Beneath

Chapter One Hundred Forty-One – Control

Loki woke quietly, with a series of small movements followed by a languid contraction of muscles, that ended when his eyes opened and fell on Jane.

Jane's eyebrows went up in surprise – she'd forgotten about the giant red eyes – but otherwise remained still, waiting by Loki's bedside for him to fully wake. They'd waited here, her, Frigga, Odin, and Eir, for some thirty minutes, most of it in silence – ostensibly to allow Loki to rest undisturbed – that at least for Jane was awkward. She and Frigga had briefly relayed what they'd learned in the station, about the damage and about the Polies' reactions to Loki having lived here as Lucas. Odin had asked if they could expect to be left in peace and Jane had told him she didn't think anyone would be coming with pitchforks and torches. He'd stared at her blankly – "I am still waiting for a civilized, adult answer" she read from the look – so she'd told him simply yes. She'd spent part of the time waiting for Loki to wake up wondering why her first instinct with Odin was to be difficult, even combative, when he hadn't really been that bad to her, but sitting next to Loki's unconscious body it wasn't so hard to figure out. She felt protective of him. Whatever the truth was about Odin, Loki held a lot of animosity toward him, and Loki was lying there completely defenseless, unaware Odin was even there. And now, when he woke, healed but weakened by blood loss, Odin would be right there. Jane planted herself at Loki's side and tried hard to ensure she was the first person he saw – the person who would be the least shocking for him to wake and see, she thought. She couldn't wait for his eyes to open, too; a relieved smile grew once he began to stir. Though those eyes did startle her again.

"Welcome back," Jane said.

"Where have I been?" Loki asked groggily.

"Out of it. Unconscious. Magic-stabbed," she added, drawing a shadow of a smile from him. "You look a lot better." And he did. He was still blue, bald, and bony, but his skin was now a more vibrant deep blue, barely a hint of the sickly-gray cast left, and there was no more bleeding or labored breathing.

"I look…" Loki drew his left hand up and quickly dropped it again, sucking in a sharp breath and exhaling shakily.

"Yeah, there's that. The wound is gone, but…that's still there."

That, Loki thought. Yes, that is still there.

"How are you feeling, sweet boy?" Frigga said, stepping up beside Jane, hoping to distract Loki for a moment from his appearance.

"I've been looking for you, sweet boy," Loki heard in his head, twisted evil behind words that were his mother's and yet not. He shivered but shook it off when she came into view. "I am…what is…what are you-"

"Jane helped me dress for the weather. How do I look?" Frigga said with a bright smile, thoroughly amused by Loki's bewildered expression. She was delighted, too, at how open he looked, how unguarded, even in a face that wasn't entirely familiar to her. She knew it wouldn't last, probably no longer than it took him to get another look at his body, or to realize that Odin stood at his other side. No matter what had happened here, if his time on Midgard had been better for him than she'd allowed herself to hope, still nothing had been resolved in his contentious relationships with Odin and with Thor. But she would enjoy it while it lasted, while he was still waking up and getting his bearings.

Loki stared at her incredulously. At a glance, from a distance, he would never have guessed it was her. Her hair was down in a simple low ponytail, much how Jane often wore hers. She wore black Carhartts over a beige sweater that belonged to Jane. "You look like someone who is not my mother," he finally said, roughened voice reminding him that in fact she didn't at all look like his mother. Because she wasn't.

"I think she looks good. You should've seen her all sealed up in Big Red."

He wasn't sure if he wanted to see that or not, but what he wanted most now was to not be seen by them, not like this. He turned his head away from them…and there was Odin. Just standing there. Looking down at him. Looking down on him. Unflinching.

"I'm glad to see you well, Loki."

"What an odd definition of 'well' you have," Loki said, turning back the other direction and quickly closing his eyes. There was no escape from all the eyes fixed on him, Eir's too, he saw now; only Thor was missing. No escape echoed in his head. The uncomfortable memory that was not quite a memory bore the stench of The Other about it and he wondered if the lackey had skulked about his head while he was unconscious. It was an unwelcome thought, but at the moment, in these circumstances, it didn't rise beyond the level of merely unpleasant. He started to push himself up, the urge to get away nearly overwhelming, but Eir's gloved hand was suddenly pressing gently on this chest.

"Your blood volume is still low. You need to remain prone with your feet elevated."

"I wish to stand."

"You may wish it, but if you attempt it, you are quite likely to feel faint and lose consciousness, my prince."

"Is that what I am, Eir?" he asked sharply, reflexively.

"Yes, it is."

Loki huffed out a breath and stared straight up at the ceiling. Eir had answered perfectly evenly and calmly, as though she hadn't just said those words to a Frost Giant, as though he hadn't been trying to provoke her to respond defensively, or angrily, or sullenly, or resentfully. Eir, of course, was essentially unprovokable.

"You owe Eir your respect and gratitude. She saved your life," Odin said.

"That's all right, Your Majesty," Eir said as Loki ignored them all. "And I had help. The Midgardian healer Nora and her assistants had Selby's treatment well under way, and the dust from the healing stone that Jane used on you improved your breathing when you were very near death, before I could return and use a second one. It was a group effort."

Thank you, Loki thought, but he could not bring himself to say it. Not in front of Odin. Thank you, Eir. Thank you, Nora. Thank you Jane. His breath hitched then, and he almost turned to Jane but caught himself in time. She had risked her life. For him. She'd gone to Asgard using the gem and the tonic intended for him, without any understanding of what the journey would entail, despite his warnings of danger. She'd been…split in two? It was hazy, his memories of what happened then, but he remembered there being two Janes, and one of them suddenly disappearing. He remembered his fear that she had perished for an unbearably pointless cause: his life. She cared about it, he understood, she valued it, but she was the only one. She and his mother.

"I need some time alone with him," Odin said.

Loki kept his face carefully still. Odin could be alone with him all he liked. Loki hoped he enjoyed conversing with a stone.

Jane glanced between Loki and Odin. The change in him had been instantaneous when he'd seen his father. He wasn't ready for it. "I'm not sure that's such a good idea," Jane said, and received in return a look that might have melted her into a crying cowering spineless puddle on the floor had she not received plenty of looks like that from professors in the past…and a few from Loki, too. She couldn't say it was entirely unflinching, but she met his gaze without backing down.

"Jane," Frigga began gently, "perhaps it's best if-"

"I can speak for myself, Frigga," Odin said. "I appreciate that you're concerned for him. But there are things we need to discuss, which are best discussed in private."

Behind the cold lines of his unyielding face, Loki suspected he knew what "things" Odin might want to discuss, given that he didn't want Jane there for them. And if he was correct, then in fact Loki didn't want Jane there for them, either. But "I agree with Odin" was the last thing Loki had any interest in saying.

"I'd like to have a minute with him first," Jane said. "It won't take long. Then you can have as much privacy as you want."

Eir excused herself to heal Selby's wrist fracture – the comment made Loki notice that his own was throbbing with a low-level ache – Frigga made an encouraging motion with her head, and Odin frowned and said he'd be waiting outside. Loki heard all the things Odin didn't say – You aren't going to avoid this. You aren't going to escape. There is no escape.

He closed his eyes, took deliberately deep breaths as he listened, and when he opened his eyes again he was alone with Jane. But he looked like this, like a Frost Giant, he thought with disgust at his own body. He would give anything to be able to change it, and at the thought actually tried to, but when he reached for the particles necessary to shift his appearance he felt nothing there, the equivalent of straining to see while blind. Useless and exasperating.

"Hey," Jane said.

"Hey," he echoed back, the word strange on his tongue, eyes still locked on the arched canvas roof of the jamesway.

"Don't do that."

"Do what?" he asked in a monotone. He couldn't even stand the sound of his own voice. It was recognizable as his, he thought, but sufficiently different that he could tell a different physical form was producing it.

"Pull away like that. Like you don't care. Like they have nothing to do with you. You were dying, and they came. You'd be dead if they hadn't. Your dad's here, too. Okay, he's not exactly a teddy bear, I get that, I mean, I've experienced that firsthand, but he was upset to see you in such bad shape. Believe me, he wasn't trying to be polite for my sake or something, he was genuinely worried about you. He cares about you. He wouldn't have come here in the middle of a war if he didn't."

Loki swallowed, eyes still on the ceiling. "You're naïve, Jane."

"You know, I don't appreciate that."

"What?" he asked, eyes briefly rolling over toward her.

"You dismissing what I say because you don't want to hear it. 'You're naïve. Don't be a fool. You don't understand.' I'm sick of that. It's insulting and after everything we've been through, I deserve better from you."

He turned his head her way. She looked angry. He felt chagrined, and his pointed look of disinterest fell away. "I'm sorry. And you do deserve better. But this is…this is difficult."

"I know. Sometimes the most important things are the most difficult of all, though. Just try, please? Listen to him. Listening doesn't have to mean agreeing. And talk to him, too. Talk, Loki. Don't goad him." Do as I say, not as I do, Jane thought with a flash of guilt. Loki didn't need to know about those cracks she'd made about pitchforks and Asgardian visas.

"You say that as though you've been eavesdropping on the last few conversations I had with him," Loki said sarcastically.

"No, I say that because I know that's what you do when you want a conversation to end. You don't walk away from it, you say hurtful things until the other person walks away from it. I know that because you've done it to me."

"Sometimes I walk away from it. But as Eir has advised that if I try to walk away from anything I'll pass out and fall flat on my face…I'm left with no other options."

"You have other options," Jane said, relaxing into a warm smile. It had taken a while for him to come out, but she was glad to see the Loki she'd gotten to know hadn't gone too far away.

"Are you well, Jane?" he asked. You see? Other options. How is changing the subject? "The last I saw…unless I imagined it, which I admit is possible, there were two of you. And one was on the floor, unconscious."

"Yeah. We're going to have to talk more about that one later. Somebody's going to have to explain it more to me, anyway. Thor tried and I can't say it quite sank in, but in my defense I think my mind had only just rejoined my body, so, you know."

"Well," Loki said, pausing to swallow – he'd tensed when Jane brought up Thor – "I'm glad you're all right now."

No wisecracks? No teasing? Insults of the friendlier sort? "Yeah. So listen, your dad's probably got a magic stopwatch out there. I should go. But Loki, seriously, give him a chance. Hear him out. Just try, okay?" she said, continuing her urging at the distance that immediately appeared in his expression. "He's the one who has to let you use magic again. And make you look normal again, right?"

"Normal?" He recalled a conversation they'd once had about "normal"; he'd referred to "normal" hair and skin color among the Aesir, and she'd accused him of prejudice. His own skin color now was not normal, not for the Aesir. Normal for his true nature, of course, but he could not bear the thought of remaining like this. It was all he could manage to occasionally, very briefly, look Jane in the eye. "You may have a point there," he said, and the thought flashed through his mind then that he could attempt that, fooling Odin, groveling, begging for forgiveness. He'd considered a similar strategy before. At his full strength, with time to prepare himself for it, to convince himself that he was ultimately demeaning Odin rather than himself, he thought he could pull it off. But he wasn't at his full strength – far from it. "Don't worry about me, I'll be fine. But Jane, I don't want either you or my mother just standing around outside in those temperatures. Why don't you take her out to see the ten-meter telescope and the DSL. She'll find it interesting, or, at the very least, she'll humor you and pretend that she does because she likes you." He didn't want Jane to overhear whatever was to come, either.

"How do you know she likes me?"

"How could she not?"

Jane smiled a bit bashfully, because that was ridiculously sweet and Loki had said it in complete seriousness. He didn't do "sweet" very often, but when he did…she felt a little melty on the inside. "Okay, I'll show her around out there, as long as the building looks safe. I'm not sure if Gary or anyone else has inspected that one yet. But you know, it'll be kind of embarrassing. That place is so cluttered with junk."

"It'll be a good introduction for getting to know you then," Loki said with a smirk that almost felt natural.

"Hey!" Jane exclaimed. "The junk out there's not mine, you know."

"I'm sure they cleaned it up when Norway's prime minister visited. My mother is queen of an entire realm, not some tiny corner of one. She deserves at least that much." The words and their tone were somewhat forced, but it was worth it to ignore everything else for a moment. And to see Jane smile.

"Actually, I bet they didn't," Jane said with a laugh. "Loki, listen, all joking aside, I'm really glad you're going to be okay. I was really scared for you. You were in really bad shape. There was so much blood and you could barely breathe and-"

"And I'm really amazed that you remained conscious through it all," Loki said, hoping to cut her off before the moisture in her eyes turned into full-fledged weeping. And before it could affect him as well. He had to steel himself for an interrogation by Odin; he could not let himself be softened by Jane's emotions and good heart. Acid,he thought with considerably more fondness than he used to.

Jane laughed and shook her head at him. "Me, too," she said after a moment, then picked up her radio from the table and headed outside.

/


/

"So good to see you again, Father," Loki said icily, letting his voice drop so low that it took on more of that rumbling quality he'd heard from the Frost Giants. It sickened him, but he hoped it sickened Odin worse. His back was against a wall – a bed really – but he wasn't going to cower. He was going to stand and fight. Or at least lie here and fight, he thought.

Odin stood stiffly, looking down at Loki. This was the part he'd preferred not to think much about. He couldn't help hoping it would go smoothly, though his head told him this was Loki and it would not go smoothly. Thor hadn't needed talking to – cast out on his own to Midgard, he'd finally learned something about thinking before acting, about humility, about true sacrifice. Loki, on the surface of it, didn't appear to have learned anything at all, other than greater-than-expected self-control in his use of magic, given the time it had taken him to lose it all. Beneath that surface, in what little Odin had seen of his interactions with Jane Foster, in what little Frigga had been able to fill him in on outside the tent, he knew there was more to it. But if he had any hope of getting there, Loki required talking to, and of the sort that Odin was not particularly skilled at.

He considered expressing concern for Loki's condition; he knew Loki would dismiss it as a ploy, and he wouldn't be entirely incorrect, for Loki was well now and Odin was not the type to dwell in sentimentality when there were other pressing matters at hand. He considered insisting Loki remain silent and simply listen; he had no way to enforce such a thing, and what he truly wanted was not Loki's silence but Loki's constructive engagement – it was simply that he would prefer silence to non-constructive engagement.

"You did this to yourself," he said in the end, taking the direct approach, which he naturally favored. "You understand that, don't you?"

Can I be returned to my cell now? Loki thought. He left me alone there, at least. "Which 'this' are you referring to, precisely?" he asked. "I don't recall having placed any enchantments on myself. I don't recall sending myself to Midgard. If you wish to go considerably further back in history, I could be mistaken but I don't believe that I left Jotunheim behind without assistance."

"What brought you to this point," Odin said, ignoring Loki's posturing, "was a series of choices that you made. No matter the circumstances you began with, what happened after that was up to you, and no one else. I didn't take away your ability to use magic, Loki. I gave you your freedom, and I placed two reasonable restrictions on you that you understood well enough, yet you could not resist misusing a talent you were blessed with. You are calculating and clever, yet you have set that aside and chosen to act recklessly, endangering yourself…and others."

Loki took a careful breath with Odin fell silent. His last outburst had left him a short of breath. "Within the limited confines of your so-called freedom, I've made my own decisions, yes. Much as a fish twitches around as it dangles on a hook."

"You speak in pretty words that conceal the fact that they are nonsense. You feign ego – do you think I don't know the truth? I was weak that day, when Thor was to become king. Weary, just as Laufey said. But I remember what happened in the Vault before I fell into the Sleep with perfect clarity. Do you think I didn't see your tears? Or that I'd forgotten them? Why do you think I never wanted you to know where you were born?"

He grit his teeth at the reference to tears. And his "feigned ego"…his instinct was to deny it but he supposed he was feigning something. Something that was holding him together, in one piece. If Odin wanted to call it "ego," so be it.

"I wasn't ashamed of the truth of your birth. But I knew how you would be treated on Asgard, if it were known. The son of the enemy. I knew the struggle you would face in your own mind, no matter what your mother or I said in opposition. I wanted to shield you from all of that. You were an innocent child. You didn't deserve such a burden. You're right, you didn't journey to Asgard on your own, nor did you ask me to take you there. But you were crying, and alone, and you stopped crying when I picked you up."

"Am I supposed to thank you for that?" Loki muttered. He hadn't really meant to speak it aloud; the words had sprung from his thoughts and come out on a wave of doleful gloom.

Odin paused at that. There had long been an edge of darkness in Loki; his mischief could be vindictive, sometimes verging on cruelty, and his jealousy toward Thor was not as well hidden as Loki might have liked to think. But all that was dwarfed by Loki's behavior after finding out he was by birth Jotun. And this…Odin wondered if Loki truly knew what he was saying, and just how dark it sounded. "Would you rather I have turned my back on you and left you there to die slowly?" he asked quietly.

"There've been a few days here and there when I've thought that might have been the better choice," Loki said, looking away. "This one being a prime example," he added, fixing an angry look back on Odin, lest the old man take more from what he'd just said than what he'd intended to give away. This one, of course was a prime example – the prime example. This was the day he'd tried to achieve that same effect by ending his own life when it had barely begun.

"This is the day the mortal woman risked her life for yours, from what I understand."

"The mortal woman has a name."

"I'm aware. Jane Foster. You've gained friends here. At least one of them a close friend."

"I won't discuss her."

"I have no interest in discussing her. My interest is in you. But the fact that you have made friends suggests that you have improved. And yet…you've still cut yourself off from all magic, and you nearly killed a mortal." Loki had done more than that, but for now at least, he would treat the time travel as a separate issue; too many unknowns surrounded it.

"What precisely did you expect me to improve on, All-Father?" Loki asked, trying to shore up his defenses in exactly the way Jane had asked him not to, he realized only once he'd already begun speaking. But Jane wasn't here, and it was all he knew to do. "You wanted me to respect the mortals and their primitive ways? To pledge to cherish and defend them? To berate myself over how I brought destruction to their realm? Forgive me if I have difficulty taking that seriously. Since when have the mortals been such a great concern of yours?"

"The mortals are irrelevant at-"

"Don't let them hear you say that," Loki interrupted, laughter in his voice. "It wouldn't go over well. And I fear it might undermine whatever remarks Mother made to them earlier today."

Odin held his tongue for a moment until he could get his temper under control. Loki was talking. His expressions were less guarded, less artful, and he wasn't actually being quite as antagonistic and malicious as Odin had feared he might. "The mortals are irrelevant at the moment. I wish to discuss you, not them."

"Ah, yes, right, what I've learned here. You know, when I look back on that last day in prison, I recall you saying that it was Thor who so sanctimoniously wanted me to learn something. Which is really rather ironic when you think about it, given that he'd just been banished the year before for reigniting a war after a thousand years of peace. I suppose those few days outside Asgard's glory created of him a paragon of virtue and knowledge. But you on the other hand, you said you wanted to punish me. Well, congratulations. You've truly succeeded on that account," Loki said, holding up a blue hand he forced himself to inspect disinterestedly. He let the hand fall back to the bed then. "Of course, you've always had a knack for inventive punishment."

"I was still angry then. But this state isn't punishment," Odin said, disregarding the rest of what Loki said. He might think further on it later, but for right now, he would not let Loki derail this onto any one of a thousand tangents as he seemed determined to do.

Loki looked up at Odin at that, red eyes fixed on blue. This isn't punishment? I wouldn't exactly call it a reward. What gall…what nerve… "Did you actually hear what you just said?" Loki finally asked.

"This is the natural end result of all magic being separated from you. You are Jotun, Loki. By birth, at least. This is your body."

Loki turned his head away again.

"It was magic that made you look otherwise."

"Not my magic."

"Not true."

Again he faced Odin. "I think I would know if I had been-"

"Not entirely true. We both played a part," he added when Loki arched a skeptical – and of course condescending – eyebrow.

Loki watched Odin in silence, seeking out the deception, not finding it. Of course, this very conversation was proof that Loki had never been as good at identifying deception as he'd thought. He huffed out a breath. He was curious. He wanted to know. But he would not ask.

"This is your true form. To wear it is not a punishment. It is…a recognition."

Loki stared for a moment, dumbfounded. "A recognition of what? Ah. That I am truly a monster? Sorry to steal the glory from your pompous pronouncements, but I already knew that. Or I should say, I already recognized that."

"You are your own worst enemy, Loki. You have done this to yourself. You have sabotaged yourself. How long did it take you to use magic maliciously, or to harm another, whether with or without a conscious decision? You were warned of the consequences, you experienced the consequences, and you are not the type to need a lesson twice. You knew what would happen, yet you continued, as you lost more and more."

"To be fair, I didn't know this would happen."

"Would it have changed anything?"

It was getting harder. Harder to keep up with all of this. Harder to come up with scathing retorts and deflect Odin's words. Harder to keep his expression snide, his voice cold and confident. Harder to feign anything. He was tired, and had been so for days. Perhaps months. "Would it have changed anything?" He thought, oddly enough, that it might not have. Odin, curse him, was right. He had known what the end state of this would be – no, not the Frost Giant part, but the loss of all magic, yes, he'd known. He'd made calculated use of magic he knew would get him in trouble for an expected greater good, but when that failed, he'd started throwing the rest away for brilliant, cunning plans such as conniving his way into a steak dinner with a view and seeing just how much he could intimidate Jessica Higgins, who was less important to him than dirt. It was self-destructive. It was stupid. Odin was saying, in his own obtuse and heavy-handed way, that he was not stupid, but had acted stupidly. And he was right. Loki gazed blankly up at the wall and said nothing.

No spiteful remarks? Odin watched as emotion flickered over Loki's face – nothing as clear as reading a book, but enough that he knew Loki was thinking about what he'd said. "Do you truly care so little for yourself now?"

Blood loss, Loki thought. It's because of the blood loss. I can't think…

"And that is the second time you've called yourself a monster. You have done monstrous things since you learned of your origins. But you are not a monster, not by birth. Not unless you choose to be."

"What rubbish," Loki said, regaining a little of his earlier fire, for these words dug under his skin – his blue skin – and burned. "I did not choose this," he said, waving a hand vaguely, over his body, the jamesway, his very life. "You brought the son of Laufey, your most hated enemy, into your household, to be raised alongside your own son. What freedom have I? I have merely played the role fate has written for me from the moment you foolishly chose to take me."

"You would blame fate, or me, for your own decisions, your own actions? Do you not see how powerless that makes you? Are you nothing more than a ship pushed about by a capricious wind, no sails, no rudder, not even any oars?"

Loki pressed his eyes closed. He didn't want to hear any more of this. Odin had made him powerless. But he didn't, he didn't. I made stupid decisions…out of desperation…or fatalism…or something…I didn't care what happened… Why are you listening to him?! He thought of the remote in the TV lounge, and wished for a mute button on Odin's voice. And on his own thoughts. "I tire of this," he said, cutting off Odin. "Can we simply get on with it? Whatever the next stage of my punishment is? Or is this it, to be left to fend for myself, looking like this?" He supposed the one silver lining of having a Frost Giant's body was that he could more easily manage the incredibly long walk away from the South Pole, since he would no longer be welcome here as Loki, much less as a Frost Giant Loki. Though where exactly he would walk to, and what he would do when he got there in this body and with no magic to change it, he had no idea. Perhaps he would just wander the largely empty continent until he collapsed from hunger.

"As I said, this, in itself, is not a punishment."

"My apologies, I forgot. It's a recognition. Now can we get on with it?"

"It's a recognition that this is part of who you are. You must accept that. But it doesn't change the rest of who you are. That you are Asgardian. That you are my son. This," he said, lightly grasping Loki's cold hand, turning it, and running a thumb over the scar there, "is as much yours as it is Thor's."

"Really?" Loki asked, giving a short laugh that came out awkwardly, for he was distinctly uncomfortable with Odin touching him, especially in this body, but not in a good position to escape the touch. "Have you burned anything into his flesh lately?"

Odin released Loki's wrist and turned his back for a moment. He was frustrated, and his patience was wearing thin. Loki was determined to put up new barriers at every turn. And while Odin could flatter fellow kings, negotiate agreements, discuss battle training and readiness, and engage others in all manner of official conversation, talking to his second son, really talking to him, was next to impossible for him. Just because he lacked skill at it, though, did not mean he would give up; the stakes were too high for that. He turned around again. "Thor hasn't needed the reminder. You have. Badly."

The reminder. Loki nodded minutely. It made sense now, everything Odin had been building toward, or rather meandering aimlessly and cluelessly toward. "Thor has fallen in line, hasn't he? The good son, the obedient son. The worthy son. Well, let's be honest, the only son. It took him only three days to march behind your pipe. Did you ever notice that I was actually the more obedient, of the two of us?"

"You pretended at obedience better than he," Odin put in, a hint of a smile twitching on his lips despite the tone of Loki's words. "But this isn't about Thor, either. It's still about you," he quickly added, trying to avoid another derailment.

"I beg to differ. It is about Thor. It's about the both of us. You can't examine a shadow without also examining what casts it. I know that Thor was made king, while you were in the Sleep. Yet now you are here, and Mother, and Eir, and he is not. Either my appearance was too ghastly for him to bear" – Loki paused over a swallow at the sudden hazy memory of Thor looking down at him as though he were vermin – "or you have let him remain king."

"He has remained king. But even were I king, I would be here. As I said, this is not about-"

"Of course it is. He passed all your tests and he has what he always wanted. He always so easily passed the tests that really mattered. And now you have his compliance and he has your trust." Loki paused, purely for drama this time, taking on a deliberately thoughtful look, then speaking up just before Odin could. "You've never trusted me, have you?"

"You choose a poor time to ask me about trust, Loki."

"Would there have ever been a good time? You always trusted him. You had every intention of making him king when it was obvious to everyone who knew him except you that he was woefully and dangerously unprepared for it. You-"

"You must indeed think me blind; of course I knew that Thor was unprepared. I would have still been there to guide him, and he would have been- he is surrounded by a full set of advisors, nearly all of whom have been at their posts for centuries, some for millennia. No man is ever fully prepared to be king. And you were no exception."

"Special circumstances," Loki ground out through a tight jaw, bristling at the remark. "At least I didn't start any wars."

"You attempted to destroy Jotunheim."

"I attempted to finish a war that Thor started."

"You attempted to subjugate Midgard." Odin watched carefully as Loki's gaze flickered. When he'd mentioned Jotunheim, something else had flashed over his son's face: something that looked disturbingly like stubborn pride. It was little to go on – Loki usually had much better control over reactions he didn't wish to share and Odin assumed it was either a sign of strong emotions or the effect of significant blood loss – but he was reasonably confident that while Loki was unrepentant about the devastation he'd inflicted on Jotunheim, he felt at least some regret over what he'd done on Midgard.

"Bad example. I was apparently no longer king then. To my point, you trusted Thor, because you knew in the end he would do what you told him, even once he became king. You could control him. And that's what it's all about, isn't it?" he said, tight smile growing into something cunning. He'd had such moments of understanding before, but now the clarity of it all was stunning. A murky turbulent pool stilling and revealing its depths straight down to the bottom. "It's always been about control with me. From the moment you first laid eyes on me. Take me, make me an Aesir, shape me to be exactly what you wanted me to be, both figuratively and literally. Keep me ignorant so that I keep striving for your approval when you know I'll never have it. Only I never fell so easily in line, did I? I was never quite what you wanted. Oh, I bowed and I did my duty but you knew that in my heart I thought for myself. When I learned the truth…then you lost all control over me. And you didn't like it, did you?"

Odin squinted his eye at Loki. His son had become a stranger to him in so many ways, and yet as this conversation continued, the longest one he'd had with Loki in as long as he could remember, he wondered how much Loki had always been a stranger to him. He hadn't forgotten how shockingly angry Loki had sounded, tears still in his eyes no less, when he'd shouted about Odin favoring Thor over him. That was an anger that had festered inside his youngest for years, perhaps centuries, not something that had just appeared that day in a moment of shock and anguish. And he was growing emotional again now, in a way Odin otherwise hadn't seen in him in an incredibly long time. Loki was still waiting for some kind of an answer, face raw with emotion Odin recognized over the less-recognizable face; he had to think back over what Loki had just said. "I didn't like some of the choices you made, no. I didn't like that you lured Laufey to Asgard and slaughtered him."

Loki broke into a cheerless laugh that deepened until it verged on hysteria, the muscle movements pulling at his altered face in unfamiliar new ways. "Do you have any idea how eager he was to do it? At first he said I should do it instead. But when I offered him the Ice Casket in exchange…he couldn't get there quickly enough. He would've slaughtered everyone on Asgard for it. He was only too happy to take your life. And you slept through it all. I was king. You had no control over me or anything else." He paused to breathe, remembering how he'd listened outside that door waiting for exactly the right moment to burst in and save the All-Father's life in front of his mother, the adulation and respect he would gain for his heroic actions that day… "And afterward, after Midgard, you had me put in prison, but that wasn't enough, was it? I was locked behind four walls yet still you didn't control me. I didn't behave as you wished, I didn't grovel and tell you how sorry I was or beg for your forgiveness." He sucked in a deep gasping breath, continuing before Odin could interrupt. "So you gave me the illusion of freedom, on Midgard, but you put me in a vise that squeezed and squeezed and squeezed until it was choking the life out of me. Because you had to make sure I saw just who has the ultimate control here," Loki said, breathing rapidly, holding up the hand Odin had taken before and twisting around to show the scar. "All-Father. You may have made me powerless and hideous. But you still don't control me," Loki said, nearly growling the last, sitting up, before the dizziness Eir had predicted set in and he broke eye contact and let himself fall back onto the bed.

Odin watched Loki, watched the anger on Loki's face, and grieved behind an unchanging stoic expression. Loki hated him so much now that even if he were truly remorseful for his attack on Midgard, he would never say so, not to him – this, at least, was what Odin understood Loki to mean. Odin feared that even though Loki had willingly spoken with him this whole time, even though he'd allowed glimpses of his true feelings to show, their relationship was so broken that nothing Odin said would reach him. He could live with that, if Loki could at least show that he could be trusted to be a reasonably responsible and law-abiding citizen again, by no means a given at this point. But that bare minimum wasn't what he wanted. "You still don't understand," he finally said.

"Enlighten me then," Loki said with affected boredom, again staring blankly at the ceiling. The exhaustion had crashed over him, and if he had his choice Odin would go away and leave him alone and Loki would sleep for the next few days. Or possibly years. That, however, was very much not under Loki's control. His fate – his immediate fate, at least – was entirely in Odin's hands. And that burned.

"I saw the course you were on. It was one of utter self-destruction. You would sit in that cell and rot until you went truly mad, or you would be freed and bring yourself to ruin. You wouldn't listen to reason. Not even your mother could get through to you."

Loki had nothing to say to that. The thought that it was all true pressed down on him, smothered him. But he rebelled against it, too. What might have happened had he been able to go elsewhere? he wondered. Not Asgard, not Midgard. It was hard to imagine it going well. On any of the other realms, he would have wound up on the run once they called for his head to be delivered to Jotunheim. At least he would have had magic to disguise himself with, to add to his defenses.

"I knew you would reach this point," Odin said after a moment. "That you would do this to yourself. Sacrifice your magic out of…petty rebellion. I wanted you to." He paused again, waited. It took a moment, but the hateful glare Loki soon fixed upon him made it clear he'd heard him. He took a deep breath, trying to figure out how to say what needed to be said. He wasn't sure he could explain it, and he doubted Loki would understand it. He had never had such a conversation with Thor, after his banishment – no explicit explanation of why Odin had done what he had done, no long-winded analysis of counterfactual what-ifs. Just relief at the return of one son, grief at the loss of another, regret that he had underestimated how damaged Loki was and that he had not been able to better deal with his younger son's situation, and a brief acknowledgement that he was proud of the way Thor had handled himself. Thor, thankfully, hadn't needed more. But Loki did. And now that Odin was neither fighting the Sleep nor caught up in his own anger, and Loki was not dangling over an abyss, perhaps now he had some chance of getting this right. Because Loki was still dangling over an abyss, a metaphorical one created by Loki's own troubled mind. After a failure that had haunted him waking and sleeping, Odin hoped that this time he could pull Loki back from it. "You needed to confront this, Loki. You have run from it, destroyed for it, killed for it. But you have not faced it. Were you afraid of what you would find if you did? You were born with this blue skin and these red eyes, and your mother and I knew they were there all along, even when they weren't visible. The fact that they are visible, that you now know they're there, it changes nothing."

Loki held his tongue but let out an angry, disgusted sigh.

"Do not mock me, Loki," he said sternly, before consciously softening his tone. "Do not mock what I feel. What your mother feels. You are still my son. You are Loki Odinson, from the line of Bor, and Bor's father before him. You are of Asgard. Asgard's palace is your home. This is as much yours as Thor's. It is your heritage, and has been from the moment Frigga and I took you into our home and our family. Into our hearts," he added softly, after a brief hesitation. It wasn't his custom to speak such things aloud, except when alone with Frigga. But it was true, and he felt it should be said. "It did not stop being yours when you found out you weren't born to us. It did not stop being yours when you turned away from us and let go over Yggdrasil. And it did not stop being yours when you no longer looked Aesir. This remains with you, a part of you, no matter where you go or what you look like."

"By 'this' you mean this scarred flesh?" Loki said, refusing to accept or even let himself think about anything Odin had just said.

"The mark is a symbol. I'm sure you have hated it…but I'd hoped you would come to realize its meaning."

"And you said you…you wanted this to happen," he ground out, seizing on that in desperation. "For me to be forced into this form. You-"

"You were not forced into anything, Loki. Certainly not into the decisions that brought you here."

"Yes, yes, you've already explained that part more than once. If I may just…summarize, shall we say? Tell me if this is correct. You destroyed me…to save me." Loki spoke the words as a performance, full of incredulous amusement, riding a new wave of energy as he did finally understand what Odin had wanted all along with this punishment, this "recognition," and it seemed the height of insanity. He wondered if Odin now expected gratitude.

"You were destroying yourself. And everyone else around you. You needed to stop. And short of leaving you locked up or in a permanent sleep for the rest of your life, this was the only way I could think of that might finally make you stop. And think. When Thor suggested sending you to Midgard, at first I thought he'd gone mad. But then I realized that you weren't listening to us, and-"

"You never even spoke to me. What was there to listen to?" Loki shouted.

"Your mother spoke with you, and your brother, too. You ignored them. If you would not listen even to Frigga, would you really have me believe you would have listened to me?" Odin looked away for a moment. "Perhaps I should have tried. But as I said, I was angry then. And so were you. You were not ready to listen. Or to talk reasonably." He sighed. "Perhaps I was not ready to talk. Or to listen."

Loki started to snap back something about how he was no more willing to listen to anything Odin had to say now, but bit it back, because he had been listening. Mostly rejecting what he heard, but listening. Before, he'd technically listened – his ears worked perfectly and when one was facing an uncertain fate and actively seeking an opportunity for escape, one needed to be alert to useful information – but his attention had been generally divided and he'd not actually considered or thought much about the things said to him. He could shut this down right now. Speak sickening, evil things until Odin walked away, just like Jane feared he would do. Jane had wanted him to listen, and some small part of him wanted to as well. Out of curiosity if nothing else. A macabre desire to watch Odin continue trying his level best to explain why humiliating him this way was for his own good. Listening, as Jane had pointed out, didn't mean agreeing. It didn't mean giving in. Giving in to what? he asked himself then. He wasn't sure what Odin wanted from him, or what he was resisting giving him. Odin hadn't actually asked him for anything. "I'm listening now," he finally said. "Though it's not as though I have much choice at the moment," he added, lest Odin think he was accomplishing anything of note here. "So if you have something more to say, then just say it."

"All right. I thought that when you finally had nothing else left…then perhaps you would recognize what you have had all along. I had hoped that the mark would remind you of that."

Loki fixed hard eyes on Odin, then on his own branded wrist. When I had nothing else left… No magic. No friends. No refuge. No hope. I thought I'd lost even Jane. It was fuzzy now, but he remembered crying then, crushed by the fear that Jane would die because of him, enough so that he'd actually called out to Heimdall. And right before that…"the mark of your heritage." All I had left. His breathing grew heavier, but there was nothing wrong with his lungs now. He couldn't remember exactly what he'd been thinking, but he remembered his hand gripping that wrist, like it was all he had. Like he needed it. The one thing he had that connected him to who he'd been before, who he'd believed himself to be, something more than this wretched body in which he was trapped.

I was delirious at the time, he reminded himself, trying to get the anxiety under control. Closer to dead than alive. Breathing steadier, he held up his wrist to Odin. There was no way on this or any of nine thousand other realms that he would ever admit that such a moment had ever happened. "You took me. You made me a pawn. A possession. You wanted to regain control over me. This is a mark of slavery."

"It is a mark of family. Of belonging. No matter your skin. No matter the circumstances of your birth. You are no one's slave. You never were. Yes, we once thought to prepare you for a different future, a different role, but you were always our son, the same as Thor."

"The same as Thor," Loki echoed, followed by a short giddy laugh. "Not exactly."

"Yes, exactly. You were never any less our son than he. Why do you not believe me?" Odin asked in frustration. There were only so many times, so many ways he could say it.

"I don't know. It's not as though your honesty has ever been called into question, especially not with regard to me."

This is pointless, Odin thought, jaw tight. War rages on Asgard and I shout at one who is deaf. He grabbed Loki's wrist, still held out toward him, and squeezed, letting the burn of Loki's skin galvanize him. He would keep "shouting" until Loki heard him. "This is not slavery and this is not control. You were never so weak-minded that anyone could control you."

Loki's mouth fell open in shock; a wave of rage quickly followed that saw him trying violently to wrench his wrist free from Odin's grip, but supine, still weak from blood loss, he could not break free.

"This mark shows that we belong to you, as much as you to us. The name Odinson belongs to you. The name Borson, through me. Asgard belongs to you. We are your family, the Aesir your people. None of that will ever change. Ever." He abruptly released Loki's wrist and Loki overbalanced, grabbing on to the side of his bed to avoid tumbling over the edge. "You asked about punishment. This has never been about punishment. I wanted you to remember to think of others and not just yourself. I wanted you to learn that the universe is not your playground and its peoples not your playthings. I wanted you to regain your vaunted self-control. But most of all, Loki…most of all," he said, voice softening, anger deflating, "I wanted you to understand that we are still your family. That these things that you've done…they are not necessary. You have nothing to prove. To anyone."

/


In December 2011, then-Prime Minister of Norway Jens Stoltenberg did indeed visit the Amundsen-Scott Station, to coincide with the 100-year anniversary of Amundsen's successful journey to the Pole and back. It's something Loki would have heard about and seen pictures of.

In other news, I've started putting up another story, Titans Bearing Gifts - five short chapters, already completed, though I've only put up the first two now. It's backstory for Beneath (and Memory Casket). It's a Thor/Avengers "crossover," so not found in either the regular Thor or Avengers story feeds; you can find it from my profile page or by searching crossovers.

"Abizmo": That's the positive view of Odin; Loki sees it differently of course. I find the most interesting characters to be the complex flawed ones, the ones that can't be so easily pigeon-holed as "good guy" or "bad guy." Loki is the best case in point! But Odin also I really enjoy as a character. We Loki fans have a natural tendency to see him negatively, but Thor (movie) gives us plenty of evidence that he loves Loki, so he's not "black-and-white" either. And I love it when readers react differently to him. None of these characters are written to be perfect.

A little too hard to find a decent excerpt and say anything not too spoilery for Ch. 142 (though that could be my pillow calling) - let's just say the family reunion continues.