Disclaimer: I own no part of the Marvel movie universe.

Chapter 22

Frigga didn't like what she saw when she got to the Infirmary.

Loki - her little Loki - was lying curled up in his side, one hand lightly holding a pillow against the side of his head while three human men looked on.

One of them seemed to be talking to him.

What followed was a rushed conversation between the other two men, Odin, and the Midgardians who had brought them there, which involved shouting at several points - not all of it from Odin.

She was too busy rushing towards Loki to pay it much mind, but she did get the distinct idea that Loki had gotten too depressed to bear eating, had skipped meals the way he'd tried to when he was younger and sulking, and that there had been some medical consequences when they let him get away with it.

Which, the men claimed, seemed to have been the right choice since so far as they could tell he'd broken through it and was doing better than he had before.

Frigga suspected they might be right, if he'd actually found a way to express a need and felt safe enough to use it.

She put a hand on his shoulder. "I'm here, Loki," she told him.

The bag and tube were evidence of how bad it must have been. But then, Midgard had no healing stones.

And, she well knew, healing stones did nothing to nourish a body. If that had been the extent of the medical risks, Loki would have been facing very nearly the same at home in Asgard.

Only in his own bedroom in the royal quarters, or in theirs if his condition had been dire enough to warrant such attention. Not in a separate facility like this.

Loki trembled a little under her hand.

She knelt a little on the side of the bed he was facing, the human who had been tending him moving to give her room with a respectful nod. She lifted the pillow a little bit.

Loki's eyes met hers, then looked away.

She didn't like what she saw there. It was more than simple embarrassment - Loki'd had enough close scrapes and actual disasters in his youth for her to know what that looked like.

He's only a thousand, Frigga reminded herself. Still not much more than a boy. Still young enough for this to feel shameful, rather than being something that came from an injury in respectable battle.

"It's me, dear one," she told him.

He kept looking off at something, and Frigga'd spent enough hours with him when he was the closest waking thing to comatose to automatically turn her head and follow his gaze.

He was staring at the man's pants, which were an odd shade of blue with the dye worn out of them in places.

Blue.

She closed her eyes.

Oh, Loki. You know.

She turned back to him, put a hand on his cheek, and managed a cheery voice. "We need to get you cleaned up, and then everything will be better, all right?"

He met her eyes again, uneasily.

Oh, if only you'd gotten language back, too...

She'd just have to do as he'd asked her that horrible day and take care of him. And hope that was enough for him to understand she still considered herself a proper mother to him, however incredibly unrelated they actually were.

It took but a few moments for the humans to get whatever monitoring device they had looking after him detached and fiddle with the tube going into his hand so that the entire contraption wouldn't have to be pulled into the bathing room with him.

"It's just a glucose drip," one of them told her. "It won't harm him to not have it for a little while, and since he managed eating something a while ago it's really more there to speed his recovery right now than anything else."

And then it was really just a matter of letting Odin take her traveling cloak from her and carrying her son into the little attached bathing room.

She could hear Odin chuckling at something behind her. "Did you think our women were not strong?"

She smiled herself, imagining the looks on their faces. It would be an easy mistake for them to make, if their women were all as slight as the pilot who'd flown them in and Natasha were. Oh, if you humans could just meet Lady Sif for a few minutes...

Thor flipped the pages with growing anger. "You grew up with these?"

Sif nodded. "We were at war, and what chance was there that a good obedient daughter would be involved in a peace treaty or diplomacy? Much less facing them as the enemies they then were on a field of battle?" The bitterness was thick in her voice.

The illustrations held little resemblance to real Jotun.

Sickly blue skin. Scarifications roughly done and badly healed. The natural ridge designs in their skin uneven, drawn as though whatever god designed them had been deep in his cups at the time. Misshapen bodies and faces. Glowing red eyes.

For all the bias in the words the princes had grown up listening to and then reading on their own, the art on the pages had at least tried to match reality.

And the words...

"Thor..."

"And they were still giving you things like this even as you began associating with us? Even as they knew what Loki was genetically, where he came from?"

Sif nodded.

"It was not so bad for us, nor so intentional, but it was still there," Hogun quietly added.

"And if his shapeshifting had failed him in battle..."

"I would have presumed we were dealing with an impostor and reacted accordingly," Sif told him bluntly.

Volstagg and Fandral nodded.

"I saw," Hogun admitted, and it was clear to Thor that his friend had no idea Odin and Frigga had already passed that along. "The shock to him was proof enough to me that he did not know. Had it been less jarring to him, things could have gone differently on Jotunheim."

Thor handed the book back to Sif. "Best that be kept as evidence of how our people once thought, hidden away where the young cannot stumble upon it."

She nodded. "So Lord Odin thought as well." She seemed to think for a moment. "Thor?"

"Yes?"

"I wasn't able to see Loki before you and he fled Asgard. I was wondering if it might be a good idea for me to come see him sometime. Even if only just long enough for him to know I'm still around. He won't know anything that's happened here until he can understand speech again, not anything that happened since he fell."

Thor would have preferred to not be reminded of that day, but he nodded anyway.

"If he manages to remember things from when he reacted to nothing, he knows these three" - she gestured to indicate the Warriors Three - "are all right. But he hasn't seen a sign of me, and the last thing that happened before he left..."

"He will not know that he did not start a war," Fandral finished for her.

"And he will know our Lady Sif would stand and fight for her realm in such times," Hogun added.

Thor thought for a moment. "I don't know how much he understands now, but later, when it's clear he would recognize you, maybe an excuse could be found? Perhaps for all of you, once he's fit for and wants visitors?"

"You brother's always been a loner at heart," Volstagg reminded him.

"Not that much of a loner," Fandral laughed. "A large crowd at a feast, he'll try to avoid. Four friends hovering over him in worry, focused entirely on him? Can you imagine the look on his face?"

They all laughed together for the first time in a long time.

They spent the rest of the afternoon finding removable ways to cover up the offensive pages in the Odinsons' old books, because while Frigga was right that Loki would need to relearn such bias existed that didn't mean it had to happen right while he was still just starting to figure out language again, did it?

Loki had his sense of modesty back, and Frigga was glad of it.

It meant she could set him down inside the tub and apart from collecting the clothing he passed her from behind the flimsy curtain the humans used for privacy, she didn't have to do much of anything.

He was well enough to sit upright on his own, just not to walk yet, and that was more than enough for this.

The room grew cold, and it took a moment for Frigga to realize it was from the water Loki was using. And then, after a moment's thought, she understood. This Loki knew what he was, and might not have a millennium's remembered training of what bathwater ought to feel like. And wasn't this Midgardian contraption not entirely unlike bathing under a waterfall, and hadn't she been overhearing complaints about Loki's love of meltwater while questing for several centuries now from Thor?

So, Loki was figuring out how to live as what he really was, a man with a foot in two realms, at last.

And no matter how much knowing seemed to have made him ill at ease, at least figuring out who he was now around his biological heritage would mean not having to recreate himself again later after learning it anew.

After a little while, he made a questioning little noise and scooted himself around a bit so his back was facing her just beyond the curtain's edge.

She took the hint and helped him with that odd little place between the shoulders that hardly any social species could ever reach on its own.

And then, when she was taking the opportunity to make sure the back of his neck and behind his ears were clean, she realized from the feel of his hair that whatever soap Midgard used for bodies was entirely unsuited to hair.

Which meant a different kind of soap, one they obviously hadn't successfully taught Loki about, had to be around here somewhere.

It was a matter of finding the bottle of shampoo - she promptly considered it a mark of the woeful state of Midgardian civilization that soap, shampoo, and conditioner were three separate things and not just one thing you could lather all of you in and pay the process no mind in the bath - reading the label to be absolutely sure the Midgardians made such things to work as more civilized realms would, and then carefully carrying out the steps while making sure Loki understood how much she was using and what she was doing.

He was nearly as observant as he had ever been, and it was a relief to her that there was no wariness to it. At least for now.

They managed to get him dried and dressed without too much further damage to his modesty.

She carried him back out.

Odin was waiting for them, and now Loki wouldn't meet his eyes. In fact, he was trying to bow his head...

"Ah. You do remember things now." Odin reached out and gently forced Loki's chin up in a manner Frigga had seen before.

There were certain offenses against the crown - usually claiming it, or a right to it - that had a particular ritual afterward if the offender intended to seek forgiveness. And while it might not fit the form, it couldn't have anyway, not with Loki nonverbal and uncomprehending.

And after that, Loki relaxed a bit.

"He's stable and recovered enough he could probably be brought back to the bedroom he and Thor have been sharing," one of the human men offered. "We've set and maintained IV lines there before without any problems, right?"

And that's just what they did.

While the humans were hooking the tube back up, Odin and Frigga shared a quiet word.

"I wonder what could have driven him so emotionally low so fast, and then have so swift a recovery," Frigga mused. "There is unease in him now, but nothing that would drive the appetite from either of our boys. I think he knows what he is, but then why the quick recovery? And I know it did not drive the hunger from him the first time."

"Perhaps the fact there are so many things he could have remembered that might have caused this says enough on its own," Odin replied soberly.

And then, they finally had a moment together as a family, the three of them, alone.