See Loki, fighting his brother while the man he thought of as his father drowses in the Odin Sleep, the realms of Jotenheim and, to his mind, Asgard hang in the balance. The Bifrost screams, the rainbow bridge groans, the stars spin so bright and cold and lifeless. See Loki thrashing his brother, a man he had fought beside for hundreds of years, the boy he learned sums with and played with and led campaigns with. See Loki beyond anger, his heart pulled to the breaking point, descended beyond rage and hate and madness to the other side, sanity without clarity.
“Tell me what made you. So. Soft!” he snarls through gritted teeth, lips peeled back. “Don’t tell me it was that mortal girl!”
Thor has no answers for him. “Oh. It was!” he screams. A thousand lightyears away a woman rocks her twin infants in their cradle, but his mind does not scatter to the little ones. He thinks of a woman, mortal, frail, completely mad, his folly. He thinks it is fortunate to sever himself from her, from one who will die so soon, a blink in his lifespan. Her life is a flash in the pan—it sears him to the bone, brief but blinding. She will never know a realm besides Midgard. She could never share her life with him; they could never pool their knowledge, could never exchange resources, could never build a partnership to make the Nine shudder in horror or awe. “Well maybe I’ll pay her a visit!” An empty threat. He will never see Midgard again. He cannot go home.
The young ones have raven hair and delicate features. Aristocratic, he thinks. They watch him with wide eyes. “Are they…”
“They’re mine,” she tells him with a ghost of a smile. She runs her fingers through the little girl’s soft hair.
He swallows. “But are they—“
“They’re mine.” She has steel in her voice and ice in her eyes. He forgot that about her. She is greedy and selfish; she sees the soil she treads upon as hers, the skies above her are hers, everything she touches and smells and imagines is hers. These two are hers, so much so that they could never be his as well. He closes his mouth.
“I see.”
“You don’t,” she sighs. “But maybe one day you will. Go home, Loki.”
“My home is a prison cell.”
She gives him a sardonic look. “But it is your cell, my prince. Your home, your realm, your life. Come back to me when you learn the mysteries of that. Or when you can pay child support. Whichever comes first.”
He returns to her two weeks later with a purse of gold. She laughs when she weighs it in her palm, but she does not refuse the gift. “Will you teach me the mysteries?” he asks, not daring to meet her eyes.
She runs her fingers through his hair, and when he touches those locks his fingertips explore a loose braid there, left as if by magic. “No,” she tells him with a grin. “But if you keep your eyes peeled and ask the right questions I might let you learn some.”
Thor loves a mortal who is plagued by the Aether. Loki wishes Thor would renounce his foolish dream, forget the mortal girl. She will only hurt him, break him, crack open his heart like a nut and feast on what she finds inside before shuffling off this plane of existence without so much as a by your leave.
Loki wishes he could follow his own advice.
Thadcus pours over applications to colleges. Good colleges, his mother assures Loki. She beams with pride, she glows with it, while she folds freshly laundered towels. The house smells of soap and lemon and baking bread. Somewhere in the house, Raven goes over her notes, “cramming” for a final exam. “They both will graduate summa cum laude,” their mother tells him, playing oblivious to his reticence.
He takes the basket of warm towels from her. “Come to Asgard with us.” He knows what she will say, but he must ask again.
“I have no place there, you know that.”
He could scream. He could throw the basket, break something, and sow chaos and destruction all across the realm. He could fall to his knees, beg, sob, plead. The answer will always remain the same.
“I made something for you.”
Raven once told him that the mark of a witch lies in her pie. A low level witch can read and follow a recipe and make a passable pie. A better witch can trick someone else into making a pie and take the credit. An even better witch knows the mysteries of pie making; she knows to follow the recipe, to substitute Crisco with lard (purchased from a reputable source), to keep her fingers out of the crust (otherwise the oils in her hands will turn it gray), to measure shortening with the help of icy cold water, to manipulate the weather into an environment with the perfect amount of ambient humidity, air pressure, and temperature. Loki’s first attempt at baking the infernal pie resulted in gray crust, burnt edges and crunchy filling. The second attempt went slightly better and it will have to do.
The mother of his children smiles at the offering. “I don’t like apple pie.”
He does not deflate, but rallies. “Everyone likes apple pie. I made it special!” She raises an eyebrow, so he switches tactics. “Fine, I tell a lie; I didn’t make it at all. I bought it from Kroger. I thought it would be nice with dinner, and I have been told that it is rude to arrive to a host’s house empty handed. So take it.”
“Loki,” she sighs.
“Please.”
She does not eat the pie. Hours spent slaving in a kitchen wasted, not to mention the work he put into stealing Idunn’s apples. The twins demolish it after dinner and do not comment on the way Loki glares daggers at their mother, or how she pretends not to notice.
The twins are kitted in some kind of fusion between Aesir fashion and something he might find at the Renaissance Festival. Thor has only one setting for conversation and that is Loud. He makes boisterous conversation at Raven and Thadcus, the three excited to see Asgard together, chomping at the bit to be gone.
Loki follows their mother into the garden on the flimsy pretense of helping her gather produce to bring to Odin’s table as a gift from Midgard to Asgard. “Why will you not join us?” He has not fallen into despair, but he cannot help the saddened note falling into his tone, the way he eyes the handsome wicker basket he carries and she fills with green bell peppers and red tomatoes instead of looking her in the face. Even this far into the garden he can hear Thor talking up the wonders of Asgard, the golden prince’s voice drifting down on the summer breeze.
“I am mortal, Loki.”
“Yes, but you need not be!”
She straightens from her crouch and fixes him with a Look. Already the years have left their mark on her, leaving creases about her eyes, the freckles on her face and arms and shoulders more prominent than the year before, a few scattered silver hairs mixed into her brown curls. “I am mortal, Loki,” she restates, as if that fact were a fulcrum upon which the universe turned. “I am human. Everything that I am and can be is human. And my children are human, even if they share their genome with the Jotnar and their culture with the Aesir. I have no such connections. I do not belong on Asgard as they do. Prolong my life and I will become a stranger in a strange land; I will lose one of the things that makes me what I am.”
“Then are your children not human?” Perhaps it is petty to sneer, but she takes no notice.
“They are human, through and through. And they are Aesir also. And they are Jotun. They are human when they turn blue in the biting winter wind, and they will stay human when they eat one of your golden apples, and they will be human all their lives.”
“You are supporting my argument.”
A murder of crows bicker and scold one another in a copse of trees at the end of the yard. Fluffy white puffs of milkweed drift on the late afternoon breeze; Raven once referred to the cottony things as “tree dandruff” and Loki could think of them as nothing else ever since. “My mother made a quilt once,” she says, apropos of nothing. “She was very proud of it. So proud, in fact, that she wished to make a second one, but the price of quilt squares being what they were, she took up crocheting instead and she made a beautiful afghan from two skeins of discount yarn.” She drops another tomato in the basket. “Now, she planned to give me the quilt when I married, but seeing as I never did she gave it to my sister on her wedding day.”
“Don’t change the subject.”
“Shut your mouth and open your ears and you might learn something. Where was I? Oh yes, the quilt. Some years pass and the quilt starts to show some wear. One of the corners got singed in an unfortunate incident, so my sister cut out the three squares that were damaged and sewed in fresh new ones to replace them. Good as new. Months later a few other squares got into a fight with a bleach spill and lost. So she cut those out and replaced them. Rinse and repeat.”
She straightens up and stretches, the vertebrae of her back popping alarmingly. “It’s a large quilt, made of many different squares. She’s going to give it to her eldest daughter when she marries, or to Raven should she marry, whichever comes first. And perhaps Raven will find a nice man, or a woman, and they’ll put a shiny rock on her finger and the quilt will come to her. Over time she will have to replace a square or two, probably more. And she will hand the quilt off to her hypothetical daughter should she hypothetically marry, and so on. And she will replace squares as they discolor or rot with age. Eventually every single square will be replaced, and not a single stitch of my sainted mother’s work will remain. But.” She takes the heavy basket from him and braces it against her hip. “But it will still be my mother’s quilt, not the same as when she passed it down to my sister, but still her quilt.
“The afghan, on the other hand, is not made of different fabric squares. It is made of interwoven lengths of yarn, and if it should become damaged the whole thing must be replaced. There is no way to change it or save it that will keep it the same blanket my mother crocheted when she was young. It is not an adaptable thing. Useful and warm, but not adaptable.”
“So your children are quilts and you are an afghan,” Loki translates, unimpressed. “Why should you wish to remain as you are when you can be transformed? I know you have arthritis in your shoulders, and your knees are next. Already your body is betraying you. How long before your mind does the same?”
She smirks. “It matters because I am human. I am human because it matters. If I lose that I will not be Aesir, or Jotnar, or anything else. I will be nothing.”
“I do not understand.”
She smells of sweat and soap and the summer breeze. She plucks a stray cottonwood seed from his hair and lets it go to drift on the restless air. “My prince, you don’t even know what you don’t know. But if you keep your eyes peeled and ask the right questions. Well.” She turns on her heel and makes her way back to the house, calling over her shoulder, “I might let you learn some.”