Work Text:
He dreams about the books he reads, which are sometimes about quests, or love, but mostly about war. He does not have the lust for battle as his brother seems to; when they act out the destruction of Svortalfheim, and the great wars of frost on Midgard, it is little Thor who takes up the wooden sword of his grandfather and the majestic cape made from one of Mother’s stolen shawls. No, Loki loves the details—the battlecries and how they sound on the tongue, the self-contained glory of them. He likes the descriptions of flags and banners, and the thunderous sound of the Valkyrie’s winged horses. He likes the songs that they would sing for the fallen. The great monuments to the sky when Bor returned home.
But mostly he loves reading about them.
He dreams about the books, and the summer afternoons spent with them, dreams which wear the skin of wolves and grow larger and wilder the older he becomes. Once he dreams himself a future.
Such things are known to happen when the worlds swing too closely in their orbit.
“How much you know already,” says the man, a glorious shadow of a man that has his face and his own bitter smile.
“Go away,” the child gathers up his sheets.
“I won’t hurt you. Nothing will, not for a long time. Marvelous, isn't it?”
“You’re a ghost,” says the child, emerging from his raven hair a little.
“So are you,” says the man. “A ghost in your own house. You must sense, by now, that you’re no more than a shade. A pale imitation.”
But such chance meetings in the stranger hours of the morning always taper away into silence, and such visions vanish, each less real than the next. Loki reads and dreams, and fights. Thor runs and laughs, and fights harder. That is the way of things. The Allfather, sometimes, does not know what to make of his youngest—this boy, at the worst of times called cruel or cowardly by the other children, this boy who weeps when a songbird is felled by a stone from his own sling, as if he had never expected to actually strike it.
He brings the bird to Frigga.
It is dead by then, but with eyes brimming with tears he carries it in one of his own shirts, unwrapped and brandished to her hopefully.
“I think its wings are broken,” he says. “Could we mend them? Is it too late?”
Frigga takes his head in her hands and holds him to her tightly, and even then he is careful not to smother the little creature. Amidst the silk, his hands are trembling.
It is true, he becomes a ghost in his own house. He will charm many but truly impress few; the impressive feats are left to Thor, who exchanges his wooden swords for metal oaths and armaments. In the meager solace afforded by living in someone else’s shadow, Loki learns what he can of each art—the art of magic, the art of strategy, the art of the blade. He finds there were few things which a century or so of candlelight dedication cannot not refine to an art, even if some of it must be improvised. The art of swearing, of scaling walls, of knowing when to blink when telling a lie, and when not to.
The finer, more entertaining points of subtlety. But things to be learned alone.
Does Odin notice any of this? It is possible he does, or Frigga tells him. The old man has only one eye available, and try as he might, Loki cannot win that gaze. He forges himself anew every time, in every way. He lashes out quietly and inwardly. He slips past Heimdall once or twice and finds his way into Norse legend. But the coveted gaze is absent, and often distracted by the deafening thunderclap of a man that, after it seemed the spell of adolescence wore off, Loki begins to consider himself forced to live with. Entombed with.
Thor is the storm, and Loki is the rain shadow, the palace ghost unseen even in the details.
Thus, the first life he took is much like his own—a heedless, boyish accident of violence, and suddenly a beautiful thing is fallen to the flagstones, and even Frigga cannot mend it. Such as he is, once, a thing to be wept over.
Someday the flags and monuments will shudder in the breeze at the boy enchained, a million miles away, and no songs will be sung for his falling.