Work Text:
Her god was very different to the rest.
He didn’t seem to mind if she wasn’t dressed up on Sundays; if she wasn’t in certain places at certain times, performing certain rituals. And she suspected very strongly that his opinion of heaven and hell was not the one her parents had grown up with.
In fact, she rather thought that the more she deviated from the orderliness and discipline of life, the more he liked it.
The first time she remembered speaking to him was when she’d lost something. She was six. Her favourite toy had vanished into the long grass, courtesy of a neighbourhood bully, and in the midst of her tears and her sheer, impotent fury at the unfairness with which the world treated little girls, she’d screamed out for help. For vengeance. For anyone.
And he’d answered.
There had been a flickering of wings. Starlings, so many they almost blocked out the summer sun, a black cloud of shining spangled feathers. She’d screamed even more for all of ten seconds, and then the birds were gone, and so was the bully.
Her bunny rabbit, however, was lying at her feet, a gleaming feather tucked between his paws. That night she dreamed of wings and of laughter, and the injustice of the world seemed mitigated, if only for a precious moment.
She kept the feather in her Hello Kitty jewellery box, until she grew too old, the Kitty too battered, and moved all her most precious things to a sturdier box with a lock, that stayed under her bed.
It had to be a bigger box, too, because as the years passed she had cause to call on him again, and he never failed her. Sometimes he was slower to respond than others; sometimes his presence was only evidenced by feelings and glimpses rather than physical actions; but he never left her alone. The feather was joined by an unpolished bloodstone, a piece of scrap paper with the ghosts of unrecognised writing scrawled across it, a strand of dark hair that could have been horsehair, but might have been something quite different.
She didn’t put a name to him until she was twelve and came across him in a schoolbook. He looked different to how she’d seen him in her dreams, but even so, there was no mistaking him. This one had hair like flame and a sharp face like a fox, and he stood on the page with a monstrous wolf by his side, a wolf with a maw that gaped as if it would swallow the world.
Loki. Chaos, cleverness and destruction, all packaged up for her in a bundle that looked like a man and acted like a god. Her god, her protector and comfort, the lodestone of her deepest personal belief, which is every human’s own form of experiencing magic.
She’d never dreamt that one day all her personal beliefs and magic would strut out into Stuttgart and rip the eyes out of someone’s face.
It didn’t seem out of place for him, even when he was tearing cities apart and hurling lives into oblivion. She watched him on television, experiencing that odd, zero-gravity feeling in her stomach that accompanied the ephemeral becoming everybody’s reality.
He was on Earth, and he was even more uncompromising than he’d been throughout the years. She had no doubt that if he wanted the world to burn, it would burn. She wanted to tell him that it was okay. There was a lot about the world that deserved to burn, she’d say to him.
And then he vanished, and she heard the rumours that he’d been captured. She knew them to be lies, because that night as she reached up to fasten her apartment door before going to bed, there came a knock and the feeling of crackling flame bathing her hand where it rested on the lock.
It is impossible to put wildfire in a cage.
She opened the door, and met his eyes, and saw that her protector was exhausted, burning to embers, and that the bullies had finally come for him as they’d come for her in the past.
“Come in,” she said. And lunged forward to catch him as he fell.