"STRANGE!"

The door to his hotel room burst open at the hinges.

A low breath escaped the sorcerer's lips that had long since twisted involuntarily in dismay; these beings from another realm, brandishing thunder and hailstorms in their stupid capes and horns, could do well to remember that the Earth was no longer the backwater planet it used to be centuries ago and at least have the decency to knock-

"Thor, son of Odin." Stephen drew his robes closer and cinched them at his waist with harried gestures that Thor would hopefully interpret as exasperation and sheer irritation at having been so rudely awakened at- 4 a.m.? Good GOD. "And good morrow to you too."

Thor was looking very upset for some reason. "It's about Loki."

At the mention of the Trickster God, Stephen's blood ran cold. Anthony Stark had booked the entire floor of the hotel just for the occasion and despite having the pick of any room, Thor and Loki were sharing a suite further down the hallway. Thor couldn't know, could he?

Stephen cleared his throat.

"What has he done now?"

"Something is wrong with Loki." Thor was very tense, if the white-knuckled fists by his side were of any indication. As if something had caught his hearing, he cocked his head and visibly stiffened.

Thor's eyes darkened and his next words were soft, almost scared. "Very wrong."

Now that Stephen was paying attention, he realised what it was he had been hearing drifting through the hallway the past few minutes; that keening, groaning sound, a muffled white noise he had nonchalantly put down to some harmless mechanics of the pipes within the walls.

"-he woke with such terrible pains in his belly-"

His senses sharpened, his memory stirred. It was a familiar sound, reminiscent from his stint as a general surgeon before his subspecialisation in neurosurgery, days of long ago spent fiddling with patients' gangrenous bowels and bleeding ulcers and perforated things.

Acute abdomens certainly were one the most painful human afflictions mankind could suffer from, and the sounds Loki was making from his room reminded Strange of such malady.

"-saw you two talking at dinner last night and he did not seem to mind your company," Thor rambled. "I was hoping it was you he had left the party with, which would mean he trusted you somewhat, which would mean I'd at least made the right decision to seek your assistance- "

Stephen felt his eyebrows quiver in irritation

"Will you help him?" Thor's plea was subdued in his distraction. Please. Stephen could read the sheer desperation creasing deep lines between the Thunder God's eyes.

He was not all sure if it was the doctor or the sorcerer in him that answered.

"Of course."

"Brother!"

Before Stephen could stop him, Thor dropped his weight onto the edge of the bed with all the grace of a white rhinoceros, jarring the bed violently, and just as Stephen had suspected and feared, Loki threw his head back and screamed.

Aghast, Thor recoiled and once more, Stephen was too slow to stop him from jumping off the bed, and the rocking movement again brought forth another cry of agony from the figure on the bed

"Don't!" Strange palmed the Thunder God's broad shoulder and physically shouldered him out of the way. "Don't-JOSTLE him, Thor!"

Thor bristled with either indignation or more likely guilt, but concern for his brother won over his stubbornness and he backed away. "I would have taken him to New Asgard but I could not move him without causing him terrible pain...as you can see."

"Yes, I can see." Strange waved his hand apologetically. "I had a hunch. If this is what I think it is, any jarring movement would greatly exacerbate the pain." And that was probably why Loki was lying there on the bed, as still as a corpse. He certainly looked like one.

He hoped Thor would not push him to explain further, for if he found elaborating on the pathophysiology and symptomology of peritonitis to Viking Gods from outer-space even remotely interesting, he would have opted to become a lecturer, not a surgeon.

An armchair materialised alongside the bed and Stephen sat down carefully, his thighs in line with his patient who was lying supine and unmoving, face tight with poorly-concealed distress. Loki had definitely looked better. Strange felt the first stirrings of concern and he did not like it.

"Show me."

"It is as you wish it, Sorcerer." Loki's breath whistled past parched, bloodless lips. "I feel I am not long for this world."

"Brother!" Stephen ignored Thor's horrified hiss and the looming great presence hovering over his shoulder. He focused on Loki.

"Show me where," Stephen growled.

Loki's hand drifted to his belly, sliding under the slip of the same tunic Stephen had last seen him wear before they parted ways just mere hours ago. He watched as Loki carefully placed his hand on the area below his navel.

"When did it start?" He hoped the unspoken words were clearly written in his eyes. You were perfectly fine last night.

Loki remained silent.

"Any food or drink you shouldn't have taken?"

Alarmed, Thor's posture straightened to ramrod stiffness. He furiously searched his memory of the night before.

It had been a small gathering, a celebratory dinner of some sort to congratulate Tony Stark on his upcoming nuptials; although Thor did wonder why the beautiful Lady Pepper did not partake in something as important as her betrothed's 'Stag Night'. Sure, all the (male) Avengers were there…and there was the human wizard Doctor Strange, whose contribution in the war against Thanos and the Black Order had been invaluable to the point Stark had considered them almost friends.

Thor could not imagine any of his friends morally capable of attempting to murder Thor's brother…or were they? After all Loki had done, the lengths he had gone to on the battlefield and off it to prove himself a foe no longer but an ally? Could Loki have been poisoned?

Before Thor could give voice to the disturbing thought, Loki heaved a gusty breath that could pass as a bark of laughter on one of his better days. A few strands of sweat-soaked hair refused to leave his lips, as if plastered to the tiny fissures at the cracked corners of his mouth.

Strange looked at him blankly, for he was never one to roll his eyes.

Loki ate the exact same thing Strange did. Which was not a whole lot. Drinks however…were aplenty.

He steadfastly avoided the sorcerer's gaze.

"Any vomiting?"

"Bleeding from anywhere, from any orifice in your body?"

"Blood in your urine, or stools?"

"Feeling feverish at all?"

"Light-headedness, feeling faint that sort of thing?"

Loki flicked his wrist 'no' to all the questions, but when Stephen half-thinkingly made to grab the wrist in mid-air, he drew it away out of range reflexively.

"I assume you will permit me to touch you at some point?" Stephen tried hard to keep the sarcasm out of his voice for it was a moot point at that too, seeing there was no deliberate exchange of consent issued between them the previous night. And Loki knew it too, so Stephen would not hold this against him; he may just be in extreme pain as his brother had so claimed.

"Loki, let him touch you." Loki managed a feverish roll of his glassy eyes. Stephen drew his gaze away from Loki for a fraction to glare at the big, blonde buffoon behind him.

Thor did not waver. "Brother, please let him help you."

Loki closed his eyes and reluctantly held out one hand in implied consent, the other still protectively clasped to his lower stomach.

Feeling for and assessing Loki's pulse once he had found it, he did not like what he was seeing. Thready and way too fast, for any species, human or otherwise. Loki's hand was ice-cold, his palm so white his nails were almost blue. If Loki were human, Stephen could certainly say with confidence that Loki was going into shock.

He could feel his own heart begin to race.

"Please describe the pain for me," Stephen murmured. After a long moment of silence-

"Unacceptable." Loki could hardly speak.

"As helpful as ever, I see." Stephen sighed.

Thor growled. "Strange."

"Fix him, yes, yes." The sorcerer studied his patient's pallid face, breaths so shallow his ribcage barely lifting off his chest. He gestured towards Loki's midsection, the area which seemed to give the most trouble. "May I?"

The look of terror on Loki's face lasted for a split second before the mask of indifference resettled over his features. His eyes calmed and before long, they fluttered to a close, as if unwilling to watch himself give in. His hand fell away from his stomach. "I am all yours, Sorcerer."

"I'm just going to have a feel, let me know if I'm causing any discomfort." A beat. "Further discomfort."

Loki only snorted delicately at the irony, his forehead wrinkled in fearful apprehension.

Strange murmured a spell to ensure his hand was warm and comfortable before probing Loki's abdomen gently, starting away from the pain, but as his fingers neared the lower region of his belly, he could feel Loki's abdominal muscles tense beneath his palm. "Take a deep breath and try to relax, Loki."

Relax, huh. Bah. If Loki survived this, he was going to stab somebody. Strange, most likely. Thor even, rekindled brotherly love or not. The Avengers too, just because. He was feeling particularly generous, no one should miss out on experiencing this for themselves, this vicious, stabbing, unrelenting, gut-wrenching, excruciating spasms of pai-

"It's gone." Loki opened his bleary eyes. The pain was gone.

The abrupt cessation of the blazing inferno of agony swept clean the fog from his mind like a clear breeze parting the clouds o'er a cinematic horizon.

Loki's seiðr awakened in slow, gentle waves.

"Truly, brother?" Thor boomed, his breaking smile brighter than a thousand suns. "Loki, you are cured of what ails you?"

Loki stared at the foreign hand palming his now quiet abdomen. What healing magic is this? "Strange, what did you do?"

Thor's immense relief at his brother's unexpectedly swift recovery dampened at the look of foreboding on the sorcerer's face. "Strange?"

The man's face had gone pale. When seconds passed and he did not blink, Thor took a few steps closer. He could see the hand still laid flat on Loki's bare stomach, but there was a strange look in the Sorcerer Supreme's eyes, a distant, faraway gaze that seemed to see nothing and everything-

Thor tentatively reached out a hand onto the sorcerer's shoulder. "Stephen?"

"Ah." Strange pursed his lips.

He was understanding it now.

"No…" Loki whispered.

Apparently so was Loki.

With a vicious snarl, he struck Strange's hand away from his solar plexus and with what little strength renewed after the too-brief respite, he curled up onto his side and pressed his knees to his chest, bargaining for the widest berth between him and the insufferable human magic wielder with his clever hands.

Clever hands, clever lips, and cleverer tongue. Damn damn damn

"Brother, I do not want him here," Loki seethed, his teeth bared. It was coming again, he realised. The beast with its gaping maw.

Strange studied the impression Loki's head had left on the sweat-soaked pillow, the jet-black hair plastered to the tremulous curvature of his back, the gangly arms now circling around his waist. Waves of pain radiated off the man like thick, red smog.

"Thor, please give us a moment."

Thor's single eye shone a bright, fierce blue. "No. I will not leave my brother."

"Thor…" A single tear dewed along Loki's lash line as he fought vainly against the clawing agony once again tearing through his lower torso, dredging deep into his pelvis. There was simply no escape. But there was no way, absolutely no way he was surrendering to this human mage again-

His teeth chattered. "Brother, get him out!"

"Thor, either you march outside right now and give us some privacy, or I will drop you into a portal, destination unknown."

Torn between acquiescing to his brother's hysterical demand and the threat of being plummeted into an eternal abyss, electricity began to bristle along the back of his neck and down his arms. Thor looked at Strange helplessly.

Strange always appeared eternally impassive, his cool and calm demeanour bordering on infuriating at times, but Thor would not mistake the smouldering fire in his grey eyes as anything but the most primitive human demand in the wake of dilemma. TRUST ME.

Thor gave him an imperceptible nod, his jaw set. Strange could sense him simply dying to say something to his bull-headed little brother, but he guessed no appeasing words were worth risking Loki's wrath right now.

The door closed none too gently behind him. A split second later, the walls shuddered and shook with a sudden roar.

"Now see what you have done. Everyone's probably awake now."

Loki heard the words, but the rush of blood in his ears blunted the sorcerer's insipid mockery to muffled wisps of whisper and smoke and nothingness

Please

Loki steeled himself not to scream as the invisible pitchfork stabbed him again and again, working to disembowel him from inside. But he knew now, the source of this wretched, atrocious pain…the flashing images of Strange's smug, smug face as he claimed him deep and hard - oh you beauty! - his damaged human hands so weak yet so slick with magic and talent as he prised Loki's thighs apart- What Loki wants Loki gets and still Loki draws

"-the short fucking STRAAW!" So much for not screaming, and bless, black spools of unconsciousness pulled him under. Finally.

When Loki came to, the hand was back again on his belly. The euphoria made him stupid and not only did Loki put his own hand on top of it, he let out a sigh in contentment.

Strange raised an eyebrow that simply meant, back in the land of the living, are we?

Neither acknowledging nor ignoring him, Loki concentrated solely on the magic sifting through his fingers, feeling it mingle with Stephen's soothing energies and sending inquiring nudges to tweak his rebellious body to reveal its secrets.

He had no inkling of how much time he had lost, but the pulse of new life nestled inside him was stronger now. He might as well be a fledgling magician for all the good his healing spells did him. He could not comprehend why his seiðr could do nothing to alleviate the pain. Now he knew.

If Loki could sense it, then Strange could sense it too. He was just better at hiding it. Or coping in general.

Loki thought no words more mundane could ever pass the sorcerer's lips but Strange managed to make himself sound marginally clever- "It is not possible."

Darling, you have no idea what's possible.

Curiously, the words echoed in Loki's mind in Hela's voice. The sharp outline of his Adam's apple bobbed as Loki tried to swallow past the sudden lump in his throat.

"I am fifteen hundred years old, Strange. I am more than aware of the dangers of unprotected intraspecies and interspecies coitus."

Strange frowned. The doctor in him had been looking for something physical, some organic source of pain he could easily incise or excise, holes he could close, bleeding he could stop…but then again, looking at his healing hand steadfast and not trembling for once and on Loki's suprapubic region no less, that he finally noted. It was where the human bladder sat. And where human women kept their lady bits.

"So what you said last night, about my not having to worry about taking you-"

"Was true." Or should have been. Loki wanted to laugh.

The clammy hand that kept Strange's own firmly pressed on Loki's belly lifted slightly as if daring the sorcerer to remove it. It remained, and the absence of pain was blissful. Loki reached up to cup his eyes. "I should have known."

"Known…what." Strange was angry. Loki could feel Stephen's anger seep through his pulsating fingers and lick its strange fire deep into the layers of his abdomen to soothe and burn his insides at the same time. It was a peculiar sensation.

"I should have known to reinforce my…contraceptive spells the moment it occurred to me that I was about to receive you." Loki gritted through his teeth. "The Sorcerer Supreme."

Idiot idiot idiot idiot

"Ah." Strange pursed his lips. "You thought I was just another average Midgardian looking for a quick extra-terrestrial lay."

"Your words, Strange. Not mine."

Strange looked at his hand resting on Loki's abdomen, still steadily dispensing the numbing tendrils of magic and he idly wondered what human drug could match it in its potency. His magic was one of chaos and to tease its workings to unravel the knots of green seiðr intertwined with the unruly golden threads of his own magic from seizing Loki's insides in a perpetual clamp of excruciating pain was unfamiliar territory, but he supposed he was doing it right. Loki had not uttered a whimper upon their first skin-to-skin contact. Well. Not first. Second today. Third ever.

Something shifted beneath his palm, and his magic flared like a spark doused in lighter fluid on its own volition. Loki's sudden sharp intake of breath stilled the flame and it receded.

"Did you try to erase it from existence just now as we speak?"

"I did. Try." The shuttered look in Loki's eyes was the closest thing to panic Strange had seen since all this…bizarreness started.

"You tried." He decided to probe further. "But you couldn't?"

"Why do you think your hand is still on my belly at all, Strange?" Loki managed to string through the scathingly rhetorical question without parting his teeth, his jaws clenched so tight.

"And did you not think to seek my opinion before making such life-changing decision on your own?"

"Life-changing…decision?" Loki murmured. He was still wracking his brain for a spell, any spell that could set him free of all this mess- "What are you on about?"

Strange seethed inwardly at how genuinely confused Loki managed to sound.

"Did you not think to include me in the discussion you had in your head with yourself?"

"It is my body, sorcerer. I shall do with it whatever the Hel I wish."

"You are with child, Loki." Saying it out loud did not downplay the entire situation and render it less overwhelming but the status quo of it all grounded Strange enough somewhat to say his piece.

"Now it might escape your attention but unless our 'subpar' Midgardian alcohol as you so eloquently put it has so compromised not only your memory in your state of inebriation, but also your exceptional magic prowess that you are spectacularly failing to see that we-this-" Stephen curled his fingers around the taut flesh of Loki's abdomen slightly as his voice trailed.

"I can see just fine, Strange," Loki said quietly.

"We created this, Loki."

"We created nothing. It just happened. There is a difference." The scoff was meant to sound derisive but it came across shaken, frightened.

"Semantics changes not what it is, Loki."

"You cannot possibly be attached to this, Strange." Loki's green eyes, bright with the memory of pain, gaped in disbelief. "There is simply no reason for you to be."

"For someone so old, are you truly an ignoramus or simply full of yourself?"

"I beg your pardon." Loki's voice chilled to match the sudden drop in room temperature.

"Do you even know why it is causing you so much pain?"

"Oh, please do enlighten me, Doctor. I am afraid the pain has made me stupid."

"No need for hysterics now, Loki."

"I should have killed you when I had the chance-"

"What, before or after you passed out in my bed?"

If Loki's eyes were daggers, Strange could very well be dead, but alas they were not. They were pretty, though.

He sighed heavily. "It is a magical being, Loki. Born of magic, albeit of two different natures with different temperaments, distinct energy signatures. They cannot mix. The magical malunion is what is tearing you apart."

"But it shouldn't." Real fear tinged Loki's voice. His cold fingers curled unconsciously, his nails scraping against the back of Stephen's hand. "I have borne, and lost children of magic before but never quite so painfully."

Strange was quiet. "You are not losing the child. We have only entered a magical contract and unknowingly signed it without discussing the terms and conditions."

He could see Loki rolling his eyeballs behind his closed eyes, the vein on the lids stark blue against the pallor of his skin. "That's your explanation?"

"The analogy works."

"So… since we have inadvertently sired it by a stroke of accidental miscalculation, all we need to do now is reach a consensus about what to do with it? Accept it or reject-" A wince. "Not accept it?"

"The child is not an it, Loki."

"Answer the question, Strange."

Long minutes passed in silence. Sunlight was breaking; the first rays slithered through the blinds and cast stripes over his face, its warmth a blessed welcome. Loki cocked his head, his own thoughts fleeting away from him like a runaway train, as he studied the sorcerer's stony façade. Strange was but the one person he could not read, and he found it both intriguing and extremely vexing.

"What feelings do you have for this child, who is yet to have a form of his own?"

"You ask me that and yet you seem to have developed feelings of your own." Stephen's heart skipped a beat. He searched Loki's face in unabashed wonder. "It is a he?"

"You do not want this." Loki's voice was soft, laced with a tenor of uncertainty.

Strange was quiet for a while. "I did not sign up for it, yes. But what happened between us happened. Fates must have willed it so."

"You are no fatalist, Doctor." Green eyes darted wildly as if struck by a sudden epiphany. "You control time."

"Please do not insult me further by suggesting I undo anything lest we invite catastrophe into our midst as you very well know it could."

With his free hand, Strange pinched his forehead between his thumb and forefinger as if calculating the impact of his next words. "It is because I am a Time Wielder that every decision I make, everything I do is as sure to my whole-hearted will as is set in stone. For there is no turning back. No matter the consequences."

All it needed was an awkward dinner to lead to false pleasantries and awkward conversation to turn into something akin to alchemy and the rest was history.

"You do not know me, Strange," Loki articulated slowly. All of a sudden Stephen felt somewhat chastised, as if he were a toddler.

"You are right. I do not."

"You have seen the monster that I am."

"What monster that you were, yes. Like I said, no changing the past."

"You cannot want this," Loki reiterated in disbelief.

"I am beginning to understand why people find you hard to be around, Loki." Strange dead-panned. "You allow no one to exercise autonomy over one's own thoughts and actions."

Loki winced inwardly. Yeah…now that he thought about it, he did get that a lot. He had discovered that it seemed to make everything simpler by nature. Is not this simpler?

"You do not even know what you feel for me." It was the alcohol that did it. Weak Midgardian alcohol. Something in the water. Something in the air. Whatever it was that made last night happen.

"There is sentience in feelings, Loki." He heard Stephen murmur under his breath, and his own hesitant breath caught in his throat as Stephen's other hand reached up to trace the outline of his temple.

"It lives, it dies." His gentle thumb flicked the wetness away from the tired corner of Loki's eye.

"And it grows."

Stunned, Loki could do nothing but stare.

"What do I do?" He whispered.

"Do rephrase that question, my dear." Snarky Strange was back, the term of endearment uttered completely devoid of tenderness, but his grey eyes were soft and gentle. Loki took the deepest and longest breath he could.

"What do we do?"

"Well. Sudden acts of madness and impulsivity aside, there is no mode of action more suited to this sort of delicate situation than facing it head on and taking it one at a time. The way we humans usually do it, we often try very hard to break the news to the next-of-kin, gently or not it is your choice of course-" Stephen pointedly looked at the door. And sighed heavily. "We have to get past the door at some point."

"Thor is a very large door-stopper. He wouldn't budge."

"Yes…I suspect as much." Stephen's eyes drifted upward to search the ceiling. There were more voices now outside the room. "Should I portal us somewhere?"

"Like this?" Loki waved his hand down the length of his body where Stephen's hand might as well be a permanent appendage- "for the next one year, give or take a few months?"

At Stephen's inquiring gaze, Loki shrugged. "I can never tell. Until it's time. Time is funny, depending on what I'm carrying."

"So…we have reached a…" Stephen's lips curved involuntarily at the edges. "Consensus?"

"A bit too late to backtrack on the contract, don't you think."

"And we hereby agree that we make every decision pertaining to the child together?"

"What, like where to send him to school or something?"

"Among other things." Stephen was dead serious.

"Seriously, Strange. As grateful as I am that I no longer feel like I'm being run through with a thousand swords, this cannot go on."

Stephen nodded. Loki could tell he was anxious, like he was itching to tap his fingers or crack his knuckles, his mind racing in never-ending circles.

"I am going to try something."

"Unification spells are volatile," Loki said warily. "To emulsify oil and water is one thing, but to meld your magic with my seiðr, it is not without risks."

"I am a Master of the Mystic Arts, you know. THE Master." The words were arrogant, but the smile was genuine, softening his features. "I will not hurt you, Loki."

Loki's forehead wrinkled and he retorted, "I don't care about-"

"I will not hurt him."

"Alright." His mouth had suddenly gone very dry. There was a peculiar flutter in his left breast where his heart was. Loki's chest heaved. "Alright."

Golden tendrils of magic formed intricate mandalas in the air, the elemental energies forming a barrier between the outer world and within and suddenly both the Sorcerer Supreme's hands were pressing on his belly, warm and heavy.

And Loki emptied his mind, methodically clearing his thoughts and bracing himself for the onslaught of foreign magic, not knowing what to expect, more pain, a different sort of pain perhaps-

Stephen was barely audible and he hummed in a distant buzz and the words of an ancient spell breathed the incantation into life and life ceased to hurt and the pressure lifted and Loki could breathe again.

"There."

Loki opened his eyes. Strange had retrieved both his hands and they were now tidily clasped in his lap.

"How do you feel?"

Loki listened to his body. Where there once was fire, it was now temperate and still and so pleasantly quiet. Something stirred deep inside him like the tip of an invisible finger touching water and it rippled. Hello, there.

Strange watched as Loki gingerly raised his upper body into a sitting position. To his satisfaction, the God of Mischief had regained some colour and clarity had quickly returned to his eyes now that all traces of pain had left him, only weariness remaining.

"I do not hurt anymore." The unspoken relief in his eyes as he met Stephen's gaze was all the form of appreciation he was going to get.

Strange found that it did not matter. "I am glad."

Seconds ticked by. Loki stared at his stomach. If he looked at it long enough maybe this would all cease to be true and he would wake up in his bed with a hangover and a sweet aching between his legs as the only reminder of the night before.

Strange too was staring into space. It was not an uncomfortable silence but neither of them was particularly eager to address the elephant in the room.

"So. A year, huh."

"Hmm." Loki smoothed down the front of his tunic and fiddled with the hem.

Strange rubbed the pads of his thumbs together in thoughtful contemplation. When he finally spoke, he sounded resolute.

"I suppose a year is ample time for-"

"Not killing each other?"

"No-"

"An armistice?"

"NO, Loki. Good God, for someone so ancient you are awfully redundant."

Loki did not even deign to pretend he was insulted. He brushed his unruly hair away from his face and tucked it behind both ears before staring intently into Stephen's face, looking only mildly curious.

"Then what, pray tell, is a year long enough for?"

Stephen had always disliked looking directly into people's eyes. On a good day, he was probably just shy off the antisocial personality spectrum. Now Loki...Loki may be a god, with a nature so chaotic he was divine madness incarnate...so far from godly, farther still from saintly.

He could be dead in a year (if the theme of death and destruction Loki seemed so fond of could not be contained)...or he could be just fine and grateful that he took a chance.

So Stephen met those green eyes head-on.

"Courting you, of course."

Loki stared at him in stark bewilderment.

"I may look contemporary, but I am a traditionalist." Stephen suspected his half-jest placated more himself than Loki.

All attempts at dry humor abandoned, Stephen's eyes finally drifted to Loki's belly. His gaze intensified as if he had caught sight of something precious. Serendipitous. Something that also belonged to him.

"A year to get to know you two."

And when his hand reached out to touch, Loki's fingers were there to catch it. Stephen raised them to his lips and hesitated only for a millisecond, before kissing them softly, but surely.

Loki did not know whether to laugh or cry. So he did a bit of both.