Chapter Text
The first winter on their own, they would have starved to death if the cold didn’t kill them first.
Instead of hunkering down with a good stock of food and fuel, Loki finds them shelter in a drafty old hunting lodge that’s abandoned for good reason: half the windows are broken, letting in a cold piercing wind that moans and screams through the shack like a dying creature. To add insult to injury, Loki is cold all the time now. Thin-skinned and shivering in a broken-down hovel. And he, who was once a prince of Jotunheim.
And you call yourself a frost giant.
The hateful thought kicks its way through his head as he blocks up the draughty cabin with whatever he can find. His stupid pinkish white skin rips at the slightest edge, and after a few days of scrubbing and making the cabin barely habitable again, the skin on his finger pads peel back and bleed. (The skin knits itself up soon afterwards, being godskin, which in later years will frighten the local yokels).
A high-pitched wail jolts him out of his self-pity. Leah’s hungry, and so is he. They’d never really starved before, not even when they had been on the road with Grimnir—
Odin One-Eye, he tells himself angrily. Face the truth, you fool. It was right there in front of you.
Freya had the right of it. He had been willfully blind, refusing to look truth in the face because he was weak, because he wanted to sink into the comfort Grimnir offered. How easy that would have been, to be pampered and adored by a powerful lord who would see to his every need, to sink into the easy dream of love again and forget. He was weak. Weak and lazy, that’s it. Lured by Aesir softness, Aesir decadence.
And now, with only his pathetic self to rely on, his Leah is cold and hungry—he cannot let her starve. With a renewed resolved that’s as foolish as it’s fierce, he stalks out of the shelter to go hunting in a blizzard. He can do this. He can look after Leah on his own. He’ll feed her and clothe her and raise her right.
He soon realizes that for all his hardy jotunn upbringing, he has only ever learned to hunt as a prince—with someone looking over his shoulder to keep him safe and guide him toward showy prey and hand him his weapons. Too soon, and with so much anger bubbling inside him he doesn’t know what to do with, he ends up stalking a great black wolf in the dead of winter. Once the she-wolf catches his scent, there’s no backing out of this—he’s tried, but the wolf won’t let him go. She’s hungry too. The winter has been brutal on all of them.
Above his shoulder the magpie screams—Ikol, he’s forgotten all about him until now—and suddenly he feels Odin’s eye upon him and he freezes, stunned stupid as the wolf leaps for him.
They go down in tumble of fur and teeth and scrabbling knees. His knives are out seconds too late, and in the ensuing fracas, he almost gets torn to shreds, kicking and stabbing and wrestling for dear life.
He’s still stabbing at it frantically when the beast falls on him—the wolf will swallow the sun—and desperation makes him wild. (Leah’s alone, waiting for him; how could he have been so stupid?) With a sob, he shoves his black daggers into the stinking, heaving mass of death smothering him, and drags them down from throat to soft underbelly, even as the wolf mauls at his neck, his face. The daggers win out in the end, and hot guts spill out on him as the wolf slumps over his body, crushing him with her deadweight.
When he finally crawls out from under the dead beast, sobbing with relief and horror, he’s too dazed to know if he’s dead, or if he’s the wolf, or nothing more than a shredded heap of meat and bones himself. No, that would be the wolf—she’s gone, nothing left but her ruined carcass. And—his heart sinks, wailing as it falls down a bottomless pit—so is the tiny lump of blood and feathers.
“Oh… Ikol…”
Faithful bird, his canny companion. Why didn’t he just fly away, instead of clawing and pecking at the wolf when he must have known it would have come to this? Ikol is smarter than Loki. Why should Ikol die so that he can live? Ikol would have taken better care of Leah, much better than Loki can anyway. What frigg’in use is he?
Ikol’s broken body is so small in his hands, and when he sees it twitch for the last time, hope leaps so violently in his chest that he’s almost convinced that Ikol has come back to life. But all that remains of his little friend are his last words: Eat me.
“What? No!”
Eat me, you fool, or you’ll die.
He feels like he’s going to be sick—he remembers throwing up in the snow—is that happening now, or something that’s happened to someone else, or was it himself in another time—what does it even matter? He’s not going to eat Ikol. He’s not so desperate that he’ll eat the still warm body of the only friend he has left—
And too soon, the golden mist that is Ikol’s last breath fades away in the air. After a while, not feeling much of anything, Loki stupidly claws at the snow to reach frozen earth, and picks and stabs at the solid surface to make it give. He’s going to give Ikol a proper burial, dammit.
In the end, he has to give up. He can’t feel much of his toes and fingers at this point, and is pretty sure one ear is all but bitten off—by the wolf, the inclement weather, who cares? He sets Ikol’s body on fire, so wild animals won’t get at him, and somehow manages to drag the wolf’s bloody carcass home. Leah screams at the sight of him, staggering home covered in blood and guts, but she recovers quickly when she understands what this means. Success in the hunt means food and warmth.
Later, when he’s cleaning his kill, he discovers the wolf’s heavy teats—it was a nursing mother—and his heart sinks. Never harry a nursing mother, or hunt down a pregnant animal—that’s been drilled into him since he could walk. He’s hopeless, hopeless and stupid, and how will he ever survive on his own, much less look after Leah?
That’s when it occurs to him, like the gong of a distant bell, that this must have been what Ikol meant when he told Loki to eat him. He meant to pass on his knowledge that way, magic that Loki hasn’t learned yet, basic survival skills, an encyclopedia of facts, so that Loki could survive without him.
Well, it’s too late now. He starts laughing, bitterly, hopelessly, and utterly without humor, and Leah comes up to him and crawls into his lap, bloody hands and knife notwithstanding.
“Why are you crying so funny, father?” she asks, and that stops him in his tracks.
“Father’s just being stupid today, baby. He mistook laughing for crying.”
“That is stupid.”
There’s little meat on the bone, and hardly any fat to render. The pelt at least will make a warm winter coat for Leah. Leah’s eyes are bright and she dances around their drafty cabin in excitement. The black wolf pelt is so beautiful. She’s a princess! She’s never taking it off. (She never will, not father’s gift.)
And it comes to him, like an arrow out of time: Hela’s filthy wolf-skin pelt, and the bottom drops out of his stomach. Already, she is treading the steps that will lead her on the path to Death.
The next day they are holed in by another storm, but the day after that, Loki sets off to find the wolf cubs. They can’t be abandoned to starve to death without their mother. Leah insists on going with him—there’s no putting her off. Any little girl will be excited about puppies, even if they are wolf pups.
Not far away from the spot where he butchered the mother he finds her den, and pulls out the five starving mewling pups. Tears spring to his eyes as the gravity of his crime weighs down on him, and he’s wondering how to foster and feed five wolf pups when a sickening crack of a small spine being snapped in two sends shivers down his back.
His stomach turns to liquid mercury as he turns around to see his sweet Leah feasting on the raw meat of a wolf pup, her hands and mouth crimson with its blood, slurping ravenously at its soft innards like a vulture. And he remembers that moment in his past and her far-flung future when he asks her, “And what are you the god of?”
She is the Mistress of Death—
But not if Loki has any say in it. His Leah will have nothing so much love there will be no room for death. There has to be a reason he’s been thrown so far into the past he might as well be buried in time. This has to be the reason: he’ll cheat fate if it’s the last thing he does.
He saves one of the pups and names him Fenrir. The wolf can be a companion to Leah, to teach her love and friendship and kindness. It’s loyal and fierce, and if he knows what they did to his mother and brothers, the little animal does not seem to hold it against them.
The others have to be killed—they could not feed them anyway, and Leah is hungry. It is the law of nature, as her hard grey eyes remind him. Unlike Ikol, the puppies have no wisdom to offer in their flesh.
“It’s a kindness,” he tells her, though it’s mostly to reassure his own horrified feelings. “Otherwise the children will be left behind crying for their mother.”
And another piece of the terrible future slots into place. How much of Hela, and not just her body, has been shaped by Loki? How can she have Grimnir’s eyes, when he is not father of her flesh, only in spirit and by proxy?
But she is a god-child for all that. If she grew too quickly in her first year, going from newborn to toddler, now she has slowed down to enjoy all the joys of childhood. She is Loki’s little girl. He sings to her to teach her about plants and animals and the seasons, and braids her hair with flowers, and teaches her to dance. He will love the death out of her.
The image of Hela haunts his dreams, and he hugs Leah closer in the dark.
Five of his toes go black from frostbite and fall off. It’s even more painful when they grow back like new buds in spring. He will not die for a long time, but in the meantime he will suffer all the pains of the flesh.
He’s learned his lesson from their first horrible winter. They cannot survive on their own, not easily, and Leah is too young and tender to be burdened with a life of constant hardship (Leah doesn’t really mind being a wild thing).
But when the ice melts, Loki comes down to the nearest village to find work—any work. It’s easier to keep Leah fed and warm that way than scrabbling to find everything she needs himself. He makes better money as a man, as a farmhand, to clean out stables and wipe down horses and help with the harvest.
When the seasons turn and the harvest is done, he moves on to the next village, braiding his hair and dressing as a woman for the winter months, scrubbing floors and churning butter and washing clothes. It’s simpler when there’s a mistress who keeps a stern eye on her household and doesn’t let her husband get any funny ideas, but beggars can’t be choosers, and he finds out the hard way that dressing as a woman means he gets paid less to get his arse grabbed.
The first time it happens, he’s so startled he stabs the master of the house through the hand with a butter knife for getting too ‘handsy,’ and then he and Leah and Fenrir have to make a run for it, with barely enough time to pack. After that, they keep a runaway bag handy, so they can skedaddle out of there without losing the season’s wages.
The second time Fenrir gets too excited and almost bites the master’s hand off. Actually they didn’t stay long enough to find out if he hadn’t. Fenrir looks mighty pleased with himself afterwards, and Leah calls him a ‘good dog’ and makes much of him for days. And it was a good farm too, prosperous, with its silos and larders well-packed. Loki had even been toying with the idea of sleeping with the master if it guaranteed a warm bed and three square meals for himself and his kit to get them through till spring.
Winter that year is cold and lean again.
The third time, the master of the house is a widower, a large man with a barrel chest, who bears some resemblance to someone Loki dares not think about, even if Asher is dark where the other was golden.
Leah just glowers at Asher sullenly when he picks up her up and calls her ‘princess,’ and wipes off his kisses pointedly, and no amount of scolding will change her ways. Asher laughs and tells Loki she will come around, the little minx. It’s clear that he’s fond of his skinny new maid, and if he is not a great lord, only a well-to-do farmer, Asher is kind-hearted and slow to anger, though his breath stutters when he discovers that under her skirts, his maid is also a boy.
Loki’s been dreading this moment, even as he flirted madly with the man for weeks, confusing fear and excitement, getting that all mixed up in the sheer loneliness and longing that skulks in the shadows, ready to gut him late at night—he must be mad, that’s it. He’ll never have Thor again, but it’s been forever since someone’s touched him, and he just wants a good fucking, dammit.
Stupid, stupid, stupid—
His heart is pounding out of his chest as the silent seconds go by, dropping like lodestones in the lake, that he almost misses when Asher says, his voice hollow with awe as he recovers from his surprise:
“You’re one of the holy ones.” His grandfather had traveled in his youth, and filled his head with stories of other lands. “Both man and woman at once, blessed by the gods.”
Not exactly, Loki thinks, but he doesn’t correct him.
“You ran away from a temple?” the farmer asks.
“Yes,” Loki tells him, making it up as he goes along. “Holy orders—it just wasn’t for me.”
Asher’s fingers are rough from hard work but his touch is gentle as he smooths his palms up Loki’s thighs. “I always wanted to fuck a temple maiden.”
After that, it does not matter if the farmer’s sweetheart has a cock and wishes to dress as a woman. His face is prettier than any woman’s Asher’s ever seen, and his hands are fine like a well-born lady’s, despite the recent hard work. Not much work gets done that day, or night, and by the time Loki comes up for air—and remembers that he has a young child to look after, the late morning sun is streaming through the windows, and the rich farmer with the kind hands is staring lifelessly up at the ceiling of his bedroom, his throat slit open and bleeding out onto the fluffy white bed.
Loki does not scream—inside he’s kneeling in a pool of blood screaming his head off—that will only bring others here, and then he’ll be hanged, with or without a trial—what does it matter? It wasn’t his hands on the dagger, but he’ll swear to his grave that he’s the one who did it anyway. How can he not, when he knows who the real killer is. Will they hang a child? (Yes. Worse if he tells them she’s barely three years old, for all that she looks like she’s ten or even older.) They might even console themselves that it couldn’t have been the work of a sweet child, that she was possessed by a demon to do such a deed, and burn her instead.
He finds the little murderess hugging her knees in her room, glaring down at the bloody daggers. She hasn’t even washed them, or washed her own hands clean.
“He was hurting you,” Leah grits through her teeth, and Loki freezes. Is that a frisson of Hela’s voice he hears in hers?
Now is not the time to talk about sex, or his raunchy sex noises. It’s all he can do not to shake her silly, scrub her hands and change her dress, and tell her to pack quickly. They’re leaving.
He pushes down the gibbering panic as he takes care of the body. It’s not that different from a wolf, all that’s left is meat, he tells himself over and over, until he’s numbed of all feeling, just going through the motions. He buries the bloody sheets hurriedly behind the barn and they take off. Washing them will take too long, and they’ll likely get caught first.
By the time the neighbors start wondering why they haven’t seen the genial gentleman farmer around for a while, his skinny maid and her young daughter have long since fled.
They run for a long time after that. Loki doesn’t stop until the stars are different when he looks up at the sky at night, and he shaves his hair off and dresses as a young man again. They make it all the way to the borders of Alfheim, where they cool their heels and keep their heads down. For the next few years, Loki doesn’t risk dressing as a woman, doesn’t dare get close to anyone as they wander from village to village so he can find work, moving on before they can put down roots.
Alfheim. When he was little, Loki had dreamed of traveling to the ends of all the Nine Realms, imagined all the wonders he’d see. They don’t run into much in the way of wonders, just more of the same dirt and trees and rocks if you have to be careful never to make friends. Men are different here, and still just the same, hot-headed and greedy, scrabbling for more food, better clothes, a prettier wife, a younger lover, and ready to murder each other over an insult, or just because they’re just drunk.
They keep to themselves, just the way Leah likes it. Once in a while, she will play with other children, but they usually don’t like her—she’s odd and puts on airs and never knows how to play any of the games—and that makes her dislike them even more. She prefers Fenrir’s company, or best of all, father’s. Loki, remembering his own light-hearted and carefree childhood playing with his brothers and his cousins, keeps pushing her to make friends her own age. But Leah will have none of that.
“I don’t need the rest of the world. I just want you,” she says.
“But when you’re grown up…”
“Maybe I don’t want to grow up,” she tells him, and the sick lump in his stomach grows. He can’t put off thinking about this for much longer. Leah has been ‘seven’ for a very long time.
When he’s alone, Loki forces himself to account for how many years have passed since they left… Odin One-eye behind in that cave. Has it really been… seven years since then?
But outwardly Leah hasn’t aged a bit since that day. She’d looked seven then, and seven years later she still looks seven, not fourteen. If she’s making up for growing up too quickly when she was supposed to be a baby, then time has caught up with her now. Or has she pressed pause on it indefinitely? He has no idea what her godhood entails. Will she be a child forever? (Is that really so bad?)
He remembers how when he was a boy, all he wanted was father, and to fall asleep in father’s arms and feel safe and loved. And how he was sent away from father too early, still soft with the milk-fat on his cheeks, still a little cry-baby as Hel used to tease him, because he was a prince and he was special, and was meant for a special life. And just look what ‘special’ turned out to be.
Later he asks Leah—oh so carefully—if she doesn’t want to grow up and be a beautiful princess anymore. She just gives him a scornful look.
“I’m already a beautiful princess. And growing up just means men can paw under my skirts when they have an itch to scratch, and what will that get me? Some drunken lout spawning a dozen fat brats on me until my body’s worn down?” Her words are fourteen going on forty, even if her lips are only seven, and before he can tell her some easy lie, she throws her arms around his neck. “I think we’re doing all right, just the two of us. Why can’t it be this way forever, father?”
“But you’ll want more than just the two of us when you’re grown.”
“And that’s why I won’t grow up—so there,” she says, as if that proves her point, and Loki groans. “We used to have Da, and now we don’t, but we’re still all right, aren’t we?”
Da… that was what she used to call Grimnir—Odin One-Eye. She hasn’t spoken of him since that day, Loki had hoped she’d forgotten about him. She’d been so young. But what does a year, or seven, matter to a goddess, who will live for millennia?
Fenrir whines and thumps his tail on the neatly swept floor of the farmhouse kitchen, where Loki’s planning on having a very cozy winter. Fen is large for a wolf, almost the size of an ox, and they’ve been turned away from a few homesteads at the other end of pitchforks and torches. He’s still growing, the way she won’t. Leah’s face turns sly, and that knowing look in her too-young face sends a shiver of ice down Loki’s spine that has nothing to do with having been Jotunn once.
“Maybe when I grow up, I can marry you, father,” Leah tells him, hitting upon the perfect solution. “Then we won’t need to have strangers get between us. It’ll just be you and me forever.”
She’s scared, that’s all, he tells himself, even as his heart beats wildly in fear. She’s scared of change, that’s it. That’s why she murdered—
He doesn’t want to admit that he’s afraid of his own daughter, of his precious little girl, but Loki’s such a terrible liar, he can’t even fool himself.
He sits Leah down to give her a talking-to she’ll never forget. There’s nothing wrong with being a very ordinary little girl and she should enjoy it, before she grows up to become a—very extraordinary—yet utterly ordinary young woman, and have all the good things that a simple, ordinary life will allow her in all its small joys and little sorrows. She’ll find a good honest love too, someday when she’s older and understands more about these things, and with someone who is not her father. If she is frightened of the world, then she’s wiser than her years. Loki will teach her how to protect herself. She shouldn’t be afraid to live just because men are selfish and greedy.
Leah nods solemnly as she listens to Loki’s lecture on living life fully and accepting what each year brings them with grace, and does not speak out of turn.
But the next morning when she comes down to breakfast, Leah is fifteen years old, just on the cusp of maidenhood, beaming at everyone in the servant’s hall with a fresh, unspoilt beauty like those small star-shaped white wildflowers that open their faces to the dawn, and the men turn and mark her passage with a wolfish gleam of interest lighting up their eyes.
As much as Loki wants to carve their lecherous grins off their filthy faces, he’s struggling with an equally strong urge to take his terrible daughter over his knee and give her a good spanking. What will he say, that she is his sister? That won’t keep their hands off her. He’s forced to say she’s his sweetheart, and he doesn’t miss the triumphant gleam in Leah’s eye.
“Don’t look so pleased with yourself,” he tells her waspishly. “We’re leaving.”
If even one of those ignorant rubes entertains the absurd notion that the oddly familiar young beauty is the same girl as that seven-year-old oddball who’s been getting underfoot for the past six months, both father and daughter will be driven out of town and stoned, for being the wrong kind of witches. They could be burned at the stake, or worse, they’ll bring the attention of Odin One-eye down upon them, and Loki knows that if they ever fall into his hands again, Odin Allfather will shape out of Leah a weapon of such wroth that the Nine Realms will tremble before her viciousness and cruelty.
It’s time to pull up their spokes and move on again.
He is now the father of a fifteen-year-old maiden (he looks barely out of his teens himself, no thanks to the godskin). They pass themselves off as brother and sister for a while, which doesn’t prevent strangers from getting too friendly with Leah, and then they have to leave before the situation becomes too tense and Fenrir bites someone. If Loki is afraid that his daughter will murder whichever miscreant that dares lay a hand on her, he doesn’t say it out loud. He just gives her a dirty look when she suggests they pretend to be sweethearts instead, and makes her sleep with the ‘dog.’
Lately, he feels that life has made him a coward, scurrying from village to small village, trying to stay unnoticed and unseen so that they can hide in plain sight, and something inside him feels like it will burst if he cannot shout and show off and shake out all his fine feathers. He’s itching for a bit of fun, debauchery and mayhem and chaos too—but he cannot have more blood on their hands.
He can do this. Thousands upon hundreds of thousands of peasants and smallfolk go about their daily business, unconcerned with the greater doings of gods and kings over the turn of centuries. He and Leah will live out ordinary lives. Loki just needs to wait it out, to survive, to let the greater tides of fate and history pass him by until… until….
But when trouble finally catches up with them, it’s not for accusations of witchcraft.