Epilogue: Ago, and Again
. . .
Ago ~
The Norns slept in a liminal place between space and time, where the water hung thick and black and each droplet contained countless dreams from countless worlds, none of them coherent, all of them real and present and rich. The Queen of Asgard stood on the smooth black rock, worn to silk by the magic and the wet, and she looked at the shifting images of the multitude Norns in turn.
They were young and they were old and they were eternal. Sometimes their faces were made of a thousand wrinkles, turning them to gnarled ancient bark, and sometimes they were stone. They were not humanoid. They were everything. They were every woman, and they were three and one, and among them they held all the forgotten dreams of the past, and hopeful dreams of the future.
They were beautiful and awful, and Karnilla, her hands still bleeding, lay adrift not far away. For how much she had wanted to awaken them to her own cause, now the old sorceress could not bear the physical weight of their presence. Frigga could hear the sobbing, small and childlike now, and there was a trace of pity inside her. If only a trace. Karnilla was marked deep now with what she owed, and that was fair.
Here in their own place, the Norns shifted around her, a circle that jerked and leaped through seconds and nightmares, an eerie and unpleasant thing to watch. Still Frigga did, unblinking, showing them no fear. With something like respect, they spoke to her in easier voices than they had in the mortal realm. "Do you understand what we mean when we say you will be cursed?"
"Knowledge can be a poison, Norns. I've drunk from that cup for a long time, and I've tasted the acid before. I have built an immunity to much, but still it will burn my throat to drink what you will tell me." She watched them shiver between seconds, catching glimpses of other people's dreams in their drifting faces. "I understand."
"You are going to die, Queen of Asgard, and you will not be old." The Norns sounded the words like the chime of distant bells. "Know that we have dreamed the hour, and seen the blade that stings thee, and it will not be changed with a wish or a whisper."
"Will you curse me with that hour?"
"We curse you with knowing that it will come in a rush, and that it will hurt, and that you will leave things unfinished."
She shrugged, accepting their words. If there was any tremble within her, it was buried deep. "She comes for all. If it be sooner for me, then I still cannot fret. I can only live each day until then."
"She will come to you as your family weeps, as your sons are sundered, as your husband doubts. The house is divided, was divided, will be divided, our Queen. She will come to you as you die for a small life for the sake of one son, itself the flicker of a candle, so brief we can barely dream her face before she is gone. You will die for another son's mistakes and a husband's bravado and a hidden fury and it will bring a war that will ignite the infinite cosmos. After that, we have not yet dreamed. She keeps it sacred and secret, for even Death does not yet know if all will survive. We must heed Her more than we may heed thee, our Queen."
"What small life costs my own?"
"A girl. A moment. A memory. Nothing that lasts. She will be cared for, and then she will be gone. The sorrows will remain. It will be a flashpoint, this death of yours, and after it, everything will begin to change."
Frigga considered that, her palms still pressed neatly together. If the palms were cold, it would be a secret. Her voice was calm and strong. "So you tell me that I will die too young to be very old, and that I will die for love."
The Norns were silent at that, acknowledging the Queen with silky glimmers in their sea of eyes.
"You curse me with the greatest fate of all, and so I must bear it, with as much gladness as I can. You tell me that there will be change after I die, and that too is a weight, and I must be glad for that, too, for there can be no new life without change." She lifted her head, and before the squareness of her shoulders, the Norns shrunk into the motions of small and alien bows. "I can do nothing more valuable than give my life for my family. It is that same choice made that brings me to you now. So you give me a tesseract, where I know now that in a true way, this is also the same moment I have died and will die. I have fought for love, I will fight for love, and I will die for it and because of it."
They shrank further at the clear ringing bell of her voice, that voice that proved her the Queen alone.
"I thank you, Norns, for the gift of this curse. I will cherish it, my private jewel kept close to my heart, and with my dying breath I will remember you, and I will remember the value of love."
"Your Majesty," whispered the Norns as one, who she knew had not been trying to defeat or break her. The Norns simply were - and they were not mortal. But they also knew their place, and even here in their own sacred space they bent the knee. "We curse thee, and we love thee, and your dreams will be and are sweet to see, until they are gone. They will live with us, and we will hold them." Then slower, like syrup, for they were also something other. "But you could still leave this weak one for us, for a gift."
"No," said Frigga, implacable. "When I came to Nornheim to end this, I thought I might kill her outright. I said as much. But the last blow is not for me to take. I must give it to Asgard entire, and it must be seen. I must be fair. You know the value of this."
"Yes. We see. As you wish. Our Queen," whispered the Norns, and the shadows became a real and wild thing, and the waters rose to grasp her and her broken enemy. And then time came around again, and she saw Kara with eyes as wide and frightened as the girl who she protected.
And also in time, the Queen died for love, and she felt the word on her breath as the wound in her side no longer hurt, content with knowing change would come fresh to old Asgard at last. Like the flowers she had loved so much, come and gone, and leaving something better with their passing.
. . .
~ Later
It was a soft autumn night, and it was not Loki's last. He sat alone on the edge of a familiar rooftop, gritty concrete and stone under his rump, and the silvery sphere of the Midgard moon hung bright and lovely in the dark. He scratched idly at his bicep under his black shirt with its blacker symbol, thinking of old memories, many of which still hurt him. At the same time, many of them had also found a new place inside his heart that was not buried so deep that they would fester any longer. The smell of asphalt was in the air, and that was less pleasant, but he could also easily smell the past from up here. He kept that close, like bottled perfume.
He had fallen for a long, dark time, dying slow until he committed himself to understanding the nature of his injuries, self-inflicted and not. Change - or simply give up and die. There were only these two choices, and he would bleed until he accepted one or the other. He hadn't died in Asgard after all, dropping it all and running just before it was too late, taking that scrap of well-meant advice, thinking of places between and all the shadows and the dim, and of all the moments in his own life that hadn't happened. Thinking of those scant stolen hours. Still, the bleeding didn't stop for many years.
And then it had, mostly, and now he understood change, if not found it ever particularly easy. It was not simple forgiveness, and it was not redemption, but it was still that rare miracle. A second chance to rewrite his own book.
Regrets? Loki knew he would always carry a few, though he also knew he didn't always have to carry them alone anymore. That was going to continue to surprise him for a long time. Humans did that, he found. A hardy people. Resilient. They'd faced him at his worst, after all, and he'd been with them as they faced even worse yet.
Regardless, he no longer regretted quite everything. There were memories he brought out to consider from time to time, putting them with the rest of the events in his life that told him that his decisions had become more painful than ever - but that they had also, finally, been right ones. He couldn't regret those, even with some - many, if he were to be honest with himself - mistakes made along the way.
She had been right, Kara. And she had been wrong, too. It was up to him to save himself. But all those memories, missed and not, they helped save him, just as well.
Loki thought of the question one of these new friends had asked him before she left to be on the run from her own troubles for a while, and knew that even then, another miracle, he had told her the truth. She was back now, and he was glad to see her safe, but he thought on her question a lot. Especially of late, when the nights were cool and dark and he was a just a little sorrowful that Earth's skies didn't hold grand blue nebulae to study and think about. The constellations here were different, and he didn't know all the stories of this world's stars. But there were stories waiting here all the same.
Were you ever in love?
No, he'd told his young human friend, in a moment of earnest stoicism. Love was not built in short hours and intended cruelties and around the corners of mistakes and moments that didn't happen. He'd barely made true friends of his own until these recent years, Loki was not about to claim he ever earned more than that.
But he had wanted it.
Somewhere out there, a hunter was still walking the shadows, and she was doing it on her terms. He kept these thoughts and their memories a buried but soft secret in a way Frigga would have understood more than he knew. Loki knew he had no right to wonder where Kara was right now, or know if she were happy, but sometimes, on these cool nights where he remembered he could still be warm, he thought about her, and wished he could have loved.
~fin
. . .
"Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song…"
~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan, or a Vision in a Dream
8/18/17 All relevant rights belong to Marvel with no infringement intended. All blame goes to the black suit, and the little bastard wearing it.
. . .
Notes:
I owe you an apology. When I started this particular story, I set out with it in mind that I was trying to do something different, a take on Loki that was more divorced from the version you might know from the Codex Loki works. And as you have by now figured out, possibly around the same time I did when writing the fic, it's a stealth prequel to the Codex, with some details to it that are possibly fairly controversial in context. That was not the plan, but here we are.
That asshole.
I don't think it changes the overall tone of the Codex works, and it can still stand separate, which is why at this time I'm not moving it into the Verse folder. My niche is genfic, and my position has always been that Loki, in canon MCU and as his own version in the AUish bulk of the Codex, is not ready for real love. He's been barely in the thriving houseplant stage of recovery addiction. Boy needs a cactus, something low maintenance. I wouldn't trust him to babysit my cat.
I should probably consider that phrasing. Anyway. For anyone alive, I don't think it changes wanting to be loved.
And I'm not going to lie. It was the suit. It is still that goddamn black suit.
I needed this. Depending on how you feel about the slightly different tone of this story and the first actual honest to god sex scene I've written for a fanfic in a long-ass time, please select one response from the following choice, and know I mean them both sincerely:
I'm Sorry / You're Welcome
. . .
Lorelei and Amora are old friends of the Codex. Ulf is a minor name taken from the Marvel wiki. Karnilla is finally seen 'on camera' for the first time, after being built up in The Lion in Spring, itself a more serious bookend to this story than I intended, and she is also slightly referenced in other fics. Her descriptions are borrowed from her comics appearance, and the Norns are a hearty blend of what we saw in Age of Ultron's deleted scenes and some shit I just made up.
Kara is borrowed from Kára, a Valkyrie from the Poetic Edda, reborn from a mortal woman and the spirit of Sigrun, and I wasn't about to use special characters all through this fic to write her name properly because I am very lazy. This Kara would resent being called a Valkyrie (not to mention that doing so would open up all sorts of Fresh Weirdness when you look at some of the rumors about the upcoming movie), but she takes some of her personality from at least one interpretation of her name - the stormy one.
. . .
It is currently likely there'll be a shorter fic for Halloween, but that depends on what time I have to finish the outline I've got sitting around. If it happens, you'll be getting a much lighter - if gruesome - little horror adventure with Magic Bros Loki & Strange seeking a killer on the road.
As ever, thank you very much for reading!