Thor looked around the ship, reminding himself and anyone listening to his muttering, “Asgard isn’t a place. It’s a people.”
“Well,” Loki said, his voice managing to ring out across the room despite his attempting-to-sound-casual tone. “Peoples.”
And just like that, Loki had the eyes of every refugee in the room — or eye, in the case of those, like Thor, with only one apiece — on him, where he so often liked them.
Thor sighed. “Loki…”
“I’m just saying!” His brother proclaimed with a look of innocent concern. “Sure, we’ve all got to stick together to help each other and our way of life survive, but … which of our ways of life? ‘Asgardian’ is something of a catch-all term. Had to be, of course, with a history of thousands of years of wayfaring and intermingling. Leaving aside my own…” Loki’s face changed to one of truly sincere disgust for just a moment. “Unfortunate genetics, some of us are Aesir, some Vanir, some neither. The people of the Enchanted Forest, for instance, considered themselves an autonomous principality, renewing their oaths to the Asgardian throne on an ad-hoc generational basis, and honestly, very different from any of the more… fully clothed communities.”
A silver-haired man, grown but not old, who had been curled up in the corner with some children, some furs, and an absence of shirt, rose and stepped up to Loki with a solemn face.
“Indeed, Lord Loki is correct. We have many differences. For example, the Forest Folk are monogamous.”
Thor then decided he absolutely did not want to know what Loki had at some point gotten up to in the Enchanted Forest.
The apparent leader of the Forest Folk continued. “And of course, Lord Loki may be particularly perplexed by the fact that we do not /lie/.”
Loki looked to Thor with one of his smirks. “They really don’t, and I really am. How are we supposed to keep enough secrets to stay safe on Earth, Brother, if we have people who make /you/ look like a decent liar? Earth hasn't just had a civilization-destroying event like we did, after all. They have their own petty squabbles. They're not even going to be thinking about 'coming together' except, perhaps, against the divine alien threat.”
Oh. Oh, Thor was starting to think this was still about Loki’s insecurity regarding whether he, specifically, could go to Earth safely after all the. Well… murdering. How to address that?
He didn’t have time to when the silver-haired man spoke up again. “We can just keep our mouths shut. Another skill that the God of Lies no doubt finds strange.”
“Really?” Loki asked blithely. “What about when faced with a direct question? Oh, for instance, Lord Hrimhari, are you fully confident in my brother’s rule?”
Lord Hrimhari, apparently — and how Thor wished that everyone else’s name would get said in front of him — froze, then scowled. “Mid-journey is no time for such a discussion.”
“Well, that’s not a nice, straightforward ‘yes,’” Loki sing-songed.
It wasn’t. In fact, that sounded like a no. After everything Thor had gone through to lead his people, some thought he shouldn’t? Did this half-dressed hunter think he could do better?
As Thor straightened up, he pulled himself together enough to look at the cause of this conversation. “Loki,” he said tiredly. “Why are you doing this?”
“I want to get any problems aired in advance, Brother, that so you’re not blindsided — no pun intended, truly — while surrounded by humans.”
That… actually seemed sincere, which in its way was still frustrating. Thor took a deep breath. “Lord…” Blast, he’d already forgotten it.
“Hrimhari,” Loki muttered to him.
“Lord Hrimhari, do you think I’m not qualified to be king?”
“It’s a position requiring leadership and experience as a warrior. You are qualified; that is not the problem. Moreover, you’ve saved all of our lives, and we are grateful.”
“But there is a problem,” Loki said, stepping between them and getting in the man’s face again.
Lord Hrimhari stood with his mouth shut, glaring at Loki, and Thor admittedly didn’t blame him…
… though he was still worried. “Look, I certainly realize that I’m not my father…” Thor found himself trailing off. With everything he’d learned, his feelings about that were rather complicated.
Loki apparently saw something during the brief silence. “Do you have something to say, Lord Hrimhari? About Odin? About the fact that Thor isn’t—”
“Odin Borsson was, with all respect, a corkscrew-minded eccentric. His deeds and misdeeds are beyond my understanding.” Hrimhari interrupted. “Of course no one is going to be like him.”
Thor blinked (winked?). Even Loki seemed taken aback. Before anyone spoke further, Heimdall, who hadn’t been in that part of the ship earlier, was at Thor’s side, speaking quietly. “He does mean it with all respect. He really cannot lie.”
Thor took a breath, steadied himself, and watched his brother and the silver-haired man staring at each other. Then he whispered to Heimdall, “We should set two of them to guarding one of those Earth logic-puzzle-mazes.”
Heimdall huffed. “As an expert in the duty, I would not think much of your brother as a guard. Granted, he he did say something true earlier: from the signals they tend to radiate, your Earth friends have been divided and arguing for some time, the rest of the planet moreso.”
In space, only Heimdall could hear people scream.
Lord Hrimhari adamantly looked away from Loki to meet Thor’s …eye. “That you are not your father, Lord Thor, is far less the source of my concerns than that no one is your mother.”
Thor thought he'd been unsettled before, but no, he was unsettled now.
And Loki... Loki was speechless.
Hrimhari continued talking. "We of the forest have always been of the opinion that if we had some kind of business in the city that was not actually about threats of disaster and war, it was best to avoid talking to warriors. Warriors deal in crises. Civilian administrators like the Ladies' Council, of which the late queen was foremost, deal in the glory-less work that must be repeated day after day." A deep breath. "Lady Frigga was the goddess of wisdom. Lord Odin, for everything else he was, also studied the scholarly arts. And you, Lord Thor, are ...a hero."
What a strange thing to sting. But it did. The part of his brain that wasn't entirely taken up with grief couldn't help thinking wistfully that Jane probably would have done great on the Ladies' Council. Mother would have shown her the ropes.
There was another voice beside Thor. "That's true. And ... no offense, but the corkscrew-minded eccentric part was true, too."
Thor sighed as he looked up. He didn't want Valkyrie in a verbally malicious mood again. She'd finally had hope.
"Is there more to this than the airing of grievances? Have you got a solution, Lord Hrimhari?"
The silver-haired man shook his head. "No solution. I would not have mentioned it without so many direct questions."
Val crossed her arms and looked to Loki. "Have you got a solution?"
"Well, I'm starting to think I'd have done better attempting to be queen than king," Loki said, but then followed if up with. "...No actual solutions, though."
"Well, we've got plenty of civilians," Valkyrie said. "Most of the Ladies' Council is probably still alive, on this ship. Meanwhile, we have a king to lead us through this crisis. Absolutely granted that we're without a queen, but that's the thing about grief -- you learn to live without. So we'll come together and we'll make do, one foot in front of the other. And if we get to earth, and our king the hero gets mired in sorting out whatever Earth crises there are, the rest of us will keep coming together, even for the glory-less parts." She took a slow breath. "Goodness knows I learned to live without glory before a lot of people here were born."
A thought struck Thor, but he pushed it away. It would wait. She was right: one foot in front of the other.