Ship: Darcy Lewis/Loki |
For: Anon |
Prompt: “Can you come pick me up?” |
Rating: T |
Word Count: 231 |
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A/n: No Powers AU, Loki is a professor (not Darcy’s, but it’s one of the only professions I can see him excelling at in a no-powers au), and Darcy works somewhere else (I haven’t quite figured that out just yet), but there is an age difference that led to a break up somewhere in their past. Not an illegal one, just enough of one to render them too different to make it work.
“Can you come pick me up?” She sniffed after. It sounded wet and made his hackles rise. Not because he felt she was lying, but because of what that particular sound along with her meek request meant.
She was crying. And she needed him. Something horrible had happened and he didn’t even know what it was.
Loki knew he couldn’t ask her over the phone. He also couldn’t ask her why, when she had everyone else’s phones to dial, she had called him. He couldn’t ask what was wrong, because if he knew, he might not be able to see straight to maneuver the car to wherever she was.
His biggest fear was that she would be hurt and he wouldn’t be there to help. It was part of the reason she’d broken up with him. She’d accused him of trying to be her dad and not her daddy.
Which in and of itself should have sent him running for the hills, but here he was. Grading papers by the single light from his desk, a deadline to get those exam scores back by tomorrow. And yet, he was also answering his phone on the first ring, jumping at the chance to talk to her, even though she’d told him she needed space.
“Yes,” he said softly, standing and tossing his pen to the top of his desk. “Where are you?”
As the BBC drama returns for a second series, the star and the director Georgi Banks-Davies reveal how they created their le Carré sequel
I am in a plush international hotel — appropriately since my assignment is to discuss a television series whose hero, an MI6 agent, once managed a plush international hotel. “As a hotelier Jonathan was complete,” John le Carré wrote of his protagonist in the 1993 novel from which the BBC’s celebrated The Night Manager was adapted. “You did not wonder who his parents were or whether he listened to music or kept a wife and children or a dog. His gaze as he watched the door was steady as a marksman’s.”
Now, in the thriller’s long-awaited sequel, Jonathan Pine is pampered at the taxpayer’s expense in high-end hotels in Central America. Guest rather than staff, Pine maintains his inscrutability, then lies as if his life depends on it, which it does.
I am here to interview The Night Manager’s manager, the driven director of the new season that arrives on Thursday, five years after le Carré’s death. She is Georgi Banks-Davies, “early forties”, a celebrated commercials-maker who directed Billie Piper’s I Hate Suzie for Sky and was the lead director of Netflix’s Greek god riff Kaos.
Camila Morrone plays Pine’s love interest, Roxana
Broadcast in February 2016, BBC1’s original Night Manager was unexpectedly successful, attracting about ten million viewers each week, excellent reviews and prizes for its star Tom Hiddleston, its director Susanne Bier, its writer David Farr and Hugh Laurie, who played Pine’s target, the loathsome arms dealer Richard Roper. In it, Pine insinuated himself into Roper’s super-rich circle, but, the nation asked, would he expose Roper’s villainy before being found out himself? BBC management seized on the show as a prime example of the corporation bringing the UK together in a multichannel, although still barely streamer, age.
The new series begins with Pine back on the night shift and still scrutinising the more dubious clientele of hotels, but this time he is based in MI6 and watching a bank of screens displaying feeds from London fleshpots. He spots a face from Roper’s circle. Soon he has plunged through the LEDs into the real world and is in furious secret pursuit of more creatures of the night, the arms trade’s merchants of death. Pine, Banks-Davies says, is like a coffee percolator, managing the anger that boils within him by pushing it down.
“But he’s also the dormant dragon-slayer. And as soon as the puff of smoke is over the hill he has to start running. Tom and I would talk about that on set. The dragon-slayer can sit sleepily on the hill, just thinking that he’s safe, that he’s slayed the dragon. At the beginning of the first episode Roper is gone. Pine’s done it! But then what? Because who are we without purpose? And for Pine that means going back in, and by going back in I don’t mean undercover or in the service. I mean going back into oneself, looking in the mirror, accepting who you are. I mean, Pine would be in therapy for ever if he were to open up that percolator.”
Smooth on the surface, raging beneath it, Pine is the antithesis of Billie Piper’s explosive Suzie, Kaos’s impetuous deities and, perhaps, the family in which Banks-Davies grew up in Leicester and London. “It was a working-class Irish family. People are really present with their emotions and I think that’s a good thing we don’t necessaryily have so much in England.” She understands Pine, the digital night watchman. “I think about me as a child just sitting very quietly, very unobserved, very much at the back but watching everybody, watching and being fascinated.”
Olivia Colman as Pine’s former boss, Angela Burr
“I think there’s the literal mechanism of the spy who is undercover and can be exposed,” she replies. “But I think there’s also a bigger one at play, in which the characters have to make peace with who they are. I’m not going to give too much away, but the three lead characters, Teddy Dos Santos, Jonathan Pine and Roxana Bolanos, all take that journey of ‘I have to understand through this who I am’.”
Hiddleston’s own journey from Eton, Cambridge and Rada to fame in the Marvel Universe as the mischievous Loki and critical respect as a Shakespearean lead was already well underway when, aged 34, he took the role of Pine. Since he was filming Kong: Skull Island when The Night Manager aired, he did not immediately appreciate its reception, he tells me.
“Months later I was invited to attend the White House correspondents’ dinner in Washington DC, where President Obama dropped the mic, and where I was introduced to then vice-president Joe Biden, who told me that they had screened The Night Manager in the White House to great excitement. That kind of thing doesn’t happen every day.”
It seems he was always going to return for a second Night Manager. “Jonathan Pine,” he says, “is a genuinely great, complex character. Still waters run deep. I admire his extraordinary courage, and what he represents. He’s one of le Carré’s ‘lonely deciders’: people who have a strong moral compass, and — at enormous personal cost, to body and soul — choose to act on it, to do the right thing. Jonathan Pine is a solitary, soulful figure, living and working in the shadows, quietly defending our freedoms, an errant knight, aflame with moral fury. I admire his resilience, self-sacrifice and capacity for endurance.
“I’m fascinated by the tension between his internal world — turbulent, traumatised, on fire — and his external persona — immaculate, contained, controlled. He dissembles to discover the secrets of others. He seduces to betray. He lies to tell the truth.”
Diego Calva and Tom Hiddleston in a scene from The Night Manager
Hiddleston points out that when we meet Pine again that is no longer even his name. “His real identity has been erased from the record. He lives a new life under a new alias: Alex Goodwin. For Pine’s own safety, his real name, his real identity, his personal history and private pain have been buried and suppressed. His trauma has been locked deep within him, like an unexploded bomb.”
Wiring the bomb is David Farr, the British playwright, novelist and theatre director who wrote the original Night Manager and now its sequel. Fans, I tell him, will want to know what took him so long.
“I think the very simple answer is that there was never an intention to make a second season when we finished the first. It was an adaptation of a le Carré book. And nobody would go beyond le Carré. That would be sacrilegious.”
John le Carre with his sons in 1964
“I call it the 4.30 in the morning, half-dream thing. It’s when a lot of writers and I think musicians have the best ideas. I don’t know why. The brain is somehow in an open space and weird stuff happens. Someone else can explain that better than me, but it was vividly clear and pretty comprehensive.”
He contacted Simon Cornwell, who co-heads the Ink Factory, the production company that turns his father’s oeuvre into film and television. Simon confirmed that no sequel was in development. Farr began his research in Colombia, meeting “interesting people right on the edge of the political situation” and, of course, staying in hotels Pine would appreciate. Writing the series, he missed le Carré’s enthusiasm, but was compensated by the absolute trust of his sons, “who carry the flame very consciously”.
Director Georgi Banks-Davies
“My job is to create a thriller plot that is so totally believable and gripping you almost don’t notice it. I always feel plots only become really apparent when they don’t work. When someone suddenly goes, ‘Well, I didn’t believe that’, you detach and therefore can’t do the thing Georgi wants you to do, which is to invest in the emotional narrative.”
For all this ambition, there are good reasons this Night Manager might not achieve the acclaim its predecessor enjoyed. Two of its most compulsive characters do not return: Tom Hollander’s Corky and Laurie’s Roper — although Laurie does have a cameo of sorts as Roper’s corpse. “Occasionally when we shot in London he would come down on his motorbike, looking extremely cool, just to tease Tom and be, like, ‘It’s all on you, kid,’” Banks-Davies says. Streaming has transformed linear television’s fortunes for the worse, making ratings of ten million newsworthy.
But there are even better reasons to think The Night Manager (for which a third series is already planned) will do the business again. The Oscar-winner Olivia Colman returns as Pine’s boss/surrogate mother, and Farr says Calva and Morrone are high-wattage and produce “a very hot sexual triangle” with Hiddleston, who is “brilliant”: “I think it’s the best thing he’s done.”
Two Januaries ago Mr Bates vs the Post Office won more than ten million viewers — and The Night Manager not only debuts on New Year’s Day, when everyone is in, but follows the first of a new series of The Traitors, whose celebrity iteration was the most-watched show of 2025. And what does Slow Horses prove if not that there is an infinite interest in spooks?
Having seen the first two episodes of The Night Manager’s return, I predict that Banks-Davies, Hiddleston and Farr will soon enough be reunited in a luxurious hotel for the first of many award ceremonies.
The Night Manager starts on BBC1 at 9.05pm on New Year’s Day
10 years after The Night Manager changed his life, Tom Hiddleston returns to Jonathan Pine having resolved his own identity crisis
The meeting of Tom Hiddleston and John Le Carré in the autumn of 2017 could have appeared in one of the British espionage writer’s novels: a chance encounter set in the early morning grandeur of Hampstead Heath, as the nation is gripped by post-Brexit uncertainty. Plus one badly behaved cocker spaniel puppy called Bobby.
The men had met two years earlier, ahead of the making of the first season of The Night Manager, the BBC series based on Le Carré’s book of the same name in which Hiddleston plays the British intelligence agent Jonathan Pine. Back then, Hiddleston had asked if there was anything Le Carré would like him to know. And, in a moment of high drama that has since been woven into the lore of the show, he replied, “‘Well, of course, Tom, you will have guessed by now that Jonathan Pine is me and now he must be you.’”
Suit and shirt by Tom Ford. Tie, vintage from Ebay. Shoe by Christian Louboutin.
And so, at 35, Hiddleston became Pine, and in turn that season of television changed his life. He won a Golden Globe. He became aware of being really known in the world, where everyone confused him and the agent he had played. And because of that confusion, the question of whether he would play James Bond came to follow him around. Meanwhile, having had his big breakthrough moment as Loki in 2011’s Thor, the thirst of Marvel fans was steadily increasing with each release. By the time he and Le Carré crossed paths again, Hiddleston had experienced the disorientating one-two combo of intense fame and a public relationship and subsequent break up with Taylor Swift. And at a fourth of July party in 2016, a private joke between friends snowballed into the most scrutinised vest in history. So he went dark for a while, and, in November 2017, he got a puppy. Before long he was taking Bobby to Hampstead Heath to train.
It was here that he bumped into Le Carré on his morning constitutional, and over the following months and years they had long conversations about the recently-elected Donald Trump; about the intensifying situation in Ukraine; about Brexit. “He would have these extraordinary takes on what was happening in the world,” Hiddleston recalled. “He had been a spy himself and seen behind the curtain. He still really believed in the country and the best things about it. It made him sad that things were being denigrated.
One topic the pair kept returning to was a second season of The Night Manager, the prospect of Hiddleston becoming Pine again hanging in the morning mist. They didn’t manage to get it done before Le Carré died in December 2020, but 10 days after he passed away, his sons Simon and Stephen Cornwell came to Hiddleston with the version of the second season that their father had wanted. The idea had come from a dream which David Farr, the writer of the first season, had after Le Carré became unwell following a fall: a vision of a black car driving through the hills of South America, winding towards a boy with an expectant look in his eyes.
As it has in the real world, 10 years have passed in the world of The Night Manager. In that time Pine’s identity has been buried and erased. Instead, Pine becomes Alex Goodwin, working for a surveillance branch of MI6 called the Night Owls – lonely, nocturnal work befitting a paranoid and fractured nation. “It’s been a long 10 years: Five prime ministers; three presidents, one of them twice; a pandemic; untold international conflict; fragmentation; uncertainty…” Hiddleston says. “We all know spies are out there, patrolling the boundaries of our reality. But what happens if those people have an existential question of, what are we defending? What’s the Britain that the service represents?”
This season is a portrait of many different types of Britishness, but it also returns to the backdrop of the original novel by drawing Pine out to Colombia. There he meets arms dealer Teddy Do Santos (Diego Calva) and his associate Roxana Bolaños (Camila Morrone), entering into a Le Carré-esque triangle of intrigue and deception where he is very soon in over his head.
Hiddleston made a deal with himself that he had to fulfil if he was to become Pine again: “This has to be bigger, braver, deeper, more exposing,” he says, his voice becoming bigger, braver, deeper, more exposing. “You have to risk more. You have to give more. It's going to cost more physically and emotionally, and it's going to be worth it.”
It is early December and in a café near Regent’s Park, Hiddleston arrives for lunch shaking the rain from his jacket. He has more years under his belt than when we last saw Jonathan Pine but he looks good: bright-eyed, handsome in an earthy, clean way. Still, the passing of time was a reality he experienced as a jumpscare when he saw the first episode’s recap of season one. “OK! Definitely in my mid-forties,” he laughs.
He goes in deep as soon as he arrives: my sister’s baby was born this morning – Is everyone well? Isn’t birth the “most beautiful, profound, earth-shattering, life-altering” experience there is? It’s something he experienced just the other day, he says, welcoming his second child into the world.
You might have been expecting this Tom Hiddleston: the one who is relentlessly, sincerely enthusiastic about Bukayo Saka’s inherent goodness and the beauty of Andy Murray’s workmanlike style of play. The one who can quote Nietzsche's famous line that the strength of a person's spirit can be measured by how much truth he could tolerate, almost word perfect. The Tom Hiddleston who does eerily good impressions and viral dance routines on chat show sofas, and is portrayed in interviews as having a labradorish zeal for even the simplest pleasures (see, notably: Bolognese).
But in the time since the first season of The Night Manager, Hiddleston has put the work into his off-screen self. He had a similar reckoning, he says, at 27, when he was only landing small TV parts and kept getting rejected at auditions. As a result, he felt like he wasn’t really in control of his life. “When I was a young man, I was constantly doing what I've been told to do. I got myself twisted in all kinds of knots, both personally and professionally,” he says. “Eventually I was like: Tom, get a grip. Go towards what interests you and motivates you. Get rid of people who don't make you feel good, who embarrass you or make you do things you don't want to do. Try not to be such a people pleaser and see where you end up.”
Shortly after he says this, as if to test the status of his people-pleasing rehabilitation, a diner from another table comes over pretending to ask what the carrots on our plates are in order to get his attention. “These are carrots,” he says happily.
But he knew his work wasn’t over back then, because a year or so after the wave of attention following The Night Manager, Hiddleston felt like his life was getting away from him again. He paused and took stock to work out if he really wanted to keep plugging away on the actor’s journey, and if so, why. “Suddenly you're looking at your choices in a different way and thinking: what do I want to do with my time and my energy? If you're really honest with yourself, some of those questions are quite hard,” he says, speaking with the careful pace of a highwire artist. “I think I had to confront a lot of stuff in my life, and the confrontation was really challenging and painful, but transformative.”
Part of that process was about making peace with himself and “all the mistakes and all the missteps and all of the moments where you said the wrong thing, did the wrong thing, made the wrong choice”. By becoming intimately acquainted with all the parts of his shadow self that he’d buried or just didn’t want to deal with, he realised that you can only change your life if you accept who you really are.
One challenge was keeping the opinions of strangers – good or bad, social media or tabloid headlines – at a safe distance. He avoids talking about anything in particular, but it is hard not to see a connection between this decision and his having to endure months of public analysis over his behaviour during a brief, private relationship, and even questions about whether it was real. “I'm really grateful for that scrutiny in some way because it generated inside me a real self discipline and rigour to [accept that] everyone's entitled to their opinion, but you have to be really disciplined about your own opinion of yourself,” he says. “That will keep you safe in the choppy waters.”
And part of it, he thinks, could just be getting older, having kids and welcoming the shift of perspective that brings. Hiddleston spent most of this year filming Tenzing, the story of the first person to climb Everest, Edmund Hillary and his Sherpa, Tenzing Norgay. The initial shoot took place in Nepal, where he trekked through the snow in minus 15 degrees, wearing 100 layers and with his fingertips cracking from the cold. When he returned to London in August he felt so grateful for his soft, gentle life. One night he vividly remembers sitting on the sofa watching the US Open on television with his partner, the actor Zawe Ashton. “I was reading the FT, and I was like, this is great. A perfect night. Dog on my lap. Everyone's here! I was feeling so happy to be together, to be the pack,” he says. “I love my ordinary life and I like the part of myself that’s really ordinary.”
This appreciation for healing and stories that offer some kind of redemption is something Hiddleston has admired since a young age. When he was a boy, he watched The Shawshank Redemption, which set off some internal fireworks. “I still find it incredibly emotional. It's so moving, the idea that you get another chance. I suppose I want that for everyone” he says. He felt it again when he was 14, at a production of Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman at the National Theatre, and the way Paul Scofield as Borkman showed the soul of this great man made the teenage Hiddleston burst into tears.
He always wants to show the face behind the mask, because he believes inside all of us is a softness, and watching those stories has always made him feel less alone. This is why he loved playing Marvel supervillain Loki, whom he made sympathetic and fallible over a 15-year arc. That journey culminated at the end of the second season of his spin-off TV show with Loki being given a second chance; to choose not to be the bad guy. “In order to become someone different, whose story had a different ending, he had to make peace with the things he did,” Hiddleston says. “It gave him the power of authorship over his own story.”
When we meet Hiddleston has recently finished filming Avengers: Doomsday, picking up from the “glorious purpose” that Loki found at the end of season two. “My contribution has been contributed,” he says of the forthcoming film. And then, slightly less evasively: “It is monumental. The centre of the story is absolutely brilliant, and was so surprising when I read it. It just has never been done before.”
In his recent production of Much Ado about Nothing, Hiddleston relished the experience of removing the mask as Benedick. In Act II, Benedick overhears his friends saying that he is too proud to be loved by Beatrice and every night on stage Hiddleston would say: “I must not seem proud: happy are they that hear their detractions and can put them to mending”, putting words to Benedick’s realisation that he must make himself vulnerable in order to be loved. And every night he really could hear the audience thinking, Oh shit! Or, to put it in Hiddleston’s English: “what a perfect, crystalline jewel of an idea!”
Redemption is a little harder to come by for Jonathan Pine given the many masks he wears. For Hiddleston, the most enjoyable parts of playing him this season were when he is pulling the strings: like a tennis match that he carefully orchestrates (killer serve, Hiddleston’s own), or stunts like scaling a wall and a motorbike chase, which he diligently trained for and was desperate to take on. So much so that, while filming the latter, he slipped on the post-thunderstorm concrete of Medellín and went flying.
But the most challenging moments were letting the audience occasionally see glimpses of a broken man trying his best. Hiddleston often thinks about when Federer and Nadal used to go to five sets, and the way the camera would cut to a close-up after a double fault. That pain! That dignity! If only he could put that vulnerability into a performance. With Pine he tried to let flashes of it show. “You see it for a moment, the window to his soul is opened and then closed, and this impeccable agent is back behind the wheel.”
In returning to the world of The Night Manager, Hiddleston wanted to keep Le Carré’s voice alive in his head. To help him do so, Le Carré’s son Simon had pointed Hiddleston to a 2023 documentary called The Pigeon Tunnel by director Errol Morris, interviews for which took place a year before Le Carré died. “It really is Le Carré’s last word on himself,” Hiddleston says. “It's almost an interrogation and a confession in the same breath.”
In the documentary, Le Carré talks openly about his painful childhood where his mother walked out when he was very young, leaving him with his father who was a known conman. Throughout his childhood the rug would constantly be pulled: money came in and soon went away. People arrived then were never seen again. They would suddenly have to move house. Nothing was real.
There was one part of the documentary that Hiddleston kept coming back to – a section which he now starts reciting as a dramatic monologue in the restaurant, causing the woman at the next table to look over. Her jaw drops ever so slightly.
“Of truth we didn't speak, of conviction we didn't speak,” says Hiddleston as Le Carré. “The most important thing was the imprint of personality. You learned very quickly early on, that being off stage was boring. You polish your act, you tell funny stories. You learn,” he breaks for a moment, “and this is the line that hit me between the eyes,” he resumes character. “You learn early on, there is no centre to a human being.”
Hiddleston watched the documentary over and over again, searching for the parts of himself that Le Carré had written into Jonathan Pine. “He'd invested Pine with so much of his own complexity and this duality: that young boy who just needs things to be stable, who wants his mother to stay, who wants his father to tell the truth,” he says.
And yet Hiddleston couldn’t help but need to believe in the human heart of the man he was playing. “I think there is a centre to Pine actually, and maybe that's because I believe in his goodness,” he says. “I believe in the goodness of people and things.”
After he says it there’s a moment where I can almost see him cringe, so he backtracks to explain. He doesn’t want to sound Pollyannaish, but he has come to see that you can only appreciate the goodness in people by facing down the bad. He’s confronted the cynicism inside him and the reality that people aren’t always so great. But seeing his kids come into the world with such unvarnished goodness was evidence that we are all born that way and should try to hold onto it. And even though he has now been here for five hours despite only being obliged to stay for two, and it’s dark and rainy outside, and at home his Christmas tree has been up for four days without any decorations, and urgently needs his attention, he keeps asking questions.
And before he finally leaves he asks one more: “Do you think there’s a centre to a human being?” And I say yes because I can’t bear to say no, but also because you could not look at this man and believe that was not true.
“It has taken a long time but I know what the centre of me is,” he says. “At least, I hope so.”
Summary: There's a man in the clearing. She blinks, certain for a moment that she's seeing things - but it is a man, a shirtless man, kneeling, panting softly in the ice. Shirtless. His pale skin glistens with perspiration, his back lithe and sinewy and heaving with each breath. Her own catches in her throat. Hurt? She can't tell. There's no blood that she can see, no bruises. The snow around his boots is packed firm, mottled with boot prints and flecks of dirt, but nothing that seems to indicate violence. The man rolls his head back, a soft, exhausted exhale coming out in a puff of white, his dark hair falling limp down his back, and — oh Norns, that's the prince.
Word Count: 2,808
Pairing: Loki x Sigyn
A/N: Just a silly thing I wrote after seeing a photo of Tom training for The Night Manger's second season and my friend @lokislittlesigyn had the thought of Loki working out in secret.
Also - this is my fiftieth fic posted! Which is absolutely wild - I was at 32 at the beginning of 2025, and never in my wildest dreams would I have thought I'd get eighteen fics up in one year. Thank you so much to everyone who read anything I wrote this year - I hope to have lots more coming in the next - and I hope you all have a wonderful New Year's and that 2026 treats you well <3
If you want to be tagged, feel free to send an ask/message!!
Read it on Ao3!
The woods are quiet. It's the kind of stillness that only comes in the dead of winter, when the chittering birds have all flown to warmer shores, and the furry critters of the forest have burrowed into their dens to sleep through to the snow's thaw. She tugs her shawl tighter across her shoulders as she saunters down the icy path. She's in no hurry.
Working at the palace comes with its fair share of hardships, of course - serving those of heightened status meant heightened standards, and heightened consequences for failing to meet those standards - but she finds that the positives far outweigh the negatives. The pay is good, meals hearty and satiating, downy beds warmer than anything else she's ever laid in. But her favorite benefit might just be the woods. There's something so soothing about it, slipping away from the stress of palace life and letting the trees' whispering shadows swallow her in their embrace. Out here, she doesn't need to worry about finishing the Vanir ladies' laundry fast enough for their liking, or if her apron is unwrinkled and spotless enough to satisfy the churlish mistress housekeeper's demands for immaculateness. She tilts her head back and just breathes.
She hasn't had much of a chance for her woodland walks as of late. After all, Yule is approaching at a steady march. The palace fills with nobility and visiting royalty, nightly banquets growing grander and grander with each arrival. There's only so much time the serving staff has to themselves, and even less in the light. Each day is getting darker, each night longer and more biting in chill - the sort of weather that seems to cast a slow, sleepy spell over everyone and everything. They wake up each morning to a fresh coat of snow that the grumbling gardeners have to dig a new path through. Firewood vanishes nearly as quickly as it's chopped.
The other maids hate this time of year, but she can't bring herself to mind it too much. The cold cuts through her shawl with a vivaciousness that wakes her up rather than puts her to sleep. Especially times like now, when the overcast sky is just light enough to give the ice in the barren trees a bit of sparkle. It's like walking through a forest of diamonds.
The snow crunches beneath her boots. She loves the sound - loves the perfect little prints she leaves behind her. The air is chilled, but there's a pep in her step. The winter heather should be in bloom by now. She adores those little pink buds, so bright against the sterile white of the world - the perfect pops of color to lighten up the drab servant quarters. In fact, she thinks—
Thud!
She jumps at the noise - it's sharp and sudden, something that she feels vibrating in her ribs. Electricity zings down her spine. What was that? She's not even sure what it sounded like - something hitting the ground? Or perhaps a tree? The woods have fallen silent once more. Did she imagine it?
But then it happens again - thud!
She swallows. Definitely real. She feels it beneath her boots - the soft tremors of impact, something being thrown to the forest floor. An animal? She knows there's bears in these woods, though she's never seen them - but what would a bear be doing out in the dead of winter?
Thud!
There's a rhythm to the sound, she's realizing - it's not the random stumbling of some forest creature, no, it's steady like a heartbeat. Measured. Deliberate.
Thud!
It's coming from her right, somewhere off the path. What in the world? She hesitates. Probably best to leave it be - she can't imagine anything good would be thumping about in the woods …
But could it be someone in need of aid? Her mind conjures up a story she heard once, when she was a small child, of a warrior injured in battle and half buried in the snow, who signaled to a passing party by pounding his club against a nearby stump. She bites her lower lip, uncertain. Surely such a predicament wouldn't be happening so close to the palace walls?
But if there was someone, and she ignored them …
Thud!
She draws a deep breath, and after a moment's hesitation, steps off the path.
The snow is far deeper here - she sinks all the way to her shins, hobbling weakly through the wet in the direction of the sound. She huffs. Well, at least there's no fear of getting lost - she's making such a mess that her trail will be easy to follow on her return.
It's a few minutes of arduous struggle through the drifts before the dense forest wood finally begins to thin. She pauses, gripping a trunk as she catches her breath.
Thud!
She freezes. There's something moving ahead.
There's a man in the clearing. She blinks, certain for a moment that she's seeing things - but it is a man, a shirtless man, kneeling, panting softly in the ice. Shirtless. His pale skin glistens with perspiration, his back lithe and sinewy and heaving with each breath. Her own catches in her throat. Hurt? She can't tell. There's no blood that she can see, no bruises. The snow around his boots is packed firm, mottled with boot prints and flecks of dirt, but nothing that seems to indicate violence. The man rolls his head back, a soft, exhausted exhale coming out in a puff of white, his dark hair falling limp down his back, and — oh Norns, that's the prince.
She has to be seeing things. But … it is, isn't it? It's not that she's intimately familiar with Odin's youngest son - she's only seen him from afar, but - but she recognizes that profile, those slicked back curls against his neck. All at once, her knees feel unsteady. What on Asgard is Prince Loki doing half naked in the woods? In the snow no less? Everyone's always said that the second prince was an odd sort, a man who reached for his spells more than his sword, but that's a far cry from freezing to death … although … perhaps he is casting a spell? A shiver runs down her spine. She knows very little of seidr. What sort of magic would require him to traverse so far from the palace? Nothing safe, certainly - Norns, she shouldn't be out here—
The prince groans, and the sound makes her start. Goodness, is he injured? No, it's a a weary sound, more than anything else - now he's rolling his shoulders back and reaching for something in front of him. She squints. It's a rock, a large rock, or perhaps a small boulder - about the length of his forearm. He rolls it along the ground towards him. Then, with one last huff, he heaves it into his arms.
Her eyes widen. Beneath his skin, muscles ripple across his back as he pulls the boulder to his chest. Slowly, deliberately, calves trembling with the effort, he pulls himself from stooped to upright. There's a grunt, and then he collapses into a squat again, body pressed down tight like a spring before it's sprung as he hikes the boulder above his shoulders. His wrists wobble beneath the rock, and he mutters something that she doesn't quite catch, breathless and irritated as he steadies himself. Elbows braced against his thighs, he pushes once more to stand. Satisfied, he relaxes.
Thud!
The rock hits the snow. A beat of labored breath, and then he starts again.
He's training. She's seen men do it before - not with rocks in the snow, of course, but down at the sparring pits, with their metal balls and leaden spears. Who would've thought? Perhaps the prince is not so different from his peers.
Thud!
She ought to go. Clearly, this is not a performance meant for her eyes - or anyone's eyes, for that matter. The younger prince has never possessed the raw physicality of his brother, nor the instinct to put said physicality on display. He's quieter too, more shy. The type of character who blends into the shadows of a painting, rather than basking in foreground's light. She's never seen him derobe when he spars in the pits, the way that Prince Thor and the others do.
… not that she watches the men sparring, or anything like that.
Thud!
Well - maybe a stray glimpse every now and then—
Still, her boots seem leaden, buried in the snow. She's watched a man train so closely before. There's something mesmerizing to his movements, the way his body stretches and shrinks with the boulder, the way his skin glistens in the frosted light. He really is quite muscular, she realizes. He always looks so small compared to his brother, especially with how often he hides beneath his clothes, but here in the forest she can see how his muscles flex and strain with every motion. It's … art. Or it should be. She's listened to the tittering of her fellow maids before, sneaking glances at the Einherjar sparring with their prince, but the hulking forms of Prince Thor and his guards never seem quite this sleek. This … she could watch this. She shouldn't, of course - she should be going back soon, actually, before someone misses her —
Wait, when did the thuds stop—?
Glittering eyes narrow at her through the trees. Her gut turns to ice.
"Come out of there." His voice is more frigid than the air.
A part of her screams to turn and run - he hasn't seen her face, and she knows these woods well, perhaps she could make it back to the palace without anyone being the wiser. But if she couldn't … if what they say about the younger prince is true, and he gives chase … she lets out a shuddering breath, and creeps into the light. She's never been one capable of disobedience.
Prince Loki's face is cold stone as she shivers at the treeline, head bowed, contrite. "You're from the palace," he says after a moment, flatly.
It's a statement, not a question. Still, she feels the need to answer. "Yes, my lord." Her voice is pale in the frozen air. Perhaps - perhaps he would not be cross. She's done nothing wrong … but the ice in his gaze is enough to wither spirit to naught.
"Do you often make it a habit of spying on your masters?" When she remains frozen in place, words caught in her throat, he scowls. "Come now - out with it! Did my brother send you?"
"W-what?" His brother? What would she have to do with Prince Thor? She shakes her head vigorously. "No, no, my lord, I haven't - I haven't seen the prince." Her breath is coming in trembling puffs of vapor. "I was just taking my break, my lord, I didn't expect to see anyone—"
The prince seems unconvinced. His chest has gone quite stiff, skin glistening in the frigid air.
"And you take your breaks alone in the woods," he asks with a pointed sort of edge, "So far from the palace doors?"
Her heart is pounding in her ears, so thundering she can barely hear her own voice. "I- I like the fresh air, my lord, and- and I thought that perhaps the heather might be in bloom …"
It sounds so silly when she stays it out loud. Norns, she can feel his frown deepening with every word she says. Stop talking. She coughs, stumbling over her words. "My deepest apologies, my lord, I never mean to intrude …"
Prince Loki is silent. Still. It strikes her how like some stalking predator he is, hidden within the grass, and she's just the frightened doe out in the open caught under his laser stare. Norns, his eyes. She's never seen them so close before, never been looked at like this. In the dappled light of the forest, they glitter like gemstones, dancing somewhere in the realm between green and blue, far too close to determine which. All she knows is that he's looking at her, and those piercing eyes are going right through her soul.
"… bring the towel, there," he says at last. "And the tunic."
It's an order, and there's relief in that - obedience comes far easier than self defense. The items are neatly folded, the both of them, in a little bundle of fabric on the rock to her left - cotton tunic, then worn towel beneath it. She fetches them both, her fingers trembling against the softness. Norns, is this all he has? There's no cloak, no furs to be found, just this thin little swath of cloth. Physical exertion does warm the body, of course, but even so …
The prince takes them without a word. She sinks into a curtsy. She's not sure he notices. He rubs his face with the towel, dabbing the sweat from his brow. There's something strange about it - his arm is stiff, his movements … stilted. It's when he pauses for a nearly imperceptible moment, before dropping the fabric to his chest, that makes her drop her gaze down to the laces on her boots. It just seems so- so personal. Not for her eyes.
That wasn't a problem when you were spying on him from the woods, she chides herself. You hypocrite. You're lucky you haven't earned yourself a beating yet.
"You'll tell no one of this." He's covered now, completely - the tunic hangs loose on his form as he smooths the wrinkles in his sleeve. "Yes?"
She jerks her head a little too quickly. "Yes, my lord - as you wish—"
"Good." He nods stiffly, more at the snow than at her. "Go on, then."
Is that all? She sinks into another shaky curtsy, but he's already turned away. Her heart is rattling against her ribs. She stumbles back towards the path, boots slipping against the snow drifts even as she tries to keep to her previous footprints.
"Wait." Her heart sinks. Of course it couldn't have been that easy. When she turns, the prince is looking at her once again, ice-cold gaze sending shivers through her bones once more.
She keeps them from her voice. "Yes, my lord?"
For a moment, the clearing is silent. His eyes drift from her to somewhere distant, his lips hanging just slightly open. She bites down on her tongue to keep her teeth from chattering.
Finally, he clears his throat. "What's your name?" He's looking at her again, face a stone mask she wishes she knew how to read.
She swallows. "Sigyn, my lord." Perhaps she shouldn't have told him. He could make trouble for her - it seems impossible that he wouldn't, with how thoroughly she seems to have disturbed him. But he's standing there so quiet, so … princely - she can't deny a request from her prince, can she?
"Sigyn …" Her name hangs on his lips, soft against the winter chill. He tilts his head to the side, studying her. His breath frames his face in another gentle cloud.
"There's a patch of heather blooming just a bit east of here," he says. "By the brook."
At first she only blinks at him. Heather - she had forgotten all about the heather. Why would he be telling her where to find it, when he had been so cross with her when she brought it up? He wanted her to go back to the palace, didn't he? This has to be a trick of some sort - he called her back to confuse her further, unless … is he just being kind?
Say something, you fool!
"… thank you, my lord."
Prince Loki nods. "Don't stray far from the path. It's very easy to get lost this time of year."
Her head is spinning. A threat? But there's no frost to his tone, no anger - is it care? Is the prince worrying about her? That surely can't be right - but none of this is right. Ever since she stepped into this clearing, it's been like stepping into some strange sort of dream. Maybe Prince Loki isn't even there at all - maybe he's just some trick of the light on the snow, a shimmering mirage come of too little sleep and too long in the cold …
Trick or not, he's staring at her. Waiting. Norns, those eyes.
"Yes, my lord, I'll -" she clears her throat. "I'll be careful."
He hums. Nods again. A wave of his hand, and he's turning away. Sigyn supposes that's all the dismissal she'll get. She hears him start up with his work once more, as she heads back towards the path. Thud. A moment, a grunt, and then again.
Thud.
An odd one, that Prince Loki. And yet … she finds herself smiling. Just a bit. Perhaps she'll keep some heather with her, next time she goes walking in the woods. To give to him as a thank you.
Smitten Kitten Loki trying to convince his lady love to come back to bed - do you think he’ll succeed? 😉 Commission for my absolute fave @justheretoread-ao3 🥰
Hello!! I know it’s been a long time, but as it is Tom’s birthday I couldn’t let the occasion pass!!
Also, since Much Ado begins tomorrow so we should hopefully be getting some content finally!! Of course, it’ll probably be him and his uniform every day because things don’t change 😁
Happy Birthday Tom!
I just really like cute boys and naps @canigetanap - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
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