered to ply, and Sigyn cares even less.
“He’s become too used to summoning me.” Loki eats like he moves, his actions careful and quick but sometimes losing interest as he pushes the torn bits of bread into the soup and lifts them to his mouth. “How long until he wants you to start darning his socks?”
“Frigga forces him to darn his own socks.”
Loki glances at her, curious, and then looks downright intrigued when she simply stares back because, yes, it’s true.
“The things you know…”
Her husband finishes his meal quickly and pushes to his feet while still talking, but she’s only barely listening.
Instead Sigyn is glaring at the food, already knowing what’s in store for her but hoping he’ll take pity on her. “… at least the giants were honest when they used me like a dog.” She makes a small noise of defiance as he refills the mug and approaches her where she hides in their bed, drawing the blankets up tighter to hide most of her body from him.
She can hide from him, of course, of course she can.
“Stop glaring at me and come out from under there.”
Sigyn might whine, just a little, in response.
The soup is set down as he wraps an arm around the lump of fabric covering her and pulls her bodily closer to himself. She stubbornly mumbles a threat for him to stop or else and he… ignores the threat completely.
“You have to eat.”
“I don’t want to. It’s so awful when it comes back up, it smells…” Loki brings the mug close to her nose and her stomach clenches, nausea blending sharply with hunger. “Ugh, it’s-” Sigyn pauses, uncertain, and takes a slightly braver breath. “What is that?”
He just stares at her, single finger turning the spoon slowly in the food.
She can’t see what it is, her eyes keep blurring. “You stop that, that’s not fair, I never know what you put into anything-”
“Oh, don’t tell me that, it just makes me want to do it more.”
“If you don’t give it to me-”
Loki spoons an impressive spoonful into her mouth, and she sinks down into her blankets with a little sigh of relief, immediately opening her mouth back up for more. “Mm, that looks familiar-”
She kicks him, and he grunts in genuine pain even as he obliges her silently order.
Their child delicately shifts inside her, the first of the movements that are starting only now, and Sigyn pointedly ignores the chill that Loki cannot seem to feel approaching from the dark.
(His shadow spits and seethes and points at her from his madness, young and wounded and still caught in a trap that he was not meant to experience. In the nights, Sigyn merely waits warily for others to hear his shrieks.)
There is more violence in Asgard as the years pass after she leaves Frigga’s chambers, and she does not ask Odin for sanctuary.
Not for any reason of pride, but because she has her own reasons, and Loki knows some and others he does not.
As far as he is concerned, Loki has them hidden well enough that his old fellows have never been able to find them, and it is an unspoken fact that they will eventually be drawn back among her people sooner or later. She has never been a creature of regrets, and Loki has only a vague concept of the meaning of the word even as old as he is, so they do not care one way or another.
He will stand beside and against Odin in the end, and help him find his way back after.
This, it is known but unspoken, is how it always is, the cold swallowing the warmth until the fires are lit to drive back the dark.
Their child will be showing soon.
The movement inside her is something that one from Midgard would soon be able to feel, and the cold sinks deeper into the air as Loki complains readily but continues to offer what loyalty he has to Odin. Loki loves none other than her, is incapable of it in some ways, but the closest he comes is with Odin and they do not need to have the conversation to have discussed it.
When his reflection curses her today, mood swerving wildly from monstrous rage to cool disgust, Loki sees nothing.
Sigyn only rewraps herself in her blankets, and stands on her toes to kiss the first curve that traces the back of Loki’s neck.
“Will he be done with you by tomorrow morning?”
Her husband glances at her in the glass, and there is the image of two for a moment as both reflections focus on her.
When he turns to push and smooth dark hair from her face, the not-smile is protective but his eyes are sharp.
“You’ll stay inside until I return.”
The question is not a question and he trusts her, has no fear and no envy of what she knows and cannot describe, of things that he does not know despite having seen the movement, the build, of everything he remembers.
Time flows for her like she is outside of it, and while he has experienced it in some ways, he knows better than to think he has ever seen anything with her eyes.
She lowers her gaze to his hand when she feels a touch against the slow-showing swell of her belly, and touches his knuckles with the smile that Frigga’s more mean-tempered maidens had always accused of idiocy.
Frigga had never been so foolish, had understood possibly from the beginning that she was merely considering something those around her… simply did not understand or were stubbornly avoiding. When Odin had banished her the morning after her marriage, Frigga had watched with sharp eyes, empty fingers moving to spin invisible fibers, and Sigyn had been unshaken.
Watch how it spins but do not dwell or the thread will come apart, she had always told all of the girls beneath her tutelage as she taught them the spinning wheel, and only Sigyn had ever understood what she was saying.
“Sigyn.”
“Your girls will be here when you finish up,” she informs him, and presses more firmly against his hand as she leans forward to kiss him. The returning kiss is heated, mouth insistent against hers, and she opens to him as he cups the back of her skull, for a moment seems to vanish into her. They break for air for a moment, a heartbeat, and she tastes salt before she pulls him back down to herself, drinks him in without shame or fear or anything but enjoyment, as always, of being able to do so.
She does not bother to think on who is weeping.
“Sigyn,” he mutters, and she smiles into his lips as she pulls back, not far enough to let his hand drop but enough to adjust an edge of his armor with her free hand. “Sigyn... Sigyn, do not make me wait again for so long, not now,” and it is the closest that he will ever come to a plea that is always so useless to voice.
Many times, she knows without the memories, she has begged the same.
And now Sigyn says only: "Go keep Thor from making a mess of his work" and there is another kiss, a flurry of heat and heart between them before he finally draws away. The lines of moisture are drying already on his face as he checks the house they’re living in this half-year, looks over it like it is an enemy he had been attempting to avoid.
But Sigyn had chosen it, and he had obeyed.
“I will be home by tomorrow.”
The shadow behind him tries to strike at her, wild and unfocused, uncaring that he cannot reach, and Sigyn does not care herself.
“I’ll keep our little beast safe until you return,” is all she can promise.
Her husband watches her, eyes wet and dark and murky like they have never been, and she only smiles until he leaves.
The shadow is watching her from a corner when she wakes in the middle of the night, impossibly cold.
The fire is somehow only a handful of dying embers in the ash.
He’s calm now, unable to strike at anything but himself and she does not bother to wonder if he realizes his reach is not far because it is himself he wants to punish so badly- and she does not have enough blankets, it’s so cold just outside the walls.
“She will punish you for this,” she feels the need to inform him and he dismisses the words, sure the babe will die as well, wishing nothing more than mercy's blood on his hands.
Hilarious, how easily this shadow misses that she is not talking about any child.
But it may be for the best, lest he decide to focus such rage on one still too weak to defend herself.
Sigyn edges out of the bed with her teeth already chattering, moves in the dark to gaze outside the windows- but there’s too much ice to see what lies beyond, and the shadows blend into the night anyway.
She feels the movement of them instead, the biting cold curling around the figures as they wait to fill their role.
None of the three knock, and she draws back for a moment, gazes down at the floor as tears fill her eyes before she can even realize she wants to cry. The tears are fat and ugly, and beautiful a part of her is sure, and the embers are dying too fast in the gray.
“You won’t know my name,” she promises in a voice rough with power and grief, a curse she has no interest in seeing him suffer from, and she moves to unlatch the door.
The cold rolls in before Sigyn can warm herself one last time.
Sigyn ties the cord around her waist like a chain of gold, and pretends it does not exist when Loki watches it with narrowed eyes.
He treats it like an annoyance for the first two days, and then it becomes a blatant enemy.
When the vein beneath his left eye tics one night as they sit in an almost quiet, she knows that he’s realized that no spell he possesses will have an effect on it. “You’ll hurt yourself,” she advises and he makes a little noise like a snarl.
“You weren’t supposed to actually do it.”
Warning her to rethink her decision.
Sigyn stares at him blandly, eyebrow lifted in amusement. “You shouldn’t inspire me so easily.”
Loki watches, fingers flexing against the wood table beneath his hands, and she waits.
Loki and the gods find her body in the coldness of their frozen home before the sun next rises.
Her husband wraps blankets around her in a moment of wild unreason, and Odin looks anywhere but at them as Loki gathers her against himself with feral eyes and shaking arms. “I have ways,” he pants out as his breath clouds white, and “you cannot stop me” and then, voice pitching wildly: “Stay, stay with me, follow the line back, stay, stay, Sigyn-”
If Thor hides behind Odin in the night, he will not admit it when the sun rises because now the trickster is simply rambling, face buried in her neck as he strokes the fingers still locked so tightly across her stomach.
Odin is staring carefully into the dark, single eye shuttered as Sigyn's fingers are pried apart and the weeping becomes ragged breaths, as they hear the words become calmer, as Loki steadies himself.
“I will,” they hear as he clears matted hair from Sigyn’s face, presses his lips against her cheek, “I will, I will,” and a white-knuckled fist presses into his own gut as he breathes into her neck roughly, shakes and shudders and finally carries her from the wreckage.
The sky is clear, the stars are dim, and Frigga waits with bloodshot eyes when Loki reaches Valhalla.
Frigga cares for him through the next five months, and cuts the twice-carried child from him herself.
He has a name that she remembers when he returns to her once and twice and forever, one that is the same in any language they have ever spoken, one that is the same whether he is husband or wife to Sigyn in any reflection of themselves.
Mine, she mouths into his skin when they marry and they are thusly bound.
Here his suffering is eternal.
And Sigyn is as ruthless as she is merciful but she aches inside and she has bound him as badly as he has bound himself.
Her death, her murder, is proof enough of the truth of this reality.
Fragmented from all that he is and has been and will never be, son of Odin and brother to none, this not-husband tears himself in two and then four, splits himself apart from one reality to the next. Stars die in the distance as he roils against himself, and nothing rises from the ash.
"You will not be incomplete forever," she assures one of the shadows that drifts around her between the in-betweens, and he shudders and fades like smoke.
There are none in any heaven who can punish him as he can punish himself in this false Valhalla.
Somewhere she is home with Loki, sometimes in the halls of Odin and sometimes in the open wilds of Asgard; somewhere she is at home on Midgard drinking too much of the black liquid flavored with sugar and milk, or on any of a million worlds that have existed or will exist. She is beast and bird, and Loki waits at the crossroads of it all, restless until the wheel catches their threads and winds them together again.
In a corner Loki weeps without shame, and down a hall he rages, screaming words of filth at her but too afraid to even look upon her face as he hides himself away.
The quieter shadows speak of Thor and of Mother (and she misses Frigga nearly as much as her not-husband, knows the sharp pain that cleaves into this not-husband's bleeding heart) and of Odin and the world he does not belong to.
Without counterweight, Loki spirals without stop and is now too great to find a balance.
A shadow curls against her when she almost-sleeps in this ever-changing, always-different world between worlds, and she combs fingers through his hair until he calms and relaxes against her body.
"It will be over soon," she lies, and he shudders with the truth of her deceit.
01. there is pretty much nothing recorded in regards to loki's "canon" wife sigyn. of course, we know far less about certain aspects of the germanic pantheons than we do about, say, the greek or egyptian. there is of course the pretty infamous image of her caring for loki during his punishment but that's about it. her name translates pretty clearly as "victorious girl-friend" and the rest, unfortunately, has been lost to time and assholes.
02. it's actually unknown currently exactly the roots of loki's name. but one variation seems to come from "air" and considering all aspects of his character actually makes quite a bit of sense.
03. as mentioned to a friend, there is a level of physics/spirituality in how i have laid these two pieces out. one of the things that didn't make me twitch about the film was how seamlessly they handled that aspect. if anyone would like me to go into it deeper, drop me a comment and i'll go ahead and do a skim over it.
04. i have a lot of ~thoughts about how much of a contrast darcy is in the film and i love her for it. if you know how to look, you'll understand that darcy was all over this fic. if not, eh, i'm writing a little bit of porn for darcy/loki so, you know, that'll be fun, :-D