Chapter Text
That first sevenday, when the air remained still sweet and soft, and kept its balance between summer and autumn, Loki assured himself frequently that things would not be so terrible. His magic had been taken from him, true, but did he need magic to consort with mere mortals? He found it easy enough to steal human raiment and dress himself in it—raiment of good quality, so that he would be recognized for the prince he was, blue skin or not, crimson eyes or not.
A prince, a god, an immortal—by human standards, at least. The golden thread of his life might have tarnished slightly, but he would have it brighten again, his fortunes restored, his tormentors punished.
What had that Midgardian play-maker written? “If I had my teeth, I WOULD bite.” Oh, but Loki intended to have his teeth again, and then would he make such retribution the great oceans round Asgard would surge red with it. He would find a way. A plan would reveal itself to him.
Meanwhile, the better to think, he walked the streets of New York City with head held high, disdainful of the mindless scurry of the ants around him.
Few regarded him closely—but then, they avoided their fellow mortals in much the same way, filled with the sicknesses of distrust and indifference, otherwise absorbed with the small, flat boxes or metal and glass each seemed to carry along with them wherever they wandered. It amused Loki when the rare human, beholding him, actually registered the sight--when a jaw dropped, or eyes went wide, before the unfortunate tore his gaze away and hurried off in haste.
Loki wondered, truly, what they took him for. Laughable, idiot creatures.
On his first night in the city, after he overcame the numbness and disbelief that assailed him for some hours after his fall, Loki discovered an ancient ash in the great, nearly untenanted central land of meadows, lakes and trees, and made it his temporary home. He liked to climb up into its branches and perch with eyes closed, listening to the whisper of the wind in the leaves, or the chatter of the numerous bold, fat, gray squirrels. He amused himself by composing lies to tell them, as if the mundane little beasts were Ratatoskr and would bear his falsehoods to the Allfather’s ears, bringing confusion thereafter to all his hated not-father's plans.
Nights he lay cradled in the ash’s crooked roots and wished Niðhӧggr would get on with things and gobble up Yggdrasil and the Nine Realms entire, doing away with the whole sorry mess. In darkness Loki's plots all seemed far away, harder to hold onto than water in his hands. In darkness, alone, he felt small, powerless, blind.
He felt as if something--not his magic, but some other distinct, and equally crucial, part of himself--had begun to slowly slip away.
That first sevenday, however, passed uneventfully enough.
Prone upon a thick branch high above the heads of mortals, on the cusp between the old week and the new, Loki sipped from a bottle of stolen too-sweet mead and watched the great stars wheel their slow, stately dance in the Midgardian sky above him. The liquor sang in his veins, stronger now that he was…
Loki’s shoulders tightened, and his fingers took a death-grip round the neck of the bottle.
“Now that I am... as I am,” he said aloud, softly, then frowned at himself, and drank deeply, the liquor flaming in his stomach like the fires of Muspelheimr.
I ought to have killed my father, he thought, clutching the bottle so tightly its glass walls cracked within the cradle of his hands. No, killed Odin. Never my father. I ought to have killed Odin, not merely secreted him away as I did.
Except he knew he would not have been able to complete the act, not with powers a hundred times greater that he'd ever known, His heart was ever set in a precarious balance, hate on the one side, love on the other--and, oh, how Loki hated the old god.
Yet, oh, how he'd once loved him as well.
Loki thought about how the others of Asgard said he possessed no heart at all, that he was made up only of lies, lies piled upon lies upon lies.
And Loki thought of the worst lie he had ever told, the lie with only one word to it, that word being the "No," with which he denied his dear mother, spoken from the pain-filled depths of his proud and hurting heart.
He would take the word, the lie, back in a single beating of that heart, given only the briefest chance. He would take his mother’s strong but gentle hands in his own, calling her by the kindest name he knew, and resting his head upon her shoulder, just to know the smallest sweetness again, the sweetness and peace only she brought to him, somewhere in his life, if only for a moment.
Somewhere between midnight and dawn, rain began to fall. The air remained warm, however, and the rain itself scarcely more than mist. The worst effect, Loki discovered when he woke in the early light, was that the wet had made his hair wind up ridiculously into great, cloudlike curls, and donning the hood he used now to conceal his face from the mortals would give him the ludicrous appearance of a man walking about with an overstuffed cushion balanced atop his shoulders.
He missed his magic bitterly as he beat and pulled and twisted the mad locks into submission, but informed himself he was foolish, it was nothing more than an inconvenience, and a petty one at that.
As Loki walked out of the great park of lakes and trees, he felt stray curls spring free from the bundle tied at his nape and wondered if his pride would survive the cutting of his hair short, in the manner of a bondsman, or a thrall
Time had never afforded Loki the chance to truly explore a human city. He took the opportunity now—out of curiosity, he told himself, to see what squalor the mortals made for themselves. And there was squalor enough, for one with eyes to see it, in both wealthy streets and poor, but there were other moments as well that caused Loki to stop, like those moments just after waking, when one is still trying to tease out those last moments of a perfect dream before they disappear out of memory entirely.
He strode all day about the streets, shaded spectacles covering his crimson eyes, head bowed to hide his face, hands thrust into the knitted garment’s front pockets—looking, he supposed, like a man of great purpose.
Loki tried to tell himself he was angry, nay, furious, nay enraged! At the Aesir and their high-handed dealings with him, full of ire at the Allfather in particular, but when he returned to the park, and his tree, that night, he found that a hollow ache filled his chest and his eyes smarted and stung.
The result, no doubt, of wearing the dark glasses all day in the dim mist-light.
On the tenth day of his exile, Loki stole an apple and an odd-shaped yellow fruit from an outdoor display. He hadn’t meant to eat, hadn’t meant to need sustenance, but his body, Jötunn or not, seemed impatient with such intentions. It seemed determined to make his head whirl if he moved too quickly and he felt weaker even than his ridiculous mortality could explain. His progress along the streets had slowed, and once he even lost his balance slightly, the hood slipping back from his face.
A man, coarse-featured and corpulent, had spied him then and growled, with such violence it knocked Loki back another step, “Mutie!”
At once he collected himself, covered his face, slipped away with a rapidity he might once have thought only his magic allowed. He found himself running, pelting along with his breath tearing in his throat and a sharp pain stabbing his side, until he’d reached his ash tree again.
As if that was safe, as if any place in this benighted round world was safe for a castaway, powerless god.
Loki curled deep as he could into the roots, almost as if digging himself a burrow, anywhere to be sheltered and warm, withdrawing into his jacket like a turtle into its shell.
You are a god and a prince of Asgard, he tried to remind himself, but the Allfather’s last words to him drowned any fragile scraps of pride to which he might try to cling:
“Witless, faithless, useless Jötunn. Useless, useless Jötunn."
The weather changed that tenth night, as if the last of the summer’s kindness had drained away with the last of Loki's luck. The earth, with its sparse grass, felt stiff and cold beneath him. The air smelled of burning leaves.
A slight shuffling sound caused Loki to open his eyes. Beside him, like a trio of small, hairy Nornir, stood three masked creatures. One of them clutched his apple between in its sharp-fingered hands, a second the yellow fruit he hadn’t known the name of. The last of the group chittered at him in a high angry voice.
Shocked entirely out of sleep, Loki staggered away as the diminutive demons set in upon his intended breakfast, shrilling at one another in a way that seemed entirely demented. He watched for a time from a safe distance, a series of shudders running up his spine, down his arms. He felt wholly disgusted with himself—certainly he’d been caught off his guard, but to have such a reaction of horror? Was he a child now, to be so easily discomfited?
Loki squared his shoulders, turning his face up to the thin, pale sun. I will not be afraid, he told himself. I will not be afraid, now or ever.
Except that he was afraid, more afraid, even, than it seemed could be explained by his circumstances.
In the distance, something flashed golden-red in the grayness, attracting his gaze, and there in all its glory before him stood the great tower of the Man of Iron. “Look at me,” it seemed to say. “Look at me in my might. And you? Tiny, misbegotten, unwanted… Puny god indeed.”
“I know,” Loki answered softly. “It is true. It is as you say.”
The cold deepened day by day and it came to Loki that the shudders he experienced were not cowardice at all, but his mortal body’s reaction to the chill. The Allfather, it seemed, could not leave him even his Jötunn resistance to harsh weather. He walked the streets now in an attempt to stay warm, and from time to time even found himself desperate enough to frequent one of the shelters where one was forced to sing the praises of the Midgardian man-god in return for a shower and a bowl of over-salted soup. The shower was his main object, because once he was clean he could enter the great library, conceal himself in a nearly comfortable chair and escape into one of the many books. For that privilege, he would hang a million insincere praises from his lips.
Loki found he learned slowly, like a somewhat backward child, though he remembered a time when his thoughts had run quicker than any other's of his acquaintance. By the time the brightly-colored lights began to appear upon trees and lamp posts, he’d discovered that the grates in the street where warm air gusted up from the subterranean world below were better to sleep on than park benches, but that park benches could be made to suffice with the clever application of those smudgy, flimsy sheets the Midgardians named newspapers, which also worked inside one’s shoes in place of socks (his had soon, unchanged, rotted within his boots). He’d learned that inns and other places of eating (called "restaurants" in this country) threw away a great many items that were still perfectly fit to eat, if one put away one’s more fastidious nature.
He learned, after days and weeks of trying, that it was virtually impossible for him to obtain a mortal job, the sort that would allow him lodgings, clean clothes and the sort of food he wasn’t forced to dig out of the giant rubbish tips the New Yorkers called dumpsters. He learned that half the people he asked for employment would send him away with a threat, perhaps even a blow, and the words, “Get lost, mutie!” The other half would merely gaze at him with bland disinterest, requesting the references and job histories he couldn’t possibly provide to them.
I am lost, he wanted to tell them. I will be proud no more, I swear to you. I am entirely lost, and will be your willing thrall. I will work, and work hard, if you allow it.
Yet even when when he forced these words past his lips, the mortals would not heed him.
Loki learned that his bones hurt all the time, and his head, his stomach, his chest--even his face. He couldn’t ever get warm, even on the days he spent all its hours of opening within the library. The skin of his hands and feet cracked and bled and the cough he’d starting out suffering only in the mornings now lasted all day, causing the other library patrons to turn and stare in his direction.
When mortals stared, when he was noticed, frightening things could occur. More than once he’d been caught. More than once he'd been beaten, his fine Asgardian boots stolen—he'd gone barefoot, his bare soles cringing away from the icy pavements, until he found a castoff pair of flimsy canvas shoes. Too large for him, by a little, but they would do. The padding of newspapers helped to make them fit his narrow feet a little better.
One group, boys still in the first flower of youth, clad in warm and costly garments and stuffed with the sort of arrogance Loki recognized only too well, had sawn off his long hair with a knife meant for hunting (and hadn't the boys hunted him? was he not their cowering prey?), crowing in cruel voices “Now ya won’t have to worry about cooties, will ya, mutie?”
He ought to have been able to defeat them easily, but he could not. He had no strength in his limbs, and they would not move as he commanded.
What have I become? Loki wondered. What have I come to? But for that he had no answer.
"Cooties" meant lice--that he did know--and lice was an infestation. A tiny, itching creature. But he was a Prince of Asgard! He could not possibly…!
The memory of this insult made Loki clap shut his library book and squeeze his eyes closed tight, tighter, his hands in painful fists, forcing himself to breathe slowly and shallowly so that he wouldn’t start coughing again. His eyes leaked burning tears, though he required them to do no such thing.
It was intolerable. This life. It could not be tolerated.
In a heartbeat, he found himself sobbing, clutching the forgotten book to his chest and sobbing. He wanted his mother. He wanted home, even if he was to be hated there. He no longer required a throne, only quiet, warmth, food in his stomach, for the pain to be gone from him.
Loki had been wounded often in battle, but that pain was transient, so quickly had the injuries healed. If he possessed such a foolish thing as a soul, as the acolytes of the man-god insisted, then not only his physical form, but the whole of his soul, now hurt him.
His mother was dead. He had no home. He was hungry, cold, ill, and no one wanted him. No one had ever wanted him.
You think as a child! said the voice in his head, Be strong. Scorn them!
Excellent advice, perhaps, but he had no strength of body, and no scorn left to strengthen his spirit.
Still wrapped around the large book, Loki moaned with his misery.
A man, dark of skin like Heimdall, in a livery of cheap shirt and trousers coloured like midnight, approached, nudging his shoulder. The man wore a gun on his hip. He was a guardian of these sacred rooms of warmth and safety, a person of authority here, Loki recognized.
A gun may slay you now, he reminded himself. It may injure you with its projectiles. It's no sense saying, "these mortals" to refer to the Midgardians. You are mortal, Lost Prince of Asgard.
For a moment Loki wondered what he might do to make the man draw his weapon from its holster. If he appeared mad (he clearly was mad, Loki felt the signs of it well within himself)... If he appeared violent (his entire life had been violence, hour after hour after hour of training—knives, swords, axes, spears, once he used all of them flawlessly)...
He hurt too much to be violent. He could scarcely sit upright. He had no idea how to care for a mortal body, and he had damaged it, perhaps irrevocably. This man in blue with the stern voice and the kind eyes would never see him as a threat. He would not feel endangered and give Loki the quick end he hoped for, any more than the abyss had given him a quick end when he dropped from the Bifrost.
Somewhere far beyond, in the void, Thanos, the Mad Titan, laughed at him, Loki knew. Was this his punishment for failure? It could hardly have been worse.
He would die, yes, in this useless body in this terrible Realm of Midgard. He would die, but the ending would not be swift, it would be lengthy, horrid, shaming.
“I’m sorry, sir,” said the guardian of the library. “I’m going to have to ask you to leave. You’re disturbing the other patrons.”
Let them be disturbed! Loki wished to proclaim. I am Loki of Asgard!
But he wasn’t. He was Loki the Unwanted. Loki of Nowhere.
“I go,” he mumbled. “My apologies. I mean to disturb no one.” He truly feared to trouble the guardian, feared to be locked again in a Midgardian dungeon (would they muzzle him and cripple his hands again, when he was so useless? Surely they would not be so cruel as to do a second time what they did the first, not when he lacked the strength to fight them).
No, they would not, Loki realized. They would not even know him. He would be locked up in an ordinary, filthy dungeon if he should be taken, in the company of ordinary, filthy men, because he himself was ordinary now--though not so ordinary that he would not be called “mutie” and beaten again by the inmates around him.
Was this, too, a part of his punishment? Odin's madness equaled his own; Loki found it hard to guess.
“I go,” he attempted to say again, with slightly more volume. The words came out of him as a faint, hoarse, leaking sound. “I am so very sorry. Please forgive me.”
A hand touched his shoulder, the merest pressure.
Loki’s head jerked up, then immediately tucked down again. A woman stood by him, matronly, a little gray in her ginger-gold hair. Had she seen? Gods, what did she want? If she began screaming…
A brown-wrapped parcel was laid in his lap. “I knitted it for my son-in-law, but green is your color, I think. God Jul, Loki.”
Loki twisted in his seat, staring after her: broad shoulders, broad hips, a sturdy, confident figure in sensible warm clothing. He hugged the package to his chest. Not Aesir, not Jötunn… how had she known his name?
It came to him in an instant: a mutie, the woman was a mutie, like the cruel name the mortals would call him, that thing the terrible people thought he was when they hit and shouted at him.
A mutie was the creature who haunted the darker dreams of these so-called normal mortals, as the Jötnar haunted the dreams of the Æsir.
Loki rose as swiftly as he was able, which was slowly indeed, setting the book carefully on the chair he’d lately occupied, taking up the package in its place, his hands so weak and numb he could scarcely hug it to his chest, though the bundle weighed near nothing.
“I need…” he rasped, not meeting the guardian’s eyes. “Might I make use of the... the restroom ere I depart? I vow to you, I will not linger.”
Hiding himself in the men’s room to unwrap his package, he shut himself into a stall, locking the door behind him, as he had learned one must do for privacy. The air within the tiled room seemed burningly cold after the cozy warmth of the main rooms. Perhaps, Loki thought, they kept it so to discourage just such unwanted sorts as himself from seeking shelter therein.
The reek of harsh cleaning potions burned his sore lungs and Loki coughed more than once as he attempted, with trembling hands, to unwrap his gift from its enclosing brown paper and sticky cello tape. Inside, at last, he found a thick jumper, expertly knitted in tones of black and green and soft as the undercoat of the white hind that grants wishes, also an envelope containing ten bills of Midgardian currency, the ones with the portrait of the handsome and somewhat foppish former king of these lands known as Hamilton.
Loki stood a long time staring at the money before glancing upward to the small window above the washbasins. Snow had begun to cling to the glass in jagged patterns. The currency meant he might sleep inside tonight, if he wished. There were places he knew, not so very far away from this shelter, that would rent a chamber by the night to ruined people such as himself—meager lodgings, yes, and often greatly troubled by the minute demons known as cockroaches, but warmer than the park, or the damp spaces under the bridges, or the heatless abandoned rooms one could find here or there throughout the city, now and then.
A tiny flame of his old pride stirred within him only for a moment—that a mortal would have such temerity as to offer him charity! He, Loki, Prince of Asgard!
The flame died nearly at once with nothing to sustain it.
Loki gathered the bills to himself quickly, secreting them deep within the pocket of his coarse, dark trousers.
Another night, he told himself. Save it for another night, it’s not meant for such a night as this, with a mere flurry of snow in the air. Be wise: worse nights lie ahead.
Before he would allow himself to pull the new warm jumper over his head, he drew off his now-threadbare hooded garment and the worn shirt beneath. He’d have liked to wash them beneath the taps, but it was too late for that now—perhaps tomorrow, when they could be washed and put on again at the start of the day, to dry against his skin as he read inside the safe haven of of this building. He scrubbed himself as best he could with the thin, sour-smelling yellow soap and the rough paper toweling, until his skin showed nearly purple and he shivered in sharp, convulsive waves. Only then did he don his old clothing and pull the gift on over them.
There were reindeer, small ones, knitted into it, in a thin band near his shoulders, and they made Loki recall his great horned helmet and the Man of Iron, Stark, calling him “Reindeer Games.” The jest filled him with mirth suddenly, as it hadn’t on the day they’d fought, and Loki found himself laughing aloud, laughing and laughing until he realized that he’d slid down to the floor and his face had begun to stream, stingingly, with tears and his own red blood. He was still trying to staunch the flow from his nose when the man in midnight livery returned for him, flinging open the washroom door. Loki barely had time to fumble the poorly-made tinted spectacles over his crimson eyes before the man’s deep voice boomed out at him.
“C’mon man, we’re closing up. Time to rock and roll.”
Loki stared at him, hands twisted in the generous folds of his new jumper.
“Grab another glob of TP for your nose, then you gotta go. Seriously, dude.”
Meaning came through him with a shudder. “Go. I need to go. Closing. I…” Loki shuddered again at the sound of his own voice, raw and foolish and subservient. He made an effort to pull his body straight, to modulate his words. “I beg pardon for the delay.”
“No harm done, your highness,” the big man said, laughing, patting Loki’s shoulder in passing. “No harm done.”
For the merest instant Loki thought he’d been recognized, his true worth known, then just as swiftly the truth came to him. The man meant only a gentle mockery. He possessed a kind heart, and so there was no cruelty in his jest, only a slightly weary acceptance of his world as it existed: a world of minds encased in madness, a world of many others as sad and broken as himself.
Loki hung his head as the guardian led him to the door, ashamed now of both his rough and broken voice and his loftier tones. He scurried out through the small side portal, down the steps to where a carved lion crouched, wearing a conical cap of snow. His strength left him there, leaving Loki clinging to the frozen beast, his blood flowing down into the rivulets and curlicues of its mane. Like Thor’s hair, it would be, were the color only golden, and Loki fell into a waking dream in which the lion came alive and was not a lion at all, but his own dear brother come to drag him away, weakly protesting, from his books, down the Bifrost and into a Hel-bent gallop across the Northlands, where the reindeer ran, still, numerous as stars and the lights in the sky were not insipid ribbons of pink and green but fantastic bursts of vermilion, indigo, ochre, lapis.
“I’ve a mind in me to feast!” Thor would call to him when the day’s ride was done and the great halls of a hundred kings would be thrown open to them, endless revels of gluttony and mead, the songs Loki would sing for their hosts, the tales he would spin, while Thor would laugh and shout his approval and applaud his brother’s clever tellings.
Thor liked the tall tales best, even the ones where he himself looked a little foolish: the one in which he was forced to dress as a great, bearded bride, the one where they camped for the night in a giant’s mitten.
Had those times been real, any of them? Could they truly have been as Loki remembered, so easy and so fearless?
The story of how Thor gained Mjolnir was true enough, that Loki knew. With numb fingertips, he traced the lines of scars buried beneath the smooth skin round his lips. The foul dwarf had smelled of iron fillings and turpentine, his breath like herring rotted and pickled and rotted again.
He ought not to have revived that memory. Loki found himself leaning past the blood-stained lion to spew a broad circle of red across the powdery snow. He knew he ought to have minded his bleeding nose better, the flow had backed up down his throat and made him ill.
In the aftermath he felt suddenly much better, light and peaceful, a little sleepy. The snowflakes danced in elegant swirls in the yellow light of the streetlight and Loki’s mind drifted again into the past: a bit of mischief played once on Volstagg that made Sif laugh so hard she’d needed to remove her golden corselet to be able to breathe properly again, afternoons when he and Thor were quite young, finding the shapes of fabulous creatures in the clouds, that first true spell he’d mastered under his mother’s tutelage.
He dreamed of reading in his mother’s garden, of a golden day alive with the drone of insects and the bright flash of songbirds through the air.
Loki smelled his mother’s fragrance, honey and lavender, and heard the quiet tread of her feet upon the pavings. Frigga took a seat beside him on the bench, her hands closing round Loki’s hands, a soft curl of her hair brushing his arm. “Oh, my poor darling,” she said, gathering up fistfuls of his butchered hair. “Always so lovely, my dearest boy, and always so particular about how you appeared. Let me look at you.”
Her fingertips traced the lines of his face, the markings on his skin, before they settled and she cupped his cheeks between the warmth of her palms.
Her face, Loki observed, was just as it had always been, full of kindness and warmth, full of love for him.
He realized, with a shock, that he’d always been her favorite, that they were too much alike in their natures for things to be otherwise. The realization ran through his belly like a spear of ice and Loki could no longer look into Frigga’s face, his shame forbade it.
“I am…” he gasped. “Ah, mother, that I should…”
Frigga laughed softly. “Oh, my poor darling boy, your head filled up with a million words, but the ones you require quite flown away.”
“No,” Loki breathed, afraid to the depths of his soul that she would vanish. He slipped off the bench, onto his knees by the hem of her gown. “Only, please forgive me. Please mother. I, your son, am most heartily sorry and I beg your forgiveness with everything within me for everything I have done. For everything I have ever done that brought you grief or shame.” Loki rested his head on her knees, breathing raggedly, as her fingers combed through his ruined hair.
“You must forgive your brother, too,” Frigga said at last, quietly. “He loves you, Loki. Steer your cleverness down kinder avenues when you can, my darling.” She slipped her fingers under Loki’s chin, raising his face to hers, staring deeply into his ruby eyes with no sign of disdain, seeing in him the dreadful time with Thanos, with the Chitauri, the things he’d done, the things he ought to have fought harder not to do, things a true warrior of the Aesir might have resisted with head high and a battle cry on his lips.
“I am not…” Loki said softly. “I am… I love you, truly, and in my heart my brother, Thor. But I am…” Loki stretched out his arms, encompassing all of the Nine Realms. “Friendless. Loveless. Unlovable. Untrusted. Not fit to be a king. Too foolishly proud to be a pauper. Too weak to be of the Aesir, yet not a Jötunn except in my skin. Selfish. Unkind. Changeable…”
“Patience, my love,” Frigga murmured, bending one last time to kiss Loki’s brow.
In that instant the warm, bright garden was gone, and Frigga with it, leaving only the bloody lion, the mad swirl of the snow, and a broad step that would make as good a bed as any that night. Loki lay on the stone with his knees against his chest, arms wrapped tight around himself, one hand pressed against his mouth because, first, his breath was warm and kept his skin from burning so from the cold, and second so that he would not weep, because he wanted to so very badly, but to give in to that urge would seem to signal the last farewell not only to whatever shards remained of his dignity, but of the tenuous grip he held on every individual piece of his life.
“But, mum, “ Loki murmured into the cover of his hands, “I’ve never been any good at patience.”
He jerked awake what might have been minutes or hours later to find himself being prodded by the staff of a grizzle-haired old man with an eye-patch. In an in instant Loki found himself bolt upright, snapping out, “Oh, by all the gods, Allfather, can you not just leave me to die in peace? Must you torment me even in this moment?”
The old man raised a brow quizzically. “There may be fire left in you, son, but it’s not enough to survive a night like this outdoors. The mercury will be dropping low in the wee hours.”
“Tend to yourself, then, if you’re so concerned.” He tossed the envelope of bills at the old man’s feet like a clot of refuse and sent the warm jumper after it, and the hooded garment as well. “Have it all—the charity, the concealment, everything, for I’ll none of it anymore!” A buzzing, as of the fury of a million bees, had set its cacophony within his ears and he seemed to alternate between panting and coughing out his rage, his heart beating all backwards and sideways in his chest. Before he knew it, Loki was running, escaping the old man who’d only meant him kindness, the gifts given to him by the mortal woman with his mother’s hair. He never knew if the old one took them up or left them where they lay before him.
In time Loki found himself in one of the brightest places, amongst the great merchant halls where the mortals seemed to throng in this season. He began to discern a deeper rumble, low at first, then growing and growing, and with it a presence, mortal bodies gathering, ringing him as the great wolf-packs of the past would ring the red deer, pressing closer and closer still with their reek of foolish, ignorant fear.
“Back from me,” Loki raged, aiming to offend them. “Back from me, filthy, mindless sons of dogs. Back from me, you repellent mortals—I am a god!”
The first blow, low across his back, brought Loki to his knees, though he sprang up at once and flew at those around him with teeth and blows and swipes of his ragged nails, while all the while that crude ugly words rumbled around him: mutie mutie mutie mutie. He knew himself hideously, thankfully, outnumbered, with no hope of survival.
If he died a warrior’s death against unbeatable foes, would his not-father, Loki wondered, be proud of him then? Would he earn his place in Valhalla?
A last blow landed, shattering the dark spectacles into a million pieces against his face and he was falling, falling, fast and forever into darkness, a tight, hard noose snapping fast around his chest, driving the final breath from his lungs and spinning him over and over and over again.
Loki dreamed he lay for a second time on the frozen soil of that ancient temple in Jötunnheimr, and though he was himself, grown fully into man's form, he found himself as helpless, as frightened, as frozen as when he’d lain there as a child. A hand ran gently, then, up and down his arm, rubbing the warmth back into his skin, and he found he lay enveloped in something marvelously soft and welcoming and warm.
“Don’t be afraid,” murmured a voice in his ear. “Nothing will hurt you now. Nothing will harm you here.”
Loki could not have said why he trusted the voice, but he did—he trusted it absolutely, and letting himself be soothed, sank into the soft and velvety warmth again.