Home-Coming
Moving: An unplottable mountain-side, Norway; the Black Lodge, unplottable mountain-side, Norway
3rd October 2003
I curl up on the boulder that is placed right beside the unseen (at least by human eyes) portal that connects Earth and Ýmirheim, staring at everything but taking in nothing in particular.
It has been ages, it feels, since the last time I breathed Earth’s atmosphere, since the last time I was purely human. I have been wondering about both, longing for both; but now that I am finally here and back in my human form – my first form, my proper form…. Well, I don’t know what is different, and it should not have felt different in the first place, but it does, and not in a good way.
Neville is standing quietly nearby, leaning against a tree and inhaling deeply, with intermittent, self-indulgent body stretches that show me how he loves to be back here, which just makes me more miserable with the added feeling of guilt. After all, I am the one who, indirectly or not, has made him and Luna stay in Ýmirheim for however long it has been: staying for an unknown, extended period of time, for the sake of somebody else that they do not often get to meet, let alone be with, in a place with that extreme a climate – which even necessitated a special treatment so that they could survive – must not have been good for them.
But they did stay, even with everything that entailed that stay. And, come to think of it again, Luna is not as visibly relieved to be back as Neville is.
In fact, she is busy going further up the trail, skipping every two steps, humming what suspiciously sounds like a non-magical children skipping-rope song, trailed by one of the security attachés belonging to the contingent of milaðen in “hot-weather form” that is a part of the stipulations for me to come back here.
Well, that is something else that might burden my friends unduly, even here, back in their – our – homeworld. They knew about it; I did talk to them about this particular stipulation of me returning here before we departed; but they could also acquiesce to being haunted by the security detail until there’s a change of arrangement just because they wanted to go home, and they wanted to do it with me somehow, and I could only come if I agreed to having this band of guards and advisors with me and monitoring my friends – at all times, for both aspects.
Not that I’m not touched or grateful about this, though! It’s nice for Amma to acknowledge that I am not only Loki but also Harry, however reluctantly, and for her to also fret about my safety and comfort and communication line and all. It’s honestly new to me, pleasantly so, after twenty-two years of neglect and abuse and manipulations that did not benefit me at all. (Well, I can’t deny it now, after lots of sessions with a magical-world-informed, non-magical counsellor.) It’s comforting, too, to have a tangible, secure and evident link to the family I have just found through these people that she has assigned to be my retinue and companions. And besides, this is a good bargaining tool for her to try to treat my elder siblings – on the milaðen part of my life – better: not prosecuting Helblindi for their unfounded, harmful aggression to me while trying to understand their point of view of why it had happened in the first place (Well, I don’t want to be hated by my eldest sibling, honestly; and they have also been punished well and fittingly, at that, in my opinion, by being forced to watch every moment of me trying to recover and piece myself back together without trying to intervene.); and not deliberately intimidating and antagonising Býleistr, too, since I read recently that a lack of presence is usually caused by not wanting to attract attention to oneself, whether in fear or deliberately, and it’s not good to maintain for a long time – more than a few minutes, as it were. But still, did she need to provide for every aspect of things that I might need and even those that I don’t think I’ll ever need? I may have to suffer being smothered in safety procedures, but must my friends suffer that, too? And Amma even assigned someone to be my nurser – and that is, literally, a person who breastfeeds me in lieu of or in addition to her own supply of breast milk!
Well, and now, the said nurser, one Eðlenstr Eðainur-childe, is playfully poking me in the ears, maybe to get me out of my sudden gloom and disorientation and off this boulder at long last, but acting like an overgrown child while doing that. To think that they are about four-thousand years old! They used to be the chief of the defence forces in a town in Ýmirheim before Amma shoved them into this contingent, at that!
And, to top it all off, Luna is skipping down and throwing herself onto my back, now.
I’m thrown clear out of the boulder, of course, and, just my luck, straight into Eðlenstr’s arms. And this overgrown child that I have been trying to avoid or ignore chirps a thank-you at the culprit of me toppling from my ‘throne’ and, while I’m still spluttering at my traitor of a friend, proceeds to say, “Loí is ready to go on, then? Very well, off we go!”
“Hey! I don’t–!” I sputter at them instead, as they jog with relish down the trail, with me still in their arms. I totally don’t want to arrive back at the Black Lodge in anybody’s arms! Let alone when in my human, all too recogniseable form! – I’m perfectly aware that we’ve spent more than an Earth’s day in Ýmirheim despite the notion that time runs differently in the latter, so the Black elves in charge of the lodge – or, all-holiness forbid, Andy – must have been worried and even sent out a search party. And if the search party sees “Harry Potter” being cuddled like this….
My blood chills uncomfortably on the last thought, and seems to freeze over when, somehow ahead of me but not down below, Luna chirps, “Missus Tonks! Hello! We’re back from holidaying with the blue angels! There are even some, here! And we have presents for you from ourselves and Harry’s mum! Isn’t that delightful?”
Oh, my, and she says that!