Farbauti's Ekkill
by JalendaviLady
Characters: Laufey, Loki, Odin, Farbauti (deceased), OCs
Summary: Laufey's life from a few months before Loki's birth to shortly after Thor's raid on Jotunheim.
Content Notes / Warnings: Alien Gender System (single-gender two-parent variant), Alien Religion, Infanticide, Child Loss, Spousal Loss, and is just in general a Tearjerker. Have tissues or a hanky handy.
Author Notes:
The word 'ekkill' means 'widower' in Icelandic. I had intended to use a reversal of Loki's patronymic for a title, but when I saw 'ekkill' on the vocabulary list I was referencing I changed my mind.
The 'Single Gender Jotun Theory' began as an explanation for why the Marvel universe gender-flips Laufey relative to Laufey's mythological role as Loki's mother. The use of masculine pronouns is intentional as the Jotun aren't actually androgynous and they are intentionally letting the other realms think they are one side of a binary gender system: they're men - men who birth babies, but definitely men.
The reasoning behind Jotun infant abandonment was heavily influenced by a fanfic where someone seriously considers arming and then murdering a suicidal character to ensure his entrance into Valhalla.
This is intended as a backstory fic for "A Different Way Forward", but I've written it so it will fit cleanly in with the movie's events.
Disclaimer: I own no part of the Marvel movie universe.
Farbauti was dead.
His broad shoulders would never work in defense of their people again. No more would his thick calves propel him along the roads and trails. His smile would never brighten the night as if his mouth was the ice-edged crags of the holy mountains.
He was gone, killed by injuries from an unpredicted rockfall.
Laufey sat by the grave, the last to leave.
That Farbauti had struggled to live to the last moment was the only thought that soothed. Those who died in struggle would make it to the greater feasthall of the gods.
Struggling to breathe through a half-crushed ribcage while the love of your life held your hand and urged you to keep trying, to give you just five more minutes together, can't you make it just five more minutes, please gods Farbauti don't leave me yet not now not alone please can't you manage one more breath Farbauti don't leave me!
That counted.
The stirring behind his navel was no comfort.
They had faced the choice, as all Jotun did, of who would carry the child. Some couples chose for their children to all have the same parent-of-the-body. Some switched.
Laufey was king. Laufey had wanted his heir to be of his body. And so that was what he and Farbauti had done. They had waited until a significant lull in inter-realm hostilities, a time when Laufey going into hiding - that the other races of the other realms need never find out there was only one gender among the Jotun - would not harm their people, and then they had set about having their first child.
Their only child, now that Farbauti was gone.
Only he already knew the child was doomed to die.
There had been detectable signs of pregnancy and then there had been a quickening, but his belly had never humped and there was no hint that there would ever be milk for the child.
Life in the ice was harsh, even for Jotun. Misborn children were not uncommon, even in the fattest times.
Farbauti had known the child was doomed. They had talked of names, of which ancestor they should possibly call him after, of what name would be best for a child who would only know the first struggle.
They had settled on Lofi, 'the palm of the hand' they believed he might be able to fit in once he was born.
Another kick.
Shh, Lofi, you can struggle out your life once you are breathing.
You'll be with Farbauti soon.
The plan had been a dream of the Jotun for centuries.
Take another realm. Make it cold enough to be comfortable but still a soft world.
And stop the misborn births from happening. Let Jotun bellies grow fat with children in a world where scarcity would not prevent breasts from awakening to infantile needs.
There was more than enough space on Jotunheim that adults, strong adults, could colonize and make useful again, but there was no way to do that, no way to risk the warriors, so long as so few of the unborn ever lived to grow up, to grow strong. The land they had was the land they had, the Casket the only artifact left from a glory age no one left could remember.
Jotunheim was a cold world in an ice age, and even though the Jotun could handle the frost the crops and flocks they relied on depended on the short summer when it was nearly as it once had been.
But the Casket, if the Casket could chill another realm to what Jotunheim had been like back them... That realm could bloom .
Laufey spent the months after Farbauti's death listening to Lofi's movement inside him while the people listened to him describe an empire where arms need never ache with emptiness again.
And the desperation grew in their eyes, because Jotunheim was now a world where even the king's heir could be misborn.
Laufey birthed Lofi alone in the temple of the people, as was the way when a family knew a child was going to be misborn ahead of the birth. Farbauti should have been there with him, would have been had he lived, but the Jotun were strong and even healthy first births could often be handled by a man alone.
Physically easy, emotionally hard, but Lofi's first cries did echo against the stones soon enough.
Laufey cut the cord close, tying it with a scrap of cloth, and dried Lofi as best he could.
The struggle was suffering enough, and such little mercies would not change the fate of the child.
The Jotun had learned long ago, when the herds were fat, that a baby grown a bit would give in to death but a newborn would cry until its lungs could take no more and keep trying .
It was mercy, then, to let the misborn cry their lives out on the first day and be taken into the greatest feasthall to sit beside their ancestors. To let the suffering be over and done with, an avalanche instead of a slow fall of snowflakes that would only drag the death out.
And before tomorrow ended, Lofi Laufeyson would be having his first food sitting beside Farbauti.
The Jotun were strong and Laufey found his feet again before Lofi had breathed an hour.
He left the newborn on the altar of He-Who-Guards-The-Feasthall-Gate, as was the way, and left.
It was no fit struggle to make a parent listen to a misborn attempting to survive, and Laufey had always trusted that the god kept his protection under such children even as they proved their spirit to him.
The people were waiting outside, and Farbauti's brother Ulfr was holding the Casket in his hands.
"Shall my nephew die heir to a greater kingdom than he was born to?" Ulfr asked with his full voice, both to Laufey and to the rest of the Jotun.
The affirmative outcry was not something Laufey could have stopped even if he had wanted to.
It had all gone wrong.
Asgard had gotten involved, Asgard who had never given a sideways glance to Midgard before.
They were lucky to have only lost the warriors they had, even though it would take over a thousand years to replace them if the healthy birthrate remained as it was.
They were lucky to have gotten home at all.
And when Laufey had gone to the temple to place the Casket back in its place of honor under the watchful gaze of He-Of-The-Blizzard, Odin had been waiting for him.
Odin, whose eye Laufey had just taken, angered to great strength.
And Laufey was still recovering from the birth of Lofi. He couldn't hear crying, but he knew there was no way to hear anything so soft as a newborn's cry on the altar of the misborn from He-Of-The-Blizzard's room.
Lofi could still be alive, even as the one who bore him was thrown to the ground by the Asgardian lord.
Insult upon insult upon insult.
Odin's men took the Casket, and Laufey was too weak to do anything but lay there as their footsteps rang out on the stone as they left.
He had failed.
The Asgardians had left by the time Laufey regained his feet.
He had to know, had to see if anything had happened, and if Lofi had passed he needed to take the body to be buried beside Farbauti.
But the altar was empty. No blood, beyond that little left on the ground from the birth.
Laufey bowed his head in pain.
Either they would kill Lofi painfully as one last insult, or they would try to let him live and damn him to never sup beside Farbauti when they failed.
There was no way a misborn so small could live long. There was no way a misborn kept under the watch of He-Who-Guards-The-Feasthall-Gate so long could survive.
Will I ever see you again, Lofi?
Laufey sat against the wall, destitute.
After a time, someone else entered, and Laufey knew him well by the scarification patterns on his ankles.
It was Ulfr.
"They took Lofi," he managed to say, and he was surprised at the weakness in his voice.
Ulfr stood there for a moment, his head bowed. Then, "Will you take five steps with me, Laufey? Just five steps?"
Laufey recognized it for what it was, a modified version of the traditional pleading he himself had used to keep Farbauti struggling to the last. He stood and let Ulfr help keep him on his feet as they walked out the room together, then out of the temple, taking everything a few steps at a time.
"You are too handsome to miss the feasthall," Ulfr told him. "And I think my brother would like to see you again someday."
A millennium of not knowing blew past Laufey as the winds blew snow off the crags.
It took hundreds of years of careful talking and gentle walking, but he and Ulfr found comfort in the losses in each other. There was no shame among the Jotun if a widower began to love his beloved's brother, and so it came to pass between them.
There were heirs, strong of heart and bone. Heirs of Ulfr's body, not Laufey's, for Laufey could not bear the thought of a quickened child in him again, could not bear the risk that it was his own body which had caused Lofi's misbirth, did not want any child but Farbauti's to ever come from him.
None of Ulfr's sons were ever misborn.
There were the scarification ceremonies of passage into adulthood, which Laufey oversaw in his place as the non-bearing parent, and their boys kept silent and did both Laufey and Ulfr proud in how well they handled the pain.
And then there was the rumor spreading across the realms that Odin did not merely have the one son everyone had heard of, but another a little younger. A son born near as anyone could tell at the time of the disastrous War-Of-One-Day.
A son named Loki, a name so close to Lofi's for a child so near in age to what Lofi should have lived to be that the thought made Laufey shake in anger for days when the tale first came to his ears.
So, Odin has two boys by his first love and I have none.
But the Asgardians left them alone, and so Laufey was left to deal with his bitterness.
And then the day came when a few young fools of the people listened to a silver-tongued Asgardian and tried to seize the Casket while Odin was awake and capable of stopping them.
The unspoken and unsigned truce with Asgard, the safety that having been beaten down to nothing provided the people as they watched the ice age wear on and listened to the misborn cry their way to the feasthall, was gone.
It was only a matter of days before the two sons of Odin and their friends - so small a force from so small a people - came to Jotunheim.
The younger son with the silver-tongue, the one called Loki, managed to almost talk his brother into leaving when Laufey offered them the chance.
He had lost enough a thousand years ago. He could bear to lose no more, especially not to the house of Odin. He struggled onward, but he would not struggle against Odin again unless his hand was forced.
But then the brother of one of the slain had to get involved.
The Asgardians fought bravely, but they were outnumbered.
The Jotun had nearly taken their revenge at long last for everything when Odin arrived.
And it was truth when Laufey told Odin the situation was past diplomacy. It had always been past diplomacy. When one side steals a dying newborn from the other, what diplomacy is there to be had?
But then, when the Asgardians were gone back to their city of no wants or needs and Laufey's family was gathering to care for their own injured, the youngest of his sons with Ulfr had a tale to tell.
"I grabbed the arm of the Odinson who stabbed me," Reifr told them as Ulfr helped bind his wound. "I tried to frostburn him, but it did not work!"
Laufey was confused. "How could that not work? He is Asgardian, as Asgardian as Odin!"
Reifr shook his head. "His skin turned as blue as my own, and he bore our family's markings on his wrist when it happened. He was as surprised as I, maybe more so. He did not know that could happen. I swear it."
Ulfr breathed, "His age. Laufey..."
"You know the law. Do not say it." It was their law no one could claim to be the misborn of a family and no one could claim someone as a misborn of their family. It kept outsiders from the few tribes that clung to uncivilized ways from deceiving their way into power through the hearts of the bereft.
But Laufey thought it must be true. Lofi was the only misborn of that century who had not been buried in the ground under the witnessing gaze of his people. Odin had opportunity, and hadn't Laufey been overwhelmed with fear at the time that Odin would try to save Lofi's life and so deny him both the feasthall and Farbauti?
Farbauti, our son is alive. Alive and struggling, small but a fighter, and bold so bold... and a pain in my lower back, but what son is not?
"What do we do?" Reifr asked. "There's no way he understands, the shock in his eyes..."
Laufey held up a hand. "We wait. We wait and see what he and the Asgardians do next."
And that's just what the house of Laufey and Ulfr did.