Lullabye (Ship of Nails: Part 2)
Mar. 3rd, 2020 02:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
coldsongLoki is careful in the wake of his breakdown.
Abandoning the children to lurk in the Wilds and sort himself out is simply not a possibility. Neither is passing over the incident like nothing happened. A balance of sorts must be struck, and days are split between lessons and friends willing to watch them with him, to sit by his side and make themselves his moral support. It turns out there is no shortage of friends, and while Loki is more inclined to chalk that up to the children’s charisma than his own worthiness, it helps to see it.
At night, he has Mrs. Hedgeworthy, or a friend staying over, or both.
It’s not really the children that are the issue, of course. It’s him, and the crushing weight of the loss they all bear and cannot relieve from one another.
As for the four kids, they are not there to bear his burdens; he is the adult, they are the children. They are his responsibility, not vice versa. He makes that clear, he thinks, with his soft whispers every time he tucks them into bed, half-sung lullabies to the tempo of the night wind tapping branches against their windows. Hush, child, I am here, I am not leaving you. I swear it on everything that is sacred.
He can’t shake the thought that they are all dead. Morbid, awful, but whatever versions of these little ones existed in his own world, they never had the chance to escape the Statesman that these four did. He never did, either. Did he fail them?
The feeling of desperate fingers slipping between his into darkness haunts him. Precious things are so easily lost, sometimes before you even know what it is you hold.
Agnarr, Sigrid, Una, Eindrid. Like him, they are both dead and alive. They are of Asgard and not-so. He did not expect to become a part of them, and yet here they all are, in this ambiguous space, waiting for a sign of something better to come.
Tonight he cannot sleep. He can tell as he tucks them away and kisses four small foreheads in turn that there will be no rest for him this night. It’s something about the quality of the light that he’s come to recognize. It precipitates his hallucinations, heralds the whispers in his ears and the glimpses of familiar faces in dark windows, a greyness to the normally vivid colors around him, as if he’s passing through a veil.
He is consumed, at times, by fear and pain, but never yet conquered.
“Will you be all right if I go out?” He asks his housekeeper vaguely, already putting on his coat. “I need...air.”
She eyes him uncertainly; it’s already obvious that he’s going no matter what she says. “Be back before they get up,” she tells him.
“I always am.”
----
The night is cold; even Loki’s cool breath steams in the air. The moon is full, though, bright silver in the starry sky. Just the one moon tonight; there are times there are two, or three, or more. Still, there is light on the snow, and overhead an occasional flicker of green and violet, like a fitful aurora.
Beautiful. He had thought at first to ride the wind, but in the face of this silent glory he walks, instead, taking a path through the woods, deeper into the wild. Nights are getting shorter now, Wintertime winding its way down but not yet ready to sleep. Often, in his experience outside the Nexus, the Season has a final bite to deliver before its rest. He wouldn’t count on there being no trouble yet. But for now, the face of the cold has its gentle side turned toward him.
He’s not sure how long he wanders, letting bare fingers run between iced-over branches, taking slow steps in knee-deep snow, listening as if for a kulning-call that never comes. He finds a feather trapped in ice on the edge of a frozen stream, but there’s too much blue in it to be from a crow. A jay, perhaps. If there are portents abroad, they are giving him a wide berth.
But he is not alone. He becomes aware of a soft step behind and to the right of him, a little snap of branches, a gasp of breath. The gait is two-legged. Whoever it is has taken higher ground than he, up the bank of the stream he’s following; they are above him. Paranoia creeps up his spine, and he turns, calling out harshly, “Speak, or show yourself! I am in no mood to be toyed with tonight.”
There’s a pause, and then a small form appears, silhouetted in the starlight. He recognizes it at once.
“Agnarr?” For just a second Loki fears he might be hallucinating again, but there is something honest, bright and heavy and real about the shape of the child he sees. “Norns’ sake! What are you doing out here? It’s dangerous!”
He makes his way up the slope hurriedly, cups the silent boy’s face in his hands as if to check if he’s cold. Predictably, he is slightly underdressed, with a coat but no hat or gloves, and Loki quickly bundles him in his own scarf.
“You shouldn’t be out here either, then.” The boy signs, and a stubborn frown settles on his face. “Not alone.”
“I’m over a thousand years old, boy. I can look after myself. You, on the other hand--”
Agnarr surprises him then, smacking both of his hands away and stepping back, his hand gestures emphatic. “You can’t keep using us as an excuse! The others don’t notice but I do and I won’t let you!”
“What do you mean an excuse?” He can’t disguise the surprise and outrage in his voice. They children rarely talk back to him, and when they do, it’s usually only refusing to eat their vegetables or take their bath. This is new, and very strange.
“You’re hiding behind us,” Agnarr accuses. “Acting like everything you do is because you have to protect us, ignoring it when you’re hurt and pretending it’s because we can’t handle it if you get upset. I watched people die and you think I can’t handle it if you’re crying? Do you think I’m weak, or stupid?”
His eyes are welling with tears, and Loki finds himself gaping, utterly bewildered by this new perspective. “I...of course I don’t, I only--”
“We NEED you. You can’t not take care of yourself and then pretend it’s because of us; that’s not fair! You can’t just walk off into the night like this anymore!”
He has no idea what to say. Loki sinks to one knee and pulls the boy into his arms. The little body is stiff for a split second, then grips onto him tightly, hugging with all his might. He can feel the hitch of sobs, though there is no sound.
There is a space of several minutes. A cloud covers the moon then retreats, and Loki becomes aware that his own tears are making frost patterns on his cheeks. “I have hurt everyone who ever loved me,” he says quietly. “And who I have ever loved. Hurt them unfathomably. I cannot bear to add any more names to that list. Please understand, it’s not a lack of faith in you, but in myself.”
He lingers in the hug, which precludes any possibility of the boy responding in signs. After a moment, he goes on, “I’m terrified, älskling. My reasons to keep going on are all wrapped up in the people around me. You, Thor, my friends and my lovers. Every last one of you so fragile, and probably safer the further away you are from me.”
A small hand curls around his braided hair and tugs, just this side of painful, and he forces himself to let go so Agnarr can sign to him. “You can’t protect people from loving you. That’s stupid.”
“If you’re sick, then you’re sick, and we’ll be with you until you get better, because we’re your family. Don’t leave us behind when you’re hurting. We still want you when you’re not perfect.”
The moment that Kurse turned around and forced the impaling blade through Loki’s heart felt no less acute than this, no less painful, no less revelatory.
To prove that I am a worthy son...
I could have done it, father!
Hello, Mother, have I made you proud?
...Do you think so little of me?
Was it Odin’s fault that Loki always felt love was contingent upon him proving himself, over and over and over again? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe it was only Loki’s own awareness of not-belonging torturing him, telling him that if he could just find the right formula, the right trick, he could earn what he so desperately craved.
How absurd is it that it takes a barely-pubescent child to explain this to him?
His vision blurs and swims but he can still see the little hands signing, “You said you still love me even if I never can talk again. It’s the same.”
“I did. I did say that. And I meant it,” he laughs weakly, and sits in the snow, dissolving into emotion for a moment. The boy puts his arms around him again and rests his chin on top of his head, and for several minutes that’s all there is in the world, and all either of them needs.
At last, Loki recovers and stands again, taking the boy’s hand in his to turn and walk homeward. He’s reminded suddenly of the times Odin took him into the wild, with Hoenir, for camping trips, training in woodcraft and fighting. He always came home feeling like a failure--even when he didn’t run afoul of a giant and end up kidnapping Idunn--and yet he came to know the twists and turns of Asgard and Vanaheim better than almost anyone. What could have been going on in his adopted father’s head, he wonders, to teach him such things? Frigga was so sure that everything Odin did was done with a purpose, but Loki himself has layers upon layers of motivations and purposes, some of them at odds with each other--and so did Odin.
For all he knows now, he was sabotaging himself, teaching Loki to resist his own plans for him, accidentally or deliberately. Loki has grown up into a strange tale, as told by a drunken man.
And yet, loved. In spite of all odds.
“You tracked me well,” he tells Agnarr in a hoarse voice as they wind their way through the trees. “And kept pace despite shorter legs. Do you know that that’s remarkable?”
The boy looks up, more used to tender encouragement than praise from his guardian, scrubs his sleeve across his face, and grins wordlessly.
“In the Spring, we’ll have to come out camping,” he says. “You and I. Maybe Thor as well, if he’s interested?”
Agnarr nods and squeezes Loki’s hand.
“Good,” the god says softly, and kisses the top of his head. He’ll do better than Odin did, he tells himself.
And if he doesn’t...well, apparently he will be loved anyway.
((Musical inspiration))
Abandoning the children to lurk in the Wilds and sort himself out is simply not a possibility. Neither is passing over the incident like nothing happened. A balance of sorts must be struck, and days are split between lessons and friends willing to watch them with him, to sit by his side and make themselves his moral support. It turns out there is no shortage of friends, and while Loki is more inclined to chalk that up to the children’s charisma than his own worthiness, it helps to see it.
At night, he has Mrs. Hedgeworthy, or a friend staying over, or both.
It’s not really the children that are the issue, of course. It’s him, and the crushing weight of the loss they all bear and cannot relieve from one another.
As for the four kids, they are not there to bear his burdens; he is the adult, they are the children. They are his responsibility, not vice versa. He makes that clear, he thinks, with his soft whispers every time he tucks them into bed, half-sung lullabies to the tempo of the night wind tapping branches against their windows. Hush, child, I am here, I am not leaving you. I swear it on everything that is sacred.
He can’t shake the thought that they are all dead. Morbid, awful, but whatever versions of these little ones existed in his own world, they never had the chance to escape the Statesman that these four did. He never did, either. Did he fail them?
The feeling of desperate fingers slipping between his into darkness haunts him. Precious things are so easily lost, sometimes before you even know what it is you hold.
Agnarr, Sigrid, Una, Eindrid. Like him, they are both dead and alive. They are of Asgard and not-so. He did not expect to become a part of them, and yet here they all are, in this ambiguous space, waiting for a sign of something better to come.
Tonight he cannot sleep. He can tell as he tucks them away and kisses four small foreheads in turn that there will be no rest for him this night. It’s something about the quality of the light that he’s come to recognize. It precipitates his hallucinations, heralds the whispers in his ears and the glimpses of familiar faces in dark windows, a greyness to the normally vivid colors around him, as if he’s passing through a veil.
He is consumed, at times, by fear and pain, but never yet conquered.
“Will you be all right if I go out?” He asks his housekeeper vaguely, already putting on his coat. “I need...air.”
She eyes him uncertainly; it’s already obvious that he’s going no matter what she says. “Be back before they get up,” she tells him.
“I always am.”
----
The night is cold; even Loki’s cool breath steams in the air. The moon is full, though, bright silver in the starry sky. Just the one moon tonight; there are times there are two, or three, or more. Still, there is light on the snow, and overhead an occasional flicker of green and violet, like a fitful aurora.
Beautiful. He had thought at first to ride the wind, but in the face of this silent glory he walks, instead, taking a path through the woods, deeper into the wild. Nights are getting shorter now, Wintertime winding its way down but not yet ready to sleep. Often, in his experience outside the Nexus, the Season has a final bite to deliver before its rest. He wouldn’t count on there being no trouble yet. But for now, the face of the cold has its gentle side turned toward him.
He’s not sure how long he wanders, letting bare fingers run between iced-over branches, taking slow steps in knee-deep snow, listening as if for a kulning-call that never comes. He finds a feather trapped in ice on the edge of a frozen stream, but there’s too much blue in it to be from a crow. A jay, perhaps. If there are portents abroad, they are giving him a wide berth.
But he is not alone. He becomes aware of a soft step behind and to the right of him, a little snap of branches, a gasp of breath. The gait is two-legged. Whoever it is has taken higher ground than he, up the bank of the stream he’s following; they are above him. Paranoia creeps up his spine, and he turns, calling out harshly, “Speak, or show yourself! I am in no mood to be toyed with tonight.”
There’s a pause, and then a small form appears, silhouetted in the starlight. He recognizes it at once.
“Agnarr?” For just a second Loki fears he might be hallucinating again, but there is something honest, bright and heavy and real about the shape of the child he sees. “Norns’ sake! What are you doing out here? It’s dangerous!”
He makes his way up the slope hurriedly, cups the silent boy’s face in his hands as if to check if he’s cold. Predictably, he is slightly underdressed, with a coat but no hat or gloves, and Loki quickly bundles him in his own scarf.
“You shouldn’t be out here either, then.” The boy signs, and a stubborn frown settles on his face. “Not alone.”
“I’m over a thousand years old, boy. I can look after myself. You, on the other hand--”
Agnarr surprises him then, smacking both of his hands away and stepping back, his hand gestures emphatic. “You can’t keep using us as an excuse! The others don’t notice but I do and I won’t let you!”
“What do you mean an excuse?” He can’t disguise the surprise and outrage in his voice. They children rarely talk back to him, and when they do, it’s usually only refusing to eat their vegetables or take their bath. This is new, and very strange.
“You’re hiding behind us,” Agnarr accuses. “Acting like everything you do is because you have to protect us, ignoring it when you’re hurt and pretending it’s because we can’t handle it if you get upset. I watched people die and you think I can’t handle it if you’re crying? Do you think I’m weak, or stupid?”
His eyes are welling with tears, and Loki finds himself gaping, utterly bewildered by this new perspective. “I...of course I don’t, I only--”
“We NEED you. You can’t not take care of yourself and then pretend it’s because of us; that’s not fair! You can’t just walk off into the night like this anymore!”
He has no idea what to say. Loki sinks to one knee and pulls the boy into his arms. The little body is stiff for a split second, then grips onto him tightly, hugging with all his might. He can feel the hitch of sobs, though there is no sound.
There is a space of several minutes. A cloud covers the moon then retreats, and Loki becomes aware that his own tears are making frost patterns on his cheeks. “I have hurt everyone who ever loved me,” he says quietly. “And who I have ever loved. Hurt them unfathomably. I cannot bear to add any more names to that list. Please understand, it’s not a lack of faith in you, but in myself.”
He lingers in the hug, which precludes any possibility of the boy responding in signs. After a moment, he goes on, “I’m terrified, älskling. My reasons to keep going on are all wrapped up in the people around me. You, Thor, my friends and my lovers. Every last one of you so fragile, and probably safer the further away you are from me.”
A small hand curls around his braided hair and tugs, just this side of painful, and he forces himself to let go so Agnarr can sign to him. “You can’t protect people from loving you. That’s stupid.”
“If you’re sick, then you’re sick, and we’ll be with you until you get better, because we’re your family. Don’t leave us behind when you’re hurting. We still want you when you’re not perfect.”
The moment that Kurse turned around and forced the impaling blade through Loki’s heart felt no less acute than this, no less painful, no less revelatory.
To prove that I am a worthy son...
I could have done it, father!
Hello, Mother, have I made you proud?
...Do you think so little of me?
Was it Odin’s fault that Loki always felt love was contingent upon him proving himself, over and over and over again? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe it was only Loki’s own awareness of not-belonging torturing him, telling him that if he could just find the right formula, the right trick, he could earn what he so desperately craved.
How absurd is it that it takes a barely-pubescent child to explain this to him?
His vision blurs and swims but he can still see the little hands signing, “You said you still love me even if I never can talk again. It’s the same.”
“I did. I did say that. And I meant it,” he laughs weakly, and sits in the snow, dissolving into emotion for a moment. The boy puts his arms around him again and rests his chin on top of his head, and for several minutes that’s all there is in the world, and all either of them needs.
At last, Loki recovers and stands again, taking the boy’s hand in his to turn and walk homeward. He’s reminded suddenly of the times Odin took him into the wild, with Hoenir, for camping trips, training in woodcraft and fighting. He always came home feeling like a failure--even when he didn’t run afoul of a giant and end up kidnapping Idunn--and yet he came to know the twists and turns of Asgard and Vanaheim better than almost anyone. What could have been going on in his adopted father’s head, he wonders, to teach him such things? Frigga was so sure that everything Odin did was done with a purpose, but Loki himself has layers upon layers of motivations and purposes, some of them at odds with each other--and so did Odin.
For all he knows now, he was sabotaging himself, teaching Loki to resist his own plans for him, accidentally or deliberately. Loki has grown up into a strange tale, as told by a drunken man.
And yet, loved. In spite of all odds.
“You tracked me well,” he tells Agnarr in a hoarse voice as they wind their way through the trees. “And kept pace despite shorter legs. Do you know that that’s remarkable?”
The boy looks up, more used to tender encouragement than praise from his guardian, scrubs his sleeve across his face, and grins wordlessly.
“In the Spring, we’ll have to come out camping,” he says. “You and I. Maybe Thor as well, if he’s interested?”
Agnarr nods and squeezes Loki’s hand.
“Good,” the god says softly, and kisses the top of his head. He’ll do better than Odin did, he tells himself.
And if he doesn’t...well, apparently he will be loved anyway.
((Musical inspiration))