AWOMOD: Entirely Honest (Ch 10)
Characters: Loki x Ashira
Warnings: angst, fluff, angst ruining fluff, death
Locations: her ship, some random ass planets that don’t matter.
Word count: 4,500+
Summary: Ashira opts to be entirely honest... ish.
A/N: I am so sorry for taking so long,,, I had more to do than I thought. I, however, also have the next chapter ready to post as well. There are probably tons of mistakes but I’m trying!!
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Previous
She is still shaken up when they land. It’s obvious by the way she bites her nails while waiting for him at the doorway, the small jump when he finally comes down to stand beside her, the nervous tugging of her white sweater sleeves at the beginning of their walk.
Loki nearly speaks up, asks what happened that caused her such distress.
He just can’t bring himself to do so.
Asking feels wrong, he concludes. Though he could try and flip any defensive responses around and point out what she did to him when he did not divulge his heritage directly, even attempting to inquire seems far too inappropriate.
She did take him on after all. It was not a requirement and she could have dumped him anywhere at this point; instead she allows him to stay. Provoking her does not seem wise.
What’s that Midgardian phrase? Don’t bite the hand that feeds you? Not an accurate statement, but close enough.
So instead they walk in silence, side by side, through the thick forests with no discernible path.
Ashira does not talk, nor does she seem to even really notice his presence beside her. Her eyes are glazed over, no more alive than a doll’s, as they stare off into the distance. Legs heavy, every step seems to be mindless.
It goes on like this for hours.
Mindless walking through a darkening forest turns worrying, however, as the barely visible sun begins to reach far past midday.
Loki steps quickly to walk ahead of Ashira and stops. “Are we going to be back to the ship soon?”
With no pause, eyes still miles ahead, she replies. “Yeah.”
The prince remains in his spot a moment after she passes, watching her thoughtless walking as she proceeds.
Something terrible happened many years ago.
That’s all he can figure out.
—
Upon returning, Ashira heads straight to shower with no words. It’s like she has transformed from a borderline psychotic vagabond to an apathetic zombie over night.
As he goes upstairs as well, he becomes torn between sitting on his bed and just going back down stairs. The bed takes up basically the entire space, save the few feet to the window seat and the odd little carve out where the stairs are. Ashira clearly navigates around it regularly but he is never there when she does so. She is also never this… odd.
He opts to just stay instead, lying comfortably down in the springy mattress. Soft sobs can be heard through the thick, metal door, distorting as they try to escape.
The noises land somewhere between pathetic and heart-wrenching once the distortion is removed. Sniffling whimpers and whole body sobs reach his hears the entire time she is in there.
When the door opens, he doesn’t move. His head does not turn to look at her. Instead he listens to how she squeezes between the wall and the bed, hands sliding against the wall for support in order to get high enough to avoid the bed entirely.
Once it sounds like she has sat down on her window seat, Loki looks to her again. The dark blue towel is still around her neck when her hands move to begin to braid her hair. Loki watches as she begins to section her hair.
Unlike back home where the braids were done so delicately and carefully, slowly to ensure each hair was perfect, her hands move quickly between the sections and loose strands, braiding from her hairline down faster than he has ever seen. His mother taught him and his brother to braid as braids are custom in anyone’s hair, but nothing as long and curly and impossible looking as hers.
“May I braid your hair?” Loki asks.
Ashira stops, brows furrowed as she turns to him. “Sorry, what did you ask?”
“I asked if I could braid you hair?”
“I-” she twiddles her fingers threaded through her hair around. “No. Sorry. I really don’t like people touching my hair. It’s a thing.”
“I get it.”
She turns back away from to look back out the window, hands working quickly to finish the braid.
Her fingers finish the last twist and a hair tie that appeared from absolutely nowhere latches around the end. She swears she knows no magic, but that looked pretty magic to Loki, of all people.
Arms wrap around her bent knees, she turns her eyes to the stars again.
It’s one thing to love looking at the night sky. Yet her gaze always seems to be a type of yearning he can’t quite seem to describe. A gaze that can be best interpreted as a face made of hope, guilt, forlorn, and a bit of skepticism.
Lonely.
She looks lonely.
A different kind of lonely than the kind he has felt and feels, but lonely all the same. For a long time, as he isn’t quite sure, she’s been physically lonely - separated from people who love and care for her. Emotionally lonely too. Never quite sure who to trust, constantly restless.
Being even slightly lonely is tiring. At least 20 years of it? It’s impressive she hasn’t entirely collapsed.
After a few more moments of silence, Loki speaks up with the only suggestion he has.
“Why don’t you come lay down next to me?”
Ashira looks at him, confused. “Next to you?”
“You’re not doing well and being at the very least beside another person can help. At least from what I remember. I did smash my head into the ground.”
I could use a hug too.
“Uh…” she sighs, shaking her head in almost disbelief. “Sure.”
Loki scoots to the far right of the bed when looking on the window to leave plenty of room for her. Ashira tentatively lies down on the side near the stairs, body immeasurably stiff. It’s as if she has been embalmed or something. Her body is so tense Loki feels tense beside her, as if he has been embalmed as well.
“Goodnight,” Loki says softly.
Ashira moves to lie on her side, looking away from Loki. “Yeah,” she practically grumbles, “night.”
—
In the morning, as per usual, Ashira wakes before him.
Some time in the night the pair went from simply lying beside each other, facing opposite directions, to facing each other, legs tucked between and on top of each other, her head on his chest.
Eyes not even open, the warmth of someone beside her combined with the closeness of their bodies leads her brain to years ago. It’s as if the past 23 years have vanished from her entirely and she is back in bed with Eros.
On instinct she snuggles closer to the clothed chest. Uncommon for an Aresian, not uncommon for Eros, who claimed she kept every room too cold for his liking.
She did keep it a little cold, she admits.
As her head pushes further into him, she notices something is wrong.
The left arm lazily strung out is leaner than Eros’. Far leaner, far longer.
Now that she thinks about it, the legs tangled with hers are too long for his, the chest a little too sculpted.
Her eyes fly open as she pushes back in fear.
A thump breaks the silence as she falls between the bed and the wall, body tucked in an uncomfortable V.
She’s not back home in her shared bed, sharing a rare late morning with Eros.
She’s in a ten models old ship with mismatched parts, lying in a bed that was never hers with someone she found a little less than seven months ago.
Despite reality crashing over her, the logic of the situation filing in, she feels so dirty. Something about lying with Loki in such a way sends spasms of panic through her muscles. Betrayal, something engrained in her to mean death, is what she feels like she has done. In some way, despite it being over two decades, she has somehow betrayed Eros.
Straight up betraying him alone is worse than the prospect of death.
Regardless of her newfound feelings, it still just feels so wrong to her.
To get away, she twists herself to crawl away from the bed and out of the uncomfortable folded position, towards her window seat, throwing it open. Hands wildly search through tiny cubes of clothing (if only Loki could see how she managed to fit absolutely all those clothes in a tiny space… the wonders of nanotech), she’s looking for one jacket in particular. Blue, like all regulation clothing, but a special blue jacket.
As her hands finally grab it, it expands fully to its correct size.
An engineer’s jacket. Softer than most other jackets but still as tough, it’s the staple piece for the engineers. 23 years on and still smells like him.
She closes her seat slowly and descends the stairs to go sit alone.
—
Waking up a good two hours later, Loki is significantly less confused than she was when he awakens.
She is gone, which he expected. Always waking up hours before him somehow.
He descends the stairs groggily. He actually slept well last night. His mother’s - no, not his mother’s - advice is never wrong.
It worked regardless of who told him.
Once reaching the bottom level, Loki’s sleepy brain picks up sniffling noises that are not terribly far. He first glances around the kitchen and other minimal space to see no sign of her. So he looks to the only other place where she could possibly be.
Loki finds her sobbing in the pilot’s seat, clutching a jacket he has never seen before tight to her chest. There is a name stitched on it, but it’s worn and definitely in a language he doesn’t know. While back on Asgard he would hide in the shadows and watch in silence to have information for later.
It feels wrong this time. It’s not interesting or cannot be used at a later date.
It’s just sad.
So he sits at the little table, opting to stare off into nothing for a while.
—
It had been at least two hours before she comes to talk to him. She walks in wearing the jacket she was previously crying in to and doesn’t even look him in the eye.
“We need to keep moving. This wasn’t the smartest planet for me to land on.”
She turns quickly around, heading immediately back to the pilot’s seat.
—
Now set up in the middle of a forest on a presumably empty planet, Loki grabs one of his many books to read.
He hasn’t read as much as he would like. Something about Ashira is just so intriguing that the stories in the pages no longer compare to real life. No matter what the plot, the setting, anything is, fantasizing about a different life isn’t in his interests any longer.
Imagining going to places far outside the nine realms is one thing. To visit them, to explore them and experience them is so much more exciting than any illusion he could conjure.
Pretending to be on some adventure in the unknown is one thing. Actually living it, traveling around with someone you just met who saved your life, the cliche of nearly every book ever, is something he could never describe in words and most authors have never been on such journey.
To read about loving someone but not realizing it until either the most inconvenient time or during some unrealistic confessional always seemed to fake. Norns, how could you just not realize it? Then it happened to him: not realizing, the quiet nighttime confessional and now the period of tension where, when he reads, he just rolls his eyes at the stupidity of the characters for being unsure when the signs are all there. Come on, how could two people in love he so oblivious?
Yet he still opens the book, one on some fantasy store written by a Midgardian of all people. Though different from most fantasy books he has read, it is no different in concept. Another story, written a different way.
Still can’t compare to how it feels to live one.
For an hour, the only noises are Ashira fixing some wiring within the control panel (which is mostly a soft buzz and hum with an occasional swear in her native tongue) and the night fauna of Essos? Asus? He can’t quite remember the name of the planet but it doesn’t matter in the grander scheme.
Loki pays no mind as Ashira returns to the kitchen area to put all of her tools back. He’s not as engrossed as he normally is, or as he’d like to be, but he is still more focused on his book than her loudly shoving a metal toolbox against the metal ground.
A handful of minutes later, Ashira steps onto the stairs. But she stops.
Guilt has been eating away at her over the past few days. While the truth isn’t something she is fond of handing out, if he is going to stay like he says he deserves to know.
He needs to know; to know why she cries over a jacket and avoids certain words, why she nearly exploded the ship and her skin sizzled nearly beyond repair.
It’s the least she can do.
So she turns on the step and goes back to the first level entirely.
“I haven’t been entirely honest with you,” Ashira meekly announces, hands hidden in her sweater and rubbing against her leggings.
Loki raises his left brow, eyes not moving from his book. “We’ve established that as occasional theme with each other.”
“No.” She steps closer to him, hands now rubbing together through her sweater in nervousness. “This isn’t a lie, it’s something I should have told you.”
Loki finally looks up from his book. “What is i-”
“I was supposed to be married.”
Record scratch, freeze frame. The classic 90s and early 00s Midgardian film technique is precisely what his brain does in this moment.
“That’s the incident that started it all. My wedding.”
His face falls. “Your… your wedding? I thought you said they didn’t have weddings on Ares.”
“I said they weren’t common. Contracts are binding on Ares, promises just as strong. One mistake and you are allowed to be killed for breaking a vow. Proof must be submitted, there are trials you have to go through...” her ramble trails off. “... they are so sacred.”
The final words come out softly, sadly too.
Loki leans forward, setting the book down on the table in front of him. “So... your wedding is when it happened?”
“There, in front of everyone. You found out you were a Frost Giant when one of them touched you?” Ashira pauses, pulling her arms up, tucking her hands into her armpits to almost hug herself. “Well I found out I could incinerate things during my wedding when I killed the one person I loved more than anything."
“So how did anyone else live?”
“They didn’t. It started with him. But then they tried to take me away and I killed more...” she trails off, eyes moving to look past Loki, mind wandering away. “It was just him at first though. I loved him more than anything and I killed him. I held his hands, I kissed him, and he died because I was too...” she hiccups due to suppressing tears. “...happy.”
Loki has no idea what to say. How do you respond to such sad and desperate words? To such an unfortunate event? Finding out what your horrible burdened is while fighting a monstrous race that is the same as you actually are is one thing. To kill a loved one entirely on accident, in an act of elation is another.
“I was too happy… Imagine the person you love dying because you were too happy.” She angrily scoffs, tears reddening her face. “Not because of some freak accident in an overly emotional moment, or because you were so happy someone wanted to take that away, but your happiness is truly what killed them.”
Loki finally speaks. “I couldn’t even imagine what they must of been like.”
A bitter chuckle suddenly fills the air. Ashira is grinding her teeth and crying.
“I wish that was the worst of it, but it wasn’t.”
“So what was?”
“In killing those officers trying to drag me away, even E - even my promised himself, I committed treason. To kill another Aresian without warrant isn’t just a crime, it’s the highest crime and I killed him and others in sight of every ranking officer, commander, general and their family. So not only was I having a mental breakdown, completely destroyed and confused, but I was locked in a cell until they decided what they were going to do with me. Alone. In the dark. They use sensory deprivation like no other species. You can’t even hear your own breath or heartbeat, there is no light whatsoever. Do you know what that does to a person? I couldn’t even hear myself cry.”
Loki leans back to try and process all he has heard. The anger, the sadness, the sheer agony in her voice overwhelms all the words she just confessed.
None of this is something he could even imagine previously.
It’s how he thought he felt after everything came to light months ago. Listening to her anguish, the quivering fear in her voice clicks something in his brain as he realizes that while he was justified, the sound of his cries and anguish were infantile compared to this.
“I knew I was going to die or stay down there until I did. I didn’t care. Someone had just turned to ashes in my hands. My parents didn’t want me to die and so an agreements was reached amongst the council. I was to be moved to Hala. They were going to do experiments on me there to see how I could do what I did but I could never return home. I didn’t know that part until later.”
She pick at a loose string in her sweater before picking up again.
“I was willing to go. I thought I was sick, infected.” Ashira scoffs at her own idiocy. “I didn’t know what experiments meant, I thought it just meant figuring out what was wrong with me. Not… not all that.”
Her eyes look back to Loki. They are a bloody red - so much so the black is practically hidden amongst the stained whites.
“Within just over a year I had gone from about to be married, to on death row, to thinking I was being healed from some unknown illness to being abused to being turned into a weapon to being sold to running away and having absolutely nothing. I feel sorry for you, Loki, I really do. I’m sorry they lied to you, I’m sorry your brother and father were assholes but until you’ve been starved in darkness after killing the love of your life followed by being beat to near death and shown off like an animal and sold like any other weapon, you can not come to know the pain I’ve felt.”
There are no words. At least none he can think of that wouldn’t accidentally hurt her.
Ashira opts on leaving the ship during his shocked silence, stepping out with trepidation in her steps, the sweater singeing at the edges.
Loki wants to follow, he wants to reach out to her to stop her. He chooses not to since it’s clear she wants some space.
—
Loki finds her in the morning.
She’s sat against the side of her ship, gaze mindlessly on the ground just beyond her outstretched legs. Her sweater is burned from the wrists to halfway up her bicep, dust of the sweater and a clear burn pattern of some form on her skin giving it away. Everything else seems to be untouched.
By the slouch of her shoulders, it’s clear she hasn’t slept.
“I do not presume to know what you went through.” Ashira shifts around to indicate she is hearing him, but still remains looking mindlessly away. “But I need to know: why did you pick me up and let me stay on? You could have left me there.”
“They were shooting at me.” Her head lolls back to stare at the sky. “If you had stayed on the ground you’d be dead.”
Loki sighs. That’s not what he meant, not entirely. “So why keep me on?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think you do.”
“Maybe I do.” Ashira tosses her head lazily to the side to look at him. “Maybe because I was lonely, maybe I just felt sorry. I don’t know, Loki. But you are here now with me and I’m in the middle of a depressive episode so I would like to be left alone.”
“I’m not going to leave you alone.” Loki sits down beside her. “You shouldn’t be alone.”
Ashira turns away from him. “I’ll kill you.”
“I don’t think you will.”
“Maybe I won’t.”
—
A good five hours pass by of them just sitting in silence, leaned against the side of the ship. Ashira’s eyes switch rapidly between emotional and emotionless while as Loki’s just remain as they always look: calm, mischievous, and focused.
Loki doesn’t mind silence. He loves it. He doesn’t not like the silence he is currently experiencing. Especially when it is nearing night on a planet that has only had sun for about six hours.
“Tell me about him,” Loki demands gently.
“Why do you always want to know things about me?”
“Well you know a great deal about me, it is only fair.”
Ashira huffs. Quickly the facade of annoyance fades and only one of contentment is left.
“His name was Eros.” Loki definitely remembers hearing that one from Greek mythology, God of Love or something like that. “His family was a pretty standard Aresian family, middle ranks though, so a bit higher in the chain. He focused on engineering which is how I came to meet him. Most of the time, the, uh, lower the rank the less interaction with the royal family and other highly ranked indivduals, but he was so damn good at what he did that Selene and I visited him often.”
Ashira turns her head away again. Loki still stares at her.
“I still remember the first time I saw him. It wasn’t love at first sight, not even close. But his hair was just such a brilliant white with a thin silver stripe along the left side. It’s unusual to have white hair. Black happens sometimes, but white? Insanely rare. Add on that he was on the shorter end, which was much appreciated by also short stature.” She hums. “His eyes were this bizarre silver-blue. So much of him was just different.”
Loki shoves the pang of jealous eating at his heart aside. “If it wasn’t love at first sight then what was it?”
“More like a friends to lovers. It was slow, but we fell in love over our passion for creation and technology. Together we changed the flight systems, all of the ships, more than half the weapons and armory. We did a lot, together. We were going to change more than that, we were going to change the entire planet, fix rules that were arbitrary and stupid, restructure the government, adjust it so ranks weren’t so binding.”
“So you were always on the verge of catastrophe?”
“Always. He was much more sound that me, less guns blazing. Which was expected, I mean, he was pathetic at fighting, easily the clumsiest at person I’ve ever met, both of which are the exact opposite of what Aresians are trained to be. He used so much logic that it sometimes made me frustrated because sometimes logic isn’t the answer. We balanced each other out well.”
Internally, Loki laments. “He sounds amazing.”
Ashira shakes her head with a smile “He was an idiot. Insanely intelligent but a complete idiot...” Ashira allows a bitter chuckle to pass her lips. “The thing is, it’s been over twenty years. I don’t miss him the way I used to, I don’t feel as sad as I used to when I think about him. I know it’s not the time that’s worn it out, twenty years is nothing. I’ve been alive over four times as long as you have.” Her hands violently rub her face, as if to wake herself up. “But after everything, after running and hiding and all of it, the love I felt just feels so small.” Ashira pauses, brain searching for the right explanation. “I loved him so, so much but if I had gone to him now, not after all of this specifically but after experiencing much more, much more mental and physical strain, I think I would have loved him differently, appreciated him in ways I could never before.”
“I think I know what you mean.” Loki prays he does not regret his words. “I left Asgard only a few times before I fell. Went to Earth many times, Vanaheim all the time. But after flying through the galaxies with you, I understand Asgard differently. I see it on an entirely different plane of existence than I did before.”
“Yeah…” Ashira smiles. “Sorta like that.”
“Who knows? Maybe one day you’ll find another who you can appreciate and love in a way you never could before.”
Ashira glances over to Loki. She isn’t sure if its the reflection of the stars in his eyes, the way they dance with each sparkle, or if maybe it’s the shine of his hair in the moonlight, but something makes him look just so beautiful, so fantastical.
I won’t one day, she admits to herself. Because one day has already come.
She decides to lean against his shoulder, turning her own head to the sky again. Loki now looks down at her face. Every time he does he notices something new about her: this time it’s the silver freckles dusted very lightly across her face and the skin that’s exposed. It likely reacts more to the moonlight than sun and he is rarely close enough to see her face in the moonlight to possibly notice.
He hopes to discover every minuscule detail of her one day.
But he’ll settle for this, for now.
----
Next
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