The battle was going as well as a battle could. You were fighting the monsters without issue, fighting with a mix of your blades and magic, staying near Loki, but each of you taking your own monsters to fight.

Everything was going smoothly. Which was about when things tended to go horribly wrong.

"SIGYN!" Loki bellowed from too far away to help. You turned, but everything seemed to be moving in slow motion. The creature behind you opened its mouth and you could see the fire ready to erupt, like staring down the maw of a dragon ready to spew fire.

Loki was running, but he wouldn't make it in time.

Then he teleported and he was there, shoving you out of the way of the blast. You fell hard on you ass on the asphalt and stared up in horror as Loki took the blast himself. "Loki, no!" You screamed, throwing up your hands instinctually, creating a shield between him and the fire breathing creature. It hadn't stopped all of the fire, but it had stopped the worst of the blast.

You scrambled to your feet as the creature turned to face you. Loki was down for the moment, wounded from the fire blast. You hoped it was only for the moment, that he wasn't terribly injured.

You had to deal with the monster before you could help Loki.

You vanished your dagger and summoned a sword. This was a much bigger monster and you needed a bigger blade to deal with it. You charged in, running to get close before it could blast more fire. It opened its maw again, clearly intending to do just that. You threw a ball of magic in its open mouth as you charged and drove your blade into its chest. The creature exploded from your ball of magic as your blade drove into its heart. You weren't taking chances with this one. Not when it had done so much damage already.

"That was disgusting, kid," Stark said into the comm in your ear as he flew over the scene.

"It hurt Loki," you replied evenly as you used magic to clean the monster guts off of you without even thinking about it as you rushed to Loki's side to see how injured he was.

Loki turned away from you, trying to hide his injured side. You rolled you eyes. All warriors were the same, it seemed. Though something seemed different about how he was hiding this particular injury. "Let me see. I can't help unless I know how bad it is," you told him firmly.

"Lady, I-"

"You had no issues calling me 'Sigyn' a moment ago," you told him sourly as you physically turned him so you could see how bad the injury was. He was standing and talking, so the wound couldn't be too horrible, or so you tried to convince yourself. You'd neglected to remember that he was an Asgardian warrior and they were trained differently and fought through all sorts of pain.

The armor of his left arm and side had been burned away. You saw where he had tried to raise his arm to protect his body and tried to shield before you had gotten your shield up. The king of his arm was burned and looked horrible. But that wasn't the curious thing. That just made you want to barf and get to immediate work healing him.

The curious thing was why the skin around the injury was blue with strange lines on it.

"You're lucky my mother taught me healing craft," you told him as you held your hand above the wound and got to work healing the burned skin. You hated doing this in the middle of battle, but it had to be done now. Loki wouldn't be able to fight with his arm burned so badly. You healed the worst of the damage as fast as you could, throwing more magic into it to heal it faster, despite Loki's silent protest on the matter.

Loki's skin remained blue when it was knit back together. "Thank you, Sigyn," he said softly, a quiet acknowledgement that things had changed between you. You weren't 'Lady' anymore, at your insistence, not after he had shouted your name on the battlefield. Not after you had healed him.

You nodded your acknowledgment of his words. You both looked pointedly at his blue skin. Loki sighed and inclined his head. "I believe I owe you an explanation. After the battle,"

"After the battle," you agreed and got back to it, trying to keep your mind on the battle at hand and not on the curiosity that was Loki. Your mind kept wandering back to Loki and the mystery of his blue skin.

Thankfully, the battle wrapped up pretty quickly afterwards, though you had to wait to get your answers. After the battle, the team had to wait for Shield to come clean up the scene, then came the post battle celebratory meal. Loki used magic to repair his armor at some point so no one else could see his injury or his blue skin. You hoped he would still give you answers once you got back to the tower like he had promised.

You knew what you had seen.