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“You cannot continue this. I simply will not permit it.” They have been arguing for hours, ever since Odin had caught her – tired, and with that hopelessly careless… far more so than she normally allows herself to be – coming (sneaking, yes) up the back stairway from the white dungeons. “He has a very important lesson to learn, and with your continued interference I fear he shall never master it.”
Frigga frowns at her husband. “Stop this madness,” she wants to insist. “Be the father, not the king.” But with the mood in which she has found Odin, that approach will get her less than nowhere. “He is not learning anything down there, save for how to die. I fear he has already lost his sanity so thoroughly that he may never recover.”
Odin makes a disgusted noise deep in his throat. “He was lost to us years ago, my queen. Nothing we did, before nor since, played even the smallest part in that battle.”
Lies, all of it. “He is our son,” Frigga huffs. “How quickly you forget.” She is furious, yes, but she is also stalling for time. She runs through everything again and again, still hoping to find a way out of the situation.
“Quickly,” Odin echoes. “It has hardly been that.” Her heart sinks. Clearly, if there is a loophole anywhere to be found, this is not it. “He has failed us for centuries, Frigga. We have given him everything and in return he has let us down at every possible opportunity. You do him no favors by letting him continue to think any of what he has done is acceptable.”
“Why,-” Frigga tries, turning away from her husband and looking out over the balcony’s edge. They are outside the council chambers high in the palace, so far above the city that in the streets below that the good citizens of Asgard seem barely larger than grains of sand. “Why do you want to see him written off thus? To see him fail? For even one so crafty as him cannot hope to overcome obstacles of this nature.”
“And why do you persist in visiting him in his cell, day after week after month, when as your husband and your king I have expressly forbidden that you do so?” Odin’s voice rings out, bouncing off the steep stone-and-metal wall behind them.
“I continue to hope,” Frigga counters. “Try as you might, you cannot order me free of that.”
“Than you are far less wise than I expected,” Odin snaps. “For none but a fool would pursue such a childish, selfish course. But you stubbornly refuse to see the peril to which you expose us all. Alas, you leave me no choice but to act.”
He takes her by one arm and yanks her away from the railing, sending her stumbling towards the ornate metal doors leading into the council chambers. Before she can call up counter-spells or even simply duck out of his path, Odin calls his seidr and blasts her so sharply she staggers three steps back. “Once again, I demand it: you shall not go into the dungeons again. And if insist on trying, you will be forced to halt. No matter what anyone does, you will not descend below the very top of the stairs.” He shakes one finger in front of her face. “If you behave as a child would,” he snarls, “you in turn force me to treat you as one. And do not try to wriggle out of this by telling me you have seen a different future. I will not be fooled. Like it or not, there can be no other way.”
“As you wish,” she says icily, once she can catch her breath. Because while she (truth be told) has seen another future, one far too terrible to fathom – Loki lost to them, driven wholly mad by the weight of his incarceration; the two of them lost to one another and to Asgard; death and horror and darkness everywhere – there is no point in mentioning it just now.
She can only hope the two of them can speak of this again another time. A time before it is too late. A time when her husband and king is more inclined to listen.
After she is safely back in her own chambers, Frigga tries something new: she uses her own seidr to send an illusion of herself into Loki’s cell. She lets the illusion speak on her behalf and is not the least bit relieved when her youngest son turns to the sound of her voice and answers.
For whether Odin likes it or not, the end is fast upon them.