Chapter Text
“Your Highness… do you remember me?”
Endre’s heart was hammering and he was all but holding his breath as Prince Loki slowly raised his eyes from the book in his hands and looked at him, his gaze cool and impassive.
“Should I?” he asked, his eyebrows slightly raised.
“I was that stable boy—the one who wanted to join the Einherjar. You walked in on me one day, pretending my shovel was a spear…”
“Oh yes,” Loki said mildly, with a polite if unenthusiastic smile. “I asked you if you were fighting the enemies of the realm, and you said you would, if only you were allowed to train as a warrior.”
“And you said you thought it was foolish,” Endre pressed on, in a rush, his voice almost shaking with his nerves and excitement. “Foolish that a willing volunteer should be kept from the ranks of Asgard’s defenders because he was lowborn, because his parents were servants.”
“Well, it is foolish,” Loki said, his smile still restrained, but growing more sincere.
“But you were the only one who said so,” Endre said earnestly. “You were the one who spoke to the master-at-arms for me, who made it possible for me to train…”
“Really, I just spoke to my—to the Queen,” Loki said in a confidential tone, his mouth twitching playfully, almost masking the slight stumble in his words. “I was as frightened of the master-at-arms as you were, no doubt.”
“Even then?” Endre exclaimed; his nerves escaped in a too-loud laugh. “You had already come of age, you were a full warrior of Asgard!”
“I was never his best student,” Loki said slyly. “I often had trouble… following orders.”
“Oh,” Endre said with another nervous little laugh. They were edging dangerously close to the all-too-obvious topic of Loki’s imprisonment and the crimes for which it was to punish him.
Seeming to sense Endre’s hesitation, Loki directed them back away from that topic, at least for the moment. “So I see you have made it into the ranks of the Einherjar after all. My congratulations.”
“And for that I am grateful to you every day, every hour…” Endre realized he was gushing, but somehow he couldn’t seem to stop himself.
“Psshh,” Loki replied, waving a hand dismissively. “Don’t give me all the credit, or I shall have to shoulder all the blame when you realize how tedious it is. Speaking of which,” he added with a wry smile that held just the shadow of sadness, “how did you get yourself stuck with prison guard duty? Did your sergeant find that your bunk was not entirely tidy? Did you miss a spot when cleaning your weapons?”
Endre cleared his throat uncomfortably; he knew they could not avoid this subject forever. “No, actually, I, ah… I requested prison duty.”
Loki stared at him, momentarily bemused. “Well, I suppose that with only one prisoner in the dungeons, the chance of being called on to suppress any disturbances is quite low…”
Endre ducked his head, feeling his face grow hot. “That’s not why.” But he forced himself to meet Loki’s eyes when he said, “I… I wanted to talk to you.”
Loki’s eyes hardened. “What, you wanted to ask me how I could have done all those terrible things?” he asked, mimicking a tone of moral outrage.
Endre’s face flushed hotter than ever, and he started to feel sick to his stomach. “Well—yes. Or—not how, but why.”
Loki fixed him with a cold, steely gaze. “When a boy is told all his life that he was born to be a king, it should not come as such a great surprise that he winds up believing it.”
Endre started to speak, but it came out as a croak, so he cleared his throat and tried again. “See, that’s—that’s exactly why I thought there must be something else. Some other reason. I know that’s what you said at your trial before the All-Father—word gets around amongst the guards, you know. But I didn’t believe it, that that was your real reason. Because you’d told me you thought it was foolish that someone’s birth—who his parents were—should determine his path in life; and you just said it again, not five minutes ago. And you didn’t just say it, you did something about it; you made sure my birth didn’t determine my future. You don’t believe in birthrights—not that kind, anyway. So I want to know why you really did it. Invaded Midgard and all.”
The words came tumbling out in a rush, stammering and inarticulate and disorganized, and by the time he finished Endre knew his face must be red as a beet.
Loki’s face had softened, though. “Tell me,” he began, and raised his eyebrows expectantly.
“Endre,” the guard filled in for him hurriedly.
“Tell me, Endre—” Loki’s gentle tone still had a steel edge to it—“do you think I’m a good man?”
Endre gaped for a moment, then said, with an embarrassing squeak in his voice, “I’ve always thought so.”
Loki sighed. “I’m not. I want you to get that out of your head right away.”
“But—”
Loki held up his hand, and Endre fell silent. “I want you to dismiss any notion you might have that I’m too kind, or too peace-loving, or—the Norns forbid—too egalitarian to voluntarily attempt to conquer and rule Midgard.”
“But you said yourself you think class divisions are foolish…”
“I think hereditary class divisions are foolish,” Loki corrected him. “I believe in an aristocracy of spirit, not of birth. But leaving that aside for the moment—I do not want you to get any sentimental notions about my moral character, do you understand me? You are not to think that I was compelled, or coerced, into doing what I did—that I bear no responsibility, or did not act of my own ‘free will’… whatever sense that term can be given.”
“I—I understand,” Endre answered, taken aback by the heat in Loki’s voice and the coldness in his eyes.
“And if I am to tell you the story behind my invasion of Midgard, you will repeat to no one what I have said to you—not your fellow guardsmen, not your wife, not your mother. Above all, you will say nothing to any of the royal family. If I hear anything suggesting that you have spoken of this to anyone—any chatter from the other guards, any hints dropped by the Queen, any suspicious visits or questions from Thor or Odin—I will never speak a word to you again, and I will do everything in my power to have you dishonorably dismissed from the ranks of the Einherjar. Do I make myself clear?”
Endre felt as if Loki’s eyes were boring holes into his skull. “Perfectly clear, Your Highness.”
“Good,” said Loki, his demeanor suddenly relaxing into open warmth. “Then I am quite happy to provide an answer to your question. After my own fashion, that is.” Loki paused. “Don’t you have somewhere to sit? The telling will no doubt go on for a while, today and for a number of days after, I expect.”
“Don’t worry,” Endre said, cautiously allowing himself a wry grin. “I have been trained to stand for at least six hours at a time.”
Loki raised his eyebrows, looking faintly horrified. “That may be, but it would make me uncomfortable to have you standing at attention all the while.”
“Of course.” There was a chair that was sitting in a shadowed corner just inside the outer doors to the dungeons, for when they had prisoners who were allowed visitors (Loki was not one of them). Endre pulled it over and sat facing Loki, seated in his own (rather more comfortable, it appeared) armchair, which the Queen had had brought for him.
“Now,” said Loki, businesslike. “What do you know of the circumstances of my supposed death?”
Very carefully, Endre replied, “The All-Father told the Realm that you d— that you fell while protecting Asgard from a Jötun invasion. The Jötnar had recaptured the Casket of Ancient Winters and used it to hold the Bifröst open while they sent an army through… you and Prince Thor were trying to fight them off, but there were too many. Prince Thor saw that the only way to stop them was to break the bridge itself. You were caught in the resulting explosion; Prince Thor tried to catch you, but he couldn’t reach you in time and you fell into the Void.”
“An impressive invention,” Loki remarked. “I might even be touched that they sought to shield my memory from dishonor, if I did not know that the true story would redound to their discredit as well. But come, Endre; I did not ask what Odin said about the circumstances of my death. I asked what you know.”
Endre cleared his throat uncomfortably. “The guards talk amongst themselves, as I said. I don’t know much, but I’ve heard… rumors. I heard that you let King Laufey and his soldiers into Asgard, only to kill them when they tried to murder the All-Father. That you blasted your brother through a wall of the palace… Prince Thor, I mean,” he corrected hurriedly when he saw Loki’s mouth twist in anger and distaste. He lowered his voice and his eyes, shy of meeting Loki’s gaze, when he added, “I heard that—that you and the All-Father had some kind of argument before he fell into the Odinsleep. That something he said to you must have—well, that you weren’t the same afterward.”
“You were going to say that something he said to me must have driven me mad,” Loki said pleasantly, but with a strange glint in his eye that was part amusement, and part something more savage.
Endre opened his mouth to deny it, but Loki waved a hand and said, “No, that is quite right. At least, it drove me temporarily mad. Or partly mad… I don’t suppose it has entirely gone away. And I suppose there must have been a spark of madness there before, waiting to be fanned into flame.”
Endre stared at him, stunned into silence by the cavalier air with which he made these declarations.
Loki laughed at his astonishment. “I didn’t seem mad, you might have said, but I speak so calmly of my own madness that now you have your doubts! But of course you wish to know: what was it Odin told me that drove me partly-or-temporarily mad?
“It was this: that I am not by blood the son of Odin and Frigga, nor even Aesir. Odin found me as a baby, left to die in the temple at Utgard, after the final battle of the war with Jötunheim. Nor was I just any giant’s cast-off runt, but the ill-made, unwanted get of Laufey himself.”
Loki watched Endre with narrowed eyes as he took in the revelation and struggled to master his shock. “So you—you killed…?”
“Yes, I killed my own father to save Odin. But of course I arranged it that way; I invited Laufey to come and kill him in his sleep. And then in, er, retaliation for this cowardly attempt on Odin’s life, I turned the full force of the Bifröst on Jötunheim—bolstered by the power of their own Casket—in order to destroy it.”
“Destroy it?” Endre asked, puzzled. “But the Bifröst…”
“…when left open long enough, ceases to be a passageway and becomes a weapon. So yes, I tried to wipe out my own kind—all but one, that is. Thor tried to stop me—this after I sent the Destroyer to Midgard to prevent him from returning; I almost left that bit out. In the end I ordered it to—to kill him. He survived, of course—or perhaps was resurrected by Mjölnir; it wasn’t entirely clear. At any rate: he confronted me at the Observatory and tried to persuade me out of my wicked scheme; but at last he realized that he could stop it only by breaking the bridge.”
Endre was shaking his head in horrified disbelief; he seemed unable to form words. Loki smiled joylessly and plunged on.
“The rest happened… almost as you have heard. The explosion flung us over the edge; but Thor did manage to catch me, and Odin woke just in time to stop him from falling as well.”
Endre finally managed to croak out, “So how…?” before his voice failed him again.
Loki’s unnerving smile broadened. “Thus it was that, hanging over the rift torn in space by the collapse of the Bifröst, I tried to explain to my supposed father that I had only been doing what I thought he would have wanted. ‘No, Loki,’ he told me.” Loki’s eyes drifted out of focus, as if he were seeing something that was not there—seeing into the past, perhaps; but then he came back to himself and finished, chillingly matter-of-fact once more: “So I let go.”
Endre was again reduced to staring at him silently in shock and horror and perhaps pity.
“So there you have it,” Loki said, with too-deliberate cheerfulness. “The catalogue of my crimes. Successful patricide; attempted fratricide (or perhaps successful, I’m still not certain); attempted xenocide; ignominious attempted suicide. Do you still believe that I would not have attacked Midgard merely because I had a whim to rule it? Or even just to watch it burn?”
Endre recovered his voice enough to protest, somewhat weakly: “You—you were not yourself; you had suffered a—a great shock…”
“Yes; I had been driven mad by the revelation of my true identity,” Loki agreed with sly amusement. “But that does not mean I was ‘not myself.’”
“I suppose I’ll be able decide that for myself, once I’ve heard your tale,” Endre said, drawing on some supply of nerve he had not known was there.
“Perhaps,” said Loki, with an amused quirk of his mouth. “But even aside from the invasion business, I imagine you’re wondering how I survived my fall into the Void to eventually arrive on Earth, looking like death warmed over (but a very stylishly attired death, I might add). It is a fairly interesting story, if not a pleasant one, so I’m perfectly willing to tell you. I do, after all, have rather a lot of time to kill.”