Loki is clearly fresh from a private hell: a night terror, induced by the extreme heat he’s experienced in these subterranean quarters at the Avengers compound. A memory of having his own flesh daily and repeatedly scalded and seared by Ebony Maw’s impressive array of surgical tools, triggered by the sweltering temperatures; the air conditioning is broken for the night–so much for Stark’s “advanced” tech–and a Jotun fares poorly indeed in such circumstances, without the added burden of trauma.
“Such platitudes are frankly tiresome without proof.”
Loki looks up from her needlepoint. She’s not mastered the art of weaving yet, for lack of a loom like her mother’s, but this craft she practices in Frigga’s honor. The sewing arts powerfully resemble the use of Seidhr: interlocked threads of thought that radiate the incanting words across vast distances on the spiritual plane.
Her expression is both sly and affectionate when her lover enters, and finds her in the process of producing a needlepoint of Sigewif for the very witchling who now sleeps on her lap. Thea preferred Loki in serpent form, as is more customary, but mama was able to persuade her to wait a while, for progress on her surprise.
“Profitable outing?” she murmurs, quiet enough to keep the toddler sleeping. She sets aside the needlepoint and reaches for the baby blanket. She places it over her womb.
Her breasts have been tender, her humors more labile, her appetites strange and her stomach sour. She has not bled when it was time. And rune stones have confirmed it.
So she guides Balthazar’s hand over her lower belly, and, while smiling all the slier, simply nods.
A smugly contented Trickster she is. Loki, ever the most guarded and cautious of souls, introspective, fiercely shy as her truest self, delights in sharing momentous news with her loves ones with eyes aglint and tongue prodding through grinning teeth. Indirectly, askance. As in this moment.
“Oh, my sweet fool, stop it.”
Her eyes flush with tears; curse her body and the ungainly ways it accommodates their bright new life.
“Stop it, I said, or I shall weep and kick you away,” she insists, wetly laughing and, quite contrary to her words, gathering the Angel of Families near. How apt this evidence that some benevolent higher power, unfathomable to her, has deigned to fill her ache for her own clan with the celestial being who nourishes the very concept.
Between kisses she laughs some more, soft breaths like stirring leaves, resigned to the fact that Thea may awaken to her parents in such a state of mutual rapture.
“I might’ve told you sooner, but it has only been several weeks, and I suspected as soon as several days, for we have been trying quite persistently, and I rarely have difficulty, quite the contrary in fact, I’ve carried multiples… eheh, ehh, would you … pay attention, eheheh … . ! I decided … !!!”
She smacks a palm square to the center of his chest.
“I decided that I would tell you today, by having a friend at the market place that very blanket within your purview. What do you think? Am I very clever? Do continue, now, to praise your wife.”
“You are brilliant,” he praises indeed, “and so clever, and it was so well done I suspected nothing, you wily creature, how incredibly fantastic of you to have gone to such effort to surprise me! I cannot imagine a happier secret or a more joyful trick! My brilliant wife, how bold your wit!”
He kisses her again and again, beaming and crying and feeling so full of love and joy that his heart might very well need to grow larger to hold it all. “You are the epitome of a perfect mother, look at you! You glow, my radiant love!”
Thea is indeed awakening, rubbing her eyes sleepily with a wee, chubby fist and blinking curious hazel eyes up at her parents. She yawns and precariously sits up to clamber fully into mama’s lap and relax against her warm tummy and chest. Thumb in mouth, the sleepy witchling’s little bare feet rest on the couch and she pulls at her soft little shirt to seat the seams that had been twisted in sleep properly once more. Curious, she begins to properly wake up in order to sort out what’s making her parents so excited. She removes her little thumb from her mouth and questions, tiny brow furrowed, “Wha’ happen? I was hab nap.”
In the middle of Balthazar’s affectionate onslaught, Loki breathlessly chuckles, and squashes a hand into his face; her lip curls in childlike, playful glee, a freedom in her movements that has not been in evidence since her godling play with her brother at her mother’s feet. Her mother … a pang of beautiful pain, the kind that comes with loving too deeply, and missing the beloved, the mentor, the hero.
She staves it off by aiding Thea in sitting upright and adjusting her little shirt. She tidies the witchling’s hair.
“What happened? Why, I told papa something most wonderful, and wanted to wait until you awoke to tell you. And then we shall go and tell your brother, alright?” She combs Thea’s curls back in steady rhythms, guiding her awake with a soft and gradual hand. “You are going to have a new brother or sister, Theophania Joie. They are growing in mama’s tummy right now.”
“What do you think, little one? Hm? Do you think you can hug and kiss and watch over a new baby? I suspect that you will be the best of big sisters.”
Loki’s expression is beatifically innocent as he lifts his gaze from the laptop monitor which sports a tiny sticker of an ouroboros.
“Oh, what? Whatever did I do?” he chimes, saccharinely.
“How dare you impugn my honor by suggesting that I, I, ever have ulterior motives?” Loki purrs.
He turns and snatches a kiss from the corner of Tony’s mouth, a sharp bite to mark his territory over the lips from which such witticisms spew.
“Act like that and I’ll hack one of your powerful friends and then force you to choose between them and me, incorrigible brat that I am, but nobody you have ever known is more beautiful, so you see, you’re at an impasse. Make love to me this instant, and I shall consider abandoning my allegedly wicked ways.”
Tony hisses with the bite, giving his lover a mock glare for the rough treatment before leaning over to push the laptop out of Loki’s reach. He has no doubts that Loki would very well follow through with his threat if he’s even the slightest bit inclined to do so.
He turns back to kiss him properly, moving to straddle the god’s lap as he licks at his lips with a silent request for entrance to deepen the kiss as his hips roll to press firmly against his lover’s. Tony wraps his arms loosely around Loki’s neck, murmuring against his lips, “My god, I love you.”
The second the words fall from his own lips, Tony freezes, his breath hitching as a result of his own admission. He’s never said those words with such honest sincerity with any romantic inclinations attached. Mostly because he’s never before hadromantic inclinations towards any of his lovers in the past.
He pulls back slightly, his nervousness clear in his gaze as he looks at his the god for his reaction. A love confession was not at all what Tony had had in mind, yet here they were…
Loki emits a plaintive sound of disappointment when Tony removes his venue to mischief; the ill-temper is short lived, however, and gives way to more licentious urges when Tony presses together their groins.
“That’s more like it,” he murmurs, sliding his hands down and groping each ass-cheek, grinding their pelvises more firmly together. With a predatory leer, he leans forward until he’s got the irascible billionaire fully beneath him. Tony’s arms encircle his neck and he opens his mouth, hungrily plunging.
Then Tony speaks.
The Silvertongue, for whom words hold worlds of oft-layered meaning, perceptibly pauses. Long dark eyelashes flutter. He pulls back enough to search the embarrassed human’s gaze.
Peculiarly enough, he finds that any verbal response falls short. So he only smiles, a very slow smile, like the whispered confession of a secret. And he plants a firm, brief kiss on Tony’s mouth, and nods. Just one nod.
Then he resumes their lovemaking all the more aggressively; feeling cherished, and chosen, that’s a rarity for the God of Mischief, and he intends to convey the fullness of his gratitude.
He considers Poppy for a few moments, debating about how he can accurately describe how it is to have a brother, well, a sibling, if he was to be entirely accurate to how Loki was on a regular basis.
Thor’s brow furrows in immense concentration as he thinks. Having a sibling..there are so many ways to describe how things were with Loki, and trying to wrap that all up into a few, simple words seems almost nigh impossible.
But, to give Poppy a response, he will make an attempt.
“Rewarding.” He finally settles on, his furrowed brow still scrunched as he thinks and speaks at the same moment. “There is nothing quite like having a sibling, Poppy. I find that you may see those who do have siblings describe them in a variety of colourful ways, and those who do not either wishing for or being happy with their non-sibling status. Depends entirely upon the person. But, aye, rewarding. Loki is a fascinating individual, and though we have experienced our moments, both those good and bad, I think that, at the end of the day it will always be a rewarding experience.”
He pauses, before figuring he should expand upon it.
“As such, I can look upon Loki whenever I might be needing him, I can reflect on our many shared memories, of when we were young, and know that there were and have been more good than bad. I can continue to make memories with him today. Having a sibling can be frustrating, and there is no doubt that we get upon each other’s nerves from time to time, but at the end of the day, the overwhelming love and adoration is still there. And I can know, that he can call me any variety of names, and mean it only in the most affectionate of senses.” He chuckled.
“To have a brother, a sibling, is to have someone to cheer you on, to comfort you, to berate you when, in my case, anyway, one’s head needs deflating. To drive you slightly mad, to make you laugh, make you cry, and make you know that no matter what the battle, you’ve always got a strong confident at your side. Hard times, easy times, good times, bad times, it all circles back to that same word, rewarding.”
These are the two ancient and immeasurably powerful deities who have demonstrated the willingness and the capacity to die for each other, or to nearly kill each other, and here they stand, exchanging infantile insults, and indeed, if that isn’t the perfect manifestation of sibling bonds, nothing is.
“Aren’t turnips red, brother? Nay, radishes. Why am I a turnip? A noble and most useful vegetable? Oh, I see, are you calling me a staple in the lives of many? Thor, how kind.”
Thor rolled his eyes. He knew he had been wrong with the turnip comment, but his wit is not quite as sharp as his siblings.
“ONLY you could find a way to turn an insult into mindless flattery.” His head shaking slightly as he considers him, finding himself suddenly overcome with the meaning behind it all.
May they never alter.
May things never change.
He asked of course, for the impossible.
Impossible? Perhaps in the sense of freezing every negligible circumstance, every fine detail, of the lives they share. But there are fixed points in the universe; there are celestial bodies that crash together and come apart at endless intervals; there are symbiotes within organisms, which are tiny universes, that are a form of endless balanced give and take. Thor and Loki are one of those fixed points; they are one of those mutually giving and receiving bonds. They are indeed eternal, at the same time as they are simply brothers.
“I am absolutely ravished by your flattery, Thun-dererrrr,” Loki comments, sardonic and smug. In the process of picking at a sterling silver plate of nuts, dates, and figs, he begins flicking nutshells at his elder brother’s head.
All Loki has ever known of his mother is that embrace limitless and omnipresent as water; clean water from the chilliest spring, meant to threaten Loki’s enemies with silky sweetness; or warm sudsy bathwater, meant to wash away the filth and the wounds of living; or driving rain, or the exhilarating rebirth of rising mists. Loki is as water, because Frigga is as water.
And memories of hiding in a warm blond plait, listening to a chorus of song from a single mouth, or kisses on the brow or the cheek when still encased in the warm cocoon of slumber, are still as fresh today as when Loki was a wild changeling.
“Well, I think I have finally mastered a way for us to appear to shift form, yet it is only an illusion, as ever when we cast illusisons, but this time, the illusions remain ostensibly solid.”
He lopes toward her, with a cautious gait that speaks in no way of mistrust toward his mother, but rather, toward existing. Such is the natural side effect of being penalized all one’s life, for living.
Snowy hands reach forward, conjuring a live mouse, and its double, and Loki dangles each carefully, gently, by the tail.
“They even respond to physical stimuli such as an embrace or a weapon wound. Fairly soon, I believe I shall be able to manufacture appropriate viscera, such as blood, when the illusion calls for such a response to external stimuli. Here, feel. I doubt you can tell the difference between the real rodent that I have summoned from another place, and the one that I have conjured from thin air.”
She watches carefully, eyes gleaming with pride when he finally shows what he has done. Though, if he does not treat them with respect and compassion, she will have to teach him a lesson.
Frigga’s brows arch delicately, though she is sure that her pride is visible in her aura. “I am impressed, my cunning magpie,” she reaches forward and holds out both hands to accept the mice, only the barest hint of subtle undercurrent emanating from the duplicate. “You are progressing far faster than I had planned. You may soon even outmatch me.”
Had Frigga offered Loki a chest full of all the jewels of the Nine, he wouldn’t be happier than he is now. Her child laps up her words of praise like a parched soul in a desert; he rises up on his tip toes, and rocks back all but giddily onto the balls of his feet. He steps over to the Allmother with a rare, broad, toothed grin, and gently grasps her shoulders.
“Móðir mín, tis only with your constant tutelage that it is even possible. I could never outmatch the queen who raised me.”
He senses her inclination towards gentleness. This, too, is her legacy upon her otherwise sharp-edged son. He conjures crumbs of fig scones into a palm and offers them to both mice.
How could he not? Is he not himself the imposter, as Thor is the genuine article?
Loki studies the young Coptic Trickster, irked by her presumptuous invasion of his personal space, with an air of icy hauteur.
He would dismiss her on the spot but for his abiding respect for her father, Anubis, and any other death god, for many times death has brushed its fingers over Loki’s skin, but mercifully not taken a stranglehold.
“I will see what I can do,” is all he commits to, holding unnaturally still; the frozen stature is the learned byproduct of a lifetime of being safer when unobtrusive while family members raged their displeasure at each other; and, more recently, being the direct victim of war prisoner abuse. Layla may or may not know that Loki shares these experiences with Tony Stark, whom she seems to have already met under catastrophic circumstances. Loki is not about to ask her.
“You have my thanks,” Layla nods, at first seeming more than willing to simply leave it at just that. But ever her Father’s daughter, she rarely leaves even the smallest debt unpaid, so it’s with a hint of reluctance that she adds, “And my favour in return, should you find yourself in need.”
Calculating golden eyes study the other god for a moment before she notes, “And please, I know your reputation for being the Liesmith, but if you know my Father, you know my family’s penchant for Truth. There will be no tricks from me to get out of such so long as you are honest with me in return. My only motivation is the protection and wellbeing of a child. As I am certain you can understand.”
“Ahhh. An offer to sweeten the pot?”
Loki breathes a laugh, soft and wry.
“You are well-trained in the art of trickery, Jackal’s Child.”
It would have been better for Layla had she closed the conversation on this note; however she proceeds, and the God of Mischief lofts a dark eyebrow.
“That sounded like it evolved from quid pro quo to a genuine threat. Careful, youngling, you catch flies with honey, and there is no need to flex your muscles at a senior god. Nor have I need to lie when both our motives are assuredly pure. Tis a weapon, lying, and weapons are only needed in defense, if one is wise. Weapons also remain well-whet when not used in excess. I do not wish for my lover to be long troubled. I will put his mind at ease, I promise you.”
The smile that follows could slice a diamond; it decisively claims the argument closed.
Loki turns a look of muted exasperation on his elder brother. He understands and concurs, really, that Thor’s purpose in life is to be a big brother, and therefore, to occasionally pester Loki until the witchling sees red.
But Loki’s eating his game hen–for once, he was permitted to eat something other than the red meat that upsets his somewhat delicate constitution–and the thunderling interrupts this most wondrous occasion with the finger suspended midair.
“Stop,” he insists, rather factually, already calculating whether or not mother and father will notice if he transmogrifies Thor’s whole arm into a bare chicken wing. Probably, if Thor made a fuss, but Thor making a fuss means he’ll have to admit he was bothering Loki, so there’s Loki’s leverage.
Loki studies the young Coptic Trickster, irked by her presumptuous invasion of his personal space, with an air of icy hauteur.
He would dismiss her on the spot but for his abiding respect for her father, Anubis, and any other death god, for many times death has brushed its fingers over Loki’s skin, but mercifully not taken a stranglehold.
“I will see what I can do,” is all he commits to, holding unnaturally still; the frozen stature is the learned byproduct of a lifetime of being safer when unobtrusive while family members raged their displeasure at each other; and, more recently, being the direct victim of war prisoner abuse. Layla may or may not know that Loki shares these experiences with Tony Stark, whom she seems to have already met under catastrophic circumstances. Loki is not about to ask her.
Loki climbs out from behind the mound of leaves, all the brilliant hues of October, brandishing both her knives, stained a screaming red.
She tosses the long braid of inky curls over one shoulder, and licks chapped lips. She examines her brother’s face, full of consternation, and chuckles. It’s the sound of a dry November forest floor rustling.
“The, ah, backside of our ambush is curtailed,” she reports, jade eyes unkindly bright, wiping her forehead with the back of a hand.
Stared at the knives, bloodied and beheld by his sister for a moment before nodding, not curtly, but in the way he nodded when he was being direct and to the point about something. He accepted the statement she had given, and he shifted a little on his feet, feeling the tell tale rumbles of thunder deep in his bones. When Thor got testy, one could tell. As a storm almost always approached thereafter.
“You have of course, out done yourself.” He comments, not giving the compliment lightly. “How do you surmount we are doing in terms of being successful? Should we launch a counter attack?” He asks, pushing one hand through his hair, keeping an ear out for any sneak attacks. As would sometimes happen when they were in the middle of battle. Hand clenched about the hilt of Mjolnir.
“And, because you were just out there, how do you believe we should proceed?”
Loki looks up from wiping her blades clean with a previously immaculate cloth, which she now folds into the pouch strapped to her belt. No sense in depositing it on the ground, where the hounds of the foe might use it to track her.
The thunder that beckons across the skies serves as signal and warning; as ever, Loki feels mingled pride and foreboding. Her brother, without exaggeration, is terrifying, and belonging in the shadow of a tempest Thor conjures is thrilling in the sublime and awful way that any force of nature is.
Her smirk is smug as she addresses him.
“They are comprised of primarily rock trolls, with a handful of elves wearing the extremist insignia of a secessionist sect. They do not represent Alfheim proper; I have dealt with their scouts. Presumably the rock trolls go in blind, so our advantage is exceedingly great. But never be overly confident, brother.”
Oh, she knows this warning against recklessness is futile, but she must try.
icyxmischief 