Author's Note: If you've clicked on this and haven't read 'Mischief, Lies, and Other Hazards of Parenting,' you may want to meander that way and then settle back in over here, otherwise you might be wondering how Loki came by a small Midgardian of his own. And a big huge welcome back to all of you who are back for the continuing Adventures in Parenting. :)
A super huge thank you to my Betas 3, Chipper, Jade, and Majoline! These ladies have been amazing at working with the plot and my gazillion mythology questions and axing some truly painful sentences and phrases before they see the light of day. You are indeed awesome. :)
She might not be his in blood but she was his in mind. Kara seized on learning, no matter how trivial or dull a task, with an earnestness and zeal that suffused him with a quiet pride. It was nothing he had given her, in the strictest sense, but he liked to think he had nourished that curiosity along.
Even something so trivial as time was cause for excitement. Kara sat in his lap, and before them were paper clocks, oversized calendars, lists of days and months and all of the measures by which humans marked the progression of their minutes, days, and years.
"Wed-nes-day," Kara blurted in triumph, each and every syllable a victory chant. They'd been on the word for nearly ten minutes. She deserved the elation.
"Very good," he said, with more relief than he should voice, moving his finger down the page. The tip rested there on the 'T,' and for a moment his voice refused to come. Kara leaned closer to the print, taking his silence for an invitation to read it unaided.
"Ta-hur…Ta-hurs…"
"Thursday." Loki forced a smile, in case she turned to see, his finger shaking against the page for the briefest of moments. For seconds. For bits of time so small they didn't need anything beyond the most general of names.
"Thuuurs-day," Kara said, managing the word far faster than the day named for the All-father, in all its Germanic variation. He saw her eyebrows rise, her lips curve upwards not simply in pride but in recognition. "Thuursday! That sounds like Thor's day!" All she wanted was confirmation, of such a simple guess, of such an easy connection. She pulled at his scarf when he didn't answer. 'Does Thor have a day, Daddy?"
Loki blinked, tried to focus on the uncomfortableness of the chair, Kara's weight in his lap, the muted sound of the traffic beyond the windows. He nodded, that same hollow smile taut upon his lips, finger resting upon the T, stark black lines against a white page. A thorn, in a different shape, but no less piercing.
"He does have a day."
"All morning long. 'It's Thor's Day, it's Thor's Day.'" Loki crossed his arms and slunk against the steps, hating how awkward he was, gangly lines and angles. "They don't even believe in him nearly so much anymore."
His mother looked up from her spinning, thread shining and golden in her hands, and chuckled. "Your brother is young. His vanity will pass one day." She paused, her eyes bright and mischievous. "We only hope."
"He will simply find something new to crow about, something else to remind everyone how wonderful he is in all the realms." Loki tugged at the edge of his tunic, already beginning to fray at the hem, green tendrils snaking around his long fingers. "As if Father needs to be reminded."
"Oh Loki." Frigga sighed, an increasingly familiar sound as Loki and Thor were, at last, growing out of their awkward adolescence. Thor, of course, was growing taller and broad across the shoulders, while Loki's only gains seemed to be a voice that often betrayed him in its croaks and cracks.
At least Loki knew who was growing wiser of the two.
"You know how Father favors him. He asked Thor to accompany him this morning, but did he even look for me?"
Frigga raised one brow, the thread spinning away in her hands. "Thor and your father are simply more alike." Their voices broke into the once serene inner chamber no sooner than his mother spoke, and the tiniest smirk flitted across Loki's lips as he heard both shouting in anger. Frigga made a light clucking noise and shook her head. "Which you know is sometimes not a virtue."
"If Father shouted at me, at least it would mean he noticed me." Loki huffed and found a new hem to tug into non-existence.
"Your Father does notice, and he is proud of you, my dear. His need to check your brother's excesses is too distracting, sometimes." The last of the shimmering roving passed from his mother's fingers onto the wheel, and Frigga rose from her stool. "But your father and I love you both. You're our sons, how could we do anything else?" She chuckled and gently patted his cheek. "One of these eras you will finally realize your mother tells the truth."
"You tell me so very much. I suppose I will have to believe you eventually." Loki let her hand linger there. Even if his mother's doting raised eyebrows and a few guffaws from the more uncouth at court, Loki was thankful for at least the one ally among his parents.
"And your brother loves you too, even when he is being a bit of a boor." Frigga narrowed her eyes at the approach of the harsh, raised voices, the sharp crack of Gungnir's butt against the floor. "Just as you love him, even when you sulk."
"I do not sulk," Loki said, frowning as he realized how petulant his words sounded. He cleared his throat. "I brood, thoughtfully. But I do love Thor. I severely dislike him at times, that's all."
Frigga clasped him in her arms and pressed a kiss to his forehead. "Sometimes love and like have little to do with one another. It took nearly a thousand years before I liked your father. He was so very stubborn, and more so as a student."
Odd the voices that murmured at the seidr-wielding Prince were never directed against his seidr-wielding father who had more power in his remaining eye than Loki had in his entire being. And no one dare murmur even a word against his mother, who had taught his father all he knew of the art.
"Perhaps father and I are alike in that, at least." Loki was scarcely an ideal student himself, if only because he kept attempting things beyond his abilities. But how else should his knowledge expand, playing at cantrips? "Though there is something I have been trying to master with little to show for it."
'Oh?" His mother was perpetually offering her advice, often unbidden, but she could explain seidr better than any of his instructors. And bear with his frustration, tirades, and brooding with more grace than anyone should.
"I am trying to create a double. It… is not going well," Loki admitted. "It looks enough like me but I cannot even make it blink, much less fool anyone of reasonable intelligence into thinking it's me."
Frigga pressed a finger, lightly, to her lips. "Do you have a purpose for the double, besides mimicry?"
Loki pauses, brows furrowed. "No. I had thought skill should come first, before I attempted anything more."
His mother's laughter was gentle, not mocking. "It is that way in so many things, but not in seidr. As for this, you must have the will first, before your skills will go farther. Without a will, without a purpose, a double will be nothing more than an… elaborate shadow."
His double needed a task, then. Before Loki could begin to think of some small, trifling goal his brother stormed into the inner chamber, their father not long behind, bringing the storm into an often-abused sanctuary.
The rebuking words on his lips died as a slow smirk took their place. Purpose, his mother said? If gaining a fraction of peace and quiet, and silencing his brother was not a noble purpose, he did not know what was.
"Brother," Loki said, emerging from the shadows, his gaze sympathetic, his arms outstretched. "What quarrel do you and father have this time? Come, you seem most upset."
Their mother simply watched, her face betraying nothing. Loki may have wondered time and time again how Odin could have a son like him but he never doubted, not once, that he was Frigga's child.
"Our father is being a raging bilgesnipe! Come, brother, you are more skilled in words, perhaps you and mother can make him see reason." Thor reached for Loki's outstretched hands. Loki's fingers curled outwards, his smile softened, and there was only the faintest flicker as Thor passed through the double, whose arms were still outstretched. Thor's face barely had time to register the shock before his stumbling feet sent him tumbling to the floor.
Loki could hear the laughter bubbling at the edge of his mother's voice, and she pressed a hand to her lips not in shock or concern but in restraint. Whatever his father was about to bellow in the room shifted, quick as silver, to a startled glance between his sons.
The double dismissed with a wave of his hand, Loki, in all his nearly quivering, overjoyed solidity, reached out a solid hand to his brother. He hoped the faint quirk of his smile was sufficiently contrite. It was more restrained, at least, than mocking laughter.
"I am sorry, brother," he said, the hand still outstretched, gauging whether Thor would pull himself up or drag him down. "Now you know how I feel after the words 'Loki, you must see this new means of pummeling one's opponents into meal' escape your mouth."
"But it was you-"
"It was a very clever illusion. As if an illusion of me would be anything but clever." Loki smirked as Thor finally clasped his larger hand about his, squeezing it more tightly than he should. Loki grunted as Thor hoisted himself up and, to Loki's surprise and not small relief, clapped him hard across the shoulder.
"An illusion that fooled your own brother! Not as if it will do so again." He kept hold of Loki's hand, even as Loki attempted to pull away. "Come, we must show the Warriors Three! Fandral will never figure out which is the real you."
"You aren't angry?" Even if he shifted into a serpent, Loki did not think Thor would lose his hold. He allowed his brother to pull him away from the chamber, away from a beaming mother and a father who seemed to have forgotten an argument had darkened the golden halls only moments before.
"Why should I be angry?" Thor laughed, a low rumbling chortle that echoed off the gleaming walls. "Angry at my clever little brother? Just think about when it is not me you're deceiving, but a great flummoxed troll."
Loki allowed his brother's praise to warm him like sunlight, singing through his veins. His mother's smile was radiant and the twinkle in his father's eye was approval, possibly even pride. Odin nodded, and his thoughtful frown gave way to smile, if only for a moment.
"Well done, my son."
"Can I have a Karaday?" Thankfully, they could not stay on Thursday forever. There was his mother's day, a day that belonged to a decrepit Roman god that Thor insisted was actually Loki's, and then at last a day with no painful connotations.
"I think they're rather set on the days as they're named," Loki said as they looked upon the calendars and paper clocks. "I would be the first to wish we could change them."
Kara paused until she realized he had, in his roundabout way, said no. "Could I have one Karaday? Please?"
"Since you asked so nicely." He laughed and flipped through the calendar, pointing at random dates. "I think next Monday would be a lovely Karaday."
The honoree wrinkled her nose before her face beamed with a mini-epiphany. "My birthday! Could my birthday be Karaday?"
"I – I don't see why not." Loki's somewhat pained smile faltered as he flipped through the months, through the year that was to come, the year of the uncertain truce with the even more uncertain end. Spring fluttered beneath his fingers, summer cut across his thumb, and finally October 2013 settled heavy beneath his hands as if waiting to devour them both.
"My birthday isn't for all those days?" Kara's eyes were wide, her lips distinctly downturned. If she could simply have ripped the months out, and time with it, she would have.
"It's only-" Loki paused, trying to count the days down, trying to ignore the weight that settled on his chest, knowing how swift 346 days would fly. He should have asked Stark for five years, for ten, for a year was a breath, a blink, it was-
"It's forever!" Kara crossed her arms across her chest, no longer smitten with her day, and as Loki wrapped his arms around her shoulders he felt time snatch away another second, another moment.
A year was nothing.
A year was an eternity.
