Bedtime Stories // (prose for nexus_crossings)

Loki tells the children strange stories at bedtime, fairy tales surprisingly dark for little ones who have seen such horror. Not all of them end happily. In a way, though, it seems to reassure them, his half-whispered narratives of beautiful ogres and cruel kings and brave children. The world is a big, frightening, wild place, and all that stands between them and destruction are the bright flames of their will, and their love.

They knew that already. As much as they need to feel safe, they also need to feel understood, and to know that the bleak terror they’ve seen is not peculiar to them. That’s part of why Loki keeps them. There are better guardians to be found in Asvera, he knows. More responsible, more demonstrative, more patient, than he. But he’s learned the trick of embracing his own pain and rage better than most, and these children will learn it best from him.

Case in point, the four never lash out at one another. Eindrid will hit his stuffed toys, Agnarr will go outside and run until he wears down, Una and Sigrid will kick rocks and beat fallen trees with dead branches until their arms ache, but barely a harsh word passes between the children themselves. Instead, they protect and care for one another. It’s no small feat, though Loki doubts it will last through their entire youth. He is doing something right. That gives him the heart to keep on trying.

It’s not until he sees them interact with the other refugee children of Asgard that he realizes what else is happening to them; he’s created, unintentionally, a small enclave of outcasts.

-----

He brings the four to Asvera to visit, and the people there are pleasant, even warm, though their eyes are wary and wondering when they look at him. By now they know that he is not their Loki; comes from another universe, another Asgard. He is a different Jotun foundling, twice-removed from their people. Because of what he has done for them, there are no harsh words, no turned-away faces. Just quiet, awkward uncertainty, tinged with the faintest blush of awe.

Loki was dead, and walks among them again, a visitor from the Otherworld. Thor is no less a shaman, in his way, with his history of death and rebirth, with his visions, with the ground turning green and growing under his touch. But he is closer to his people. He is of them, and they of him.

Loki never was, and he never will be.

And now, he has the children, and they him. He watches them scamper in the snow with the resident children of Asvera. Some of them, too, he plucked from the Statesman with his own hands just before it was destroyed, but though he concerned himself intimately with their welfare, he did not keep them so close or so long as the four.

As with the adults, there is no overt cruelty amongst the children, and if there is bullying it is so subtle Loki himself cannot spy it at a distance. Nonetheless, he can see the walls, invisible barriers between his children and their peers. One of the girls is reluctant to take Sigrid’s hand for Red Rover. Una charges around after a group that seems to be trying to politely leave her behind (but they reckoned without her persistence.) They do not all look at Agnarr when he signs his words, and it's not because they've forgotten he can't speak.

Yes. It was like this when he was a child, too, he remembers. He was a prince, younger brother of the beautiful Thor, the son of beloved rulers, and yet always looking in from the outside, peering through invisible bars.

“For the longest time,” he tells Mrs. Hedgeworthy absently, “I thought the Mind Stone was fooling me in retrospect. I wasn’t wrong, though, was I? I wasn’t wrong about everything.”

She doesn’t know what he means, exactly, but she clicks her tongue and answers: “No one’s wrong about everything. Even a stopped clock.”

He gives her a wry smirk. “Then perhaps I am that proverbial broken clock. I’m glad I wasn’t completely deceived.”

Still, he’s sorry he passed his curse on to the children. Is it too late? If he should return them to their people, settle them in Asvera…

But that would break their already-lacerated little hearts.

----

“Once upon a time,” he murmurs as he sits by the fire that evening, with Eindrid on his lap, the others draped around him as if he were a source of warmth rather than an icicle in fine leathers, “there was a monster. A giant, with fierce red eyes and sharp teeth and wings that screamed like a hurricane. And he was a terrible thing, because he was alone.”

“Did he kill people?” Una is already intrigued. “Did he eat them?”

“Ssh,” Sigrid clasps the other girl’s hand, looking up at Loki pensively. She already guesses where he’s going with this, he thinks. Of all of them, she reads him the best.

“He did once, yes,” he answers. “But then he learned what it feels like to lose someone important to you, and he decided...he decided to be more careful with his power, to destroy those who deserved it without mercy, but to spare the innocent when he could.”

Una was really looking for gore, and seems disappointed, but she nods her understanding.

“But this story is not so much about the giant, as about his children,” Loki goes on. “There was a great flood in the village near his cave one autumn, and the frothing, raging waters brought debris past his fishing spot. In the wreck of the houses that washed past there were many dead bodies, whole families broken and taken into the deep dark water. But there was also a little coracle with four children inside, clinging in terror to one another. Two girls, and two boys.”

Sigrid takes Agnarr’s hand in her free one, holding onto it reassuringly. He smiles a little and squeezes hers in return.

“Well, he was a monster, but he did not wish to harm innocent children, or even to leave them be to fend for themselves. He pulled the boat in to shore and took them into his cave, dried them off, wrapped them in warm skins and furs, and fed them fish and the roots of cattails, and berries from the wild wood. And they began to grow strong again.”

“He kept them over the winter, caring for them as best he could, and perhaps there would have been better guardians in the world, but none of them came to take the children from him, for the roads were impassable with snow. So the giant grew to love the children dearly, and they him.”

“In the spring, when they were able to travel the roads, he carried them back to the village they came from, to see if they still had family there, cousins perhaps, that would love them as he did.”

All the children are quiet now, rapt. All of them aware the story he is telling is about them.

“It is strange how things change with even a little bit of time,” he says. “There are stories of great warriors abducted by elves, wined and dined and adored for a time, and then allowed to return to their own world only to find centuries have passed there, when their time in the magical realms seemed to them to have lasted only a few nights. The children felt that way when they walked into the village and looked around. Buildings that had been flattened had been rebuilt. There were new homes, new gardens, and while many people were missing and many monuments had been built in memory of the dead, there were new babies, as well, and lambs and ducklings and kittens in the yards.”

“The village had grown without them, and they were not sure where they belonged in it.”

Agnarr looks down and worries his lip, then raises his hands and makes some of the signs he has been taught: They belong with the giant now.

Bless the boy. Loki smiles at him gently. “Perhaps so. The giant, though, mourned for what they had lost, and what his care had cost them. A safe home, a cozier world than his wild caves. Time, he knew, would continue to make the village grow, and the children would grow as well, further and further apart from the home that was once theirs.”

He pauses a moment to collect words, and they wait for him.

“I have doomed you to my fate,” he says at length. “To be a monster’s children is almost the same as being a monster yourselves. You will watch the warm hearth from a distance; you will run wild in the woods and fields; the voices of the wind and the fire will be yours, but peace as you know it, the peace of a small home and a simple path, will not be for you. Forgive me, little ones, because I meant to give you my best, but even my best comes with a price.”

“Then we’ll pay it,” Una speaks up decisively. “I mean...the children. In the story. I bet they said that. I bet they are brave enough.”

“They were very brave, strong children,” he says softly. “And they had one another, as well.”

Sigrid knows better than most what it means to be a child of Loki. Already, she’s watched the kulning call and seen the Hunt ride; she has sat at his side as he wove seidr in the sky; she has smiled into the ruby eyes of the Jotun face he wears in the chill. She’s quiet for a moment, looking at the others, and then she leans in against his side, pulling Eindrid into an embrace.

“We’ll take care of each other,” she promises. “Always and forever.”

The children in the story, signs Agnarr. Did they live happily?

“They went through many things,” he says. “Many challenges, of sorts they never expected. They walked the line between the tame and the wild, the sacred and the unholy, in the footsteps of the giant. But there are gifts to be found in útangarðr as well as challenges, and he was ready to teach them all he knew, as was befitting for his children.”

He could not have spoken any clearer words of adoption. Paperwork might come later, formalization, an addition of his name to their own. But this, they would remember years from now, was the moment they all knew who belonged with whom. The moment they became the sons and daughters of Loki.

“I want to learn everything,” Una says, and Sigrid nods. Agnarr, often shy of touch, puts his head on Loki’s shoulder and makes a whispery noise in his throat, a barely-audible sound of agreement.

Loki smooths Eindrid’s hair and looks down at him. The toddler is sucking his thumb, but his eyes are big and alert, and he smiles at Loki.

“Well, then,” Loki says. “Let us begin.”