Winter's Treasures
By Rey

Chapter summary: The discovery of an ugly truth is always a wretched experience for all parties involved. Only, Loki never thought to guard from one aspect of this….

17. Identity

Consciousness came back like a bolt of lightning rending the darkened sky, this time. – And how pathetic it was, for one to get accustomed so much to bouts of unconsciousness to acknowledge a this time.

How pitiful it was, also, for one to have a preference for how one should return to consciousness. – Because now that he was at last awake and more or less coherent, Loki wondered with dazed longing where the wordless song he secretly adored was: the train of eerie and eerily meaningful notes which had greeted him in the previous couple times he had regained consciousness. Everything was so silent, unnervingly and tensely so, and it made him want to return to the peace of oblivion. Worse, every minute detail of his being felt battered and as heavy as house-sized boulders. He could not even open his eyes, let alone move anywhere, and the vulnerability frightened him.

Worse things were yet to come, he knew. He was still in the land of monsters, after all, judging from the scents on and ambience of the air. – And that, in a way, was the worst torture of all.

Thrice he had expected to die in this broken land, and thrice he had been spared. – Why would the Norns spare a monster like he was? Why did they keep sicking saviours and companions on him? What possible plan did they have for him in a place like this?

Endless loops of thoughts swirled maddeningly in his mind. So, when oblivion came again, he welcomed it gladly.

Everything was still so unnervingly and tensely silent when Loki next awakened. The desolate atmosphere was unchanging, and so was the state of his body. But something else had clearly roused him, judging from how his pounding heartbeats were welcoming him at present.

And then he noticed the quiet, intense regard laid on his person from somewhere not so far away, captured by his heightened senses, now overly sensitised by paranoia.

Laboriously, he opened his eyes, then spent an inordinate amount of time blinking in the dim light that nonetheless overwhelmed his sight. The only comfort that he could take right now, as pathetic and degrading as it was for a warrior like he had been raised to be, was that he would have died a long time ago if this intruder had indeed meant him to die, with how slow and weak his responses had been thus far.

Still, the notion did not help him calm his heart any, when the intruder moved closer to where he lay, helplessly stretched out on something soft and smooth like live offering on an altar.

That unruly organ in his chest skipped a beat in the next instant, when the said intruder dryly murmured in a gravelly voice that he remembered from a recent acquaintance, in the æsir tongue, however thickly accented, "Greetings, Loki of Asgard. How are you feeling this afternoon?"

His mind blanked out, and so did his fight-or-flight response. He felt numb all over.

It was only afterwards that Loki realised he had fainted on hearing the intruder's proclamation, like a frail, sheltered maiden when proposed for marriage by a boystorous hunk of a warrior.

With cheeks burnt by shame, he forced his eyes to open again and scan his surroundings with the limited neck-swivel range that his muscles could manage at present. It took an inordinate amount of time for his mind to process the details trickling into it, as supplied by his slowly adjusting sight.

Firstly, he was utterly astonished that the small room he was in was, after all, empty. Where were the guards that should keep both eyes on him all day and night? Where were the restraints on all movable parts of his body, just in case the ás pretending to be a jötun tried to flee? Where were the interrogator and torture devises? Or the executioner, even?

Then again, where were the invisible bands of pain that had squeezed his limbs and heart and brain into agonising unconsciousness? Had his jailers freed him of those? If so, they had been very, very stupid and wasteful, forsaking such a resource. That set had been a good leash: secure, efficient and effective; better than he would have thought to construct for his bitterest enemy, even.

Well, in any case, he was free now. As soon as he regained his strength, these imbecilic monsters were going to regret not chaining him better. After all, he no longer had to pretend to mingle, to act as though he were one of them.

He would kill them first, before they killed him.

He was going to live.

Somebody – no, no, not a monster, he had been the monster in that skewed relationship – had died for him, without asking anything from him in return; without having any reason for him to live in the first place, either. – He had been a total stranger, after all, and he was sure that person had known very well how Asgardian he was despite the skin he had been wearing all this time, given his attire back then, and they had still treated him like their child. – So he was going to live, for himself and for that stupid somebody who had died in an Asgard's former prince's stead.

He would kill these creatures, get the only other person who had known who he was and had still cared for him from the slavers if they were still alive, and maybe Avlar too, then he was really going to leave this forsaken iceball far behind.

He pooled all his strength together and dragged himself into a seated position, to make himself at least feel less vulnerable at the moment.

He surveyed his surroundings from his new vantage point with growing bafflement, next.

Now that he felt more collected, more focused, with a new plan – or the semblance of it, for now – in mind, he could tell that this place felt… familiar, somehow, despite how small it was, with bare, translucent ice walls stretching to all sides at that. The furs and pillows laid on the small cot he was occupying felt even more familiar on his naked skin and in his trembling hands.

He dragged the white, luxuriously soft – if rather thin – fur that had been covering him back to his shoulders, then up to his nose for a better sniff.

And he had to hastily stifle a sob when he took a far deeper inhale of the scents left on the blanket.

He smelled himself there, but also somebody else: one that was not that stupid somebody yet had cared for him attentively all the same, with enthusiastic love and chattery chipperness and bumbling earnestness, alike yet unlike his not-brother.

He had to stifle a hysterical giggle, now, as he remembered having been called Bump, of all things, by this particular idiot.

Where was that idiot? He?… She?… had planned to hog him for… well, herself; as unnerving as that sounded, even now. Was that plan abandoned now, because he was after all not the "Bump" that she had sought to reconnect with? Was he just an Asgardian clad in jötun skin, too, to her?

Was she just as monstrous as Odin was, then: giving him hope of attaining affection, only to mockingly rip it back, knowing he was not what any of them wanted?

Still, he pulled the blanket tighter round himself, curled up into a fetal position, and buried his face in that bit of fur that still held that scent.

He was pathetic.

Too busy weeping and raging at himself for falling into a trap twice, Loki at first did not realise that he had company, that his vulnerability had a witness.

"Loki," the voyeuristic gawker said quietly, and his head snapped up, eyes wide and wet and unseeing.

He blinked, blinked, and blinked again.

A jötun. Less familiar. Huge. Hulking. In a relaxed pose. At the foot of the Loki-sized cot. Long arm reach. Could easily pluck him up from that other end of the bed.

Hostile. The monster who had sniffed his identity out in some way.

His hand automatically shot up and flicked sharply in a fluid motion, in order to release one of his daggers from his pocket dimension and fly it to the heart of his target.

But nothing came out. Nothing even happened.

There was even no pocket dimension to retrieve anything from, now he realised, with rising horror and an inkling of an answer to how his identity had been sniffed out.

"Loki," the monster repeated. And the addressee pressed himself right up against the bare, translucent ice wall that served as the headboard of the cot, clutching at his white fur blanket as if to a shield that could possibly defend him.

He shifted into his æsir form, then, and ignored the bitter shock of chill that raced up and down his naked back. – If he was to die here and now, with his businesses unfinished, he would at least like to die in what he considered his true form. Nothing and nobody could rip this one choice out of him.

But the monster just regarded him silently for the longest while, unmoving, ignoring his defiant glare and his shift into the face of the enemy.

Why? – The monster was supposed to be the grand general of Laufey's whole military force, were they not? Why had they not struck him down yet? Why had they not done it in the earliest possible moment since they had found the damning evidence to his duplicity, even? – Him, Loki, one of the bitterest enemies of the realm, who had led jötun warriors to their ignoble deaths in Asgard, who had led a warmongering Thor and that oaf's band of parrots to Laufey's court uninvited, who had killed jötnar in the battle that had ensued, who had killed Laufey in a bid for treachery far away in Asgard.

He was weak and defenceless as a newborn right now. It was a perfect chance. Tyr would have used this chance to drag him to Odin for judgement, or simply to strike him down on the spot if he happened to be in his monstrous form, and Tyr had the same capacity as this monster in Asgard.

"Loki," the monster murmured musingly, instead; slow and melancholic, as if savouringly tasting the name of a dearly departed in order to slake a useless yearning for what could have been.

Then they sat down on an ice-grown chair at the foot of the cot, and, of all things to remark, said in the heavily accented æsir tongue they had used before, "You are not supposed to be this big and this old yet, little one. What did they do to you there?"

"Why on Yggdrasil would you care about my form and age?" was the sharpest return that Loki could devise in his sheer astonishment and bemusement. But still, he welcomed the chance to use what he considered as his native language.

"Because you are still little, child, and thus the responsibility of adults to care for," the monster pointed out drily, unperturbed by the confrontational tone… well, maybe because the deliverence had been just a tiny bit shaky. "And with those markings, and with the wards and enchantments washing away from you, it was so easy, also, to deduce who your parents are for people who are close enough to them to have seen similar markings on their bodies. – Kinlines tell a lot, little Loki, although they do not tell all. – And with whom your parent is, I am also, professionally, obliged to care."

Loki stiffened on the news of his treacherous markings on that other body. He stiffened only further when the monster declared in a low, fierce tone, forsaking their earlier near-indifference, "I told you, little one, I am the Grand General of Queen Laufey's military forces. I am loyal to Queen Laufey. I and my people will protect you with our lives. – The insurgent elements who harmed you so are still being flushed out and corraled right now, but the four who harmed you directly have long been detained, to await your mother's wrath. It turned out that they have been doing that since the last war to soldiers under Queen Laufey's banner, so this also answered several inexplicable questions."

"What," Loki swallowed, "do you think is my current relationship with your king, that you would divulge such a thing to an enemy of the realm?" And Laufey had been – was? – a king, right? Else how had the Asgardians been so wrong – how had he been so wrong?

"What," the monster returned, in a deceptively mild tone that raised his hackles, "would make you think that I would divulge such an information if it were not pertinent to you, little one? – And please do not call your mother a king, little Loki. It is insulting, not to mention quite untrue, since she after all carried and birthed you."

Loki clenched his fists just beneath the blanket. "I am of Asgard," he bit out, feeling reckless and antagonistic under the bombardment of frustration, confusion and helplessness. "Do you think I would divulge state secrets to you in exchange for the titbits of information you gave me? Do you think your king would appreciate you leaking secrets to your bitter enemy?"

His captor and interrogator shook their large, blue, ridged head and sighed, equally frustrated. "We need to talk more, after this," they decided. "For now, let us table this discussion. You are still shaken and recovering, and I am distracted with what will come next. Please discard that hot-weather skin for a while, little Loki. The weather is too cold for that, especially if you decide to go without clothes like now, and falling sick from easily preventable situations in this vulnerable state would spite many people's efforts to bring you to this point, including your own. You can wear it again afterwards, in this room, if you feel comfortable with it, and I shall make sure you are supplied with suitable attire to supplement it."

He gave them a frankly disbelieving look for that. "Afterwards?" he repeated in the same frustrated harrumph. "What will come next? – How can a corpse change into this skin, unless prespelt beforehand?"

The look was returned to him, two-fold, tinged with confusion and a smidgen of anger. "What corpse, Loki?" they said sharply. "You are alive. Eðlenstr paid for their misstep more than ten-fold already, to help bring you back. Please do not throw your life away to spite what they accidentally did. Please do not spite our effort to bring you back, also, child. Tora loves you, despite the action of a few insurgent elements hiding in it."

`Eðlenstr.` Loki's breath hitched. "What did you do to her?" he whispered, wide-eyed. "What did you do to me? What are you going to do to me, if not to execute me for being an Asgardian?"

The blue hue of the monster's skin paled considerably, and their red eyes widened exponentially. "Execute you?" they squawked,for once losing their composure, also reverting to Allspeak – perhaps in their extreme agitation. "Eðlenstr has been dying, trying to save you, and here you would like to be executed?"

"Dying," Loki breathed, stuttering, stunned. "Dying."

Grief burst in him, sudden and sharp like the punch of an offensive spell or a barbed arrowhead.

"Dying." His voice wavered noticeably now, but he could not care less about it.

"Dying." He was turning into a stupid parrot, and yet the word still refused to register in his numbed mind.

"Dying."

His second caretaker in this harsh land was leaving him, to where he had proven time and time again that he could not follow, and he had not thought to guard against it past the initial fear of the notion.

He had been the most idiotic of all the monsters.

Caring would be his undoing.

Caring was his undoing.