Winter's Treasures
By Rey

Chapter summary: Trying to appease and appreciate a caretaker went a huge bit too far, at least in Loki's opinion.

10. Eðlenstr, Part 1

"Who are you?" Loki managed to whisper to his fussy, chattery, touchy-feely… captor? Kidnapper? Helper? Caretaker?… in one of his more lucid moments, just as the odd, unusual jötun returned from… somewhere… and proceeded to pick him up from the bed like he would pick up a piece of parchment from his desk. He had never taken the chance to know even a little of that other one right from the source; he was not going to miss this one.

Even if the full awareness of being perched so casually in a jötun's arms like a little child while both were garbed in almost nothing felt highly disconcerting and discomfitting; even if the said jötun was the first ever living, adult frost giant that got physically close to him while he was fully conscious after that orchestrated scene with Laufey in Odin's recovery room; even if the said jötun was twittering to him about names of people – and probably places – that he had no idea whatsoever about, while trying to shove his face at their – her? – naked chest, which were definitely populated with two nippled flattish breasts….

He yelped – denying forever to call it a squeak – on that last part, and pushed away the best that he could, struggling to get free from the muscles wrapped round him while he was at it, which unfortunately tightened in response.

"There is no need to be so rude, you know, Bump. Did your amma not teach you manners?" Glaring grumpily, his suddenly subdued, yet-unnamed captor poked twice in rapid succession at the tip of his nose. "You could always just say so, if you no longer wish to be in my company."

Hurt shimmered blatantly in those big red eyes, and Loki looked away, feeling mystified by the seeming non-sequitur yet guilty all the same. "I spoke the truth!" he tried to defend himself. "I do not even know where this place is." It was unwise, perhaps, to admit to both at once and so bluntly, given his currently quite vulnerable state, but his captor seemed to be having a tongue-loosening effect on him… or maybe he was indeed still too out-of-sorts to manage any interaction with another living being.

"Well, you are in Tora, of course, in my house, and we are currently in my bedroom," the jötun said after a beat of sulky pause, then seated… themself? Herself?… on the edge of the bed, while still stubbornly clinging to Loki and trying to get him to nurse like a baby. "Some people found you and your little friend near the midway point to Aglasý one and a half moon-turns ago, checked the beacon that lay near your hand, which was what had called them there, found your mark in the record of its last use, and figured where you were going in the same manner. They delivered the both of you and the beacon to the healers here within the next day…. Well, Ymir loves you still; you were quite battered but alive and not hurt permanently. – Were you sneaking away to visit with Gannha Ekki and their folks in Aglasý then come to visit us here? Ava is from one of the villages there, no? But… on foot? Bad move, you know. Storm season is coming early, somehow, after that odd earthquake, and the wilderness has not been safe since then… not that it was quite safe before, after the loss of the Anchor. I would hate it if something bad happened to you… despite the fact that your amma did not see it fit to introduce you to the realm, let alone to me…. And where is the other one? I would not put myself in the first-to-know list, after being absent from the rest of your amma's pregnancy and your birth, but… my name! Not even my name…." They descended into low-toned mutterings aimed at themself, switching between Allspeak and Ymska seemingly at random.

The loosening of their attention on their hapless captive was thankfully followed by the loosening of their arms round the said captive.

Loki took the chance. He eeled himself down the jötun's lap to the ice-sheeted, pale-yellow floor, then made his wobbly way the best and quietest that he could across the big – even to adult jötun's standard – room. Hopefully, this way, even if he could not escape outside yet, it would be more of a hassle for this clingy, insane, otherwise all-too-chipper frost giant to recapture him.

The new vantage point allowed him more liberty to observe his surroundings, naturally, as the now woebegone jötun was no longer there to try to cuddle him close like a doll or shove their nipple into his mouth.

There was surprisingly little to observe, nevertheless. There was no door to speak of; just a vertically rectangular opening on the centre of the wall opposite the bed, which lay to his right. Other than the bed, whose finely crafted stone frame was coloured pale brown perhaps in imitation of a birch tree, there was only the tall and rather spindly nightstand set directly beside it and its mounds of furs and pillows, coloured a light blush pink. The incongruously delicate-looking thing held what looked like Ovrekka's deactivated beacon, an honest-to-the-Norns huge wooden lidded mug, and nothing else.

The vast room feel achingly empty, furniture-wise.

However, added with the pale-grass-green walls, the chamber almost had a psychedelic effect on the eyes compared to the land's usual colours and colour preferences, making up for the lack.

As headache-inducing as its owner, he thought with reluctant amusement, especially for the jötnar. After all, these colours were no doubt hard – or even impossible – to find in this drab, desolate, almost monochromatic realm; so when they were all put in one room like this….

He looked away from the sight of the jötun – garbed in some soft-looking loincloth died in patterns of white, orange and lavender, glaring at nothing in particular with hurt petulance like a bewildered child in an adult body – and up to the ceiling, trying to conceal a very unwelcome grin…

…And found the said ceiling to be tinged Midgardian-sky blue, complete with painted clouds of every shade from cheerful white to stormy grey, and a ball of yellow-white seiðr hanging on the very centre of the gentle conflogration like a Midgardian sun indeed….

The peculiar, childish, sulky jötun across the field of positively rioting colours stopped muttering to themself and instead sent him a reproachful glare when, unable to entirely help himself, Loki burst into a soft, very brief sputter of snickers. "Do not mock my efforts, little brat. I gathered the paints and coated everything by myself, you know," they… she, perhaps, rather… snapped, full of – maybe unfaked, maybe not – hurt that was just lightly tinged with a bite of anger.

He caught her eye, shook his head, and tried to repress his grin.

In vain.

Giving up, then, and trying to distract her from both the ever-spreading misunderstanding and a possible further attempt to breastfeed him, he said, "Do you have more paint? Or wish to redecorate this place a little?"

After all, something that would aggrevate the greater populace of the frost giants was always a plus, right? This activity that he had in mind was perfect for that, in his current indefencible state: It could occupy his troubled mind and yet-weakened body without straining either parts too much, while being unsuspicious to whoever hapless enough to visit, with the bonus of distracting this weird, child-in-adult woman from treating him like a baby.

And, blessed be the Norns, the abnormal, exasperating, amusing, most likely gullible jötun reached into seemingly empty air in response. She came up with a small army of odd tubes big for his size, with the respective colours represented on their bodies, and stoppered with what looked like the blend of a twist mechanism and fine but stiff brush each. "Just squeeze the body – softly, mind you," she chattered in her meandering way. "The paint will seep out and coat the brush. – It's from lef'erk's hair and they are hard to hunt so do not ruin the brush all right? – Do not let the lid open and the brush unwashed after you use each tube; I'll have you squeeze out the oil needed to loosen the dried paint if you get these ruined and mind you it's one gross and boring thing to do! The paint can survive for some time yet when unsealed, but I would rather not chance it… and you would not, either, if you know what is best for you. Tell me and I shall wash the brush after you are done with it, each, immediately. – Erm, did your amma ever tell you I like painting, by the way? Just asking…. I couldn't believe it…. – Erh, well, umm, let us just forget that. Very well, here they are."

"Use none of your seiðr" and "Let me know if you need any shape you have drawn to be trimmed" were the only parameters in the project, with the lone caveat of "Do not reject the milk, which I shall give you right after this, even if I have to get Elder Koðrati or somebody else to nurse you; your body cannot digest solids well yet after too long starving" thrown at the end, in the tone of almost an afterthought.

He went wild with the silly project, therefore, despite the proviso, increasingly willingly – and even somewhat happily – assisted by the truly astonishing owner of the paints and the enormous canvas of the bedroom walls.

Falling asleep in the middle of a very simple, very sedate, quite physically untaxing project was one of the most embarrassing things Loki had had to endure to date, he was finding out. One moment he was trying to paint a red deer on the wall on his eye level, with his earnest, increasingly eager, amusing painting assistant always hovering nearby with paints and advice and helpful seiðr and chatter at a ready; next moment he found himself alone, tucked into the bed, still clad in the comfortable, finely woven silky loincloth he had found himself garbed in earlier, but feeling stiflingly hot even with the minimalistic bit of clothing, and there was an ice – or crystal? – plate of… something… on the nightstand, which was otherwise bare of its previous occupants.

The "thing" was a mound of pebble-like ice shards, each the size of his æsir-skin thumbnail, coloured an exotic, pretty silvery – almost pearly – blue-grey.

`Are these…?`

He crept to the edge of the bed, wading on all-(wobbly)-fours through the hillock of furs and cloths that his absent caretaker – no, minder, now, most likely – must have draped on him at some point, and peered closer at his new neighbour.

No, neighbours, because he had just discovered the edge of a rough, thick light-brown-grey paper peeking from under the plate.

`Paper? In Jötunheim?! Can they even read? Let alone write?`

Frowning, he eased the paper from under the plate, gawked a little at its apparent smallness, then turned it over in hope of finding some writing on the other side, because the upside part turned out to be empty.

The small gamble worked. There was some writing on the previously hidden side of the paper, indeed, conveying a rambling message nearly identical to the minder's spoken words despite its brevity, carried by a very small – for a jötun, he would imagine – and neat rounded handwriting done in glowy pink thick ink. The lettering and actual message were translatable by Allspeak, but there was a brief line of characters above the name of the memo writer that might be of Ymska origin, and most likely carried either a rote greeting for written correspondence or a translation of the Allspeak-translatable name in Ymska. It read:

Out to the market for a moment. Will bring you there next if you behave. No leaving bed. Like kampi? Will buy you some. Powder from its seeds mixed with oil for the paints is good for making colours glowy, you know, if you didn't know before. Sip the frozen milk I prepared by the bed. Must be finished when I'm home. NO HIDING IT AND/OR GIVING IT TO ANYBODY ELSE. Respect me at least a little in this matter, Bump.

Eðlenstr
(But I'd prefer you call me Etta or Íto Etta, if you'd deign to grant me either of those wishes.)

Seated cross-legged against the wall opposite the door that the bed was pushed against, which had by now been decorated with a simple rendering of a Vanirheim forest scene in place of the headboard, he looked down at the message for a long, long moment, contemplating each and every nuance it might hold and glancing just as speculatively to the plateful of… milk?… every so often. Questions, theories and suspicions crowded his boggled mind, making him more and more unsettled and overwhelmed by each rapid addition to the lot.

One thing was clear, however: Breast milk seemed to be highly valued by at least the minder, if not the jötun society at large; breastfeeding, if looking back at the minder's – Eðlenstr's? – reaction to his rejection to it some time ago, seemed to be even more so. Even when both were aimed at feeding someone who was by no means a baby; and given by someone who was most likely not any relative or close friend of the targeted person's family, either, although Eðlenstr did seem to have some tie to Jötunheim's Royal Family in the past if judging from her mutterings.

It totally stumped him.

It took Loki far more time to finally reach a skittish hand out to the plate, let alone to bring one of the pebbled frozen milk to his lips, than it usually took him to contemplate and enact a plan to neutralise a highly complicated and dangerous magical artefact. Nevertheless, the moment the iced milk began to melt in his mouth, his previously ignored instincts overcame the hesitation in a very, very short order.

It felt like snacking on a very big, perfectly ripe cluster of amna, minus the overly sweet taste that he usually could not abide. As he had never been able to enjoy the experience of snacking on those clustered, oval thumbnail-sized bits of fruit given his palate's preference for somewhat subdued tastes….

Well, by the time he had gained enough energy and equilibrium to leave the bed, the plate's contents were sans twenty or so of its occupants already. That number increased to a third of the plate when he was confident enough to walk while holding his precious snack, and to half of it when he managed to creep to his earlier spot across the room, beside the lone – nearly floor-to-ceiling – window.

In fact, he only realised that he was finished with the plate when a long moment's rooting blindly on its somewhat bowl-like surface produced him no more bit to suck on.

"Damn."

Worse, he himself did not know whether the curse was aimed at the lack of more iced milk to snack on, at his somewhat overstuffed belly and overenergised body, at the fact that he had been readdicted to this substance, at the feeling of anticipation his instincts exuded on the thought of getting more of that in the near future, or at the fact that he had just obeyed the instruction of a jötun, more or less willingly.

"Damn."

That bumbling, rambling, earnest, honest, childish – even a teensy bit endearing – demeanour could very well be weaponised.

And he would not have a sufficient shield to defend himself against it, let alone anything that he could use as retaliatory offence.

"Damn…."