- Chapter 23 -
'The knife opened my veins.' Long sleeves. Only three hundred and forty, just a boy then. Odin had a hard time listening to what Loki was saying. It was worse than what Thor mentioned. The beast within him was beginning to growl. He would never have believed that he himself would be a target of its wrath, but its growling rage was clearly pointed at him. He also would never have believed himself worthy of its wrath, yet that too was changing. Not only had his son been so distraught that he tried to die, but he'd done it when he was truly a child. Was Frigga right? Have I ever been a good father to you?
The knife opened my veins ...
Odin still remembered fondly the times when Loki couldn't sleep as a child. He thought the boy too young, too small, to have such nightmares, but he did. Loki would dream of smoke and fire, of blood and death. Occasionally he would dream of a silent man with orange eyes. Loki would climb out of his too big bed, and dragging his pillow along, would come to find his father. Odin hadn't minded when, in the middle of the night, he would be awakened by a tiny hand gently tugging on his night shirt. "Father, I had a nightmare. I'm scared. Can I sleep with you and mother?" his little Loki would ask. Odin would always wipe the boy's tears away and lift him up into bed. He would put Loki between him and his wife. His young son would drift back to sleep with his little hand holding tight to just one of Odin's fingers.
The knife opened my veins ...
Loki was such a tiny child with a slight build, only about half the size of most other children. It wasn't until Loki was almost an adult that he gained any measure of height. Even as he approached a nearly impressive height he was still slight of build. His small stature never stopped him from trying his hardest to keep up with Thor. He always worried that Loki would be hurt. More often than not, Odin was right. Not matter what injuries Loki received, or what sickness he struggled through, he never stopped trying. He was always most proud of Loki 's indomitable spirit.
"The knife opened my veins," the words kept echoing in Odin's head. Unbidden an image of Loki lying unmoving in a pool of blood, eyes devoid of life, sprang into his mind. He could already feel ghastly new nightmares forming from already awful old memories.
.-.-.-.
"I went to greet my uncle when he arrived for the gathering. I was wearing a set of my formal leathers; boots, vambraces, belt, pants, and jerkin, with a matching green silk shirt." Loki noticed Tony's little smirk. He enjoyed teasing her about the small seemingly nonsensical elements of royalty, often calling her a 'diva'. "Don't laugh. Royalty must always look the part. Always," she said with a very serious look.
"Sure thing, cupcake," Tony's smirk was angry and hurt, but still willing to poke at her about her endless wardrobe. He didn't smirk as hard as Loki did, but he still smirked pretty well.
Loki gave him a small glare before continuing, "When I greeted my Uncle, I did so in the formal manner in which one greets family. I clasped his forearm and he mine."
"Ouch," Tony said. He knew how much razor blade cuts stung. Being a Stark and then an engineer gave him an excellent appreciation of the many different types and durations of wounds.
Loki shrugged; pain was rarely relevant when she was a young man. "I didn't think about it before I did it, so was unprepared for the spike of pain that shot up my arm. It was only a small flinch, but Frey noticed." She shook her head at her own naivete. "When he asked if I was well, I told him what I told everyone. 'The heat made me unwell; I'd be fine; there was no reason to be concerned.' I understand his look now. It's the look he gives to anyone he's assessing. I didn't know it then. I thought that he was disappointed in me, that I was too small, too sickly, too weak. Everyone was disappointed in me. I was wrong. It took me too long to see it."
"He didn't say anything about it?" Tony asked. He would've said something immediately, but Frey had a softer touch than him.
"No, not directly. He said that I should go and rest, that he hoped I would feel better. It was phrased as a standard platitude. I'd like to say that I should have known better, but my Uncle Frey is a complex man. It's taken me centuries to understand and appreciate the depth and nature of his complexities." A distant look entered her eyes, "I didn't understand then. I wouldn't begin to understand for another four hundred years."
Tony watched as Loki let herself get lost in her own thoughts and memories. It was easy for her to do. He couldn't be angry at her for it. She was nearly twelve hundred years old. He liked to think that he'd have a lot of memories to get lost in when he was that age, but he already had enough to get lost in. "Loki?" he called out, breaking her reverie.
Loki sighed, there were so many mistakes she'd made growing up. So few of them could ever have been fixed. "The first cuts didn't work. I thought, 'I've made a mistake in how I went about this. I can correct that mistake. I can make it work the next time.' It was during this week after the gathering had concluded that I was on the verge of trying again." Loki looked down at her wrists and traced where the cuts had been. "The cuts weren't deep enough or long enough to do any real damage. I think it was because the knife I used wasn't as sharp as it could have been. I chose a better knife and contemplated where I would make the next set of cuts. My wrists hadn't yielded enough of a bleed, so I was preparing to try for the larger veins on the sides of my neck. 'It will work this time,' I told myself."
Tony didn't care for the detached way she spoke about it. It was more like the clinical analysis of a dissection than the retelling of how she planned to end her own life. I'm going to burn Asgard to the ground, they'll all know how much they hurt her as they're burning. Soon. It was a common thought for Tony. He hated the thought of them getting away with it. The anger made him grind his teeth. He didn't flinch as it happened, he was too used to it. The sharp ache in his back chose then to sink deeper into the middle of his back. It put a fine point on his anger. The desire for retribution in blood had become powerful over the years. Tony originally thought that the anger at Thor, at his and Loki's parents would fade after a while. It never had. The dark days and the fallout from them saw to that. The anger exploded into roiling inferno of rage. It grew from a righteous anger at a thoroughly botched situation into a full-blown desire for bloody revenge. He knew it was obvious what he was thinking from the sadness on Loki's face. His seidr had carried his anger away again. If that was all it carried away then he was still fine. She was always sad when she talked about her family. Tony was beyond the point of caring. His mind was already made up. Fuck Asgard!
.-.-.-.
Thor was over the nausea at least. Now he just felt thoroughly sick at heart. There was so much to try to sort out. The way that Loki talked about it, about cutting into himself, about not bleeding enough. It was like Loki was talking about someone else, something else. The casual detachment was awful to Thor. How can Loki be so dispassionate about his own life? Is this the sound of madness?
Thor looked up, to where his companions were seated. He could at least be grateful that they hadn't said much. Fandral looked both bored and unmoved. Volstagg looked uneasy. Sif seemed unimpressed. Unimpressed?! How did I never see their dislike of Loki when it is so plainly obvious? It was Hogan to whom he felt some semblance of gratitude. Hogun seemed to share Thor's sickness at these discoveries. Hogun was always so unflappable. He was as calm in battle as he was sitting in a tavern drinking with his companions. To see Hogun's face twist with pity as he looked at Loki eased some of the anger he felt towards his dear friend for his silence in the face of the others' cruelty to Loki.
Frigga was breathing unevenly, quietly fighting back the tears. She tried to maintain her composure in the face of these grim revelations. Her hand was still held tight in Odin's hand, drawing comfort from the strength she found there. There could be no defending this. She failed in her duties as mother. Her son had tried to end his own life when he was just a child. She'd failed, and her son came close to dying because of her. How could he have hidden this? How could I have not seen? As much as she wanted answers to those questions, she also wanted to know why Loki was telling these things to Stark. There was a small but growing anger seething in her thoughts that this man married Loki. She was the one who Loki should've been entrusting these things to, not some ill-mannered mortal.
Odin spared a sideways glace to his wife, then his son. Each of them looked as sickened as he felt. However, he was King, the Lord of an Elder Realm. The King wasn't allowed to show his emotions in public. He couldn't shed the tears gathering in his eye. He couldn't show the terror he felt at the thought of how his son had slashed his own wrists as a child. He dared not reveal the depth of the guilt that flooded through him in an unleashed tide. Odin was Lord and King, and Kings didn't have emotions outside of their private chambers. Therefore, he wouldn't gasp or sigh, wouldn't rant or weep, wouldn't show the burden of emotions coursing through him. He would sit and take in everything, while giving nothing away.
Odin's gaze went from Loki to the not-mortal Stark. His brother-by-law said that he lacked the ability to bring Loki to heel. If what Odin had seen was right, then there was indeed nothing in the Nine Realms that could force Loki back to Asgard if Loki choose not to go. It was a power that not even he could fight, his armies would fall before it. It couldn't be right, couldn't be what he thought it was. It was too soon to tell from what they'd seen. Frey seemed certain of this, but he didn't trust Frey. There were still too many things that Odin didn't know. He needed to know more of this man before he decided what to do about his son. Loki needed to answer for his crimes, but that was a dilemma now as well. Could he truly hold Loki responsible since he was shown how unbalanced the boy was? Even though Loki seemed sane now, there were still hundreds of years of misery to consider. There were the many attempts made on Loki's life by the boy's own hand. How many times in total? How did I not see?! Was he attempting to punish Loki for acting in a madness that he caused? How unbalanced is the boy's mind …and is there damage to the memory chains?
Odin tried always to be a just and fair Lord and King. His father was neither a just nor fair King. Lord Borr was a hard man, and an even harder King. Odin never wanted to follow in his father's footsteps. To punish Loki for these crimes of madness seemed so much like something Borr would've done. Even the thought was distasteful. Despite what surprised him to find as the prevailing opinion in Asgard, he didn't want vengeance against his son. He only sought justice. Crimes were committed, so punishment needed to be meted out. If he couldn't punish Loki for these crimes, how could he explain that? How could he justify this decision to the victims of his son's madness? Could he tell them that Loki was a victim too? If Loki was a victim, who then was truly at fault and deserved punishment? Odin's thoughts circled around moving between the same points without ever finding a solution.
I don't know enough to make a decision, not yet. I must know more before I can preside over this fairly.
Odin still feared to know what Frey meant when he said that Loki protected them from an Inquiry to Enlightenment. What is truly going on here? What is it that Skuld wants? What justice is it that she seeks? What debt does she think I owe? To whom? For what?
