#logyn au

Despite the woman’s pale skin, so fair it must have never seen sunlight, her long shiny black hair and sharp eyes reminded Sigyn of a panther. Sigyn wasn’t afraid.

“What’s your name?”

“Huh?” Sigyn blinked, taking a mortifying second to realise she had been caught staring. “Oh, um, Sigyn. Yours?”

“Lady Loki.”

“Lady?” Sigyn questioned with a smile. It made Loki’s heart skip a beat, not that Sigyn would have ever believed it.

“Yes, well, it will be Queen Loki one day. But, baby steps,” Loki grinned back.

“So, Sigyn, huh? I think I remember hearing that name around. You’re the woman who killed her husband on her wedding night, right?”

Sigyn’s smiled disappeared and she turned her face away in shame. “He wasn’t nice,” she murmured.

Dammit, Loki. Whatever happened Loki was going to see that smile again.

A guard strolled down the aisle, pausing to leer at Loki, earning the guard groan of disgust.

“What’s the matter, Officer Balder? No wifi out this way? Buy a magazine at the next gas station then, you perv.”

“Watch that mouth of yours, Laufeyson,” Balder growled, punctuating his threat by hitting his baton against the edge of their seat. To Loki’s credit she didn’t flinch, just glared back with her venomous green eyes.

“What are you in for?” a quiet voice asked a few miles later.

“Moida,” Loki replied with a smirk, affecting a thick New York accent. “Same as you. A couple counts more of it than you, but still.”

“Bond with your new pet while you can, Lesbison,” Balder smirked on his way back to the front of the bus. “The second we get to Helheim I’m having you put in solitary.”

“I look forward to it,” she replied, baring her teeth.

Balder grimaced and shot a warning look at Sigyn, who averted her gaze again.

“Don’t mind him, he’s a big softy really,” Loki tried to assure Sigyn. “His underbelly is soft, at any rate.”

“Just need to find something sharp…” Sigyn added quietly, her eyes unfocused. “Broken broom handle, maybe.” She blinked and realised that Loki was staring at her, studying her. Sigyn shifted nervously in her seat and turned her eyes to the window.

“Hey,” Loki called, reaching out for Sigyn’s hand ignorant of the limitations her shackles put on such movement. “Don’t hide it, beautiful,” she added, smiling warmly as Sigyn reached back. “Feed it.”

Sigyn couldn’t remember the accident, even years later. Not the truck t-boning the bus, not the bus tumbling down the hillside. All she could ever recall of those next few seconds was the feel of Loki’s hand in hers.

The first thing Sigyn remembered after the accident was walking away from the crash - running made heavy tracks, so Loki had told her. They headed back towards a bridge the bus had crossed earlier, wearing only white singlets and black boy shorts, carrying their jumpsuits and shackles in their arms. When they reached the bridge Loki wrapped their jumpsuits and shackles around a rock and threw them in the river. Loki checked with Sigyn if she could swim first before they got into the water, and then they travelled downstream for half an hour, keeping close to the bank and staying quiet. Upon the muddy bank of the river, under the next large bridge they came to, Loki let them rest for a minute before hiking towards the road.

“Wait,” Sigyn called, grabbing for Loki’s hand. When Loki turned back Sigyn took her face in her hands and place a quick kiss upon her lips. “Just in case, you know…”

“Just in case what?” Loki asked, smiling hungrily as she stepped towards the nervous Sigyn until she backed herself up against a nearby tree.

“In case… we get caught, in case we end up at different prisons… In case of suicide by cop, I don’t know,” Sigyn rambled.

Loki claimed Sigyn’s lips in a passionate kiss, her hands roaming over her wet clothes, pawing at the crappy standard issue sports bra underneath.

“Nothing bad is going to happen, beautiful,” Loki assured Sigyn when she finally pulled away for a breath. “We’ll be fine, I promise. We’ll Thelma and Louise it.”

Sigyn’s euphoria evaporated with a blink. “…Thelma and Louise died.”

“What?”

“They drove off a cliff. They died.”

“Oh. Hmm… Do you know of any Sapphic stories that end happily?”

“None come to mind,” Sigyn laughed uneasily.

“Oh well,” Loki beamed, taking Sigyn by the hand and leading them up the hill. “We’ll just have to write our own.”

The first car they saw pulled over, its driver only too happy to help two damsels in wet t-shirts.

Poor bastard.

“Uh, spare room’s over there. You can just… put your things in there,” he added lamely, wondering why he didn’t do a better job of cleaning up before she arrived. Oh, that’s right, the sarcastic voice in his head reminded him. You assumed Fandral’s cousin was a dude. “My cousin’s flying in for the wedding – can they stay at your place for the weekend?” Oh, sure, that’s fine. Let me not ask any more questions at all – not even their freaking name. Idiot. So now he had a kind of cute, kind of bookish brunette crashing with him for the weekend, in his bachelor pad. …with all his empty take out containers. …and the empty whiskey bottle. …and all the –

“Wow, that’s a lot of games…” Loki turned and found Sigyn gawking at his media room which consisted of a big ass tv, half a dozen gaming consoles, and a shit tonne of games and dvds.

“Ah, yeah…” he mumbled, running a hand through his black hair. That was the other issue with having some random woman in his home – chicks didn’t get games. Well, most of Loki’s previous girlfriends didn’t anyway. Some of them “tolerated” it, but that was just as bad. His love of games wasn’t some dirty habit he should kick. “Do you play?” he asked, trying not to get his hopes up.

“No, sorry, not really.”

“Not really? What does that mean?”

“Oh, well… I didn’t have any consoles growing up, so I never really got that interested. But friends did so I’d play them at their place.”

“What was the last game you played?”

“Oh, um,” she giggled softly, brushing her hair behind her ear. Okay, she was kind of adorable. “Probably Mario Kart on the, uh, Wii? The one with steering wheels?”

“Yeah, I’ve got it,” he admitted brightly. “How about I order some pizza and we play while we wait?”

“Sounds good.”

Ten minutes later everything was set up and Loki was waiting for Sigyn to pick a track.

“Oooh, rainbows!”

Loki smirked. “You want to play Rainbow Road?”

“Sure, it looks cool.”

“Okay, then…”

He selected the track and gave Sigyn a quick refresher on how to play, which she promptly shrugged off.

“It’s like riding a virtual bike, I’ll be fine.”

The flag went down and Baby Daisy on her ridiculous little duck bike tried to push through the ranks and was promptly knocked off the road and burnt up in the atmosphere. Loki smirked as Luigi in his Standard Kart moved quickly to the front of the pack. “Do you want me to stop and wait for you?”

“Shut up.”

She finished the rest of the first lap without falling off again and when she started her second lap she felt confident enough to pick up her speed. Eventually she caught up to most of the other racers – Luigi, however, was way out in front. Until that annoying beeping started to warn Loki that a blue shell was in bound.

“Shit.” There was nothing to do. By the time Luigi could move again the rest of the racers were right on his tail.

“Hm.”

Loki glanced at a smirking Sigyn out of the corner of his eye. “Wait, was that you?”

“Was what me?”

“Did you throw a blue fucking shell at me?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she replied innocently as Baby Daisy received a bullet and flew past all the other races, landing right on Luigi’s arse.

“Oh, that is not fair!” Loki cried as Baby Daisy bumped him off a corner.

“Do you want me to stop and wait for you?”

“Shut up.” Luigi had almost caught up to Baby Daisy when she ran over a mushroom another racer had lost and took a flying leap across a giant gap in the track. “You just jumped over the figure of eight… How did you do that? How are you not dead?”

“Magic mushrooms,” she replied blithely as Baby Daisy hooned around the course.

“How long since you last played?”

“I dunno, a couple of years?”

“Okay, so you got your groove back. That’s cool. I’m gonna stop going easy on you now.”

“Please do. I could do with a challenge,” she replied, sticking her tongue out.

“You asked for it!”

They trashed talked well into the next lap and soon the finish line was in sight.

“You’re not going to win!”

“Oh, yeah?” she asked, turning her whole body as her character took the last corner. “That number one on my screen says otherwise.”

“NO!!” Loki leapt to his feet, knocking the steering wheel against his head as he grasped it in disbelief. Luigi lost to Baby Daisy by a nose.

Sigyn was on her feet too, jumping up and down and laughing. “Ha! Winner!!”

“You cheated!”

“How!”

“You totally hustled me!”

“What?!”

“You pretended to be all rusty, “oh, I haven’t played in years”, then you throw a blue fucking shell at me!”

“What was I supposed to do? Hoard it? And I wasn’t lying. It has been years since I’ve played. It’s just that, well, I’m very competitive. I won now just like I used to win then.”

“This isn’t over,” Loki growled, straightening up so he had some height over Sigyn. “There’s still three more tracks to go – loser pays for pizza.”

“You’re on.”

They both settled back on the couch and Loki selected the next track, Grumble Volcano, already imaging how much better he’d feel once Luigi knocked Baby Daisy into some lava.

In the end Baby Daisy won – Barely! Loki griped as he forked over the money to the delivery guy before snubbing Sigyn and disappearing into the kitchen. His misery guts act didn’t last too long as Sigyn was quick to suggest other things they could play. Other video games were out of the question as Sigyn was unfamiliar with them, giving Loki a distinct advantage. “I don’t see anything wrong with that,” he smirked.

“Do you have any board games?”

“Um… I think I have an ancient edition of Monopoly somewhere…”

“Nope, Monopoly is evil. Anything else? Got any cards?”

“Hey, yeah! We could play strip poker,” he said without thinking, immediately breaking out into nervous laughter to pass it off as a joke. “Or, you know, normal poker is fine. Um, winner gets…”

“Strip poker it is.”

Loki stared slack jawed until Sigyn stared back expectantly.  

“I’ll put the pizza in the fridge – you go get the cards?”

“Uh, yes. I will do that.”

Loki tried, as he returned to the recently cleared table, to remind himself that he was in fact a 28 year old man and had seen plenty of women naked. The suggestion of strip poker shouldn’t render him mute. He glanced up at his opponent and saw her fidget with her cardigan.

“Don’t get too attached to that,” he said, feigning confidence. “I’m going to have you down to your panties in no time.”

“Joke’s on you; I’m not wearing any.”

Loki froze mid shuffle, biting his lip as a mental image appeared unbidden. Sigyn smiled smugly.

“Oh, you bitch. You’re trying to psych me out!”

She laughed maniacally as she cracked her knuckles. “Shut and up and deal, Odinson.”

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