Trials

Chapter Six: The Fourth Option

Morning came, and Loki woke to Thor still sound asleep beside him. That in and of itself was enough to tell him yesterday hadn't been a dream – the days were long past when it was a normal occurrence for one of them to spend the night in the other's chambers. These days Baldur was far more likely to wind up spending the night here than Thor, for Loki always made sure to create an adventure of a sleepover for his little brother.

"Go on, get up," Loki said, making no move to do so himself. Loki grabbed the pillow underneath his head and pulled; Thor's head fell back then jerked up as he scrambled up into a sitting position.

"What?" he said, turning to Loki as he apparently figured out where he was.

"Have I ever told you that you look funny?"

"Over the entire course of our lives?" Thor asked, running a hand through his blond locks in an attempt to smooth them out. He was still breathing heavily from being startled awake.

"I mean recently."

"I don't think so."

"Well, you do."

"Says my brother with the pale skin and black hair."

"It's the beard. I'm not used to it."

"It's getting pretty full now, isn't it?" Thor said with a smile, putting his right hand over his chin and stroking his prized facial hair.

Loki nodded. His own face was bare, and he had never needed to shave it, though Thor had started shaving when he was seventeen, around the average age for Aesir boys. It was one of the ways a man could be distinguished from a youth, since a nineteen-year-old didn't look all that much different from a hundred-year-old, so once permitted to grow his beard out at twenty, an Aesir man typically did so. Loki wondered if perhaps his own stubble-free face was a sign that he was never to become a man in Asgardian eyes.

"I'm sure yours will start coming in before long," Thor said, guessing the direction of Loki's thoughts; he used to tease about it regularly, until he realized Loki was genuinely bothered by it. Now he only teased about it occasionally.

Loki absently nodded; he didn't complain about it anymore now, and it was easy enough to let everyone assume he shaved, like every other nineteen-year-old boy.

"When are you going to talk to Sorkvir and Tyr?"

"I don't know. Not right now. I don't want to right away. Maybe this afternoon."

Thor nodded, and the two fell silent for a few minutes, until Thor asked Loki if he wanted to send for breakfast. Loki declined, telling Thor he didn't want to eat, and Thor agreed to go back to his own chambers for breakfast. Loki promptly sank bank into the bed and pulled the covers over his head.

And stayed there.

Inside these chambers, he could be whoever he wanted to be. Whoever he believed himself to be. Loki Odinson, Prince of Asgard, warrior of Asgard. Outside these chambers he was a failure. He vastly preferred it inside these chambers, he decided, and even more so in this bed and under these covers.

/

/

At a little past noon there came a knock on the door. Loki's first instinct was to ignore it, but then he thought possibly it could be Father, come to tell him he'd decided to speak with Tyr after all. He threw the covers back and hurried barefoot through his chambers to the front door. When he opened it, though, Mother stood there, holding a covered silver tray.

"Don't look so happy to see me, Loki," she chided, her smile nevertheless as warm as always.

"Come in, Mother. I'm sorry. It's just that I thought it might be Father."

"Your Father is busy with his day's work, and I heard that you haven't left your chambers all day, or had any food sent up," she said, heading straight for his new dining room, leaving Loki to follow like a little boy. He didn't like the feeling.

"How did you know that?" he asked.

"I asked Jolgeir."

"You aren't supposed to use the Einherjar to check up on me."

"I wasn't asking details about your activities, Loki, only if you'd left your chambers."

"And if I'd ordered any meals."

"Loki…," Frigga said, putting the tray down on the table and giving him a reproachful look.

"Sorry, Mother," Loki said automatically, though he wasn't feeling very sorry. He was feeling sensitive to being treated as a child.

"I didn't think you'd see what I asked as an invasion of your privacy. If you do see it this way, tell me, and I won't do it again," she said, giving him a steady look that told Loki she meant it, but she wouldn't much appreciate it if he took her up on it. "Though I will feel a bit silly knocking on your door and waiting for you to respond when you aren't there, and I could have simply asked Jolgeir or Thidrek or whomever was on duty and not wasted my time."

"Jolgeir and Thridrek and whoever aren't supposed to be there anymore after another week," Loki said darkly, staring down at the plate his mother had set before him.

Frigga stopped her fussing over the tray for a moment. "Ah," she said. "Is that what this is all about? Loki…the Einherjar are only there until you're twenty, regardless of whatever else happens." She quickly finished setting the table.

"Really?" Loki asked, looking over at her. It would be one small bit of relief, at least.

"Of course, my precious one. Of course," she repeated, stepping behind him, where she leaned over, wrapped her arms around him, and kissed the top of his head, or something close to it, the top of his head not being so easy to get to anymore.

Loki didn't react to it; his instincts were torn between wanting to hide himself in her arms and giving in to the urge to reject any sort of mothering from her, simply to prove he didn't need it.

She released him and came back around the table to sit across from him. "Now eat. Just because your body can get by with less food, it still needs regular meals to stay in top condition."

"It's not like it matters," Loki said, taking a bite of stew anyway. He'd heard this lecture in one form or another too many times to count over the last couple of years, first for Thor and then for himself. About not eating, not drinking, not sleeping, carelessness toward injury… But what difference did the condition of his body make? He was not a warrior; he may as well be weak and feeble and decrepit.

"Of course it matters. I want my sons healthy."

Loki nodded, took a piece of bread, stuck it in the stew, then popped it in his mouth.

"Now, you aren't planning on staying in your sleepwear in your chambers forever, are you?"

"I was thinking I might," he said with a shrug.

"I imagine you'd grow rather bored. Your father gave you a course of action. Do you not intend to take it?"

Loki put his spoon down. "I already talked to Tyr and Sorkvir yesterday. I know what they'll say: 'you failed!' They said I broke the rules by using magic. But no one ever said I couldn't. I worked hard to be able to create that light. It wasn't easy."

"No, I know it wasn't. I was impressed. You have to be very precise in your manipulation of particles to create light."

"Yes! Exactly! And it worked, exactly as I planned it, and I defeated Tyr. How is that a failure? Mother…would you have failed me?"

"Oh, Loki, I wish you wouldn't ask me that. I can-"

"You, too?" Loki asked, stunned. "How can you say that? You know I would-"

"Loki, hush. I haven't said anything yet. I only meant to say that I'm hardly objective. You were a true phenomenon in the arena yesterday. Incredible to watch. But I'm your mother. Even if you'd been below average out there I would have beamed with pride and passed you without question. I know how hard you've worked, how many hours you've put into preparing for your Trials, far more than you were required to. But Loki, I don't make the rules, and I don't make the decisions on who passes and who fails."

"Then can't you do something about it? It's not fair!" Loki insisted, his voice rising uncontrollably to a shout. "Speak to Father! You can convince him."

"No, I cannot. This has put him in a terrible position, you know. He can't undermine Tyr, he's the head of the War Council."

"But I'm his son!"

"You are, Loki," she said with a firm nod, "but that doesn't mean he can step in and overrule everyone else where you're concerned. Nor could he with Thor, nor with Baldur. I know it doesn't seem fair, but your father cannot make this go away for you."

"But it's not…it's not a normal situation. This is all because I beat Tyr. No one has ever failed the Trials in the history of Asgard, except me, just because I made Tyr angry."

"If you ask Tyr, he'll tell you that he regrets what happened, but that all of the trainers take the rules of the Trials very seriously, and he had no choice but to fail you because you broke them."

"Somehow I doubt that," Loki said, his voice heavy with sarcasm.

"Would you call me a liar, then?"

"What?" Loki said in confusion. "No, I-"

"I spoke to him this morning. He sought me out, not the other way around, and he explained his thoughts."

"He did?" Loki felt himself go cold and stiff with nerves that quickly supplanted the anger. "What else did he say?"

"I asked him what your options were, and he told me that he saw two. You could either accept the failure and try to put this behind you, and wait for the opportunity to fight and prove yourself in a real battle, earn your title as a warrior that way, or you could go to your father officially, as a citizen to his king, seeking a royal petition for you to be able to repeat that Trials. I've no doubt your father would provide that for you; otherwise there's no formal provision for repeating the Trials. He said if you obtain the petition from Odin, he will of course grant it, and he'll work with Sorkvir to make sure it's all arranged quickly, so you can still complete The Trials before your birthday."

Loki slumped in his chair. This wasn't what he wanted to hear. "Why can't he just acknowledge that I won? That I passed?"

Frigga signed and pushed her plate and bowl away. "Because according to the rules, unfair as they may seem, you did not. Reality is sometimes an awful thing to have to face, but you do have to face it, Loki, and if you want to pass the Trials then you'd better do so quickly. You turn twenty in less than a week now."

"But according to what rules? It isn't fair, Mother. No one ever gave me some list of rules. Sorkvir told me about choosing a weapon, and I suppose he and the other trainers told me a couple of other things, but no one ever mentioned magic. How was I supposed to know I couldn't use it?" Loki turned his head aside and gazed dejectedly at the family portrait on the wall. In it he was trying to match Father's serious expression, while Thor grinned widely enough to blind the artist, and Baldur, just two in this image, squirmed on Mother's lap.

"Loki," Mother said after what might have been a few minutes, "did they really never provide you with a list of rules, either things that were allowed or things that were not?"

"No."

"Admittedly my Trials were a very long time ago now, and the women's version, but I can't remember anyone providing me with any formal rules, either. Only the order of the individual trials and what had to be accomplished in them."

"No one ever even really told me that. But that was because I knew it already, from helping Thor get ready for his." Loki went back to staring at the portrait, but eventually looked at his mother again, somewhat surprised by her silence. Her expression was thoughtful, her eyes unfocused. "What's wrong?" Loki asked her, assuming the worst, because that's how the last couple of days had gone.

"Nothing, sweetheart. I was just thinking…you may be right."

"Really?" Loki said, not quite following. Right about what?

"Yes. How can you be expected to know what the rules are, if they aren't ever explained to you?"

"That's what I keep saying. To Father, too. Can you make him understand, Mother? I'm sure he would listen to you."

"Nothing has changed there. Your father, because he is your father, cannot intervene for you, other than through the formal petition to repeat the Trials, as Tyr mentioned. I know this is hard for you to understand. I know it makes it seem as though he doesn't care. He does, believe me, he does. But it would be worse for you, not better, if he made some sort of arbitrary ruling overriding Tyr and Sorkvir. Can you imagine it? The king of Asgard getting involved in such a thing as the Trials? Think of what people would say. 'Loki Odinson – only named a warrior because his father said so and forced Tyr and Sorkvir to go along with it.' Is that what you want?"

"No, of course not. I just…I just want this all to go away."

"Well, since that's not going to happen, why don't you figure out what you're going to do about it?"

"Go back to bed? For the next hundred years?" Loki asked, his voice full of a kind of falsely cheerful hope.

"All right, let's call that Option Number Three. What if there were a fourth?"

"Move to Midgard where no one's ever heard of me?"

Frigga laughed. "I wouldn't like it if you moved so far away. That's not what I had in mind."

"Then what?"

"Have you forgotten everything you had to know for your examinations already? 'When an Asgardian citizen believes an incorrect or unlawful ruling has been made against him or her, he or she has the right to…'"

"'…bring it to the attention of the appropriate level of the Office of the Magistrate for consideration in accordance with all applicable laws of Asgard.' You're suggesting I should…talk to a magistrate?"

"I'm not suggesting anything. This has to be your decision. I'm simply mentioning another option that occurred to me. But perhaps there are some applicable laws; I really don't know. It couldn't hurt to get some additional information, though. Obtaining relevant information before acting is rarely a bad idea."

Loki nodded thoughtfully and the two fell into silence. It seemed a strange path, but…why not? If he could not get satisfaction for the unfair decision that had been made against him by simply pointing it out, then why couldn't he get it through another route? Perhaps there was a law against what Tyr had done, and this whole disaster could be straightened out very easily.

Mother began to eat again, and Loki finally joined her, putting aside the magistrate idea for the time being, and asked about her plans for the day. Conversation was awkward and halting, though, for there was virtually no topic unaffected by the results of his Trials. His twentieth birthday was just around the corner, and many of her plans were related to that. His uncles and aunts, he found out when he asked, had gone home already, not wanting to further complicate a difficult situation with their presence, but to Loki it was clear that they were simply ashamed of him and wished to leave.

/

/

"Loki, are you still in here?" Thor's voice boomed through Loki's chambers. At least he hadn't used Jolgeir to check up on him, but Loki wasn't so sure bursting into his chambers was actually any better. It irritated him because of his mood, but he couldn't really complain, since he did the same to Thor whenever he felt like it.

"In here," he called from his dressing room, where he was hooking the last leather straps around the golden medallions that marked him as an Odinson. He stepped back from the mirror – everything was properly in place. Now he just needed to get his hair under control. He ran into Thor – literally – on his way to the bathroom.

"Are you just now getting dressed? I just came from the training field and Tyr said you hadn't come out to see him yet."

"He's right," Loki said, applying a little bit of a gel he'd been using lately to help keep his hair in place.

"Have you gone mad? Loki, you're acting like this isn't important. It is. You can't just…ignore it. Come on, I'll go with you. We'll talk to Tyr together. He's still on the field. I told him I'd bring you there."

"What?" Loki said, whirling around. "Thor, you had no business doing that!"

"No business? You think this isn't my business? You're my brother. It is my business."

"It was my Trials, Thor, not yours. It's my business," Loki retorted, jaw set.

"It was your Trials, yes. But you weren't alone out there. I was out there on that field in the arena with you. And I got all those people to come. I was out all night long and into the morning convincing everyone I met to come and see my brother at his Trials. And you cheated because you had to be better than anyone else and everyone left with the most embarrassing story to hit Asgard in centuries and how do you think that makes me feel?!"

Loki felt his nose itching and his cheeks burning and if he didn't get this under control right now he was going to start crying. Crying. He grit his teeth. No wonder they didn't declare me a warrior. He felt like he'd been kicked in the gut hard enough to be knocked out.

He put his shoulder down and shoved his way past Thor, when there was plenty of room to do it without touching him at all. "Nobody asked you to make all those people come, you know," Loki said with a painfully tight throat as he walked away. He heard Thor following and spun around to find himself almost nose-to-nose with his older brother. "And I didn't cheat!" he shouted.

Thor jerked back in surprise. He stared at Loki for a moment, then reached out a placating hand to Loki's shoulder. "Loki, calm down. I didn't really-"

Loki twisted away from the hand and again walked away, back out through his bedchamber and into the antechamber. A minute later Thor was again following him. Loki wished he would just leave. But more than that, he wished for Thor's support. That was what brothers were for, wasn't it? Father had said so just yesterday. They'd always supported each other in the past. Well, "always" might be overstating it a tiny bit, he thought, remembering his jealousy over the attention Thor's first girlfriend took from him and how he'd tried to sabotage their relationship. They'd both grown up some since then. But if this was what growing up really meant – he and Thor on opposite sides – then Loki would rather they both remain youths forever.

Loki reached the tall dresser that held his coats and pulled out the thigh-length sleeveless one in dark brown leather with silver accents that was his current favorite. He slipped his arms into it, turned, and there was Thor.

"Loki, just hold on a minute, all right? If you aren't going to talk to Tyr, then where are you going?"

"I'm going to see Finnulfur," Loki said, continuing on to the door, but Thor darted around him and got there first.

"Finnulfur?! What for? Are you going to try to tell him Tyr did something illegal?" he asked with a crooked grin.

"Yes."

"Ah…that was a jest."

"No one told me I couldn't use magic. They can't fail me for breaking a rule they never told me about."

Thor looked confused by that, and Loki silently willed him to understand. "But it's just a trick. You can't use tricks in the Trials."

"It's not just a trick," Loki insisted, putting his whole body into emphasizing it, trying to make Thor see. "And besides, wasn't that a 'trick' when you came onto the field and pretended like you were going to lift the log because I couldn't?"

"No," his brother said, shaking his head. "It was just…showmanship. Like the dramas we used to do for our tutors. You lifted all the weight yourself, in the end."

"And I defeated Tyr myself, in the end."

Thor rolled his eyes. "Loki, you did not defeat Tyr."

"Then whose sword was to whose heart in the end?"

"But that doesn't count, because you used tricks."

Loki stared at Thor a moment longer. They were at an impasse, and Loki was growing truly angry, and he didn't want to be angry at Thor. "Think what you want, then," he said. "Will you just move?"

Thor stepped aside; Loki opened the door and stepped out into the corridor. Thor again followed. "Loki…wait."

"What now?" he said, turning around and giving Thor a testy look. He was losing patience, and time was passing, and he wanted to reach Finnulfur before official hours ended.

"Are you really going to see Finnulfur about this?"

"Yes, Thor!" Loki exclaimed in exasperation.

A few seconds more passed in silence before Thor nodded. Loki frowned and hurried to the stairs.

/

Each of us has felt like Loki here at some point, I'm sure, with some problem we wished would just go away...

For those of you wondering how Thor really feels about what happened, here's part of it. I'm fighting hard not to put here what I think about Thor's reaction. Some of you might like to know, but I like to let you come to your own interpretation. If you've read my other stuff, you can probably guess "Thor is an evil wretched excuse for a person" isn't exactly where I come from, as it's generally not where I come from with any of my characters . ;-)

Also...now might be a good time to point out, if you haven't already noticed, that I really like titles with more than one meaning. ;-)

In the next chapter, Loki meets with Finnulfur and runs into more problems, but sometimes solutions can appear from the most unlikely of places.