As the sun climbs higher and higher, Loki is beginning to seriously entertain the idea of leaving a double in his place and returning to the negotiations, where he could actually be doing something useful instead of just standing here and feigning interest in watching a few hundred soldiers sweat even more profusely than he does. It's currently Frigga who is in talks with the ambassador from Muspelheim – none of Lady Irpa's diplomatic staff are sufficiently skilled at projection (she is looking into hiring more candidates with seiðr, but it will be a while until that becomes helpful), so it's down to the Allmother and Loki himself to conduct the negotiations. The Eldjötnar, traditionally reluctant to leave their realm, have not yet agreed to any of Asgard's suggestions for a neutral meeting place, and since neither Aesir nor Vanir (let alone Jötnar, Loki can't help adding before he stops himself) can survive for long in Muspelheim's climate, projection is their only means of moving the negotiations forward for the time being.
And yet he has to waste precious hours here, on the viewing platform above the parade ground, in order to demonstrate his support for Asgard's troops and General Tyr's reorganization of their army. Loki's interest in military matters has always been limited to the tactical side of warfare, but he knows he needs to be here, in plain sight of the soldiers who are being taken through their paces under the merciless glare of the midday sun, no matter how bored he is and how many other pressing matters he'd rather attend to.
One of the reasons Loki never wished for the throne was the fact that he understood from an early age that kingship entails far more than just the work which goes into politics, administration and diplomacy – he wouldn't have minded that (and, at the time, had been fully prepared to do most of it anyway once Thor was king and didn't bother with any of it), but he always abhorred the idea of being a figurehead for everything Asgard supposedly stands for, of having to sit through a never-ending succession of pointless ceremonies because the king just has to be there in order for his subjects to feel secure in the knowledge that everything is as it should be in the Golden Realm. Now that he has personally let the people of Asgard know that everything is very much not as it should be, that they are preparing for a fight in which their realm's survival is at stake, it is even more important for him to be seen in public whenever he can, to instill his subjects with confidence in his leadership and remind them of their king's tireless efforts to make sure Asgard will prevail.
For all your scheming, brother, do you truly think that we actually stand a chance against Thanos?
He still doesn't have an answer to Hela's question, but it is of little consequence what he thinks – it's the people of Asgard whose faith in their resilience might well decide the war, and it's up to Loki to ensure that their faith doesn't waver.
That goes double for Asgard's soldiers. Since the first days of his youth, Loki has known that the realm's warrior elite will never respect him – while Thor grew into the embodiment of Asgard's warrior ideal, Loki became its antithesis (some do battle, others just do tricks, Thor's voice whispers in his memory, but Loki has replayed the sentence so often in his mind that it has lost its sting by now), and he's well aware that little of what he did since he took the throne was bound to endear him to the members of the old warrior clans who make up the main body of Asgard's nobility. He doesn't expect them to rebel openly against him – their own rigid concept of honor and duty is his best tool to keep them in line, but they won't ever be glad to follow his lead and might drag their feet at a crucial juncture because they will never fully trust a king who has made no secret of the fact that he isn't one of them.
The common soldiers, though, are another matter entirely, just like the Allthing was far more willing to accept and heed Loki's words than most of his own council was. Few of the men going through sword drills and mock battle formations on the dusty parade ground below him come from the old, proud warrior families – they're the sons of farmers, craftsmen and traders, ordinary citizens of Asgard who grew up in the knowledge that warfare wasn't an end in itself, that the only reason for them to pick up arms would always be to make sure there was still a life for them to go back to when the war was over. These are the people who have been flocking to General Tyr's banners ever since their new king first addressed the Allthing, and they're the reason Loki is here now to show them that he wasn't just spouting empty phrases, that he's taking the situation just as seriously as he was asking them to take it. He can't keep asking Asgard's people to consider the upcoming fight against Thanos their common cause if he isn't willing to demonstrate his own willingness to do the same. Therefore, Loki grits his teeth, casts another surreptitious cooling spell and nods along to General Tyr's clipped explanations without allowing his eyes to glaze over.
Something is changing, as if this place is slowly becoming less... wrong around me the longer I rule it.
He isn't sure why he's suddenly remembering Hela's cryptic words, but they ring oddly true – he's farther out of his element than a fish out of water right now, and yet he's faced with the dawning realization that he no longer feels like an impostor in his own life. There's still something he cannot fully grasp, a strange, shadowy sensation of... not the wrongness he constantly felt during his early days on the throne, but of something other, a part of him that doesn't seem to belong anywhere and yet keeps brushing against his consciousness like the flutter of a moth's wings. If he'd just –
"Ah, here's the roster I wanted to show you, my king."
Loki has too much experience with boring situations to let Tyr notice that his mind was miles away when the general addressed him. Still, it's only now that he becomes aware of Fandral standing next to Tyr with a stack of papers in his hands, and his mood brightens instantly when he notices the man's pinched expression.
"I haven't seen you in a while, Fandral."
"My duties have kept me busy, my king." If looks could kill, Fandral would now be guilty of regicide, and the bright smile Loki flashes him definitely isn't helping.
"I'm sure General Tyr appreciates your dedication."
"Well, we're getting there," Tyr states drily, and Loki is treated to the rare spectacle of the corner of the general's mouth quirking up for a moment. Tyr dismisses his lieutenant with a wave of his hand, and the glare that accompanies Fandral's stiff bow before he makes a hasty exit goes a long way towards compensating Loki for suffering through the mind-numbing dullness of the last hours.
It may be petty, but given how heavily the burden of kingship is weighing on his shoulders, he figures that he's entitled to a few small perks as well.
.
Loki balked at first when Frigga suggested that he should take over her traditional yearly inspection of the Volur's teaching facilities – trudging after Lady Gullveig as she boasts about the quality of their education while simultaneously pumping him for extra funding seems frivolous at best, given how little time he has to spare these days. It took several days of nagging – not that he would have called it that to the Allmother's face – until he gave in, but now that he's here, he can't help finding the tour Gullveig is giving him (with her most senior acolytes trailing behind them at a respectful distance) mildly interesting, which is more than can be said for the majority of his ceremonial duties. He has never been on the premises before – not only did he receive his own magical education under Frigga's supervision at the palace, it would also have been unthinkable at the time for a male practitioner of seiðr to enter the sanctum of Asgard's sorceresses, even if he doubts there would have been a way for the Volur to refuse if a prince of the realm had actually asked.
For a moment, Loki wonders how Odin would have reacted if Loki had had the audacity to make such a request.
In retrospect, it seems a little ironic that he has visited all leading institutions of magical studies throughout the Nine except for the one on Asgard, but it's hardly surprising given that none of the other realms share Asgard's gender bias when it comes to the practice of seiðr. With that in mind, Loki was expecting a rather frosty reception by Gullveig's fellow sorceresses, but if the other Volur resent him for forcing them to break with one of their most sacred traditions, they manage not to show it. Loki figures that a mage on the throne is too valuable an ally for them to alienate no matter how much of a grudge they may hold against him, and it's an arrangement he's perfectly content with.
He's less sanguine about Gullveig's pronouncement that their students would be honored to meet him as well. Facing a bunch of nervous children is going to be awkward at best, but there's no polite way to extricate himself, so Loki plasters a smile on his face and follows Gullveig as she leads him towards the classroom where, she informs him, the youngest aspiring mages receive their basic training.
The group that awaits him in the large, vaulted room is bigger than he expected – there must be at least three dozen girls, dressed in plain grey apprentice robes, who look like they're trying to stand to attention while staring at him in a way that reminds him of a bunch of scared rabbits. It takes him a moment to spot the three boys in the back who appear a little lost among the gaggle of girls, but still fixate him with the same wide-eyed stare. The shortest of them must be the notorious Ansgar Egilson, and Loki finds himself momentarily curious whether the lad is still happy with the path he chose for himself or is already beginning to regret it.
Of course, there wouldn't be time for Loki to ask the question even if he were actually inclined to do so – Gullveig is already calling forward the group's apparent star pupil, a chubby girl who barely looks old enough to be out of the nursery. The girl seems so anxious that Loki is tempted to take a step back because he half expects her to throw up on his boots any moment, but she still manages to conjure a rather pretty butterfly that even takes flight before it dissolves into a shower of silvery sparkles.
Loki gives her an approving nod and is rewarded with a blush that clashes horribly with the girl's copper-colored hair. He's aware that he's probably expected to address her, but he has no idea what he's supposed to say to her (to the best of his recollection, he hasn't held a conversation with a child since he stopped being one), so he finally settles on asking her how her seiðr manifested given that she's still so young.
To his surprise, the girl's blush deepens, and it takes a stern look from Gullveig to get her to answer. "My king, I – I gave my brother a pig's snout. Not on purpose!" she adds hastily. "It was just that... he kept calling me a fat little piglet, and I – I didn't mean to, but I... I got angry."
Biting back an entirely un-pedagogic laugh, Loki tries for a solemn expression instead. "I take it he stopped calling you names after that?"
The girl shuffles her feet. "Nobody wanted to play with me anymore, so Mother sent me here to be trained. I like it better here, but I... I know I mustn't get angry like that again."
Oh dear. Loki doubts he's qualified to offer an opinion on that specific topic, but the situation obviously requires some words of wisdom, and it doesn't look like Gullveig is going to come to his rescue. "A mage's anger can be dangerous," he finally agrees, "but it can be a powerful tool as well. There's nothing wrong with being angry if you manage to rule your anger instead of letting it rule you – but I'm sure that's a lesson you will be taught repeatedly in the course of your studies."
So were you, a traitorous voice at the back of his mind speaks up, not that it did you much good when it really mattered, did it? He still can't help wondering whether the course of his life might have run differently if he'd been given the chance to grow up surrounded by other children with seiðr instead of –
Thankfully, Gullveig cuts his thoughts short before they can take him deeper into precarious territory. "My king, might I suggest we move on to the advanced students now? I have asked them to prepare a rather complex incantation –"
On a whim, Loki nods with the kind of solemn earnestness that, during his own youth, would immediately have put his tutors on high alert. "Lead the way, Lady Gullveig."
When she turns away, he casts a double and sends it out of the room alongside the old volva; then he crosses his arms and waits while the students' awestruck silence is starting to get punctuated by suppressed snickers.
He knows that a sorceress of Gullveig's caliber won't be fooled for long, but she's still halfway down the hallway before she notices that something is amiss and turns back to see Loki standing among the giggling children with a smirk on his face. He grants himself a moment to enjoy the expression on her face as she realizes she isn't allowed to glare at him here; then he dispels the illusion with a flick of his wrist and follows her.
He's hardly the right person to provide a bunch of fledgling mages with life-altering insights, but at least he has given them a story to tell.
.
Loki usually skywalks to the Observatory when he wishes to hear Sif's report without keeping her from her duties, but lately, he has taken up the habit of walking back across the Rainbow Bridge under the cover of an invisibility spell afterwards. Not only do these solitary walks provide him with some much-needed time to think; he's also painfully aware that he still can't look into the gaping vortex of nothingness under the bridge without his insides clenching with anxiety, and he's getting tired of fearing something that used to be an everyday part of his life for a millennium.
Tonight, though, he finds himself even more out of sorts than usual when he forces himself to look beyond the shimmering colors that are the only thing between him and the pull of the Void underneath his feet. He woke from another nightmare about Thanos in the small hours of the morning – they're getting more and more frequent, and even though none of them are as vivid as the one after his trip to Xandar, there's always that shred of worry that one of them might eventually turn out to be more than just his own mind playing tricks on him.
Halfway across the bridge, Loki stops and then, steeling himself, steps up to the edge. He hasn't thought about this for a long time, but now he remembers how he used to come here, back in the days of his adolescence, when his mother was trying to teach him all kinds of meditation techniques in order to center himself, to find the focal point of his seiðr and discipline his wandering mind so he could learn to fully access the well of his own power. He had a hard time of it initially, even more so because nobody else seemed to understand or care how difficult it was, until – not long after he had learned to conceal himself from Heimdall's Sight – he snuck out of the palace one night and went to sit on the Rainbow Bridge. There, with his feet dangling over the edge, he let the song of the Void fill his mind until he felt his own heartbeat resonate with the slow, steady pulse of the cosmos. It calmed and focused him in a way nothing else had until then, and for a while, he kept coming back regularly until he was finally able to control and command his innate magic the way his mother wanted him to.
Now, with the leaden weight of dread heavy in his stomach, Loki slowly sits down and inches forward until his feet are dangling over the abyss just like they did all those centuries ago, although he can't help digging his fingers into the bridge's edge until his knuckles turn white. Pushing back against the rising panic that makes it hard to draw breath (a giant hand around his neck, red spots dancing in front of his eyes can't breathe can't breathe can't breathe), he forces himself to stare into the swirling darkness whose beauty has turned poisonous now that he knows what's staring back at him, that he has learned there are worse things than mere oblivion that await those who foolishly allow themselves to be swallowed up by the yawning maw of the Void in hopes of merely becoming one with the nothingness.
I could have done it, father!
No, Loki –
He startles violently when a loud caw pulls him out of his thoughts. His ravens are coming towards him, two small black dots against the gleaming skyline of the distant city, and once they're near enough, it's obvious that they are fighting again. Munin keeps flying into his brother's path, at times pecking at his eyes, at times trying to tear out his feathers, and Hugin's hoarse cries cut so painfully into Loki's skull that he's forced to clap his hands over his ears. The two birds circle for a while – they sense his nearness, but the invisibility spell prevents them from finding him, and at long last, they give up their search and leave in two different directions.
Loki slowly lowers his hands and notices belatedly that they are shaking. He still has no idea what's wrong with the ravens, but he's beginning to find their behavior deeply unsettling – Odin created them to be extensions of his own mind, and now that they're in Loki's service to fulfil the same role, what is he supposed to make of the fact that they keep attacking each other with ever-growing viciousness?
You cannot hope to command your power as long as you do not have command of yourself.
How often has Frigga told him that when he was fretting over a conjuration gone awry or his hold on a spell slipping? But how can he possibly achieve such a goal now when he can't even center himself properly for fear of what he's going to encounter in his own mind?
He can almost hear Odin's stern voice admonish him to cease this pathetic sniveling, to man up and stop cowering in fear like a spineless coward, and suddenly it's easy to let his frustration tip over into anger. He is the one who held Asgard against her enemies when Odin couldn't, who sits enthroned on Hliðskjálf's golden seat while the Allfather's remains are scattered among the stars, and he'll be damned if he allows the memory of a man who took him home as a war-prize and discarded him when he no longer had use for him to turn his own thoughts against him.
A mage's anger is a powerful tool if you manage to rule it instead of letting it rule you.
He no longer is the lost, heartbroken boy he was during his first, disastrous reign, when he couldn't keep his anger from lashing out blindly until he ended up with nothing but the shards of his shattered hopes and dreams. He has stared into the face of death and worse since then, has been through hardships none of Asgard's boastful warriors could even imagine, has been broken to pieces and put together wrong, and yet he is still here, with more power in his hands than he ever wielded before, and he will not be haunted by the specters inside his own brain any more.
Rule your anger instead of letting it rule you. Holding on to the burn of fury deep in his chest, Loki closes his eyes and turns his focus inward with no regard for all the areas in his mind he has walled up for fear of what he might encounter there. He's no longer willing to content himself with merely keeping up his defenses against the seething mass of terror, grief, hurt, shame and regret deep inside his soul; he wants all of himself back, every thought and experience and memory, no matter how painful or frightening. He has tried to live his life with pieces of his own self missing for so long that he almost got used to it, but now he is done.
Pushing through all his carefully erected barriers, Loki widens his senses as much as he's able to – he can't afford to miss anything, needs to see, hear, feel everything that exists within the reach of his seiðr because he can tell there's something, a thing that doesn't belong and yet does, that has been a part of him for a long time and yet isn't. It feels twisted and wrong as if the Norns had allowed his thread to become so tangled that a filament has come loose and is now coiling itself around his life like a vine around a branch, breaking away and then arching back to take hold in the places it can reach until the thread itself is threatening to tie itself into a gnarled knot.
It takes Loki a moment to realize that the deep, resounding hum he can feel in his bones is coming from the Aether in his dimensional pocket. The Reality Stone has never awoken on its own like that ever since he has had it in his possession, but now it pulses with a rhythm that is perfectly in synch with Loki's own heartbeat.
When he opens his eyes again, he finds that the darkness underneath him holds no terror any more. The Tesseract's gentle song joins into the music of the cosmos, reminding him there's no danger of getting lost in the Void again, but it's the Aether's power that truly fills and heightens his senses in a way that reminds him of those rare moments when he has managed to fully master Hliðskjálf's Sight, when the surface of the world seems to fade away to reveal its true, deeper nature underneath.
Loki climbs to his feet and blinks as if he'd just woken from a deep sleep. The swirling vortex of the Void is still there, but it feels like he's watching it through a veil that is thinning before his eyes, and for a moment he's struck by the same strange feeling of double vision that he experienced during his latest talk with his deadly sister. A part of him wants to recoil, but he pays it no heed and focuses his awareness on the reassuring presence of the two Infinity Stones on the fringe of his consciousness. They are both singing to him now, the joint power of Space and Reality pulling him forward, and it's suddenly easy to push the veil apart and step through it.
.
He finds himself in a small, nondescript room filled with stale air and the sound of a man's loud snoring. The room is lit by the dim, yellowish light of a small lamp on the floor that casts long shadows onto the bare walls; the floor itself vibrates gently with the mechanical hum of engines. Loki has no idea where he is, but it doesn't concern him overmuch; wherever his two Gems have taken him, he trusts that they will be able to bring him back just as easily if he should encounter any danger.
Stepping cautiously forward, Loki focuses his attention on the room's sole occupant, a large man curled up in a ball with his face to the wall on a narrow cot in the corner. He is fast asleep, yet his slumber appears troubled; his snores are interspersed with gasps and murmurs, and he twitches in his sleep as if he were being chased by nightmares.
Loki is still deliberating whether he should risk approaching the stranger further in order to get a better look when the man grunts and turns over, exposing his face to the lamplight.
The world stops.
Very little of the man's face is actually visible under the long, tangled beard and the mass of matted hair, but Loki would still recognize it anywhere in the universe.
The man on the cot is Thor.