Fic: See You Later . . . (Sifki)

[bookishwench]

Written for Keenir for Mischief and Mistletoe 2024

Sif let out a long, tired breath and threw her travelling bag on her bed, then herself. She was still in full battledress, but she was so exhausted that the thought of having to undo all the buckles and laces was too much. This wouldn’t be the first time she had slept in her armor, and she was sure it wouldn’t be the last. For the last five days she had been away with the Warriors Three and Thor, tracking a dangerous traitor who had managed to steal state secrets and was on his way to sell them to the highest bidder. That would have been bad enough, but it turned out every wealthy enemy of Asgard, and there were many, had sent a representative who not only had ludicrous amounts of treasure to purchase the man’s information but also was highly skilled in combat. After no fewer than fifteen battles, one of which involved fighting a sixty-foot, air-breathing shark that was also spewed black fire from its mouth, they had finally managed to recapture the documents and sent the thief whirling into the abyss of space.

Damn, she was tired.

Her eyelids immediately grew heavy, and Sif was well on the way to falling into a deep sleep that would last the better part of a day when suddenly she heard a knock on her door. It wasn’t just any knock: two staccato taps, a pause, and then three more. Sif groaned. That was Loki’s signature greeting. Of all the times for him to show up at her rooms, he had to pick now?

“I’m in no fit state to answer the door,” she said, barely loud enough to be heard by his sharp ears. “Go away.”

There was a pause, then the same pattern again, this time somehow managing to sound deeply annoyed.

“I don’t have the energy to see you now,” Sif said. “Unless you would find bedding a completely unresponsive lump enjoyable, go!”

This time, the sound wasn’t just a knock. Loki was pounding on the door to the point it was a wonder the wood wasn’t splintering. For the first time, Sif began to suspect something was actually wrong. On top of the incessant pounding, he hadn’t spoken a single word, and that in itself was very strange. Although it took an extraordinary effort, she slowly sat up and stumbled to the door, mumbling, “If this is a trick, I’m going to hide every one of your books in the deepest, darkest, dampest spots I can find all over the realm. And when you find them, I’m hiding them again.”

She grabbed the door handle, grunting as she pulled it open, only to find no one in the corridor. Sif looked back and forth, but absolutely nobody was visible anywhere.

“Buri’s bones, I’m going to extract revenge on that fool,” she cursed, but at that moment something touched her foot. She sprang back on instinct, then looked down.

“What in the Nine Realms?” she said, staring in confusion at what stood before her. “You cannot be… Loki?”

The small reptile stared up at her and slowly, miserably nodded its head.

As her jaw dangled in shock, the creature scuttled quickly into her room. She watched, dumbfounded, as he ran towards her bed and flexed his scaly knees as though to jump up, but absolutely nothing happened. A weird spitting sound mixed with a growl came from his mouth, and Sif couldn’t help believing that he was cursing up a storm in whatever passed for the animal's language.

“Just be calm and let me help,” she said, carefully lifting him off the floor and putting him on the blankets.

He gave her an annoyed grunt, then stomped all four feet until he had made himself a comfortable little nest. Sighing, he stuck his nose under the covers and hissed again.

“I take it you can’t speak in this form?” she said.

The animal shook its head.

“That may be an improvement.”

Another hiss, but also a dejected dropping of his shoulders let her know that for once in his life, Loki might not be up to joking.

“How long have you been like this?” she asked.

As she watched, he thumped his tail on the blanket three times.

“Three hours?”

He shook his head and banged his tail three times again, this time harder and slower.

“Three days?” she said in disbelief. “And no one noticed?”

Loki tipped his scaly head to one side as if to say, “This surprises you?”

“So, you’re stuck in this form,” she said, and he nodded. “How did that happen?”

The animal rolled its eyes at her and gave a frustrated hiss.

“No need to get testy, though I suppose that really is a bit too complicated of a question to explain only with nodding, shaking, and tail signals,” she said. “You can’t hold a quill?”

Shaking again.

“There must be something I can do, or you wouldn’t be here,” she said. “But what?”

Loki jerked his neck, pointing his elongated nose towards the ceiling.

“Upstairs? You want me to take you to your rooms?”

Loki nodded vigorously.

“That’s simple enough,” she said, moving to pick him up again, intending to carry him upstairs in her arms. However, he seemed to object. Instead, he scurried towards her travelling bag, nosing his way inside, then immediately shot back out again with a sour expression on his face.

“I haven’t done my laundry yet, and I have no idea what sort of muck that is, only that it smells atrocious,” she said. “Ask next time! You’re even more impolite than usual in this form.”

He swayed his head from side to side, miming talking in an exaggeratedly idiotic way, obviously mocking her. She seriously considered just leaving him to stew for a while, but taking into account the state he was in, she decided to let his manners alone this once and just dump the dirty laundry on the floor. As soon as the bag was empty, he wiggled inside.

“I take it you don’t want anyone to see you,” she said, and the fabric of the bag bounced up and down. She couldn’t really blame him. Thor would never let him live it down. “All right then, let’s go.”

She threw the bag back on her shoulder and staggered under the unexpected weight. While he didn’t weigh as much as a fully grown man in this guise, he was still surprisingly heavy for his size. He was also moving around far too much.

“Stay still! Don’t make this any more difficult than it already is,” she muttered. “Also, I won’t be held responsible if I fall asleep halfway up the staircase from pure exhaustion. You really did choose a terribly inconvenient time to get stuck as a… whatever it is you are.”

Loki snorted impatiently but stopped twisting. Well, mostly. She supposed she couldn’t really expect more than that.

Ten minutes later, Sif was standing outside the door of his suite of rooms. She was just lowering the bag to the ground to let Loki out when a booming voice behind her made her freeze in her tracks.

“Lady Sif!” Thor said, walking towards her from around the corner. “A pleasure to see you as always. But I thought you would be sound asleep by now.”

“I nearly was, but I had an errand to run for your brother,” she said.

“I don’t believe he’s in,” he said, frowning. “Most strange. Apparently he’s been missing for the better part of a day.”

A disgusted grunt came from the bag, earning a strange look from Thor.

“What’s in there?” he asked, starting to bend to look inside.

“That’s women’s business,” she said.

He stared at her in complete confusion, and she gave him a look that suggested she was delicately referring to some of the less pleasant functions of female anatomy. He immediately moved his hand away as if he had been burned.

“I apologize for intruding on your privacy,” he said, immediately backing up five paces as though to avoid being infected. “If you happen to see my brother, tell him Mother is looking for him.”

“I will,” she said.

She stood and watched as Thor strode back down the corridor, though she could have sworn she heard him mumbling to himself, “What in Helheim has a hissing bag of laundry to do with that? Never mind, I have no wish to know.”

Once she was certain he was gone, she opened the bag and Loki waddled over to the door.

“Wait,” Sif said, “aren’t the wards on your door set so that only you can enter? Will they still work when you’re like this?”

Loki gave what passed for a shrug and stared up at the doorknob. Sif could tell he was concentrating hard, trying to do something, but nothing changed. At length, he sagged dejectedly and walked back towards her.

“I’m sure there must be some way—” but he interrupted her but putting his elongated jaw behind her ankles and nudging her towards the door. “What?”

He gestured at the door, then at her.

“But it won’t let me in,” she said.

He motioned towards the door again, more emphatically this time. Deciding to at least try, she pushed on the doorknob, and it immediately opened without any resistance. Loki skittered inside so quickly Sif nearly fell over. He ran straight towards a table that had a huge tome sitting on top of it. She followed, shutting the door behind her, and looked curiously at the open page.

“’Animal transformation’” she read. “’Midgardian alligator. So that’s what you are?”

He nodded, but twirled his tail in a motion that seemed to mean “keep going.”

“’Know ye that this spell is most dangerous and complex. E’en a small misstep can prove fatal.’ Really, Loki, what was so important that you risked death to turn into an alligator?” Sif said in disbelief.

He shrugged again, and she had the distinct expression that if he could still speak, he would have said, “I was bored.”

“Loki, you need a better hobby,” she said. “Have you considered embroidery? No, never mind, you’d probably just stab Thor with the needles.”

She turned her attention back to the book.

“’In order to turn oneself into an alligator, one need only say… well obviously, I’m not saying that… and drink the transmogrification potion from chapter 27,’” she read, then noticed a mostly empty flask on the table. Squinting, she was able to read in Loki’s tiny handwriting the words “Frosty Ice Charge.”

“Obviously you did just that,” she said. “Now, what about turning you back?”

Her eyes skimmed the page until they landed on a section titled “Reversion to Natural Form.”

“’To return to one’s normal appearance, one need only form the desire in one’s mind, then drink the appropriate deactivation solution found on page 394.’ I hope you already have some of that lying about,” she said.

He nodded, then gestured towards a shelf on her right that was covered in literally hundreds of flasks, beakers, stoppered tubes, and bottles of every description.

“Tell me you know which one it is,” she said, an edge of desperation creeping into her voice.

He slapped his tail on the floor four times.

“Fourth shelf from the top?” she asked.

He nodded excitedly.

“Fine, I can move my hand slowly from left to right. Let me know when I have the right one.”

At almost the exact middle of the shelf, Loki gave a most un-alligator-like squeak while pounding his tail on the floor like a drum major. Sif picked up the little glass bottle, removed the cork, and sat next to him on the floor.

“I’m assuming you can’t drink this by yourself,” she said. “Open your mouth.”

Loki did as he was told, and Sif poured the contents over his tongue. He gagged a bit, but in another moment, the alligator sneezed mightily, and suddenly Loki, in his usual form, was laying on the floor. He also happened to be naked, which Sif supposed she should have expected, but it was still a bit of a surprise.

“Welcome back,” she said, doing a very poor job of hiding an amused smile.

“Three days running about staring at people’s ankles!” he said, stretching. “No one even noticed I was missing until Mother, Norns bless her, asked after me!”

“Loki, how did you get stuck like this?” she said.

“Once the spell worked, I went out into the corridor to test how fast I could run, and one of the maids happened to be passing and nearly screamed her lungs bloody. Then she picked me up by the tail and hurled me out the window and into the garden below. It’s a damn good thing that shrub broke my fall,” he explained, still lolling about on the floor. “I couldn’t have got back up all those stairs again. I spent the last three days wandering about Asgard, trying to figure out what that stupid thing eats. I got quite ravenous until I figured out they like fish. Before that I came frighteningly close to eating the neighbor’s cat. I still might have if you hadn’t come back when you did.”

“Yes, but if you needed a potion that was sitting on a high shelf in order to change back, didn’t it occur to you that you wouldn’t be able to reach it by yourself? Why didn’t you put it on the floor?”

“I can’t be expected to think of every little detail,” he said indignantly, then stopped as though he’d just noticed something. “I’m naked, aren’t I.”

“Completely,” she said. “Why? Feeling bashful?”

“No, feeling cold,” he said finally climbing off the floor and going to his wardrobe, where he pulled out a thick robe and casually threw it on. “Much better.”

“I have just one other question,” Sif said.

“I suppose I can grant that since I do owe you a debt of gratitude.”

“Why was I able to go through your wards?” she asked.

He glanced away for a moment, biting his lip before he answered.

“I changed them just after you left on that mission,” he said, looking at the floor and seeming to fold in on himself. Sif knew that posture. It meant he was feeling vulnerable. “I… missed you. And I wanted you to know you are always welcome here.”

Sif’s heart melted in spite of how tired she was. The whole situation had been utterly ridiculous, and therefore completely Loki’s style, but that one little show of trust was enough to make her glad that this insane idiot was hers. She got up from the floor and went to him, wrapping her arms around him and giving him a warm, soft kiss.

“Thank you,” she said, smiling up at him. “Now, are you going to make me walk back down all those stairs, or can I collapse in your bed for the next day?”

“Collapse away,” he said, “as long as I can join you.”

Both of them nestled under the rich, warm blankets on his bed, and though Loki had harbored hopes of something a bit different, she was asleep in less than five heartbeats. Sighing, he wrapped his arms around her armor-clad form and fell fast asleep as well, making a mental note to never use that spell again.

Author's note: Frosty Ice Charge is a flavor of Gatorade. Gator. Aid. Sorry for the awful pun!