When Loki was small, he'd loved to play with her hair. He would come into her room with her most nights, after dinner for stories, his little dimpled hand caught in hers, and he would marvel at her long hair as she let it down, pin by pin. He would wait beside her on the bed and he would take the pins from her hand and put them carefully into their dish on the vanity.
She recalled once, his growing suddenly quiet, and how she had turned about. "What's amiss, Loki?" she'd asked, "You look troubled."
He'd been looking at her with his eyes huge. "You're beautiful," he'd breathed.
Then, hearing himself, he'd flushed deeply pink and hidden his little face in his hands. Laughing, she'd taken him and kissed him and tickled him until he was laughing so hard he was out of breath.
More quickly than she liked, he had grown too old for such pastimes. But sometimes, if he was with her of an evening, and they were alone, they would both pretend that they did not know it.
She remembered several occasions when he was all but grown, before some ceremony and between the time her handmaids had absented themselves and the actual commencement of things, asking him without thinking on it, after her hair or her appearance. She recalled the way he grumbled before offering his grudging assistance. But he'd always offered it, and she knew he remembered, and that he was glad she had asked.
Thor teased him, once, before a ceremony some months prior to his coronation, when the date had yet to be set, that Loki was the only warrior with the ability to adequately style a woman's hair.
Before Loki had the chance to do more than whirl on his brother, Frigga had cut in. She watched them both in the glass before which she sat. "Few men are cunning enough with their hands to be of much use in that way, Thor."
Swallowing whatever it was he had been going to say, Loki only smiled smugly.
Thor put up his hands, unwilling, at the very least, to argue with her.
She watched them in the glass behind her. And she knew that nothing in life could have made her happier than to be their mother.
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"Little did she know…mwahaha." Heh.
This is the end of the prequel. Now we're in sight of movie timelines.
More soon.
