Chapter Text
There’s been an itchy feeling under Loki’s skin since not long after he left the funeral home to meet the others back at headquarters, and he pushes it deep down into his chest for as long as he can. That’s how he’s survived all these years: keep yourself under control. Don’t let anyone see what you think, how you feel.
He’s gotten worse at keeping his feelings hidden over the last year, though, and he blames the group of idiots around him. There’s something very disarming about them, and he hates that; he survives by never letting himself be disarmed. But it’s hard to avoid when he spends every day with Fandral’s amusing wit, Thor’s cheerful generosity, Frigga’s motherly warmth, and Sif’s . . . Sif.
Sif.
The itchy feeling gets worse, and Loki finally lets himself take the feeling out of the box he’s put it in and examine it: nerves. A bit of fear. He’s . . . anxious. And as he looks around the three others lounging about their office, he knows why.
“Where’s Sif?”
Three heads turn to look at him. “On her way, I imagine,” Fandral says.
“She had to stay there longer than any of us,” Thor points out. “Makes sense she’s the last to arrive.”
All logical responses, but none of them lessen that itchy feeling in his bones.
It’s not that the hacker can’t take care of herself; she studies martial arts and is better in a fight than Loki is. It’s just that she wasn’t hacking or fighting today. The cons they undertake on this team often require them to step out of their comfort zones in terms of roles they play: they all have their specialties, but they’ve also all learned to throw a punch or mess around on a computer or do a little grifting, should the need arise and should no one else be available.
And Sif, bless her heart, has never been a particularly good grifter. Loki took to it like a duck to water—after all, it’s just lying, and he’s very good at lying. Frigga, too, turns out to have quite a knack for acting and for figuring out what a mark wants to hear. Thor isn’t a great liar, but he’s so charming and handsome that somehow he usually gets away with it.
But Sif’s always been the worst grifter of the group. She’s passable, as she’s been taught by Fandral and he’s one of the world’s best, but she’s too upright, too forthright—too honest, which is funny, given that she’s a criminal working in a collective of criminals. It was one of the things that caught his notice, that time they met at that hotel pool: he could sense her sincerity, her fierce moral core, and that’s so rare in his world that he couldn’t help but be drawn to it.
The point is, Sif has never been a great liar, so she’s never been a great grifter, so they usually don’t use her in that capacity unless there’s no other choice. And today, there was no other choice; everyone else had roles they had to fulfill, and so it was Sif who put on a somber black dress and went to spin a yarn about her dearly departed grandmother and snoop into some records while she was at the funeral home.
And that shouldn’t have been a problem—corrupt funeral home directors are a menace to grieving families, but they’re not dangerous—except that these corrupt funeral home directors are apparently in league with a local gang leader called Javier; they sell Javier the identities of the recently deceased, to be used for fake IDs in drug running operations. So if Sif slips up and is found out, she’ll be facing some people who know some people who are very good at making people disappear.
The itchy feeling grows.
“Why don’t you check her earpiece?” Frigga suggests, and in her tone, he can hear that she’s feeling some of the same concern he feels.
That’s true; he’d forgotten that the earpieces Sif designed have GPS in them and they can be tracked from the massive computer at headquarters. How fortunate that she’s been teaching him some of what she does and he knows how to get into her system.
He goes to her computer and taps a few keys; the massive array of screens on the wall turns on, and then a map comes up. Four markers appear, crowded together where headquarters is. There is no fifth marker. It’s just . . . gone.
Something sick and sharp twists in his stomach. It’s like the thrill he gets when he rappels off the side of a building during a heist, except this isn’t fun, it’s upsetting.
He’s afraid.
“Something’s wrong,” he says.
Thor looks at the screen. Loki generally doesn’t have a high opinion of his former foster brother’s intelligence, but to the man’s credit, he seems to understand immediately.
“I can be back to the funeral home in thirty minutes,” Thor says, which would be impressive, as it’s a forty-minute drive.
That lessens the twisting in Loki’s gut a little; Thor might be the least experienced of all of them at this whole criminal underworld thing, but if there’s one thing he’s extremely good at, it’s beating people up. And if anyone has done anything to Sif, they definitely need to be beaten up.
“I’ll come,” Loki says, standing, although he doesn’t know what good he’ll do in this situation; if anything, they need Fandral’s talent for talking his way out of anything, or Frigga’s keen mind and clever planning. All he knows is that the thought of sitting here and waiting while Sif (fierce, loyal, beautiful Sif) is in danger makes him want to crawl out of his skin.
But before he can take a step, his cell phone rings, and his heart jumps into his throat: only four people in the world have that number, and three of them are currently looking at him.
He whips it out of his pocket. It’s an unknown number, but surely there’s only one person it could be. “Sif?”
“Loki?”
His blood runs cold. He’s never heard Sif sound like this—so small, so weak, so . . . scared. He thought she wasn’t afraid of anything, and he wants to find the people who proved him wrong and put them in the ground.
(That, he will quickly come to see, was a very appropriate turn of phrase.)
“Where are you?” he demands. “Are you okay?”
“Javier’s men grabbed me and knocked me out.” There’s a long pause. “I think I’m in a coffin.”
. . . . . .
Hearing Loki’s voice is the first piece of comfort she’s had since she woke up in a tiny box and this whole nightmare started. The second piece of comfort is when Loki puts her on speakerphone and she hears the team—her team—jump into action to save her.
She explains about the phone call that woke her (Javier informing her that she needs to tell her team that they need to find him more stolen identities, or he’s going to let her die in there) and how she knows she’s in a coffin (in the light of the cell phone that her captors left her, she can see the satin lining above her, and she recognizes the model as one that the funeral home director tried to sell her). She doesn’t tell them about the panic that set in when she realized where she was, about the precious moments she wasted scrabbling futilely at the satin-lined wood above her. They probably can guess, and she doesn’t want them to think less of her.
She doesn’t want Loki to think less of her, in particular. The man is cool as a cucumber in all situations; he wouldn’t have panicked like that. And she just would really like it if Loki thought well of her, because he is brilliant and enigmatic and talented and handsome. That’s all.
Immediately the team gets to investigating and planning.
“What time did they grab you?” Frigga asks.
“A little after 11.” She can hear how shaky her voice is, but she can’t help it. It is sheer force of will that is keeping her from completely falling apart right now; she’s never thought of herself as claustrophobic, but then she’s never been tested in such a visceral, terrifying way.
“It’s been an hour, then,” the team’s mastermind says. “If they took the coffin anywhere, they didn’t take it far.”
“Not many places you can stick a coffin and not have it draw attention,” Fandral observes.
“The funeral home’s too obvious,” Loki says. “They have to know we’d look there first.”
There’s a long pause while Sif tries to keep her breathing even.
“Maybe they buried it,” Fandral says finally, which is what she’s been trying hard not to think about for the last few minutes.
Fear pierces through her.
“Sif.” That’s Thor, his voice booming and comforting. “Can you hear anything?”
She strains her ears for a moment, then hears a familiar whooshing sound—it’s been there the whole time, she thinks, but she just was too focused on other things to notice until this moment. “Water, I think. Moving around or above me. It’s . . . do you think it’s sprinklers?”
If it’s sprinklers, then her worst fears have come true: she’s definitely buried somewhere. Buried . . . underground . . . in a coffin . . . she digs her fingernails into her palm and forces herself to breathe slowly.
Her team seems to agreet that she's been buried.
“It’s only been an hour,” Frigga reminds them. “That’s not a lot of time to grab her, stick her in a coffin, move the coffin, and bury it. I should imagine it’s somewhere near the funeral home.”
“Unless you have machinery, it takes hours to dig a coffin-sized hole six feet deep,” says Fandral. “Don’t ask me how I know. Either they planned ahead, or they put it in an existing hole.”
There’s the sound of typing, and Sif distracts herself from her growing panic by wondering who’s at the computer. She’s been teaching Loki some computer stuff lately, partly because he shows a knack for it, partly because she just enjoys having an excuse to spend time with the handsome, aloof, erudite cat burglar. So maybe it’s him typing away.
“There’s a cemetery a mile from the funeral home,” says Loki. “The only one for twenty miles in any direction. Easy place to hide a recent burial.”
“Grab the laptop,” Frigga commands. “Everyone, cars, now.”
The fact that they’re moving, that they’re on their way to come find her, lightens the jet-black mass of panic that’s sitting on her chest, just for a moment.
She hears rustling on the other end of the phone, and then Frigga’s voice. “We’re on our way. How much battery life do you have on that phone?”
She checks. “Half.”
There’s a moment of silence, then Frigga says, “We don’t know if that’s a good battery—half a charge could last hours or it could last twenty minutes. I’d hate for us to get close to the cemetery but then not be able to find you because your phone’s dead and you can’t talk anymore. Do you think you’d be all right if you hung up for now, to save the battery?”
That makes sense, but the thought of being alone again down there makes her breath come faster. “Okay,” she says softly.
There’s another rustling sound. “We’re in the car.” That’s Loki this time, and it’s amazing how quickly just the sound of his voice calms her down. He has a beautiful voice: rich, smooth, deep. It’s like everything else about Loki: elegant and a bit perfect. “We’ll call once we’re closer to where you are.”
“Okay,” she says again, hating how weak and small her voice sounds, hating the inevitability of waiting here in the dark—but glad that her team is coming for her. They’re all brilliant and talented in their own ways. They’ll get her out. She has to believe that or she’ll go mad.
There’s a pause, and for a moment she thinks Loki has hung up. Then: “Sif.” His voice is velvety.
“Yes?”
“You’re going to be okay,” he says. “We’re going to find you.”
“Thank you, Loki,” she whispers.
“I’m hanging up,” he says. “I’ll talk to you soon.”
The call ends.
Sif is alone in the darkness, six feet under.
. . . . . .
Thor was right: he makes the forty-minute drive in thirty minutes, all without attracting the attention of the cops. Loki, wound tighter than a spring, tries for the first few minutes to stuff his fear back under control, and when that doesn’t work, he spends the rest of the trip calculating and recalculating how long Sif can survive down there. As a thief who spends a lot of time crawling through air ducts, he’s the team’s resident expert on tight spaces. But he’s never in sealed spaces with the oxygen slowly being replaced by carbon dioxide, so any guess he can make is only that: a guess.
But he is certain that she doesn’t have long, given that she’s already been down there for more than an hour.
A few miles outside of town, he pulls out the phone and dials that unknown number from earlier, putting it on speakerphone for the whole van to hear.
“Loki?”
His chest, his heart, his gut, everything tenses at the sound; Sif is not okay. She sounds worse for wear, and her breath is coming in short gasps. He can only imagine how sitting down there alone in the dark for so long would prey on your mind; he likes being alone, and he likes enclosed spaces, and he thinks even he would be losing his grip on reality at this point. “We’re coming,” he says. “We’re close.”
“Loki,” she whispers, “please don’t hang up again.”
He is shocked by the wave of fierce protectiveness that washes over him. “I won’t.”
A hand closes over his. “Sif, we’re here, darling,” says Frigga. “But can you give us one moment?”
“Okay,” comes the weak answer.
Frigga taps the mute button on the phone in the Loki’s hand and looks up at him. “She’s panicking and breathing too fast. You need to talk her through this.”
“Me?” Loki demands, too surprised and concerned to notice how open he’s being when he says, “You know I’m not exactly great at coping with emotions, right?”
Frigga’s voice is calming and gentle. “Out of all of us, you have the most experience being in enclosed spaces. Talk her through it. Keep her from hyperventilating and using the oxygen up even faster. Keep her calm.”
He stares at her; her familiar, kind face is set in an earnest expression.
“She needs you, darling.”
He processes this, then nods jerkily and climbs to the back of the van. It’s not much in the way of privacy, but he’s not sure he can do this with an audience.
“Sif, I’m here,” he says. “Are you still with me?”
“I’ve got nowhere else I could be just now,” she points out, and in it he hears echoes of her usual dry, straightforward humor. It makes him smile, even as it gives him a funny sort of pang somewhere in the vicinity of his ribcage.
Walk her through this: he can do that. He can’t do much at this moment, but he can help her breathe calmly. “All right, Sif, I want you to listen closely to me.”
“I’m listening,” comes the shaky reply.
“I want you to listen to my breathing and match it exactly, okay? Now, in.” He sucks in a long breath, noisily enough to be heard over the phone. He hears her do the same a moment later. “And out.” He lets the breathe out, long and slow and whooshing. “And in.” Deep breath in. “And out.” Deep breath out.
They do this for several more rounds of breaths, and when he finally stops, he can hear her gasping has stopped, so it must have worked. “Thank you, Loki,” she says, and her voice is a little calmer. “Thanks—thanks for answering your phone.”
Normally, this is where he’d say something snarky, like “Well, I was afraid that if I didn’t pick up, you’d just keep bothering me.” But Sif is one of the few people in this world that he’s rarely inclined to be snarky with. Sif makes him want to be sincere. She makes him want to have real conversations. She makes him want to form real connections with other people. (Well, with her, anyway.)
So instead of being snarky, he hunches over and, for reasons he can’t quite explain to himself, covers his eyes with his free hand, as though to hide himself from the others. Tucked away in this corner like this, with his eyes covered, with Sif’s careful breathing in his ear, he has a sudden funny feeling that he and Sif are alone in the world. That’s not a bad-sounding world, if he’s honest.
After a moment, he’s surprised to hear himself say, “Do you remember when we met in Nornheim?”
“Yes,” she says softly.
“I would never have believed you were a criminal,” he says. “You were too good. Too noble.” He pauses, then, wanting to hear her laugh, adds, “And none of the other hackers I know look so good in a bathing suit.”
There it is: a breathy laugh. “I found you after our conversation,” she says, voice trembling. “Hacked the hotel’s system—I had this idea that maybe I’d try to find you again. Imagine my surprise when the name in the system turned out to be an alias for the Sorcerer.”
She’s never told him that, not in the year that they’ve been working together, and it makes something in his chest feel warm, to think that she enjoyed the conversation enough to try to find him again.
It occurs to him that if it were anyone else, under any other circumstances, the last few things they’ve said could sound like flirting. Surely not now, of course; she’s slowly running out of air in a tiny box underground, and he’s . . . him. Loki the Sorcerer. Always alone. He moves faster alone, and he tells himself that he likes it that way, and he usually believes himself.
Plus, did he mention that she’s dying? So they’re not flirting.
(He wonders if she wishes that they were. He wonders if he wishes the same.)
The van screeches to a halt, and the moment is over. “We’re here!” he exclaims. “Let us know if you hear anything.”
“Hurry,” Sif says. “It’s getting hard to breathe.”
They find shovels leaning against a shed and run out into the headstones. The cemetery isn’t large, fortunately, and they quickly ascertain that there are only two recently filled-in graves. “Which one?” Thor calls.
Loki looks around. The one near him has soft dirt around it, and in it, he can see footprints. Among them are the unmistakable signs of high heels—lots of them. None of the gang members would be hanging around in high heels while they buried a coffin. “The other one!” he yells.
The group converges on the spot and starts digging furiously . . . all except one. “Where’s Thor?” Loki yells, and in that moment, he hears a roar: Thor has found a backhoe, probably the same backhoe that originally dug the hole, and is driving over.
“How in the world . . . ?” Fandral asks.
Frigga is grinning broadly. “He worked construction for a while. He always enjoyed using the machinery.”
Loki has transferred the call with Sif from his phone to his earpiece, so he can speak to her with the shovel in his hands. “We’re coming, Sif!” He barely notices that he has lost the careful control he normally keeps over his feelings and his tone of voice—that he is all but shouting, spurred on by the pounding of his heart and the adrenaline rushing through him.
“I think . . . I think I hear you above me,” she says. “I can hear some kind of machine.” She coughs. “I feel sleepy.”
His heart goes cold. He steps away from the grave and the backhoe to make sure she can hear him over the roar of the machinery: “Sif, I need you to do something: take the deepest breath you can and hold it. Can you do that for me?”
“I’ll try,” she says. “But if this doesn’t work . . . thanks for trying.”
“No!” he all but yells. “No goodbyes. Thor is going to dig you out and you are going to be fine, do you hear me?” A thousand scenes flash through his mind: Sif’s face lit by the glow from her computer screens. Sif smiling quietly at some stupid joke told by Fandral. Sif’s eyes lighting up as she chats with Frigga. Sif glistening with sweat when she spars with Thor at the tiny gym at headquarters. Sif taking no crap from anybody. Sif in that red bathing suit in Nornheim. Sif warm and soft against him that time they kissed to get through that alarmed door (a moment he thinks about more often than he’d ever admit aloud). Sif spending hours teaching him what it is she does on the computer, her voice soft and gravelly and low and soothing, her warmth radiating across the distance until he can feel it against his skin as if she’d reached out her hand.
It’s Sif, he suddenly realizes, who’s been his closest friend on this ridiculous team. The others are all kind to him and not overly objectionable, which, coming from him, is high praise. And Frigga’s . . . well, Frigga’s something to him. But it’s Sif who he gravitates toward whenever they’re all together. It’s Sif who’s become his friend, who’s become most important to him.
And the thought of losing that is unbearable.
“Loki, I can’t . . .”
“Deep breath and hold it!” he insists, his voice sharp with fear. “You need to stay with me, Sif! Just a few more minutes.” He takes a deep breath of his own. “You have to make it through this,” he hears himself say. It’s all back, the itchy feeling and the twisty feeling and that strange sensation he sometimes gets when he’s close to Sif and his stomach ties itself in knots, and it all combines to make his voice shaky. “Because this team needs you, okay?” He has a sudden horrible image of them opening the coffin and finding out they’re too late, and his breath rushes out like he’s been struck in the stomach. “I need you,” he adds quietly.
“Dig!” he hears Thor yell, and he turns to see his former foster brother jumping out of the backhoe. Apparently he’s reached the coffin. Without hesitation, Loki runs over.
Luckily, the coffin wasn’t buried a whole six feet deep; that explains why Sif gets cell reception down there. They manage to get the edge cleared, and then Thor pries the lid up, reaches down, and pulls Sif up out of the coffin.
Loki nearly collapses in relief. It’s done. They saved her. Sif is alive.
The hitter helps the hacker scramble up out of the hole they’ve dug, and then he pulls her into a hug. “Don’t you do that again!” Thor is insisting, while Sif nods emphatically into his shoulder. Then it’s an equally tight hug for Fandral, and then she nearly collapses into Frigga’s arms. The older woman is teary-eyed; no wonder, for she thinks of her team as family.
And then—it should be Loki. He’s the only one who hasn’t hugged Sif yet, and by rights, it should be him next. And there is a part of him that wants nothing more than to pull Sif into his arms and protect her from anything else that could hurt her or make her voice sound so tiny and scared.
But hugging isn’t something he does. He's never cared for it (or maybe it’s only since he ran away from the Odinson home—when he started living on the streets and making a name for himself as a thief, when showing affection to another person could only cause trouble—that he got out of the habit of hugging). The point is, he wants to hug Sif exactly as much as he wants to keep the world at arm’s length, and right now he doesn’t know which impulse will win.
For that long moment, he and Sif stare at each other from across the grass—Sif still in the circle of Frigga’s arms, still in the dress she wore to the funeral home, tears glittering in her eyes. Loki is sure he looks just as desperate, just as disheveled.
And then Sif nods. That’s it, she just nods her thanks instead of coming over to hug him, like she understands how hard it is for him to show affection and vulnerability that way, and he nods back and wonders how he can be so disappointed not to get a hug he wasn’t sure he wanted until after it was no longer being offered.
. . . . . .
But that’s not the end of it. Late that night, when the others have left, Loki finds himself still at headquarters, perched on the edge of the conference table and staring into the dimness of a half-lit room. He can’t let go of what happened today; every time he closes his eyes, he sees a worst-case-scenario image of the coffin lid opening to reveal Sif lying there, unresponsive, not breathing—
He used to be good at stuffing down his emotions, he thinks, not for the first time that day. It’s this team of idiots that makes him feel, makes him admit that he’s human and that he cares, at least about some things. And Sif, in particular, makes him feel so much .
As if summoned by his thoughts, Sif materializes in the doorway. She is stunningly beautiful, even casually dressed in leggings and a t-shirt; maybe it’s just knowing how close she came to dying today that makes him feel like he’s never truly looked at her before. He wishes, as he’s been wishing all day, that he’d hugged her when he got the chance. He’s imagined it more than once—constructed a reasonable facsimile of what hugging Sif would feel like, based on how it felt to hold her close during that kiss. He thinks he would have enjoyed it.
She stands next to him, and even though he’s struggling to look at her right now, he can tell she’s fixed that clear, steady gaze of hers on him. “I never would have made it through that without you,” she says without preamble, without hesitation, without any of the tricks he would have used to hide the raw emotion in that statement.
He shakes his head. “That’s not true,” he argues, because arguing is his default when he’s not sure what else to do. “Anyone can learn to hold their breath.”
Sif says nothing, just examines him until he glances over at her and then glances away, not sure why he’s suddenly embarrassed. And then she steps forward, puts one hand on his forearm, and leans in to press her lips to his cheek.
He is acutely aware of everywhere she’s touching him, of the softness of her lips against his face, of the way she smells like the bodywash Frigga keeps stocked in the shower at headquarters. His eyes drift closed as he wonders how such an innocent gesture can feel more intimate than that passionate embrace during that first heist they pulled. Maybe because this is real, not to distract security guards. Maybe because she knows him and all his flaws, and she’s still touching him of her own volition, and suddenly that feels like a very big deal.
“Thanks for not hanging up the phone,” she says softly, still so close that he can feel her breath on his cheek.
Then she walks away. Loki presses his fingertips gently to the spot she kissed and stares unseeingly at the darkness for a long, long time.
. . . . . .