Carpe et Capere

Chapter 2

The sheer capacity of boredom began to set in for the trickster by the second week in the dungeons. Not only had Loki read his books through once but eight times. And it wasn't like he had many people to talk to. Other prisoners were laughably beneath him and too far away to hear his whispered plights.

Alastor made sure of that.

Alastor had begrudgingly isolated Loki into a corner of nothingness and Loki despised him for it. By day two Loki began to talk to the microscopic organisms around him as he wiped dust from the floor onto his fingertips.

"It is ungodly dirty in here," Loki mused to himself, wishing internally that someone or something would agree with him so that it didn't feel like his skull was splitting in two.

"You're right," Loki murmured in a deeper voice, pretending to be an accompanying entity. "You should really clean this place up."

"Why thank you for that observation," Loki bowed to his imaginary companion, setting aside his book and beginning to tidy up. Because he was O for zero for cleaning supplies, he largely took the dust scraped against his hands and used, sadly, his sleeves to reposition the gray fuzziness.

Satisfied to the best of his ability, Loki sighed and looked to the hall for a glimpse of what might have been the time although he had a sneaking suspicion that it had only been ten minutes, if that. He couldn't tell if it was fortunate or unfortunate for him that the Asgardians didn't keep track of time in the dungeons. Maybe it was a way of cracking down on prisoners-forcing them to think of their crimes and repent.

Loki chuckled at the prospect.

"What now?" Loki asked to the open air.

The silence that followed was deafening.

The unwelcome gurgle from his stomach rattled his frame. Alastor had stuck to his word and Loki had barely eaten in the last few weeks. What little he was fed from other guards who took pity on him he was saving and rationing out to himself very carefully.

Oh, how he longed for someone to talk to him.

As if on cue, he heard the sweetest voice from behind him.

"My dearest Loki," her voice brought calmness over the trickster's soul.

"M-Frigga," Loki replied, tears almost filling his eyes.

"You look so pale," her voice moaned with concern. Her head tilted to the side as she looked upon him with sadness muddled in her eyes and a distinct forgiveness within them too. "I have done everything in my power to make you comfortable."

Moving across the cell Loki said, "Have you? Does Odin share your concern? Does Thor? It must be so inconvenient them asking after me day and night." Loki's voice took on a tone of cruel sarcasm.

Frigga barely bristled at his words, instead calmly pointing out that: "You know full well it was your actions that brought you here."

Loki raised a hand dismissively. "My actions? I was merely giving truth to the lie I had been fed my entire life…that I was born to be a king."

Frigga continued without a beat, "A king? A true king admits his faults. What of the lives you took on Earth?"

Loki huffed, "A mere handful compared to the number that Odin has taken himself." Loki's back faced Frigga as he took up a wooden cup in his hand.

Frigga shook her head in dismay. "They were lives no different than yours."

Loki barked a laugh. "Please, do spare me the woes of a mortal's lifespan. They are beneath me. I am not them."

"You may be a god but your plights are no more significant than theirs. They were innocent lives you took, Loki, and a punishment is only fitting for the havoc you so needlessly brought onto them."

"Needless," Loki groaned in exasperation. "As needless as this conversation were to me." He shook his head, wishing for the doubts crawling in his mind to disappear.

"Although your father took-" Frigga began but Loki immediately turned around in a fury, slamming his hand onto the nearby table and shouting, "He's not my father!"

They stared at each other for a moment as Frigga pursed her lips, her golden hair shining in the light.

"Then am I not your mother?" she whispered.

Loki paled, taking a small step back. "You're not," he affirmed.

Frigga shook her head, a deeper sadness than before entering her eyes.

"You're always so perceptive about everyone but yourself."

Tears emerged in Loki's green eyes as he made to comfort Frigga and an apology formed on his tongue for everything that had happened, everything that would come and for all that he was but when he reached for her hand it passed through her illusion and the sting of hurt and betrayal laced through his veins for days.

{***}

It was another week later when the nightmares got worse. Often Loki found himself shouting to no one and thrashing in his thin sheets. He would awaken with his heart racing, sweat dripping into his garments and breathing heavily. He'd lie awake with only the gold sheen from the wall lighting up his space as the memories lingered at the edges of his vision until Alastor came by presumably hours later with the sludge for porridge.

Loki never mentioned them to anyone but it wasn't like he had anyone to tell either. He was just another prisoner of Asgard's realm, an outsider and a misfit. There wasn't anyone to talk to, anyone to manipulate or anyone to lie to. He almost wished there was. It would certainly make his imprisonment that much more bearable.

Instead he had shades of darkness, old memories locked away in his brain and the loneliness that threatened to overtake him.

It also meant he had a lot of time to ruminate over his life, his mistakes, his faults and his betrayals-both the ones inflicted upon him and those that he had created. He would spend hours rethinking old conversations and playing out all the variables regarding new ones. He found himself praying for mother-not-mother-to return but she never did.

He didn't know it then but it would be the last encounter he had had with her and the regret he had of this pooled in his veins for years to come.

{***}

The day it happened began as uneventful as the forty-two before it; Loki awoke from another hellish nightmare in which he ran, futilely, away from the six-fingered hands of the Other and their torture only to be re-captured and tortured worse than before. It was a memory, in some respects. There were small details like the way the Other's fingers slid like gloss over Loki's skin before they broke his arms and harshly hissed whispers that collided into Loki's eardrums were replaced with dream nonsense such as bouquets of roses being inserted into Loki's rectum and delightful smiles from the galaxy around them sprinkling into his vision like a kaleidoscope.

Regardless, it was absurd and left him distraught and shaking all the same. He had spent the last few hours before dawn broke staring up at the dark ceiling wishing that something would force its way into the castle so that the stones above would just end his misery for him.

It beat having to stare at ceilings with his vision blurring as he wept to himself softly enough that no one would suspect a thing.

Breakfast came then disappeared.

Alastor was still a bastard, some other prisoner whined about not getting enough porridge and things went on as they will in life.

It was only near lunchtime that the ruckus began.

At this time, Loki was tossing a cup into the air while catching it with ease as he lay on his blankets in the bed within his cell. It started with this indescribable noise, a series of grunts and groans and an… explosion of sorts. Upon hearing this, Loki sat up from his bed and approached one of the walls of his room, curiosity mixing with apprehension.

Within his line of vision, he saw the breakout of multiple prisoners, their footsteps clambering one after the other as they took off with noise down the hall. Loki couldn't help but roll his eyes at how amateur they were in their high spirits with their newfound freedoms.

Loki's gaze narrowed considerably when the creature who appeared to be the one breaking out the other prisoners slowly walked by his cell.

The creature gazed with mistrust upon the trickster, stepping up close to the golden shield with Loki glowering a smirk right back in their direction. The creature, large and dark like a silhouette with spiky horns upon its face and armor, approached cautiously, gazing over Loki's more lavish cell and taking in his position.

Its blue eyes locked with Loki's green as it raised a swollen hand as if to break the iridescent shield, only to growl lowly and turn away at the last second.

Loki's brow quirked as he raised his chin at the retreating figure's back, offering sage advice, "You might want to take the stairs to the left."

With a final look back at the trickster, the creature retreated from the dungeons into the grand halls of Asgard beyond.

Loki hoped the chaos ensuing behind this creature and within the dungeons would cause a furrowed brow and the lines on Odin's forehead to wrinkle as he rung his hands with what to do next.

Mischief managed, Loki returned to a book that he flipped through mindfully. Not mere moments later, Loki could faintly hear Thor's friends and Thor himself speaking to the low-life's and fighting with them. Loki tried not to convey his anxieties, but even if he had, there wouldn't have been a free soul around to see them.

Instead, he bitterly basked in the foolish nature of some creatures and read on, page after page, even if he'd already read this book days before, it kept his mind at bay and the memories hidden behind his eye sockets. With reading, he could escape even temporarily, whereas with alertness he could not maneuver an exit from these ever enclosing four walls.

{***}

It was hours later, Loki hastened a guess at about six, when a helmetless guard approached his cell. Previous guards in the hours before had managed to gather some prisoners back inside their cells-the ones who hadn't perished in the fights that had broken out earlier at least (Loki figured this might have been more cost-effective for Odin after all).

When the guard, nameless and practically faceless, told Loki the news that his mother-not-mother?-was dead, he felt the world drop out from under him.

Because even if she wasn't his true mother, she was the closest thing he ever had to that. She was his hope; she was his world, even though he only realized it when she was gone. When she was gone and the world was lesser without her in it and Loki would never have the chance to right his wrongs with her, he would never have the chance to be held by her one last time, he would never get to tell her how much he did love her even if he wanted nothing to do with her love because he felt he didn't deserve it.

None of this would matter in the end because she was gone and Loki was left with the pieces he didn't realize were already barely holding him together. None of this would have caused such pain and grief to settle into his bone marrow if it weren't for his realization with quick ease that the creature he had advised to produce pain to Odin had brought his mother instead to her death. The regret and remorse that pooled within his soul coated him to the bottoms of his feet.

How could this have happened? Who was he, really? Because he was certain that only a monster would cause his own mother to perish unfairly.

So, when after Loki's rage self-destructed his cell and the lights went out, he barely thought anything of it. It felt only fitting for the rest of his world to be physically pulled out from under him. That's how it felt: like someone had just thrown a blanket over his head and wrapped him up in warmth he didn't deserve and a pain aching in his chest that he couldn't do a thing to get rid of.

If this wasn't the end for him, it sure felt like it was. And with his newly acquired grief, Loki wasn't surprised to find himself hoping it was so he could right the wrong that had been done to his mother, if only in his sub-conscious.

A/N:

Hey guys! Sorry it's been a while for most of my stories! I have to juggle so many art mediums these days that some get swept under the rug for a while, eeps!

I hope that this update is somewhat helpful and interesting! I feel that I may be rehashing the same old, same old in this chapter so I apologize if it reads that way at all! I really wanted to get some of TDW plot in this chapter which is partially the reason it took so long to get properly written (wanting to put some of the conversation and description canon to the movie). Damn you, research!

I don't really know how Kurse can be in this fic if the plot for this story goes sideways and avoids that movie's entire plot but let's pretend it works without any hiccups, shall we? XD Next chapter will take off where this one ended as after all it's a story about seizures. :)

Thanks for reading! I'm hoping to get more fics written up with new chapters soon. :] And if you could leave a review that would help my motivation immensely! :D xxx

This chapter was written: 12.12, 12.14, 12.17.2018 & 2.27.2019

Edited: 2.28.2019