Namesake
The word cuts, cruel and thick, each of the three syllables deeper than the last. He does not blink when rough hands grasp the ruin of his coat and pull him backwards with enough strength to make him stumble. His eyes stay locked on Odin All-Father-but-One. The latter, assured of his victory turns from the room and Loki listens to his footsteps echoing endlessly in the hollows of his mind. He has been falling since he let go of the end of a spear a lifetime ago but now he slams into the ground with enough force to shatter bone.
When he returns to himself he is in the dungeons, this he expected. His coat is gone as are his heavy boots and what remained of his armor. He counts these losses in his head and adds them to the never-ending list. Loki wonders what else will be lost before his 'wicked days' are empty. For once Odin's promises were truths; he does not see Frigga again, not really. He does not see anyone.
All the things he could have been dance madly at the edges of his vision, made madder still by the endless bright white that is his world. He dreams entire lifetimes behind his eyelids, dies and lives a hundred times. The guards who change like clockwork watch him warily and he does nothing to goad them. After years of silver-tongued lies, his silence is more unnerving than razor edged words could ever be. He keeps the lies for himself.
Laufeyson.
Sentiment clouds his eyes and colors his lies. He tells himself that it does not matter what an old man says. Loki has denied his once-father for over a year, it should mean nothing to have that kindness paid in return. He tells himself it should make him glad. It shouldn't carve at his chest like a wound. Loki cut out his heart and offered it to forgetting a lifetime ago but finds himself the conned. There is no freedom and there is no forgetting.
Months pass and the truth that burns is that no one ever asks. None but the mother he will never see again sought answers or looked for him in the dark. No one wondered. He remembers a time long ago when he was a small child still chasing after Thor, in awe of his fathers every word and action. He had fallen very ill one winter and Eir had cautioned his mother to be wary of hope. If he could rewrite time he would undo the master healers skill and let the fragile wish Frigga cherished die. It would have been better to die before the universe had the chance to damn him. He wonders if they would have wondered then.
He spent his entire life trying to be enough for the burden of his namesake, so heavy it dwarfed the hammer his not-brother threw weightless to the wind. He clawed and dragged himself forward despite the words that followed after his footsteps, second-best, disgraceful, untrustworthy, unwanted. He stumbled and the words caught up and found a home between the madness that flourished as he faltered. A frost giant would never sit on the throne of Asgard and Loki would never be a father's son.
In dark moments, he wonders if he was doomed from the start of if he'd damned himself. He lingers over memory that means the same thing as eternity, over a fool of a child who asked if the monsters still lived. The irony is enough to make him laugh and the noise sounds like drowning. Odin didn't answer then but he answers now. His lies fall apart every day, they whither and die when Loki dreams a life out of nothing, all shadow, bone and mistakes he would not undo. He was abandoned once as a child, it only makes sense that the universe would right the lie that led him to believe otherwise. The world is strangely empty without the lies but Loki needs only one truth.
He is no one's son.