Eagle (A Loki love story)

Chapter 148

I was jolted awake unpleasantly by the sound of Dreyma crying. So much for her having slept through the past few nights. It seemed she knew it was finally safe to wail at the top of her lungs in the middle of the night. I rolled over and readjusted to my pillow covered both ears. Loki jerked awake a few minutes later and groaned.

"I'll go get her."

"No we can't. Eir said we have to let her cry it out."

"She's not crying just to cry, something's wrong."

"How could you possibly know that?" Even I couldn't distinguish her different types of crying, "And don't say sedir, because then I'd be able to sense it too."

"Not necessarily, doe. I trained in the art of sedir under the supervision of my mother and a few other masters over the course of a thousand years. All your skills come from a month of teaching yourself. Yes, you advanced farther than most could ever hope, but that is no substitute for time."

"Ok, ok. Why is she crying?"

"I believe she is lonely. This is a new place for her, and this is the first night one of us hasn't been sleeping in the room with her." That made a surprising amount of sense, "If you are alright with it, I'm going to move her crib into the doorway, as close as it can get to us."

"Yes, of course." Loki shimmied out from under the covers, doing his best to keep them tight. Moments later, I heard him cooing to Dreyma.

"What's wrong, my little one? Did you not know where your mother and I were? Do you want to come be with us?" I heard him moving things around, and his silhouette appeared in the doorway, followed by the crib. After carefully positioning it, he merely stood by it and continued to rock her.

It didn't take long for Dreyma to calm, nor did Loki have any trouble laying her back down before returning to me in bed.

"You're going to have to teach me how to do that."

"It would be my pleasure." He nuzzled my cheek, leaving a soft kiss there, followed by a more passionate one on my neck. It took all I had to keep quiet and not wake the baby. If it hadn't been for my iron will, Loki would have gone much farther, but I grabbed his wrist before it drifted too far south.

"Not tonight. Not until those tests come back."

"Forgive me. This has become...a bit of a habit recently." I'd already gathered that, it certainly hadn't been with me.

I took a deep breath to calm my mind. It wouldn't do anyone any good if I snapped at him now. He'd expressed his remorse and the past was the past, I just wasn't willing to let it go just yet.

That got easier during the next couple months, when the tests came back negative and the people had more to worry about than Loki's deceiving them. With our current progress, we would run out of supplies before we reached Earth, so we had two more weeks to figure out how to get three month's worth of supplies. Working as a team, we'd managed to get some semblance of a communications system up and running, and the same with the scanners, to look for possible supply stops. So far, all our searches had come up empty. However, that had not prevented out systems from picking up distress calls from Xandar a week ago. They had been invaded and mercilessly wiped out by Thanos for the Infinity Stone they had in their possession. Thor assured me that one: there was nothing we could've done about it and two: that we would slip below Thanos' notice, as we did not have that which he seeked. Only Loki and I knew otherwise.

It had taken a couple weeks, but Loki and I had gotten our relationship back on stable ground. He still sent Valkyrie the occasional glare when he felt she'd been looking at me too long or standing too close, but they never came to blows over it. That possessiveness had always been there to some degree, I knew, I'd seen him act similarly when someone like Steve got too close to his liking, despite his relationship with Bucky. As for Valkyrie, she just rolled her eyes and shrugged him off. Meanwhile, she had become one of Dreyma's favorite people, and was the only person Dreyma would allow to hold her for longer than a few moments. And not even Thor had reached that point yet. Thor and Loki had also become closer, after he got over Loki's initial betrayal. According to Thor, they had not gotten along this well since before I knew them, before Loki discovered his heritage. But I still couldn't get them to tell me what this 'Get Help' was, much to Loki's relief.