“I give a fuck. I give lots of fucks, actually. I’m practically a prostitute of feelings.”
(( open to all ))
“ … trouble with colleagues at work again?”
Loki examines Tony for his volatile outburst with a combination of sympathy an bemusement.
“You could say that,” Tony sighs, dropping onto the sofa next to him.
He leans back, resting his head against the back of the sofa, tilted enough to look at the god beside him. “Do me a favour? If you suddenly decide you want to make another go at world domination? Let me know so I can join you. It’d probably be less frustrating than these ‘team building’ exercises upstate.”
This elicits a rare laugh: not a few breaths of mirth but an actual merry cackle. Loki tosses a smattering of some nebulous cloudy concoction into the cauldron by his laptop. Hilariously, said cauldron, for its antiquated purpose, is a perfectly beveled sphere composed of vibranium (a joint gift from Tony and Princess Shuri).
The act conjures a cloud of anthropomorphic forms in eerie green-gold. From the morass appears a beaver constructing a dam; the dam metamorphoses into a suit of armor distinctly reminiscent of Tony’s latest upgrade.
Loki still hasn’t responded to Tony’s quips when the lime-hued miasma floats over to precisely that suit of armor and encases it, then dissolves.
Loki’s thin Trickster lip quirks.
“Go on. You’re dying to ask what I did to it. Consider it a consolation prize for your hard work not punching people.”
Loki looks up from a spell with which he is conjuring increasingly elaborate water and ice serpents. The magic is part of a series of experimentations to augment the convincing nature of his illusions. It is quite literally a science to Loki, who loves the mystique, the enigma, of the Seidhrs, but is every bit as fond of the organized and regimented nature of perfecting one’s skills.
As fate would have it, his lover’s little boy is vexed with the same goal.
“Oh, darling. It is not a skill one acquires overnight. I know it is hard to hear such words at your age. Adults are ever saying, ‘be patient’ and ‘accept the seasons of life,’ and you want something to go your way right now, don’t you? Come, sit.”
He waves away the conjured serpents, which hiss and slither into vaporous nothingness.
“No one is going to tell you to study something else. Not in this household, and if they do so at school, you should look them straight in the eye and say, ‘why do you want me to stop doing what i love’? Say it politely but clearly, and then they will stammer and blush, and shut up. Now. What spell are you trying to cast? Cardinal directions? Love, that is easy. Draw a W on your left arm for West, an E on your right arm for East, and an S on your shoe for South. What remains of course is North. Make it a physical reality, and it is far simpler.”
He offers the child a quill dipped already in ink.
Davie listens with attentive interest, fascinated as ever by his adopted daddy’s magic and knowledge of such. He loves the crackling energy, like bonfires on the special days his witch friends celebrate and he loves that he can always find daddy and Thea because of that bright, pretty energy. He nods thoughtfully at the suggested phrase, committing it to memory. Daddy has the very best ideas when it comes to getting people to understand what you want and why they should let you have it. Papa says daddy’s got a silver tongue, but Davie thinks that’s pretty silly.
He nods when asked about the spellwork, explaining, “Before we get to move on to any bigger stuff we gotta be able to cast a protection circle. I gotta know what’s widdershins and sunwise and I gotta be able to find the cardinal points of my circle. I keep getting stuck on it because I can’t remember east and west.” The little angel takes the quill eagerly, handling it with as much familiarity as his beloved paintbrushes. W on his left, E on his right, he nods decisively.
“I got north and south,” he assures his daddy proudly. “When you stand in the middle of the circle, north is in front of you and south goes behind you!”
“Widdershins is always the direction against the sun’s. So find the sun first, Davie, and then move counterclockwise. So, toward your left arm, and then, down toward your feet… . I will tell you a secret, love.”
Loki, who is a bonfire embodied, a hearthfire, flickering and ever-fluxing, yet simultaneously, paradoxically constant, collects Davie close, and presses a soft kiss to his temple. He who is ruthless, venomous and fierce is never gentler than in the company of his own children.
“While I was good with directions, Uncle Thor was ever dreadful. Sometimes he also confused the order of runes and letters, as well. So that our father did not become cross with him–which a father should never do, when a child is doing his very best–I helped him memorize his recitations of the Eddas, so that he was not embarrassed in front of crowds of nobles at our great banquets. But look at what he has grown into! A fiercest of warriors, perhaps the most powerful god to come from Asgard, and certainly the most valorous.”
Jade eyes linger on the boy’s, emphasizing the meaning of the message.
“Never fear that when something is harder for you than it is for others, it means you have failed, or will always fail.”
Loki’s falcon gaze catches Sigyn’s enthusiastic waving. He coughs, contains himself quickly and hesitates only long enough to pass a glance his father and brother’s way. Something about the indecent warmth of the gesture, and the way the Einherjar continue to stand at stiff attention over the courtyard, and the way sundry palace-goers with their elaborate coiffure and glistening silken attire gawk, all amount to his own contrary glee.
So he turns his mare and bids her bolt up on two legs in a whinnying salute, while waving with equal abandon all the way up at the rampart.
Loki’s very public affections warranted a handful of cheers from the crowds there to witness their monthly dose of Asgardian pomp- and a loud whistle issued by his brother.
“hmmm,” Sigyn hummed against his lips, before giving a quick kiss in return. “You seem to do plenty of that yourself! But I shall do my best to aid your efforts.”
Following close behind her husband, the AllFather greeted his Queen with regal restraint, almost as if an example. Together, Odin and Frigga turned to lead the way back from the open courtyard and into the palace, with Thor swaggering behind them, Sigyn and Loki following.
Sigyn clasped Loki’s hand tightly in her own. She had deeply missed the company and affections of her new husband, not quite realizing the attachment she felt until his prolonged absence.
“Won’t you tell me about the tour? I want to hear every detail!
“But of course, my darling.”
Loki scratches his chin in Thor’s direction, concealing a saucy hand gesture in the process. Shrewd eyes follow the Allfather and Allmother, lips pursing at Odin’s incessant disapproval, and Loki swallows the barb in his throat as ever, to compartmentalize and later ferment into further resentment.
For now, he focuses on his wife, one arm at her disposal, his opposite hand stroking her knuckles.
“Alfheim remains my favorite realm away from home, if only for their superior libraries chock full of rare magical scholastics, and their …let’s say, open mindedness, about the practice of sorcery. Oh, but Sigyn, I shan’t pretend that your beloved Vanaheim was not also a delight. You remember the unparalleled assortment of flowers and herbs, for all manner of bodily healing? I’ve brought you back a small apothecary with which to weave your charms. I remember your fondness for the art. Frankly I think you could teach the midwives and other, ehm, authorities on fertility practices, how to better perform their tasks.”
“Twas but a jest,” Loki hastens to clarify, “made by a god who perhaps chafes at the idea of open apology.”
Whether Tony hears him or not remains unclear. Both of them are too engrossed, already, in the human’s broken dam of confessions, some startlingly intimate. Loki is uncomfortable in the presence of such raw rage and grief, for they too closely resemble his own past agonies, and he has never felt at ease withexcesses of candor. But he makes no mistake of the privilege of being the person on whom Tony unburdens.
Perhaps it’s only an anomaly of timing. Perhaps he’s a familiar face and there is freedom for Tony in speaking to him, for Tony can hardly give a damn about Loki’s opinion of him.
But Loki feels honored all the same.
Tony speaks of a “Wanda” and of her death. Then of a boy called “Peter,” and his. A child. Loki, who is both mother and father, feels his heart tighten like it’s filled with razors.
Death. By a wormhole. Resuscitation by beings of a locust-like hivemind. War, war, they chant, in their strange metallic tongue. Chitauri, they call themselves. By torture and experimentation, incessant forms of cruel resuscitation. The Other, he calls himself. By impalement, via his mother’s killer. Resuscitation, because of the “enhancements” previously administered. By strangulation, while the only person in all the universe for whom Loki would die watched. While what remained of Loki’s scattered people in diaspora lay, smoudering carcasses, on the ground. Carcasses Loki was destined to join, but never for good. Never in rest. Never gifted Valhalla. Never. Always coming back, always a little more diminished. Always thrown back into an existence in which there is no rest. But the same bruise-hued mottled face with the same cold fanatical compassionless eyes looms, again and again and again. Waiting to kill and revive him again and again. The same being superimposed over his own father, an imperialist, a warmonger, a falsely benign patriarch of so many scattered “children.” The same creature forever unworthy of godhood.
Words that have little to do with the matter at hand escape in a hitched breath:
“The dead do not always thusly remain.”
He narrowly stops himself from suggesting that Tony’s friends who are dead may have enjoyed the most merciful fate of them all. True though it may be, Loki is not a truth-teller. Not in this moment. It is not what his comrade in arms needs.
“ … anyroad. You do not have to ‘live with’ a grave injustice. You can let the rage consume and anesthetize you, guide you fixedly in your purpose. You can honor your child, for that is what he was, for all intents and purposes, with the sacrament of revenge. But I caution you: you will become me, on that tower, unleashing that alien army, for the sake of survival, and due justice, and very little else.”
He licks his lips, thin and pale and chapped.
“I am sorry for the losses that you have borne, which are innumerable and cruel. If you tell me all these things because you want a guarantee of my aid, then you have it.”
You and I, Stark. We both had fathers who doubted us, excavated and displayed our insecurities, until the end, didn’t we?
We both have something to prove, and someone to prove wrong, don’t we?
Tony could not remain still. His chest heaved and his eyes watered, eyes that looked down at the hands that couldn’t wash clean no matter how hard he scrubbed. All he ever saw was smeared ash. Stark had probably scrubbed off two layers of skin, and he could still see it.
In reality, they were spotlessly clean.
They feel pretty fucking dead to me.
Dead, like Pepper likely was. She was supposed to go to her sister’s house upstate when things got bad. She’d probably watched him fly after that spaceship and not come back. She hadn’t called. He couldn’t bring himself to. The longer he waited to dial that phone, the longer he could hold on to that shred of home that she might be life. The longer he could pretend she was alive.
Loki’s caution yanks the engineer from these thoughts, and oh did anesthesia sound wonderful. That had been his plan; to work until he couldn’t feel his body. Until he could see the ash.
You will become me.
Stark was still struggling in his own skin, as if his body wasn’t large enough to contain the emotions within. There were shameless tears on his face, because fuck if he hadn’t started to think of Peter in a fatherly sense. Fuck if he hadn’t talked to Pepper about having kids of his own that morning. And fuck if he wasn’t prepared to be the last guy standing. For survival, due justice and nothing else.
“Who hurt you?”
It’s a blurted question through ragged, tear-strained lungs. Impulsive, and astonishingly sincere.
“What happened to DRIVE you toBE that guy?”
“ … I once told the fallen friend of my brother that there would be a line forming for those who wished to hurt me. And do you know. . . ”
Nothing, nothing of Loki’s long lean statuesque form, regal in comportment, even when facing such a question, moves. Nothing but his mouth: such a thin, insubstantial, yet powerful part of his person.
“You are still the first person to ask me that question. The first person, in over one thousand fifty years.”
He wheezes something that should be a laugh, but that dies in his throat, wrung out with grief and renewed rage.
“It began with my father. Doesn’t it always? Aren’t fathers always the source of grief? I read your file, Stark. I know you can relate. Oh, be easy. I won’t turn this ‘round on you. You don’t know how grateful I am that someone gives a damn.”
He lashes around, bares his back to Tony: that, right there, in that moment, is all it takes to show the Avenger that Loki honors him with his trust.
“My birthfather did not want me; I was a bastard and a runt. Then my adoptive father, who colonized, enslaved, and ridiculed my birthfather’s entire people, stole me, to render me a convenient failsafe, an item for trade, a puppet king under his control, should the ‘peace treaty’ between our races ever fail. He used me all my childhood, all my adolescence and young adulthood, to groom my elder brother,your friend, to his utmost, lying to us both that either of us had a chance at the Throne, in order to foster ferocious competition and never allow us to forge a close bond. Unfortunately for Odin, and against all odds, we did, and that is why I died for Thor, more than once. For THOR.”
He turns to face Tony, strangely desperate for the vindication of an impartial third party.
“As for the unfortunate moments when my purpose in life–to be at my brother’s side, his equal and his foil--those were the product of Thanos twisting my heart’s starvation for recognition, and understanding, into envy, into greed. He showed me deceits of all five senses, until I believed him. Experimented on me, until I was a foolproof warrior, resilient, scarcely capable of death, no matter how I suffered. His fieldmarshal, to capture his damned Infinity Stones. Ask Quill’s acquaintance Nebula. Ask her, what Thanos does to his ‘children.’ That the torment might stop, I promised him the Tesseract. And that is how you and I met.”
//Majesty by Nicki Minaj is giving me major Loki feels lol. In all seriousness though Nicki and Beyonce often give me Loki feels because their songs are ruthless, self-empowering, proud anthems of the Othered.
icyxmischief 