it was another night. a night where the abyss had called to her, quietly insistent in its insidious whispers. she had forfeited sleep, and this was her punishment, the way her bones ached and her shoulders sagged. her lair shifted and hissed, with each passing second it was beginning to get increasingly more difficult to force it into a state of neutral submission. it sought to darken, sought to close into itself and wrap the fingers of reality into a ribcage blackened with sin and so did its master.
such sickening desire pooled and churned at the pit of the earth's stomach, but before she expelled it from her body in cacophonically dissonant spells, she let her senses be sharply, almost cruelly awakened by the sudden sound of wood scraping against marble. the quickness with which she had gotten to her feet surprised her. as if she were a paraplegic suddenly given the gift of movement.
her feet carried her swiftly and silently, and without warning she felt like less mighty goddess, and more skittish child, picking her way amongst quills, books, scales, all manner of study tools but whether child or goddess, she always ended up in the same place.
there he lay, her prince of books, now king of asgard, his frame rising and falling in the steady breaths of a deep slumber. the way he slept sometimes scared her the way he would avoid it like a sinner would church, then collapse into it like they would into confession. loki slept as he did anything. wholly and severely. and it was for these reasons that his wife watched him for so long. to count the stable movements of his chest, and let the factual weight of solid numbers stabilize her shaking hands as she brushed a strand of his hair from his eyes.
she crawls by his side with the fluidity and eerie silence of a serpent. not unlike, some would say, the serpent that poisoned the garden of eden, and brought sin into the world. and she wishes for a moment that she could be something warm, something pleasantly soft, and not something poisonous or sinful. but when she lets her arms envelop him, when she lets her legs tangle with his, such laments are easily and readily forgotten. replaced by an aching, equal parts sweet and equal parts overwhelming, to be closer to him. to trace every inch of his skin, to hold him with such devout desperation that the silver lines of his every scar made mirrored indents upon her own flesh.
she lets the sharply intoxicating scent of peppermint and cinnamon dull her senses into an endlessly blissful state of drowsy dizziness. and in the span of one fleeting heartbeat, she is glad, she thinks, greedy and selfish seraphina, she is glad that he is as dark as she is. that he sports the same sharpness to his tongue and to his wit. for their angular bodies cut by years of cruelty and suffering, now lay side by side, the pieces of some coveted, unsolvable puzzle. had he been something soft, something pure and perfect, her ragged edges would surely have sliced him to ribbons by now.
the woman litters her husband's back with kisses warm and supple, and seraphina does not question whether or not heaven is real. she questions instead, how heaven could be incarnated into a single person.
and why it was given to so undeserving a sinner.
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