For a while, I've had an itching to do an Adventure Time/Marvel crossover centering around the idea that Finn is the current incarnation of the mighty Thor! And then I decided to tie it into the Marvel world more thoroughly, but haven't done anything like that yet. And I like the mythological Thor and espicially myth!Loki, espicially the versions presented in the American Gods-inspired tabletop RPG Scion. And I was interested by the whole 'weight of belief' concept enforcing their personalities and destinies and so on.
But that's on the burner-side, pun not intended, so I decided to do a short drabble concerning Loki's possible Adventure Time incarnation and Flame Princess, because my mind will not stop comparing those two.
Disclaimer: I don't own anything I don't own.
...
The volcanic rock was rough and more than a little sharp on the Flame Princess' shoes, pricking her feet a little, and the slight discomfort was strangely appealing.
The lands outside the Fire Kingdom were too fragile. It was too easy to make things burn just by being there; step on grass, the whole plains go up in flame. Fly over a tree, a stray spark ignites a leaf and then the whole forest is on fire. Have a little fight with a three-headed giant on the way back home and people start yelling at you for incinerating him until there's just a smoking crater in the ground with the flames spinning out colors in beautiful round-and-round shimmers and also he got burned so bad there aren't even bones left. Just ash, and sometimes a sense of bitter regrets.
Flame Princess frowned and poked the lava sluggishly poking up against the pseudo-'beach' she sat at, her finger sinking into it without any of the damage she was have suffered if she hadn't had elemental fire running through her bones, the radiant passion of the sun itself suffused in her flesh and her muscles and her spirit, lesser heats bowing to the very touch of her flame. All this and several other semi-philosophical thoughts ran through her head as quick as flashes of summer lightning, concerning such things as passion and hate and loyalty and all the other things that fire really was and it eventually occured to her to think that lava was molten rock, and seemed proof that everything burned with the appropiate effort. The sky burned. Mountains burned. And even the rock miles under people's feet burned.
There were so many ways to burn, and there were more benign ways then people seemed to think.
She thought of the blond boy - Finn? That was the name the dog had given, wasn't it? Too hard to be sure, too hard to be certain, too hard to be safe about anything she knew half the time - and frowned. She gave the lava another enthusiastic poke, producing a single thick ripple spreading for a short distance and sinking back into the molten substance of the lava.
Her amusement halted at the sight of the lava slowly turned in concretic circles, splitting away and making small ripples that swelled up into large bubbles that popped back into the lava, the chunks barely visible for the few seconds they had before they merged with the lava again, but her sharp eyes saw them nonetheless, and saw that they became mass of wriggling snakes and snarling wolves and heads laughing as madly as they could even with their lips sewn shut with shards of obsidian pecularily unmelted-
The thick and odd splash signaled their merging with the lava. The Flame Princess blinked. "That's weird," She said, and while it was technically the appropiate answer, it still seemed insufficient. Lava didn't splash, for one thing. And that was still the least unusual thing about that matter.
She wondered, briefly, if that was the calling card of some malign entity with ill-natured designs on her life. She grinned at the thought; she was feeling so confused and grumpy and not knowing what she was supposed to do about this whole Finn thing and such an emo blah. Nothing made her feel quite as happy as the opportunity to just beat the stuffing out of some idiot. And then maybe make with the ka-booming.
"Sweetness," She murmured under her breath, small flames licking out over her teeth and sweet on her lips.
A small motion, behind her. Her head twitched to the side, ever so imperceptibly, and saw a flash of yellow, brighter and obnoxiously bright in this realm of flame-orange and sun-white and lantern-red and ash-black.
She felt something behind her, and the unmistakable sense of someone invading her personal space (which, in the appropiate circumstances, extended several miles from her person) and possibly staring at her. She waited a few moments more. Absolutely nothing happened, and she resolved to wait a little longer to see if whoever it was happened to be sneaking up on her, and she got to three and a half seconds before she whirled around, blazing up into the air all roiling flames and brilliant solar flares spun off from her incandescence and screaming, "WHAT DO YOU WANT!"
Her attention focused to the humanoid that had evoked her temper; a male of uncertain species sitting on a obsidian rock a short distance from her, smirking at her from under a low-angled yellow hat with a wide brim, his face abnormally thin and something off about his mouth. Even sitting down, folded up like a bird that wasn't sure how all it's parts were supposed to go when not in flight, he was unusually tall and unusually stocky; the yellow suit he was wearing, ragged and patched in places and heavily wrinkled like he had slept in it for years, was so severely rumbled and yet so bright that with the light from the lava flickering around, it looked like he was wearing flames of his own, frozen in time and wrapped around his body.
He looked at her with a curious expression, still smirking the whole time. It reminded her, with a soft pang, of a time when her grandfather had arrived to see her. "I want to do whatever it is that I want to do when the mood takes me," He said. "Maybe spreading some chaos here and there, advancing a plot or two to pass the time, and definitely irritating the living hell out of anyone that it akes my fancy to annoy." His smirk grew slightly wider. "…Too much information?"
She stared at him, her temper cooling very slightly. "…What's a 'hell'?" She finally said, several other thoughts fighting it out against each other for supremecy and this being the one that seemed the most interesting.
He looked at her, smirk faltering briefly, the look of infuriating smugness melting into confusion for just long enough for her to adopt a smug smirk of her own. "Ah," He said after a moment. "I forget. Convention of the time, don'tcha know. Meant 'Nightosphere'. Probably goes better with people if I say the modern name, but…hey, loyalties." He nodded, as if this made sense to him, and gave her a conspiratorial look. "They took that name from my daughter, you know."
"Really," Flame Princess said as deadpan as she could manage, not really interested in the last, but this was admittedly more fun than poking lava and thinking soul-searchy deep thoughts. Listening to a crazy person wasn't something she'd done in a while.
"Yes. Yes, they did." He raised an eyebrow at her, and resumed that infuriatingly knowing smirk. He stretched out, yawning mightly and gave a small rock a small flick that sent it rocketing past Flame Princess and over the lava, bursing into flame from the convection and acceleration and melting before it was even halfway there. "But whatever. Ancient history, man." He gave her a sidelong look and amended, "Girl."
He tilted his head up, blue skin gray in the lava-light. Flame Princess sneered at him, about to deliver a 'go away or I will explode you' ultimatum, and paused. He was still smirking at her, and this time she could see that his lips were…wrong. They were horrendously mutilated, ugly jagged scars running in a clockwise pattern from one corner of his mouth to the other, like someone had sewn his lips shut.
"They did," He said.
"What?"
"They did." He sat up, and for a moment his face went dark with bitter poisonous and ancient grudges. "They sewed my lips up. There's a lesson in that; never make a bet with someone unless you have a back-up plan to get out of and, now follow me on this, you make cussed well sure that they can't turn it around on you." He paused, smirking at some ancient memory, and added, "Or for that matter, let your friends exploit it so they can shut you up for a month." Abruptly, he laughed, as if amused by some old joke that had been on him but he had grown to appreciate.
She stared at him levelly, and it was difficult to keep herself from putting a finger to her own lips in sympathetic wonderment. She couldn't prevent a small shiver, or imagine what it would be like to have your lips sewn up.
He pointed a finger at her. "I've heard about you, y'know. The Flame Princess of the Fire Kingdom. Dunno why they don't call you the Fire Princess of the Fire Kingdom, but Flame just sounds better, I guess."
She frowned. "Heard what?" She asked gruffly.
His smirk became a faint smile. He didn't answer right away, and said, "It hurts, doesn't it?"
She frowned at him.
He elaborated. "When they lock you up, I mean. Those little bitter moments when they shove you into a little space so they don't have to worry about you anymore, or get scared that you'll do something crazy or whatever stupid thing they just know you'll get up to without a minder to control you." He shrugged. "I know. I know all about that."
His amusement factor was quickly draining away. "Go away." She turned her back to him.
She heard his chuckling and did her best to ignore the sudden impulse to blast his face off. She didn't know why he would care and he was honestly starting to irritate her.
"They think they know everything they need to," he mused, patently ignoring her ignoring him. "So maybe there's a little fire here and there to lighten things up. Spreading a bit of light in the world, and it doesn't matter if there's already some there, light's always good to have around. But it always goes wrong, doesn't it? Always. Freaking. Blows up in your face. Doesn't it?"
She remained steadfastly quiet.
"You try to make a little firebird for Daddy on his birthday, the damn thing gets into his throne room and makes the whole place explode somehow. Then Daddy won't let you into his throne room without guards no more. You try to make a way to get around that whole pesky 'executed people aren't useful anymore' by turning them into cute fire cats that don't know who they used to be so the old person is effectively dead, and it freaks people out that you can erase who they are, just like that." A snap of the fingers, and fires exploded around them, fading with an acrid smell.
Flame Princess shuffled slightly, her eyes wide and hands gripping into fists. The fires answered her, pouring out of vents in the dirt and storming from the torches and blazing out from the lava; he knew. This strange man knew about her.
It was pecularily infuriating and welcoming at the same time.
The man continued. "A dozen more tricks and tries to make people like you, to help them, to make them just stop looking at you like you're this thing that blew in from the monster's birthing pit, and it never does anything but make things worse. And then you're stuck in a jar just sitting there and hating everyone and everything in the world because it's just so damn frustrating and nothing ever works and you just want to make it pay for screwing with your little head like that and then you find yourself thinking about watching the world burn." He began to laugh. For a moment, there was just his laughing; the bubbling of the lava, the sweet smell of her Fire Kingdom, and the man's laughter, quickly getting higher and louder and more wild, until it was just a rough noise like a wild animal in pain, screeching and howling it's insanity to the world, and then suddenly it stopped. She felt his eyes intently boring into the back of her head.
"And then something comes along to change that. You get news about a guy that likes you. Only, wait, stop, never mind, it's just people screwing with you again. Only turns out he does like you after all." A low chuckle, more honest than before, and it reminds her of her own people, grinding and hissing like chunks of obsidian or busting lava heard together. "Man. What a total mind-trip."
Flame Princess whirled around; the man sat there, looking innocent. "How do you know all that?" She finally yelled, her limited patience already breaking.
He shrugged. "I pay attention to things." He was smirking again, just daring her to demand more honest answers. "And I like this place. I know this place. The first people who came here were my people you know. Maybe I'm taking an interest in you for that reason. Or maybe I'm just a nosy jerkass who can't stay out of people's business."
Her temper cooled to a more equitable grumpyness. "Whatever," She said, walking off. She gave him a mistrustful look.
He was still grinning. "So. Do ya like Finn?"
She stopped in mid-step.
"He comes out of nowhere just like a bolt of lightning, shouting like the thunder." He laughed. "Heh. Thunder. Some things really never change. Or maybe they can't. Fate's a bit of a pain that way."
She looked at him more intently. "You know Finn?" She said, trying not to sound hopeful; she knew so little about Finn, wanted to know more, needed to know more, and if here right in front of her was someone who knew about him…
Well. That was more good luck than she was accustomed to.
He nodded, and grinned. "Yep. We're friends, even." She gave him a look, and he amended it to, "Well, I turned him into a foot once to teach him a lesson about reckless altruism. That makes us friends, right?"
"…I guess," She said. As far she understood friendship, the idea seemed about right.
He nodded, finding that acceptable. "I can tell you all about him," he promised.
She scowled. "What's the catch?"
"Ooh, you caught that one, didn't you?" He smirked. "Well, let me put it easy and sweet for you. The price here, is the job itself." Flame Princess raised an eyebrow. "I just want to see what happens right here and now. What will happen between the Flame Princess and the Hero of Ooo? It'll be just like throwing a firestorm and a hurricane together and seeing the sparks fly. Except with less collateral damage, but with you two I'm willing to accept that perhaps this won't be the case." He grinned. "Besides. You could use a friend."
"No I don't!" Flame Princess blurted out.
He laughed at that, leaning back and improbably floating into the air. "Right. So." He stuck his hand out. "Do we have a deal?"
Flame Princess hesitated. "Who are you?" She asked at last, a question that she should have asked sooner.
He looked absolutely gleeful at this. "I've had many names," he said, looking proud. "Oldest of all was the Trickster, and then they also called me Gabriel, and most of all they called me the Liesmith. Before the Mushroom War that burned the world, they called me the God of Evil, and those that understood me properly called me the God of Mischief. I am the father of many, and the son of more. In the service of Fate, I have been the Wyrd. I have become Fire itself, and been the Devourer, and I've embraced Chaos in full, and become the Void. I am, you see, an agent of chaos and beholden only to myself. My most precious and secret name has been lost to me, which pretty much sucks a lot. But people, today? Today, everyone calls me the Magic Man." He stuck his hand out again. "So. I repeat. Do we have a deal, friend?"
Flame Princess hesitated once more, decided that if things went wrong she could always burn a recriminatory note into his face, and shook his hand. "Deal."
For a second, Magic Man's constant expression of mildly insane glee burned away under a light of genuine happiness. "Awesome," said he.