Chapter Text
Sif's glaive is halfway out of its sheath before she recognizes the person who just appeared out of thin air right in front of her. "Loki, what the – I mean," she hastily corrects herself, her cheeks reddening, "I beg your pardon, my king, you startled me."
"Yes, that was rather the idea," Loki replies mildly, with just the slightest hint of amusement; it has been far too long since he's had the chance to use his skywalking abilities to such an effect. "I commend your vigilance, Lady Sif. Walk with me."
He gestures for the Einherjar under Sif's command, who have fallen to their knees at his appearance, to get up (now that he no longer has to play the role of a power-crazy conqueror, he finds that he isn't actually all that keen on people kneeling before him) and beckons Sif to follow him into the center of the Observatory where they're out of earshot. She obeys without hesitation, although her slight frown indicates that she has an inkling what this might be about.
"Anything unusual to report?"
She shakes her head. "Not as far as Asgard's safety is concerned, my king. The Convergence will reach its peak tonight, although we who don't have the gatekeeper's Sight can see little of it."
"I'm aware." A decade ago, a cosmic event of that scale would have been the only thing on Loki's mind; as it is, he hasn't had time to take more than a brief look at the approaching alignment of the worlds from Hliðskjálf's seat. "You know I'm not here to talk about the state of the cosmos, though."
Sif raises her chin ever so slightly. "I'm next, then?"
Loki does his best to keep his expression under control; he wants to keep her uncertain of her fate for as long as possible. "Your shield-brothers were quick to warn you, it seems."
She shrugs. "Word travels fast, my king."
"So you heard about Heimdall, too?"
"I did." She hesitates, as if she had realized in the nick of time that she'd been about to say something that would cross a line.
"Go ahead." Loki isn't here for a show of subservience, after all. "I can see there's something you want to say to me, Lady Sif; you have my permission to speak freely."
She takes a deep breath, clearly steeling herself. "You could have done far worse. To all of them."
"I could have." Loki keeps his voice even. "I assume you expected me to."
Sif is silent for a moment, although her eyes never leave his. "We were friends once, weren't we?"
Loki holds her gaze; his tone is almost gentle when he replies, "No, we really weren't."
She looks away for the first time and chews her lower lip for a while before she admits, "You're probably right."
Loki's eyebrows shoot up. "And yet Thor was always utterly convinced you were my friends just as much as you were his."
He doesn't miss her minuscule flinch at the mention of Thor's name, and for a heartbeat, he finds himself envying her – for being able to admit to her grief, and for understanding what it is she's feeling in the first place. There are moments when he still wishes he could grieve for Thor, but the part of him that never truly left Sanctuary knows only too well that he can't afford to loosen his tight grip on his emotions.
"Thor was... convinced of a lot of things." Before Loki can ask her to elaborate on that peculiar statement, she visibly pulls herself together. "If we are still speaking freely, my king – why am I still here at my post when Heimdall is dismissed and Fandral and Volstagg are playing errand boys for General Tyr?"
"There's the Sif I remember." This time, Loki doesn't try to hide his amusement. "The honest answer is that I'm not sure yet what I should do with you."
She shoots him a glare. "Still undecided how to best punish me?"
"Do you think you deserve punishment?" Loki deadpans, honestly curious how she's going to react.
She seems taken aback. "I trusted you even less than Fandral and Volstagg did!"
"I'm well aware." The smile Loki gives her is dagger-sharp. "It was probably the reason why you always took me seriously, which is an honor neither my – neither Thor nor the Warriors Three ever granted me."
Betray him and I'll kill you. For a split second, he feels the ghostly prickle of Sif's glaive at his throat, but the impression is gone before he can react. What in the Nine is the matter with him these past days? He and Sif have butted heads for as long as he can remember, but she has never physically attacked him outside of the training grounds.
Thankfully, Sif misses Loki's short slip; she looks like she, too, is struggling for composure. "I still turned traitor during your regency."
Isn't that interesting. Loki wholeheartedly agrees with her, of course, but he would never have expected anyone in Asgard to acknowledge that Sif, the Three and Heimdall had all committed high treason against their rightful ruler during Thor's banishment. "I suppose you considered your actions well justified."
"I did." Sif bites her lip again, but then presses on. "I learned only later, after... when we believed you dead that you had not usurped the throne. You sent the Destroyer after Thor, but that was after we went to bring him back against your orders. What you did – I cannot think of any justification for attacking your brother, but it doesn't change the fact that we betrayed you first."
In the face of such a startling admission (from Sif of all people!), Loki finds himself suddenly overcome by the mad urge to be completely candid with her for once, if only to see what she will do with the truth. He's still deliberating whether he should go with this reckless impulse when Sif decides for him.
"There's one thing I've wanted to ask you since the day Thor was supposed to be crowned." She doesn't sound hesitant anymore; obviously she, too, has decided to throw caution to the wind.
"You want to ask me if I let the Jötnar into the Vault?"
Sif holds his gaze without flinching. "I do, my king."
"You're bold, Lady Sif."
His cool tone actually seems to bolster her courage. "I suppose I have little to lose at this point."
That goes for both of us, Loki can't help thinking. Still, now that the dice are rolling, he figures it's too late to back out of the game, and if he's honest with himself, he wouldn't want to even if he could. "You're not wrong about that. Yes, as a matter of fact, I did show the Jötnar the way into the Vault and hid them from Heimdall's Sight. Happy now?"
If Sif is surprised by his careless confession, she doesn't show it. "Can I ask why?"
Loki shrugs. "Isn't it obvious? I was jealous of Thor, I wanted the throne for myself, I've always been a liar and a coward..." and a monster, he almost adds and catches himself just in time, "...and a stain on the Allfather's name, so I'm sure everyone expected me to betray Asgard at the first opportunity."
He was going for cynical and realizes too late that his answer came out sounding bitter instead. He should probably be embarrassed, but he finds that he can't bring himself to care.
For once, he isn't able to read Sif's expression. "My king, if I may – I wasn't asking about everyone's expectations, I was asking you why you did what you did, and I don't think you've answered me yet."
Loki narrows his eyes; this is beginning to get annoying. "Are we playing at honesty, Lady Sif? Very well, then: yes, I was jealous of Thor after spending my entire life in his shadow, but if it had just been about disturbing his day of triumph, I could have thought of twenty different idiotic pranks that would have ruined his coronation without forcing me to risk contacting Asgard's greatest enemy. I've always known he would be king someday, after all, and it's not like I wanted the throne – I never expected the Allfather to banish Thor for his stupidity, let alone that I would end up on the throne in the middle of the whole mess."
Make your father proud, my king. Norns, what a fool he had been to believe it would ever be possible!
"I know that now." Sif's unexpected admission cuts into the memory like a knife into a festering sore. "I saw your face when I hailed you as my king after you had led us to victory against the Svartálfar. The man I saw before me... he didn't look like a man who wished for the throne. He... if it isn't too bold of me to say so, my king, you still don't look like you do."
That is far more insightful than Loki is comfortable with, and it causes his temper to flare. "You want truth, Sif? Then here's your truth: I let the Jötnar into the Vault because Thor wasn't fit to rule, didn't even understand what ruling means, and I needed the Allfather to see it for himself because he dismissed my warnings as nothing more than a second son's petty jealousy. If Thor had been king when the Allfather fell into the Odinsleep, Asgard would have been at war within the month – a real war, not the glorified children's games that were Thor's fabled quests and campaigns. He would have rushed headlong into every fight no matter the consequences, and nobody would have been able to stop him."
"You're right." Sif's voice is trembling ever so slightly, but that doesn't change the fact that she actually agreed with what he said, and it leaves Loki momentarily speechless. "Believe me, I wish it weren't so, but it's exactly what he did when the Svartálfar first attacked, and he paid for it with his life."
She inhales deeply and presses on even though it's obvious that she has to force herself to speak. "When they hit the Observatory... I tried to get him to wait for reinforcements, but he insisted that we needed to come to Heimdall's aid immediately, that we couldn't allow the Dark Elves to think even for a moment that they could attack Asgard with impunity... you know there was no holding him back when he was in such a temper." She tries to smile, although it comes out wobbly. "The only one who could ever do that was you."
Loki has to look away; there's a crushing weight on his chest that makes it hard to breathe. He doesn't want to remember, doesn't want to think of a hundred moments like the one Sif described, when he frantically tried to come up with ways to convince his fool of a brother not to get himself killed because as much as he often resented him, the idea of Thor no longer being a constant in his life was too impossible to consider. Sometimes I'm envious, but never doubt that I love you...
That was, of course, before he turned out to be one of the monsters Thor had sworn to slay, before he learned that you're my brother and my friend was the biggest lie he'd ever told without meaning to, before the first words his alleged brother said to him after a year of believing him dead were 'Where's the Tesseract?' and the last thing Thor ever did to him was to muzzle him like a dog.
Loki clings to his anger with all his might because he needs to remain angry, needs to let the fury silence every other sentiment that he can't afford, that would throw him headfirst into the gaping abyss he can always sense under his feet. Stop it, stop remembering, stop feeling if you don't want to go mad with it –
"Did you ever know how jealous I was of you?" Sif's question takes him so utterly by surprise that it manages to pull him out of his frantic thoughts. "I always knew that you held a place in his heart I could never reach, and I resented you for it, but after you were gone – he was no longer the man I had known for centuries. I always thought that my best friend and shield-brother was Thor Odinson, but it turned out that... that it had been Loki's brother, and I never truly got him back after he lost you."
Loki closes his eyes and takes a deep breath in a desperate attempt to steady himself. There are a hundred answers he could give her, but every one of them would cut much too close to truths he is never going to reveal to her.
"You don't know anything about me, Sif."
"I'm beginning to realize that." Sif has apparently found her composure again. "I don't know where you were after your fall from the Bifröst, or what happened on Midgard between you and Thor because he refused to talk about it after his return. I know this for a fact, though: you came back during the hour of Asgard's greatest need, you saved our queen, you avenged our king and our prince and fought by our side until our enemies were defeated." She glances at the spear in Loki's hand when she continues. "I saw with my own eyes how Gungnir came to you when you called it, and I knew then that you were Asgard's rightful king, that I owe you my fealty and my loyalty, and you will have it no matter what you choose to do with me."
At Loki's stunned silence, she adds in a tone that sounds downright defiant, "I will gladly swear it upon my honor."
"That is not the oath I'm asking of you, Lady Sif." Something that was no more than a vague idea at the back of Loki's mind when he went to talk to her has now become a firm conviction. "I have a task in mind for you that would require all your dedication and loyalty for centuries to come."
Sif raises her chin and squares her shoulders; a warrior's stance. "Name it, my king, I will fulfill it."
"Asgard needs a new gatekeeper."
Sif's eyes widen, and then narrow. "You would put Asgard's safety into my hands? Since we have established that we were never friends – is that your way of keeping your enemies closer?"
Loki doesn't take the bait. "Are you my enemy?"
Sif holds his gaze for a moment before shaking her head. "I never liked you very much, Loki, but I was never your enemy."
Loki has to suppress a laugh; the utter disrespect of her blunt statement is a more convincing reassurance that he chose well than any solemn oath could be. "The first part of that sentence is what makes me inclined to believe the second one."
Sif actually grins at that, although she sobers quickly. "I don't have Heimdall's Sight."
"Not yet." Loki lifts Gungnir in both hands and lets the power of the ancient spell flow through his fingers until the spear is glowing golden with it. "It will be yours as soon as I have your oath to watch over Asgard, to dedicate your life to her safety, and to faithfully serve her king to the best of your ability. Do you swear, Lady Sif?"
At his nod, Sif kneels and places her hand on the spear. "I swear it to you, Loki, King of Asgard, on Gungnir and on my honor."
The soft golden glow starts flowing along her arm as she speaks; by the time her oath is finished, it has enveloped her entire body. Sif gasps and lets go of the spear to cover her eyes with her hands; when she lowers them again, the glow around her fades, but her irises are now gleaming with it in the brilliant gaze of Asgard's gatekeeper.
Loki can't help feeling a little envious when Sif, unsteady as if she were in a daze, clambers to her feet and walks to the edge of the Observatory where she stares out into the shining swirl of the cosmos with huge, bright eyes. The king's Sight from Hliðskjálf is said to be equal to that of the gatekeeper, but he has no idea how it feels to See with your own eyes, to have the realms laid out before your gaze wherever you go.
He grants Sif a moment to get a taste of her new ability – it will be some time until she's used to it, and probably even longer until she can truly master it. At long last, she seems to remember that she's still in the presence of her king and turns back towards him.
Loki allows himself a tiny smirk when her eyebrows draw together as soon as she looks at him. "Is anything wrong, Gatekeeper?"
"My king, I have no words to describe what I'm seeing, but... I can't see you. I mean – I can, you're standing right here, but I can't See you."
"Your predecessor found that it vexed him greatly." Loki doesn't try to keep the glee out of his voice. "Consider it a chance to test your newfound feelings of faith and loyalty towards me, Lady Sif, because you will never be able to See me unless I choose to permit it."
"That is not altogether surprising," Sif answers dryly, but then adds in a more serious tone, "As Asgard will hold you to the oath you swore at your coronation, you can hold me to mine."
Loki's answering nod is solemn enough for her to take it as mockery if she wants to. "I intend to. Asgard will have to face dangerous foes, Gatekeeper, so I need you to become proficient in the use of your Sight as quickly as you can."
Sif frowns. "What foes, my king?"
Loki hesitates; he should have expected the question, but he finds that he's not prepared to answer it. He isn't going to speak to her of the Titan, of course, but keeping entirely quiet about the danger that will reach them eventually might prove disastrous as well.
"I have no clear answer for you at this point," he finally admits, although he doesn't add that the reason is reluctance and not ignorance. "Do not just watch the Nine, but turn your gaze to the worlds beyond Yggdrasil as well – learn to look far and wide, and to pierce the darkness of the Void between the realms to see if anything is stirring there."
Sif glances at him sidelong, but Loki is careful to keep his face blank. There is no way he is going to discuss his fall into the Void with her; he can see she wants to ask him about it, but even if he could find the words to describe what utter nothingness means, he would never speak them because his nightmares are bad enough as they are.
She must interpret his expression correctly, because she merely nods. "I will, my king."
+++
It is past midnight when Loki quietly gets out of bed, leaves a double in his place in case a nosy servant decides to check on him, and slips out of his quarters under the cover of an invisibility spell.
It is no small relief to move through the palace without a gaggle of courtiers dogging his steps; it is only now that he truly realizes how little notice everyone took of him back when he was nothing more than Asgard's second prince. Sneaking around entirely unseen, however, is downright comforting in its familiarity.
There are a few guards stationed outside the throne room, but the vast hall itself is empty, allowing Loki to drop the cloaking spell when he sits down on the throne. He's facing a task that will need his full concentration, and he doesn't want to risk the diversion of maintaining an unnecessary working.
The moment he becomes visible, the two feathery pests that are Odin's ravens are perching on the backrest behind him as if they belonged there. Loki does his best to ignore them, although he can't help noticing that the birds appear... uneasy. Then again, they are magical constructs; perhaps they, too, can feel the approaching Convergence.
He has put this off far too long, but today, his own words to Sif reminded him that he, too, needs to learn how to truly master a new power he now wields, that he can ill afford not to utilize such an invaluable tool to its full capacity. There's never a moment of peace for him while he's on the throne during the day, so he will have to make use of the dead of night as often as he can – another thing that feels entirely familiar to him, although back then it was sufficient to lock himself into his rooms.
For once allowing himself to lounge in the uncomfortable seat with no regard for appearances, Loki closes his eyes, empties his mind and lets Hliðskjálf's Sight take him.
The peak of the Convergence is breathtaking in its majestic beauty, and Loki lets himself get lost in the sight that even most Aesir only get to observe once in their lifetime. It is incredibly liberating to forget about Asgard, about his plans and duties, even about the looming danger of Thanos for a little while and become nothing but an insignificant witness to the overwhelming spectacle of the perfect alignments of worlds. The entire cosmos is spread out before the throne's Sight; he doesn't try to focus on details, but to take it all in to the best of his abilities, to widen his mind as much as possible in order to grasp the magnitude of the display before him as far as the limits of his body allow it.
It is over far too quickly. Loki feels a pang of loss when he reluctantly pulls back, but he knows that he cannot afford more than a little while of blissfully losing himself in the moment. A part of him still feels like he's sleepwalking through an imaginary reality that will dissolve into nothingness as soon as he comes back to himself, but he's starting to accept that no matter how wrong everything still feels, it is the only reality available to him. He can feel the Aether stirring at the back of his mind; it still hasn't fully settled in Loki's dimensional pocket, far less content with its narrow confinement than the Tesseract, and the jarring reminder of another power he still hasn't mastered proves surprisingly grounding. He is Loki, King of Asgard, and he needs to prepare himself and his realm, the entirety of the Nine for a fight unlike any other they have faced in millennia.
The ravens are cawing at his back, and for the first time in his life, Loki feels like he can almost understand what they're saying. There are no words, just... fragments of images in his mind, but it seems that there's another thing he might be starting to learn tonight.
Dismissing the ravens for the moment, Loki focuses on the Sight again. He knows that he must never try looking for Thanos directly, and it's not just because he isn't sure he'd be able to face the Titan again even when he's worlds away. He's only too aware that the imprint of Thanos' touch in his mind might actually manage to guide his Sight, but a connection like that, however unwillingly formed, always goes both ways, always opens a window that can be looked through from either side. Finding the Titan that way would be akin to lighting a beacon that would lead Thanos straight to him and the Infinity Gems in his possession.
Instead, Loki carefully extends his mind towards the two Gems in his pocket universe and tries to channel as much of their pull as he dares so they will guide him to their siblings. Preventing the Titan from acquiring the Stones is more important than anything else, but in order to do that, Loki needs to locate them first. He isn't conceited enough to even consider collecting them all in one place – no being of flesh and blood could hope to control the combined power of all the Infinity Stones, so it's best to leave them scattered far and wide as long as they are well out of Thanos' grasp.
He starts with the Mind Stone because he already knows where it is, and he has surprisingly little trouble locating it although he is deeply grateful he doesn't actually have to come near the accursed thing again. It doesn't take him long to confirm that the mortals are still squabbling over it, but since Midgard is centuries away from developing the ability to tap into its full power, Loki reckons the Stone is safe enough in that primitive backwater of a realm for the time being.
He's about to start searching for the other Gems when a piercing caw from Munin distracts him and pulls his Sight... sideways, for want of a better term. Irritated, Loki tries to return to his original goal, but then Hugin, too, starts cawing in his ear until Loki unwittingly focuses on the images forming before him.
His eyes narrow as he struggles in vain to make sense of what he's seeing. The ravens are getting louder, their cawing becoming more and more urgent, as if they were trying to tell him something that he can't quite understand. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees a black shadow darting forward, and before he can react, he feels the peck of a razor-sharp beak at his temple. The sting of pain sends a picture flashing through his mind, clear and jagged like a shard of colored glass.
Green fire and black smoke and a pale, sneering face with poison-colored eyes –
Loki leaps from his seat and flings himself into the space between worlds before he has time to think about what he's doing.
+++
Frigga startles awake when all the lights in the room flare up at once. Loki is standing beside her bed, out of breath as if he had been running although he must have skywalked since the spell locking her door is still undisturbed. Not even during the first days of his youth would he have committed such an outrageous breach of protocol, but a single glance at him makes her forget entirely about protocols and propriety.
She hasn't seen that look on his face since... since the day he learned of his true origins, and Frigga feels herself go cold with sudden dread because she cannot imagine what could possibly have happened that would manage to upset him as much as that.
Foregoing all queenly dignity, she jumps out of bed without even bothering to put on a robe over her nightgown. "Loki, my son, what is it?"
He flinches back when she reaches for him; he's still breathing hard, and his expression is a mix of shock and fury when he hisses, "Are you still not done lying to me, Allmother? Were you ever going to admit that you knew Odin would bury me alive because he had done it before with your firstborn?"
When Frigga can only stare at him, utterly dumbfounded, he adds in a voice shaking with rage, "Tell me, did Thor ever learn that he has a sister?"