einfach_mich: Kid Loki learns to visit other people's dreams and stumbles upon a girl who dreams in numbers.

Wherein Loki learns a new trick and Frigga worries. (Family/Angst. Arguably canon-compliant. PG.)

Please ignore the fact that Loki's childhood took place about two thousand years before Jane's birth.

The unspoken secret of raising children is that every parent has their favorite.

Not that it's a matter of love; Frigga could not love one son more than the other even if she tried. As well ask her which lung she values greater, which side of her heart she finds more vital. She would die for them both; she would kill for them both. They are equal in her mother's soul.

But Thor has always been Odin's. He is growing up brash and loud, with so much energy for everything he can hardly hold the enthusiasm in his own skin. His easy confidence charms whomever he meets, and Frigga adores the way he has a friendly grin for every living being in the Realm Eternal. She swells with pride at his fearlessness, which time will temper into wiser courage. He wants nothing more than to be his father. He hangs on Odin's every word — and Odin favors him in turn. They cannot help it. They are too alike.

Whereas Loki…

From the moment Odin laid their second son in her arms, Loki has been all hers.

It is one of the reasons she is teaching him her tricks.

Loki sits before her now, legs crossed, eyes bright. "I'm ready," he says, wiggling in excitement. "Can we start?"

Frigga longs to pull him into her lap, as she did when they began their lessons long ago. He is too big for that now. "You must be still, Loki," she tells him. "Still, and relaxed. If you do not control yourself, you cannot control your magic. You could hurt someone."

"Thor hurts people with his sword when he trains."

"Battle hurts bodies. Magic hurts minds. Minds are far more difficult to heal than bodies. Always remember that."

Her son nods. Sharply. "I will. Always."

"Good. Now, like we practiced."

Loki closes his eyes obediently. His features, which have been sharpening as the baby fat fades away with age, soften into a quiet, placid expression. Almost too quiet and placid. Almost too much like a mask.

It is becoming harder for Frigga to tell when Loki is genuinely calm, and when he is simply caging his emotions behind a wall of ice. Perhaps one day she will not see the difference.

No. Odin always tells her she frets overmuch. Frigga knows her son. She will always know when he is hiding something. He is calm. He is ready. He can do this.

But he peeks at her all the same. "You are coming with me?" he asks nervously.

She smiles. "Of course I am."

"All right." They both close their eyes this time. Frigga hears Loki take a deep breath—

—and a rush of energy swirls around them both, pulling them into a current of thoughts as relentlessly as a river surging towards a waterfall. She doesn't even have to alter their direction; a small touch to steady the pace is all that is required. She will tell Odin of how splendidly their son has performed on his first try, and she'll see to it her husband, who may not recognize on his own what a great feat this is, is as strong in her praise as she is.

Their stop amongst the mists is a little rough — that's to be expected. Starting is always easier than stopping, in all things. Insubstantial in an insubstantial world, both present and not present, she watches her son without watching as he looks about without looking. "There's so many," he breathes without breathing.

"Midgardians do love their sleep." Frigga nudges him forward without nudging. "Go on. Choose well."

It is, perhaps, somewhat questionable that she is allowing her son to try this at so young an age. Touching dreams is a very precise art. But Loki is so talented, and more importantly, Loki is so alone. His older brother adores him (and how Frigga wishes Loki saw that more clearly), but their interests and temperments are growing more different by the day. Thor has many friends. Loki has none. And, more worrisome, Loki does not seem to care. He detests being teased by Thor's new playmates, but he makes no effort to find his own.

In human dreams, he needn't stand in his brother's shadow.

"That one." Loki points without pointing. "That one there, with the numbers."

It takes Frigga a moment to sort through the nebulous, fragile clouds of fantasy, but the mortal her son has chosen soon makes herself apparent. A girlchild, roughly his own age — by human standards, anyway, how does one count Midgardian years? Frigga cannot recall — staring down at her cupped hands. From between her fingers flow endless sand grains of numerals. They blow away in an imaginary wind as they fall.

Frigga delicately pulls without pulling; the girlchild's dream floats closer, gains definition, becomes lines and shapes and colors. She's a pretty little thing. Frigga wonders with a twinge of alarm if that's why Loki chose as he did, if her boys have grown up so very much, before reminding herself that her sons still frequently amuse themselves by playing hide-and-seek in the throne room. There is a great deal of time left before she need worry over their notice of pretty girls. "Here you are," she says. "Gently."

Loki takes a breath without breathing. He steps without stepping.

Frigga's heart is in her throat as her son enters the mortal's dream without so much as a shiver.

The scene sharpens abruptly into a grassy Midgardian field, dark with deep night. The girlchild doesn't look up as Loki approaches, only frowns at the specks of numbers still falling from her hands. "There's too many," she says before Loki has a chance to speak — for mortal dreams rarely require introduction or explanation. "I can't remember them all."

"Oh. Well, you ought write them down; that is what I would do." Loki is all grace and confidence. Only a mother would know his uncertainty.

"Too many," the girlchild repeats. "I'll never get it, never." Loki reaches out for one of the falling grains, but the girl snatches her hands back. "No, don't touch! They're mine."

Loki scowls. He has rarely heard the word No from anyone but his parents; few dare lecture a Prince of Asgard. "I only want a few."

"Well, you can't have them."

He doesn't listen, and tries for the numbers again.

The girlchild kicks him in the shin.

"I… you… how dare you!"

"I told you not to touch!"

"You don't need all of them!"

"I do!"

"You don't!"

"I do! Watch!" And the girlchild throws her handful of sand numbers into the air.

They lodge in the midnight sky, turn white and bright, transform into stars.

"See?" The girlchild and Loki are both staring up now, faces pale in the starlight, little noses casting shadows across their youthful cheeks. "You see how many? I can't remember them all!"

"I can," Loki says quickly, and later Frigga will take him to task for that. Lying is unacceptable, even to a mortal, even in dreams — but that is the one vice no one has been able to draw out of her son, even her.

"You can not."

"I can so!"

"Then show me!" The girlchild traces her finger through the air; lines follow her fantasy touch, connecting star to star, until a crude figure sketches out above them. "What's that?"

Loki bites his lip and blushes. Frigga has seen to it both he and Thor were taught the skies of Asgard, but they bear no relation to Midgard.

The girlchild waits a few moments before telling him: "It's Gemini." The combativeness has almost instantly vanished from her tone. "Look, that one's Castor—" a tiny number at the corner of the sketch flares red "—and that's Pollux—" another flare "—and down there is Tejat—" another flare "—and next to it is Mek… Mek… no, Mebsuta, Mekbuda's on the other side—"

"Are you going to tell me all of these?" Loki interrupts, staring at her, utterly appalled.

The girlchild glances at his face for the first time. "Yes," she says simply, as though she couldn't conceive of anything in all the realms that a person would want more than to hear every star in the wide skies listed by name. Then a shadow crosses her expression, and she mutters: "As many as I can remember, anyway."

Frigga's precious, perceptive, lonely second son stares at the strange little girlchild for a long moment.

And then he shrugs. "All right," he says.

The girlchild beams. "Okay. Good. Good! Now, see, next to Gemini, that's Cancer, and it's a little easier because there's only five…"

Many hours later, when the girlchild begins to fade back to the haze, when Frigga pulls Loki free from the collapsing dream without pulling, when they come back to themselves in the darkened halls of Asgard, when the mother leads the exhausted son to his bed and tucks him in as he will soon no longer allow her to do, Frigga says: "You did very well. And next time I'm certain you will find a livelier dreamer."

Loki shakes his head. "No. I want her."

Frigga pauses. "It is very difficult to find a mortal more than once in the mists," she explains. "It will have to be someone different."

"But I want her."

"We do not always get what we want, dear one." Frigga cannot help but smile when he rolls away in a huff. "But you never know," she says. "Individuals can be located much more easily once you've met them in the flesh. Perhaps one day your paths will cross." She kisses her son's temple. "Sweet dreams, Loki."

He is asleep before she has even left the room.

When she wakes the next day, seven-year-old Jane Foster, who had cried herself to sleep over her father's sky charts, cannot remember of what she'd dreamed… but finds she can remember every one of the elusive stars that had caused her so much grief.