"I remember you, Watcher. You'd keep watching all of us, wouldn't you, if you had your way?" said the Valkyrie, circling, feinting, circling more. "Never bestirring yourself. Never choosing to act. You'd watch and only watch, if you were able."
It was less taunt than tactic, possibly. Where speaking too much on the battlefield was a hazard, distracting one's opponent in the sparring ring could reap fine results. Still, it struck home beyond that, in a way she might or might not have intended. Heimdall was thus forced to consider before providing an answer--and, in the considering, neatly fumbled a block any child would have long since mastered. He landed on his back, the Valkyrie's arm at his throat.
"I yield," he said, as he had in his consideration found little enough worth saying.
"Go again?"
And there was a question that required not the least consideration. "Of course."
*
It was a surprise to at least one of them when they went to bed.
It had been much longer for him than it had been for her. No part of her was a mystery to him, this Valkyrie he'd looked in on every so often in the centuries since he'd chanced to glimpse her, so diminished and so far from home. Every part of her was nevertheless a revelation. the clench of her thighs around his head as he tasted her, the clench of her cunt around his cock as he moved within her. Her somehow less than mocking laughter when he came much, much too quickly.
"Pretty sure," she said, and he slipped his fingers into her, one and then another, "pretty sure you did that on purpose."
He found it easily enough, the place that would make her writhe, perhaps even scream. "Why would I do that?"
"So you could watch."
"Ah."
"Are you watching?"
"I am," he said.
*
"Been a while, huh?" she asked, a little later. She'd squirmed, and screamed, as he'd thought she might; toward the end, drawn tight and shaking beneath his touch, she'd closed her eyes. That was something Heimdall had never understood. How someone could choose not to see, when they were embroiled in this act or any other.
"A long while indeed," he admitted.
Again, he considered her tactic from before. He did not consider for a moment saying that his inaction in the event of Loki's rule had surely counted as otherwise; or that he had bestirred himself indeed when Hela had come; or that every day aboard this ship felt like another step toward being part of things he should only have been observing. She already saw him more than did any of the others. Perhaps because she remembered him. Perhaps because when he looked at her, she alone of all of them truly looked back.
It wasn't quite pleasing, not exactly unnerving. It was, perhaps, merely different. Another new thing among a hoard of new things. It was something Heimall would think on often, over the following months and years:
How strange it was, to be seen.