Ayy, milestone prompt here :) Darcy/Loki, and fire? xxxxx love youuuuuuu
FLOWERS. I love you. Gosh.
Unrelated but I just saw: THIS IS MY 1,000TH POST (yes my blog is a baby)
Pairing: Loki/Darcy Lewis
Loki’s jaw clenched as the Muspelheim guards led him closer to Darcy’s cell. Her cage. He could see her through the wavering flames, balled up on the rock floor with her face hidden beneath the hood of her sweater.
“This was unnecessary,” Loki bit out.
The guard to his right, a towering and smoldering creature with eyes like black stars, shrugged. It spoke with a sparking, spitting tongue.
“This is a luxury by our prison standards, princeling.”
Loki turned back to the image of Darcy flickering through fire and clenched his fists beneath his sleeves. He had been a king. Now princeling. And he wasn’t for a moment convinced that Surtr, King of the realm and supposed ally—after the demand for negotiations with Thor that had gotten Darcy kidnapped in the first place—hadn’t been perfectly aware that it was a Bad Idea to put a Midgardian in a cage of fire. Realm standards or not.
“The gesture is noted,” Loki managed to say, and let his tone speak to the nature of the ‘note’. “May I retrieve our ambassador now?”
“At your convenience,” the guard hissed, stepping back.
The flames remained intact. Ah. Very well then. He strode through, fighting the urge to flinch and losing it as he crossed the threshold. It was a damn oven inside, worse than the Muspelheim deserts. Darcy was limp as he lifted her from the floor, his fingers tracing at her wrists and temple. Her pulse was fluttering but her skin was raw and dry, lips chewed and chapped.
He had a choice. He could toss her over his shoulder like he would any other one of Thor’s mortal friends. Or…He cradled her against his chest, pressing her forehead to his neck and cooling his skin to provide some relief. When he turned, the flames parted in a doorway.
“I didn’t think you’d come.”
They’d been traveling for hours. He had been traveling. Darcy had been…sleeping, for the most part. Waking when he stopped just over the threshold into Niflheim, a gasp on her lips as the suddenly icy air rushed over her face. He had wrapped her in his cloak and fed her ice chips for the better part of an hour, her eyes rolling unseeing over his face.
“You’re awake,” he said and buried the feeling of relief under his steps. “Did you expect Thor to abandon his friend?”
“I didn’t think you would come,” she whispered, shifting in his arms to try and sit up a little, trying to take in the icy mountain scape around them.
He almost hadn’t. Well, that wasn’t true. It was never a question of him coming, not as far as he was concerned. His mind was made up the moment he’d heard. But he hadn’t even been on the first short list they’d come up with. If Thor honestly thought Sif and Korg would have been a more diplomatic envoy than him… He was offended.
“It was an accident,” he said instead, not answering her question. If it was a question at all. “You were meant to be Jane Foster.”
“Duh,” she said. “Who do you think told them I was Jane?”
“You what?” He glared down at her and found her skin too pale around her lips and eyes, too flushed over her cheeks. She would go into shock if he wasn’t careful. He needed to get her back to her planet. Their planet, he remembered with a grimace. “You didn’t even know what they wanted with her.”
“No, but I knew Jane would be the one to figure out how to get me back,” Darcy said. She shivered and pressed her forehead against his jaw line.
It had been Jane who contacted them. Well, Bruce. He’d called it ‘playing telephone,’ Jane getting in touch with him to get in touch with Thor when her science couldn’t trace where they had taken Darcy.
“How go the peace talks?” Darcy asked.
“Muspelheim maintains their tentative truce with Asgard’s people,” Loki said, with a shrug that was more of an excuse to hold her closer.
“Nooo, the Thor and Jane peace talks,” Darcy said.
He huffed. “Not high in my current interests.”
“It’d be nice to see more of you,” she said and her lips bumped over his pulse. “If they were friends again.”
He was silent, biting hard on his tongue as they reached a wood of frozen trees that stretched so high into the sky the legends claimed they were grew down from the ice laden clouds, not up from the ground. It would be nice to see more of her. To excavate the feelings she had brushed at in the course of one evening when they’d first arrived in Norway.
“Loki,” she whispered. “I’m getting…cold? But I feel dizzy.”
“We are almost to Midgard,” he said.
He wasn’t exactly following directions by taking Darcy to his home instead of wherever Thor and Jane were undoubtedly circling each other like wary cats. But he wanted her well not harassed, so delay was a necessary evil. And Darcy said nothing against it.
“Drink more,” he said, handing her another bottle of water (lifted magically from the fridge of Tony Stark’s personal lab in New York, just for fun.)
“Are you trying to drown me?” she asked, but she drank.
She was sitting with her legs folded on top of his bed. He had taken the charred sweater from her when her hands shook too badly to unzip it herself, and had opened the windows to let cool fresh spring air into the room. The worst of the shivers he had removed with a little bit of magic to loosen her muscles.
He reached out and set his palm against the side of her neck to gauge her temperature and she leaned into the touch.
“You run cool,” she murmured.
“I can,” he said, trying not to feel so dazzled by the bat of her lashes over her cheek or the way she always seemed to be leaning closer.
She met his eyes and gave him a small smile, gaze gentle. She knew, then. That was just as well.
He stood and moved to sit behind her on the bed. “Lean back.”
She hesitated and then shifted back, scooting closer and relaxing against his chest.
“Close your eyes,” he said.
“Loki.” She started to turn her head to look at him and he stopped her, stroking at her cheek with the backs of his fingers.
Darcy sighed and he could see her lashes flutter in irritation as he stared down her nose, waiting. But they fell shut and stayed that way. He unravelled the Asgardian illusion. Thor had asked once, if it was relief to let it drop sometimes and he had simply said ‘No.’ The truth was it felt like peeling away a layer of his own skin, leaving him more than naked. An open wound.
“Oh,” she murmured, shoulders easing as he shifted to his Jotunn form. “That’s really nice.”
He felt a twitch of a smile on his face and then her fingertips were grazing over the bare skin of his arms where his shirtsleeves were rolled up. Her touch felt like fire, still feverish from the heat stroke. He stiffened in place, uncertain if he wanted to pull away or press closer. Her fingers tangled with his, palms against the sigils over the backs of his hands and knuckles, and she wrapped his arms across her waist.
“Do you mind?” she asked.
He realized he was still rigid and he forced himself to relax, arms squeezing carefully around her.