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Beneath
Chapter One Hundred Fifty-Three – Mistakes
"What have you to say, Mother?" Loki asked once the door was closed again and no one had spoken; Jane was fidgeting, glancing anxiously at the door. "I hope you won't mind if you do all of the speaking and I merely the listening. I believe I've spoken a month's worth of words in the last hour, a year's worth since you arrived on Midgard, and I have nothing more left to say at the moment."
"All right. I w-"
"I'm sorry, I should give you some privacy," Jane said, standing.
"No, I do desire privacy, but I would like you to be here," Frigga said.
"Um, okay, just…I'll be right back. Just a minute." She scrambled to get her jacket on and face and hand coverings, then hurried out the door, without another glance at either Frigga or Loki, lest one of them try to insist she stay. She would return. But there was something she had to do first. Something she had to say.
They weren't that far ahead of her, and stopped and turned when they heard her following. For a moment, they simply stared at one another in the starlit dark. "So this is the part where you decide his fate?" Jane abruptly asked when Thor started to speak.
"Where I decide how to respond to what I've learned here, if that's what you mean," Odin answered.
"And mine?"
"Yours?"
"Jane, no. This isn't about you. You've done nothing wrong."
"Nothing wrong?" Odin echoed, turning to Thor with an arched eyebrow. "You have done great wrong, Jane Foster. But you were not the instigator; the fault does not lie with you. Asgard has nothing to say, officially, about your actions."
"It wasn't his fault, either. It's yours."
"Jane?" Thor took a step toward her, but she was focused on his father.
"Mine? Ah. Because I sent him to Midgard. In that case you may lay your blame also on Thor's brow."
"No. Not because you sent him here. Because you shouted at a little boy and left him in ignorance about time travel when you could've explained to him why it was so dangerous."
"I didn't shout at him. Not then. Did he tell you such? Do you believe everything he tells you? Loki is known for his deceptions."
"Do you always talk about your son like that?"
"I speak truth. Thor would not disagree. Nor would Loki himself, if you asked him. And as for you, Jane Foster, I commend you on your boldness in lecturing me on being a father. When I consulted the manual on how to deal with a clever and mischievous son, who entertained notions of using the bifrost to travel through Yggdrasil's passages of time to learn which questions would be on his examinations, ideas which if actually enacted could reduce all nine realms to dust, when that same son would one day in fact be able to gain access to the bifrost and the ability to do just that…the page was unfortunately blank. Do not be so hasty to judge someone in whose boots you have never trod."
Jane stood there, taken aback, some of the air let out of her indignant balloon. She didn't have kids, and her world had never before included time travel and bifrosts and Yggdrasil and the potential destruction of the universe. Maybe Odin had just freaked out and overreacted, like any parent stumbling across a kid toying with something dangerous might. But would it have killed him to at least go back later and explain? Maybe not about Glodir and the whole story, but just that it was dangerous and destructive? Loki of course, hadn't been opposed to dangerous and destructive. Maybe he wouldn't actually have done very much differently.
"Are you done?"
No, Jane thought, trying to recapture some of the fire that had been in her belly. The South Pole, maybe, was hard on fire. She frowned at herself. It wasn't the South Pole. It was Odin and his confidence and his unwillingness to yield on anything. Stronger people than her had surely tried to stand up to him and failed. But she wasn't quite ready to give up. "There is no justice in you dishing out any more punishment on him because of the time travel. He didn't know about the consequences."
"I am satisfied that that is true."
"Loki doesn't need punishment," Jane tried again. Maybe he deserved punishment, jail time, for his actual crimes, but she didn't think he would continue on the path he'd been on before, so jail wasn't going to prevent hypothetical crimes, and it definitely wasn't going to rehabilitate him.
"And what is it that he needs?"
That gave her pause. What Loki didn't need, what wouldn't help him, was easier to say than what would. A family that loved him wasn't it; he already had that, even if Odin's expression of "love" left something – a lot of something – to be desired. "People who care about him that he can trust. People who can trust him," she said after some thought. "Real friends."
Odin let out a slow breath. "Unfortunately, I cannot bring about such things by decree. Does he trust you, Miss Foster?"
"Yes," she said with a nod. "I think he does."
"And you him?"
"Yes," she said again. "When it matters," she added as a caveat.
"Then that is something. If you would leave us now."
Jane hesitated, but she'd said what she wanted to say, and she didn't think she'd get any further if she tried to continue. So she took her dismissal with grace and turned to go back to the Vehicle Maintenance Facility.
"Thank you for sharing your thoughts, Jane. It's appreciated. We won't be long," Thor said, uncomfortable with the tension between her and his father, but uncertain what to do about it. She twisted around and gave him a nod, continuing on her way.
/
/
"Sometimes I wish I'd given birth to girls," Frigga said after sitting with Loki in awkward silence for an uncomfortably long few minutes after Jane left.
"And what has that to do with me?"
"Hmm," Frigga murmured over a sigh. "Have you ever told a lie for so long that you find yourself forgetting it's a lie?"
Loki looked away. Too many lies, too long a life. Frigga's lie, though, had spanned the entirety of his life, so he did not have any that quite compared.
"I didn't really think of it as a lie, you know. Not for long. It made no difference, whether I'd given birth to you or not, not in any practical sense. Would I have loved you more, or otherwise felt differently about you? I can't imagine so."
"It makes a difference. It makes a very, very big difference," Loki said, deliberately leaving behind his usual more eloquent turns of phrase to make himself abundantly clear.
"I know it does, for you, now. And I'm sorry. I truly am. As we have all just established, the past cannot be changed, not in ways that change the course of your own history. I cannot change it; I can only hope that you can forgive me for it, someday. Forgive us for it."
"That isn't how it works. Or how it doesn't work."
"Forgiveness?"
"Time travel. It's not about whether or not it changes the course of your own history. Only whether the change to the past would prevent you from later making that same change to the past. Or, I suppose, whether it changes the indisputable reality before your eyes. Nothing can be done in the past that would change the fact that you and I are sitting across from each other at this exact time, in this exact place. There cannot be two differing iterations of history. If you require further explanation, you need only ask Jane. She has countless examples and never tires of repeating them."
Frigga smiled. If Loki wasn't ready to forgive, or even talk about forgiveness or his own feelings, she wasn't going to push him. "Jane has been a good friend to you, hasn't she?"
Loki gave a little huff. "Our interests intersected."
"You said she wouldn't say anything, but she did."
Loki shifted abruptly from distant, avoiding engagement, to giving his mother his full attention. "What do you mean?"
"When she was in my chambers. When you were a baby. You said she wouldn't have said anything to explain herself, that she would have remained silent to avoid altering history. And now it makes me wonder."
"Wonder what? What are you talking about? Speak plainly."
"She singled you out. Called you by name when a mere handful of people knew the name we'd chosen. She told me that you needed all the love I could give you."
Loki's gaze drifted away and his hands, clasped loosely over his lap, felt uncharacteristically awkward and fidgety. Jane, you sentimental fool. You sentimental, hypocritical fool. Countless warnings and lectures, and your first moment alone with someone on Asgard you can't resist changing everything. "Is this why I always felt close to you, then? A wraith in strange garments told you that you must show me greater love? Did you love me already then, or only make a real effort at it upon an apparition's words?"
Frigga shook her head slowly. "I already loved you then," she answered, softly, thinking back to that day, so long ago, some images of it crisp in her mind, others wavering and imprecise, made vague by time and too many rememberings and retellings. "I don't think I realized just how much until that day, though, faced with the possibility of losing you."
Jane had long had a desire to communicate something to his mother, even before she'd known his true name, when she'd wanted to reassure an alienated mother that he was alive and well; she'd long had a desire to "fix" his supposed familial relations. On Asgard, she'd finally found her opportunity. "She succeeded, then. She influenced history. But only because the effects of what she did ultimately did not change the events that led her to your chambers and to say those words again."
"I don't know. I don't think I actually loved you more because of what Jane Foster said that day, but I was more keenly aware of my own feelings…and perhaps it made me try hard, harder than with Thor, to ensure you knew how much I loved you. Perhaps because of her, or perhaps because you were not of my flesh and I never wanted you to feel less loved because of that."
Jane returned then, and Loki was grateful for the distraction. He stood to greet her return. "Tell me, Jane, where am I banished to now?"
She gave him a pained smile. "Nowhere, hopefully. I just wanted to make sure your father knew it wasn't your fault, the time travel, the damage it caused."
"I doubt he'll banish me, anyway. More difficult to give me to Jotunheim if I'm not kept close at hand."
"What do you think should happen to you, Loki?" Frigga asked, rising from her chair as well. "What should the consequences for your actions be?"
For several seconds, Loki could do no more than blink. He recalled jesting in biting sarcasm about this earlier, in an Asgardian cell. He'd never given it any serious thought. He found he had no answers about what should happen; he knew only what he wanted to happen.
"It seems to me that you have gone to great lengths to avoid expressing even a drop of guilt. But I believe, Loki, that what you have not expressed would form oceans. I don't speak merely of guilt, but of things that make me fear for you. That day when you locked me out of my bedchamber…why take the risk of entering such a heavily guarded location?"
"Were you not listening earlier?" Loki asked with a chiding tone and a chill. "Jane wished to see-"
"There were public events. Your Welcoming was a known date and location."
"Don't be absurd. I could hardly have walked right up to you."
"Why not? I could hardly have recognized you from the one-month-old baby you were then."
"You might have remembered later. The way we did it was the only way to ensure a moment of privacy, a moment entirely unseen."
"You weren't concerned about being 'entirely unseen' when you took her to one of our most important festivals. But no matter, fine. How did Jane's device become damaged?"
"Um, maybe I should-"
"Stay, Jane, please. I'm sorry for asking you to, but not sorry enough not to."
"All right," she answered reluctantly, uncertain why Frigga wanted her there. The queen's questions weren't directed to her – not even the ones that were actually about her.
"Why did she have to make repairs alone in my chambers? How did she get there in the first place with such damage?"
Loki looked to Jane with distinct discomfort. Such a question should be directed to Jane herself. But Frigga, too, knew well how to control a narrative when she so wished, and how to use that control to root out falsehood. She was clearly suspicious, but he wasn't sure what she suspected; he didn't think she could have guessed the truth.
"Do not look to Jane. I am asking you."
He squared his jaw. "The device in question blocked Pathfinder's regular attempts to recall a traveler. It wasn't necessary for travel to a place or time. It was necessary for returning to a place or time."
"And how was it damaged?"
"It…must have been minor damage, for Jane to be able to fix it within the next five minutes with only a knife. The device must have been jostled." It had been jostled, when Loki tried to force Jane back to Midgard so that he could finish his task.
"I see. And this knife…in fact, this knife," Frigga said, withdrawing the long knife, dagger really, that Jolgeir had retrieved for her, which she had subsequently hidden away in a soft leather sheath in the pocket of her borrowed overalls. "Why did Jane have it? Thor was adamant that Jane does not carry weapons."
Loki looked at the knife held in his mother's fist, and thought briefly about its journey, issued to an Einherjar as a sword, severed in half, taken to Midgard, taken back to Asgard over a thousand years in the past and long before its creation, then held there and returned to him a day later and a thousand years older. It was fascinating in an insanity-inducing sort of way, and made an excellent excuse for procrastinating on coming up with an answer. But he felt the weight of the eyes on him; he couldn't avoid the questions indefinitely. "It was not Jane's knife, of course. It was mine. In the chaos of the discovery that Jane's RF switch was damaged, I dropped it. Fortuitous, apparently, since Jane was able to use it to repair the damage."
"That's a poor lie, Loki. Was it even an hour ago that you said you were not so sloppy with a knife? My son does not drop his knives, no matter how chaotic the circumstances."
His eyes slowly drifted up from the knife to Frigga's unyielding countenance. It was a poor lie. Careless. Thoughtless. Of course he would not have dropped a knife. We had a few seconds, before Pathfinder pulled me back to the present, so I gave Jane the knife to make her repairs. It was what he should have said. But he'd thought of it too late, only after his first, stupid lie had been challenged. Lies were failing him. Words were failing him. He felt like a specimen under a microscope, and he was falling apart under the scrutiny. "I was giving it to Jane," he said, voice lifeless to his own ears, trying to fold the first lie into the improvement, "when I was pulled back."
"Mmmm. Marginally better," Frigga said with a slight smile. "How long shall we continue? You pride yourself on maintaining a certain amount of mystery about yourself, of letting others think they're close while keeping them an arm's length away, but I think you've forgotten who I am. I am your mother, Loki, and despite all that you have gone through, all the troubles that have tormented you, I know you." She paused, took a deep breath that came out in shudders. "And I saw the note."
Jane's eyes flared and her lips parted; Frigga had been standing right next to that note, but she'd never shown any sign that she'd actually seen it. She looked over at Loki and found him much closer than he'd been before, then realized that she'd taken several steps toward him without even realizing it.
Loki forced out a response, voice tight and slightly unsteady. "The note has nothing to-"
"Please do not insult me. It's true I didn't know what to make of it at first. I knew you intended some terrible thing, but I could not tease apart what you meant, what you might do that would hurt Jane though you did not wish it to, that you hoped for her forgiveness but also hoped she wouldn't know there was anything to forgive. If you simply hoped Jane wouldn't find out about your plans, you wouldn't have left her a note referencing them. You were saying goodbye. That was clear. I suspected, when Jolgeir told me what he found out about the knife, but I couldn't comprehend how it was possible. When I learned about the time travel…then the note made sense, and I understood what happened, what had been on the verge of happening, all those years ago. It wasn't Jane who was threatening my babies, who was threatening you. Jane wasn't supposed to be there at all, was she?"
The silence dragged. His mother wasn't budging, not physically, and not in rejecting his every attempt to deny the truth. He swallowed over a dry throat. The cold in the pit of his stomach had grown and now clamped down on him, leaving him weak. He remembered standing beside the cradle, Jane's hand wrapped ineffectually around his arm, doors glowing and creaking behind him as his mother tried to force the seal to break. "She wouldn't want this. I don't want to lose you, and neither does she." He'd denied it, to himself and to Jane. Eliminating himself from the beginning would make his mother happy, he'd told himself. It had all seemed right at the time. He'd tried so very hard to make it seem right. "She followed me," he admitted, when no escape presented itself. "She found the note. And caught me in a mistake."
"Leaving a note seems mistake enough. Even I know Jane well enough to know she is not the type to sit at home and wring her hands over a friend's foolish and dangerous actions, but to take action of her own to stop them."
"She shouldn't have had time to stop them," he said with a glance toward Jane, who was keeping very still but watching and listening intently. "And therein lay my mistake. She had literally all the time in the cosmos. She simply programmed Pathfinder to send her to the same place I'd gone, but a minute later."
"Two," Jane corrected quietly.
"Ah. Two," Loki said with a nod.
Frigga turned to Jane for the first time since insisting she stay. "My Loki only takes as friends the cleverest among us, often to his own detriment. In this case, though, Jane…," she said, pausing to swipe a hand over the beginnings of a tear, "you have saved my son's life twice in one day. Twice in one day and once over a thousand years ago. I believe I shall count them both, when you saved my grown son and my infant son at the same time." She went to Jane and clasped the younger woman's hands in hers. "And believe me when I say that I'm terribly sorry for threatening to kill you for it; you must have been terrified," she said to ease the heaviness of the moment, finishing with a smile.
"It was a little scary," Jane allowed with a nervous breathy laugh. "Even without the forty Einherjar behind the door."
"Forty Einherjar?"
"You said- You were lying. No Einherjar?"
"I said that? It was a bluff, then. There were two or three Einherjar, a few servants…I didn't know what was going on behind those doors and the last thing I wanted was a battle surrounding my boys. Afterward, there were probably a hundred Einherjar. Most of whom I suspect thought me mad. But Jane, whatever fear and wrath I felt for you at the time, know that my gratitude now is infinitely more. If there is ever anything I can do for you, simply name it and if it is within my power to see it done it will be. I swear this to you forevermore."
"You don't owe me anything," Jane said, shaking her head.
"Nonsense. I'm beginning to think I don't know just how much I owe you. And I will be most pleased to do something for you in return. Now, Jane, if you wouldn't mind, I would like to have a few minutes alone with Loki."
Jane looked over at Loki, who met her eyes briefly before his gaze flickered away. He was really uncomfortable, that much was plain, but she supposed anyone would be in his position. Even in the midst of everything, back on Asgard, even then Loki had confessed that he didn't want his mother to see him in those circumstances, that he didn't want her to ever know.
"Wait," Loki said when Jane started pulling back on the ECW gear she'd only partially removed. "It's too cold for you to simply stand around out there. If you could just step into the Supply Arch, that will be enough." Jane agreed and made her way to the connected Supply Arch; Loki created a sound barrier that enclosed most of the VMF.
"This is the knife you would have taken your own life with?" Frigga asked.
"This is not something I wish to talk about."
"Too bad. I do not often push you to speak to me of your secrets; perhaps that was a mistake. This I insist you talk about, because my worry for you is too great. For me it was so long ago. For you it was only yesterday. Do you not wish to live, Loki? Do you see so little to live for?"
"It wasn't like that."
"What was it like? Tell me."
Loki sighed and took a few steps away, almost to the side of the building, where when he looked in the right way, he could see the strength of the sound blanket, no pesky corners straining to break free. "It was a means of setting the cosmos right. Without me, there would be no war on Asgard so terrible that you must obtain food from Midgard and have it prepared by wounded Einherjar. Without me, Pathfinder would never have been used the way it was, and these people's lives wouldn't have been at risk. We already knew by then. Jane figured it out, that Pathfinder was somehow causing the earthquakes. We agreed not to use it anymore. And I did anyway, because I was confident I could undo the damage. But in the end I only made it worse. A familiar refrain, is it not?"
"That wasn't the end. In the end, you saved them. You. Here, alive. Your death was not a solution. Did Jane follow you there and convince you of that?"
"She followed me there. She first thought I'd come to kill Thor. She found out the truth, then tried to convince me I was making a mistake. And I tried harder to convince her to leave and let me do what…what I believed should be done."
"And the device that helped send her home was damaged in the process?"
"Yes. She wanted to save me, and I nearly condemned her to a foreign realm a thousand years before her birth. Do you still fail to see my logic, Mother?" he asked, turning to give Frigga a bitter smile at the last.
"Then…you do not think yourself worthy of life?"
"I think myself worthy of things I shall never have." And while that was true in some moments and not in others, it sounded better than what was true in the others.
"So you give up entirely?"
"What would you have had me do?" Loki said, closing the gap between them and locking his gaze on hers, both angry and pleading. "I was stuck here. I had barely enough magic to make light. I'd placed all my cards on time travel – if I could control time, control history, I could control everything. And I failed, utterly and miserably, at absolutely everything of consequence that I attempted. I failed you. I…I failed. What was I to do? I used to wonder what would become of me when winter ended. But then the building was damaged and… I never wanted it to be like this. I only wanted…"
"What? What did you want, Loki?"
"I don't even know anymore. Something that I didn't have. Something that was taken from me. Something I will never have again."
"'Never' is a very long time. Loki…things will not be the same as before, that is true. But our lives constantly change, and we adapt, albeit sometimes slowly and painfully. Not everything has changed, though. You are no less my son than you have ever been. My love for you is unchanged. Is that why you asked me if I already cared for you then? Did you think that in doing it this way, you would cause me less pain?"
"I thought you might not be too attached yet."
"You were already too late for that. I would have been devastated. Consumed by grief. But this is not about me. You cannot live for me, not for me alone. This is about you. Your heart is big, my son," Frigga said, clasping Loki's face gently between her hands. "And it has always felt deeply. Wounds that pained Thor for a day, wounds of the heart, pained you for so much longer. Wounds he forgot about entirely festered inside you. The wounds you bear now are deep, deeper than any of us first realized. I don't want you to bury your feelings. I think perhaps that's what you were doing before, and it nearly brought you to ruin. But please don't let them overcome you, either. There's no shame in a wound, or in the pain it causes, but try to let it heal. Give it the time it needs to heal. Don't take rash actions. Don't take rash permanent actions. I ask for your freely-given oath that you won't."
Loki extricated himself from his mother's grasp to step just out of her reach. "You seek an incredibly broad oath," he said, but only because he could not help being recalcitrant in the face of the fervency of her emotion. "Today, however, is not yesterday. If you will accept it in the spirit in which it was sought, then you have my oath."
Frigga nodded as she took a few quick shaky breaths. "Of course I accept it. Now will you stop running from me for just a moment and let me hold you?"
"You ask far too much of me in a single day, much less in a handful of minutes," Loki answered crossly, then gave a sardonic smile and extended an arm just enough to let her know that he would not refuse her. In the next instant her arms had wrapped around his back, enfolding him and pulling him tightly against her; her head tucked in against his shoulder and one hand reached up behind his head and pressed his cheek down against her. It reminded him of the sometimes nearly smothering hugs she used to give him, and while a part of him instinctively resisted, whispering to him that she was not his mother, that this was a lie, that it was wrong in so many ways, the larger part of him was tired of resisting, tired of running, tired of that other part of him that wished to rob him of anything good left in his life. Frigga, his mother, was good. She'd lied to him just as much as Odin had, but her he thought he could forgive.
When he found that his arms had made their way around her back and he was pulling her close just as much as she was him, he thought perhaps he already had.
"I'm sorry," he whispered.
Frigga didn't know what he was apologizing for – attempted suicide, earthquakes, following Jane, attacking Midgard, attacking Jotunheim, attacking Thor – but neither did she especially care. His heart, so badly broken, was healing, and with it would come the full weight of what he'd done, if it hadn't already. That, too, might need time, both the guilt and learning how to live with it, and she was willing to allow him that time. That he was in her arms now, that he was alive to be in her arms now, was all that mattered right now. "So am I," she whispered back.
Minutes later, Frigga gave Loki an extra squeeze and a kiss on the cheek, then let him go, hands running down the green cloth covering his arms to clasp his hands for a second. She went back for the dagger she'd laid on one of the chairs, then held it out to Loki. "It is yours, isn't it?" she asked when he eyed it but made no move to take it.
"You don't worry what I'll do with it?"
She gave him a bracing smile. "I see no point in worrying what you'll do with this particular knife. I'm under no illusion you can't obtain another one should I withhold this one."
"A fair point," Loki said with a smile that was almost real, lifting the knife with practiced ease from her open palm. He felt lighter, more at ease, as he slipped the knife through a loop he'd used for that purpose before, its crossguard catching on the loop and resting safely. "So, Mother…"
"Yes?" Frigga answered with a growing smile. "Mother" had never sounded quite so good.
"What can you tell me of Asgard?"
/
/
Outside, with Jane gone, Odin walked without real destination, Thor at his side. He wanted to think, and out here it was better to keep moving while one did one's thinking. Thor, in a welcome demonstration of newly-learned patience, matched his pace in peace and quiet. It had once been Loki who could have exhibited such patience, who appreciated the value of silence. Thor had risen to become the man he needed to be, and Loki, Loki had fallen so very far.
Odin's plans were never overly controlled. Nothing in life, including people, could be entirely controlled, despite Loki's conviction that Odin thought he could control him. There were too many variables to account for, too much that could never be predicted. Neither Loki nor Thor before him had been sent here in restraints. Constraints, yes, parameters that Odin established. Within those parameters, it was up to his sons. Their own choices, actions, reactions.
Thor he'd provided with a means of restoration and return. He'd had no doubt that Thor would learn what he needed to, and that no matter how long it took – he certainly hadn't expected it to take only three days – Thor would prove himself to be the man Odin knew he had it in him to be, and find his way back to himself and to Asgard. But Loki…Loki he'd not provided with such a means. Loki's path lay through Odin.
He hadn't believed that Loki was capable of proving himself. Of finding his way back to himself and to Asgard. So he hadn't provided the path, not the full one. Loki's path had an endpoint. A point with no magic and an unfamiliar body and a father he had to convince. Had Thor been left with a parallel endpoint, he might have done just that – begged to be brought home, to be restored to his family and home and status and power and life. Begged for forgiveness. Loki, it was becoming clearer and clearer, never would. He'd done so once, centuries ago, but Loki was not now the same as he was then.
Loki's path, perhaps, should have allowed for a return based on conditions Loki fulfilled. But Odin had not considered that Loki could have done so in the first place. And the situation they were in now was not the one Odin had expected. He'd thought Loki would be ready to listen. To truly listen. Ready to return to his place in Asgard. Ready to come home. Eager to come home, once he understood that he had not been rejected, not because of where he was born. That, or he would have found a Loki who, given the freedom and opportunity to do so, had merrily shed every ounce of honor and every last crumb of compassion and had no regard for anyone or anything and had so thoroughly embraced darkness that there was no salvaging him, no hope for recovery at all.
He was grateful that he had at least not found that.
But he'd found a defiant Loki who'd befriended mortals but rejected and scorned his own father, who saw a mark of belonging not as belonging to a place, a people, a family, but as belonging to an owner. A Loki who, perhaps like his mortal friend, thought his father simply meant to make him suffer. He hadn't wanted his son to suffer. Not in the way Jane Foster meant. He had thought that upon experiencing what truly having nothing was, Loki would realize that he'd had a family and a home and Loki himself was the one who'd walked away from it, but it was still there, still and always a part of him.
Loki was different from Thor. Odin had always known that; even in their infancy it was obvious. Both boys had grown arrogant, but each in his own way. Thor had needed a lesson in humility, to have the shell of his arrogance cracked. Such a lesson was not a bad one for Loki, either, but not his chief need; he'd had enough cracks already, and seemed determined to keep right on cracking. He'd met Jane Foster, he'd come to this place, and the cracking had slowed. Stopped, even, perhaps, for a time. Odin had thought he would be broken, the end to his path of self-destruction. He hadn't truly envisioned any other path.
"I wanted your respect!" Loki had shouted.
He had provided Loki no means of return. No path home that he could achieve without Odin's intervention.
Odin wondered if, without even being aware of it, he had indeed respected Loki less.
Loki's situation was different of course, on many levels, but most importantly in that Loki had committed horrific crimes and Thor… Odin's jaw clenched a little tighter. Thor had also committed a crime, in fact, technically. Travel to Jotunheim was not allowed without special approval, and Thor had led his friends and brother there, after being forbidden by his king from pursuing the Frost Giant incursion.
Odin wondered if he'd erred.
If he'd had less faith, less trust in Loki than in Thor, for reasons that had nothing to do with their particular mistakes. Reasons that were unfair to Loki. Thor, after all, had committed an egregious error in judgement – rekindling a war with another realm – that simply did not happen to appear in the law books as a crime. Thor's feelings were plain for all to see, while Loki's were hidden behind a mercurial mind and a clever tongue; perhaps, he thought, his greater trust in Thor was only a reflection of greater trust in the transparency of Thor's heart. But it wasn't only that. His expectations of his two sons had differed.
Fair or unfair, his prior decisions and courses of action could not be undone, Loki's dangerous attempts to do aside. There were more decisions to be made, decisions that demanded his attention on the present reality, not every fork in the road that had led to it.
"Loki is still deeply troubled," Odin said, breaking the long silence.
"Yes," Thor agreed after a brief hesitation. "His tongue has always been sharp and he has always had a keen mind for mischief…but he is different now. Sharper. Colder? He seems to change from minute to minute."
"I used to think he had grown somewhat cold. Before all of this. Now I believe that was never his true face. He was an emotional child, 'sensitive' your mother always called him. The feelings he expresses now, they are newly visible. Not newly existing."
"I never imagined how much violence was in him."
"There is violence in all Aesir. All others, too. In the right circumstances. But I understand what you mean. Loki is in some ways neither like those he came from, nor like those who became his." He skimmed his memories, his impressions of Loki from this time on Midgard. "I never imagined how much anger was in him."
"Nor I," Thor said. "I never knew how much he hated me. I don't know when love turned to hate."
"He still loves you."
Thor shook his head. "I also never thought I'd see the day I called you naïve."
"You called me a fool; do they differ so much?"
Thor turned to his father with a raised eyebrow as the two slowly continued on side-by-side. A smile twitched at Odin's lips; Thor returned it and looked ahead to the dark expanse of ice before them.
"Emotions are simple things for us, I think. Uncomplicated. Loki's have a hundred myriad angles and at least ninety-nine of them he keeps hidden away and carefully guarded in any given moment. I have never understood him, not well enough. I shouldn't have accepted that, perhaps. I should have tried harder." It was strange, speaking to Thor this way. The life of a king was a lonely one – Frigga was the only person he would normally speak with about such personal matters – but Thor, too, was now a king, and had matured much in the last couple of years.
"I thought I understood him. And what I didn't understand…I suppose I simply shrugged my shoulders and thought, 'It's Loki, it's just the way he is.'"
Odin nodded. "It's just the way he is." An reasonable sentiment from a brother. From a father, somewhat less so. "I didn't realize the depths of his doubts. In himself, in me… I thought all of this – the anger, the rebellion, the poor choices – was about learning he was Jotun by birth. But his troubles run much deeper. He told me he'd spent his whole life trying to earn my approval. My respect. Were you aware of that?"
"He said that?"
"I don't think he intended to, but yes."
"No. I always thought he had it." He thought a few seconds more. "Of course, I always thought I had it, too."
"You did," Odin said wearily. "Though you had your shortcomings. As did Loki. But you both had my respect, my approval. My love," he added after a moment, eyes fixed ahead of him.
At that, Thor quickly glanced toward his father, but he was looking away now. Odin had never really spoken to him of love. As he considered it, he was fairly certain he'd never heard his father tell him "I love you." As he considered it further, he thought that "I love you, too" would fall awkwardly from his own lips. Yet he'd never doubted Odin's love, not even when he'd been banished, not really. It never occurred to him to question it. But Loki had doubted he was loved? If he'd ever even remotely questioned it before, it must have plagued him after learning the facts of his birth. Before he could respond, his father continued, confirming what he'd been thinking.
"Loki believed I took him from Jotunheim as a tool to be used against the enemy. A thing and not a person. I tried to disabuse him of that, but I'm not sure he believed me."
"Jane spoke of trust. He was lied to about who he is. His heritage."
"His heritage is the same as yours."
"Father," Thor said, the beginnings of a protest, but he was interrupted.
"And more, yes. But your heritage is no less his."
"Yes, of course," he said, understanding then what his father meant to say. "But Loki doubts this as well, doesn't he?"
"He does. No matter what I do to try to convince him otherwise."
"He doesn't trust us."
"Nor, I'm afraid, do we trust him."
"Trust broken is not easily repaired."
"It is not. Given all this, what do you think should be done?"
"You know my decision on Jotunheim," Thor said immediately, voice tense. If it was time for this argument, he was ready to have it.
"Jotunheim has nothing to do with us. That is a separate issue, and one which we will do all we can to avoid. Loki has committed grievous crimes, and while he has made a certain amount of recompense here for his crimes against Midgard, he has shown no sign at all of regret for the attempted destruction of Jotunheim, and he has refused to say what he would do with his freedom, were he granted it. So I ask again for your thoughts."
"Father…I don't think I should be part of this. I am Loki's brother. I wish to be only his brother."
"You are king. You are his king. You will never be only anything to anyone, except for the stranger, to whom you will be only king. That is a luxury you do not enjoy. Do you trust him enough to let him be free to do whatever he wishes, wherever he wishes?"
Thor considered it reluctantly. He wanted to. He wanted to badly. Loki was his brother, friend, companion, and fellow warrior and adventurer whom he missed. But he couldn't forget, or pretend that Loki hadn't done what he'd done. Even if he thought perhaps Loki had turned from his malicious behavior and was simply too stubborn to admit his mistakes…it called for more trust than he could grant at the moment. "I don't know," he said, after minutes had passed and he'd gotten nowhere. The resistance in his own mind didn't help. He could not decide his brother's fate. "Put it to the magistrates this time."
"What magistrates?"
Thor grimaced, mentally kicking himself. Few magistrates remained in their offices; most had donned armor and taken up swords, while others served various functions more critical to the immediate survival of the realm than handling minor legal matters.
"You were not so eager to leave this in the magistrates' hands before. You conceived of your own solution and pushed hard for it."
"I think perhaps it's done him well in some ways, being on Midgard, but-"
"Yes. Though attempting to interfere with the very fabric of reality neither did him nor anyone else well."
Thor nodded. He didn't blame Loki for the physical damage caused – Loki's insatiable curiosity and Thor's unquenchable thirst for adventure had landed them both in trouble over unforeseen consequences more than once, and Loki had helped right this wrong. But Loki coming to him as though in a dream, in his past, seeking to change his future – Thor still could not quite grasp it but he keenly felt the wrongness of it, this attempt to treat the past as fluid, as much open to possibility, to manipulation, as the present. "This cannot be my decision. I cannot step in now and-"
"I did not say it was your decision. I asked for your thoughts."
"I wish for him to be free. I wish for him to come back to Asgard and fight with us. But that must be his choice."
"If it is not his choice then it is not freedom. I asked him more than once what he wants, what he might do with his freedom."
"And?" Thor asked immediately, before his father could continue. "Did he say anything at all?"
"I wanted him to give me a reason to trust him. And he would not. He would not give me any indication at all of his intentions, except to say that he did not wish the people of Midgard ill. He is proud, Thor, as proud as you ever were, in his own way. And he has little left to hang his pride on. He hangs it primarily on refusing to directly answer questions. An expression of control in a situation where he feels he has little left of that, either."
"Perhaps some form of restriction could remain on him, then," Thor suggested, looking for some means of giving Loki freedom while mitigating the risk that that would create. "I need to speak with him. Even if he won't fight with us, he knows things, about the war, about who's behind it. I'm certain he knows more than he's told me so far. But if we-"
"Although this is a truly scintillating discussion," Loki said with heavy sarcasm from right in front of Odin and Thor, who startled backward a step, hands tightening around weapons at his sudden appearance, "your debate is taking far too long for my taste. In the interest of resolving it for you more quickly, thus sparing you further unnecessary exertion, I offer you a bargain. In exchange for my complete freedom, without restriction of any kind," he said with a hard look at Thor before boring his gaze into Odin, "I will win a war for you."
/
Anyone else going a little nuts over the Thor 3 shoot in Brisbane? I am, seeing "Loki" in his costume. Notice how the hair is still long, but tamer? And nice suit! He sticks out like a sore thumb like that though, and with fans rushing Thor, my speculation is that Loki is meant to be invisible to them. This stuff is great because it stokes my imagination while not giving any spoilers (of consequence) for the movie.
Responses to guests -"ladymouse2": Will a metaphorical kick work? :-) And you raised a *fascinating* question. *Was* it purely Loki's own thoughts and conclusions that prevented his actions? I don't want to say more for those who might want to go back and consider it. (There's room for interpretation.) But to the bigger question, yes, had Loki remained intent on his actions in both cases, something else would have prevented them (ala saving Baldur). He literally could not have killed Thor or himself. But he definitely didn't know that. I would still say then that he had a moral choice. He made a decision, he never did try to bring the knife down before he himself changed his mind. But it opens a really interesting philosophical debate, that I only know one tiny tip of the iceberg about - if only one outcome was possible in the end, was there truly a choice? I say yes, but I think some would say no. Compare his attempts to save Baldur - his choice was absolutely clear but his actions were thwarted. And as for the rest re Baldur, hold that thought! Guest (Aug. 6): The necklace will be back. Baldur's story will be back too. :-) "Sibsii": Awww, Odin's really all soft and gooey on the inside. :-) And Loki got his hug. Yeah, he needed it. "lwolf": Yep. Odin was grilling; Frigga was putting pieces together. "Starlight": Welcome! Can I borrow your speed-reading skills? I find Loki endlessly fascinating. Such great depths to plumb. Thanks, re Jane! I'm glad you liked the way she found out he was Jotun. :-) I don't think I have anything quite *this* epic left in me after this, but "Eighteen" will probably come closest; I'm *almost* certain I'll commit to that one, once the others in progress are done. Thanks! Guest (Aug. 11): Save the best for last? Yeah, that was just some silliness, but really the easiest way to screw up a lie is to forget its details. So he keeps it to minimal detail...and fork rhymes with New York. I have mostly been denied the opportunity to write Loki/Thor banter in this story, and it's really good fun! I must confess I can totally hear Loki saying "With your mighty *thoughts*?" and it cracks me up. Guest (Aug. 19): Here you go!
Previews for Ch. 154: Craziness. Mostly a really fun chapter to write. And too hard to preview it sans spoilers. A few decisions, a few surprises. Excerpt that follows is maybe mildly-mildly spoilery? Depending on if your expectations differ from what I expect them to be.
Excerpt:
"Svartalfheim did not initiate the war. Svartalfheim is irrelevant. Am I to understand you haven't filled him in?" Loki asked, turning suddenly to Thor.
[...]
"And what of Jotunheim?" Odin asked. If Loki were to be involved at all, Jotunheim had to be discussed.