9. The Swindled
Chapter nine
The Swindled
OLI
I considered literally seizing Loki, gripping him about the waist and making him listen, but he would only blast me away again. For a moment, I didn’t dare move or breathe, because then he would realize I was back, and I wasn’t yet sure how to begin.
Trust had to be earned, but even earned, it was difficult for the person trying to trust when they barely trusted themselves. I had to be willing to lose.
I had to be willing to fail.
And still try.
“I’m not going to push anymore, Loki.”
His shoulders tensed, but he didn’t turn around. Not yet.
“All I want is an answer to one thing, the only thing that matters to me after all I did for you, for them, for… me. What do you want?”
“You already accomplished what I wanted, remember?” Loki said it, detached and cold. “We had a deal. You completed it.”
“Then why don’t you look happy about it?”
At last, he turned, his lips spreading into a mad, false grin. “Are mortals so dim that they can’t recognize a smile?”
“Are you so dim that you think I’d believe a fake one?”
His expression wavered, but he held on to the mask. “As I said, I have what I wanted. Now you can get what you wanted.” He tried to grab my wrist, to undo the magic binding our pact, but that would mean the end. That would mean I’d be sent back to Midgard and never see him again.
I put both hands behind my back and lurched away. “They forgive you,” I said. “All of them. Even if they didn’t say so outright, it was clear to me from every encounter. Heimdall. Balder. Odin—”
Loki vanished, and I knew to spin around, finding him behind me, trying to grab one of my wrists by trickery.
I lurched away from him again.
“Enough!” Loki ported behind me, but again, I evaded him.
“ Why ?”
“Oli—”
“If you wanted forgiveness, to be welcomed into Asgard again, you have it! Why won’t you accept it?”
“Because I don’t deserve it!” Loki bellowed with such force that I was magically blasted away again, but not into another realm, just enough to stumble backward. The force also billowed his unbraided hair, revealing his scars, which he immediately covered and turned away from me.
“You’re still scarred. Even after being reborn.
Because you don’t forgive yourself for what they represent.
That’s why you’re angry. Why you grew angrier after each god you sent me to.
You thought helping them, proving to yourself that they forgive you, and in a manner only you would have thought to seek forgiveness, would make you feel better. But you don’t, do you?”
Loki turned his scarred half further away from me, and I pulled my hands from behind my back to reach for him.
He grabbed my wrists with the reflexes of a snake.
“ No .” I twisted to get out of his hold, but he wouldn’t let go.
He couldn’t grip me properly, something I assumed he needed to break the pact between us, or I’d already be back on Midgard, so I kept twisting, kept struggling to be released.
“Stop. Will you just stop? Loki! Why are you so insufferable?”
“Exactly!” He gave up trying to get a proper hold of me and pushed me square in the chest. Not hard.
Little more than a childish shove, and that was exactly how he looked.
Childish. Young. Frustrated. “ Wise Oli, you do know me. You know me so well. And that is why you could never—” He snapped his mouth shut like he had said something he shouldn’t.
“Why I could never what?”
Loki flinched but refused to answer.
“It’s true that I know what an insufferable, infantile ass you are.
That you sometimes push the joke too far.
You make stupid mistakes. Got yourself into every mess that ever cost you something.
How human of you. You also got yourself into every mess that ended with a child you love and every story of you worth telling. ”
“Right,” Loki scoffed. “Because you think from those stories that I never cared if it all went wrong.”
“What I was trying to say—”
“I always cared!” he bellowed again. “I always, always cared, but when things started to go wrong, I made it all worse! Every time. I was prophesized to end everything. And I did! It’s no wonder I was destined to…” He trailed off again. What wasn’t he telling me?
“To what? Loki, please—”
He launched himself forward to try seizing my wrists once more, but I was ready for his quick reflexes and spun out of reach.
Loki snarled, and when I looked at him, for a moment, his face, his whole form, seemed beast-like, poised on the cusp of transforming into something terrible.
“Don’t you get it?” he demanded, and I thought he was about to transform, but instead, he gripped the top of his tunic and tore it from his chest, causing the top to hang from his belt.
One side of his body was completely scarred like his face. The mottled tissue went all the way down, disappearing into the band of his belt and trousers.
“Since you know our stories so well, why do I have these scars?”
I knew. I knew and answered honestly. “They’re from the poison that dripped on you, while you were bound, suffering punishment after Balder’s death.”
“And how was I bound?” he pressed, with another shimmer over his form like a beast about to burst from his skin.
I preferred the ridiculous stories. Ones so absurd, a little blood and violence hit with less impact.
But to punish Loki for the start of Ragnarok, for Balder’s death, one of Loki’s more human-like sons had been turned into a wolf, a mockery of Fenrir, that then set upon his brother, Loki’s other more human son, and killed him.
The entrails were used as Loki’s bindings.
“I see from the green tint to your face that you do well know,” Loki sneered.
“You think yourself loathed?” I asked. I knew he bore a hidden pain, but I hadn’t thought it so deeply etched.
“I am.”
“But your wife,” I recalled her as I said it, “she caught as much of the poison as she could to protect you. If she hadn’t cared enough to do that—”
“My whole body would be scarred, yes. And Sigyn was the mother of some of my children but not my wife. I have no wife. Willing and wonderful partners all who gave me my children, the stallion who seeded me with Sleipnir included, but no spouse. Care about me though they might, none ever wanted to keep me. All eventually grew tired and left.”
“Not your children.”
Loki looked away, hunching from his proud stance like he wished he hadn’t torn his tunic and wanted to hide his scars again, yet he didn’t wave a hand to fix it either.
“You haven’t seen those sons since your escape, have you? Since their rebirth? They were the sons of a god. Surely, they were reborn too.”
“They were. But how does a parent face their child after inflicting such tragedy, even if not directly by my hands? It was my fault. And then, in my rage, in my vanity, I made it all worse again and did everything I was destined to. I gathered my children, every monster I could, everyone who might fight on my side from every realm and tore it all down for nothing.”
His rage was dwindling now, losing momentum and leaving him limp.
Which meant now was the time to push again, if only a little.
“You’re right, that was pretty selfish and stupid of you.”
Loki’s eyes glimmered.
“And nothing, nothing is ever going to change the moronic choices you or the other gods made.” I stalked toward him, boldly staring at his scars, at his twisted tissue, that no more marred him to me than his sneer or attempts to keep me away.
“Even so, you’re all still here. Here again.
So, you, just you, Loki, can either learn from it all and be better like the other gods are trying to be, both for themselves and for those they care about.
Or! You can prove yourself right by being the whining, petulant brat you let everyone see. ”
I expected another snarl, but Loki’s eyes looked damp.
I took another step closer to him. “I don’t think any of them believe that is where your future leads, and I know none of them want it.
You think they do, but all of them forgive you for the part you played in making them see their faults too.
You were all idiots. All of you. But they want to move on and live new lives, without obsessing over yours, or any other friend or family member, or even enemy.
That sort of obsession is exhausting. Ask Odin. ”
A corner of Loki’s mouth twitched. He looked so small, further shrunken, with liquid eyes continuing to pool.
“Loki…” I was a reach of a hand away from him. “You’re exhausted. And maybe you’ll never believe you deserve to be free of your scars, your past, your wrongs, but those things are not all that define us. Especially not scars. Or do you think Hel so terrible for her inhuman half?”
“That is not the same—”
“Or Tyr deformed for his lost limb?”
“He never should have had it so close to Fenrir’s—”
“Loki ,” I stopped him, for it was not me who needed to be convinced.
Not of his worth to be forgiven. “Even if you don’t believe it, your scars do not ruin you.
” I reached for him, like I had tried to so many times, and again, Loki stopped me, but not with a brutal snatch.
He held my wrist, keeping both of our hands suspended.
“They do ruin me because I caused them. I caused too many scars I can never take back.”
“I know. And fun as it was being proxy for your apologies, there is only one thing left for you to do. If you want to.”
“ You ?” He attempted to grin.
Imp. “I was going to say: actually apologize. But you can do me too. If you want to. Then you can send me home. Then our pact can be complete. Not before. Because you are one of the gods who needs me, just like all the others.”
Loki seemed to look through me, his eyes unfocused. There was too much pain there for me to sift through it all and truly know what he was thinking.
Then his eyes cleared and snapped to mine like the crack of a whip.
“How about I send you home now?”