It's THAT time

Um, February? Loki Appreciation Month? Does this ring bells? Because I've been wearing green and walking around with my Loki necklace, and I have a picture of Loki in my wallet (...yeah, okay, that's a little weird), and I have a Loki keychain hanging on the wall in the bedroom.

Yeah. I'm serious about this stuff.

I have yet to write anything brilliant and Loki-themed this month, sadly. But I do have some previous stuff, and while it's not refined or anything, I figure that I'll share a bit, because it is Loki Appreciation Month. So here we go.

(I know where this is going. And I'm not telling you where it's going, because I am VERY serious about this story, and I'd kind of like it to be a little bit of a surprise. And this is not edited, or gerund-checked, or anything, really, I just wrote it, and I'm keeping it as it is until I find the time to devote, like, a year of my life to the story and perfect it and then get the tar published out of it. Yup. So here's the first section of an untitled story involving my favorite Norse God of Mischief.)

When Athena wakes up, Loki is so close to her that she could touch him.

            She doesn’t. Partially because of the blood that paints half his face scarlet and turns his already pale skin even paler. Partially because of the blood that will always stain his hands after the crimes he has committed. Mostly because one of her arms is pinned underneath her body, and, from the feel of it, the other is a little bit broken.

            With utmost care, Athena maneuvers herself into an upright position, mindful of her broken arm. She takes a breath and immediately coughs it back out because her lungs are full of who knows what. As she regains her breath, Athena assess the total damages and comes up with a concussion, a broken arm, a rolled ankle, an assortment of various cuts and what are sure to be spectacular bruises, at least three broken ribs and two more that are fractured, and a gash that has cut lengthways through her right eyebrow. None of the injuries are important enough to require immediate care, so she turns her attention to her location. Only, that doesn’t work, because all she can see is a mess of badly piled debris.

            Since it’s the logical next step, she then turns to Loki.

            He doesn’t look well. Though he’s carefully arranged in Lotus position, heels on his thighs and back straight, his hands shake against his calves and his closed eyes jump beneath his eyelids. She can’t see him breathing, and his flame-colored hair is plastered to his head and face with a mixture of sweat and blood.

            Athena is unnerved. She’s never had the opportunity to look at him with his eyes closed, and, honestly, she could have done without it. Without his eyes open, he looks boyish and innocent and human. He doesn’t look like he belongs in the vicious world of the gods.

            Disoriented and concussed as she is, Athena apparently doesn’t have the usual perfect control of her mouth, because she hears herself say, “You look terrible. What happened to you?”

            The response is delivered so casually that for a moment, Athena completely loses track of where she is.

            “Oh, I had a building dropped on me.”

            Then Loki opens his eyes, and Athena completely loses track of everything.

            “Cronos,” she spits out, and Loki offers her a meaningless smile in return. Athena barely notices, though, because Loki’s irises have somehow shattered. Vibrant green has begun to push into what should be the whites of his eyes, and it looks as if emerald strands have replaced the veins in his eyeballs.

            Athena has never seen anything like that. She has absolutely no idea what it means. From the look of it, she assumes that it’s bad.

            She must look shaken, because Loki raises one hand to rub at his eyes as he says, “There’s no need to be so shocked, Goddess. I’ve chosen to wage a war against the most powerful beings alive.” He drops his hand back to his leg and blinks a couple times. “It’s ludicrous to assume that I’ll always come away unharmed.” Almost as an afterthought, he adds, “And sometimes buildings just fall on people.”

            “That’s not what I-“ Athena begins, then realizes that there’s a tiny smile on Loki’s lips, which presumably means that he’s teasing her. So she stops talking. Then, because this is too surreal and she doesn’t know what else to do, she looks around again.

            Now that Loki has mentioned it, it’s obvious that the rubble around them has come from a building. Athena can see the remains of a wall, wires and plaster and pipes, and the glass that litters the ground must be from shattered windows. What looks like a smashed desk is wedged between a section of crumbling brick, and, strangely, there’s a perfectly pristine pen not three feet from Athena’s knee.

            She’s tempted to laugh, but she doesn’t think you’re supposed to do that when an enemy is sitting so close to you.

            And then all temptation to laugh is gone, because her mind sharpens enough to tell her that the structure of the makeshift cave they’re in isn’t just badly piled. It’s all wrong, because none of the wreckage is positioned stably enough to hold anything at all, which means that they should be crushed, and since they aren’t, that means—

            Startled, her gaze flies back to Loki, to the blood all over his face, to his closed eyes and strained features. At first glance, she’d assumed the blood came from the split near his hairline. And while that’s been a great contributor, she can now see the thin trails of blood that stem from his nose and left ear. Even as she watches, another thread of blood begins to crawl from his right ear.

            Before she can stop herself, Athena reaches toward him with an exclamation of, “In the name of Gaia, what do you think you’re doing?”

            With frightening speed, Loki snatches her hand out of the air. “Don’t touch me!’ he spits out with what Athena thinks is misplaced venom, eyes still closed tightly. “You’ll break my focus, and then we’ll both die.”

            “You’ve already burst blood vessels in your brain,” she snaps back, “And I’m too disoriented to be able to use what little power remains with me.” Loki opens his eyes to slits, not so much to glare at her as to fix her with a total lack of emotion. Athena ignores him to continue, “If you insist on killing yourself this way, then your focus won’t matter, because we’ll both be crushed.”

            He closes his eyes, then opens them again, and a chill spiderwebs its way across Athena’s back. She can actually see the green spreading further from Loki’s irises, and while she has no basis of comparison, Athena is positive it’s not a good sign.

            “Look,” she says in an attempt to be as diplomatic as the situation allows, “I’ve no idea if you’re suicidal or masochistic or something, but I would personally rather not die.”

            His eyelids mercifully shutter his beyond-unnerving eyes once more, and he asks, voice a treacherous mix of saccharine and acidic, “Pray tell—what do you suggest?”

            In an instant, Athena’s architect eyes have broken the enclosed space into mathematical figures and angles and weight plus mass and perfect balance.

            “Move things just enough that the rubble with support itself,” Athena says, and Loki’s eyes fly open and fix on her. She points to a section of cement, a mostly intact wall, and other barely-recognizable parts of the building. “If you shift those just enough, then the weight will settle in a way that should allow us to survive without further brain damage.”

            Loki’s eyes follow the motions of Athena’s hands with a fixation that concerns her. But it’s clear that he can see exactly what she’s talking about, because he murmurs, “Norns. Why didn’t I see that?”

            There’s such self-directed disgust in his voice that Athena can’t help but respond, “I’m sure it would have been obvious it you’d been any more lucid.”

            Loki doesn’t bother with a reply. He only breathes out deeply and straightens impossibly further. He doesn’t close his eyes, but they tighten at the corners. The sluggish flow of blood from his nose and ears increases enough to make Athena doubt that he can do this, but he just locks his eyes on the first piece of rubble and it begins to slide into place.

            Barely half of the necessary shifts have been made before Loki suddenly spasms and the entire structure begins to cave in on them.

            Athena is positive that they’re both dead, but then Loki lets out a sound like a dying animal and forces the invading metal, rock, cement, and glass away through sheer force of will.

            For the first time, Athena begins to realize why Loki is still alive when he’s fighting a war he can’t possibly win. And then she understands that in this moment, that doesn’t matter, because Loki is a breath away from hyperventilation, and though his features are still carefully organized, his eyes scream panic.

            “I can’t do this,” he manages, and his voice sounds strangled, like he’s speaking through a gag. His eyes have begun to bleed red, and he’s blinking too rapidly to follow. “There’s not enough of me left to do this.”

            Athena sees an instant solution, and it’s not exactly preferable. “By Helios and Oceanus and Father Zeus,” she curses as she crawls to his side through the wreckage. He won’t look at her, and keeps on shaking his head as he mutters something in a Runic language so old that not even she knows what he’s saying.

            “This can still work,” she says firmly, and then he’s startled, because he didn’t realize she was so close to him. “We’re just going to have to share a much tighter space than I anticipated.”

            Abruptly, Loki laughs. An honest, carefree laugh that absolutely terrifies Athena. No one should be able to go from panic to amusement so quickly.

            “It’s like a second-rate romance film!” Loki exclaims, offering Athena a lopsided grin that, combined with the blood painted on his face, makes him look grotesquely comical. “Does this mean we’re going to have a bonding moment and you’re going to kiss me?” he inquires cheerily. “Because that would definitely improve this whole maudlin business of dying.”

            Athena is practically on top of him now, but she ignores that, as well as his question. “I need you to make three more changes,” she says. “Can you do that?”

            Just like that, he’s back to lost and listless, and his response, as he stares sightlessly upward, is, “Not like I have a choice.”

            Unwilling to risk him moving the wrong pieces of debris, Athena carefully points out what needs to be shifted and exactly where, and Loki follows her wordless orders automatically. His veins visibly pulse under the blood that covers him, and a steady stream of monotone curses spill out of his mouth. But despite that, a twisted mess of metal and plaster is telekinetically pushed into place, followed by what looks like a section of road. By the time he reaches the mangled door in its equally mangled doorframe that is the last piece of wreckage to be moved, each breath is a gasp, and his eyelids are stretched so far that it looks as if they’re trying to retreat into his head. Unable to help, Athena just sits in silence as the door grinds through the rubble with excruciating slowness and finally wedges itself into place.

            Loki releases everything, and wreckage rains down on them. Athena is seldom wrong, though, and while every bit of unnecessary space is buried in instants, the painful arrangement holds. The only problem is Loki, who simply collapses the moment he no longer has to focus. There’s little enough room that if he pitches forward, the falling debris will remove his head from his shoulders, and while that would be an easy solution to myriad issues Loki has caused for the gods, Athena doesn’t think it’s fair to let him die that way.

            With yet another curse, Athena grabs her enemy with her one good arm and pulls. Unable to resist, Loki falls against her, and for just a moment, they’re both silent.

            That one moment is all she needs to discover that she has never hated anything more than the feel of Loki in her arms.

            His breath is still coming in gasps, and he’s shaking. His hands clench and unclench against her arm, but it’s weak enough that she barely feels it. A stream of almost inaudible words spill out of him, the cadence reminiscent of a prayer. That’s ridiculous, though. Gods don’t pray, because there’s no one to hear them. But it still unnerves her, because in this moment, he is too fragile and childlike and close to innocent, and she knows that he’s anything but that.

            Her arm throbs, and dust coats her lungs, and she’s dangerously close to feeling empathy for the thing in her arms, so Athena says the first thing that pops into her head.

            “You’re a murderer.”

            Then she mentally buries her face in her hands, because while she may be the goddess of battle strategy, sometimes she absolutely fails at safe conversation.

            She’s not sure what she expects as a response, but she definitely doesn’t expect Loki to calmly riposte, “You have gorgeous eyes.”

            Honestly, Athena has no idea what to do with that. So she opts for just looking at him like he’s crazy, because that is not the type of thing you say to your enemy when you’re trapped under a building with them. The effect is lost on him, of course, because his face is buried in her shoulder, and he’s not actually capable of moving. Still, her silence is apparently enough to convey her disbelief.

            “What?” Loki says, not quite defensive, but close enough. “I couldn’t figure out if we were stating the obvious, complementing each other, insulting each other, threatening ourselves through a comment about the other person, or just filling the silence. So I thought I would go with a blanket response.”

            There’s a lot she could say to that. She has no idea how much of it is appropriate in the current setting. So she asks, “How would referring to my eyes as gorgeous be an insult?”

            “Zeus has blue eyes,” he tells her, “Which means that your eyes come from your mother. But Hera also has blue eyes, and you seem the type to be offended by children born from illegitimate affairs. Therefore,” he continues, drawing both his hands back to his sides, “It would be insulting to complement your eyes, because it could be construed as a reference to your illegitimacy.”

            Athena has never thought about that. Unfortunately, it’s absolutely true, and she barely resists pushing Loki off her, because now every time her eyes are mentioned, that’s all she’ll be thinking.

            She decides that it would be better to not say anything else. Except that she can’t help but ask, “How would your comment about my eyes be a threat to you?”

            He doesn’t instantly respond. And when he does, his voice is too light to possibly be real.

            “I’ve a weakness for gorgeous eyes,” is all he says, and Athena gets the impression that this is in no way a safe line of questioning.

            “Why are you talking?” she demands. “I can still see blood coming out of your ears.”

            Instead of replying that he was talking because she’d asked him a question, Loki practically yells, “Because it’s what I do! I talk, because I’m unable to do anything else right!” Then he curls into himself with a gasp of pain and chokes out, “Norns,” and there is going to be so much of his blood on Athena.

            Athena has never had to deal with a deity as bipolar as Loki apparently is (though that may just be the brain damage), and she doesn’t see a logical course of action. But it doesn’t matter, because he’s the enemy, and she would never be in this situation if she could help it. She has no need to try and make this any better for him.

            So the two of them just lie there, unwillingly curled around each other in an improvised shelter made of debris. It might be one of the more bizarre experiences of Athena’s life, and while it isn’t unexpected given the strain he’s endured, it only becomes more bizarre when Loki’s breathing evens out and he slumps fully against her, tense even in sleep.

            Athena briefly wonders whether or not it’s safe to let him sleep when he has brain damage, but she determines that he’ll probably heal fast enough that it’s irrelevant.

            For perhaps another twenty minutes, she sits there, arms wrapped around Loki because there is no space for them to be anywhere else. Her mind, usually so analytical and sharp, is curiously blank, though she mostly attributes that to her injuries, more extreme than any she’s had in years. When a few thoughts finally manage to worm their way to the forefront of her mind, they are only that she should probably follow Loki’s example and sleep.

            Unable to help herself, Athena huffs out a laugh. How much more pathetic could this situation possibly be? Two enemies, falling asleep on each other because they’ve no one else to fall asleep on, trapped under a building, waiting for a rescue that may never come.

            Athena’s last thought is that this is probably not what they mean by “sleeping with the enemy.” But she still feels guilty as she drifts into the land of Hypnos.