1281/Scattered Leaves

Scattered Leaves
Date of Scene:	05 July 2017
Location:	West Harlem - Mercy's Garage
Synopsis:	Mercy and Loki return to her garage after defeating Coyote.
Cast of Characters:	Mercy Thompson, Loki

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Mercy Thompson has posed:
While the four were still together Mercy's mind was occupied with things that needed done. She might have needed some prompting, but anything asked of her was eventually answered. It's only now, after Claire and Bucky have been tucked safely at Claire's apartment, that Mercy's attention turned inward. Her gaze lost some of its focus and her eyes took on the cast of a thousand yard stare.

To Mercy it almost feels as if days passed when it was only hours. Not even a full twenty-four, not even twelve, just /hours/. She's finding her thoughts are like leaves upon the wind; going every which way but straight. One minute focused on a mundane thought and then tossed right back into moments from tonight.

Claire and her fear, the guilt she keeps locked up tight. That guilt something she'll one day have to make peace with, otherwise it might destroy her sense of self.

Bucky - oh Bucky - the horrors he's seen. That they've all seen, though it's not quite the same for Claire and Mercy. Those images will eventually fade; for the Soldier he likely will never be that lucky.

And her own moments, of course. Sharp teeth descending upon a bared belly, a tug, a tear, pain and blood. A wound so terrible that Mercy knew she was dying. That shock too great for the coyote's psyche to shake. However, before the coyote could transition from the astral plane to something even higher, something stopped her. A name. Her name. Called by a familiar voice. The owner of that voice here with her now, helping to bring everyone home, including her. A solidity there when everything now feels so much less so.

Loki has posed:
Time is a fluid entity rather than rigid and unyielding. After all the paths she proverbially walked in the mind of her own kinsmen, Mercy might have another couple notches on her lifeline ticked off. Claire and Bucky have their own burdens to bear but, as pure mortals, they're accustomed to crushing experiences into a limited frame of a couple decades anyways.

Skinwalkers stripped of their power are another matter altogether.

He can pursue the matter with unaccustomed grace and care for someone decidedly mercurial, impatient, and callous in most respects. Tactically Loki draws his boundaries, and prepares to wait out the storm of shellshock descended upon her. It's not really an experience he shares. Mortality isn't his cup, and even slain, he returns to himself.

A latte may not be the right choice. She has coffee, anyways, and the strong demitasse filled by Italian espresso to whet her nose. Cookies baked for her would be impossible without assistance from some dazzled baker, so whatever she has on hand will be her nourishment. But that chocolate cake, half-gone, is still somewhere in the kitchen.

Him, too. He does not stray far while she undergoes her own mental extremis. The ragged bleachings of her suffering are plain enough to him who sees things in spectra without end, and interprets them how he will.

"Eating, drinking, physical things will help." It's the only advice he is willing to give. "They probably will have no appetite for days, or they will."

Mercy Thompson has posed:
A Loki in her kitchen.

If she were of a better mind there might have been a gentle jest there, but for now any tease is lost. His words, however, are enough to bring her into the kitchen when he moves there. An anchor to thoughts that would pull her away from the here and now.

While her kitchen isn't overly large nor tiny, but somewhere in-between and it'll hold the two comfortably enough. Coffee is definitely there, as are a few other odds-n-ends that people often have around for idle snacking. And of course, that chocolate cake. His words and the scent of that never-having-ever-been-eaten cake, twice now, pulls something of the old Mercy back. It's like a tattered cloak of who she is, or was, being gathered back around her. Somewhat the same, but different now.

Focusing upon Loki, Mercy's gaze will search his face for a few silent seconds, before a ghost of something - not precisely a smile - twitches a corner of her mouth. "Cake -" There would have been more, should have been more, as the coyote intended to heavily deflect all of tonight with humor, but she finds the rest of her sentence suddenly stuck in her throat. The treacherous thing.

That humor of hers so often used in stressful times is lost to her for now.

Then to prove its point a faint tremble of her bottom lip (likewise treacherous) gives way to all of what she feels.

While that lip of hers reveals all, there isn't any tears from the coyote. Not yet, at least.

And while her feet are frozen to the spot for an instant, that second passes, and Loki will find the coyote stepping right into his personal space. As long as he doesn't move away from her, or make any negating gestures, Mercy will reach for him. For something so simple as a hug.

Loki has posed:
Kitchens serve as the heart of a house. Family gathering places besides, the nearest thing to a modern day hearth represents something fundamentally important. Nourishment for the soul and warmth for the psyche, Loki definitely recognizes the parallels. The skinwalker choosing to stay there instead of hiding in her bedroom or disappearing under a rattle-trap murder device, a wrench in hand, gives him some hope.

The darkness still stalks his resting thoughts. Dark rage and ice-cold protectiveness follow one another in endless cycles. He's caught up in paying attention to Mercy rather than allowing himself to stop and feel. One step ahead means the roof is still standing when his volatile emotions are something akin to a prickled wolverine. He wants to lash out with tooth and claw against another's chosen progeny.

And that's just not bloody going to happen. Accepting it doesn't mean liking it.

He reaches to reclaim the paper bag for her. Inside the white box contains the chocolate cake, though mysteriously pieces of it are gone and the crumbs completely absent. Flicking the top open takes the stroke of a thumb and little more. He sets the opened container in front of her and blindly rummages through drawers for a fork, presuming the little desert wolf doesn't bury her nose into the chocolate body and savage it with her teeth, sharp or not.

His other arm accepts her into the chosen proximity made for himself, allowing the dark-haired woman to exist at more than arm's reach. It feels proper and banks the smoldering wrath still looking for an outlet, the dim gleam of uncontrolled emotion ablaze behind his green eyes.

"You've never been treated that way before, have you?" A guess partitions past and present, Asgardian prince and man pretending at human connections and acknowledgment. "Nothing changes you, Mercy. It's a bad dream. You wake up into the sunshine, and its power over you ends." He drags his hand down to hers, curling his fingers over hers until they press into his palm. "/This/ is real. What you saw is in the mind. This is what matters. Your flesh remembers what it is. Your soul holds no conceptions. The mind right now follows their lead and learns from them."

Mercy Thompson has posed:
Perhaps another day she'll bury herself in work. Or her bedroom, but tonight she needs something other than silence. She needs another's touch, another presence to be near. To banish all that's swirling in her head right this moment.

Forks are easy enough for Loki to find. Third drawer to the left. All the silver-ware is there for nimble fingers to find and take.

Whether she can scent his repressed rage and anger is hard to say, for now, likely not. She's nose-blind right this moment, too trapped within her own emotions to see much beyond that.

When he accepts her into his arm, Mercy can't quite help the close press against him, even as she turns her face just enough to press it against his chest, or shoulder, whichever is closest to her. His questions about tonight are heard, but it'll take Mercy a minute to actually answer them. The tremble that started with her lip has transferred to subtle shakes throughout her whole body. Nothing wracking, or debilitating, but definitely there and easily felt. Her body is fighting against itself; the mind and heart at war with one another. The more logical self saying she's fine, while the hindbrain says she nearly died.

His words do, however, help her to focus when the shivering lessens. The touch of his hand and her fingers to his palm helping even more. She doesn't quite pick her head up to look at him, but she will speak finally. "No. Nothing like that. Ever." And her words stop again, as she considers everything that's rolling within her mind. "He did something like that to Claire too, Yasha -" And there's a hesitancy now with saying Yasha, not now that she knows his real name, "- Pulled memories and made them worse. Terrible." Then suddenly a thought occurs to her, and Mercy's head raises upward with a jerk, her brown eyes searching Loki's face suddenly. "You too? Did he do that to you too?"

Loki has posed:
Tonight, he needs to defy his divinity and quench the burning wrath coiling in his veins even now. The distance between him and the moment the Winter Soldier detected the two human figures lying in the forest clearing is far shorter for someone who measures his life in generations and millennia. Affronts are not something Loki, son of Laufey, son of Odin, has ever been good at allowing.

Turning the other cheek is so hard for the selfish, demanding creature forced to bite his tongue. Coyote in all his permutations might just take this moment to hide from the proverbial shuddering of the Trickster.

Comfort is something else entirely. The lessons from the golden queen in her sunrise gown require some effort for Loki to summon out of memory, even approximating the softer tone she adopted to ease the childhood hurts so long ago. Western civilization wasn't even really present then.

A hand strokes Mercy's side and back when the trembling becomes the more apparent, her loss of composure at the subconscious level answered in kind. He sets his chin atop her shadowy hair full of secretive fragrances and memories of blood, copper-hot notes, soil, and broken pine needles. Whatever makes her underneath is something sought to improve his disposition and the clutching possessiveness that has //no// business rearing its damn head right now.

And it does. Because the bear cub she once lifted in a hip carry is also a globe-spanning serpent prepared to devour the planet or munch on the sun if thwarted. Breathing the little deeper of her, he curls his arm around her a bit more protectively.

Nothing to do with the fact she said Yasha's name. Not at all, no. Mere coincidence, not causation. And the sky is orange.

"Forced me to relive parts of my life as he imagined them? Of course." A grim smirk accompanies those words. "As if I haven't done that before. Your forefather I might worry slightly more about. But bulling around in me? He's quite lucky I didn't decide to disperse his consciousness across four realms."

Mercy Thompson has posed:
Of course.

His grim words so honest and forthright. It's enough to cause Mercy's expression to shift. Guilt creates lines along her mouth, upon her forehead and shadows within her eyes, as she looks up at the Asgardian Prince. Her expression only shifts when he so off-handedly mentions having had this done to him before. A note of horror now enters those light-brown eyes of hers, adding to the already chaotic whirl of all else.

"You've had this done to you before?" Begins the coyote, her words low, pained - pained for him. "Loki."

But what can she say to that? That's terrible seems to fall quite short in Mercy's mind for this particular situation. And the fact that she helped to bring it on again? It's enough to call back the treachery of her lower lip. Though slightly less than before. Slowly, her body and mind are adapting to these circumstances.

Slowly.

"I'm so sorry." She manages, her voice still holding a heavy note of heartache; for him, for herself, Claire and Bucky.

The mention of her forefather brings a slight edge to her expression, shifting some of that guilt, that sadness away, for something close to anger. While she could straighten from his hold, she doesn't, not yet. "Father." Says the coyote, her words laced with a bitterness that was never there before. "And while I'd like to say you should have, I'm glad you didn't." Meaning her half-brother, she's glad he didn't disperse him to the four corners of the world. "There was a moment there where I saw all of me. Or maybe I saw the whole of it. The truth of it all." She mutters, her brows furrowed as she considers how to describe it all, "Something at least, but I don't think he purposefully went out seeking to go mad - and I don't think it was something as simple as coincidence either."

Now her voice just sounds tired and her head drops back against him, "But I do remember one thing. You called me back. If you hadn't I don't think I'd be standing here." There's a slight hitch to her voice with those words, "Thank you."

Loki has posed:
"Our enemies are many. Mine moreso, as a sorcerer. You did not walk into this knowingly." He brushes Mercy's hair off her brow, the better to place his jaw to the unveiled stretch of copper-dusted skin. At some deep level it satisfies the immediate need that refuses to uncoil itself.

He can go beat the stubborn rictus serpent later. Her gaping pauses and apologies remind once more of her terrible fragility, the weakness found in more than teeth ripping into the skin of her belly and the vital organs underneath. Memories stained in viscous ink-stains on the fabric of thought will not slow to fade. If ever they'll fade.

"He touches you again, I will not be so kind as I was." Kind. That's a mockery of a thought of compassion and service on one's needs to the greater welfare of the community, something the self-servicing godling and a much older, crueller one collectively cannot stoop to do. Frigga's soft touch and concerned look resonates from the depths of childhood and he banishes them with only a little effort. As if that bright star in his life wouldn't have taken up a sword and descended in full furious majesty, worthy of any valkyrie, to defend them. Three mortals who shouldn't mean so much. Who should mean nothing.

He traces the sinuous arch of her back in long strokes that profess nothing but smoothing out the ruffled fur hidden somewhere away. "Why are you apologizing for something you did not do?" Blunt words. Smooth, Loki, smooth. He needs to practice his pitch, the mastery of manipulation fairly poor when applied to making someone feel better. "The astral plane never holds a complete view. Symbols and possibilities disguise certain truths, but they are shaded heavily by perception, personality, experience. What you saw is not the whole of you." He kisses her temple. "You are making it terribly tempting to lock you up until you are comfortable in your own skin. I know you'll box me for even trying, however, so I will ask..."

How the hel does he ask? It's not a game he knows, rules so strange. But try. Must try. Must not be the bastard control-freak he wants to be. "What do you want me to do?"

Mercy Thompson has posed:
Enemies.

Now she has enemies, doesn't she. A mad half-brother taken by their manipulating father. And whatever else may be out there. A terrible thought, but not something for tonight. Not quite yet.

The press of his jaw against skin allows for a faint return pressure from Mercy. Not quite a nuzzle, but something close, as she instinctively reaches for that offered comfort. The touch consoling both, it seems.

Three mortals. Whoever thought Loki of Asgard would feel such a thing. The same can be said for Mercy. All three, especially Loki mean something to her. Though perhaps the whys of it are easier to understand for her than the Asgardian.

And while others might make noises to his threat, Mercy doesn't. Well, perhaps she does allow one small sound. Something between sadness and a watery sort of amusement.

He's so like a wolf in Mercy's mind. They would have said something similar, even done something similar; though perhaps with more growl and definite fur. Not that Loki couldn't sprout fur, as she saw earlier within that dream world. His touch down along her back is soothing to the coyote's fur, as it metaphorically settles into less sharply spiked hackles and into smooth lines of russet and cream.

Those blunt words of his will pull an actual expression from Mercy. The tiniest of crooked smiles, which might be felt, as she has yet to lift her face upward. Empathy. The few times she's expressed it to him, for him, he's always pushed it aside. As if he didn't need such a thing - when all creatures, godly or not, do. One day she's going to ask why he shies away from such things. What happened to him that he has so many walls up.

The kiss to her temple and his words brings her head upward, away from its hidden spot against him, and he'll see her expression looking far more normal. Less pale. Less lost. His advice about the astral plane is considered, but hardly digested. That will come with sleep and possibly a meal. Though hunger doesn't necessarily gnaw at her belly just yet. No. Instead, the coyote will allow the softest of snorts to be heard, that sound holding an almost hidden note of humor, that amusement finally being dredged from someplace deep within her. "Box you. I like that. I'm going to remember that for later use."

Then, "Stay. I want you to stay. That's really it." Her words are stated in that typical quiet honesty of Mercy Thompson. She could hide behind walls, or her humor more, but for this particular night all her defenses have been pulled aside by the shadows.