#cause your take on loki and sigyn has me like 👀

[wineworshipped]

Gods bless Sigyn for the mercy she offers him in finishing that thought. He’s a god of truth—but he’s never been good at it. The emotional truth is easy to tell, but changes like the weather, making his truths equally as mercurial. He can’t bring himself to smile, but his expression softens, merlot eyes conveying a gratitude his lips refuse to reflect. He keeps his eyes on hers and grounds himself in them rather than his spiraling mind or her branching scars. He knew she’d get it. The minor gods always do; they stick together more than most gods cling to their pantheons. He might be an Olympic god, but his pantheon’s certainly never treated him as equal. The forgotten gods of other pantheons—Sigyn, Sekhmet, Chandra, gods and goddesses like them—have always felt more like home to the outcast god.

Thank fuck for that right now.

“Y’know,” he starts, “I always wondered about that. You two. Right around the time the mortals started deciding Loki was some leather clad twink, I started wondering what was gonna become of you guys. You should talk to Sepphie, figure out who does her and the hubbie’s PR. If they can turn a kidnapping into a by-choice tale of feminism, there’s gotta be something they can do for you.” It might sound a little hollow, off-putting, but he means it sincerely. It had mended long-destroyed bridges between Demeter and Hades; if a little good PR was capable of that, there was nothing it couldn’t do!

Of course, now he’s using Loki and Sigyn as a shield to avoid talking about the one thing he knows he needs to talk about. No telling what stories Sigyn has heard—some are more shocking, less truthful, than others. If they even tell of the marriage at all, that is.

“A lot of shit was going on at the time. Ignoring the…let’s call it ‘family drama,’ I’d just gotten back to Greece after a few years outside of it. Kinda hard even now to tell how long—wasn’t in my right mind, story for another day. I’d just gotten off a pirate ship (again, long story) when I found her grieving in the surf. She was trying to drown herself.” The sun was beginning to dip back down into the sea, turning the ship in the distance into a tiny black shadow against it. Parts of her dress floated out as if reaching for the ship, torn in anger and pain and grief from her body. Her eyes burned with tears and saltwater and in their reddened state he had seen all the red that colored his vision, fueled his desires, for the last years…and for the first time since his ascension, the hardened shell over his heart cracked. For her. For her pain.

“I…wasn’t sure what to do. So I scooped her up out of the ocean and brought her further into the island with me. I told her that if she still wanted to die, she could do it in the morning and I’d even help her. We didn’t talk after that for a while. When the last of the sun was gone, she told me her story. It’s actually easier to find that part than it is to find our marriage—the, uh, hah!, the CliffNotes version is that there was a Minotaur, and a princess, and a whole lotta dead kids—and then a hero who killed a Minotaur and tricked two princesses. Stopped the slaughter but left his own savior for dead when he decided to pursue other ass.” A crass retelling, but no less true. Theseus and Phaedra were heroes, but not good people. Ariadne had been both. “You can imagine how she felt.

“A lotta people—here’s a laugh for ya—think I scared him off, or had Thena do it. (Can you imagine Thena doing me any favors? Hah!) But all I did was listen to her tale and trade her a few of my own. I think she expected me to be gone the next morning. I know I expected her to leave after she woke. But I was there and she stayed—more than stayed! She took charge!” Dio smiles, gently, lost in the warm haze of pleasant memories. He isn’t telling the story anymore; the story tells itself through his lips. “Funny how they do that, mortals. I had no plans to leave the island for a long time to come and I guess she just assumed we were both stranded there. She started organizing shelter and water, had me on food detail—flipped a switch overnight. We lived like that for a few weeks. Got comfortable. I was already in love with her, deciding how to break the whole ‘I’m a god’ thing to her, when Silenus showed up and took care of that for me.”

Oh, those dark, beautiful eyes, branded into his very soul from the first time they had met his own, how they widened in shock! He expected to feel chastened, apologetic, but he instead he found laughter rising in his throat and bubbling out into the air between them all. His clever Ariadne, savior of Crete and Athens, struck dumb by what she must now be seeing as having been obvious all along: a beautiful, mysterious stranger who was shipwrecked but unafraid, who feared neither the night nor the wilds, always able to acquire whatever was needed but seldom supplying answers—who else could he be but a god? Her eyes, those eyes, his stars, searched him carefully when she spoke. “Why didn’t you tell me?” His smile grew as he leaned close, tucking one wild curl behind her ear. “Why didn’t you ask?” When her laughter married with his in that moment, his soul married hers; the ritual days later would only confirm what was already true.

Tears flood present eyes and Dio has to look away; in the face of one faithful wife he fears catching a glimpse of another. He hasn’t spoken her name since Rome fell.

“God of ecstasy, joy, liberation—I had never known its Form before her, and I haven’t known it since.” Oof. You know he’s feeling some type of way when the inner narration and the outer swap places.

He’s a mess. He’s a mess and he knows that, and that’s why he hasn’t gone home—not to his Manhattan apartment, not to his villa on Olympus, not even to a fucking temple. It’s just that time of year again. He loosens his tie and collapses into the seat next to her, hair already a mess from where he’s pulled, carded, pushed back, and otherwise rearranged it in his frenetic fit.

This isn’t something he likes to share. But it’s just that time of year again and he doesn’t really want a repeat of what happened in Rome. He just also can’t trust many people, gods especially, with this.

“It’s…—y’know one of the worst parts of being a god?” Attacking this indirectly might make it easier. “Everyone knows your business. Even the private shit! But they don’t…know. Y’know? They hear a story and they think…whatever they’re gonna think, you know how mortals are and gods are even worse…but they never….”

Okay. Or attacking it indirectly might just lead him around in another short, frustrating circle. He drops his face into his hand with a groan, raking long fingers back up through his hair.

Fuck it. If there’s going to be a god to hear this and not judge—or at least not fucking weaponize it against him—it’s Sigyn. Probably. He takes a breath and lets it go, leaving his hand on his face so only one eye is left unobscured, staring directly into her face. Inviting her to stare back. Not everyone knows this story, somehow, even though it’s thousands of years old and not exactly a secret.

“Did you know I was married?”