"I call Ambassador Skadi," Lord Forseti said.
Ambassador Skadi was from Jotunheim. She towered over the proceeding as she rose from her place and walked gracefully to the stand, trailed by restless whispers. Asgard had made firm peace with Jotunheim, but Loki was not the only one who still looked upon the Jotnar representatives with guilt and uncertainty. "I hear the call and will testify," the ambassador said calmly. Personally, Frigga quite liked and admired the ambassador. She thought it wise Skadi had been appointed as Jotunheim's ambassador for many reasons, not least the fact she was a woman gave her more latitude in either vehemently chastising or decorously ignoring rude behavior around her. It took a strong woman to represent her people in the still-tempestuous relationship with Asgard. Frigga did not expect Skadi to hold back in condemning Loki, unfortunately. Skadi was fully aware of Odin's and Frigga's goals for the trial, and she had even tacitly if unofficially approved, but no one on Jotunheim pitied Loki.
"Ambassador, since few of Asgard have ever been to Jotunheim, can you tell us something of your planet? How is it, and its people, different from ours?"
"Certainly. Firstly, we are called Frost Giants for a reason. Our planet has an eccentric orbit and slow rotation resulting in long days and nights and long seasons. We have been undergoing an ice age for the past twenty million years with extended periods of glaciation and shorter inter-glacial eras. The current period of glaciation has been ongoing for seventy thousand years. This is the climate our species evolved in and to which we are well-suited. Our size is an adaptation to preserve body heat; during prolonged, warmer, interglacial periods, our young stop growing sooner to tolerate the heat. Our population is smaller than that of Asgard, around one million persons in total, because the climate cannot support more with the current levels of glaciation which extend two-thirds of the way to the equator during the summer and four-fifths during the winter. Our home has made us resilient. Our civilization is older even than Asgard's, though few would recognize that by sight alone. Our homes are usually crafted of ice, ever changing with the gradual movements of the glaciers. Larger structures are sometimes made of stone with an icy mortar, except in inter-glacial periods when we historically have not bothered with any kind of permanent structures at all, except for critical infrastructure such as space elevators, which are obviously equatorial anyways to maintain contact with geostationary satellites. Prior to King Laufey's war with your people, by which I mean the entire thing not just the events of last year, we had several lunar bases both within our own star system and in several others, and our ships traveled the Nine Worlds freely in trade. Our climate is challenging, but our planet is rich in natural resources, if one knows how to get them from beneath the miles of ice, and this was ample material for trade."
"Thank you. If I may, where were you when Loki attacked Jotunheim with the Bifrost?"
"I was attending our war council. King Laufey had departed on a secret mission and told us to be ready for anything."
"Were you preparing to attack Asgard?"
"Not necessarily. We were primarily concerned with the defense of our own realm."
"Were you expecting an attack from Asgard?"
"Yes."
"Did you know at that time that Loki was himself a Jotun?"
"Yes. He revealed it to Laufey's court when he came to discuss the cease-fire."
"Did you know he was Laufey's son?"
"No. Laufey dismissed the court quickly to speak with Loki in privacy. Only his closest advisors remained, and they died with him. The rest of us were not informed until after everything was over and Asgard sued for peace."
"Hmm. What do you recall of the attack itself?"
The Jotun shuddered. "It was an earthquake stronger than any had felt before, even our eldest who have over ten thousand years. Besides the shaking, the glaciers cracked. No structure could withstand it, even though the epicenter was far, far away from our capital. There were terrible floods in the equatorial regions that obliterated everything in their path, including several of our permanent satellite communication centers and a space elevator. No one knew what was happening. In fact, we assumed it was a natural disaster and only learned the truth from Asgard, weeks later when the first relief vessel arrived. At that point, we were still experiencing regular aftershocks. The attack changed the currents in the mantle underneath the strike zone. It is still unstable and geologically active now, and will be for hundreds or even thousands of years."
"You still suffer, then?"
"Of course we do! We are fortunate that the Jotun people are durable. We continued to find survivors for months afterwards. We never found them all, though. More importantly, although our planet survives, it is marked and deeply damaged. There is a great rift valley through our largest land mass now, right in the equatorial zone, all tumbled, barren rock. That was once prime agricultural land, which is both rare and precious in our climate. If we had not had immediate aid from Asgard and the rest of the Nine Realms, there would be famine in Jotunheim now and for years to come as our ecosystem recovers. Even so, we are losing biodiversity that will be difficult to get back, even with emergency biobanks. We will be rebuilding for decades if not centuries."
"I am sorry... Does it matter to you why Loki did this?"
"It matters, and it doesn't. It matters because our grief and anger is matched by disconsolate confusion. Knowing why gives greater understanding and potentially fosters healing. It doesn't matter because there is obviously no reason that is reason enough. This disaster is too great. The lives of all who live on Jotunheim are forever marked. No one will forget it. Children will grow up with greater hardship. One way or another, it is a turning point in our history. Our history, not Loki's. His thoughts and motives do not deserve our attention, not really."
"Thank you. No further questions."
"Loki?" Njordr asked.
This time, Loki looked frozen at his desk, with a blush coloring his ears. Ambassador Skadi waited. "I..." Loki began shakily. He looked down. "I'm so sorry. I have no other words. I will not force you to talk to me, Ambassador. No further questions." Frigga knew Loki had rather a lot of questions for the sole Jotun representative, actually, mostly because he had never actually met a Jotun in peace before, not that he remembered. Frigga was not surprised Loki found it difficult to speak now, though. Thor, and Odin, had felt the same way during the peace negotiations the year before. Frigga had led the initial conversations for that reason. She had borne just as much pain as her husband and eldest son for the tragedy, but less guilt. She had been determined in the wake of her youngest to ensure his life and death at least meant something and brought about the end of the conflict that had seemingly killed him.
"I have no redirection, Ambassador," Njordr said. "Loki, you may call your other witnesses."
Loki did not respond immediately, but he finally looked back up at the council. "Thank you. I call Lady Eir Menglothdottir, as expert witness."
"I hear the call and will testify," Eir answered.
"My Lady, can you describe the full extent of the brain injury I sustained on Midgard?" Loki looked back down; this was his chance to recollect himself. Eir's testimony was going to be long, Frigga knew.
"Of course." She produced a holographic emitter and turned it on to produce a large, translucent image of a normal-appearing brain. Then, suddenly, it wasn't normal. It was squished by a large, lens-shaped glob of red that Frigga recognized as the hemorrhage Thor had extracted on Midgard. That was not all, though. There were multiple areas of bleeding inside the brain as well and drenching its surface. "This image represents the gross injury Loki sustained in battle with the Hulk. The epidural hemorrhage here has caused considerable mass effect upon the brainstem, which Prince Thor was able to recognize. Thor therefore emergently removed a section of the overlying skull here to remove the collection and staunch the bleeding. Without Thor's expedient intervention, Loki would have died within minutes to hours, depending on whether the hemorrhage continued to expand."
She waved a hand again, and the large hemorrhage squishing the brain vanished. The brain shifted into a more normal shape, but the bleeding inside it got worse. "This is Loki's actual gross neural scan by the time he arrived in the healing chambers. You can see intracerebral hemorrhages within both frontal, temporal, and occipital lobes, as well as the cerebellum. These caused multiple seizures before the proper preventive measures were implemented. As Loki was initially lucid after Thor's intervention for the epidural hematoma, it is likely these hemorrhages expanded once the pressure was relieved, causing further damage to the surrounding tissues."
The image changed again, with the areas of hemorrhage shrinking down. "We used magical methods to stop the bleeding and reduce the bleeds back down to inconsequential size. If the bleeding were the only damage, Loki would have then awoken more or less neurologically intact. Yet he did not. He was profoundly disabled when he first awoke, barely conscious, unable to speak fluently or understand instructions, unable to see even though he thought he could, and unable to coordinate his movements." Frigga closed her eyes in pained remembrance of the fact. There were few words for the joy she had felt at the fact of Loki's return, and none at all for the anxiety she felt at seeing his grievous injuries.
Eir went on to detail the injury at the cellular level, ending with an image showing dead, necrotic cells in pink while the rest of the brain faded to silver. The pink was patchy, but it was everywhere. The necrosis was why some regions of Frigga's son's brain had remained unsalvageable. Eir went on to explain the standard healing procedures they had used initially, and their limitations. She concluded, "The brain of a sentient mortal contains around eighty billion neurons with nearly a quadrillion synapses. The brain of an immortal, regardless of species, contains over a hundred billion neurons and nearly a quintillion synapses to support a memory of several thousand years' duration. Immediately after this kind of injury, cell bodies, axons, and synapses can be restored with magic, but it is a losing battle within hours and days, because even if the cell bodies can be saved, their thousands of synapses will be permanently lost, much faster than the larger structures, much faster than even a team of neural healers can save them. By the time Loki came to me, I would estimate a full half of his connectome was compromised, and a quarter remained compromised after our initial stabilization."
"Norns," one audience member loudly muttered.
"Silence," Njordr reminded them, then nodded to Loki and Eir to continue. Frigga looked away from Eir's depressing displays and back to her son. Ironically given the subject matter at hand, Loki appeared perfectly calm again. He must have felt her eyes on him. He looked up at her with the ghost of a smile, as if to say, I'll be fine, Mother.
"My lady, tell us more about the healing process from this kind of injury. What was and is my prognosis?" Loki asked.
"As I said, standard healing techniques rely on cooperation; that means I can only fix things that we can test as we go. What I cannot restore at all are patterns that are unique to you, most especially your personality and your personal experiences over an immortal lifetime. Now, those are also much more broadly distributed throughout the brain rather than localized to one specific region, which is one reason they tend to be stable over time, but as we can see, the damage you suffered was pretty much everywhere. The damage was particularly heavy in the temporal lobes, which are more commonly affected by this kind of trauma, particularly as the epidural hemorrhage would have first compressed the temporal lobe on that side. These areas are extremely important for both memory formation and memory retrieval. I was able to reconstruct the circuits to allow you to form and retrieve new memories, but I was not able to reconstruct many of the connections that would allow you to retrieve specific long-term experiences."
Loki grinned. "We are not all healers here. What does that mean in a practical sense? I clearly have some long term recall, after all."
"You do, but we quickly identified that your memory is not uniform. Your memory for the recent past, which I will define loosely as the last ten years, appears to be completely gone." Frigga heard one of the humans gasp. To them, ten years was a long time. Eir continued, "Your memory for the intermediate past, extending from ten years to eight hundred years is severely impaired. Your memory for the remote past, which is by nature the most fully integrated and thereby most resilient to injury, is mildly to moderately impaired." Of course, all who were listening would also know, or guess in the humans' cases, that even an immortal's memory of the remote past tended to blur over time. Loki's recall of significant experiences from a thousand years ago may be only mildly impaired after the several neural regenerations he had been through, but his memory of trivial experiences from the remote past remained rather poor, in Frigga's opinion. This was proving an enlightening measure of what Loki really cared about, actually: he seemed to remember just as much if not more about his life with his friends and at the Sorcerer's College as he did of important political events he had been involved with. Frigga suspected that was one reason reading the whole Chronicle of the Reign of Odin had ended up causing more frustration for Loki than actually helping him much.
"How is it that I function well enough to represent myself in trial, then?" Loki asked.
"Again, by the nature of what I can and cannot heal. If there are changes to your personality or your personal memory caused by this injury, there is usually little I can do about it as a healer after the first few hours. There is much I can do for other symptoms. More than usual was possible in your case because we developed a new kind of neural reconstruction procedure specifically for you."
"Describe it to the court."
"We had an old, highly detailed, neuroanatomical scan on file, which we were able to use as a template for certain areas where the cellular architecture was lost. A soul forge was programmed to map discrepancies between the old scan and a new one, and then we meticulously tested each disconnection before correcting them. This was most useful for improving your functional capabilities such as procedural memory, vocabulary, and things like spatial orientation, and it helped further improve your remote memory recall." She shrugged. "The template scan was too old to recover recent memories, over a thousand years old in fact. We are lucky we still had it. Even royal files are purged of material older than fifteen hundred years."
"Will those memories ever come back?" Loki inquired.
Eir hesitated. "At this time, I don't think so. Not substantially. Even if missing memory-retrieval pathways continue to recover as you re-encounter the associations that should connect to them, the memory patterns themselves will further degrade the longer they are disused. I am sorry."
"Thank you," Loki said softly. "The court will note Lady Eir has now used the described neural reconstruction procedure multiple times as salvage from additional brain injuries sustained during multiple assassination attempts on my person since my return to Asgard. These are still under investigation and are only tangentially relevant to the matter at hand, as she has, rather miraculously, been able to restore my body to our starting point almost completely every single time. Now, my lady, I have one further question for you. When I returned, you marked numerous scars all over my body, of which you had no records in your medical files. What do you think was their source?"
Frigga glowered in anger. Eir grimaced. "Some were self-inflicted during the uncontrolled magical release of your seizures. But most I am quite certain were sustained due to torture." There were some startled noises from the audience; Loki's scars were well-known to the council, but not to the public.
Loki grinned ironically. "I don't remember such a thing. When might it have happened?"
"My presumption was within the last year, which was supported by my forensic tissue scans."
"Thank you. No further questions. However, I will submit as evidence for the court, the scars on my arms, neck, and head." He rolled back his sleeves and lifted his arms, twisting them a few times to show his network of scars to the council; the ones on his head and neck had been plain to see the whole time, as his hair was still so short. Still, Frigga hated looking at them, hated the thought of what her baby had been through whether he remembered it or not. "Please note for the record these continue with a similar density all across my back and legs. There are also some on my chest and abdomen but not so many. I trust a more complete demonstration is not needed."
"Duly noted, and no, no further demonstration," Njordr agreed, peering at Loki's wrists. He blinked and looked away when Loki lowered his hands and readjusted his sleeves. "Lord Forseti, do you have questions for Lady Eir?" he asked.
"None," Forseti said.
"Very well. The only question I have for the healer is this: you have spoken at length about Loki's memory loss. You have also stated that if the brain injury had altered his personality, that is not something you would be able to fix. In your professional opinion, do you think his personality has been altered?"
Frigga did not think so at all, not substantially, but Eir raised her eyebrows and pursed her lips. "It... is hard to say, my lord. I was not his close confidante before this event. Moreover, I expect subtle changes to personality due to changes in his mood from the difficulty in adjusting to his new circumstances. I can confidently say I have not noticed pathological disorders of personality which can result after severe, untreated brain injuries."
"Thank you. Loki, you may call your last witness."
"I call Lady Lorelei Rinnesdottir, as an expert witness."
"I hear the call and will testify," Loralei said.
"My lady, you were summoned to evaluate me in the course of Prince Thor's investigation into the multiple assassination attempts against me. Why?"
"Because Lady Eir determined they were not just due to poison but also magic. I offered my services when Prince Thor brought me in for questioning, along with many other members of the College of Sorcerers."
"And what did you find?"
"Initially, very little. When I was called to observe during one of the attacks, I was able to identify it as a kind of mind magic. When I later learned of the suspicion you were tortured at some point, it became clear that we were dealing with an involuntary mental possession."
"Please define that for the court."
"When a possession is enacted, the victim's mind is not their own but rather an extension of the possessor. The possessor may come and go at will, but when they are present, the victim gives up all volitional control."
"Why was it harmful to me physically?"
"Because the connection was damaged in the course of your brain injury. The possessor regained enough of a connection to interact with your consciousness but not to fully overpower it, thus when you refused to comply with their demands, the result was physical injury as you tried to fight them off, although it is also possible they had partial control of your magic and were actively inflicting injury. Certainly, the latter is what must have happened in the final magical assassination attempt, when they finally managed to take possession of your awareness while you were awake, if not your will, and for all practical purposes successfully killed you when you tried to resist."
"Objection," Forseti said. "The witness is exaggerating and thereby deceiving the court as the defendant is not dead."
"Two words: life sponsorship," Loki answered.
"Objection overruled," Njordr said.
"My lady, given what you know of my life, these recent events, and the nature of a possession, when did this magic take place?"
"Sometime after you fell from the Bifrost and before you arrived on Midgard, the same time you were tortured. I said it was involuntary: no sorcerer who knows anything about mind magic, and you had a mastery in it, would consent willingly to a possession. Most would die before they let it happen. And yet, no sorcerer with a mastery in mind magic could be magically forced into a possession in the ordinary course of events. I have to assume whatever happened to you, at the time you considered it a fate worse than death, or else you had been driven so hard that you had no magical or mental defenses left."
"Is there any way of knowing the purpose of the possession at this time?"
Lorelei shook her head. "No. It was totally broken when Thor slaughtered the possessor. We can only speculate based on your actions during the period we know the possession must have been active, specifically the invasion of Midgard."
"Thank you. No further questions."
"Lord Forseti?" Njordr asked.
"Yes, Lady Lorelei, if the will of a possessor can come and go while the connection is intact, does the victim not retain any will of his own?"
"Well, when the possessor is fully active, no, absolutely not. When the possessor is absent, it depends. The possessor might forsake the victim entirely, allowing them to live their life normally. It is possible though for the possessor to leave some lesser compulsion in place, giving the victim a directive but leaving them freedom as to how to fulfill it."
"So even if Loki was possessed during his invasion of Midgard, some of his actions could have been his own?"
"Well, sure, but it depends on how you define their decisional latitude. I could put a compulsion on you to go fetch me a drink. You would have to stop whatever you were doing to get me a drink, but you would be the one to decide whether it was water or wine." She shrugged. "We can argue all day whether that decision is meaningful." Frigga concealed a grin at Loralei's sass. She decided she should get to know the sorceress better once this was all over, particularly if she won her bid to become Archsorceress.
"Is there any way that you could attribute Loki's attack on Jotunheim to this possession?" Forseti asked.
"Probably not. The timeline just doesn't fit. We identified the possessor as an unknown alien from the gamma quadrant, and as far as I know, Loki hasn't been there in decades. His movements were always well accounted for as a prince of the realm, so it's very unlikely he somehow managed to be captured and tortured by this alien prior to this last year, particularly as he would have had to hide the evidence of the torture from everyone, including Lady Eir and his family."
"Thank you. No further questions."
"And no redirection," Njordr said. "Questioning of witnesses and presentation of cases is concluded. Unless there are further comments..."
"My lord, since we were able to find observers from Midgard, I would like to give them voice to this assembly," Loki said. "And free voice to Ambassador Skadi, should she have additional comments that did not come up earlier."
Njordr raised his eyebrows. "Your request is unusual but not unheard of. Granted. Ambassador Skadi?"
"I am not a poet. More words mean nothing from me. My statement is unchanged, may it repeat itself in the defendant's mind forever."
"...Alright. Then if any of our guests from Midgard would like to speak, you may take the stand."
Hesitantly, one of the ambassadors stood, the one from Spain, Frigga remembered. "Ambassador Dolores Sanchez. First, I would request the written statements that Lord Forseti mentioned be read out loud."
"These were technical reports gathered from the Avengers when Thor was most recently on Midgard, expert briefs you might consider them, not official statements," Njordr clarified.
"All the more reason to read them, I should think. Prince Thor was present in New York, but he does not understand our ways and how the invasion affected us."
"Very well." It took another hour to read the Avengers' statements, and to listen to the eyewitness accounts these diplomats were only too happy to provide, as all but one had been living in New York City at the time of Loki's invasion.
"It was chaos and terror," the Nicaraguan ambassador Violeta Ortega said. She was the best speaker of those present, and the last. "The Americans are tight-lipped when it comes to national security, so there was no warning, not even for the United Nations. It is one of the reasons the Security Council still could not agree to your request for a representative this morning. Even in the face of a global threat, the superpowers of our world find it difficult to truly unite. On that day, my government was informed of the incident in Germany, but no one living in New York was aware of the threat until the great hole opened in the sky and monsters flew out of it. Buildings were coming down on top of us. People were crushed. People were shot by the alien- by the Chitauri. Some police tried to protect civilians, but they were completely outgunned of course. We recognized Iron Man flying around to protect us, but Prince Thor, even the other Avengers were completely unknown to us at the time. I don't think anyone outside of the Americans' SHIELD Agency was aware of Loki's identity and the connection between the events in Germany and New York until days and weeks after the fact."
"What was your reaction when you learned of Loki?" Njordr asked curiously.
"Fury. My country is poor. We are used to the elites of our own world trying to take advantage of us. Loki was the same."
"Do you feel the same way about Loki after hearing the testimonies today?"
The ambassador thought for a long moment, studying Loki. Finally, she shook her head. "For what happened to my home, no. No one I have ever met seeks to be evil. This tale of mind control is beyond my experience but not beyond my understanding." She grinned. "I've read Harry Potter. The imperious curse is unforgivable for a reason. The victim of the curse is not. If Loki is repentant, then I can forgive him. If you'll pardon me from voicing a judicial opinion, I would say if he was imperioused while attacking New York, then I would concur with his opinion and say he's innocent, of that at least. I would not presume to say anything about what happened on Jotunheim." She blushed and raised both hands suddenly. "I should note a disclaimer, that this is my opinion only and I do not seek to represent my government let alone all of Earth with it. That the General Assembly would definitely have to vote on." Frigga smiled. Here was another young woman she would enjoy getting to know better if the opportunity arose.
Njordr grinned. "So noted. Thank you. Are there further comments or questions from our council today? No? There being none, we shall proceed to recess and return for closing arguments tomorrow."
Author's note: I feel like a lot of that became redundant summarizing of what came before, but I had trouble condensing it down more than this. I really just wanted to have a chance for victims to speak...
"When people don't express themselves, they die one piece at a time."
"You have to know what you stand for, not just what you stand against."
"I have survived. I am here. Confused, screwed up, but here. So, how can I find my way? Is there a chain saw of the soul, an ax I can take to my memories or fears?"
― Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak
Obviously, the traumas of Skadi, Loki, and my fictional human ambassadors are very different from the trauma in the novel Speak, but these sentiments are still relevant because they define everyone's reaction to trauma. As Loki would answer the last one, an ax to the memory doesn't work, because it only transmutes the fear.