The Remnant Prince
A/N: This chapter was beta-ed. I will go back and fix the last and any others later. Other updates will not be this soon.
Ch.10: Caught In The Web
**The Future, Approximately, or The Present**
Naryu could still see her brother, dropping below her like a stone. His eyes were closed, his arms outstretched. An itchy, prickling sensation started making its way up her spine, moving into her shoulder blades. Pain bubbled to the surface like razors slicing her skin and her bones there began to ache, making her cry out in pain. With a final stab, the wings she had wished for as a child sprang outward, ripping and tearing the back of her shirt and baring her shoulders. The new appendages tripped her up uselessly, throwing her off-balance and sending her into a twirled descent through the blackness end over end.
A portal: that was the only thing that would save their lives. She had one in her robes, a portal cube. Her last portal cube. She had learned how to fashion the portable doors, or windows rather, when she was still living with her kind. She was already ice cold. Her trembling fingers fumbled numbly in her pockets, clammy as they slid against the fabric of her robes. It seemed an eternity before they closed over the object. It was warm slightly in all that cold, like solid sunshine, and fuzzy under her fingertips.
Forcefully wrenching her new wings around so they were behind her, Naryu caught Loki, though she wasn't sure how. He was unconscious. She pulled him close, realizing she needed a flat surface for the portal. Swearing, she sunk into despair. Until she remembered the book in her other pocket. Regretfully, she pulled out the text, admiring it one final time. She enlarged it, angled it just below them with her free arm, and, somehow, set the cube atop it.
Naryu heard the barely audible pop ring in her ear, felt the portal open and pull on them. She didn't think to concentrate as something came near them in that dark place. She just forced them through the sucking portal mouth before them and would have prayed, if she did that sort of thing, that nothing followed them.
**Approximate Present, or The Past**
He knew he shouldn't go to the ball. Watching her with that detestable Victor Krum made his stomach turn over. The fool couldn't say her name, he was clumsy on the ground, or any flat surface for that matter, he lacked etiquette, grace, or eloquence, he lacked any real brain power and Hermione's mind far outstripped his feeble one. Loki loathed him. He despised the sound of the hated voice, turned his nose up in distaste at the ungainly gait.
He told her so. Constantly. He knew she wasn't happy: he just wished she knew it, too. Rosalie was inclined to agree with him. He really didn't see how she was a Hufflepuff. All of this he pondered as he stood in the crowd of students congregated in front of the Great Hall doors, waiting. He had almost given up when he saw her at last, having thought that perhaps she had change her mind or left the absurd mortal wizard far behind.
Hermione smiled, and it was for him, only for he, Loki, and Loki knew it. The only other person he was visible to was Rosalie, who stood off to one side eyeing them amusedly, lovely and alone, a party crasher. No, definitely not a Hufflepuff. Hermione had tamed her hair through some miracle, and the result was that it had never looked quite so soft or so been so curly. The pink dress she wore fell gently against the contours of her body as if it were a mere blush against her flesh. And her makeup...what makeup? She wore not a trace. She was beautiful, truly beautiful, his real-life Matilda.
Loki blinked and frowned to himself at that odd thought, smoothing his features out as she descended the stairs beaming. Loki waited until Krum had gone for drinks to appear again, choosing to sit in the baboon's chair.
"You look dashing," Hermione commented, leaning back in her seat and crossing her ankles.
"As do you," he replied. She watched as he fished something out of his pocket.
When he opened his gloved hand, a strange medallion lay in his palm. He dangled it in front of her face. She caught it against the flat of her palm, staring at it intently. It made her hand tingle.
"There's magic in this," she murmured, meeting his gaze. They were leaning across the table then, oblivious and invisible to all others barring Rosalie.
Loki paused a beat, then admitted, "Yes."
He elaborated no further. "Put it on and never take it off, promise me."
"I-" she began, "it's just a-"
"Promise me," he pressed her. She gazed between it and his face thoughtfully before nodding, once.
"You'll have to help with the clasp."
He obliged, sliding behind her. He brushed her loosely fallen curls out of the way, his fingers ghosting over her bare shoulders and lingering ever so slightly. Bending towards her ear as he fastened it, he whispered, "It has a trick clasp and is difficult to break. You'll probably forget about it until you need it."
She brought her hand up to hold his in place as he retreated. "Why would I need it?"
She turned around to peer up at him suspiciously.
"My dear Hermione, we both know that you'll follow them."
She didn't ask who, what, when, or where. She knew, and he knew she knew. There was no explanation necessary.
"I just don't want to see you get hurt."
"whose place did I take?" she asked him. His eyebrows knit together. "Whatever do you mean, silly girl?" he asked.
"Everything you take comes with a price. Who's paying my price? Whose protection do I have?"
"Would it matter?" he asked sharply. Hermione's brown eyes flashed fiercely. He loved that burning passion.
"Shouldn't it?" she retorted evenly. He paused.
"Not everything is stolen," he replied, backing away. It was then that she saw a matching amulet around his neck, and then that he disappeared into the crowd.
"Here is your drink, Herm-own-ninny," Victor's voice sliced through her search. Reluctantly, she turned away. She took the glass. "Thank you."
The words were not for Victor. But he could think so.
**The Future, Approximately, or The Present**
Fárbauti's agonized scream pierced the air as she watched Naryu dive off of the edge after her son. Loki. She fell at the edge having dodged Thor and Odin's grasp. She struggled, biting and kicking as she wept bitterly.
"NO, NO!" she sobbed, at last slumping dejectedly back into Thor's strong chest, allowing his muscled arms to encircle her, to hold and ground her. She could not stand if she did not think he was there to help her do it. She felt weak, as if all was lost. All was lost. He set her down, gently, a few feet away, and she fell over onto her side, curling in on herself like a kicked dog and mumbling incoherent nonsense.
"She's in shock," a voice said.
"She's in pain," another corrected, and, as ragged gasps escaped her chest like the cries of a wounded beast, she heard Frigga say, "A part of her has died, as has a part of me."
Her son, her only son...
Loki awoke with a stabbing pressure behind his eyes. He opened them slowly. The hard surface he had felt underneath his back was an unforgiving rocky surface. He sat up slowly, wincing. The air was still and stale. The light was a strange, dark half-light, gloomy and murky. He was in some sort of natural cave formation. He had no idea how he had gotten there, thought himself alone. Movement of something else quickly changed his mind.
"You're awake."
Naryu moved into the faint light coming from the outside. Her hair was disheveled, her clothes torn slightly and her eyes wild. She eyed him warily. It hurt. Of everyone in his life from Asgard, he never thought she of all people would view him with suspicion. Of course, he had been prepared to throw her into a dungeon with his own mother. He had been angry. He was still angry. But he also had to protect his weaknesses, and he loved them too much to leave them vulnerable. He had needed Frigga, needed her because she would believe the lie, the rouse, hail him a hero. Naryu stared at him a moment longer, and then she lunged forward and slapped him, hard.
"Is that any way to treat a weary traveler?" he said, gingerly touching his face. She ignored him, instead staring at him again.
"Do you know what you've done? Do you know what you've done!" she screeched.
"YES!" he yelled at last, reacting to her, "Yes, of course I did! I only did what was expected of me!"
This time when she lunged, he put his arms up to fend her off, thinking he didn't want to harm her. He was surprised when her arms clamped around him in a fierce hug.
"You're a complete fool, brother," she whispered. His hands felt something strange behind her, something that shouldn't have been. Something warm and ethereal, some membranous thing...
"Your wings," he whispered. Naryu sat back on her heels, smiling despite herself or her anger.
"Yes," she whispered. Her smile fell. "It happened when we were plummeting to our doom in that spacial rift."
"I recall only myself and Thor hanging on by a thread...and no one else. Only the All-father was present..."
"You didn't see me," Naryu said with quiet surprised. "I don't know what came over me...I had a vision and I knew what would happen...I knew you let go. Why, Loki? Why let go? Why any of this?"
"I need not explain myself to you, sister," he replied, turning his head aside.
"What was so terrible that you had to do that?"
"What?" he hissed suddenly, "Take the throne a Frost Giant should never have or try to ensure I was no longer anyone's problem?"
"Don't you dare tell me you had nothing to live for," Naryu snarled.
~"You know, why is it that families keep so many secrets from each other?" Loki asked angrily.
Naryu calmed slightly. "Is this what everything has been about?"
Loki glared at the cave ceiling. "Not everything."
~"Well...because family's so important. It's the hardest love to lose and that's why it's so difficult to tell them how you feel...or what you know."
"You're saying they were protecting me?" he thundered, shaking his head, "No, I won't believe that."
Naryu reached for his hand, about to reply, when a paralytic pain had them both gasping on their sides.
Ugly, metallic looking figures scrambled inside and drug them out into the open. They both gazed upward when they were thrown before someone's feet. Loki saw that there were actually two somethings. One was heavily cloaked, the other a hideous purple being.
"The half-Jotunn prince Loki, my Lord," the cloaked figure informed the second, hulking figure. The helmeted head lifted, the face that of a gruesome, skull-like being, with eerie blue eyes peering at the two Asgardians with a chilled, calculating greed.
"Excellent. Take them to our dungeons...see how they are after our complimentary welcome."
"Of course, my Lord Thanos."
Chains bound them and they were hauled roughly to their feet. Thanos tilted Naryu's chin upward, turning her face from side to side.
"Who is this one?" he asked the Other.
"If sources are correct, Master, she is his first cousin, Naryu Astelm, daughter of Farose , her father, and Div, her mother…the unrelated half-siblings of Queen Fárbauti. "