ROARA
I was leant over him cleaning his face when he opened his eyes. They took a second to focus but once they did they were locked onto my face.
"Roara?" Loki asked, his voice barely audible.
I beamed, eyes filling with tears of utter relief. I dropped the rag of material back into the small bowl of water, my hand cupping his cheek. "It's me." I whispered.
"Where are we?" He asked, trying to rise.
"No, no getting up." I gently pressed his shoulders back down. "I don't quite know. I teleported us, borrowed your power while you were unconscious, the building fell down and it was the only way to get us both out." I quickly wiped my tears away and sat back, looking him up and down. "How do you feel?"
"Fine, apart from my leg and my head." He replied, very much awake now.
"Good." I said and punched him hard in the shoulder.
"Ow!" He rubbed his shoulder. "What in the almighty was that for?"
"NEVER, and I mean NEVER, do that to me again! Do you understand? Never!" My eyes were filling with tears again and I angrily wiped them away. "If you ever die on me I will kill you."
"You can't kill me if I'm already dead Roara." He countered sarcastically.
I punched him again. "Then I will bring you back to life and then kill you. And then I'll have to drag you out of the halls of Valhalla because I'd just killed you, and that's way too much work for me to do, so you better never ever bleed out on me ever again."
He groaned and rolled his eyes. "I will try not to, but I don't think it's entirely in my control, even if I am a god."
"You're not a god you're a fucking idiot." I huffed. "Also a thank you for saving your sorry life would be good."
"Thank you? I'm very grateful to be alive?" He tried, not sounding all that thankful.
I crossed my arms. "That'll do." And then I burst into tears, sobbing so hard my entire body was shaking. I covered my face with my arms and sank my head into my knees.
I felt a hand gently caress my back as I cried. Shakily I pulled my hands away from my face, tears still flowing down my cheeks, and looked at him. Just for a second I thought, I could kiss him. I could lean over and press my lips to his and feel his hand in my hair...
"Roara, I-" He began.
Instead I flung myself into his chest, hugging him hard. He wrapped his strong arms around me, holding me to him. He smelled of pinewood and lavender, just like he always had.
"I'm sorry about your hair." I murmured into his chest. "I had to cut it off to check your head."
"I'll grow it back." He promised.
I pulled away, rubbing furiously at my eyes. "Ugh, stupid teleporting and your stupid leg."
"My leg?" He asked, looking down. "Oh. My leg. Well that's useful."
"I had to cauterise it, I don't think I did a good job." I mumbled.
"I'm a shape-shifter, I don't get scars." He reminded me.
"I know." I sighed and leant back on my hands.
"What happened to your face?" He asked, hand reaching out to touch it.
I batted his fingers away. "It hurts don't prod me. I fell over. Twice."
"You've got blood everywhere."
"Well noticed, I had no idea."
He picked up the cloth I'd been using to clean his face and gently pressed it to my cheek. I hissed and flinched as the water stung my bruised and bloody cheek. He paused and gave me a look that said sit still or I'll make you. I rolled my eyes and bit down on my lip as he pressed the rag to my face again, gently dabbing at the broken skin. He carefully wiped away the drying blood from my nose bleed, being careful not to press too hard.
"How did you fall over twice?" He asked, eyes concentrated on his work.
"My leg. I think I broke it." I explained. "It's gone all numb now, really achy. Before I had these shooting pains, but they've passed. My powers are weak too, when I broke the wall down to get to you my scars," I gestured to the side of my face, "they began stinging. I think I exhausted my powers before, what with all the fighting and then teleporting."
"Can you walk?" He asked.
"Can you?"
"Touché. I heal quickly though, as you well know." He put down the cloth. "Supposedly so do you." He raised an eyebrow.
"Apparently not this time." I rolled my head around my shoulders. "Do you know why you passed out? You were hulk smashed once and stayed conscious."
"Your powers, when they mixed with that man's, it exploded everywhere. I saw it coming towards me and couldn't dodge it. Then I woke up here." He shrugged. "It was all very annoying. What happened to my leg?"
"Knife wound. Happened after the blast."
"Fiona?"
I shook my head sadly. "Didn't make it." My heart felt heavy in my chest, like the weight of the grief was crushing me slowly.
"I liked her." He sighed. "That's a real shame."
"Did I just hear your say the words, 'that's a real shame' sincerely? Are you mellowing with age Laufeyson?" I prodded him in the shoulder. I couldn't concentrate on the grief, on the young life that had been lost. If I thought about it too much I thought I might implode.
"I'm not mellowing." He said defensively. "She was a good kid."
"She was." I agreed.
There was a moment of silence as the fire crackled beside us, filling the cave with warmth and soft lighting. I could see the colours dancing across the backs of my hands, moving like some ancient ritual.
"Any contact with the others?" He asked
I shook my head. "My communications devices are all broken. Can't get my GPS to work. Everything else is out of charge."
"I would call up to Asgard but we aren't exactly on the best of terms." He smiled wryly.
"I figured. We're stuck here until we're well enough to leave or until someone finds us." I sighed. "I don't even know what planet we're on."
Loki paused, sucking in air through his teeth. "What did you see outside?"
"Pine trees mostly. Took another look earlier, there was a river too, but not much else. Some small mountains in the distance." I sighed. "If we're on Earth it looks a bit like Canada maybe?"
"You can't have teleported outside of the nine realms. You don't have the experience or the power." He explained, finger tapping on his lower lip as he thought. "Possibly Vanaheim if not Midgard."
"Great." I groaned, and then shivered. The fire was good but it wasn't enough. My body was putting most of its energy into trying to heal my leg and any other cuts or bruises I had all over my body. I wrapped my arms around myself, realising that while my suit was useful in battle, it wasn't useful for sitting still in a cold cave. My fingers rubbed my bare shoulders, and I tried to pull my detached sleeves up further to cover more of me.
"Are you cold?" He asked.
"No." I replied icily, carefully dropping my arms.
"Have you slept?"
"No."
"Are you still annoyed at me?"
"Yes."
He groaned and sat up. I'd warned him not to, but it was hit choice if he wanted to be an idiot, and he often chose that path. He shuffled a bit to lean his back against one of the large boulders and looked at me.
"What, exactly, are you annoyed at me for now? I presume you're not still angry at me for nearly dying." God he was such an asshole! Such an asshole!
Here I was, in a cave, god knows where, because instead of leaving that apartment building when I had the chance, I'd stayed for him. I could have left him there. I should have left him there. I could be at home, in my room, with Bucky, listening to an old 1940s record. I could be warm and safe. But instead I was in the middle of nowhere with this dickhead, and here he was, being a pretentious bellend.
"Would you like me to write you a list?" I said, not bothering to keep the tiredness out of my voice.
"That might be useful." He crossed his arms. Two could play at this game.
"Right. First of all you lied to me. I don't care if you think you didn't, if you believe you just allowed me to be mislead by Thor as to what happened all those years ago. By not telling me as soon as you realised I didn't know the truth you were lying. You betrayed my trust, and you're just as guilty as him. I waited for you, for four hundred years, thinking you might come back. Hoping that my best friend was going to just waltz back into my life as if you'd never left." I took a deep breath. His eyes didn't leave my face, he didn't make a sound.
I swallowed and continued. "Every year I grew more and more tired of waiting. I have watched empires rise and fall, I watched men go to war and saw their mothers and wives and sisters grow old when they never came back. I have traveled the world, and I looked for you in every place I went, thinking maybe you'd be there, maybe this time. I rejected lovers and partners and friends, all because I wanted to leave space for you in my life, for when you returned. It was all for you. I couldn't make lasting relationships because after 10 years they'd start to become suspicious as to why I was not aging. I was so alone, and Thor only came every so often." I turned from him to shakily prod the fire with a stick beside me, shifting the logs around in the flames.
"And all that time you could have seen me. All that time. You've gone against your father's orders before, I know you have, and yet you didn't. Not even when I was alone, on my birthday, counting another year that you did not show. You promised me I could trust you. You've proven that I can't. You were my closest friend. We walked together, talked together, drank together. You told me stories of Asgard and I told you stories of Earth. I never forgot a single moment of that. I carried it with me, and no matter how hard I tried I could never find someone who made me feel the way you did."
I shook my head wearily. "Second of all, you never actually apologised for pushing my boundaries. I find it hard to talk about things that happened sometimes, because it all hurts too much." I pressed a hand to my heart. "In here. It takes me a while to process things and I need you to understand that I can't talk about them right away. I'm not used to talking to people about my experiences because I spent so long on my own. If I decide to tell you something, I'll do it in my own time, and you cannot push me. I was never yours Loki. I was only ever my own. But I made room for you, inside. And that's not something you have a right to, it's something you earn. It is a privilege."
I glanced back at him to make sure he was still listening.
"I did not choose Bucky over you, it wasn't like that. He understood that I couldn't talk about things. He never broke any promises. He never assumed I owed him anything. He made me happy, made me feel truly loved, for the first time in a very long time. And then he was gone and I thought that was how it was always going to be for me, that the person I found peace with would always leave. And then you both came back into my life at around the same time, and for those first two weeks before the party I felt so blessed that I had both of you. Then I found out how you'd lied to me, and we had that argument and I realised that in four hundred years you hadn't changed. And I have. And I realised that maybe the space I'd been saving for you was a part of me I'd been holding on to. A foolish dream of a 19 year old girl."
I looked down into my hands. "I'm not 19 anymore. Sometimes I don't even know how old I actually am. I can't just pretend as though nothing has changed in the time between you leaving and coming back."
I sniffed and wiped my eyes, feeling embarrassed at how emotional I was getting. I was annoyed and frustrated at him, but I also knew it wasn't entirely his fault, that a lot of these things were not things he could just set right. I risked a look at him. He was still looking at me, his face unreadable, his eyes glassy.
I cleared my throat. "I need some fresh air." I took hold of the wall and pulled myself up before producing two Y shaped sticks in my hand. I pushed each one under my shoulders and used them as crutches to walk outside.
I pushed through the vines covering the entrance of the cave. It was night time now, the stars above me shining brightly. The clouds had disappeared, revealing a dazzling full moon in the sky.
I limped over to one of the rocks and sat down heavily, stretching my bad leg out in front of me. I was exhausted, in pain, and confused.
Loki was messing with my head. I would tear the world down to save him, sacrifice anything for his life, but I couldn't stand to be in a room with him for more than five minutes. I just wished we hadn't had to spend all that time apart, that maybe we could have grown as people together.
I lifted both hands, and with some effort, produced tiny little balls of fire. I lifted them up with the wind and hovered them around the rocky outcrop, like fireflies in the night.
I heard a crunch behind me and turned. Loki was limping out through the vines. His hair was back to normal, and he was wearing something different to before. Long sleeved green and black undershirt with a dark green covering on top that wrapped around his body and went down to just above his knees. A brown belt was slung across his waist . He had new trousers on, no holes in these ones. He was carrying a blanket.
"I thought you might be cold." He explained, putting the blanket around my shoulders.
I didn't look up at him, but he sat down beside me anyway.
"I've used my magic and made the cave a bit more liveable." He said, and in my peripheral vision I could see him turn his face to look at me. I continued staring out at the horizon, watching the mist roll over the mountains in the distance.
"Look, we're going to be here for a while, we might as well be on speaking terms with one another." He looked me up and down. "Come on Roara, give me something."
The way he said my name made my spine tingle. It was as though it was made for his mouth.
"I didn't come back to you because I thought you were better off without me." He said quietly, his face now turned in the same direction mine was, looking out into the distance. "I thought it was my fault you became sick when I tried to pass powers onto you. The only reason I did it was because..." he trailed off and put his head in his hand, "was because I wanted you to be protected, even when I couldn't be there. I thought I'd be giving you something to make sure you weren't hurt again. But all I did was hurt you more."
"But once I was better. You still didn't return." I whispered.
"Do you know how painful it is to fall in love with a mortal girl, a human?" He asked me, his voice rough and pleading, as though he was admitting a horrible secret. "To know that if you stay by their side you will watch them age and grow old and die, and that you are powerless to stop it? That the cycle of life will snatch them from you. To know that once they are gone, that you will have to live for thousands of years without them? Midgardians live for a blink of an eye Roara. Every day I spent with you I fell in love with you a little bit more. I knew that if I came back I'd never be able to leave again, and I'd keep falling for you until my heart was no longer my own, and you would own it all. All of me would be yours. I would have given it willingly if I had stayed. I could not do that to myself, knowing the pain it would cause me. It was selfish, I know. To be apart from you was the most painful thing I have ever experienced. But I knew I was saving myself from more pain, in the end."
"But I am neither a mortal girl, nor am I human." The small fires moved slightly in the breeze.
He nodded into his hand, and said with a groan, "Once I became aware of the fact that you were not aging, I thought it was my fault." He paused, his hand moving from his forehead to his mouth. "I thought that I had done that to you, and it would have been a terrible thing to do a person. To force them to live longer than they are supposed to. To give them no choice but to watch the world around them change, to lose the people they love to old age. It was the very grief I'd been protecting myself from. I couldn't face what I'd done. I was a coward."
I took his hand in mine as we gazed out into the forest. "Do you know what my name means?"
"No." He said quietly.
"It's a combination of two words, Asgardian names in fact. Roar, which is a boy's name and it means fighter or ruler, and Rona, a girl's name which means, well it means a lot of things, but one of the things it means is strength or powerful. Odin explained it to me when I was in Asgard. He said he didn't know how my Midgardian parents would have been able to give me that name, it's not an English name or one from Earth, he said it was as though the name chose me. As though Asgard chose me. My name is who I am. I'm a survivor, a fighter. I'm not afraid to love, nor am I afraid to be hurt. You need to learn how to embrace the pain that comes with caring about someone. It's all part of what love is. Love isn't gentle, or kind, or understanding, it's horrible and it's painful and it's terrifying. It's not a game, you can't win or lose. The only way you can truly triumph in love is coming out the other side better for it, treasuring the person it has allowed you to become even with the pain. It's something you have to fight for and fight against. We are all warriors in love. You just need to learn how to come out victorious even if you're wounded in the battle."
I looked at him as he looked outwards, taking in the view. He looked more at peace than I'd ever seen him, his eyes the same colour as the pine trees below.
I leant towards him and placed a light kiss on his cheek.
He turned to look at me slowly, his brow deeply furrowed. "What the hell was that?"
I sighed. "It's called affection Loki, even you should know that word."
"I thought that you were angry at me. That you hated me?" He replied, eyes raking over my features in the half light.
"That's all true." I said simply.
"Then you're lying."
"Am I?"
He hesitated for a second. "Do it again."
I pulled his face towards me and very gently kissed his forehead.
"See." I said, letting go of him. "Affection. That doesn't mean I'm not annoyed at you, or that we're friends again. Just saying thank you for being honest."
I groaned and stood up, taking my crutches and limping back towards the cave. "Are you coming or not?"
He scrambled up, his left leg evidently still paining him slightly as he followed me inside.
There were two blankets laid out on the floor on either side of the fire with a thin sort of long pillow underneath them, almost like a mattress.
I raised an eyebrow. "Homely." I said sarcastically.
"Well it was the best I could do, I did nearly die you remember. If you want to give it a try you're welcome to." I was glad to see he was back to himself, sarcasm, dry humour and all.
"No." I sighed. "This is fine."
I leant my sticks against a wall and hobbled over to one of the makeshift beds. "It's not very comfortable." I announced.
"I am so close to slitting your throat." He grunted, getting into the other one.
"Oh you have no idea how many times I've pictured strangling you in the past few hours." I replied, trying to get comfortable.
"Why don't you do it then, at least I'd have some peace and quiet."
"I need you to get home." I snorted, pulling the blanket up to my neck.
I shifted around uncomfortably.
"Stop moving around." He muttered.
"I'm cold!" I shot back.
"It's your fire, deal with it."
"I've told you my powers aren't working very well here." I replied. "But if you keep being an ass I can muster enough wind to throw that blanket off you."
"You'd regret that."
"What are you going to do Laufeyson? Leave me in the wilderness?"
"You're intolerable." He muttered. "I'm glad I lost feelings for you."
Ouch. No, really, ouch. One minute this man was confessing his love from centuries ago and the next he was a petulant teenager. But that had stung. I might have moved on from him, but he still didn't need to say that.
"Are you just annoyed because I had sex with Bucky? Because I explained that."
Silence. So he was annoyed about that.
"God I can't believe I waited 400 years for an asshole." I snapped, sitting up to look at him. "Get a fucking grip."
"Do you like being annoying or does it just come naturally?" He shot back at me.
"I hate you." I muttered, lying down. I can't believe I'd just kissed him on the cheek, when I knew he was just going to turn around and throw my kindness back in my face.
"Good." I heard him say.
I closed my eyes, trying to get to sleep. I twisted and turned but I couldn't get comfortable. My leg was painful. I was hungry. I was stuck in a cave with the single person I'd have chosen not to be stuck in a cave with. I thought about the last time I'd slept, nestled beside Bucky in my bed, his skin hot and flushed against my own.
"Loki." I whispered.
"What?" He whispered back.
"I'm cold."
"Well what do you want me to do about it?"
I sighed. "Can we share body heat?"
I heard a low groan.
"Aren't you cold?" I hissed.
"I don't get cold." He replied.
"Just sharing a bed, that's all. I don't want to freeze to death." I was shivering now, even with the blanket pulled tight against me.
I heard a scraping, and then uneven footsteps. The blanket lifted up and Loki slipped in beside me, facing the other way.
He was a lot bigger than me, well over a foot taller, and took up a lot of room.
"Can you please stop shaking?" He moaned into the pillow.
"I'm s-sorry, it's f-freezing now." It had indeed gotten a lot colder, the temperature dropping significantly, and all I was in was my fighting suit, which was tattered and torn. Realising this I pulled my arms out of the blanket and took off my sleeves, placing them by the bed.
I pulled my arms back in, wrapping them around myself now.
"We're never going to sleep like this." He muttered.
"W-well what d-do you pr-propose?" I stuttered, my teeth chattering so much it was hard to get the words out.
I felt his body shift beside me under the blanket, so he was facing the same way I was. His breath was warm on my neck, and I couldn't stop thinking about how close his lips must be to my skin. Get it together Woodson. He wrapped his arms around me, pulling me into his chest, the pressure of his grip stopping me from shaking.
"Better?" He asked, his voice low and quiet as though perhaps his imagination was conjuring the same images mine was. I couldn't help the thought that slipped into my mind. It would be better if you could do something else to keep me warm...
"Much." I replied.
My eyes closed and I felt the soft blanket of sleep wrap itself around me, drawing me into its darkness.
I was barely awake, probably dreaming, but I thought I heard the words, "I can read minds remember, Roara."