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Chapter 17

"Mother," Thor asked the next morning over breakfast, "why did that pile of books you handed me have so many negative messages about the Jotun? I understand having some of them - they were our enemies back then, after all - but... and with Loki listening and reading too..."

She sighed. "We were trying to hide what he was, Thor. If I'd had my way, there would have been no need. We kept the worst of it away from you boys, but it was so pervasive... We'd have had to commission books in order to completely avoid it, and unless we had specified otherwise, those would have had the same messages in them."

"And there would be that many more people around who might know."

She nodded. "And then you would have begun associating with other children of the court around your own ages, and they would have all those prejudices themselves. And while we found tutors who already knew or who we could trust to know, well, it was hard to find textbooks that didn't have all that in them. Then, you both started reading original texts in your chosen fields, and if we hadn't at least exposed you to the fact anti-Jotun sentiment existed..."

"Then we would have been floored by some of what we were reading." A few military tomes and scientific texts on the other realms came to mind.

"And he'll need to see those, eventually. When he's well enough and remembers enough to be told why he had to go."

"...what? No."

"Yes. Thor, he has to be told when he can handle it. He has to know why he fell, why he was ever in his tormentors' hands at all, why he had to recover on Midgard instead of surrounded by family at home."

'When I'm king, I'll hunt the monsters down and slay them all.' "But..."

"He must," Odin told them as he walked into the room and took his own seat. "Hiding the world from him will do him no good."

"If he's always going to need a guardian anyway..."

"Thor, he has to see family as being fundamentally honest with him now. He has to get used to those looking out for him making judgments about him based on information he also knows. How else is he supposed to have the first idea when complaining might be appropriate?" Frigga counseled.

"That's just it. He doesn't complain about being mistreated. At least not for anything less than being stepped on. He's even protested being treated 'too well'. I had to sleep on the floor with him all the way to the place called New York because he refused to sleep in a bed if anyone else was on the floor."

"All the more reason," Odin replied. "And besides, one day Asgard will be safe for him again. And yet, there will be words said in corridors about Jotun who are not him. If he gets to the point where he only needs help in the largest decisions of his life, will you wish him barred from leaving the royal quarters in case a stray word teaches him the truth of how others saw him? And what if he remembers it anyway? Deception within the family has failed him. Now, we must try honesty, as much as he can take."

Frigga tried a different argument. "Thor, you told us this Dr. Strange thought he would be returning to something a lot closer to his old personality soon."

Thor nodded.

"You knew Loki well. Would the man he was before have tolerated being kept ignorant like that?"

"No," Thor admitted. "He was too bright for it, anyway."

"And if that part of himself is recovered?" Odin asked.

"Then it will again be worthless to try."

"Thor, there is a thing I am not sure you understand in your heart yet," Frigga told him.

"What is it, Mother?"

"The brother you end up with seems less likely to be the man who now is with some of the capabilities of the man who was, and more likely to be the man who was with many of the limitations of the man who now is. He will know what he has lost and be capable of being quite frustrated at what he is incapable of doing for himself."

The thought was horrifying. Loki had been frustrated enough as it was.

And then he thought of the girl Loki had apparently been interested in, and the fact Loki was going to figure out sooner or later, if he remembered her, that he really hadn't had a chance.

Thor wondered if she'd known she was being watched, if she knew her father was warning a prince away from her, what she had thought when she found out who he was...

And didn't mention her, because it was the last thing Frigga needed to hear.

The thought of what Loki was facing stayed with him all that day and all the next.

Loki took longer than the one day to work everything through, even though the first day's thought did produce the fact he was a second prince and some of the things associated with that, but on the second day he finally realized it while showering in the evening.

The Odinsleep.

Thor would have to go home. He was the heir, and the realm was more important than any single member of the royal family.

Especially when the people here had already been helping Thor take care of him.

It was very frustrating, even shaming, to understand that he had forgotten something that had always been so fundamental to his life.

He counted days on his fingers.

Too long.

If Thor had left when it began, he ought to be back by now.

So either he left early or something had gone wrong again.

Wait, when has anything ever gone wrong with the Odinsleep?

He remembered that had always been a worry of his and that Thor had laughed at him once or twice over it, but for something to happen...

No, something had gone wrong, horribly wrong, with the start of it, once, because he remembered Odin lying helpless on the ground alone with him.

But why would he have... None of it made sense. It wasn't the way the world worked.

He eased down into the tub, instinctually knowing that he did not want to be standing for whatever memories came back next.

Cold water beat down on his back.

He and Thor had always quarreled over bathing opportunities while in the field questing, he remembered, because inevitably Thor would try to turn down perfectly good refreshing meltwater as being 'freezing cold' despite the fact it wouldn't be if it had stopped being snow, now could it?

But what did that have to do with Odin, besides the shushing Thor had gotten that one time he borrowed a Midgardian joke and claimed Loki's mountain stream habits would turn him blue someday...

Turn him blue.

It had happened.

He could remember the feel of the fingers on his arm as the armor grew brittle and fragmented off of him.

Jotunheim, for the first time, and for an ice world it had felt comfortable despite Heimdall's warning...

What did the Odinsleep going wrong have to do with...

The memory of a single conversation came in a flash of knowledge and horror.

No. Nononononono. Please, no!

Jotun.

He didn't remember everything about what that meant, exactly, but he knew he had called himself a monster and it took something big and large and wrong to make you think that about yourself, right? And he couldn't think of any positive association he had with the term.

He and Thor weren't brothers after all, then. There was no shared blood between them. Did Thor know? Had he been faking everything so Loki would think everything was as it had been before?

He remembered Laufey, and the conversation gave him his name.

Had Laufey known his people were missing a living child? Had he been told what Loki's true nature was after his body betrayed its secret at last?

Was Loki here for protection, for hiding, for shuffling off where no one could see the monster raised to think himself a man? Useless to Asgard as anything more than a curiosity?

Why had Odin sent him away? Why had he and Frigga kept up the fiction of family when he was still too damaged to care? And what would Laufey do when he heard...

And in one final wave of memories, Loki knew that Laufey would never be doing anything ever again.

Thor stayed at the evening meal chatting with Sif and the Warriors Three until the servants very nearly had to run them and the rest of the stragglers off.

He'd been back for three nights, now, and tomorrow he'd be taking over while his father slept. Best to get his socializing in while he could, especially since he planned on returning to Midgard as quickly as Odin would let him afterward.

They were just getting up when a young woman Thor thought he'd seen hanging around the edges of feasts before walked over cautiously.

"It's all right, Sig," Sif told her with an exasperated look.

She still seemed shy and flustered even when she seemed to take heart from the words. "Um, m'lord Thor?"

"Yes?"

"Well, um, my family... I'm sorry, not that I had anything to do with it of course..." The last was far too fast, as if she feared he'd think she'd agreed with them even though this was the last place she'd be if she had.

"You want to apologize."

She nodded. "Yes. I... I should have known something was up. The things they always said. Said something was wrong with him. Not that I think there was anything wrong with him." Again, she finished too fast.

"Sig, calm down," Sif told her. "We've been over this. The Allfather knows you weren't involved, and an accidental misspeak because you get flustered so much is not going to change that."

She nodded. "So I'm sorry about that, and wanted you to know I hope he recovers quickly and fully."

That hit a nerve that had been getting ever more sore since yesterday morning. Thor gave a quick shake of his head and bluntly told her, "He can't."

The little bit of brightness that had returned to her face with Sif's reassurance left. "I'm sorry to hear that." She gave a little nod of respect and took her leave.

"Her father gave her as much trouble for being a scientific type as mine gave me for wanting to fight," Sif told Thor and the Three as they left. "Sorcery's more appropriate for girls, you see, and she's got some potential but her mind's more suited to... well, they didn't know each other, I'm sure of that, but she's read most of his public work. I think she was dreaming of begging to pick his mind for fifteen minutes if her father ever let up on her."

Volstagg shook his head. "The way we used to try to shut him up about it?"

"She'd have been lucky to get away after thirty minutes," Fandral joked weakly.

"An hour," Hogun corrected.

It was quite a while before Loki left the bathroom and crawled into bed with barely a nod to Steve, whose presence seemed a lot less innocuous now.

He lay awake for a long time wondering if the difference between being controlled to prevent accidental harm to oneself and the sort of prison he seemed to recall Odin preferred for prisoners who couldn't remember their offenses would look like from the inside.

It was not a pleasant thought to fall sleep to.