LOST CREATURES X
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When he had summoned Mjolnir to his hand, crouching next to a struggling brother on the floor of a half-abandoned forge, the sole thing on Thor's mind had been to make it stop. To cease the reckless, useless torment of his brother or said sibling's recalcitrant rebellion, either one. Loki was fickle, fey and wild as they came, and falling through the empty space between worlds had only made that more apparent. To bind him was one thing; shackling madness before it could spread - Thor had convinced himself - was reasonable. But this? this torment for the sake of it? This would achieve nothing!
Apparently, his mother had agreed; her verbal intervention both saving face for her younger son and her husband, and preventing her eldest from committing the crime of raising his hammer - his weapon - against the direct, expressed will of his father. It seemed, when he considered it in retrospect, that once more he owed his mother his heartfelt thanks: The verbal exchange Thor had shared with his father all those months ago, the one that had resulted in his banishment, would have been nothing compared to that, and Thor uneasily pushed aside the thought of what the commensurate punishment would have been.
When he looked back on it, the one thing that struck Thor was how surreal the entire episode had been. His own near-gaffe, elegantly turned aside by Frigga's deft handling of the situation, contrasted with the queen's parting shot. And it was a parting shot; though physically frailer, Frigga had ever been her husband's match when it came to determination and intelligence; any less, and she could not have been his foil, his queen, his light. Thor knew that with the same certainty (a certainty settled in his bones) that he knew that, while he were worthy, Mjolnir would ever rest in his hands. So Frigga's final words, her transparent attempt to gently chide Loki back into the role he had always been groomed for - that of Thor's right hand man - had seemed a clumsy turn of phrase for his ever-eloquent mother, for all her oft-expressed wish that he and Loki would take up the role of king and advisor when she and Odin stepped down.
But while appealing to Loki's bravery seemed a lost cause (after all, any one who persistently chose to use seidr for his weapon of choice was by definition a coward. All of Asgard knew that, and Loki had certainly had it pointed out to him on more than one occasion.) Thor found he couldn't dispute his mother's assessment on one particular point.
Loki was wasted as a prisoner. He was also, in Thor's duly considered opinion, utterly squandered as an artificer, building toys and tools for Asgard, indulging his habit for seidr. He was utterly misused, no matter how pretty or successful the fruits of his labour were: Surely - Thor had convinced himself - the Volur that Asgard had seen assigned to the Bifrost before Loki's return could have laboured a little while longer and eventually achieved the same result, and all without tainting his little brother once more with the taste for high seidr, for world-threatening creativity.
For once the dark-haired maverick rediscovered his predilection for it, who knew where his skill for creation would lead? nowhere good for Asgard, Thor was certain. Nowhere where Asgard could stand perfect, unchanged. Unchallenged with change.
In private moments - and only to himself - Thor had long since resigned himself to the knowledge that Loki's cunning, his canny grasp of strategy, and his relentless imagination (even - especially - when it came to tactics) far outstripped Thor's own. It was part of why, when the Man of Iron had invited the Captain to devise and command the Avengers' strategy during the attack on New York, Thor had acceded with nary a murmur of dissent despite his superior status as both prince and god, and his - literally - aeons of experience leading small, stalwart groups against overwhelming odds.
Far too many times that small group had featured Loki, and rather more often than Thor was comfortable considering, Loki had been the strategist who had wrangled victory or escape for himself, Thor and Thor's steadfast warriors three, often in the face of near-certain defeat. Faced with the novel and unwelcome concept of battling against this talent while fighting on Midgard, the thunder god had deferred to the star-spangled captain, hoping that some flash of brilliance on the masked superhero's part might just be enough to tip the scales against his brother, to win the battle.
Though it had in the end been the Man of Iron who had done that, Thor could not help but uneasily note that Loki's entire attempt on Midgard had felt clumsily half-hearted. Certainly, it had lacked anything resembling his usual finesse and skill.
Foreign though they were, the Chitauri force had been unquestionably military. An army? Loki had used an army? A living example of brute force and unsubtle tactics, notions of which he so utterly disdained? And not just used them as a diversion; the mischief god had been overtly, obviously, smack bang in the middle of the fighting force. Glorying in the type of combat that usually brought a sneering curl to his lip.
It was no more comforting a thought now than it had been when he'd initially considered it during the very first dinner with his parents back on Asgard, after Loki had fled the throne room for his lab, beginning his task with alacrity and rather more determined doggedness, and indeed enthusiasm, than Thor would have liked.
Still, his mother was correct; Loki's usual cunning in battle (though spectacular only by it's absence in the most recent conflict) would be an invaluable boon to Thor on the throne. Likewise his skill with diplomacy - manipulation - was indisputable, and could be made serve to quietly strengthen both Asgard and Thor's position once he was king, and all without the thunder god having to lower himself to un-warriorlike political delicacy. Thor himself lacked the cunning, the gift of wordiness, that both Loki and - to a lesser extent - Odin excelled at. While Odin's skill was enough to ensure his secure, prosperous rule, Thor lacked even that much verbal adroitness. Frigga was right; Thor needed his brother, and the thunder god was more than certain that Odin knew that.
It made Odin's decision to punish Loki by commanding him to take up his seidr and create somewhat inexplicable to the young crown prince. The only reason he could see were if there were some sort of overriding need for the Bifrost to be repaired quickly. But there wasn't, was there? He, Thor, would surely know. His father, king on high, would have told him.
Wouldn't he?
The summons to his parents' chambers came almost as a relief. The sight of his father - old, worn, and slump-shouldered - did not.
"Father?" He asked, uncharacteristically hesitant in the face of his sire's unmasked fatigue. He was used to the elder god being stalwart, assured, and indomitable. The weakness hinted at in the lines of the Allfather's mouth, the tension of his grip on the windowsill at which he stood, served only to make Thor's skin crawl. It's too soon for an Odinsleep, I'm sure of it. Uneasily, Thor thought of the demands placed on his father since the last one: his own trip to Midgard to stop Loki, powered by Odin alone due to the Bifrost's destruction. Then the enchantment of the Dvergar bonds and gag, both to silence the mischief god initially, and then once more for their later transmutation into the tools of Loki's sentence. With a start, Thor realised just how much seidr - how much strength - that must have sapped from the Allfather.
It would have been even more of a demand than when Odin had freed Sleipnir from the Palace stables to ride across the Bifrost to Jotunheim and rescue his sons, to use his strength to enact Thor's banishment and Mjolnir's sealing. . . back when the world went mad and took Loki with it.
Odin had needed to enter the Odinsleep shortly after that, forced into it before he could even repair the damage done to Loki's psyche by the disastrous trip to Jotunheim, by the discoveries the mischief god had made there.
And Odin was nothing like Loki: Where Loki seemed undiminished, or even invigorated, by his seidr-work, Odin grew fatigued. Where Loki seemed to grow stronger with each spell he cast, each creation he wove out of his hope and his mind and his seidr, Odin was lessened. Where Loki's seidr-skills were as much a part of him as his arm or leg or heart, swift to his hand when he needed, Odin's were carefully rare, grafted on, and used only deliberately aforethought and at great personal cost.
The realisation made Thor's blood run cold. I'm not ready for him to need another Odinsleep! I've so much to learn still, and I cannot - cannot bear - to handle the remainder of Loki's punishment!
"My son," creaky. Tired and old, Odin's voice was still powerful. Thor found himself straightening unconsciously.
"Father," going with his instinct, Thor knelt in a position of fealty, and rather than flinging his arms around the older man, he amended his statement. "My Liege."
Odin - Asgard - needed a crown prince right now. Not a son. Thor could do no less than rise to the occasion.
"I have need of you. Asgard has need of you." Straightening, the heavy burden of rule settled once more on his shoulders, Odin turned to his son, gestured for him to stand. "Though maddened - willfully so, it seems sometimes - Loki is no less intelligent for it."
"Father?"
"He is quite correct, in as far as that goes; the Bifrost must be tested. Because it must be functional."
"But why?! If Loki is a madman, he is merely one with a seidr-spawned mess of colour that may or may not allow living creatures to travel it to reach Midgard! Why then this urgency? Why test this thing he's made at all, if it may simply serve to leave it's passengers 'spattered inside out across the branches of Yggdrasil'? Why not simply get the Volur who were working on-"
"Because they failed!" Short, sharp, and without any increase in volume, Odin's words nonetheless cut his son's tirade dead in it's tracks.
"Because there were twenty of them, and they had years, and at the end of it they were no closer to success than when they started! And one man, my second son, managed to do what they could not, and he did it alone and in less than a month as a punishment!" Turning, the aging king walked to the balcony, looking out over the halcyon afternoon.
"Asgard must have this link to the other realms Yggdrasil; without it, we are merely a bough with no connection to the trunk of the tree." Pausing, he faced his son, piercing grey eye boring into Thor's blues. "And no branch survives long without the support of the bole."
NOTES:
Aaaaaand the plot thickens (congeals?) C&C greatly appreciated: Let me know what you think. Thanks for reading!