Stars
The pages were black, glossy, like a recently painted canvas, and speckled, freckled even, with tiny bursts of silver light, as if someone had flicked a brush filled with silver paint repeatedly against the black, bursting to life through the paper. His fingers traced the numerous constellations as he struggled to remember then ones his mother had taught him in his youth, back in the days when he had had private lessons with her. She had been a patient tutor, never rushing him or snapping if he got something wrong, but always encouraging and gentle, and always complimentary whenever he got the least little thing right. He had preferred lessons with her than with his...the All-Father.
It was dark in the room. Ash wasn’t back yet, but Loki wasn’t worried; she had warned him in advance, during her lunch-break, that she might have to stay at the office a bit later than usual, and he was quite absorbed in her old copy of The Eyewitness Guide to the Universe, which he had dug out from a pile of her childhood books on the bottom shelf of her bookcase, books that she hadn’t the heart to throw out just yet. True, they weren’t Shakespeare, but Loki had been interested to find out what the Midgardian perspective on the universe was, so he was lying on his front in the middle of the living room with the book spread out in front of him, taking in the portraits of stars, planets and constellations that littered across several pages. Being Frost Giant and also having magic, he didn’t have to worry about needing light to be able to read, so when the sun had started to set, he hadn’t bothered flicking the light switch but had just kept reading into the evening.
So, when Ash finally made her way into the room, she all but jumped out of her skin as she snapped on the lights and saw him sprawled out on her rug, far too lost in the subject matter to have even noticed that she had come back. Even when she breathed out a sigh of relief at seeing it was just him and not some intruder, and when she knelt down beside him to see what he was so intrigued by, he didn’t notice, and when she tapped his shoulder and said “Hi,” he almost jumped through the roof.
Recovering his calm, and a little annoyed at having been so easily frightened by such a childish trick, he turned to face her. “You’re back.”
“Obviously.” Ash smiled at him. “What are you reading?” Then, when he showed her, she sat back on her heels and went on “Ah. Yeah, I didn’t have the heart to chuck that one. There’s some pretty amazing pictures of space in there.”
“How can anyone paint like that?” Loki asked, tracing the stars with his fingers again. “I mean, we have some fine artists in Asgard, but none of them ever produced anything like this before. The stars look so real.”
Ash managed to stifle her laughter, not wanting him to think she thought him an idiot for not quite getting it. “Actually, they’re not paintings. They’re photographs.”
Loki frowned at her. “Photographs?”
“Yes. They’ll have been taken with some high-powered camera launched into deep space.” Ash clambered to her feet, in a rather unladylike way, but she knew Loki wouldn’t judge her. “Here, I’ll show you.” Loki pushed himself up a little and watched as she crossed over to the coffee table, pulled open one of the drawers and extracted a strange silver cuboid about the size of her palm. Flicking it on, Ash aimed it at the bookcase and pressed a button on top which emitted a small, soft click, and then dropped to her knees beside him again. “See?”
Loki glanced down at the small screen at the back of the device and saw that she had captured an exact likeness of the bookcase on it. He furrowed his brow. “That’s what these artists did here, then?” He tapped the picture. “With one of those...things?”
“Camera; yeah.” Ash smiled, hoping that he wouldn’t ask her how it worked.
“How does it work?”
“Well, you just point the camera at the thing you want a picture of, and then you click the button on top, and then you take it somewhere to get it printed out, and that’s a photograph.”
“But how does it capture the image like that?”
“Ah...I’m not entirely sure.” She offered him an apologetic look. “Sorry, there’s a lot about technology I don’t know. But I suppose it’s like...well, you can project images of things, right? Like when you can make multiple versions of yourself appear in one place?” Loki nodded. “Well, I guess it’s kind of like that, in reverse...or not. I don’t know.” She shook her head and Loki couldn’t help but chuckle at her sheepishness. “Do you enjoy making me feel like a fool, Loki?”
“God of Mischief and Trickery, remember?” Loki replied, pushing himself up to his knees. “It’s what I do best.”
“How could you see in the dark, anyway?” Ash asked. “If I tried that, I’d damage my eyes.”
Loki shrugged. “I don’t know; there’s a lot about my kind that I don’t know.”
Ash laughed and got to her feet. “Touché!”
Loki frowned. “Sorry?”
“Touché; it means, um, well, I don’t actually know what it means. It’s just something you say when someone catches you at a loss for words or turns teasing back on you, or something,” Ash explained.
“Oh.” Loki got to his feet. “I’m still getting used to your Midgardian terms.”
She laughed, lightly. “Well, are you hungry, because I am starving? Fancy a takeaway?”
Loki followed her into the kitchen as she pulled the menu for her local Chinese restaurant out from behind the cupboard. “And that word means?”
“It means I don’t have to cook.” She smiled at him. “I order the meal and someone brings it here; or rather we order the meal.” She held out the menu. “It’s Chinese; from Asia. I think you’ll like it.”
Loki found that he did like it very much.
They ate, for once, sitting in the living room on the sofa, sitting at opposite ends with their legs crossed and eating out of the cartons, a glass of wine each sitting on the coffee table and the television on. Ironically, the programme that followed the news was one of Brian Cox’s Wonders of the Solar System repeats, and they both sat fascinated all the way through it.
“It’s funny,” Ash mused afterwards as she threw the empty containers into the kitchen bin. “I’ve never really been able to get my head around physics, but I think if I’d had a tutor like him at my school, I’d have passed my exams no bother!”
Loki laughed, agreeing that he had made the content of the programme extremely interesting. “It is strange,” he mused after a moment’s pause, “that in all the Nine Realms, things are so different, people, lifestyles, but we live under the same sky. We all see the same sun, the same moon and the same stars, the same constellations.”
Ash offered him a small smile. “It’s like when I moved here for the first time. My first night here all I kept thinking was that I was miles away from home and everything I knew. But then the next night, I had a late one, and as I was about to go to bed, I looked out of my window and I saw a shooting star. And then I reminded myself that that stars I could see here in London were the same stars that I’d always seen in Dorset. I was just looking at them from a different angle.” Loki said nothing and she blushed, quickly, and went back to washing their glasses. “I really wish you’d stop me when I start babbling, Loki.”
Loki shrugged. “I like hearing what you’ve got to say. And that’s a sentence I never thought I’d hear myself say to a human.”
“Oh, well, then I’m honoured,” Ash teased back, and the tension was dropped. Loki went back into the living room to pick up the book from the floor and put it back on the shelf; by the time he had done that, Ash was finished with the washing up and all she wanted to do was flop into bed. Loki had no objection to that, of course. Since that night when he had had the nightmare and she had woken him up by kissing him, he hadn’t had a bad night’s sleep beside her.
“Tell me about the shooting star,” he persisted as he clambered in beside her, both in their bed attire by this point. “I’ve always heard people say they’ve seen them, but I’ve never seen one for myself before.”
“Well, it happened pretty fast,” Ash replied, trying to remember the exact details. “It was just like...a bright ball of fire suddenly just shot across the sky. At first I thought it was just a plane, but then I realised it was going too fast, and it was glowing too brightly. It just streaked through the darkness and then disappeared, somewhere beyond the Abbey. I’ve no idea where it touched down, probably in the sea; I mean, it was miles away and I’ve never heard of the remains of one hitting London before, but...it was pretty amazing.”
Loki nodded, thoughtfully, remembering all the times he had joined Heimdall at the Bifrost Bridge to further his learning of the night sky; how the universe had stretched out before him in a smattering of darkness glittered with bright lights. “Stars always are.”
“Mm,” Ash agreed, turning over to get comfortable. “It’s just a shame ordinary people can’t get to see them up close. I suppose I could if I had a telescope, but even then, it wouldn’t be the same.”
She flicked off the light and settled herself to sleep. To her surprise, however, Loki suddenly sat up, throwing the covers off both of them, exposing them both to the sudden cold. She turned to him in surprise. “Loki, what-?”
“You want to see them up close?” Loki asked into the darkness.
“What?”
“The stars?”
“Well, yeah, but what-?”
“Come with me.” She jumped, not realising how close to her he actually was; his face only a few inches from hers. Then she felt him take her hand and pull her so that they were both standing up on the bed. “Loki,” she stammered, uncertainly, and then the next thing she knew the ceiling came shooting down towards them, everything became a blur of rainbow light and then her feet hit what felt like concrete.
“Loki, what the-?” Ash glanced downwards and then clutched at his arm. “Whoa! That’s a long way down!”
Loki quickly pulled her back from the edge. “Are you alright?” he asked.
“I’m a bit dizzy,” she confessed, rubbing her forehead. “Did we just...teleport?”
Loki grinned at her, wolfishly. “Did I fail to mention I can do that?”
Ash laughed, nervously, and glanced into the distance. “So...we’re on the roof?” She shivered, wrapping her arms around her. “You should have warned me; I’d brought my coat and shoes if I’d known that was what you were going to do.”
Mentally kicking himself for being so thoughtless, after all the cold didn’t bother him, Loki waved a hand at her, immediately cloaking her in her warmest coat, socks and her black boots over her pyjamas. “Better?”
“Much, thanks,” she smiled, and then she glanced up at the sky. “Oh, wow!”
He followed her gaze upwards. Above them, the stars seemed to smile in the heavens, the scattering of them twinkling down in a friendly way, almost as if they were waving.
“Oh, with all the lights in the city you can’t see them so well,” Ash went on, brushing her fringe out of her eyes as the wind ruffled their hair and clothing. “I forget how amazing the sky looks at night.”
Loki looked at her awestruck face and smiled. “I know it’s not the same as floating around among them like those people in your book, but...” He let the sentence trail away as he conjured the constellation of Orion in his hand and held it up for her to see.
Ash drew in her breath in amazement. “My God!” He tried not to smirk at the pun. “How-?”
“Look up there.” Loki nodded in the direction of the sky. Ash followed his gesture and a second later clapped her hand over her mouth. The cluster of stars that was meant to be Orion had vanished, as if someone had simply rubbed them out of the sky. Her eyes fell back on Loki’s hand and as the realisation set in, she laughed in wonder.
“You’re actually able to do that?”
In answer, Loki used his magic to replace Orion and then conjure up Ursa Major instead. Once again, Ash was rendered momentarily speechless with awe as the stars floated in the palm of his hand. “That’s amazing.”
Loki couldn’t help feeling somewhat smug about it. Thor had always asked him what the point of tricks like this was, because he could never see the appeal of such things. Of course he couldn’t, Loki reminded himself, he favoured brawn over brains, after all. But had he been able to woo his Lady Jane with such incredible feats of magic? No; he had simply won her heart by saving her planet a couple of times, an incredible feat, yes, but any warrior could do that. Here he was now, though, doing something that Thor would never be able to achieve in a billion years, and Ash was fascinated by his skills.
“Do you have a favourite constellation?” he asked, replacing Usra Major back in the sky again.
“Um...” Ash thought about it a moment. “Well, I suppose my star sign, Cancer; the sign I was born under.”
No sooner had the word “Cancer” left her lips then Loki had sought it with his magic and pulled it into the palm of his hand. Ash smiled, and then, hesitantly, asked “Can I...touch it? Or, will it burn me?”
“Hold on.” Loki concentrated a little, working up the spell, and then nodded. “You can touch it now.”
Ash reached out her hand, her fingers reaching tentatively over his, and then she stretched them as close as she dared to the tiny, sparkling balls of silver flame. She could feel a small warmth radiating from them, like the flame of a candle, and the sensation of excitement tingled through her body. Loki watched her as she danced her fingers, daringly, over the stars, tracing them just like he had with the ones in her book, and suddenly the smugness he was feeling felt washed over by another feeling, a feeling of simple happiness, that he could cause a human to feel so amazed and exhilarated by this simple act, which, to her, was beyond impossible. With another small concentration of magic, he made the crab-like constellation spin slowly, dancing along with her fingers, and he smiled at her soft giggle.
“Loki, this is...” Ash shook her head in wonder. “Well, I don’t know what it is.” She dropped her hand but continued to gaze down at the stars in his hand. “They’re so beautiful.”
Loki glanced at her. The patterns of the stars he was holding were dancing in her eyes, giving them a soft, heavenly glow, like the illustration of an angel he had once come across in a book when he was a child back on Asgard. The city lights caught her dark hair, turning certain patches of it a slight auburn hue, the breeze lifting small strands of it, teasingly, and he caught a scent of her shampoo, which smelled vaguely of cinnamon, not at all unappealing. In the darkness, her skin looked almost as pale as his own, yet brushed with a soft pink blush that gave her a warm, healthy glow.
He could feel his heart racing as he answered her. “Yes...very beautiful.”
Ash watched him lift his hand and send Cancer back into the sky again, before she turned to gaze back down at the city of London. Lit by night, it was certainly a lovely sight, the buildings silhouetted and jutting at odd angled against the star-filled sky. She sighed, happily, holding the bottoms of her coat sleeves, feeling the material in her fingers. “Oh, I’d stay up here all night if I didn’t have to go to work tomorrow!”
Loki smiled. “Maybe we can do this again sometime? At the weekend?”
“Yeah!” Ash laughed. “Forget film night; we’ll just bring the snacks up here and star-gaze!” Turning to him, he saw that her eyes were shining, though not with tears, even though her voice sounded slightly emotional when she spoke next. “Thanks for bringing me up here, Loki. It’s been incredible.”
Loki shrugged. “It’s the least I can do. I mean,” he added, awkwardly, almost losing his nerve as she stepped up to him, “you’ve done so much for me; taken me in when I had nowhere else to go; made sure I’m not hungry or bored...”
Ash smiled. “Well, you’re very welcome.” Then, tucking her hands, rather regretfully, into her pockets, she added with a sigh “But I suppose I really should get back to bed if I’m up at six again tomorrow.”
“Come on, then.” Loki took her hand again. “And close your eyes this time; it’ll help with the dizziness.”
Ash did as he suggested and when she next opened them, they were both sitting back on her bed. Kicking off her boots, gratefully, she unbuttoned her coat and turned to him. “You were right. I’m not dizzy at all now.”
“I know,” Loki smirked, already under the duvet.
“You know, if I had that power, I’d save a hell of a lot on bus fares,” Ash joked, joining him. Then, to his surprise, she took his hand and gave it a squeeze in both of her own. “That really was amazing, Loki. Thanks for showing me.”
“You’re welcome,” Loki managed to say as she rolled over away from him and settled back into her usual sleeping position. The second she was asleep, however, he rolled onto his back and slapped his hand to his forehead. This wasn’t meant to happen. They were meant to be just flatmates, friends at most, and now he was finding himself attracted to her. How? True, she was kind and he liked her, but he had assumed that that was all it was; liking her, in the way that he was meant to like Sif, and Fandral, and Hogun and Volstagg; the way he was meant to like Frigga and Thor, and to some extent, he supposed, Odin.
So why, in that second on the roof when he had noticed just how beautiful she actually was, had it taken him all of his self control not to kiss her?