Muffins - Loki & Ylva alternate universe stories

Bound

Author's note: Teenage Loki and Ylva, both living on Asgard. As always, top art by Nanihoo. Enjoy!!

***

It was meant to be humiliating, making Loki watch the party in shackles. Yet she couldn't find it shameful; he didn't seem to think so either. He was watching the gathered people with disdain, the flickering light of the fire not even reaching his outstretched legs because he was that far away. His face was in the shadows, though she could see the hard glimmer in his eyes. He was angry, his pride was probably hurt, yet he still managed to look like he had planned to be put in the corner like that.

Ylva didn't really know why the youngest son was bound this time. Maybe he'd stabbed Thor, or had made his older brother believe he was a snake again. Loki was always scheming to thwart the plans of Thor and his friends. If they didn't include him, he made sure to include himself somehow. Ylva was sure he would deny her theory fiercely, another reason to make her think she was right.

She thought a lot about Loki, probably way more than he would ever think about her. He knew who she was, of course, being Fandral's younger sister she was about the same age as Loki and they more or less hung out with the same people. She also saw him in the library often, when the lessons were done and they had to do homework. Thor always snuck out and went to the training grounds; Loki didn't, though he didn't really do his homework either. He was always reading, trying to go deeper or further or beyond the stuff their teachers talked about. Of course he had private lessons, he wasn't in her class; he was a prince after all and she was definitely not royal. Yet she didn't think his lessons differed much from hers, she had seen him with the same textbooks she had.

She saw a lot. She saw how he licked his finger before turning a page. She saw how he sometimes frowned when he was reading, or how he bit his lip when he came upon something particularly complicated. She also saw how the corners of his mouth turned up when he read something he liked, or the way his eyes lit up when he got excited over a book. She also saw how the young prince - and this was her favourite thing to watch - rested his head in his hand when he got a little tired, his fingers woven in between his dark hair. Tired Loki who enjoyed the book he was reading, that was her favourite image of him.

He probably barely had any image of her in his head. When someone mentioned her to him he most likely thought of some generic girl, not specifically of a girl with strawberry blonde hair, blue eyes and freckles that became more prominent in the summer. Or a girl that liked the same books as he did. Or a girl that was always trying to come up with something to say to him, but always came up blank whenever his eyes happened to glance over her. He knew of her, but he didn't know her.

It might be the mead in her blood, or it might be that the warm night made her bolder, but she had slowly backed away from the merry circle of people around the fire and now she was approaching the trickster prince from the side.
They had shackled his hands behind the last pole of the fence that divided the sparring area in two. It was not much of a fence; just wooden poles in the ground, connected with a plank nailed against the side of the poles. Loki was sitting on a sandbag or something, it couldn't be all that comfortable, yet he seemed relatively at ease.

"Hey, Ylva," he greeted her casually when she came close. It surprised her that he knew her name. They'd never really talked before, apart from the obligatory greetings and a little smalltalk when they found themselves in the same company.

"Hi," she said softly, because she felt a little awkward about coming over to him and because she didn't want any of the others to notice them. The whole point of his punishment was ignoring the boy and that was the opposite of what she was doing.
She walked past the dark-haired prince and stopped to lean on the fence with a few feet between them. Looking down on him like this she could see how his longish hair curled at his collar; she wanted to touch it, to feel if it really was as soft as it looked.