Written for Sifki Week Day 2 prompt - secrets

A secret. He is the one who defined the terms of their arrangement. Their pact was made in the dying firelight of his chambers, a deliberate agreement regarding what would follow.

This was only a fling, this thing happening between the two.

They were free and open.

There was to be no talk of "them".

It meant nothing.

No attachment.

No commitments nor allegiance.

Just a dalliance that would burn hot before inevitably crumbling to ash.

She had agreed. A lasting relationship between them was unfathomable, given his status and promiscuity paired with her obligations to her craft. Public knowledge of their affair was undesirable to both of them. This would be their little secret. And so they carried on that fateful night, happy in their mutual understanding, moving from the furs laid before the fire to tumble into his bed heaped with silk.

It was his insistence to deal in shadows and stairways. But this fact did little to stem his newfound contempt for their rules. Simmering and easily overlooked at first, the longing had now grown to the point that he could hardly stand it.

She had not asked for this, and he had demanded assurance against it. He knows that he could not confront her with these reactions and emotions. It is his secret to bear, and bear alone. Loki will keep his word, and keep his silence; tongue tied and heart shredding, he finds another way to soothe the emotions that brim inside of him, threatening to spill out.

He whispers his secret to her but, not with his voice.

Tracing slow letters, he writes Bound , looped with the pad of his thumb into the delicate skin of her hip as they doze, sated and satisfied atop his bed.

Warm and serene, he washes her hair in the tub, grazing Loyalty into her scalp with shampoo slick fingernails.

Feet flying while she laughs and runs in his wake, he pulls her by the hand down hallways and scrawls Us into her palm with a sly knuckle.

Heavy and unhurried, bathed in moonlight after a grand feast, Sif turns and lifts her hair for him to unclasp her pendant's chain and untie her gown. Loki ghosts his fingertip to spell Devotion down her spine

By candlelight as they move together, between jagged, frantic breaths, Loki's tongue paints Forever against her throat, his face tucked against her neck.

His lips brush the skin of her stomach, her shoulders, her breasts, every inch he can reach, he forms every rune, every letter, every symbol, in every language he knows. His mouth writes Love .

Each night, word by word, he writes a love letter, one she could never read. His secret.