Post-Avengers. Loki is brought before Odin. Inspired by the song "Forever My Father" by Go Radio.
I just needed you to lift me up
Like you did when we were younger
When the lightning and the thunder
Had me clinging to your heart
For someone to lift me up
When I'm down and I'm forgotten
You'll forever be my father
Odin All-father sat hunched upon his great golden throne, broad hands clutching the lean sceptre on his lap, his head bowed over it. The blue jewel at its crown shone dimly at him, a weak glow resting on his finger tips as they enveloped the light of the orb. He sighed. Huginn cawed softly into the All-father's ear, and the king looked to the doors. The jet raven fluttered and came to rest at his feet. Muninn bristled and clutched his master's shoulder with sharp talons. Odin winced.
As the king watched the doors to the throne room open, his heart sank. He set his jaw and clenched his teeth, sitting up straight and proud. Only the quivering of his lip and the frantic blinking of his eye gave him away.
Loki stepped into the long throne room, small, a pinprick on the horizon. He was being led by Thor, a strong hand gripping the younger's arm. When they approached the king, Thor released his grip and bowed shortly.
"Father," he sighed, unsure of whether he was permitted to be pleased to be home, or if it wasn't yet the time, "I have returned." A slight smile graced Thor's face, met with a gentle softening of his father's face. Not quite a smile. Not quite a sigh.
Loki fixed his eyes upon his feet. He remained silent; the metal muzzle over his mouth assured that. He could have spoken histories with his eyes, had he wanted to. He could have overturned the ships in the harbour with a single glare, could have roasted his father's ravens with a single glance, such was his rage – if he had wanted to. He remained silent.
"Go. Leave me with him," Odin spoke, his voice deceptively sure, his eyes fixed on the downcast visage of his adopted son.
"Father! I should be here, I amthe one who returned him to Asgard! I should be here for his trial!" Thor's voice rose, causing his father's weary head to loll and his hand to raise, silencing him.
"You will go now, Thor Odinson." The king's voice was quiet, reserved. The son of the All-father knew better than to argue the point further. He left, letting the colossal doors clamour shut behind him. The guards shifted on the spot.
Odin stood, using the sceptre as a shaky support. Loki watched surreptitiously as his father's knees shook and his steps wavered as he came down from the throne's pedestal to stand before him. Even in his elder years, he was taller than his black-haired progeny.
"Loki," the All-father rested a hand on his son's shoulder, yet still he would not meet his father's gaze, "tear that ridiculous gag from your mouth before I do it myself."
Loki lifted his bound hands from under his vestment, glancing at his father from under a lock of ebony hair. He shrugged a little, pincer-like eyebrows lifting over ocean-green eyes. The king of Asgard scowled with palpable acidity as he struck the curved blade of Loki's sceptre against the fragile Midgard chains, before striding away and throwing the damned abomination over the balcony, into the ocean, out of reach. Loki paused, hands lifted limply free by his chest. He flexed his tender aspen wrists before pulling the iron snout away from his aching jaw.
"Thank you," Loki muttered, neither his mouth nor his throat quite ready to speak just yet; his voice rattled with the new-found effort it took.
"For what?" Odin turned, the sunlight glinting off his golden armour, "For letting you run wild further even than any of the nine realms? Or perhaps for almost destroying one of them?" The older god's voice rose dangerously, his posture leaning in towards his son. The ravens ruffled their feathers.
"Father, I barely scratched the surface of –" Loki started and his eyes widened as his father bit back.
"Of? Of a city? Of countless lives you snuffed out, extinguished! All for what? For power?" He refused his son the chance to cut in, moving heavily down the shallow steps into his child's space; Loki did not step back, "A pathetic tirade! A child's irate folly! A fit of petulance, nothing more!"
"A child's folly? Petulance? Oh, how you would love that, father! Reduce me to the child I once was, to the ignorant infant I used to be! How simple that would be, wouldn't it? Make me out to be the jealous heir to a throne that will never be mine, ignoble whelp, mewling into my mother's arms, dilute me to that just as you always did!" Loki's voice regained its fervour as he took a step towards his father, who retreated in their dance of frontiers.
"I? I? You dilute yourself! You could have been great! You were meant to be a king! You could have been king!" Odin paused, his breath short; when he spoke again, his voice was calmer, his hand placed upon the cheek of his lost son, "I never understood why you hated me so; why you always turned from me and hurt me by becoming what I never hoped for you to be."
"And what is that, All-father?" Loki took a step back, out of his father's reach, eyes glistening with hateful tears, arms raised at his sides in deprecating glory, "A destroyer of worlds? A god of, what, mischief? How quaint. No, no. I only ever wanted for myself what you showered upon Thor, nothing more than that!"
"You were both to be kings, I –"
"NO!" Odin stammered into silence as the broken god before him doubled over, bellowing his anger into the ground, "This, this is why I am this way, father. You think of me as a king, as a merger, as a – a trade to better secure your real son's claim to your throne! Never as a son! Never as anything more than currency once I started to think for myself, once I stopped being your chi – " He smiled, covering the grimace it soon became with a quivering hand, disdainfully wiping the wetness from his cheeks, "no, not your child. Your pet,that's more likely. Never to be trusted with the truth."
"Loki! You were – you are my son!"
"Oh? And what of when I was a child, 'father'? When I was no higher than your knees and you would take Thor and Mjölnir out onto the plains and leave me with mother, leave me to practise my magic alone? What was I then?"
"You speak of distant memories, Loki! Irrelevancies! You cannot be excused for your crimes based on a child's view of the world!"
"Irrelevancies? When I was so terrified by the thunder Thor would conjure to haunt my nightmares and the lightning he would send shooting over my head, to use me as target practice for his birthright– what was I then?" Loki's emerald eyes shone, staring irrevocably into those of the king, who slumped into his throne, tired.
"You were my child, you are –"
"Your child! Yes, I would come running to my father who would take me into his arms and hold me tight against the horrors of the world. Isn't that right? And what of later years, father?" Loki trod silently closer to the king, one slow step for each venomous sting, "What of when I became your second-rate bargaining tool? What of when Thor and I came of age? What was I to you then, when I was cast aside, forgotten, pushed into the shadow of my brother's glorious legacy?"
The god of chaos leant over the All-father, strands of his black hair hanging over the king's head. Odin turned to face the stranger before him, seeing the face of the son he once loved, watching a man he never knew burn himself from the inside out.
"You were my son. You are stillmy son. You never needed me, Loki. What was I to do when the son I raised, took from the jaws of death and war and brought into a world of plenty, of peace, turned his back on me? I was so proud of you, my son. So proud to call you my son. I wish you could have been proud to call me your father."
Loki faltered. Some of the rage within him quelled as a wave of something new, something foreign, extinguished his sustaining flame. He felt remorse. Proud? Was he proud of the king sitting below him now? He observed Odin's strong jaw, resplendent armour, and disregarded it all. The sole aspect of the withered king holding his gaze now was his one eye, the other gauged away by a creature more closely related to him than the god who had raised him. And yet...there was something in the king's gaze that held Loki fast. He couldn't be sure what it was. But as that wave of guilt, of culpability, of realisation snuffed his anger, he was reminded of his childhood.
He remembered Thor's lightning waking him from sleep.
He remembered his father's voice calling to him in the night. He was worried. Loki never screamed.
He remembered the feel of those strong arms, lifting him away, away, into safety.
He remembered countless times he had seen that very same gaze as the one the king, his father, bore now.
He remembered the pain he caused himself in pushing his family aside. He remembered the expression of his own pain on the faces of the Midgardian people he enslaved, he murdered. Yes, he could admit it now. He had murdered them.
He remembered that pain. He felt it anew, stronger than ever before. It brought him to his knees; such agony, such tangible, crumbling agony within himself. Yes, he could admit that he felt it, now. The pain, the sadness, the hope encased within it, locked deep inside regret and fear.
Yes, he could admit that he remembered what it was to be loved.