Chapter I
“You must be truly desperate, to come to me for –”
Thor thrust a glass jar in his face. “Your spellwork, you fix it.”
Loki went cross-eyed. “What?”
“The lady Jane became ensnared in one of your magical traps. Your spellwork, you fix it,” Thor repeated, shaking the jar for emphasis.
The tiny lady in the jar squeaked and flailed as she was thrown about her glass enclosure.
“Do you truly want her fixed or would you rather shake her to death first?”
Thor froze, eyes widening and mouth twisting in a grimace. Very carefully, he removed the jar from Loki’s personal space and cradled it to him.
“I am so sorry, Jane. I swear I shan’t forget again this time.”
This time, Loki noted in amusement. Jane uncrumpled herself and gripped the piece of birdcage fashioned over the opening of the jar for balance, all the while shaking one tiny fist at Thor and chirping what Loki could only imagine were profanities. While Thor spewed apology after apology, Loki leaned in to study the woman and what his handiwork had done to her. It had been at least two centuries since anyone set off this particular spell, and he was pleased to note the magic had stood the test of time without corruption or decay.
Jane Foster was perhaps half a hand high, and from her back sprouted a pair of pearlescent turquoise wings that flapped till they buzzed whenever her indignant little noises got particularly ferocious. She wore a shoulderless, knee-length dress fashioned from blue flower petals, held together with the finest thread. Loki was quite sure he detected his mother’s magic in it.
“The jar is a nice touch. Really emphasizes her mayfly nature, not to mention her place in the house of Odin. Your idea, brother?”
Thor looked up and Jane turned around, and they glared at him in unison.
“It is a safety measure,” Thor said. “To keep Freya’s cats away and protect her from the currents of the air. The wings your spell gave her are difficult to use. Her flight is ungainly and erratic.”
“The wings are perfectly designed. If she can’t figure out how to use them, only her own incompetence is to blame,” Loki replied flippantly.
Jane spat a single, poisonous squeak his way. Loki repayed her with his most brilliant smile.
Then he turned on his heel and headed back for his cot. “And before you… ‘ask’… a third time, no I am not fixing her.” He plopped down, folded his arms behind his head and closed his eyes. “She deserves it for snooping around in my chambers.”
“We were not snooping,” Thor said defensively, the cadence of his words perfectly mirrored by a series of chitters from Jane. “We were looking for your book about the dark realms of Yggdrasil. We have need of it to –”
“This spell was not on any of my books.”
“And your books were not in anything resembling a logical order! You even have some in your bathtub.”
Loki shook his head. “Still snooping.”
Squeak squeak squi-squi squeak.
He cracked open one eye. “What was that?”
Jane pointed behind her, at Thor, and squeaked slowly and clearly. Not that it mattered one whit.
“Thor told you it was okay, you say?”
She nodded emphatically and made an itty bitty version of ‘my most innocent face’.
Loki shrugged and closed his eyes again. “Only makes it worse.”
Thor’s footsteps approached the cot. Loki recognized the tell-tale sound of a fist being planted in an armored side. Oh joy. Loki contemplated whether to bite if Thor tried to touch him, but no touch came.
“You lost the right to complain when you decided to level half of her nation’s capitol. And we wouldn’t have had to snoop at all if you hadn’t done that and gotten yourself thrown in prison.”
“Not my problem. Get someone else to fix it.”
“We’ve tried. Nobody can.”
Grinning, Loki opened his eyes just to preen. “Really?”
He knew the exact moment Thor decided to try to butter him up. His obvious tells were almost endearing. (But actually not. Absolutely not.)
“Yes, even father couldn’t manage it,” Thor said brightly.
Loki raised an eyebrow at Jane. Decidedly less enthused, she crossed her arms over her chest and nodded.
“I am a genius,” Loki declared to no-one in particular, and preened some more. (If he knew his not-father at all, at least half of that ‘can’t’ would be more accurately described as ‘won’t’, but Loki had selective reality down to an artform and couldn’t care less just then.)
“And surely it would only attest to your unmatched genius more if you proved to all that only you can break the spell – by breaking the spell,” Thor suggested with a waggle of eyebrows.
Loki laughed in Thor’s face.
Thor sighed. “Loki, please.”
“No.”
“Please.”
“No.”
“What can I bribe you with?”
“Oh, you know. My freedom, death and destruction of the fire and ice and dead man’s toenails kind, a few choice heads on spikes…”
“Loki, so help me –”
“Oh shush, you’re squirming already. Come back when you learn how to threaten me properly.”
“She can’t stay like this forever, Loki!”
“Of course not. She won’t live forever.”
Thor pinched the bridge of his nose. Jane opened the little door in her piece of birdcage and leaned out to twitter angrily at him.
“Oh, and I suppose that’s my fault too now?” he huffed.
Jane pinched the bridge of her nose too.
“If you won’t do it yourself, at least tell us how to reverse the spell so that someone else may.”
“Sorry, no can do,” Loki said, studying his nails. “Only the creator of the spell can reverse it. Breaking it, however…”
Thor raised his eyebrows expectantly.
With a beatific smile, Loki finished: “That’s as simple as a kiss from another fairy.”
Thor’s face clouded. “There’s no such thing as fairies.” *
“Present company suggests otherwise.”
It had been a while since Thor had last looked like he wanted to beat Loki to a pulp quite so much. It was glorious. And here Loki had been worried visitations from his not-family would result in feelings and other such unpleasantness.
But then, for no discernable reason, Thor blinked and his expression grew shrewd. Not the kind of ‘butter Loki up with all the subtlety of a Mjolnir to the cranium’ shrewd from before – shrewd as if he truly had just realised a way to twist Loki’s metaphorical arm.
Loki didn’t like it.
Thor promptly turned on his heel and brought Jane’s jar closer to his chest. “Return to your shelter, dear Jane. I know just what to do,” he murmured as he walked out of the cell, clear through the magical barrier that locked Loki and his magic in.
He did not look back.
No, Loki did not like this one bit.
It took Thor so long to return, though, that Loki dozed off and only realised his not-brother was back when the booming shout of his name awoke him with a start, and the realisation of a projectile about to strike his face triggered a catch! reflex.
Too-suddenly awake and upright on his cot, Loki blinked the sleep from his eyes and shook the tilting from his skull, and stared at the object in his hand.
It was the magical instrument – hand-crafted by himself, one of a kind, revolutionary in its own small way – that had cursed Jane as her greedy, trespassing hands snatched it from its resting place. And the spell protecting it had just hooked its claws into Loki’s hand.
Impossible, he thought.
After that, he only had time to register a sense of betrayal and look up to see his brother’s stubbornly determined face and his mother beside him, before the world and his body and all his self dissolved in a rush of magic.
When he came to, he was on his belly, clutching at a strange, ribbed surface, with something dark and entirely too heavy pressing down on him all around. He managed to turn his head and saw woven strands, above and below and all around him, light peeking through intermittently.
My pajamas, he realised. Rage surged, intertwined with incredulity. They turned my own spell against me!
The weight lifted. Light and a potent rush of air washed over him. Then the light dimmed again, to be replaced a moment later by an enormous hand. It dropped something beside him and withdrew.
“PUT THAT ON, DEAR,” a slightly terrifying voice boomed. “THERE’S NO NEED TO DO THIS IN THE NUDE.”
Mother, Loki realised, pushing up on his forearms. She’d already made a tiny set of clothes for him to wear as a fairy. She’d agreed to this. She’d contributed to this.
Now that hurt.
“Traitor!” Loki bellowed. “I thought you loved me!”
– or so he intended. What came out instead was the undignified squeaking he’d programmed into his spell. He could understand his own squeaks, could tell that they still meant the words he had meant to speak, but squeaks they were.
Trice-damned sodding –
“I do hope I got the size right?” Frigga asked from somewhere beyond his cave of clothing. “You’ve lost so much weight since I last fitted you, I was forced to guess as to your current proportions.”
Loki wilted.
Eventually he emerged, reluctantly, sulkily. The trousers and sleeveless, low-backed tunic were perfectly fitted and made from green, white-veined leaves. He stubbornly hated how well his mother knew him, because it was impossible to hate her properly when she knew him so well. His wings were green too. At least that was something.
“Are you comfortable?” Frigga asked.
She was gigantic, seated on the edge of his cot. Thor, standing, towered over them both. It was more disconcerting than Loki cared to let on. Arms crossed, shoulders hunched, and scowling for all he was worth, he nodded.
“Don’t worry, I made them to expand along with you when you return to your normal size. Neither of you need lose any more dignity over this than you already have. Now –” She nodded to Thor, who leaned down like a mountain folding in half to deposit Jane Foster beside Loki. Frigga then pinned her youngest with a stern gaze. “Kiss.”
Loki scowled even harder.
Jane scowled right back. “Just don’t think you can try anything funny, buster,” she cheeped.
“If you think I’m kissing you at all you are sorely mistaken, wench,” Loki squeak-snapped back.
“Oh, bla bla bla. I’m supposed to believe you’d willingly spend the rest of your life like this just to spite me?”
Loki smirked and jerked his head in Frigga’s direction. “That right there is my mother, and she has never denied me anything. Do you really think she’d condemn me to this for long over the likes of you?”
He pointedly refused to wonder quite how much of that was a bluff these days.
“Maybe your mom wouldn’t, but your dad’s the one who turned your spell around. Good luck with that.”
Loki’s jaw dropped.
Jane grinned like a fiend.
A poke in the back from an enormous finger made Loki stumble.
“Chop chop,” Frigga said. “I can keep you company all day if you like, but your brother and Jane have urgent business to attend to.”
Loki felt his face heat. ‘Need not lose any more dignity than you already have’, his arse. He righted himself and glared up at Thor, weighing his options. Kissing Jane would be a momentary annoyance to the lovebirds, but he was in no position to make it any more than that. Forcing her to stay like this for the rest of her life would be so much more satisfying, but it would also cost him more. Granted, the price was mitigated somewhat by the fact that he was already in prison, and the increased size of his cell relative to his body plus the ability to fly would almost be a gain. On the other hand, the odds of that plan being foiled were considerable.
Case in point: Jane lunged for him, evidently having run out of patience already.
Guess the most he could make of this situation was being as much of a nuisance as possible. Fair enough.
Loki side-stepped and shoved Jane along as she shot past him, causing her to stumble and fall flat on her face. Clumsy, untrained woman. But determined; she was back on her feet and rounded on him again in a matter of moments, with fire in her eyes.
Loki smirked. “What’s that Earth gesture again?” He pulled down the skin below his eye and stuck out his tongue. “‘Catch me if you can!’”
Then he turned tail and ran.
“Loki!” his mother said admonishingly.
Paying her no heed, he pushed off the bed and took to the air.
Well, he tried.
Getting the wings to cooperate was a little harder than anticipated. He floundered and flailed his limbs to stay upright and airborne, and silently swore to every god ever invented that he would slowly and painfully murder the first person to throw his words about incompetence back in his face.
One yank on his ankle by a pair of fairy-sized hands was enough to send him crashing face-first into his bedding.
“Perfectly designed, huh?” Jane gloated above him. “‘Only my own incompetence’?”
Slowly. Painfully.
Loki rolled onto his back, took stock of his position, of Thor and Frigga high above, hands poised ready to strike. Jane threw herself upon him. Smirking, Loki drew his knees up to his breast and kicked her in the chest with enough force to send her flying.
Really flying, though, was an instinct as much as a skill to be mastered. Jane, only just having gained her wings, was not possessed of that instinct. She went sailing over the edge of the bed, with nothing to stop her momentum or break her fall. Her drawn-out shriek only ended when her body hit the ground with a pock! like an exceptionally fat bee slamming into a window.
Thor and Frigga exploded in sound and movement. The jar shattered; the sound was murder on Loki’s shrunken eardrums. He breathed in with a cringe, breathed out with a sigh. Oh well. It had been fun while it lasted.
Frigga snatched him up where he lay, the fingers of one hand encircling him from his ankles to his neck, while Thor fell to his knees and waved his hands frantically around and about where Jane lay, and babbled incoherently.
“Loki, what have you done?” his mother whispered, aghast.
“Oh, she’s fine,” he said, and rolled his eyes so he’d have an excuse not to look at her.
“I’m okay! I’m okay! Thor, it’s fine,” Jane’s voice sounded.
“See?”
With a cry of relief, Thor scooped his tiny mortal into his hands and raised her up to eye level. Jane was knelt in the cup of his hands, clutching his raised thumb for balance. The petals of her dress weren’t even wrinkled.
“I am fine. It didn’t even hurt.” Her bewildered gaze found Loki.
Loki rolled his eyes again, and didn’t meet hers either. “The point of the spell wasn’t murder. Our strength may have diminished to match our size, but our bodies are as resistant to injury as if we were still aesir-sized.”
That didn’t diminish her bewilderment. On the contrary. “Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why not – why no murder?”
By this time, his mother had pressed the hand she held him in to her heart and folded the other over it besides, murmuring under her breath. “Oh, thank goodness,” and “oh Loki, why would you scare us like that”, and other things along those lines. Loki shifted uncomfortably.
“The wanton murder and destruction is a recent development.”
Jane gaped at him a moment longer. Then she shook herself, looked up at Thor, and motioned for him to move her closer. Thor reluctantly complied, and Frigga held out Loki. Jane clambered up to him, a dangerous gleam coming into her eyes, and drew back her arm.
Loki’s eyes widened. “Don’t you dare –”
She dared.
His head snapped around from the force of the slap. Thor and Frigga startled, but Jane withstood the quake.
“I may not be dead, but it still scared the shit out of me, asshole!”
Then she backhanded him.
“And that was for New York.”
And another slap.
“And for Puente Antiguo.”
“Jane –” Thor tried weakly.
And another.
“For Erik!”
Frigga drew Loki back, but after a wobbly moment’s delay, Thor moved with her to keep Jane from falling through the gap between their respective hands. “Er, Jane –”
Another.
“And that condescending bastard man-in-black SHIELD suit I keep forgetting the name of.”
She raised her hand again “And –”
“OkayJanethat’senough.” Barking a nervous laugh, Thor narrowed the cup of his hands and pulled Jane away from Loki.
“Well, that took you!” Loki snapped, glaring up at him.
Thor seemed to get the gist of his squeaking, because he looked defensive and said, “Well, you kind of deserved it.”
Frigga sighed. Loki, clasped to her bosom again, moved with the rise and fall of her chest. “Yes. Unfortunately, he did.” And Loki’s face burned again, much to his own chagrin. Sentiment. Ugh. “But might I propose that we do what we came here for now, Lady Jane?”
Jane brushed back her hair and smoothed her dress, then breathed deeply and nodded.
“I will make you rue this day,” Loki ground out, then remembered that he was a prisoner in every sense of the word. “Somehow.”
“Quit whining already, you big baby, it didn’t even hurt you, any more than it hurt me.” That seemed to infuriate her all over again. “It’s your own damn fault. None of this would have happened if you’d just undone the spell.”
Loki had a retort about snooping and ‘your own damn fault’ at the ready, but she cut him off by crushing her mouth to his. Loki locked his jaw, squeezed his eyes shut and scrunched up his face, and they stayed like that for a long moment.
Nothing happened.
Jane drew back. “Why isn’t anything happening?”
“That… should have worked.” Loki frowned. “Let’s try again. This time I’ll reciprocate.”
“If this is some kind of trick –”
“Believe you me, it is not.”
Jane leaned in again, face dark with suspicion and displeasure. Though hardly kind or pleasant, it was a proper kiss this time. Still nothing happened.
“Something is wrong,” Loki admitted.
Jane looked anxious. “It doesn’t take a ‘true love’s kiss’ or something like that, does it?”
“What?”
“That’s what fairytales on Earth usually say. The spell is broken by the power of true love, and then the prince and the princess live happily ever after.”
“That is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard,” Loki said, mind racing. Changing the creator signature on this spell, ready-made and autonomous as it was, would have been as easy as changing a battery. Assuming that Odin hadn’t crossed any of the wrong cosmic forces in doing so, and there was no reason to assume a sorcerer as capable as he would have…
“Brother?” Thor asked worriedly.
Loki looked up and shrugged. The effect was somewhat ruined by the hold his mother still had on his whole body, so Jane spread her arms and repeated the gesture.
“Oh dear,” Frigga said. “Loki, if I let you go, will you behave?”
He nodded.
Once free, he studied his hands, looked over his shoulder to inspect his wings, patted his chest – studied the knots and relays of the magic. Nothing seemed to be broken, as such, but…
Realisation hit. He groaned and dropped his head in his hands.
“What?” Jane asked.
“What?” Frigga and Thor chimed in in unison.
Loki spread his arms helplessly. “The magic was just too old. I thought the spell had survived the centuries perfectly preserved, but I was wrong. Natural entropy set in and corroded the – the off-switch, if you will.”
Jane’s eyes were wide. “That can happen?”
He didn’t dignify her with an answer. Instead he turned to Frigga and mimed writing, and shrinking and expanding. His mother, his wonderful, wonderful mother, understood immediately, found his notebook and pen in the pile of books in the corner of the cell, worked some of her own magic, and pushed the writing instruments toward him. They shrunk to a perfect size for his fairy hands, and some minutes later, expanded back to their regular size when he pushed them back toward her.
“If it’s just a case of… of a rusted lock, basically, it should be easy to fix. Right?” Jane asked while, with Thor peering over her shoulder, Frigga read the answer he had written down for her.
Loki made a face. “If only.”