–
Title: Meeting
Author: tristhe
Rating: PG13
Fandom(s): Thor (Marvel movie-verse), Supernatural
Pairing(s): gen
Wordcount: 1,768
Status: Incomplete, but unlikely to be continued. I love this story, this idea, I really do, but I just can't write it. If anyone at all wants to take it from here, I would love you.
Spoilers/Warnings: Through Season Five for Supernatural, and the "Thor" movie.
Notes: Un-beta'ed. Also jumps around in time a bit. Written for the norsekinkmeme, round two.
Disclaimer: I do not own these characters, and make no money off of them.
Summary: Loki has no idea why these strange people are calling him Gabriel.
–
- 1 -
"GABRIEL?"
Loki, idly inspecting an avocado, looks up at the loud and impassioned shout to discover two mortals staring directly at him. Were he someone else, he'd have blinked in evident confusion, but as he wasn't, he gave absolutely no sign that he had no clue why these humans were looking at him.
A moment later he realized there were in fact three of them, though the third was nowhere near mortal. Loki was highly disturbed to realize that were it not for a very bright and thick rope of bonding branching off one of the mortals to lead directly to this being, Loki would not have seen him. Only because the mortals had called his attention with their shout and blatant staring, and only because one of them had a very obvious and strong bond, was the third being even visible to him at all; and even then Loki could only see a vague outline.
He'd never encountered a race he couldn't see before.
The third being was inhabiting a mortal, it appeared, but whatever affect rendered it unseeable quite obviously neatly cloaked his physical shell as well.
Loki abruptly realized that he had absolutely no idea how long that being had been standing there, staring at him. It might very well have been the one to call the two mortals forward. It might have been following him for...a completely unknown amount of time. It might have been stalking him.
Loki followed that realization with a second: he had never felt quite this quality of fear before.
It wasn't that he was terrified, or horrified, or anything so extreme. But never before had Loki felt this deceptively mild, creeping, slow shiver from someplace low and quiet, rising up his spine.
He was intrigued.
- 2 -
It wasn't so bad, at first.
Well, granted, the fall sucked.
He still had nightmares about the fall.
But once Loki had landed, it really was not so bad.
He hadn't made it a habit to keep abreast of what lesser beings did with themselves, but unlike most of the Aesir he also excelled at adaptation. It was one of his...skills.
So within a few weeks, he was quite comfortably ensconced in a high-end penthouse apartment in New York City, fully documented with all the necessary legalities these mortals demanded of their citizens, and working on perfecting an American English accent.
He already sounded just fine when communicating in the Alltongue, of course, but unlike (his fami-) the Aesir, he found no reason not to learn the native language properly when he was going to be stranded away from Asgard for some significant period of time anyway.
Also, there was the fact that since he'd been taught the high-class form of Alltongue, he tended to sound disconcertingly...formal by the standards of many realms, the current Midgard included.
It made him stand out unless he used magic to mask it. And Loki only used magic when he wanted to, not because he was a stupid blond behemoth too dense to learn the local tongue.
At the moment, though, he was shopping for avocados. There was an art to selecting the most appropriate ingredients for a spell, more than just ensuring ripeness. There were at least three levels of mystic resonance that needed to fit just right before even bothering to look deeper, and none of it could be trusted to his personal shopper (a fake-blonde woman named Gertrude Maria Ezbuchen, very efficient, if a bit too chipper and uncomfortably familiar with his person).
He adored these 'supermarkets', personally. Unlike the more quaint 'farmer's markets' that were gaining in popularity, the produce at a supermarket was almost universally devoid of the personal auras of the growers. There was no personality, no echo, no memory as you would find in the product of the kind of small-scale farmer that put his heart and soul into his work. The supermarket produce was often of inferior nutrition and taste, of course, but for magic it was by far the superior option.
Wait, you didn't think he was shopping to cook did you?
- 3 -
He actually did try to shake them. At first it had seemed a grand trick, playing along with their delusions, but the greater the complexity of their tale grew, and the more dire and foul the depths they revealed to Midgard that the Aesir had never imagined...
Well, slowly, Loki began to realize he was out of his depth.
This was not so unusual – sadly, many of his tricks did not end well, and he was greatly experienced in the sharp bite of his own chaos upon his neck.
But never before had he been quite this lost. Every passing hour listening to their prattling, leaching into days of their persistent and increasingly worrisome company, led Loki into an ever deeper and more viscous sea of uncertainty the likes of which he had never been faced with before. Even when so rawly introduced to his true heritage, Loki had at least understood the landscape, even if the completely reversed perspective had been disorienting. But this was an entirely new world disguised beneath a realm he had thought he knew well.
Angels, of all things. Angels. How was he to deal with that?
So yes, of course he tried to shake them off. Tried to slip away sly and silent and unseen, only to find that angel staring straight at him from within the safe hole he'd been so sure he'd made impregnable.
It wasn't so much that Loki was afraid – though he was, of course he was. But Loki was accustomed to fear, and to dealing through the suffocation of it, to snatching some bare simile of victory from the grinning jowls of defeat.
It wasn't the fear so much as the uncertainty that bothered him. Despite his reputation to the contrary, Loki never began a trick without a truly exquisite amount of preparation behind him. It rarely helped, of course; the nature of such tricks meaning the resulting chaos all too often took oblique paths he could never have envisioned – but he certainly tried, at least. Almost compulsorily, in fact.
But he knew nothing of angels. He'd managed to keep his true level of ignorance from his three pursuers, at least, but that did not fix the truth. He knew nothing of angels and they had been hiding in the background of existence shepherding the course of events all along.
For someone with Loki's degree of control issues this was...highly concerning.
Thankfully, for some reason his three followers seemed to have expected him to attempt to flee, and did not actually seem angry about it. Exasperated, if anything, but with no real aggression. Well, not from the mortals at any rate. The angel was so much harder to read.
- 4 -
Loki honestly wasn't entirely sure how this charade had managed to last past the first hour.
At first he'd assumed that he merely looked like this 'Gabriel' they thought him to be, but that wasn't it; they apparently looked nothing even vaguely alike. So then he thought perhaps it was his magic that they had mistakenly latched onto, but that was impossible; Gabriel was an angel - archangel, in fact - and there was quite simply No Way of mixing up an angel and an (Aes-) Jotun's power signatures. So then he thought maybe someone else had misinformed them somehow, but no; the angel had tracked Loki down by himself.
It made absolutely no sense. He tried oblique, discreet questioning on it (he might as well have not bothered, they seemed to have expected that too), and the answer was some confusing, nonsensical ramble on astral resonances and mythological role-places and the mystical impacts of one's aura, etc, etc, etc. Loki considered himself one of the more informed in the esoteric arts, and the angel's explanation made neither head nor tails to him.
Basically, apparently, this Gabriel had pretended to be Loki here on Earth for something over a thousand years, and being an angel, when he decided to counterfeit something he did it really well.
Loki could make no more sense of the whole mess than that.
So, end result, he had two humans and an angel absolutely convinced, on the vaguest possible grounds, that he was their missing-in-action and assumed-dead erstwhile ally.
Who they apparently expected to have run away and faked his death, which made Loki question by just what standards they were judging their enemies, if that was an ally.
- 5 -
Loki's mind was blank with shock.
He retained enough control that none of it showed, of course; quietly allowing the angel to herd him along.
Behind his composed face, however, was pure whirling chaos.
Loki had been unsure of the specifics of Gabriel's mystical mimicry of him, but the generalities were not terribly difficult to speculate on. Loki had spun all sorts of possibilities to himself, usually to occupy his mind when the mortals and their angel were being tedious again. Though strenuous and impressive and downright dangerous, there were plenty of ways a god might be impersonated by someone foolish or powerful enough to try.
None of them came even close to explaining how Loki had just walked through the Gates of Heaven using Gabriel's name.
There was really only one explanation he could begin to conjecture for that; and it should not have been possible without Loki FEELING SOMETHING.
You cannot just ATTACH yourself to someone like that without CONSEQUENCES.
And yet...obviously Gabriel must have.
It was a bit galling to have to resign all those clever ideas of his; on the other hand, it said something really important about angels, too.
Loki was focusing very hard on this, latching on to this point of clarity and Not Thinking about the other implications.
It said something about angels; that rather than use all those other, smaller, less powerful but less permanent possibilities, Gabriel the Archangel - said to be the tricksiest and most ruthless angel next to Lucifer himself - chose instead the simple, brute-force, and irreversible option of permanently bonding his essence to an alien pagan god that he'd never even met and never intended to meet.
It said something very, very important about angels, and Loki was focusing very, very hard on it.
He did not want to think about the fact that he'd apparently been soul-bound with neither permission nor awareness, only to discover this all after his bonded was quite dead.
He did not want to think about that, at all.
So he was thinking about all the other implications instead.
–