"Oh, come now, my dear, I'm sure our darling Loki will wake up soon," the Queen assured her husband, patting what she can reach of his sleeve in what she hopes is a consoling manner. The King looks furious, his cheeks a bright scarlet, and the Queen has the strangest urge to laugh – Who painted your cheeks red? Off with their heads! – but she knows that it is hardly an appropriate time to laugh. "He can't be too poorly," she tells him, but she hopes secretly that Loki is, if only so he will have the chance to escape the King's reign of terror for a few hours, a few days, a few months. She hopes he never wakes up. She wonders if that makes her a bad person.
She's stood over his sleeping form, pale and drawn, bow lips pursed in a faint, secret smile. She's held a pillow in his hand, looking from its soft, downy surface to him, back and forth, back and forth, long after the rest of the castle is already asleep, and has thought, What if, what if, what if -? In the end, though, she's never had the strength to go through with it, and she's always placed the pillow back underneath Loki's head, pressed a soft kiss to his cheek, and tiptoed back to bed. She wonders if this makes her a bad mother, before she reminds herself that she is not really his mother, that his mother is an unknown woman in a foreign world. She wonders if his mother thinks about him, if she misses him, how much she would give to see Loki's firsts. First steps, first words, first teeth.
The King had been delighted, had held out fat fingers for the baby Loki to grasp, had plied him with cookies and jellies and soft toys. Finding Loki crying in the rose gardens had been a blessing, and the day the Ace had brought him back to the castle, swaddled in a paint-stained cloth, the King hadn't even had any of them beheaded, even though they had clearly been painting the roses red.
Loki's bluebirds twitter and cheep around the King's head, and he waves them away irritably. They were nice and friendly howdy-do birds, and Loki had managed to coerce a dozen of them into his little plot in the castle's gardens. They were fond of singing and chirping at all hours of the morning and the night, but the King had allowed him to keep them, a bribe to ensure his happiness. "Everyone should have a dozen bluebirds," Loki had said, and the King had ordered the cooks to crumble up uneaten crusts or pastries for the birds to eat.
"If he had only listened to me," the King snarls, and the Queen is afraid he will start yelling again. "If only he wasn't so obsessed with that damned cat, trouble is all he is," he hisses viciously. "I want that cat's hide. I want that filthy pink and purple vermin held responsible for his crimes."
While the Queen wants to agree, she knows that it is a moot point. The Cheshire Cat is a master of mischief as well as misdirection, and the Queen doesn't think any amount of searching or begging or bribing will come to anything. And he hadn't forced Loki to climb that tree, not really, he couldn't have, the cat had no substance, all purple stripes and fur and a curved sliver of a bright mouth. The Queen wonders often if the crescent moon outside Loki's window is really the moon, but never mentions this to the King.
"Dearest," she tells him, patting his hand soothingly, "dearest."
He looks at her out of the corner of his eye, and she sighs and pats his back awkwardly as he bursts into tears, fat, ugly teardrops slipping down his face and splashing against the tiled floor with little plip-plops.
"I want him dead," he sobs into his hands. "I want them all dead for what they've done to my sons!"
And, therein, the Queen thinks, lies the very problem, but she says nothing and hushes him gently, wiping away his tears.
Loki wakes up with a start, gasping and sitting up, his heart racing as though he's just run through the entire castle maze and all its dead ends without pausing for breath. He reaches down to push off the blankets, eyes widening as his hand goes right through the heart-patterned quilt, a scream rising in his throat as he looks just a bit to the right and finds another hand, pale and thin, clutching at the covers. He squashes it in time – it is night, it appears, and it wouldn't do to have the castle waking up. He doesn't want to imagine whose heads would roll for his carelessness in waking up the King.
Moving in slow increments, he turns to look behind him, gasping as he sees the person behind him. Stringy dark hair frames a pale, drawn face, cheeks hollow, mouth pursed in slight disapproval and sarcastic amusement. The colour has long since fled the cheeks – his cheeks – before him, and he is the colour of chalk, the colour of the ugly, dying white roses in the farthest reaches of the castle gardens, the ones that hadn't been painted yet.
He reaches out, hesitant, biting his lip – and have his lips always been so pale? he wonders, tracing over a chapped, bloodless mouth – and isn't quite so surprised this time when his hand goes all the way through his head. And how odd of a sentence that is, he thinks to himself, giggling, even for Wonderland standards. But he doesn't wake up, not even a twitch of his eyelids, and Loki thinks that perhaps it is better that way.
He lies down, tries to align his bodies, but even though he tries again and again, even though he is convinced every hair is in place, he still feels no difference, and sits up again to find himself still in two distinct beings.
He looks at himself, looks very hard, raises a hand and brings it down against his cheek, but there is no sound and his hand passes directly through his face, coming out intact on the other side. He thinks that this is perhaps the strangest dream that he has ever had.
He looks around her room, at the beam of moonlight shining through the open curtains, and goes over to it. His feet make no imprints on the soft carpet of his room, and when he looks behind him, he finds the moonlight passing directly through him, finds that he casts no shadow. The mirror over his vanity remains blank even as he sits on the stool in front of it. The small, heart-shaped cologne bottles on his dresser remain stubbornly stationary, no matter how hard he tries to pick one up, but he thinks as he draws his hand back out through one of them that he can detect the soft smell of sandalwood and oranges.
He wants to laugh, and so he does, tossing his head back and laughing loudly, gaily, before stopping suddenly and looking around, listening hard. There are no footsteps on the stairs, no voices, and the castle sighs in its sleep, creaks and groans of a house settling in for the night.
Loki glides over to his bedroom door, taking one last look at himself – he doesn't think he'll ever be able to rationalize this – before stepping directly through the white wood and out into the hall.
He runs down the cobblestone corridor, his footfalls silent, and he reaches the end of the corridor, laughing at the freedom, at the fact that he isn't out of breath at all. He runs through the castle, popping through the entranceways of rooms that have always been locked, that he has always been forbidden to go to. He runs into the library, which his mother has always said has been off limits, looks very hard at a book lying open on the table. It is something about military strategy, and after attempting to pull another book down from the shelves and failing, Loki leaves.
In the kitchens, he bends down and buries his face in a cherry pie that some baker has forgotten to pack away for the night. Other than the phantom sensation of delicate crumbs and the lingering, faint taste of tart, sweet cherries, Loki pulls his face back out and finds that the pie is completely unscathed. He hopes that the baker, or somebody, will put the pie away before his mother wakes up and begins her morning inspection of the castle. With the way his mother has been recently, Loki wouldn't be surprised if something as little as this would be enough for a declaration of corporal punishment.
He goes to the cards' quarters, looking at the card soldiers neatly stacked, two or three to every cot, here where ranks don't matter, and Aces and fives can sleep together as easily as eights and nines, where nobody will judge them and nobody will tell them to line up in order. He smiles, and hopes that one day this bedchamber equality can somehow make its way into the public eye.
He saves his parents' bedroom for last, gliding silently through the door, perching on the very edge of their bed. The King is snoring loudly, and the Queen is mumbling lightly in his sleep. He wonders what his father is dreaming about, if his dreams feature guillotines and poleaxes, if these are the equivalent of nursery stories for him.
He stares at his father for so long and so hard that he doesn't notice that the Queen's eyes are open and she is staring directly at him. He gasps, sits up straighter, readies to make a run for it, but the Queen isn't looking at him, not really, just staring through him.
"Loki?" she asks, her voice soft and curious, and Loki wants to reach out and hug her, wants to tell her not to worry about him. "My sweet Loki," she murmurs quietly, before turning over to curl into the curve of the King's side and falling asleep again.
Loki feels tears spring unbidden to his eyes, and he presses the back of his hand against his mouth to muffle his sobs, but there is no sound that anyone can hear besides himself, and his tears evaporate the instant they hit his parents' bedspread, as if they were never there at all.
Unable to stand another minute, another second in the room, Loki leaves, taking deep, slow breaths to calm himself down, feeling helpless and lost and intensely angry for a reason he cannot herself explain. Breathing hard, he pounds back to his room, flinging himself onto the bed and grabbing himself by the shoulders. He ignores the way his hands disappear into himself, ignores the complete lack of motion as he shakes and shakes and shakes himself.
"Wake up!" he screams, sobbing. "Wake up wake up wake up!"
But he doesn't. He wonders if he even can.
He presses his head down onto his bed, sobbing wildly, angrily, punching at the mattress with his fists, leaving no dents.
"Curiouser and curiouser," a disjointed voice says somewhere above his head, and he chokes back a sob, turning around wildly on the bed to try to find the source of the voice.
His gaze falls out the window, where a bright sliver of crescent moon dangles outside his window, illuminating the labyrinth and rose gardens below, casting bright white light on the woods beyond. The woods where he has only been once, and then, and then what? he wonders to himself.
"Go on," the disjointed voice prompts him. "There's nothing to stop you. Don't you want to know what's out there?"
"Yes," he breathes, before clapping his hands over his mouth at this traitorous admission. He has never been allowed to leave the castle before, the Queen always reminding him of the dangers that lurked outside the palace walls before telling him to go play in the gardens if he was really that bored. "Yes, I do," he admits, holding himself up straighter, as if this will give him more confidence.
"So go," the voice whispers by his ear, and he whips around, but there is nothing there. "Go. No one will know."
He swallows roughly, turns to look at himself – he certainly isn't going anywhere, he thinks – before taking small, hesitant steps that grow in length and determination the closer he gets to the castle entrance.
He pauses in front of the solid oak doors, silent, wondering what it will be like.
"Wondering isn't going to get you anywhere," the voice says, singsong, and Loki wonders for the first time why this voice, this invisible person, can see him and why he cannot see them. "And sometimes people don't want to be seen. You must understand that, surely."
He does – don't scream don't breathe or he'll know you're here, holding his eight-year-old fist over his mouth as black boots march in front of him angrily – and he nods once, twice, to assure himself, before taking a deep breath and stepping out into the night.