Chapter Text
Late at night, when midnight drapes velvet blackness over the bedroom, he lies awake and can still feel the venom dissolving his flesh….
Initially, it is only a tickle, and for a millisecond, he almost sobs in relief.
And then--
Unspeakable agony.
His first cries are those of shock--nothing he has ever known, nothing he has ever felt or will feel can compare to this. It is transcendent, singular--he can think of nothing else. He knows nothing else; he has never known anything else --he is pain itself, as pristine and finely-sharpened as the tip of a blade. As he beats his heel on the edge of the stone to which he is bound, he lets out a wild, braying cackle.
Brilliant. Beautiful in its simplicity. Beautiful.
When Sigyn returns and frantically thrusts the bowl over him again, her voice choked with sobs, he cannot stop laughing.
He laughs again the second time she empties it. And the third. And the fourth.
But soon, he no longer recognizes his voice as his own--it is cracked, hollow gravel grinding over a low moan. It drives him mad; the sound, the pain. He spits at her, foul accusations.
“--leave me, then, leave!” he rasps, his chest heaving and spittle snaking down his chin. “You fucking whore, go fuck someone else--!”
Her arms quiver with the effort of holding up the rapidly-filling bowl; her eyes are smoldering coals.
“Don’t you dare,” she says between her teeth. “Don’t you dare accuse me -- when you never felt an ounce of guilt--! ”
“I didn’t! You’re right!” he shrieks, hating her more than he has ever hated anyone--save, perhaps, himself. “I didn’t! I couldn’t fucking stand the sight of you--!”
“Then would you blame me?” She laughs, breathless, and the vitriol in her gaze burns him with more heat than the venom ever could. “Would you blame me for seeking out someone else--anyone else--?”
His awful cackle cracks like a whip in the cave.
“You simpering little parasite,” he hisses, straining against his bonds. “You linked yourself to me for glory and nothing more--you were nothing without me, dust in the wind, an afterthought--a useless bitch who clung to her husband like an insect on a weed--!”
She lets out a cry of white-hot fury and in one swift movement, she hurls the bowl of venom to the opposite wall, where it clatters cacophonously to the stone floor. The contents sizzle as they spill into the earth.
Immediately, the great serpent above begins to uncoil, lowering itself further down, its jaw agape and slick with poison.
Loki’s heart hurls itself against his chest.
“No, no, no, no, no--Please--pl--S--!”
“Our sons are dead!” Sigyn cries, her cheeks streaked with tears, her black curls a tangled furze around her dark face. “Our sons are dead! Mutilated! And it’s your fault! You never gave a damn--you never loved them---you never gave a fuck about anyone but yourself! Ever! You don’t know what love is, you selfish waste ! Your sons are gone-- denied a life before they had even begun to live--!”
“Stop,” he pleads, and then louder: “Stop--!”
“ No! No!” she shrieks, her voice ricocheting off the stone walls. “I won’t! I won’t! You did it! You killed them! You killed them! Your cruelty, your callousness--they were boys! They were boys, they were children and you let it happen!”
“Stop--!” he is frantic, writhing against his restraints--bowels, entrails, those of his so--
Sigyn strikes him viciously on the cheek; and then again until he sees stars, blackness, and the pinpoint of a translucent stream of venom sliding slowly, slowly down towards them.
When his vision returns, she is leaning over him, breathing hard. Her expression is still, perfectly still, but something thrums beneath it--something he recognizes all too well.
“I hope you burn,” she says, her voice low, measured. Almost tender. “I hope you burn...You deserve every ounce of agony poured upon you. I hope you burn and suffer until the sun turns black. I hope you dissolve into it-- I hope our sons haunt your every waking moment. And when it’s over, I hope there is nothing left of you. Nothing. ”
She is panting almost as if in the throes of ecstasy. Loki’s gaze flicks upward, and she follows it; the tendril of venom is a hair’s breadth away from the top of her head. Carefully, she ducks, dodging its sting, and he watches in horror as she backs away, her eyes never leaving his.
“No,” he croaks, “Come--come back! Come back! You--hold the bowl, damn it! Hold the bowl! Sigyn! Sigyn! Hold the bowl! Hold the fucking bowl, you bitch, you--!”
But the venom pools onto his skin, and fire swallows his pleas.
Nothing.
He is nothing. He is Not. An Other, an Absence. Blank. Blank, blank.
But pain...pain Is . Pain is All. All, and he--
He?
Never, never, never--
Above him, his two sons spill from the serpent’s mouth, their faces decayed, their mouths perfect Os as they howl for relief.
His chest cleaves in two, and he is gone.
Eons later, something nearby whimpers, cries.
“ Oh, oh--no, no, no--ohhhh, elskr, elskr--”
Woman. Woman, he thinks, roiling in agony that crests like waves in a gale; needle-thin, slate gray, piercing.
Woman, woman, and it means---it means--
“Oh, no, no--oh, Loki--”
Woman, he thinks, but he cannot remember what it means.
Clattering, shuffling. A moan, a fire on his abdomen--
And then it stops.
Silence. He feels--
Nothing.
He hears--
Woman. Soft crying.
He blinks, but cannot see.
But he hears--
“I’m here. I’m here. I’ve-- I’ve got the bowl--I’m here. Elskr, elskr, I’m here.”
The venom has eaten away at him.
Draugr, he thinks, for he knows the flesh is gone, the muscle dissolved, the bone exposed--and where it is not, he has wasted away to bone, anyway, his ribcage like a barrel, like carrion left in the mountains, his limbs like burnt twigs. The serpent has taken his eyes--they bubbled like broth in his sockets as the acid poured from the great jaws and obliterated the world in a flash of red and white.
He hears a thin, high wheezing. Hears the woman’s quiet breathing speed up with effort as the bowl grows full.
She apologizes, this woman, whenever she must empty it.
Kind.
He knows anguish again for a moment, only a moment, before she replaces the bowl and he hears the metallic plink of the venom hitting the basin above him.
Sometimes she sings, her voice low and hushed, the words distant:
“Drøymde mik ein draum i nótt um silki ok ærlig pell...um hægindi svá djupt ok mjott, um rosemd með engan skell.”
I dreamed a dream last night of silk and fair furs..o f a pillow so deep and soft, a peace with no disturbance.
She is saving him, she thinks.
But he is gone.
Kind woman.
Above, the dripping poison almost sounds like rain.
And then, commotion.
Woman shouting. Hissing--serpent.
Metallic clang-- shink!
Rustling, rustling above, sliding--slithering-- ( hurt hurt hurt hurthurthurthurt )
A growl; a war-cry.
Shink! Another hiss. Then--
Choking. Wet gurgling. A great thump that booms along his spine and rattles the base of his skull.
Silence.
Clattering metal on the stone floor.
The woman breathes.
He does not hurt. He does not hurt now.
He hurt, once. Searing rain from above. Angry, so angry--he did not want to make it angry. But it was. And he hurt.
But he does not hurt now. Different, now--no searing rain, no jagged stone below him. Soft. Soft, now. Nice.
He cannot see, but he can still hear the high-pitched whine coming at intervals, in staccato bursts. He wishes it would stop. He does not like the sound--someone is in pain. Hurt.
But he also hears something low, gentle--the woman.
“ Elskr, you are safe --you are safe...shh...it’s alright. It’s alright. It’s dead--I--it’s alright--be with me; be with me--”
He follows the sweet sound.
He does not believe it. But he follows it.
When she closes her eyes, she can still see him in the cave...
He is rotted in some places, burned in others. The venom has flayed his face, the skull partly exposed, the eyes melted within the deep, hollow sockets, the red hair singed off or dangling in matted clumps from lingering pieces of scalp. His mouth works in a soundless plea, the lips eaten away, the teeth glistening pegs in bloodied gums.
She knows then what she will do.
And she knows why.
When the serpent lies dead at her feet, its head rolling away to a darkened corner, she drops the bloodied sword and sways where she stands. The creature on the rock beside her twitches. She watches it numbly for several minutes, feeling adrift. Disembodied.
And then she picks the sword back up.
Severs his bindings.
And delivers him to liberty.
He is lighter than a feather as she lifts him up and carries him to the makeshift bed she has prepared in the opposite corner. She places him gently on the thick quilts, swallowing bile as some of the remaining skin on his back sloughs off. Her arms are drenched in blood, the front of her shift coated with it.
She stares at the detritus on her palms--globules of muscle and fat. She wipes it on her apron, her ears ringing, and kneels beside him.
He is bone, all bone, his limbs twisted and blackened and limp, his hands curled like a vulture’s talons. His cheekbones jut through the thin skin stretched across them like parchment, crusted with waste. His breath comes in high, thin wheezes, and she can see his heart and lungs fluttering below the mess of mottled rot on his sternum.
She lurches to the side and retches, wondering if it would be more merciful to take up the blade and end him now.
But she knows that she will not. She cannot.
She will never.
Weeks pass, and by miniscule degrees, Iðunn’s apples begin to do their work. Sigyn has come armed with satchels of them and mashes them into juice that she carefully pours into his mouth. He lets out a rattling moan whenever he tastes it, trembling in relief--or perhaps in pain. She cannot tell.
She continues to sing to him, to speak to him as he heals. She thinks it calms him, although she cannot be certain.
His hair regrows in copper bristles, his lips creeping back over his teeth; the new skin has the shiny, translucent sheen of scar tissue. His eyes are the last to return, but he remains blind, the two sunken, milky-green orbs rolling slowly in their sockets, seeing nothing.
He is still absolutely skeletal. A jagged network of new muscles and tendons wraps sharply over the brittle bone. His jaw is always slightly agape, his mouth still working, working, but emitting nothing but that wheeze.
One night, as she feeds him spoonfuls of the cool, rich juice and watches his heavy-lidded eyes blink, she thinks, I hate you.
I hate you. I hate you.
But the Loki she hates is no longer there.
Nor is the Loki she loves.
This thing--this wraith--is little more than a husk. The rage is gone, all glimmer of intellect gone. The spite, the cruelty, the chaos--gone.
(The quick smiles, the sharp, handsome features, the honey-sweet words, the boisterous laughter, the gentle touches--)
The others, she thinks, have done well. He is gone, the threat vanquished.
She gently pulls his limp, emaciated body to her and cradles him against her chest.
She hates him. More than anything, more than anyone in the universe. His defeat is vindication at its best, primal, pure, unfettered. She would witness it again a thousand times over if she could. She hopes memories of the boys were what eviscerated him and not the poison. She could weep for joy at his suffering, at his madness.
His breath shudders, and his sunken eyes slide shut. But his bony hand twitches, and the fingers loosely curl around her own.
She hates herself.
She cannot stop loving him.
He grows stronger, but barely, and only in body. His frame is no longer that of a corpse, but he remains unnervingly gaunt. He is still too weak to move, and so she must carry him up, up--back into the world above and outside for water, for the feeble sunlight that filters past the forest and leviathan stones surrounding the cave’s entrance.
He does not respond to the gentle heat of the sun, nor to the faint brush of the wind upon his cheek. Sigyn watches for any sign of a reaction, but he remains limp, his mouth still hanging open, his once quick hands curled uselessly at his sides.
His eyes have sharpened somewhat, the milky sheen dissipating little by little, although Sigyn doubts he can see clearly. She stares directly at him, but he makes no movement, no sign of recognition, and she feels a nauseating commingling of triumph and profound grief.
Their days drone on in silence. He sleeps often, although she wonders if it’s actually sleep or a kind of paralysis; it does not appear restful. His breathing hitches, and he is in constant motion, twitching, flinching, moaning as his fists clench and he grits his teeth.
Sometimes, she works to soothe him. Other times, she merely watches, numb.
She thinks incessantly of the boys, convinced their loss will kill her. She weeps outside the cave until she is sick, and then begs the Norns to end it all, everything, if only her sons will return to her. She calls upon her halting seiðr to summon something, anything that will call them back, but the effort only drains her until she can no longer move. She collapses beside the wasted form of her husband and wills herself to sink into the earth--to die, to die, please, let me die.
But she does not know who to beg. There is no one. Nothing.
She is Nothing.
The others likely think them both dead. It has been an age, perhaps, eons since they were last seen--but Time is fickle, and Sigyn cannot know for certain. She does not care.
She is slumped against the slick granite wall of the cave, eyeing the great sword discarded in the center of the cavern, its blade crusted with the serpent’s dried blood. It would be so easy, so quietly done. The metal would slide cleanly, beautifully into her heart.
Coward.
She laughs quietly.
Suddenly, Loki stirs. She does not care.
She does not care.
Beside her, Loki’s breath rattles out a name.
Hers.
The rain drums on the leaves, the stones, the pools at her feet. He sits a short distance away, unflinching as the storm batters his newly-healed skin. She’d carried him up to the clearing at the mouth of the cave several hours ago hoping for sunlight, but clouds had rapidly devoured the warmth.
When she’d moved to carry him back down, he’d shaken his head, glassy eyes staring intently at the heavens as he muttered something unintelligible.
She hadn’t argued; she found she hadn’t the strength for it.
And so there he still sits, hours later, his bloodshot gaze scrying the roiling black storm with an intensity she hasn’t seen since before their world fell apart.
When she finally creeps closer, she can just make out his voice scratching out a litany:
“Coming, it comes, it comes, it comes, it comes--”
Tentatively, she brushes his bare shoulder. He does not react to her touch, but his tongue darts out to wet his cracked lips, and the muttering quickens.
“--comes, it comes, it comes, it comes, it comes--”
“What comes?” she whispers, but she knows. She knows.
Loki does not answer. Instead, he lets out a strange, low, stuttering sound.
It takes her a moment to realize it is a laugh.
As if remedying his long silence, Loki soon takes to chattering incessantly, feverishly. Much of it--most of it--remains incomprehensible to her, each word frantically tripping over the next.
And as always, Sigyn can only watch. He rarely responds to her; she wonders if he even realizes she is there.
“Lie down,” she says dully to him one night, because while a small part of her hopes for a reprieve from the constant muttering, a larger part of her--a hollow, heavy part--knows it is useless to ask.
Predictably, he does not react, continuing to mutter under his breath as he scratches something into the cave wall. His torso is bare, the knobs of his spine cresting like peaks down the length of his bowed back. He has been writing on the wall for hours upon hours, but the runes are half-formed, jagged, incomplete. The scratching of rock on stone should grind her, too, to dust, but she feels divorced from it. Absent.
Loki lets out a sharp exhale and that low, stuttering laugh. Silence falls for several seconds, and she does not notice that he has scurried over to her until his hand finds her forearm and squeezes, his nails digging into her flesh. She starts.
“What--?”
“See?” he rasps, gesturing to the wall of rudimentary runes. “You see now. You see. It’s coming. It comes--it--it burns. I--it comes--”
He looks like a dead man, purple shadows pooled beneath his bulging eyes, a sheen of sweat coating his brow. He pants as if he has just scaled a mountain, his eyes too bright, fevered.
“It comes --” he says, shaking her. “It comes, and they--it will burn, it will burn, it will burn, it will all burn, all of it--and I--I--H-- Hart er--Hart er í heimi--vindǫld, vargǫld—áðr verǫld steypiz--áðr verǫld steypiz--Mun engi maðr--ǫðrom þyrma-- it burns, Siggy, it comes, it comes, it comes, it--!”
“Stop,” she chokes out weakly, but her words disintegrate and his breathless mantra spills over her plea.
“--end of it all, the end, the end--glory, the end--it comes, it comes, it --vindǫld, vargǫld—áðr verǫld steypiz--Mun engi maðr--ǫðrom þyrma--ǫðrom-- comes, it comes--it--the end of it all, the end, the end, the end, the end, the end theendtheendtheendtheend--”
She finally snaps, seizing his thin wrists in a vice-like grip and saying firmly, clearly, “Loki. Look at me-- stop it! Stop. Loki! Stop!”
He lets out a sharp exhale, his gaze darting over her shoulder as if he is rapidly scanning some text she cannot see. He flinches and twitches and lets out a series of low hums, grimacing as if in pain, squeezing his eyes shut, shaking his head--humming, whining, wheezing--
"S-s vǫrt verða...s-sólskin...of sumor eptir--”
“Shhh---” she takes his jaw in her hand and turns his face back towards her. “Look at me--no--look at me, focus here--here, elskr…. here--”
He starts, as if suddenly realizing she sits in front of him, and his breath catches, the muttering slowing.
“ S vǫrt...verða...s-sólskin...of…” He hunches into himself. “Of---s--Sig--Siggy--”
“Yes. Focus here--on me, here. Look at me. Look at me. Shhh--look at me.” She touches her forehead to his, gripping his hands tightly. He trembles in waves, the constant motion almost dizzying, but soon, he leans into her touch.
“Breathe--here,” she takes one of his hands--cold and shaking--and presses it against her chest. “Focus on me, on me... Drøymde-- Loki, here...Drøymde mik ein draum i nótt um silki ok ærlig pell…”
He lets out a hitched, shuddering breath and collapses against her, his fingers digging into her arms, his shoulders heaving. She ignores the stinging in her eyes, the lump in her throat, the leaden weight of her bones. She sings, softly, the old melody low in her chest, and gradually, she feels him relax.
But moments later, he whispers, his breath warm against her chest:
“ It comes.”
And if she imagines the deep well of sorrow in his words, they are at least uttered with conviction.
She cannot shake a sudden, new feeling of resignation. Resolution.
“It comes.”
Then let it, she thinks.
Let it.