Sometimes, the world was a dark, cold place that threatened to devour him. Loki remembered sitting in the sun, wrapped in warmth, his chest so full of happiness, he thought he would burst. He remembered the cold wind bitting his cheeks and warm lips on the tip of his nose; remembered tiredness, crankiness and hunger melting away at the sound of shrill laughter. Now, though, everything was too quiet, the light too dull, the stars nowhere to be found. Where had the stars gone?
He slept rarely, but when he did, it was for weeks at a time. His dreams were as empty as the rest of him, haunted by shadows and snippets of conversation he could almost recall. He didn't speak; his head was empty; his tongue lay too fat and heavy in his mouth. He didn't eat; a black abyss sat in his belly; there wasn't room for anything else. Food tasted like ash anyway.
Usually, he sat by the window, staring glassy-eyed through the visitor's comings and goings. His mother sat by his side whenever she wasn't occupied with her queenly duties. His brother stormed around the room for a couple of minutes, growing increasingly frustrated with Loki's apathy until he finally slammed the door. His father never visited. Neither did his friends. He wasn't confined to his rooms, but Loki found no reason to wander beyond them. His legs were too stiff, his feet too heavy anyway. Books and magic held no interest; art and music rolled over him without touching his soul. Loki sat and stared and drowned silently in the soft echo of cries.
The attendants that manhandled the prince around had been sworn to secrecy, but that didn't stop the rumors. The story whispered in the palace's corridors described a strange sickness, a maladie contracted on Miđgard, a parasite of the brain, or a human virus the young prince—so prone to illness—had caught. At the queen's insistence, servants took him to the gardens and tried to engage him in conversation. They sat him on stone benches and at picnic tables and beneath massive trees, their branches heavy with peaches. They talked to him, read to him, or ignored him. Mostly, they tried not to stare and wonder where the youthful prankster they had known for centuries had gone.
****
Loki didn't weep. Not when he heard children laugh and shout in the distance. He didn't weep when it rained or when his keepers read him sad stories. He didn't weep when the sun set behind the mountains, and the roaring of the sea under his window was loud enough to drown out the world.
No matter where he went, he heard the incessant cry of a baby. He didn't know why it wouldn't stop, but the screaming babe was driving him crazy. Why would nobody shut it up? One night, when the heaviness in his body ebbed, he tore his rooms to shreds, trying to find the child. He shredded tapestries, toppled bookshelves down, scratched and bit and yanked at everything he could get his hands on. The baby kept crying: desperate and suffering and completely out of reach. His mother's scream when she found him, was only barely louder than the constant cry.
"Why won't she shut up?" Loki asked from the place he had collapsed on the floor. "Why won't she stop crying?"
"Oh, my love," sobbed Frigga, wrapping her arms around him, as if that could keep the pain away. "Nobody's crying."
At some point, Loki understood that the baby was something else only he could hear, like the singing of the Universe in the air, and so he let himself drift back into the darkness until he forgot that he couldn't hear the song of magic anymore.
He remembered a dreamed world full of wonders. He thought there had been something before the crying baby girl and the unbearable dullness. He had enjoyed- something- Loki couldn't muster enough interest to find out what that was. Soon enough the void inside him swallowed that realization, too.
***
Loki squinted around, trying to understand where he was. Around him, the gardens gleamed, decked in golden garlands for a festival or other. The sun hung high in a cloudless sky. The air was warm and full of birdsong. He turned to see where his husband had gone, only to see an aesir woman scolding two boys. She was dressed in a rich brocade red dress; her hair pulled into an elaborate diamond studded updo. The children were biting their lips, their noses bright red, and their fists balled tight as they tried to swallow their tears.
The prince barely had time to turn away before being powerfully sick.
***
Beyond the large windows, the sky was overcast, heavy with snow clouds, and the dining room was warm. Loki sat at the table, on the golden plate in front of him something red that made his stomach turn. Across from him, sat Frigga. She looked pale, dark shadows under her eyes - had she been ill? Thor was to his father's right, nodding dutifully at whatever nonsense Odin was saying. He stared at the man who had been his father and was now just a giant. A looming shadow, broad around the shoulders, with silver hair cascading down his shoulders and a neatly braided beard speckled with blood. He sat like a king at the head of the table, dressed in a comfortable shirt. Round-chested and ruddy-cheeked in the smothering heat, guzzling down mead from a cup that was never empty. Gorging himself from a plate that was always full. His hands were large enough to snap a tree in half, covered in age spots and callouses from all the wars he had waged. All the lives he had taken.
For the first time in his life, Loki looked at the man who fathered him and hated him. He didn't know why, only that he wanted his kingly blood on his tongue. Fire pulsed in his veins; snakes coiled around his muscles, ready to strike. His heart pounded in time with the baby's wailing. He wasn't aware of summoning knives, wasn't aware of moving, or casting. The world sharpened. The Universe sang loud enough to drown every other sound. Someone screamed. Or maybe Loki did. He didn't know. The only thing that was real was Odin's life in his hands and the desperate urge to kill him.
Thor threw him off the tyrant. Loki slammed against the wall, the air rushing out of him. His mouth was moving; the Universe's music cracked. Loki blinked, and Thor was on him, shoving him into the floor hard enough to make the wood crack and splinter. The baby screeched. Thor's expression was a mask of confusion and pain, his sleeves were on fire. Everything moved too quickly, too slowly, colors bled into each other, and he couldn't breathe, couldn't think. Looking into his brother's eyes, he understood that he was alone.
Loki closed his eyes and let himself fall into the darkness again.
***
The large gilded mirror on the wall reflected somebody tall and pale. The man had long, bright orange hair and dull, forest-green eyes.
Fireminx, whispered a kind, loving voice into his ear and Loki half turned before remembering that he wasn't there. Not anymore. The prince swallowed the lump in his throat and dropped his eyes to the hands folded in his lap. He barely recognized them. They had been different, not that long ago, smaller, calloused from working, from cooking and mending and cutting wood. He had kissed Loki's blisters when he complained.
The man in the mirror used to be familiar. Tall, and reedy, muscles corded tight under his pale skin. Now, it looked wrong. Too flat without his breasts, his manhood something strange.
You look beautiful no matter what skin you wear, said that loving voice. Loki could almost feel their breath on the back of his neck, the brush of those lips, the careful, shy hands wandering featherlight over his skin. His heart lurched, his stomach turned. The void in his lower belly threatened to eat him alive. Loki tried to shift, shed his skin as he had done so often. He willed his body to turn from man to woman. It had been easy. Loki remembered how easy it had been. His body was made for change, every skin had felt as comfortable as tailored clothes.
Now- Now the very thought made him nauseous. His too-large hands trailed over the flat planes of his chest, willed it to fill, his body to shrink those two inches, his hips to widen. Why? Why couldn't he change?
She was dead, too. They had killed her, too.
A sob exploded against the walls. Those large, dexterous hands summoned a knife. The magic was jerky and stuttery but still there. The man in the mirror wailed, crumpled on his knees, choking on a mourning that never ended. Loki took the knife to those bright red curls. She was dead. She had a right to rest with- with-
The baby cried, and the prince wondered if she would ever stop.
***
Time passed.
His hair grew black and thick, and if he had once been a redhead, nobody ever mentioned it. His body grew stronger, his tongue sharpened once again. The void and the baby were constant companions, but he learned to ignore them, to push the noise to the back of his mind until it blended with the constant song of the Universe, to fill his time and his head with ideas and activities and projects until he forgot it was there.
Loki was alone. He knew there ought to be someone he could talk to. Friends or companions who used to fill his life, their names on the edge of his consciousness. But they weren't in Ásgarđr; they weren't anywhere he went, and nobody ever asked about them, wondering why he was a lonesome recluse. So, he assumed they didn't exist either. Maybe he had always been alone. Maybe those friends whose shapes he remembered from a time before were like the crying babe and the song of the Universe, just another symptom of his splintering mind.
The prince clawed his way back to the light. He shape-shifted less. There didn't seem to be a point anymore. His skins became a tool to use only when it was useful, and if a part of him still enjoyed the way his muscles stretched and flexed when he did, he understood that nobody else liked it, and he shouldn't either.
"Someday," his mother said, sitting in the weaving room. Loki loved the weaving room because it was the one place his father would never set foot in, "you will find a good girl, and you will fall in love and have many children."
"Will he kill them, too?"
Frigga stayed very still, looking at him with horror. The silence would have been unbearable, hadn't it been for the baby screaming.
"No, my son. Nobody will touch your family."
Loki nodded.
A part of Loki understood why it had to be done. He had shamed his family, he was wrong and monstruous and argr. He shouldn't have played with his shape and his magic like that. He had stepped over an invisible line that couldn't be crossed and had to be punished.
Another, larger, - secret - part of him didn't understand why it had felt so right. Why had he felt so happy and why did he mourn so deeply when it had been such a deviation?
***
The prince started taking partners to his bed once again. At some point, it didn't feel like cheating anymore.
Loki concluded that the problem had been turning himself into a woman and seeking humans. That was wrong. He couldn't turn into a woman anymore, but that didn't mean he couldn't take men. As long as he was careful, as long as they weren't human, as long as he wasn't always the bottom, it was ok.
None of this, right as it was, made him feel any cleaner.
***
Thor stopped tiptoeing around him. He made jokes and dragged his brother about with his – their? - friends.
At some point, Loki discovered that nobody knew the truth. Nobody was allowed to know. Ásgarđr had to be protected from Loki's shame. If anybody found out, the Allfather's power could be weakened. So, the story was that Loki had been sick, but he was better now.
Anger burned in Loki's chest, but he didn't challenge Odin's decree. That felt like a betrayal, too.
***
Some nights, when he drank too much, or when the void seemed to yawn wider than usual, or when the child had been more persistent in his crying, he would curl in his bed and weep.
That was shameful, too, so he took great care not to let anyone know.
Huddled under silencing spell over silencing spell, Loki screamed their names. Sometimes, he conjured up an image of him, his strong and handsome Sigfried. Loki would imagine himself being held in strong, warm arms, a low accented voice mumbling sweet nonsense into his ear, running calloused hands through his hair.
He couldn't bring himself to conjure up the image of his children.
***
Time passed. Time would heal, they said. Time did heal, leaving something scarred and ugly behind. Loki learned to hide what was so wrong about him. He masked that curiosity that was forbidden and that sometimes burned deep in his gut.
He learned to smile brightly and be truthful. The child wept softly in the background, but the magic of the Universe sang, and Loki learned to believe that it wasn't horrible. And if mockery and slights burned, he learned to counter those, too.
He sneered at those man-children that still held tight to that great weakness-Sentiment.