Winter's Treasures
By Rey
Chapter summary: Ear-tickling: a way to make losing a game so very exasperating.
22. Angrboða, Part 1
Loki was tired of falling unconscious whenever the Norns liked it. He was weary of the lethargy and/or disorientation that followed each bout of unconsciousness, fed up of not knowing how many days and weeks and months or even years he had spent in this Norn-forsaken land, and simply done with not knowing where he was, what the expectations on him might be, or what he could do to survive in this vicious, barbaric place.
He had woken up in vastly different situations attached to a vastly different person each time – except for the one before this – while in this realm, and this was no exception.
However, the last situation he had remembered was that of uncertainty of militant attack. It added a sharp, bitter flavour to this latest bout of lucidity. – Had he been captured by the rebel faction? What did they want with him? Did they mean to ransom him to whoever succeeded Laufey on the throne of Jötunheim? He would never be free – or end up alive – if so! Who would pay the ransom for the previous king's murderer?
He did not open his eyes, and tried to regulate his breathing to the slow, shallow pattern of slumber. His other senses – sharper than when he had been in his æsir skin – strained to their fullest, gathering information.
His whole frame shook constantly from rough turbulence, as if he was sheltering in an enclosed box that was being battered by a particularly horrible storm. He could hear the roar of the wind from outside, although this box's frame was not rattled in the slightest, but underneath it he could also hear a different kind of roaring, almost a pleasant humming.
The box, if it was indeed a box, felt cramped. He was sharing it with one – no, two? – other… others? And one of them – the much smaller one – both felt and smelled familiar. `Avlar?` Was he safe, then? Had Avlar managed to drag his unconscious self away, forsaking the distant blankness the boy had been adopting since that aweful day? What about Eðlenstr?
`Eðlenstr!` – But the much larger being tangled together with him felt and smelled neither like Eðlenstr nor like Koðrati, nor even like Lúkra – from their breif acquaintanceship in the library that long time ago.
`Alien. Unknown. Danger. But didn't Koðrati say something about a runner turning into a bodyguard for us? Or is this one a rebel from that militant faction he kept hinting about?`
But if he was trapped in here with a rebel, whyever would the said rebel put him in their lap, together with Avlar no less? Because now he could at last detect, faintly underneath all the constant noise, the sounds he had become familiar – even become accustomed to – with his two caretakers, discounting the ever-busy Grand General: steady heartbeats and breaths, pressed gently into his eardrum like soft cotton against skin. There was some kind of leather pressed against his cheek and nearly nonexistent external ear instead of naked skin, but the position was otherwise so familiar that his heart ached with stupid and useless longing.
Stupid, stupid longing, laughingly ludicrous and embarrassing at that, for a young man and a warrior quite nearly on the cusp of adulthood to crave soft physical contact and soothing sounds and emotional attachment like an infant, from monsters no less.
But the deepest, most basic part of his being could not deny that, seated sidewise like this on one broad thigh, with his folded-up legs loosely hugged by a silent Avlar as if they were the little dolls the boy had appropriated twice, all made by a bored and listless Loki, and with his body snuggled against the – nicely cool, open, vulnerable – front of a much larger person, he felt… right. He certainly did not feel safe – `Not yet, maybe; but just a little… not that much, no.` – nor was the cramped position comfortable except to the most visceral, unruly part of his psyche that he would greatly love to ignore, but he felt right.
Nobody in Asgard would have ever thought how clingy the jötnar were to each other, for a race of monsters, if he saw from his own reactions alone thus far. He himself would not have ever thought so in his wildest, darkest imaginings.
But reality was a cruel mistress indeed.
And now that he was at last awake, his body demanded both sustenance and recycling most insistently.
Plus, he – simply, absolutely – must know what had happened with Eðlenstr. He had sacrificed so much! He deserved to know that much, in return.
So he took a gamble, and permitted himself to stir a little and blink his eyes open.
He did not expect the dry chuckle and drier words that welcomed him, spoken in Allspeak from somewhere above his head and reverberating in the chest half of his face was pressed against: "What information did you gain in that little intelligence gathering of yours just now, child?"
"What makes you think I would like to tell you?" was his automatic reply, mumbled through the lethargy that lingered in every pore of his being.
"Spicy," was the dry remark given in turn. "And here I thought you were curious of what facts you might confirm from your observation."
`Tempting.` But Loki did not succumb. He had used this very tactic, as crude as it was, so many times before, on so many people from so many walks of life.
Instead, he focused his eyes and attention, using the simple single lines and shapes decorating Avlar's – surprisingly open-eyed – sleeping face as anchor, then shifted further to look round.
Tried to, anyway.
He realised then, that both he and Avlar were tethered to this huge jötun using a pair of crossed slings made of ice – the huge jötun's ice, from the inexplicable feel of it. His arms were also trapped, neatly arranged to be hugging himself: crossed against each other in between his chest and folded-up legs, with palms flat against his ribs at either side.
And none of his knives was anywhere to be felt round his waist, where he had hung them before, although he was still clad in his battered travelling attire Ovrekka had made for him those ages ago.
His captor was subtle and clever.
He looked at the bands of ice crossed on the middle between his body and Avlar's, concentrated, tried to push at it by will alone, which Ovrekka had said would be enough for working his own ice.
But then, it had been ages since he had last tried to exercise that particular – newly found – ability of his, and the latest attempt had not given him any good result in any case.
This effort, it fell even shorter from his target, as if he were a boastful new archer attempting his first shot directly with a great longbow, instead of a much smaller and suppler beginner bow.
Worse, he got the niggling sense that his captor was silently amused regarding this overshot attempt of his.
Even worse, the suspicion was proven true not a moment after, when the said captor commented mildly on the "toothless spike of seiðr" and asked if he was done with his temper tantrum yet.
To those words, Loki simply gritted his teeth and bore the teasing in silence.
And to that reaction, his captor said approvingly, with no levity to be found in their voice, "Good."
Loki bristled. He had always been silent in Asgard, when he had wished – no, needed – to speak. He had always been the butt of jokes delivered by Thor and that oaf's friends, and he had been accused of being wicked when he had retaliated.
No more. No longer.
"What do you want with me?" he snarled.
His captor sighed in resignation, incongruously. "To be calm and silent, for now," they grumbled nearly under their breath. "I need to concentrate on steering this thing. I do not fancy driving through a hailstorm with three little snowflakes in tow, so we must get away from here long before that, and that does require speed, that I will not be able to safely reach if you persist to be difficult."
`Driving…. So we are most likely in a transport of some kind, now, running at full tilt against the wind.` "Where?"
"Home."
"I had a home already," Loki pointed out, bluffing.
His captor snorted. Loki had not even imagined a monster's throat could let out a snort; just grunts and snarls and growls and yelps and screams… and purring, like a distant warm – if embarrassing – memory provided him.
"Where?" the huge, infuriating jötun returned the question, in perfect imitation of Loki's own tone and word and even inflection.
"Now you do not deign me with a reply, while I already indulged you so much. How rude. Did your parents not teach you manners?" the said infuriating monster continued after a long pause, in which Loki wished dearly that he could clench his fists and drove them into that unprotected belly. His teeth – black and sharper now than when in his æsir form – ached with the returning teasing tone.
Worse, one huge finger then darted into his other ear that was not pressed against this jötun's chest, and twisted inside of it, creating a tickling sensation that he had not prepared to guard against. He yelped and squirmed, futilely trying to shake the offending finger off when it came for a second round barely a moment after… and then a third… and then a fourth.
"Stop it!" he squawked at last, barely restraining himself from laughing. He was not a toddler, to be played so!
The jötun shushed him, in response, and patted a stirring Avlar's head with the same hand. "Hmm. Not only rude, but also inconsiderate," they remarked, then, tone unimpressed. "Was it necessary to bother your little friend so, eh, little ice shard?"
"You…. You…," Loki spluttered, incensed. He was unbelievably cornered, in a game of subtleties at that, which was usually his forté – nay, his speciality.
To add acid into the open wound that was his pride, that utter git tickled his ear again.