An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Sigyn has been forgotten by Marvel Comics, the MCU, and the Loki TV series, but not by me.
Unbeta’d, so don’t blame @caffiend-queen for my mistakes
Classic Loki arrives in the Void
When the TVA came for him Loki laughed.
What other response could be possible?
Rather than resisting, he held out his hands with the graceful resignation of a one who’d been shackled with frequency and had long since learned to not mind bearing the weight, and laughed.
He laughed as they stripped him of his raiment. He laughed as they made certain he was a creature made of meat and spirit rather than a robot. He laughed as they offered him reams of paper filled with all he had ever said, including countless pages of his solitary soliquising, audienceless rants, and oft mad mutterings of the thousands of years he’d lived with only his magic and regrets for company.
In their one-sided court he laughed hardest of all.
Now, standing on a grey-grassed verge where a slight hill rolled down into a shattered ruin that looked like it might have once been a Midgardian city, Loki’s laughter faltered and died as he heard the screams echoing from those broken buildings.
Within those ruins there roiled and writhed and roared a mass of smoke and cloud that moved with intent and hunger, leaving nothingness and silence where it had passed.
“You needn’t fear for the moment. Alioth would normally pursue you like a shark scenting blood, had that poor, benighted place not appeared just before your arrival. That is a feast he will linger over, glutton that he is.”
Spinning on his heel, raising hands alit with green fire, Loki was prepared for an attack. Even eons alone had not dulled those reflexes.
A woman stood behind him, unarmed, with the smallest, weariest smile and tired amber-brown eyes. The robes she wore were silk and flowing, badly torn at the hem and cuffs, her chestnut hair was dressed in an elaborate knot of braids, and though she held herself with dignity there was dirt beneath her nails and streaked on her bare calves.
“You’re Asgardian,” he said, taken aback. Then, remembering his manners, he offered a bow that was less elegant than it might have been due to the terrible costume the TVA had forced onto him. “Your pardon.”
With a flare of magic he was back in his own garments and completing his bow, “Prince Loki, my lady.”
“I know. I knew you, long ago. I knew you would be here. Eventually,” she said, not offering her name in return. “I waited, despite the fear, and the boredom, and the lack of any hope, I waited so I might see you one last time.”
Frowning, he righted himself. Her face was unfamiliar, but he was so very old now, and his life on Asgard was long, long ago.
She gave a small, snorting laugh at herself, “ Pitiful, I know. But in the Void one will hold onto any reason, however faint or sad or pitiable, to continue on.”
Loki frowned. Did he know this woman? Her regular features were not especially beautiful, though not not beautiful, her voice was musical, and based on the ornate arm-ring high on her long arm, and the golden belt that hung from her hips, she was a noblewoman. Though there had been so many minor goddesses in his father’s court that it was all but impossible to know them all.
She was still speaking, moving with great slowness towards him, as if he were a steed easily spooked or a canine of uncertain temperament. Each of which had some truth.
“So many of you have come here. Loki after Loki. The youngest a sad child, the eldest a Necrogod so ancient that they would see you as an infant. Some with your face, others nothing like. Every universe in the Sacred Timeline creating you over and over, and the TVA unknown, haunting you, watching your step to ensure-”
“To ensure I play the villain,” he finished for her, uncomfortable under her steady gaze, filled with an unknowable emotion. “Clearly you know me, madame, sadly I cannot seem to recall-”
Now she interrupted him. “Oh, that is no surprise. I knew you in your father’s court, from when we were but children. My mother was one of your mother’s ladies, and then later I was as well. I was not very noticeable, I am afraid. Not compared to your brother and his boisterous companions who you played and then later meddled with. I saw though. I saw and I laughed. When you hypnotized Thor to believe he was a boulder…”
Loki had forgotten that trick, it was most amusing.
She hid her mouth behind her sleeve and laughed until she snorted. A most wonderful sound.
“I wanted so often to tell you how clever you were, how much I laughed in private at the memory of them, how I thought your japes and trickery were magnificent, but you were always speeding away, to lessons, to play, to fight, to mischief, and I was forever called back to hold a goblet, or fetch a potion, or deliver a missive. Or to merely wait until I was wanted.”
“Ah,” he said, “the life of a lady-in-waiting.”
“Yes,” she nodded, now very close to him, but not too close. It had been long and long again since he’d been near another living creature, other than those TVA louts, and Loki could feel her warmth and smell the salt of her skin. “And then, later, there was the Enchantress, and her pretty sister, and so many others between us. We did dance, once.”
She said that slowly, again, with that tired smile, yet with a certain dreaminess of her eyes.
“At a feast in honor of your and Thor’s great victory against the Griii. The Queen charged me to sing. Afterwards, you asked me to dance.”
Loki remembered the victory, and the feast, of course.
The great hall of the All-Father was filled with long tables and golden light. There was the smell of honey, fresh roasted boar, and candlewax, the pop of a grape between his teeth, the boasts of the warriors and Odin’s gifts to his warriors.
So much wine. His father looking at him with pride for once, their mother only grateful that her sons were home and well.
A voice. Sweeter than a mouthful of mead, or the kiss of a pretty boy. And she sang -
“Men trærne danser og fossene stanser
Når hun synger, hun synger “kom hjem”
Men trærne danser og fossene stanser… ”
It was his favorite song. A song to weep over lost love. Yet a song to drink and roister to as well.
The girl who sang it… who’s face he vaguely knew, always at his mother’s elbow, downcast eyes surprisingly merry and with a smile of mischief ever seeking to alight on her red lips.
He could recall the feel of her waist under his hand as he spun her outward, clapping and then spinning in, her long, dark hair smelling of rosemary and clean sweat trailing like silk over his cheek and throat. And at the end of the dance he thought to steal a kiss, but before he could Amora had taken his hand, pulling him, laughing, to dance with her as well.
“…then, when things were darker-”
She stopped and then started to walk down the hill, towards the ravenous Alioth.
Despite his better instincts, which was all of them, Loki followed, thinking he might teleport them both away should the moment arise.
“-and you were so sad. So angry.”
True, and true. Though he rather thought he’d done a better job of hiding it.
“I saw you turn your anger outwards and your sadness in and your tricks grew crueler and crueler still, and I thought I might say something to you. That I too saw the All-father’s clear preference for Thor that wounded you so, yet Frigga loved you dear, and so did- Never mind. Again, I did nothing. Who was I to offer comfort a prince? I did not speak, and you were farther and farther away, and then Thor was banished and something was so terribly wrong with you.”
I was a Frost Giant, he thought to himself. The son of Asgard’s bitterest enemy. A cuckoo in Frigga’s nest.
At the time it had ripped his heart out to know that he was not the child of Odin and Frigga, the brother of Thor, a Prince of Asgard. Only years of peace had made him understand that he was their child, Thor’s brother, and himself, and whatever else chose to be, and where he was born and to whom mattered not at all.
And that being a Jotun was no better or worse than being any other creature. As a shapeshifter he was in the best position of all to know that particular truth.
“The night you were named Regent King, after Frigga handed you Gungnir , I saw you standing outside the All-Father’s chamber, staring at nothing, looking so troubled and lost. You were so alone and I was finally going to speak. There was no one around to pull you away or send me on a task, and I knew that at that moment the last thing you would want was to be interrupted in your thoughts yet I wanted to say…”
She stopped walking, her shoulders shifting as if she were stopping herself from turning back toward him.
Loki noticed beyond them that the great beast had all but finished devouring the city.
The screams had all quieted.
Why could he not remember this woman’s name?
“I have been pruned nearly as often as you have, you know? No,” she laughed, “how could you? I have been pruned and pruned and pruned and always, in every time, in every universe, for the same thing. For wanting to speak to you. For wanting to say to you over and over that which I wanted to say to you that day. That I saw you. That I saw your wit and your sorrow. That I knew you and that I was unafraid of whatever secret you kept, whatever darkness was in you, be it real or only your fears. That I loved you-”
Loki felt as if a great weight had lifted from his spirit and settled itself in his heart instead.
“ -and that I wanted nothing from you, save that you be well and that you could find a corner of peace and contentment for yourself. I tried to tell you that day, I stepped forward. One step towards you, two steps, and then the TVA came and took me. They took me and my Variants, male, female, both, neither, other, they pruned each and every me in every universe, in every iteration, all for wanting to give you a kind word.”
Loki turned her to face him, “My lady-”
“They finally eliminated us entirely. I was the last and the judge told me we had ended up being too much trouble to allow to continue on. We were too unruly, and had no greater role in the Sacred Timeline - unlike you and your Variants we were unimportant so the Time Keepers decided to remove us from Asgard. To move our existence to an unimportant little planet in another Realm where we would never meet, where I could never interfere with your Glorious Purpose.” She laughed again at that, “The Glorious Purpose of playing evil nursemaid to reluctant heroes. Horrible.”
Then she kissed him. His first kiss in thousands upon thousands of years and he stood there like a statue, overwhelmed by the soft touch of her lip on his, the weight of her hand resting on his arm. Every inch of his skin longed for more, to pull her close and to kiss her back and to find a place where they might lay together, naked and entwined, wanting nothing more than that sweetness.
Yet he was immobile, even as she stepped away. “You should go now, toward that copse of dead trees. Find the court of your younger self and look after him. The poor mite has been here forever and needs a friend. I will give you a lead on him, please waste it not.”
Then, with a wave of magic, she opened a portal.
His mother’s magic. She must have been very fond of this woman to teach it to her.
“I know that Asgard is gone now,” she said, “so perhaps it makes me a bit petty that it still saddens me that even if it should float in its serenity no one there would even remember I had ever been there at all.”
He remembered her. Finally.
They had, when so very little, sat near each other, with Thor and the other children of the Court, as Frigga made a show of dancing lights and shadow to entertain them. The brown haired girl had captured a butterfly made of green and golden light, and giggled as it tickled her fingers and then broke into a dozen fireflies to dance about her head like a coronet.
Stepping through the portal, which quickly snapped closed behind her.
At the moment that portal closed another opened, far down the hill, at the edge of the now empty field of dying grasses, and he could see her tiny, tiny figure appear before the snaking mass of Alioth that moved like a spear of smoke.
Raising her hands, hundreds of tiny lights, which Loki was certain were shaped like butterflies, rose into the air to be thoughtlessly devoured by the monster, her laugh staining the air for a trace of a moment after the rest of her was gone.
“Sigyn…” he whispered, finally remembering.
She looked back to him, despite the impossibility that he should have heard him, and smiled.
And then she was eaten and Loki ran.
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