Her scissors snick over the little tangling curls and he sits completely silent as she cries salt.
(a tradition: the closest relative of a criminal prepares him for execution, for burial.)
As she pulls back a strand of greasy hair, her fingers bump his cheek and he jerks away, hands crumpling into fists in his lap, pain lighting up his still-sensitive skin. Skin sewed like embroidery to let the silver tongue rot. A more organic, more permanent and more cruel mask than the one fitted on him before he came home. She wants to take it back, to not have hurt him at all, to pull the cords out and let him have his way with words like he used to, but reverse-torture is still torture.
Both people are shaking but the silver blades come together on course, and then she rubs water and and soap through the black and kisses the damp top of his head and the water is salt.
"Be brave, my son. My child. My child. Loki, my child."
He looks at her with dead frost-flat eyes, the ones she will have to close later on when there's peppermint splash red on white.
Takes her hand.