Chapter Text
The most curious thing about Midgard, Loki decides, is how alive it is. To be a realm so young, he realizes, is to be teeming with stories, always changing, ever vicious, clinging and scraping and struggling. Asgard, in its eternal state, had settled, the taxonomy of its histories studied, noted, tidied, forgotten. Even as a child, Loki had known he could never live the life of a scholar, honed instead for battle and diplomacy as the prince of a realm, but here on Midgard there is not much to do but remember, set into writing, restore, and learn.
And so Loki has taken upon himself the task of recording Asgard’s culture, its histories and folklore, the stories passed through song and poetry. The libraries, Loki had managed to salvage, burrowing a hole through space and time and siphoning the books into an interdimensional pocket. A simple enough working, if hastily and clumsily done. The books will have to be rearranged and set to rights, but at least they are not ash.
But there is knowledge among the people ( his people , Loki thinks, and it is not as unfamiliar or as unwanted a sentiment as he has often wished) that is not found in dusty tomes, and Loki means to be as a naturalist, plucking specimens and holding them to the light, sketching them out and keeping careful notes. Setting them somewhere safe, so they can be passed on.
The truth on Midgard is this: the gods, after all, are merely stories. And Loki hates to be forgotten.
--
They arrive in the cold of winter, at the cliff where Odin had left his sons on a course to destroy their own realm. It is a tidy enough end to the All-Father’s rule, to start anew here, at the edge of a land that once worshipped them.
Thor and Heimdall spend a week in a city called Oslo, negotiating. They return to their cliff with a promise of refuge for their people. In that week, Loki finally works out a spell to keep children from running off the edge and plunging into the cold water below. Aesir are hardy, but it is troublesome for the caretakers to be running after children all day. And whatever children they have left, they must keep safe.
As Loki perches on the edges of the cliff, and an idea forms. Slowly, he begins to weave his seidr.
--
The 25th day of the month called December, Heimdall tells them, is the feast of Christmas. It is dedicated to the son of God (the son’s name is Jesus, Thor says, but the god has no name of his own. Isn’t that strange?), and Loki tries not to rankle at the idea. He and his brother offer prayers at Yule, for it is Odin’s feast, but Asgard as it is is meager, sparse, and the celebrations are simple.
The early days of the season are for feasting, for slaughtering cattle and drinking wine, but these late days are for surviving. And there is, for Asgard, not much to do except that which is perhaps most difficult: to continue to live and breathe. To go on after the foundations have been ripped from underneath you.
They wait for spring.
--
The minutiae of ruling hold no interest for Loki, but Thor seems to have taken to it readily enough, with Heimdall at his side and his own relentless guilt. Every night, Loki eases the burden from his brother’s shoulders, only to wake up with Thor hunched at the edge of their bed, poring over reports and accounts and balances. There are bruises across Loki’s back from where Thor had clutched at him in his sleep. Loki hushes his apologies.
Meanwhile, there is little of Asgard left to be ruled. Thor organizes the tradesmen, the seamstresses, the healers, the mothers, the farmers, discusses his plans with Heimdall and tries to pull the remains of their people together. Loki finds himself being followed and accosted by a wide-eyed gaggle of children, who settle for an exchange of stories for stories, or for tricks, or for illusions, or for secrets.
Spring comes creeping with coltsfoot, which the Aesir call widow’s leaf, for their leaves only appear once the yellow flowers have withered. Like miniature suns, they peek out of the grey frost.
“I was drawn almost to weeping at the sight of them, they were so familiar,” Loki confides, later that night, and cherishes the way Thor’s eye widens, his mouth falling open a little at the confession. As if he would swallow down every little truth that Loki deems him worthy of receiving.
“You used to braid flowers into my hair,” Thor says, “Do you remember?”
“I remember,” Loki says, runs a hand through Thor’s shorn hair, and thinks: I would kill the one who did this to you .
The night, when Thor cannot sleep, Loki murmurs, “I would see your hair grow long and golden once again, brother.” So Thor knows he will be there in the morning, and for many more mornings after, and can rest with that yoke fallen from his shoulders.
--
One little girl in particular is enamored by the wildflowers, and she spends a day in the fields surrounding their new settlement, sloshing through snow left behind, and picking her way through newly-thawed ground. Loki recognizes her, for her stories are animated and ridiculous, and she holds a special talent for seidr. Her hair is the color of straw, like Thor’s was.
The story she tells Loki is a folktale he’d learned as a child as well: about the woman who had travelled seven realms to gather seven wildflowers, and slept with them under her pillow. That night, she had dreamed of her future spouse, and woke up to travel seven realms anew to find him.
The maids in Frigga’s quarters had giggled about the story to the young and impressionable sons of Odin, but wildflowers did not grow in Frigga’s gardens, and the princes never found seven of them to put under their pillows. When they were old enough to venture out of the palace, they had forgotten the stories of flowers grown wild in favor of stories of dragons, and battle, and glory.
--
Loki comes up with six and asks Svala for a seventh. The girl obliges, and says, “This one makes my brother sneeze, so Mama doesn’t want it at home.”
“You have my thanks,” Loki says, a fist upon his heart.
She smiles and says, “A favor for a favor, my prince.”
“Ah,” says Loki, solemn. “Very well.”
“My hair,” she says, “I wish for black hair. Like the woman in your story, with the golden locks turned dark as coal.”
“Your hair is beautiful as it is,” Loki says.
“I want it. For my papa,” she says stubbornly.
“Your papa must have loved your golden hair,” Loki says, for he cannot commit subterfuge or weave lies around children. He can only appeal to the truth.
“I want his hair,” she says, insisting, and is perilously close to tears, which Loki cannot abide.
“A compromise, then, my lady,” he says, and reaches out to touch a strand of her hair, where a jet black streak shoots down from the roots to the tips.
“My prince,” she breathes, in awe, then bows and runs away.
Loki stands up, seven wildflowers in his hands, and makes his way home.
--
It is merely a story, but so is Thor, and so is Loki, and yet here they are. So was Ragnarok, and it came to pass, by Loki’s hand. This will come to pass by Loki’s hand as well, and though he knows what outcome he wishes for, he cannot speak it out loud.
He places the seven wildflowers under his pillow, reciting their names in his head to send himself to sleep.
Loki’s eyes fall shut.
--
Thor leans over him and presses a kiss to his cheek, his mouth. Loki , he breathes, and Loki opens his eyes and nearly weeps for this dream.
Then Thor sneezes, and reality reveals itself.
“Not a dream then,” Loki mutters to himself, as Thor, bewildered, sneezes again.
Even gods, it seems, get hay fever.
--
When Loki tells Thor the story, pulling his pillow back to reveal the flowers, Thor laughs, and then sneezes, and then laughs some more. In retribution, Loki spells more of the wildflowers into being. His punishment is to endure Thor’s sneezy nuzzles and wet kisses.
“You are disgusting,” Loki informs him.
“Who did you mean to see in your dreams, brother?” Thor teases. He presses his chest up against Loki’s back, and Loki squirms with the heat of him, a brand draped all along Loki’s body.
Loki’s throat tightens with the words he wishes to say.
“Not me, I hope,” Thor says, still teasing, and Loki has had enough.
He wrenches himself from Thor’s arms and pushes him down, hard, into the bed, holding a hand to his brother’s, his king’s throat. His pulse is beating loudly in his ears, and humiliation is hot on his neck, his cheeks.
Thor looks up at him, fond, and smiles.
Loki tightens his grip on Thor’s throat, slowly, slowly, until Thor gasps out a laugh and says, hoarsely, “I do not understand why you would wish for a dream when I am right here, brother.”
“For how long, brother ,” Loki says. He tries to form it into a sneer, tries to spit it at Thor’s face but all his anger is in his grip on Thor’s throat, and it only comes out as a flat whisper.
Thor twists his head down to brush his lips against Loki’s wrist.
“Till the end of the world. Till the end of our world, this world, all of them, Loki.”
Finally, Loki releases Thor’s throat.
Thor takes a deep breath, and sneezes.
--
Despite the sneezes, Thor deftly weaves a crown of wildflowers, large, calloused fingers following patterns they’d learned as children. When the flowers do not have enough stems to hold them together, green flows from Thor’s fingers, seidr of a nature Loki has never seen from him. But Thor is the god of fertility and growing things, and he is coming into his own. Loki cannot begrudge him for it, not when it is so satisfying to see Thor’s power at work. Not when he places the crown upon Loki’s head.
“My husband,” Thor murmurs, “and my king. If you wish, Loki.”
“Ask me properly,” Loki says, and forces Thor’s failure by kissing him, hard.
It is a sweet victory.