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They settled, as Thor had hoped, in Norway, and the lands they were ceded included the place where Odin had died, which was convenient, if nothing else. The people built a memorial in that place. For the first few years, neither of his sons visited it.
It was Loki’s idea to name the new settlement ‘Ydalir’, the place of the yew trees, after the retreat in the mountains where the royal family had once spent their holidays. Brun and Sif both pointed out that there were no such trees anywhere near their ceded lands, but Thor smiled and gruffly, gently, agreed with his brother. “We had fine times there, as boys,” he remembered. “It was a good place to be a child.”
“Hopefully, so will this place be,” Loki replied simply, and then turned away from the sight of the king pulling Sif close. She was only just beginning to show.
“You should think about settling down,” Thor advised him, later, after the day’s work was done and they were taking their ease in private, as had become their custom on the ship. “For all your mischief, you would be an excellent father.”
“Well, I certainly did have a fine example of what not to do,” said Loki, sipping his drink and pointedly avoiding Thor’s eye.
“You can’t tell me you haven’t thought about it.”
“I haven’t had much choice. There’s been an absolute explosion of babies, since we arrived. Though I have to admit, doing my duty to Asgard in that way hasn’t been at the top of my priority list. In case you’ve forgotten, it’s not actually my species. I wouldn’t be helping the gene stock all that much.”
“I wasn’t thinking of your duty to Asgard.” Thor drained his tankard and reached for the pitcher to refill it. “But you need something to anchor you here, else you will be off again as soon as you get bored. And you and the Valkyrie are—”
“Probably the last two people on the planet who should be allowed to breed, let alone together. Besides, I don’t like babies.”
“That is a flat-out lie. You’re at the school every damned day. I keep waiting for the children to rebel against their teachers and proclaim you king.”
“Don’t give me ideas, brother,” Loki smirked. “Children, who’ve reached an age where they can walk and talk and get into trouble, appeal to me. Babies are terrifying dependent meat-sacks.”
Thor looked down into his beer. “I’m scared of being a father, too.”
After bidding him goodnight, Loki returned through the cool, star-lit darkness to the cabin he shared with Brun. The house was dark and quiet, and instead of calling a light into his palm, Loki found his way to the bed by touch, shedding his clothes as he went.
“Had enough man-time?” she teased drowsily.
Loki snorted. “More than enough.” He insinuated his long lean body in between the sheets, wrapping himself around his wife’s smaller muscled frame with something between protectiveness and possessiveness. “My brother’s impending fatherhood is warping his mind.”
“It tends to have that effect on people...”
“He’s trying to suggest that we start a family.”
Brun didn’t move, but something in the air changed, and Loki realized that she was now very much awake. “To be fair, it would be good for the colony to have a few more kids in it.”
“Doubtlessly. But he neglects to account for the fact that we may not want children, or that there might possibly be problems involved in bringing up a half-Jotunn child, or that if he’s terrified of being a father, how it might make me feel...” Brun turned over in his arms and pressed her palm firmly to his mouth.
“Or you could just shut up and let me sleep.”
Loki chuckled. “I could do that, too.” She butted her head in between his shoulder and chin, and curled up against his chest. He kissed her forehead and let himself relax. He was just drifting off, when...
“Should we talk about it?”
“Muh?”
“About kids. Do you think we should maybe talk about... if we want them?”
All in a moment, like water rushing into a thin glass bottle, Loki felt very full and very fragile. “Maybe,” he murmured, kissing her to mask the shake in his voice. “In the morning.”
They did talk in the morning, and that afternoon, and that evening, and on and off on the subject for the next several months. Sometimes they almost came to an agreement. More often they came to blows, fighting battles that usually ended in sex. But by the time Sif had her child, agreement was beside the point.
When it was Loki’s turn to hold the newborn – his niece, how was that even possible? – he was absurdly glad to see that his hands, unlike Thor’s, did not shake. Nor did he have to look to Eir in terror to ask how to support her head and neck; Loki had at least held babies before. But the small squashed face that nestled in the crook of his arm... that was something else.
As much as he rolled his eyes at Thor insisting the baby looked like Sif, and an exhausted Sif curtly retorting that clearly their child took after her father, Loki thought he could see both of them in his niece’s face, but her face was still entirely new. It was a strangely comforting thought, that there was a new person in the village that was both the sum of her past and something that had never been seen before.
And as the days passed and she became less of a squalling red alien life-form and more of a recognizable baby, he saw so much more. In her clear blue eyes, he saw Odin. In the curve of her mouth, he saw Frigga. In the shape of her ears, he saw Sif’s long-dead mother, who he remembered from his boyhood as the gentlest of the healers in all the halls. And he fancied that there was a hint of Sif’s father in the child’s hands, strong steady hands who had once held out Gungnir for Loki to take.
All of them gone. All of them feasting in Valhalla. Yet all of them... lingering...
Later, after the moon had risen, Thor found him sitting on the cliffside, his legs dangling over the edge. He lowered himself to the rocky ground to sit on Loki’s right side. “Still terrified?” Loki asked.
“More so than ever,” Thor admitted. “Now that she’s here... really here...”
Loki nodded. “I know. But at least you won’t be alone in your terror for long.”
He glanced sideways at Thor to catch the moment when understanding hit, and the delighted grin that bloomed across his brother’s face.
The baby girl was named Astrid, and Thor proclaimed her his heir without hesitation. “Even if I’d had doubts about my heir being a woman,” he said wryly, before all the Asgardians in Ydalir “between my wife, my brother, and my brother’s wife, I think I would be very quickly persuaded otherwise.”
Loki grinned broadly at that, and drank off the toast to his new little niece. And then he drank Brun’s cup in her honor, since for the time-being, alcohol was forbidden to her.
“That’s the worst of it, so far,” she groaned, as he helped her into bed that night. “It’s not even like I need to drink as much as I used to, I just miss it.”
“No need to worry, I can drink for both of us.”
“You have the alcohol tolerance of a kitten. Three drinks and you’re under the table trying not to puke on Thor’s boots.”
He rolled his eyes and climbed carefully into bed beside her. “Thankfully, I have other sterling qualities to make up for my inability to sink ale like a proper warrior.”
“Remind me of what those are, again?” Then, “I’m not going to break, Lackey,” said Brun, irritable and reassuring. “You don’t have to look so terrified.”
He colored up absurdly, but did not stop caressing her abdomen softly with his palm. “Perhaps this isn’t terror,” he murmured. “Perhaps it’s wonder.”