Part 2
Author's Note: All I'm gonna say is enjoy the humor while it lasts. =D Also the number of stupid headcanons I have with little Loki and Thor are INSANE. They're also too crazy to do anything about, because I am not writing with three-year-old Loki xD
The water stain thing. I actually did myself. :') xDXD Proud owner of lethal-to-drywall spray bottles. 💖
ALSO. I have no idea where Hela picked up calling people 'darling' from. But I officially accept she does it whenever she finds someone adorable. What determines that, I have no idea. :3
~ Rivana Rita
"What," Hela spells out slowly as if speaking to a three-year-old who can scarcely understand a word of Asgardian, "In Odin's name are you writing?"
"Precisely," Loki grins with enough cheer it is terrifying, "I am writing. In Odin's name."
Hela's eyes narrow on the paper he hasn't stopped scribbling on with his feather. "Is this a play?"
"No. It's a script. Of how you'll become queen."
"Then why are you writing it?"
"I suspect we may have to rehearse it a few times." He magics his feather away and hands her the parchment.
Hela takes it from him, brows slowly rising in disbelief. "Absolutely not." She crumples it and throws it in her brother's face.
"Well, it would work." The grin doesn't slide.
She's going to smack him. Or spear him. "This is not how I speak."
"Then, how do you speak?" How dare he look curious?
"To start with, I would not step through a portal to Asgard saying "hi, people who haven't seen me in a thousand years, I hope somebody missed me'." She glowers.
"What were you planning to say?" Loki asks, spreading his hands in probably fake curiosity.
"And I cannot imagine Odin saying "my idiot son", unless he was speaking of you."
Loki's expression scrunches. That hit a nerve, Hela thinks. "Doesn't matter," he shrugs, "He's about to die. Are you ready to become queen?"
"I will be very much relieved not to call you 'Father' in public," Hela admits grudgingly. "And how would we make this appear real?"
Loki smirks. "Magic."
Hela hates how impossible it is to argue with flawless logic. "Do you truly expect this not to end in a bloodbath?"
"I hope it will not, sister. For if it does, we may have to rethink our arrangement." Loki extends a hand to her.
Hela blinks at it, confused. She's supposed to, what? Take it? "I suppose so." Truthfully, Hela doesn't need him anymore. Or at least, she will not, but he's a sorcerer, and... he's her brother. She has to be grudgingly honest that she has a soft spot for him that she dearly wishes she didn't have.
"Am I just going to just keep standing here and uh –" Loki looks down, wiggling his hand at her.
Hela follows his gaze. "What am I expected to do?"
"Never mind. You made it awkward?"
"Me?" Hela stares at him, brows raised in incredulousness. She cannot believe him.
"It's a custom on Midgard. Everyone knows that. Well – actually, it's a more recent custom. I – I did not always know that. There was a time – when Thor and I first visited, it was not a custom yet." He exhales. "Sorry, I keep forgetting how long you were cut off from other worlds."
Hela's lips press together, and she tries to quell the frustration bubbling in her chest. She understands that. It comes with a stinging hurt, anyway – she should never have been there. She lost her entire life thanks to Odin.
But Loki stripped him of his powers and sent him to Midgard, where he can live the remains of his life among mortals. Hela will not deny finding smugness and relief in that. Though she also cannot help being angry. It seems a fitting end, but she wishes he weren't alive.
"You will have to rethink my entrance," Hela tells him.
"Oh, I have," Loki promises, "You'll have to rethink your first choices, too. What was Asgard like, in your time?"
It's so... strange to be able to speak of this. Somehow, Hela never thought Asgard would be so different when she returned, but the palace she walked into was nothing like she remembered. "When I was younger, we did not have nearly as much gold as we do now," Hela answers, "It was... different. Less beautiful. Though, I must say, Odin's taste of gold is horrendous. A bit here adds beauty, but too much is –"
"Lame," Loki supplies, "Yes, so I would tell him. Maybe we can do a bit of... recoloring."
Starting, she's going to rip down those paintings Odin slapped over the ones that once were.
If Odin's going to erase her, she's more than willing to erase him, too. Maybe they should replace them both with something of her and Loki in a decade or so. The paintings changed throughout Hela's life, too.
"We need a lot more black," Hela decides.
"And green," Loki adds, attempting to un-crease the parchment. "Sister, I must say, you have an impressive fold. May I ask you not to repeat?"
"You can't magic something to replace it?"
"Well, I could, but that would be a waste of paper."
Hela will grudgingly admit she misses seeing parchment, too. She hasn't had anything to write in in a long time, and her fingers itch to hold feathers every now and then. It's another aching sort of longing, deep in with the hunger that will never go away.
She longs to see the sun.
To finally be truly free.
"I will make my own lines," Hela tells him flatly when she sees the feather's white end moving again.
"Oh, but this one is perfect," Loki protests, stifling a smirk.
Hela's eyes narrow at her brother warily. Why is he writing so tiny and squeezing words into the side-margines? Who writes like that? Her eyes skim halfway over a half-written line of "I'm Hela goddess of death and I'll do what I want with your realm, peasants". Hela tries snatching the parchment, grabbing the edge and yanking.
Loki yelps as his feather does something stupid across the page.
Hela laughs.
Something ups itself from the floor behind her, yanking one of her feet out from under her. She catches herself with one hand on the desk and flips upright. Well, actually, she doesn't remember who moved first, but then they're tackling each other.
Loki hits the desk, and then rolls them both across it, landing on the floor with a thump.
Hela grabs his shoulders and flips him off, fully determined to win, when she hears footsteps in the hall. A passing guard, probably. But they still need to avoid an alert.
"Hide," Loki warns, scrambling upright and vanishing his feather and ink.
Not that someone very rudely intruding in their room couldn't be hidden. Hela could stab them. She would gratefully do so. This is her room.
But Loki's insistent on no killing, so she steps over whatever menace her brother abandoned on the floor and yanks him into the bathroom. The room's still small. Not that it needs to be bigger. It looks almost the same – actually. A bit more green, Hela thinks. There are also some suspicious water stains on the ceiling that were not there when she left – to her recollection.
She's hardly been in here for years, and her chest constricts sharply. This was taken, too, given to Loki – she remembers...
(Moments, little things, like being in here, reminds her of her mother.)
(Then Odin took and gave all of this to Loki. This was her space. Her room.)
She hears the door creaking open in the next room.
They stand in the darkness, and Hela releases her brother's arm when she realizes she's still gripping it. (What would he have looked like when he was small? He's young, but he's grown now. Did he look even more like her when they were little?)
"Why are we in the bathroom?" Loki asks after a long heartbeat when the door shuts again.
"No one would look for us in here."
"It's obvious you didn't know Thor and I when we were little."
Her head snaps back around. (That's what she wanted that's the only thing she ever wanted, to get to have a family, to be seen and recognized to be remembered to have Loki.) "Why?" Hela asks instead, "What did you do?"
"Truthfully, most of it is too embarrassing to discuss."
Hela pushes the door open, double-checking their room door is shut. It is, thankfully. No more scuffles, clearly.
"Looking back at it, I honestly feel bad for Mother." Loki's light footsteps follow her.
"I trust I can blame you for the water stains," Hela comments dryly.
"I hid a spray bottle. Under the sink. Where no one could find it."
How do you not find something under the sink? Hela turns back, appraising him with a newfound level of disbelief. "You truly are the God of Mischief."
"Well, I try to live up to my name." He exhales, sounding worn. He still sways somewhat, and Hela is not fully convinced he is healed from when she stabbed him.
(She stabbed him. She stabbed her brother. She stabbed Loki. She can't believe she did.)
His words carry a weight, tired and worn – he has tried. He has tried a lot to be what was expected of him. No doubt nurtured and exploited just like Hela herself. She is angry on her brother's behalf. They really are the same. Odin well made sure of that.
"That's all there is for any of us."
**w**
"Have you thought of what you will do once I take the throne?" Hela inquires, looking at her little brother. It's daytime, and Loki told her with no small amount of humor that he's started the illusion of Odin's unnecessarily fancy 'death'.
In essence, her brother is going to announce to all of Asgard – via illusion, of course – that he's about to turn into golden sparkles, and since Thor isn't here to take the throne, and Loki is dead, he's giving it to his firstborn Hela who he hid from existence for centuries. And then he'll 'die' before he needs to worry about the fallout, and dump the rest of the mess in Hela's lap.
"It isn't as though you have not thought of what you would say every day if you could return," Loki had snipped when she tried to argue.
Which is fair. She has. She knows what to say.
And it will be nothing ridiculous like "hi, missed me?"
Loki blinks. "Of course I have." He shifts forwards, leaning his elbows on his knees. "You are aware of the war between Asgard and the Dark Elves, yes?"
"Naturally, considering it's half of what you've been talking about for the weeks I've been here." Still waiting. It feels like it's been – perhaps far longer than it truly has, because Hela finally has... someone. Her life is no longer filled with voices of the dead. It has life. A life. Loki's life – and he's real. It's none of the fantasies she spent years sifting through, lost far away on Helheim. Lost with nothing but clouded, darkened sky and jagged rock.
Her body would not let her die, but the amount of food she could get there was scarce. For most, it would never have been enough to survive, and she's so hungry. She hates that she's so hungry.
If Loki has noticed how hard it is for her to keep food down, or to eat, he hasn't said anything.
But he still feeds her. That's more than Odin has done in so far over a thousand years.
"So, perhaps you go to their world to finish the fight, and you find me there."
"You're going to turn our life into a live play?"
He shrugs. "Why not?"
He's still full of unexpected.
Hela shakes her head with semi-fond adoration.
"First, may I ask," Loki inquires. "Why do you want the throne?"
The question floors her. It's obvious, and yet... not. "It's my birthright."
"But, what will you do with it?" He's playing curious. Hela knows Loki well enough to know there is something else he is playing at. Something... deeper. "Once you conquer all the Nine Realms?"
"I have always asked Odin why stop at Nine," Hela answers, "When the entire cosmos lies in front of us."
"And what, once you have conquered all the cosmos? What will that give you?"
She will never live that long. Hela is fully aware of that, and Loki must as well. But what she wanted most was – was to be free. Of Odin. Of everything. She never wants to be trapped anywhere again. She remembers how Odin chained her, stunted her, held her back from what she was meant to because she was just his weapon.
He cast her aside and forgot she was his own daughter.
That's why.
Because she will not be treated as nothing ever again.
"Freedom," she answers finally, "Freedom from control. And a chance to choose my own path."
"You'll replace one tyranny with another," Loki says quietly, "To do to everyone else what was done to you." He looks away, though the vulnerableness in his eyes pulls at her heart.
She curses there's a part of her that wants to listen to him. She's getting soft.
"I'm almost ready, sister. Pick me up on Svartalfheim?"
"I'll be waiting." Darling, her mind supplies, though Hela shies away from voicing it. She is not thinking at all on how deeply she considers that true. Fenris was such once as well. Her dearest friend.
Hela stands. Loki straightens from where he is seated at their desk. Air whistles around them, energy pooling and a wormhole forming in front of her. A portal. "You're ready, sister," he promises, "They're waiting. Go. Claim your throne. And undo everything Odin made us."
A wave of nearly giddy excitement rushes up, clamming her nerves.
Hela steps through it, slowly, carefully, deliberate and wary. Loki did not know of her, and she cannot expect anything different from the rest of them. She expects to be stabbed, for drawn weapons, but when she steps through, it's to an awed, hushed crowd.
Unfamiliar faces. There is hardly a single one she can mark as familiar. It aches, but this is home, and Hela smiles. "Kneel," she says, "Before your queen."
**w**
Walking through the streets of Asgard, freely, is foreign. She has been trapped away for so many centuries that she can't remember what it was like to be free. To be a princess. To be a queen.
The people are wary, and she can't help the bitter "I honestly thought you would be glad to see me," that slips out. None of them are.
Loki is waiting.
Fenris has waited longer.
Hela prowls over every inch of the palace, first, steering far from Odin's room and what she hears from the servants belongs to Thor. She is not ready to think of her brother who Odin wanted in her stead.
She cannot shake the smugness that Odin is dead to the world.
It finally feels like Hela can let him go, too.
And here she is, a thousand years later, a queen once again. First, Hela will assess their state with the rest of the Nine, and then, she will find Thanos. There is nowhere in the cosmos which he can hide from her. But to do that, will mean an army.
Most of the items in the Vault have very little use, she rapidly discovers. Hela cannot imagine what anyone would do with such things.
The only worthwhile items here are the Tesseract and the Eternal Flame.
Loki is going to whine about how she is ruining his home, no doubt, when she breaks a hole in the Vault floor and drops into the nether parts of the palace.
These, these people she remembers. These are her friends, her history – even if their dead, decayed faces and green-glowing eyes are all she can see of them now.
"Fenris, my darling, what have they done to you?"
Fenris stands in front of her, towering, silhouetted black against the shadowed interior. Eyes glimmering bright and green and familiar, staring down at her.
Her best friend, the only creature she was ever soft enough to care for, whom she relied on.
Fenris.
Norns, she is a queen, and she will not cry like a baby, even if she's in the shadowed depths beneath the palace.
Hela cries, anyway.
**w**
"Gatekeeper," Hela greets evenly, staring at Heimdall where the man stans, as still and stoic as ever, hands on his sword. She carries Gugnir now, and it feels right in her hands. "Send me to the world of the Dark Elves. I wish to see the damage my brothers" she spits the word out with an overwhelming level of scorn "have wrought on this world."
He looks at her for a long, heavy moment before he rises, turning away and plunging his sword into the bifrost's center, and the machine whirls to life.
Heimdall says nothing to her. He does not acknowledge her, and a twisting, gnawing fury churns up inside of her.
"Tell me, Heimdall," Hela asks at last, with barely restrained fury. Her hands are icy, twitching to feel metal and weapon. "All those years, I was on Helheim, alone, did you see me? Did you remember?"
"I was sworn to obey my king," he answers, unemotional. Dead.
There is a moment where she considers, genuinely, thrusting her spear through his heart just to see if it would bleed, but then she remembers "to do to everyone else what was done to you" and somehow, that is enough to stay her hand.
Hela pats Fenris's neck, motioning him forwards, and he leaps into the bifrost.
**w**
The world is dark and desolate. Worn with war, indeed. There is no life that she can see, though Hela knows there remains a few residual life forms on the world. Perhaps enough to repopulate and to continue their race someday.
But the air tastes with death. Not the type in war, not the thrill of the movement of fighting, but the heavy, forever oppressive, life-altering gloom and emptiness.
Hela sees little to salvage in this world. It is not worth spending time here.
"So, you met Heimdall?"
Hela looks over her shoulder to where Loki stands, leaning against a crooked mountain, arms crossed. His hair is messier than usual, blowing across his face instead of way-too-cleanly combed back. The one thing she has learned about Loki is that he is completely nuts when it comes to anything hair related.
Fenris barks, head lowering with a prowling hiss.
"I knew Heimdall before my banishment. Pleasant fellow." Her level of sarcasm is reaching a whole new level.
"Did I fail to mention where I was king for a short time?" Loki inquires. "Previously?"
"Dearly," Hela replies. She heard something of it when she was trying to catch up on Asgard's more recent history, but it was not an event she ever learned details about.
"When Thor was banished, he went into Odinsleep, and I received the throne for a short time. It was only a few days, but Heimdall – he had good reason, certainly, but he committed treason on multiple occasions. He did it again with Odin, shortly thereafter. I am the only reason he is still alive, and I cannot say he warrants death, but we must be wary of trusting him."
"I take it you're concealing us from his sight?"
"I cloaked all of us since your arrival. Heimdall should see nothing."
"I see you have it all covered. There are seven realms yet to visit. Come."
Fenris turns his head warily as Loki approaches, but doesn't move to eat or bite, since Hela hasn't labeled him as a threat. This is familiar. It's been gone from her life for so long.
She can't wait for a real fight.
**w**
To say the palace needs remodeling is a severe understatement. It needs major recoloring. Most of Loki's suggestions are go-to no-no's, and the guards or high-ranking officials keep interrupting their bickering session with other important information and questions.
She wants to fight, yes, but she hasn't seen her own home for so long, Hela barely recognizes it any longer.
It's the beginning of the first full day of her queenship when a group of younger people, who are definitely in her brother's generation enters the room. A red head, another man who clearly has far too great an appetite, and a girl with long, dark hair who ought to be a leading member of the Valkyrie on sight if they still existed.
Loki's leaning against the side of the throne, and immediately straightens when they enter.
"My queen," the way-too-big one says, "With respects, may we ask how it is that none knew of your birth until yesterday?"
Hela waves a hand impatiently. "Clearly, your belove benevolent king spelled the cosmos into forgetting all that we did together."
"Can we ask a way to verify –"
"My friends," Loki speaks up, stepping forward. "There is no need. I am certain she speaks the truth."
"Oh, who are you?" Hela queries, leaning forwards. Loki has never mentioned friends, and Hela questions if this is a matter of politeness versus reality.
"I'm Fandral," the redhead speaks up, "This Volstagg, and Sif."
"They're warriors," Loki answers, "Members of the army, except higher ranking. They served alongside Thor and I as we grew up."
To be looked on with caution, then – their loyalty is no doubt to Thor, not Hela or Loki.
"Nevertheless," she answers, standing, "You asked for proof, and I'll give it to you." She aces down the throne's steps to where the painting stands in the center of the hall. "It lies here." She flicks her wrist, drawing a spear and flinging it upwards at the ceiling. Cracks spread across it, and she throws a few more, until the ceiling breaks and falls, debris crashing downwards onto the floor below.
There. As she remembers it.
"Odin and I drenched civilizations in blood and tears. The moment my ambitions outgrew his, he cast me out. Hid me away." She shakes her head, disgusted. "The secrets he couldn't erase, he covered up." But that is enough on her. She needs to know more about these people. "As warriors, do I have your loyalty to the crown?"
The three of them exchange glances before slowly lowering themselves to one knee, hand over their heart. It's a promise, one Hela can no longer believe. She never used to be so distrusting of people. Odin broke that in her.
"What is Loki doing here?" Sif asks. There's a fire in her. Fire is good. Hela likes that, though it can also be a threat. Something she must be wary of.
"Is there any place else he should be then at his queen's side?"
"The All-Father sentenced him to the dungeons. A life sentence." Sif's eyes dart past her to Loki.
Her brother is looking at her. His face is blank, but there's a flickering fear in his eyes. His eyes show so much of his soul. He's afraid. Does he truly think that little of her? That she should respect any choice Odin has ever made? "If Odin trained another of his children into a killer and complained when he surpassed him, I will gladly grant him freedom."
And Loki called these people his friends?
Sif throws Loki another look. It looks pointed, an echoing whisper of a conversation they had once before.
Fandral bows to her again, thanking her for giving them time, and a few other mumbled thanks before the three of them leave almost fast than they came.
"So," Hela asks with overwhelming dryness, "These are your friends?"
"They're Thor's friends," Loki answers quietly, "They... they helped Thor break me out of prison. It's... a long story, but... they did help me, though I believe they think I set this up." That leaves a very long messy story that Hela quite frankly does not have the energy to inquire into.
Odin has not changed whatsoever, for all he claims to be a benevolent king now. Hela has many questions of her brother's childhood. He has many of hers, too, no doubt.
"It's – late," Loki ventures finally, "If... we have nothing else to attend to, I would like to go to the gardens for a while."
Hela's mother used to, from time to time. Loki did that, too? "You spend time in the gardens?"
He nods, eyes distant. Wistful. Hurt. "My – my mother had an area there. Somewhere she would spend time sometimes when she needed to be away. I would always find her there."
Frigga. He means Frigga.
Hela spent a lifetime hating her, but for Loki there's nothing but love. Because Frigga wasn't key in what ruined his life.
She swallows her bitterness, anyway.
**w**
It's good to be out in the air here. The sun is setting now, and Hela has missed sunsets. She never saw them on Helheim, and those rare times she was able to see the flickering golden rays, it was only brief. It lacked color. It lacked life. She had long forgotten the vibrance of the real world.
It looks different now. All the plants are different. The patch that once belongs to Hela's mother overgrew when she was still a child, and there are no traces of it now.
Loki's sharp intake of breath has Hela turning. He's staring, wide-eyed, at one of the fountains in the center of the garden. A bench sits in front of it. Hela doesn't remember if it's the same or not – her memories of this area are too... hazy. Fogged over with loss of time.
"Did someone stab you again?"
Loki slowly lowers himself onto the bench, arms wrapping around himself. His eyes are wet. Hela slowly sits beside him, half on the seat, ready to stand, awkward and entirely uncertain if she even belongs seated here. "I used to sit here." His voice is quiet. "At night sometimes. When I was little. My – my mother and I. She used to do these little bits of magic for me. Right here. Turn a flower into a frog, cast fireworks over the water... It all seemed so impossible then. But she said I could do it, too, because... I could do anything." He exhales heavily. "But I guess she was wrong. I couldn't save her."
Hela has memories of this, too. There were some flowers that her mother would like. A long time ago. Certain... planets. Hela had liked them back then. She doesn't much care now.
Her heart still aches.
Loki inhales shakily. He's crying. Hela tries not to watch. How he can do it so freely, she will never understand. "Do you remember your mother?"
Hela hasn't talked about her in thousands of years. Her and Odin scarcely spoke of her. There was no point, when she was ripped from both their lives so sudden and abruptly. There was no point discussing how her mother was gone, and Odin declared war on all the Nine until her death was avenged and he was the victor of it all.
Maybe he wanted freedom from fear.
Hela doesn't care. He met Frigga, and he replaced Hela's mother with her, replaced Hela with Thor. And Loki.
Well, no – he tried to make Loki into her, and locked him away when he succeeded too well.
"Yes," Hela answers curtly, "I do." I was several hundred years old when she died, but that wasn't enough to forget what she was to me, that she was probably the only person who truly loved me. She died, even if she was a Valkyrie, the best there ever was, even if she was the All-Father's wife and childhood best friend.
Even though she was my mother.
And I couldn't stop that.
"It started with a prison riot," Loki confesses lowly, hugging himself tightly and rocking just a bit. "I sent the Dark Elves right to her. I thought – I thought – but they got her. I wouldn't have cared. If it was anyone else. But I did it and they got..."
How she had thought the same. For decades, centuries, thought if she had listened better to her mother in their training sessions, no matter how playful they had been, then she could have done something. "It was their sword, even if it was your word," Hela tells him, anyway, "You're the God of Mischief. It's not your role to decide who lives and who dies."
Loki makes a quiet sound, head lowering, hair falling forwards over his shoulder and hiding his face from view. "I still got her killed. That – was my doing."
To Hela, Frigga is what ruined her life. She came in, and Odin married her and changed everything about himself because that was more important than the life he'd always lived and Hela. But to Loki, she was his mother and he loved her, even if that's not an emotion she can even fathom. Hela spent years hating Frigga.
"What was she like?"
"She was... the queen of Asgard." Loki shakes his head, blinking and wiping his eyes on the back of his hand. "She was good. Purely decent. She... was the kind of person you'd want to believe in you."
"Did she?" Hela asks.
Loki sighs. "Well, she did. While it lasted."
"Your mother and I never hit to each other well."
"You knew her?"
"Briefly." Hela shrugs. She thinks of all the times they argued, of all the times Frigga thought something was beneath her, that there was something Hela should or shouldn't do. That she wasn't neat enough, that she didn't sit eloquently or whatever gibberish she thought of for the day. "She did not understand what I was. I'm not a queen, or a monster. I'm the Goddess of Death."
Loki's head dips in a nod. "You're not a monster, Hela. But you are a queen."
"She didn't think I was. That I was worthy. She wanted Thor. So she could raise her own son in my stead."
"I'm sorry," Loki tells her quietly, "She was not... I do not remember her being that way with either of us."
Of course not. Because they were her children. Hela wasn't.
"What... What was your mother like?"
How does she begin to express this? That her mother was the fiercest of the Valkyrie, that she was a fighter, but that wasn't enough to save her? That Asgard did not then have the army or means to protect itself? That it had suffered so much at the whims of the other realms before it grew from its ashes? That it was her mother who made her who she was, and how Hela can say freely that she was perhaps the only one whom her mother truly loved?
These are not things for words.
"She was a Valkyrie," Hela answers, "From the days where they remained loyal to the throne."
"Whatever happened to her?"
"It was the beginning of Odin's conquest. She was caught in the crossfire. Asgard was attacked, and... I tried to stop them, but I couldn't."
Just like Loki. They were truly meant to be one.
He was meant to be her.
"Oh," he says softly, "I'm sorry."
She shakes her head, accepting the apology, but still uncomfortable nevertheless. "I was young. Five hundred. About." She never forgot that day. That year. Even if it's been many centuries since. She would have been about half Loki's age then. Perhaps. She knows, roughly, how old her brother must be. Not his exact age. "Do you know your birth date?"
He exhales. "I know what they told me, but that's the day Odin stole me from Jotunheim. Laufey may know, but he's dead, and Jotunheim is... um..."
"In shambles?" Hela guesses.
"Courtesy of me."
She's almost proud. Loki, she has begun to realize, is the closest to her heir that she will ever have, because Hela cannot ever imagine having a child of her own. She would like to be a mother. (She wishes she could have raised Loki as her own.) She cannot ever imagine calling anyone her husband.
Hela is not one to rely on people. She never has been, and she never wants to. Someone to continue her name, her legacy is different than... that. Loki and Fenris are the only family she needs.
"I thought the Valkyrie had always served the throne? Thor and I were still quite young when they disappeared."
The Valkyrie always bring up a swell of hot bitterness. Naturally, Odin would have to hide the truth, too – he couldn't tell everyone what happened. Hela realizes, now, that they may have been spelled to forget her. "It was perhaps a century after I was banished. I found a way out, and tried to break through the wards he had on the paths between realms. He sent the Valkyrie in to stop. Years I fought with them, and they turned on me the moment he said the word."
"You killed them all?" Loki guesses. He looks so young. Vulnerable. Is he even an adult yet? Hela can't tell. But he's definitely barely cutting it, if that.
"That is why I trust no one. It's only time before all these people do the same." She looks across the gardens, weary. She's so tired. Hela thought she could step through that portal, reclaim Asgard, and everything would be fine from there on out. Now, she's just tired. So tired, as though she hasn't been sleeping for weeks and weeks and months and years until Odin's magic was finally stripped from him and Hela broke through the portal to come back home.
She thought they would be happy to have her back, to reclaim their role as the highest in the Nine.
But no one is, because no one remembers her.
Loki's right. What is she fighting for?
Her life means nothing. It never has.
"I won't." She turns her head to look at him. The sun is setting now, slowly sinking over them and the garden is mostly shadowed now. A few torches have turned on along the wall opening into the garden. The dancing flames throw a golden-orange hue across Loki's face. It makes him look even paler. Younger. But his eyes are haunted in the shadows with something far outgrown his time.
Thanos.
Hela's lips press together tightly. A bit longer, and she will find him.
But to trust one. Somehow, so deeply –
"Won't you?" Hela asks, because she's starting to realize that's the thing she fears the most. She doesn't know how she could run him through with her spear again, even if he were to try to kill her, because she doesn't want him to look at her with such a raw, gutted fear again.
She is definitely going soft.
Her mother was soft with her, too. She rarely smiled. Except at Hela.
"I betrayed my mother, my brother, and my father. I want to do better with you. I have a chance to start over with someone, and... I want to take it."
She trusts him. She trusts his word, but one day, their interests will align no longer. That is a promise. Like her and Odin.
"I wish you could've been here. That you grew up with Thor and I – I think we would have been happier. But then I might have betrayed you, too."
You won't. The words blur in her mind, unspoken, unbidden, because she's too afraid to say what comes with it.
"For the first time in my life, I have the chance to do something right, and I want to try." He's picking at his left palm. Hela thinks she saw Frigga do that. Is he nervous? He looks like it.
"We will find Thanos," Hela answers, "We can begin there. Exterminating the deadliest threat to the Nine will be a good way to spread our name."
Loki's head slowly lowers onto her shoulder. She nearly jumps at the contact, but it's gentle and warm, and she has a good view of his hands. He can't stab her like this. "He won't be easy to defeat."
"Darling, in all my years of war, there has never been an opponent I could not defeat."
"I thought the same. Trust me. I tried."
"And I defeated you." She quirks an eyebrow at her brother.
"I was wounded. It wasn't what I'd call a fair fight."
"Care for a rematch?"
His head slides deeper onto her shoulder. "No." Wind rustles her hair, blowing Loki's against her face. It's soft. It reminds him of Fenris somehow, when her wolf would rube his nose on Hela's chest and beg for snuggles. Soft. Safe.
Home.
(Darling.)
"I did learn to do the magic my mother did. You wanna see?"
"I clearly have nothing better to do."
Loki smiles a little, raising his hand palm glowing green. An illusion flickers to life over the fountain in front of them. Fireworks, multicolored, falling in shadows of the rainbow, the explosions softer than real ones, but a close mimic, nevertheless.
It is beautiful.
It's... nice, seeing color again. (And it means a lot, too, that Loki is willing to share this little bit of his mother with her. Something sacred to him. Something Hela would never share with another. That she could never.)
And they just sit there for a while, Loki's head pressed to her shoulder, beneath the million twinkling stars.
trying to continue War With Myself* be like:
Me: Oh yay I get to write 100000k of Loki-Hela adorable fluff before reaching the angsty part 3
Loki: ok I'm going to cry in every scene =)
Me: HEY THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE HAPPY –
Lol
Well, the next part is pretty long, but I figured this was a good splitting point. There's an awful lot of foreshadowing in this chapter for what's to come. Enjoy the peace while it lasts. 333 Let's just say it's about to get ruined. By someone. Whose name includes a T and an O and an H. But not in that order. =)=)
~ Rivana Rita
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