A/N: This is the last chapter that will be told completely from OC's POV. For those of you wondering, yes, she remains unnamed for a reason that will later be clarified. For now, I have been referring to her as Ghost-Girl in my head. Enjoy!
Chapter Two
After my near-death, I wandered the empty shell of what remained of New York City. Underneath the dirt and rubble, I heard people cry. I saw the blood.
I stepped over the bodies and waved goodbye to the souls who could Float Away Up Into The Stars. I begged a Ghost-Child, a little girl with messy hair the color of a yellow highlighter, to take me with her. I reached out for her small hand so she could float me up away with her.
Since she was All The Way Dead, she seemed to understand already how this whole thing worked more than I do. She backed away from my hand and smiled sadly and danced away into the explosion in the sky that spilled out evil into the streets of New York, even though aliens didn't exist and good guys were supposed to slay the monsters.
(do you have any idea what you have done?)
I come here every night and sometimes I think he feels me. When he sleeps, he mutters words and asks "Why?" or says"I'm sorry."
Sometimes I hear him cry. It is not enough.
(I want you to burn in my mother's pain I want you to feel the desperation of being in between watching everything move on without you with you being stuck in the same place I want you to hurt hurt hurt)
(But sometimes, I think you already do.)
(And I hate that.)
When he sleeps, I feel the nightmares start. He begins to jerk and twitch in his sleep. And I feel them fly past me, sharp and jagged: the others who he has killed.
They enter his head and he whimpers and cries as he dreams.
(you don't see us but you feel us)
The people who are dead because of him. The difference is they are All The Way Dead and I am not. They can Float Up Into The Stars when he wakes but I can't do anything else except watch him.
It's almost painful the way he acts like it doesn't affect him. He wakes up crying and suddenly, he's not the monster anymore but the boy whose father didn't love him and the boy who stayed in his room to read books to cover up the fact that he had no friends to play with.
But then he stops and puts on his face, the one that was capable of setting New York ablaze. A deranged smirk. A bored lift of the eyebrow. A crossing of the legs to show everyone exactly how much of a damn he doesn't give.
He kills everything he feels. I see him do it and I can almost pinpoint the exact moment every morning where he decides it's better to stop feeling than to face any of the ghosts lurking behind his eyes.
I don't know what to make of it.
Loki's mother, however, reminds me of mine.
He, I firmly believe, does not deserve such a mother.
Frigga.
I say her name over and over. It's comforting to say somehow. It reminds me of when my mother would give me a glass of warm milk in the middle of the night when I could not fall asleep. I follow Frigga around whenever I can. I do not want to admit to myself the reason why.
(I miss my mother and you still have yours)
She has the most beautiful hair I have ever seen and eyes the color of warm honey. She spends most of her time reading in the ancient Asgard library, walking through her breathtaking gardens, or wandering the halls of the palace, no doubt worrying about him.
I follow her around, especially when she goes to the library. I sit and read with her. And sometimes, I just sit in a chair near the window and stare outside.
This place seems infinite, with all those stars and ocean opening this world like the inside of a seashell. There is also a bridge that looks as if a rainbow spilled its colors into carved glass marble. Every time I look at it, I feel a swooping feeling in my stomach as I see the dangerous height of it. What would stop someone from falling if they looked too close over the edge?
A strange twinge of fear twists my gut every time I see it. There's a darkness there I cannot exactly explain. I feel compelled to go there but something holds me back. The rushing of the water underneath is hypnotic in its beauty but I cannot figure out where it all goes. It's like the spilling of an ocean off the edge of the world. Like if the earth was flat the way the explorers back on Earth believed it was centuries ago. Will the ocean run dry eventually or will it fall into nothingness forever?
How can anything begin again when so much spills over to the point of no return?
I am afraid of it. There is nothing to keep you upright should you fall standing on it. I daydream of walking on it and looking at the magnificent sight of Asgard below me and seeing the array of everything ahead.
But then I feel the knowledge shake the foundation deep in my bones- I will be hypnotized by the never ending depths and lean over too far and fall. It's irrational to think but I cannot slow down my racing heart when I see it. I can almost taste the pull of the insane split second when falling forward over a precipice seems like a perfectly satisfying thing to do.
I cannot venture there. I will never return.
So I opt to stare at it from a far enough distance through a sheen of glass, safe inside the dusty halls of the library. Secure on the opulent tiles lining the floor.
Most people here have forgotten to appreciate it's danger and beauty. But I know Frigga stares at it as much as I do.
And a shadow passes over her face that I cannot comprehend.
"Odin continues to send me new friends. How thoughtful," Loki says.
I sit in the cot that Loki has nightmares on every night. I watch the prisoners enter and I frown at their strange wardrobe.
"The books I sent- do they not interest you?"
Me and Loki swivel our eyes towards Frigga. I tense while Loki paces.
"Is that how I am to while away eternity?"
He looks dangerous.
"Reading?" Loki walks in front of me. He has not washed his hair in a while.
"I have done everything in my power to keep you comfortable, Loki." The books in the corner sit perfectly organized, looking exactly as they did when Frigga had them brought down here. I know this because Loki spent two hours shifting the corners and placing them obsessively in order to make them seem untouched.
"Have you?" Loki asks. He leers forward. "Does Odin share your concern? Does Thor?" His father and brother. I never had any of those but somehow, I do not think it is commonplace to call your father by his first name, even here on Asgard.
"It must be so inconvienient them asking about me day and night," he says waspishly sarcastic. I cringe. His voice, like his name, is unexpected- soft, refined and deadly when I expected ragged and hollow to match the resentment in his eyes.
But why would he resent his mother, when only she has seemed to show any concern over him?
"You know full well it was your actions that brought you here." Frigga says sternly.
Rage flames my face and burns wetness in my eyes. She sounds like she is berating a child. Chastising his temper tantrum on Earth when the end result is dead in the air around them.
"My actions," Loki says, sweeping his arm mockingly polite. "I was merely giving truth to the lie that I've been fed my entire life. That I was born to be a king."
"A king?" Frigga moves closer and I hug my knees tighter, still reproachful towards her. I do not miss the way Loki deliberately turns away from Frigga's gaze.
"A true king admits his faults. And what of the lives you took on earth?"
Here I am, I want to scream. I almost stand and wave my arms but I sit shock still and do not take my eyes off of Loki's back. Turn around and look into my eyes.
What of my life? What of my life?
(my blood that mars your ledger)
"A mere handful compared to the number that Odin has taken himself."
So blunt.
I don't matter. And his voice and his words make it true.
They keep talking but I am shrinking away. They don't even notice.
I dimly register Frigga's voice but his words turn into sharp, crystalline glass that pierces the scarred tissue around my heart that still holds the feeling of my mother crying, of the souls that Floated Away and left me behind like a child who tripped on her way trying to follow the racing kids far up ahead, of my life that disappeared with a burning blast from a monster under the command of a man who shouted into the ash sky that "you are all of you beneath me." And I laid beneath the rubble and knew he was right.
A mere handful.
A fragile glass tear falls unseen from my eye and lands on the floor with the quietest breaking of glass I have ever heard. Frigga and Loki would hear it, if they would stop their speaking.
I stand up unnoticed. I make for the magical golden wall fully intent on never returning. Never again. Until I hear Frigga say something and-
"HE'S NOT MY FATHER!"
My hand strokes the surface of the gold sheen and I freeze. I sense the breaking of another heart behind me, warm and honey-colored.
"Then am I not your mother?"
His face is like a child's.
I close my eyes. "Don't say it," I whisper. "Don't say it."
I turn slowly and time slows in the way that only the dead sense. The crystal tear I left behind cracks the floor between mother and son and splits the ground in two. Only I see the fissure; Only I hear the crack.
The son's face freezes into something unrecognizable.
"You're not."
I close my eyes again and I hear Frigga laugh breathlessly. Humorlessly. Can she tell how close Loki stands on the edge of the split between them?
"Always so perceptive," Frigga whispers, "about everyone but yourself."
I open my eyes to see Loki shake his head. And I feel as if he sensed the looming split between him and his mother all along but instead of backing away, he hurled himself right off.
Frigga opens her hands out to him all the same. A lifeline. A second chance.
Hold on, I want to tell Loki. Get out of the chasm.
(You can still fix something even if it can't be me.)
But my tears and anger have crystallized into a hard lump in my throat and I can't swallow it down. A horrible, savage part of me that was born when I died wants him to fall. I want him to smell the blood. I want him to see the carnage. So I say nothing. He wouldn't hear me anyway.
And Loki's face looks like he has understood for far too long that second chances have long since passed. Too late now.
He waves a hand through Frigga's transparent form-a magical illusion, a glamour, not really here- and she begins to disappear before our eyes and somehow I just know-
This will be the last time we see her.
With searching, shining eyes that say Do not do this.
After Frigga leaves, Loki closes his eyes and looks as if he is trying to banish away every memory of his mother. But the feeling of the plummet carved into the floor hangs heavy in the air and reminds him of what has just been lost. Only I can see it. But I know he feels it there.
He collapses on his cot and I see his back rise and fall unsteadily. There is no sound and I cannot see his face. I hesitate- then lean over him.
He's sobbing. He does not move for a very long time.
To be continued.
A/N: Please review if you can so I can improve my writing!