Loki is aware they're both being on their best behavior for the moment, and perhaps it is because of that elephant in the room, the dark memory of fire and screaming that Loki has lived and Felassan has dwelt within, for at least several awful minutes. It strikes him not as polite gentility but as a hint of kind concession. A peace offering, in return for an explanation. But then, Loki has long since concluded he need not be Felassan's enemy as long as he is not Solas' enemy, and he's getting rather attached to Solas. Beleth, as well, though in a far more distant and less personal way.
(What in the Nine realms is friendship, anyway? He's still learning how it works, after millennium of life and multiple deaths, even with as many examples of it as he's been given here. It's a strange, eldritch creature with many limbs and far too many hearts.)
But back to the story. "As you see me now, this is my birth form. Jotun, a Frost Giant. My kind are normally larger. Mm..." he waves a hand carelessly in the direction of the plains of snow near them, and the dream shivers, the aurora above them taking on colder, bluer tones as the icy crags and foreboding King's Seat of Jotunheim form around them. Along with them comes Laufey, well over fifteen feet in height, jagged and sharp, muscles carved of glaciers, eyes like banked embers. Around him appear his various henchmen and honor guard, all male, all built like monumental statues, with that same rugged, fearsome muscular broadness. They are tinged with something from Loki's own psyche--the fear he had of them as a child.
"That one, Laufey," he points. "Was my biological father. I have no idea who my birth mother was. I hope she escaped him safely. But I was a runt from birth, roughly the size of a human infant. A disappointment, perhaps? I'll never know for certain, because the singular opportunity I had to clear the air with him was wasted by both of us."
"All I know for certain is that I was left in a temple to Ymir, in the midst of a war between Jotunheim and Asgard." And he will spare Felassan the images of that war, because he knows the tales he's heard of it were false, lurid, exaggerated by the victors. But the vision changes nonetheless, to a man that looks far more human than the Jotnar, in armor, with blood half-frozen on his face, dripping from a torn eye socket. There is emotion attached to this figure, as well: he's a powerful man, someone who Loki looked up to with desperate affection, until he learned better.
"Odin All-Father, the king of the Asgard and Emperor of the Nine Realms. He found me in the temple and knew who my father was. And he picked me up and took me back to Asgard to raise me as his own."
The battered warlord scoops a small blue infant up from a hollow in the ice and smiles as the red Jotun eyes turn a softer green, and the cobalt skin turns ivory.
"He claimed I was left for dead," Loki says. "And he might have been right. I can't know for sure. It's true that the Frost Giants are a hard, unyielding people. Laufey might have tossed me into the snow to get rid of me, or to see if I were strong enough to survive on my own."
"But one rarely leaves things of no value at all inside a temple, so I find myself reluctant to believe I was discarded for no reason. Personally, believe I must have been meant as a sacrifice, to ensure Jotun victory over the Aesir. Ymir is notoriously a primordial god of clashing forces, ice and fire, and neither male nor female. I was born intersex. A tiny omen, maybe, or a harbinger of terrible change."
"If so, that sacrifice was either interrupted, or not accepted, which seems in keeping with my nature." A thorn in everyone's side, unacceptable simply because he exists. Loki smiles faintly, proudly.
As the scene shifts, Felassan settles his hands and bare finger into the snow behind him and leans back, a casual affectation of someone entertained by a play that's belied by the keenness of his gaze on the approaching figures. They are giant. Elgar'nan, who towered over the elvhen, might reach Laufey's waist — and Felassan would enjoy seeing that only somewhat less than he enjoys knowing he's dead — but somehow here is Loki, a perfectly reasonable degree of tall. And there is another Loki, tiny.
Felassan has always liked children. There was a time, an interlude between the certainty any child would be a slave and the certainty any child would die, when he hoped he might have one. There is a future where he yet could — or Beleth and Solas will, and he might see it, which is the same thing or better so far as Felassan's feelings are concerned. In the meantime he's picked up his own foundlings, though none in temples, and here in Caldera there's a gaggle of feathery Sylph preteens he's teaching to fight and to never trust someone who would claim dominion over them. And right now there's the way his mouth slants into a charmed smile at the sight of the baby, despite the harshness of the surroundings and the circumstances.
Defiance and Contrariness, he thinks, with a sideways glance at Loki's satisfied smile. Mischief and Rebellion. He knew a spirit once whose nature would have most concisely translated to Resistance to Definition. Felassan has always liked them, too.
"The change," he says, extracting one hand from the snow to gesture to his own face. "Was that his doing or yours?"
Maybe it would surprise Felassan to know that Loki is equally fond of children. It's a relatively bad idea to trust him with them, not because he would let them come to harm but because he cannot help but teach them the worst possible habits and then let them loose on their families and society like little living time bombs of social chaos. Childhood exemplifies a lot of the qualities within himself that he likes best: defying authority, testing boundaries, questioning the world around you, and lying with a complete lack of malice, just because you can.
He has no proteges here, in part because he doesn't trust himself to do right by them, but some day he damn well intends to, if he lives long enough to heal his heart a little more first. He'll even birth them himself, if needs must.
He has no affection for the sight of himself as an infant, though, and there's a flicker of soft amusement at Felassan's smile. That's endearing. He shrugs helplessly at the question.
"Well, I can't remember for certain, but Odin said it was my doing and in this I am inclined to believe him. Jotnar have an innate ability to shapeshift to camouflage themselves within their environment. It's not a stretch to imagine a Jotun baby being picked up by an Asgardian and transforming itself into something he might feel more compassion for, out of sheer instinct."
He sobers again. "But he and Frigga, my adopted mother, built upon the illusion when he brought me home, layers of magic so complex that my infant brain accepted them as reality, and by the time I could sit up, I had no idea I was ever anything but their son, the younger prince of Asgard."
"They never told me otherwise, and that...remains a point of contention, now and forever. I fear I became the god of lies because I was lied to. The lie itself is nothing. When do you tell a child they were adopted? How the hell would I know? One would think within the first two or three hundred years, but." A helpless shrug.
"No, the part that still stings is that they claim they lied to protect me, so that I would never feel different from the people around me. But of course I always felt different. I always was different, and they knew I struggled. They lied to me to protect themselves, both of them, and they never could admit it."
"And of course, Odin planned to use me as a political tool, eventually to set me upon the throne of Jotunheim as Laufey's heir, a ruler friendly to Asgard, to end the conflict for good, bloodlessly, in his favor." He smiles, because it was a clever idea. His chest burns, because it still enrages him.
"I found the truth by accident. A fight between my older brother, Thor, and Laufey, which I more or less caused, myself, but to go into that would make a long story even longer. Suffice to say, I was a little shite even before I knew I had reason to be, and learning the truth of my parentage was such a shock, I more or less snapped. I attempted to kill Thor, which was unworthy of me. I succeeded in killing Laufey, for which I have no regrets. And then I threw myself off the Bifrost into space, because I realized nothing I could ever do would change that Odin saw me as a tool and not a son."
It's both true and untrue that Felassan was never a child. More true that he never had parents. Less true that he never had family. The spark of feeling that Felassan grew from came from the flint and steel of a people already organized into cities and nations and empire, embracing them and chafing at them in turns, producing children who yearned for idealized dreams of the freedom their parents had willingly traded for security and comfort. In that sense he was birthed and raised by people — by the entirety of a people — and he has never felt alien among them. Never baffled by their relationships and emotions.
So he feels it. He doesn't think it; he's an optimist by nature but a cynic by trade, an idealist shaped by circumstance into a practical-minded schemer. He has watched families squabble and kingdoms topple for the length of his world's even half-remembered history, and he thinks everyone is a tool for something. He thinks that this can coexist with love. That it must, if anyone is to be said to have ever loved anyone at all.
But beneath the thoughts he feels the betrayal of a son who still had every right to have expected more.
He's seated beside Loki, and then in the next moment he's standing beside Odin for a closer look. Not in a rushed way. His arms are folded behind his back — and if it's a posture reminiscent of Solas, that's no coincidence, after all the following-him-around Felassan has done — and his expression pensive. Not the look of someone about to snatch a baby away. But the thought has occurred:
"At home, in the world of dreams where spirits originate, there is no history," he says, a dreamy sort of digression while he inspects the scene without disturbing it. "We could have the same fight a dozen ways and none would be truer than another. Once you are physical, though, the earth shows scars. The body shows scars. Changing the story doesn't change what happened."
Which is to say: he would not truly be changing anything by taking that charming little child out of Odin's arms now. But ancient impulses die hard.
He turns back from that overgrown trail of thought and looks toward Loki (the grown one) with sharpening focus. "The space among the stars?"
Felassan's motions in this place, as well as his trains of thought, are fascinatingly tricky to follow. He is at home in dreams, like a fish in water, and Loki...well, he's comfortable, but he's more like a seal. He can venture into the depths with ease, but were he to stay submerged here for too long, he would suffocate or drown. There is a slight tilt of his head as he watches the elf study his construct of Odin, amusement at the way he clasps his hands--not because it reminds him of Solas, but because it reminds him of himself. He does the same, and he knows damn well where he picked up the habit: Frigga.
It strikes him that to leave her out of the tableau is an injustice, and so after a moment, she appears as well, and his emotion and memory colors her, too. There is an innate warmth to her figure, as if she were carved of sunlight. A faint scent of rain and roses, a feeling of aching, bitter regret. She wears a golden gown, and she reaches to take the infant Loki into her arms when Felassan turns at last. And where Odin gives the impression of a granite cliff, a warrior strong and implacable and canny, she is all warmth and wisdom and patience. Everything you could ask for in a mother, save for that one little lie she helped to perpetuate.
It's still hard for Loki to reconcile.
"Do you suppose reliving it in a different way, changing it to be kinder and fairer--would that help to heal a person, or would it just drive them mad when they had to return to waking world?" Not that he's asking for any such thing, but it's a thought experiment worth considering.
He shivers a little at Felassan's question, and nods, sobering a little. "The Asgardian empire extended to the nine realms closest to our planet at one point. They had long been a spacefaring people. Most of their commerce" (and isn't it odd how he switches between 'them' and 'us' when he speaks of Asgard) "was between the realms of Alfheim, Asgard, and Vanaheim, but we went often to Nidavellir as well, and to Midgard in earlier days. I was very fond of humanity in my youth."
"The Bifrost was the method we used to travel. Focused energy, a kind of magic." And were Thor's Jane Foster here, he would let her take over the explanation, but the technical details aren't what Felassan was asking about anyway.
"But I fell from it. I let go." A flicker of shame and pain and uncertainty, which he shoves aside within a matter of seconds. "And free-fell through the space between stars. It was cold, airless. I must have spent days on the edge of death and never crossed over. Sometimes that blackness still haunts me." Falling, floating, moving simultaneously so fast and so slow, and all around the distant, fitful, uninterested light of stars.
"I don't know how long it was before I was picked up by a ship of Ravagers--space pirates--half-frozen and more or less catatonic, but they didn't have me for more than a day before they were attacked and plundered by a ship of the Black Order."
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(What in the Nine realms is friendship, anyway? He's still learning how it works, after millennium of life and multiple deaths, even with as many examples of it as he's been given here. It's a strange, eldritch creature with many limbs and far too many hearts.)
But back to the story. "As you see me now, this is my birth form. Jotun, a Frost Giant. My kind are normally larger. Mm..." he waves a hand carelessly in the direction of the plains of snow near them, and the dream shivers, the aurora above them taking on colder, bluer tones as the icy crags and foreboding King's Seat of Jotunheim form around them. Along with them comes Laufey, well over fifteen feet in height, jagged and sharp, muscles carved of glaciers, eyes like banked embers. Around him appear his various henchmen and honor guard, all male, all built like monumental statues, with that same rugged, fearsome muscular broadness. They are tinged with something from Loki's own psyche--the fear he had of them as a child.
"That one, Laufey," he points. "Was my biological father. I have no idea who my birth mother was. I hope she escaped him safely. But I was a runt from birth, roughly the size of a human infant. A disappointment, perhaps? I'll never know for certain, because the singular opportunity I had to clear the air with him was wasted by both of us."
"All I know for certain is that I was left in a temple to Ymir, in the midst of a war between Jotunheim and Asgard." And he will spare Felassan the images of that war, because he knows the tales he's heard of it were false, lurid, exaggerated by the victors. But the vision changes nonetheless, to a man that looks far more human than the Jotnar, in armor, with blood half-frozen on his face, dripping from a torn eye socket. There is emotion attached to this figure, as well: he's a powerful man, someone who Loki looked up to with desperate affection, until he learned better.
"Odin All-Father, the king of the Asgard and Emperor of the Nine Realms. He found me in the temple and knew who my father was. And he picked me up and took me back to Asgard to raise me as his own."
The battered warlord scoops a small blue infant up from a hollow in the ice and smiles as the red Jotun eyes turn a softer green, and the cobalt skin turns ivory.
"He claimed I was left for dead," Loki says. "And he might have been right. I can't know for sure. It's true that the Frost Giants are a hard, unyielding people. Laufey might have tossed me into the snow to get rid of me, or to see if I were strong enough to survive on my own."
"But one rarely leaves things of no value at all inside a temple, so I find myself reluctant to believe I was discarded for no reason. Personally, believe I must have been meant as a sacrifice, to ensure Jotun victory over the Aesir. Ymir is notoriously a primordial god of clashing forces, ice and fire, and neither male nor female. I was born intersex. A tiny omen, maybe, or a harbinger of terrible change."
"If so, that sacrifice was either interrupted, or not accepted, which seems in keeping with my nature." A thorn in everyone's side, unacceptable simply because he exists. Loki smiles faintly, proudly.
no subject
Felassan has always liked children. There was a time, an interlude between the certainty any child would be a slave and the certainty any child would die, when he hoped he might have one. There is a future where he yet could — or Beleth and Solas will, and he might see it, which is the same thing or better so far as Felassan's feelings are concerned. In the meantime he's picked up his own foundlings, though none in temples, and here in Caldera there's a gaggle of feathery Sylph preteens he's teaching to fight and to never trust someone who would claim dominion over them. And right now there's the way his mouth slants into a charmed smile at the sight of the baby, despite the harshness of the surroundings and the circumstances.
Defiance and Contrariness, he thinks, with a sideways glance at Loki's satisfied smile. Mischief and Rebellion. He knew a spirit once whose nature would have most concisely translated to Resistance to Definition. Felassan has always liked them, too.
"The change," he says, extracting one hand from the snow to gesture to his own face. "Was that his doing or yours?"
no subject
He has no proteges here, in part because he doesn't trust himself to do right by them, but some day he damn well intends to, if he lives long enough to heal his heart a little more first. He'll even birth them himself, if needs must.
He has no affection for the sight of himself as an infant, though, and there's a flicker of soft amusement at Felassan's smile. That's endearing. He shrugs helplessly at the question.
"Well, I can't remember for certain, but Odin said it was my doing and in this I am inclined to believe him. Jotnar have an innate ability to shapeshift to camouflage themselves within their environment. It's not a stretch to imagine a Jotun baby being picked up by an Asgardian and transforming itself into something he might feel more compassion for, out of sheer instinct."
He sobers again. "But he and Frigga, my adopted mother, built upon the illusion when he brought me home, layers of magic so complex that my infant brain accepted them as reality, and by the time I could sit up, I had no idea I was ever anything but their son, the younger prince of Asgard."
"They never told me otherwise, and that...remains a point of contention, now and forever. I fear I became the god of lies because I was lied to. The lie itself is nothing. When do you tell a child they were adopted? How the hell would I know? One would think within the first two or three hundred years, but." A helpless shrug.
"No, the part that still stings is that they claim they lied to protect me, so that I would never feel different from the people around me. But of course I always felt different. I always was different, and they knew I struggled. They lied to me to protect themselves, both of them, and they never could admit it."
"And of course, Odin planned to use me as a political tool, eventually to set me upon the throne of Jotunheim as Laufey's heir, a ruler friendly to Asgard, to end the conflict for good, bloodlessly, in his favor." He smiles, because it was a clever idea. His chest burns, because it still enrages him.
"I found the truth by accident. A fight between my older brother, Thor, and Laufey, which I more or less caused, myself, but to go into that would make a long story even longer. Suffice to say, I was a little shite even before I knew I had reason to be, and learning the truth of my parentage was such a shock, I more or less snapped. I attempted to kill Thor, which was unworthy of me. I succeeded in killing Laufey, for which I have no regrets. And then I threw myself off the Bifrost into space, because I realized nothing I could ever do would change that Odin saw me as a tool and not a son."
no subject
So he feels it. He doesn't think it; he's an optimist by nature but a cynic by trade, an idealist shaped by circumstance into a practical-minded schemer. He has watched families squabble and kingdoms topple for the length of his world's even half-remembered history, and he thinks everyone is a tool for something. He thinks that this can coexist with love. That it must, if anyone is to be said to have ever loved anyone at all.
But beneath the thoughts he feels the betrayal of a son who still had every right to have expected more.
He's seated beside Loki, and then in the next moment he's standing beside Odin for a closer look. Not in a rushed way. His arms are folded behind his back — and if it's a posture reminiscent of Solas, that's no coincidence, after all the following-him-around Felassan has done — and his expression pensive. Not the look of someone about to snatch a baby away. But the thought has occurred:
"At home, in the world of dreams where spirits originate, there is no history," he says, a dreamy sort of digression while he inspects the scene without disturbing it. "We could have the same fight a dozen ways and none would be truer than another. Once you are physical, though, the earth shows scars. The body shows scars. Changing the story doesn't change what happened."
Which is to say: he would not truly be changing anything by taking that charming little child out of Odin's arms now. But ancient impulses die hard.
He turns back from that overgrown trail of thought and looks toward Loki (the grown one) with sharpening focus. "The space among the stars?"
no subject
It strikes him that to leave her out of the tableau is an injustice, and so after a moment, she appears as well, and his emotion and memory colors her, too. There is an innate warmth to her figure, as if she were carved of sunlight. A faint scent of rain and roses, a feeling of aching, bitter regret. She wears a golden gown, and she reaches to take the infant Loki into her arms when Felassan turns at last. And where Odin gives the impression of a granite cliff, a warrior strong and implacable and canny, she is all warmth and wisdom and patience. Everything you could ask for in a mother, save for that one little lie she helped to perpetuate.
It's still hard for Loki to reconcile.
"Do you suppose reliving it in a different way, changing it to be kinder and fairer--would that help to heal a person, or would it just drive them mad when they had to return to waking world?" Not that he's asking for any such thing, but it's a thought experiment worth considering.
He shivers a little at Felassan's question, and nods, sobering a little. "The Asgardian empire extended to the nine realms closest to our planet at one point. They had long been a spacefaring people. Most of their commerce" (and isn't it odd how he switches between 'them' and 'us' when he speaks of Asgard) "was between the realms of Alfheim, Asgard, and Vanaheim, but we went often to Nidavellir as well, and to Midgard in earlier days. I was very fond of humanity in my youth."
"The Bifrost was the method we used to travel. Focused energy, a kind of magic." And were Thor's Jane Foster here, he would let her take over the explanation, but the technical details aren't what Felassan was asking about anyway.
"But I fell from it. I let go." A flicker of shame and pain and uncertainty, which he shoves aside within a matter of seconds. "And free-fell through the space between stars. It was cold, airless. I must have spent days on the edge of death and never crossed over. Sometimes that blackness still haunts me." Falling, floating, moving simultaneously so fast and so slow, and all around the distant, fitful, uninterested light of stars.
"I don't know how long it was before I was picked up by a ship of Ravagers--space pirates--half-frozen and more or less catatonic, but they didn't have me for more than a day before they were attacked and plundered by a ship of the Black Order."