Chapter 42 - She Left a Beautiful Corpse

Thor watched as Kelda's skiff floated over the edge of the water towards the expanse of empty space beyond. Just before it reached it, the ship and its passenger began to glow and turn to stardust. It was such a waste; Kelda had been so young and beautiful. Why had he never gotten up the nerve to—below, someone among the commoners began to clap, but it was cut short. If Thor had to guess, that would have been Tony, who had likely gotten elbowed in the ribs by Pepper again.

Thor let out the breath he had been holding and turned to face his brother. Then he turned the other way, just to make sure he hadn't moved to his other side. Nope. Well, that was what he should have expected, really. He ought to have made Loki hold his hand, the way Father had always made Loki hold Thor or their mother's hand during these kinds of events as a small child, to make sure he wouldn't wander off.

It shouldn't have been necessary, however. Loki was old enough to understand his responsibilities, and there was no excuse for shirking them. Thor had been working night and day to fulfill his duties as king and care for their father, but Loki couldn't stand still for one event that took half an hour at most? Not to mention, he had specifically told Loki he wasn't to leave! He thought he felt a vein pop out of the side of his head. He hadn't been this angry with Loki when he had attacked Midgard, and he wasn't just going to let it go either; this time his younger sibling would face consequences for his behavior or Thor would be a bilgesnipe's mother.

The crowd below him began to disperse, and Thor retreated into the palace. "I'm going to trap him inside that tree Father always warned him about," he decided, as he stomped down the corridor, looking for signs of his little brother's whereabouts. It wasn't an idle threat, either. The position of All-Father came with a significant boost in magical abilities, and even if he hadn't completely mastered Gungnir's power yet, he was certain he would be capable of that much. "If he thinks he doesn't have to obey me because I'm not as powerful an All-Father as Odin was, he has another thing coming."

But the longer Thor scoured the palace for his brother, the more his anger turned into worry. What if his brother wasn't even in the palace? What if he had taken this opportunity to run away? Unlike at the Tower of the Avengers, there was no security to alert them if Loki tried to leave without permission. A worse thought crossed his mind; but no, there had been no indication that Loki had been contemplating bringing about the end of himself recently. On the other hand, would there be any indication? The moniker "God of Lies" might have been unfair, but it was true that Loki had long been skilled at deception.

For a moment he contemplated the merits of giving all the Einherjar in the palace an order to search for his brother, but he worried they would be too rough with him if they caught up with him. Loki was not well liked by the Einherjar, not only because they had been the victims of many of his jests throughout the years, but also because many of them still blamed him for the deaths of their brethren who had been guarding the Casket of Ancient Winters when the Frost Giants attempted to retrieve it.

"Hey, Your Majesty, how's it hanging?"

Thor had never been so happy to turn around and see Stark standing behind him. He gripped the smaller man by the shoulders. "Man of Iron, you must help me find my brother. During the funeral, he disappeared."

"I wouldn't be too worried about that. He really didn't want to go in the first place, so it's not a huge surprised that he bailed, is it?"

"But I cannot find him anywhere in the palace! What if he ran away?"

"Nah, I don't think he would. Unless he decided to take the Bifrost back to New York without us—"

As soon as Tony mentioned the Bifrost, Thor realized how stupid he had been. "I can ask Heimdall where he is, can't I?" Relief swept over him as he remembered that even though Asgard didn't have security cameras, it did have a Gatekeeper. (There had also been his Father's ravens, but he hadn't seen heads nor tails of them since he took over as king, so he supposed they weren't something he was to inherit with the position.)

"Yeah, but to ask him, you're going to have to go all the way out to the Bifrost, aren't you? Seems like kind of a long way to walk. Isn't there any place in the palace that you haven't looked yet?"

"There is one place, but he couldn't possibly be there."

Tony squinted at him. "Point Break, I'm willing to bet you a million dollars that wherever you think he can't possibly be, that's where he is."

"I will take your bet, then, because there is no way that Loki is in my Father's bedroom."

Tony's eyebrows flew upward. "Oh yeah? Personally, I would have checked there first."

"But surely, Loki would not want to visit him, when he still denies that Odin was ever—"

"He probably went there to give him a piece of his mind." Thor's confusion must have been evident, because Tony translated his odd turn of phrase. "To yell at him."

"Oh. I suppose that's possible. But he really shouldn't, when Father—"

"You don't think your dad deserves it, just a little? I mean, I know he's not all there—"

"That isn't the problem. Father has been known to lash out at those attempting to care for him, not only physically, but with his magic. Even if Loki does feel a need to confront him, he shouldn't be alone with him."

中_（ꐦ𝅒_𝅒）

Loki found himself faced with the same decision he had made millions of times before. He could capture Odin's king with his next move, or he could throw the game and let Odin win. He had long ago surpassed Odin's abilities as a strategist, at least when it came to games. He could have won every game they had played in the last three centuries, but he knew that wouldn't have done. It wasn't just out of deference to the All-Father that he made sure to let him win more often than not. He hadn't wanted Odin to become bored of playing with him the way Thor had when he had realized that he didn't have a chance of winning against him.

He didn't particularly care about that now, of course; but Odin wasn't in his right mind anymore, and for all Loki knew, beating him at a game might be enough to set off some sort of episode. Instead of making the winning move, he pushed a piece on the other side of the board into the empty space next to it, to give Odin time to recover.

Odin scowled as he surveyed the board, and Loki got the feeling he had made a mistake. His heart began beating in his ears. Then, without further warning, Odin's arm lashed out and knocked the entire board to the floor. Loki's stomach filled with a cold dread. "Do you think I'm a fool, child?"

Loki leapt up and began backing away from the table. He threw a shield around himself. He had never truly been afraid that Odin would physically harm him when he was in possession of all his faculties, but now he couldn't be sure what the man would do.

But Odin only blinked up at him in surprise. "Are you well, Loki?"

Loki relaxed just a bit, and for a moment, he wondered if he had overreacted. But then he remembered what Tony had told him after he'd expressed regret over running from Bruce; if he didn't feel safe in a situation he should always feel free to remove himself from it so long as doing so didn't put him in more danger.

He lowered his shield, since at least for the moment, he didn't seem to need it. Odin seemed to have just noticed the board on the floor and the scattered pieces, and had bent down to start collecting them. Loki wondered if he ought to help, or if he should use the opportunity to cut and run. Before he could decide, a heavy hand clapped down on his shoulder, and Loki nearly jumped out of his skin.

"You are in so much trouble," Thor growled in his ear. Loki turned around and launched himself around his brother's middle, and his brother's entire demeanor changed. "Loki, are you alright? Father hasn't said anything to upset you, has he? If he has, I'm sure he didn't mean it."

Loki was certain that if Odin had said something cruel he would have meant it, but he didn't wish to debate that particular point with his brother at the moment. "I'm sorry I disregarded you and left the funeral early. I only did it because I was feeling poorly."

"If you were ill, you should have told me." Thor stooped down and scooped Loki up in his arms before he could object.

"Thor?" Odin called after them, as Thor turned towards the door. "Where are you taking your brother? We haven't yet finished our game."

"It is past his bedtime, Father. He will have to play with you some other time."

Odin nodded, seeming to accept Thor's explanation. Gefjon had awoken, perhaps when Odin had knocked over the board, or perhaps when Thor had entered the room, and was now helping the king pick up the rest of his Hnefatafl pieces.

Still carrying him like a new bride, Thor pushed open the door to the corridor. On the other side of it, Tony was waiting for them. "Hey, what happened? You alright, kid?"

"I'm okay," said Loki, even though he really wasn't. "We were playing Hnefatafl and Daddy got upset and knocked the board over, that's all."

"I feel like you're leaving a few things out—wait, Daddy? I thought I was—"

"If I can have more than one mother, I can have more than one father," Loki interrupted, not particularly caring at the moment about the disappointment in Tony's voice. "Technically, I already had both you and Bruce."

"But Bruce is your mom."

"You're the only one who calls him that," Loki pointed out.

"I for one am glad to hear you call Odin your father again," said Thor, though he didn't sound entirely happy. "But what in all of Asgard happened in there?"

"Not that much," Loki admitted. "I just remembered that things between us weren't always bad, that's all. And it just seems so useless to be angry with him now, when he's—" Loki took a shuddering breath as he tried to find the right words to end that sentence with.

"I understand," Thor told him, and for once, Loki believed that he did.

Tony reached out and ruffled his hair. "I know it's hard, kid. Howard didn't live long enough to go into any kind of mental decline, but Aunt Peggy was diagnosed with Alzheimer's a few years back."

"Steve's Peggy?"

"One and the same. She's not really my aunt, obviously, but she was a friend of Howard's and she was around a lot when I was a kid."

Loki expected Thor to put him down now, but instead he began walking again. "Thor, where are you taking me?"

"To bed, like I told Father."

"I thought you were just telling him that to placate him."

"No, I believe it is truly past your bedtime."

"Tony," Loki whined.

"He's right, it's way past bedtime, Lokes. At least, I'm pretty sure it is. I don't really know what time it is here, since my watch is still set to Earth time. Anyway, you'll probably feel better if you get some sleep."

"I'm not tired."

"Loki, did you not say you felt unwell earlier?" asked Thor.

"I thought I was going to be sick again, but I wasn't. I'm fine now, and you can put me down."

Thor put him down gently this time, and Tony laid a hand on his shoulder. "If you need to talk some more before bed with me or with anyone else here, we can do that. And you definitely don't have to sleep alone or in the dark."

Loki shrugged his hand off, a little annoyed with Tony's overabundance of concern for him. "Actually, I think I'd like to be alone for a while."

(~_~。)ヾ(-෴-)

Ikol (and what did it say about him that he was starting to think of himself by that name now?) landed on a balcony that felt familiar even though he knew that technically, it wasn't the balcony of his quarters, but those belonging to the Loki of this timeline. "I thought you weren't planning on staying here."

"I changed my mind." His immature self sprawled dejectedly on an almost-overly spacious and well-appointed bed that wasn't the bed Ikol had slept in growing up, but looked suspiciously like it.

"You mean you decided to sulk about something or other."

Loki, god of Adolescent Angst, rolled onto his side, putting his back to him. "Go away. You can't possibly understand what I'm going through right now."

"Might I remind you that we're essentially the same person?"

"In your timeline, does Odin completely loose his mental faculties?"

"Not that I knew of, though from what Mobius showed me, he must lose his mind eventually. He actually tells us that he loves us."

The young man was silent for a few moments before asking, "Do you suppose he means it?"

Ikol decided he didn't want to have this conversation as a bird. He hopped to the ground, transformed into his Aesir male form, then flopped onto the bed next to himself and stared up at the intricately painted ceiling. "What reason would he have left to lie in his final moments? Besides, I never particularly suspected Odin of lacking all feeling for me before I found out that my entire life was a lie. The betrayal wouldn't have hurt as much otherwise."

"Perhaps he did love us, but he loved Thor more. Don't tell me it isn't true."

"I wasn't going to." He tried to make it a policy not to lie to himself that much. "Though perhaps just because Odin liked Thor better doesn't necessarily mean he loved him more," he added begrudgingly.

"That doesn't make any sense."

Ikol wasn't sure it made sense either. He had only said it because he didn't know what else to say to console himself, and it sounded like the kind of thing that Frigga might have said. He decided to try again. "Love is a dagger—"

"That makes less sense!"

"Cut me some slack, will you? In the end, I'm you. You can't expect me to understand love or Odin any better than you do." Ikol turned onto his side so that he was practically spooning with himself. "Why does it matter so much if Odin loves you or not? Personally, I couldn't care less at this point."

"It doesn't matter to me," said his ever-so-slightly more innocent self.

He poked himself in between his shoulder blades. "I think you know how little I appreciate being lied to." Even if he had just told a similar little white lie a moment before.

"I'm not—"

"Tell me another lie, and I'll send you to the naughty corner."

His other self rolled over so that they could scowl at one another face to face. "Why can't you just leave me alone?"

Ikol thought the answer ought to be obvious. "Because that isn't what you want."

"And what do I want?" The child's lower lip began to quiver. "Because if you can tell me, that might actually be helpful." Norns, he wasn't going to cry, was he?

With a bone deep sigh, Ikol pushed himself up and situated himself against the headboard. Then he held out his arms. The child's eyebrows furrowed at first, but two seconds later he flew at him as if magnetically attracted. Ikol caught him. "It's going to, you know, be alright," he said stiffly, as he began to pat the child's back.

Loki made a strangled noise, and then began what could only be described as an "ugly cry." Damn, he had hoped that if he allowed him to hold onto him, he wouldn't have to deal with that. Part of him wanted to tell the boy that princes don't cry, but he wouldn't want to be accused of sounding like Odin again.

Still, he was beginning to doubt his ability to handle this situation, and that doubt was accompanied by a deep sense of horror. Was this what Odin had felt every time his eyes had begun to leak as a youth and had hurriedly handed him off to Frigga? "Maybe I should go get Thor for you."

"No."

"One of the mortals then—"

"No."

"Did you just wipe your nose on my shirt?"

"Yes."

At least he hadn't attempted to lie to him again. Ikol rolled his eyes as he resigned himself to being used as a stand-in for a handkerchief. "Fine. Just get it all out, I suppose. I'll send my dry cleaning bill to Stark."

.。.:*・° .。.:*・°

When Loki awoke, he was still curled against Ikol, though the man had fallen asleep and had begun to drool. Norns, he hoped that he didn't drool in his sleep like that. Loki disentangled himself to avoid getting soaked, and slipped silently out of bed.

He felt a lot better now that he had, as Ikol had put it, "gotten it all out," and had slept for a few hours. He didn't feel tired at all now even though it was still dark out. For no reason in particular, he felt compelled to venture out into the corridor.

There, he got the skin-prickling feeling that he was being stared at. Slowly, he turned his head in the direction he instinctively knew was the direction of the person—or thing—doing the staring. "Bor's whores," he cursed, as he found himself looking into a pair of dull, dead eyes that were much too close to his own.

"Can you see me?" asked their owner, an exceptionally pale woman with long platinum blonde hair who was wearing what appeared to be a gown of thin white linen, which clung to her generous curves.

"You're dead," said Loki, though he might have been stating the obvious. "It was Sif's idea to make you grow a beard," he added, just in case that was why Lady Kelda's spirit had decided to haunt him.

Kelda tilted her head. Her shade having taken the form of a reanimated corpse, the movement seemed a little stiff. "I need your help."

"I'm afraid there's not much I can do for you, since I'm not a necromancer."

"I don't need a necromancer. I want to be able to move on."

"And what's preventing you, exactly?"

Kelda bit her pale blue lips, and her eyebrows furrowed together as she seemed to consider her answer. "I wish for revenge," she said at length.

"I told you, it was Sif's idea. She forced me."

"I wish revenge on the one who murdered me," Kelda clarified.

"So you didn't, you know—" Loki tried to think of a way to ask what he wanted to ask nicely, and ended up making a series of gestures miming slitting his own throat, hanging himself, and running himself through with a dagger.

Kelda arched an eyebrow at him. "I did not kill myself, if that's what you're asking."

"You weren't distraught over the death of your mortal lover?"

The dead woman's dead eyes grew dark. "Of course I was. Bill was murdered as well."

So her lover's death hadn't been of "natural causes" after all. "Alright, so who did it? Or are you expecting me to play detective?" He hoped she would tell him it had been Sigyn. He hadn't seen her yet on this trip, but he had a feeling she was skulking about somewhere, and he already had a score to settle with her.

No such luck. "It was the Enchantress," Kelda told him.

Loki cursed under his breath. "You have to be kidding me. No one's seen Amora in a hundred years! How ever did you become involved with her?"

"She has been back for a while," Kelda warned, "hiding in the shadows."

This, Loki had mixed feelings about. There had been a time when he had considered Amora a friend—his only friend, in fact—and he wanted to believe that even if she was a little bit ethically-ambiguous at the best of times, she wasn't evil enough to off two people without good reason. "I'll pass the message along to my brother," Loki told her. If Amora was around, Thor ought to know anyway. Whether or not the woman was a murderer, there was no denying she had once been every bit Thor's stalker as Sigyn had been his.

Kelda frowned. "There's something else."

"What more do you want from me?" Loki asked, exasperated. He couldn't fathom why Kelda had chosen to reveal herself to him, of all people.

"Even if I knew that Amora would suffer for her crimes, I am not sure that I could move on. As you likely know, one of the duties of the Valkyries was to assist the souls of Asgardians in finding their way to Valhalla."

"But the Valkyries are all gone. What in all Hel do you expect me to do about that? You know, I could just say—"

Kelda dropped to her knees. "My prince, I beg you not to!"

Dísir, thought Loki. Dísir, Dísir, Dísir. But apparently, just thinking the word wasn't enough to call the cursed ones to come gobble Kelda up. "Fine, I won't say it. I'm still not sure what you want me to do, though. I suppose I could have a word with Hela about the situation, though it's not as if I can just summon her, and I'm not about to jump out a window just so we can visit."

Kelda had begun to stare off into the distance, as if she could no longer hear or see him. She got to her feet and began to wander off. Loki wondered if she was just pretending not to see him anymore, but before he could call after her, her shade faded into the moonlight shining through the palace windows.