Where My Feet Bring Me
By Rey

Where my feet bring me
Where my heart leads me
It's a place I used to know
Cosy little thing, softly aglow
Don't ask me, I can't tell
But I can always dwell
There, in dreams and wishes
There, where the fog vanishes
And I see it, I see myself
I know it, I know myself
It's bitter, it's sweet, but that's life
Soft as butter, sharp as a knife
That place, cozy little thing
That place, I never stop searching

Loki never stops searching. And then he finds it. But he is not the only one searching, it turns out.

Story tags: Age Difference, POV Third Person Limited, POV Loki (Marvel), Loki-centric, Loki (Marvel) Has Issues, Loki Does What He Wants, Loki Needs a Hug, Present Tense, Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, Pre-Thor (2011), Jotunn Physiology, Internalised Racism, Internalised Sexism, Unexpected Family Relations, good-natured bickering, Family Dynamics, Family Feels, Family Fluff, Unreliable Narrator

Story notes: There is a biological and cultural difference in age for humans, jötnar and æsir, in my universe. In this fic, Loki is 1000 years old, about 13 years in modern human standard for an ás', biologically, but about 8 in the same standard for a jötun. Furthermore, most of Jötunheim does not support warrior culture, while all of Asgard is about warrior culture, which is a further consideration that impacts the rate of maturity for people raised in those respective societies. (Naturally, those raised in a warrior/hunting culture will mature faster.)

Author's note: If you read Winter's Treasures, you might recognise two of the Ocs here. Here's my answer to the wish that some readers posed there, that Vrelkki lives and Ovrekka behaves lighter.

Started on: 12th June 2019 at 09:17 AM

Finished on: 20th February 2020 at 10:47 PM

Loki never fits in Asgard. It is a fact as stark and contradictory as blood on pristine snow. Everyone but the hardened people who often or regularly work with such thing knows it and shies away from it. And just like the comparison, everyone but the "hardened" people who often or regularly work with him knows it and shies away from him.

He is a thousand years old already, and yet he craves his parents' attention still, and looks a little too young indeed for a lad at the beginning of his adolescence. He is so young still, in a way, but already comparable to the greatest – old – scholars in the realm in terms of intelect, tactics and certain kinds of maturity. And indeed, he is often seen advising his father the King on matters fit for a full-fledged advisor, not a little princeling.

He is a warrior in his own right, but he works with daggers and stealth and seiðr, the so-called "ways of women and the cowardly." Most of the times, he plays pranks with varying degrees of severity on people who displease or slight him, too, rather than confronting them dead-on and challenging them into duels for his own honour.

He excels in seiðr workings, but not a woman. Not according to himself and his parents, at least, and sometimes also not according to his elder brother Thor, despite the fact that he is slender, smaller than other lads his age, possessed of rather delicate features and voice, showing none of the signs of emerging hairs in new places, fastidious with clenliness and neatness, and blessed… or cursed… with both male and female reproductive organs.

Being called "ergi" and "baby" and "coward" and "upstart boy" – or "upstart girl" – and "Prince of Trickery" out of the hearing range of his parents and elder brother has long become an everyday thing for him, because of all those. And his own brother even calls him rather unmanly sometimes.

And he is really, truly, extremely fed up with it all.

Today is the millennium celebration of Asgard's victory over Jötunheim – and, also, perhaps accidentally, Loki's birthday. And, as per usual, there is no special celebration for him amidst all the people, with how they are too busy getting roaring drunk – literally, in most cases – for a far more auspicious reason. But he does not mind this; he never does. Quiet meals spent with all his family members for the day is enough. And it has indeed been done so since time out of mind on this day, in spite of the festivities going on both in the palace and outside of it, ones that the Royal Family spends amongst when not taking the said private meals.

But today both his father and his brother have been entirely missing from the meals, leaving him spending each time alone with his mother and Yössur, Deputy Chief of the Royal Guard and the son of a family friend, also a close family friend on his own merit. He cannot deny that the absence crushes him, and he cannot conceal the feeling from both of his mealtime companions either.

He can, however, conceal his plan – hatched through the course of the day, born out of an acute sense of loneliness and abandonment – from them. It is vital that they do not get any whiff of it, and he is glad that, thus far, he has managed to keep it so. After all, they would likely react with extreme prejudice if only they knew where he wanted to venture out tonight.

He has worked rather much on his world-travelling skills, perfecting the said skills with all the means available to a royal prince blessed – or cursed, maybe – with an abundance of seiðr and not a little sum of wealth in his coffers, not to mention connections with the best mages in all the realms. The little similarity and acceptance he always feels on Asgard has oftentimes driven him to escape the Eternal Realm whenever he is able to or has the "valid excuse" for, thus, since the moment he was firstly confident enough to attempt realm-hopping. And there is one trick he likes the most out of his world-travelling arsenal, and one realm he has always been curious to peek into….

An Asgardian creeping into Jötunheim during the anniversary of its defeat by Asgard is a crass, heavy-handed, insulting thing that would usually be done by Thor, not Loki. But… well… the entire day has not been "usual" for Loki, anyway, and he does not mean to venture out far from the crack of reality near the weapons vault that he is sure leads to that frozen land of monsters, anyway.

He just needs… something; something to do, something to feel, something that is his own and nobody else knows.

Something like some vague dreams he has, in fact, when they are not populated by everyday things made bizarre or nightmares of loss, hunger, loneliness and chill.

Making use of the naturally available portals between worlds is the least taxing, the least flashy and the least complicated of the transportation modes that he knows, although one of the most dangerous for the unwary and ignorant. Well, in this case, Loki could be categorised as both, but he is reasonably sure, regardless, that he has correctly judged where this particular portal leads to. He just would not be able to specifically tell how he could be so sure about a portal he has never tried to pass through before, if asked.

Then again, who would ask? Who would know, in the first place? He is certainly going to tell nobody about this excursion, and he has in fact painstakingly cloaked himself from mundane and Heimdall's sight.

So, now, garbed in many layers of winter apparel, to prepare for the purported unbearably bitter chill of the realm he hopes to visit, he drifts invisibly past the scant and scattered guards, past the revellers and busy servants, past the empty hallways that nonetheless buzz and echo with thousands of loud sounds, down to the weapons vault and past it to the portal in concern.

He fancies the harshly cold temperature of his destination seeping out and surrounding the invisible seam in reality like a halo.

A small, controlled tendral of seiðr helps him locate and open the portal. It acts as his pathfinder, guide and protector all at once as he steps through, pulling himself past the divide, more confidently than everyone – including himself – would have expected from him.

But the moment his boots touch the snow-blanketed permafrost on the other side of the portal, the moment he inhales the briskly cold, snow-spattered air round him, the moment his body acclimatises all too readily to the surrounding air, he reels back, inwardly.

He can only see icy wasteland, wherever he looks, however far he tries to peer through the gently and sparcely falling snow, but he also cannot help thinking that this place is somehow familiar.

And hot, too, somehow, while he is garbed in so many layers of winter clothes like this.

So he peels away most of the layers, stuffing the unnecessary pieces in his pocket dimension, leaving himself in just his winter underclothes and his waterproof outermost coat. After that, he puts a step forward, then two, three, four….

He ends up running through the snowfield, slowing down only when his boots trip on something – a buried bit of rock, perhaps – that is concealed under a heavy layer of snow. Rarely coming across the white stuff as he does, what the thousand-year-old youth does next is to throw it about while wading through it, grinning and giggling to himself as he inadvertently creates a rough and semi-artistic channel with his passage. Asgard so rarely snows, and Vanaheim has snow only on its opposite ends, and to date he has experienced winter only in those two realms. If only he knew to come here much earlier, not during a sensitive time….

His mood plummets on that very thought. He is here not entirely on his own volition, after all. He is here because….

Because?

Because what? Because his father and elder brother have abandoned him for the day? Because he is so thirsty and greedy for attention that, in lieu of that from his family, he seeks to get it from a land of brutes – not even from those brutes themselves, who must be… what? Mourning? Cursing Asgard? Plotting revenge? Doing nothing at all like lackwits?

He slows into a rocking stop and frowns abstractedly at the gently falling snow before him.

For a harsh, cold land of monsters, Jötunheim is peaceful, even beautiful, if rather deserted at present. It does not match all the tales and recounts he has heard, nor the – admitedly, somewhat dubious – accounting from the precious few books he has managed to find at the most untouched corners of a few libraries, including the palace's own collection. And where are its inhabitants? Where are the fearsome frost giants that Asgard defeated a millennium ago? Has his passage here been totally unmarked?

But no, he felt something upon his exit from the portal. It felt like a ward set out to bar intruders from a home, or a settlement… or maybe even a whole realm.

He remembers that it felt familiar.

The bewildered second son of Odin has no chance whatsoever to ponder the conundrum, all the same. Without any prior warning, something barrels over his upper body, and down he dives into the snow, quite without his own say-so.

The "something" turns out to be a frost giant, at long last, who turns towards him as he surfaces, spluttering, from the patch of deep snow he has fallen into. He has no time to observe the thing, sadly, nor to distance himself from it, for it immediately goes over to him and jabbers in a language that is oddly untranslatable by Allspeak. The words he hears are even less coherent the longer the jötun talks, as the soft breezes that have been blowing the snowflakes everywhere intermittently now turn into one strong wind that enthusiastically tries to fly him like a kite.

He has no more chance to ponder about the words and the weather, soon after, for the huge blue brute, agitated, grabs at his arm and just… carries him away by that arm as if he were a bag of groceries. A seiðr push does not avail him, and neither does a physical one. All that he earns for his efforts are more jabbering and him being treated like a baby, cradled in the jötun's arms instead of dangling from an arm.

He is unfortunately the only one shocked out of his mind when, upon arriving at a stone dwelling of some kind… maybe a cluster of beautified caves?… he finds that his skin is blue. Not out-of-blood blue, not bruised blue, not chilled blue, but blue – a rich shade of blue, greyish in the dimmer light of the entrance but truly deep… and rather beautiful, he must admit… when under the illumination of the soft silvery light in the next room over.

His kidnapper-by-chance seems more puzzled with how the texture of his skin does not truly match its own hide despite the visual similarities, rather than the fact that he changed skins. The same thing happens to the few other – elder? Well, certainly bigger – giants that it calls over to where it is parked along with its captive.

It is as if they have indeed expected him – Loki, son of Odin, an ás – to… what? Be a jötun in disguise? Turn into a jötun upon entering the realm? Ridiculous.

Even more ridiculous, in his opinion, is the notion that here he seems to be a little child. He is treated thus, anyhow: unable to walk on his own anywhere because any of the overly tactile giants keeps carrying him. After the meal that they share – some kind of tough, rough meat, cubed small and marinated in some kind of sour and salty thick sauce the colour of bruise purple – they even ramp the interaction up to cuddling him. They do not seem to mind that he is yet to tell them his name or speak in more than a few terse sentences in Allspeak.

But they do mind it when he insists that he go home, even through the storm that is now whipping ferociously about outside.

"Nobody has any business being outside right now. You know that well, do you not, child?" the biggest giant in the cavern-like house, calling… itself? Themself? Himself? Herself?… "Elder Ekki," rumbles in… their?… typically calm, thoughtful tone, in heavily accented and native-tinged Allspeak. It… well, they are his current captor, and they have brought him to look out through the transparent ice that acts as the windowpane, watching the slurry of grey-white snowflakes whip about outside. "We are at the tail-end of the storm season, true. But even so, the storms at this time cannot be disregarded, child. You were foolish in venturing so far away from home at this time. Whatever your argument was with your dam or kin or sibling or sire, Elder does not think that being killed in the storm is worth proving a point to them."

"Worth it if one is running away from a nightmare glider, though," calls one of the smaller giants from somewhere behind them, followed suit by a smack that might be hand meeting head, courtesy of… their… maybe mate. – Well, in any case, although both smaller giants have differing markings, traces of those markings can be found on the hide of the smallest giant, which would suggest such relationship… if barbaric brutes do have things like marriage and family….

But this eldest, hugest, calmest jötun does have a calming presence, and a comfortable hold, and a soothing voice….

Well, in any case…, "What's a nightmare glider?"

A – maybe half alarmed, maybe half frightened, but certainly playful – yelp breaks above the constant roaring and whistling of the wind filtering in from outside, courtesy of the previous speaker. It is followed by thumps and the mate's ranting in the Allspeak-untranslatable language, soon spattered by the littlest giant's giggling and cheering, and strengthened by Elder Vrelkki's subdued chuckling.

And Loki cannot help but contribute his own mirth into the mix at length, stifled in vain.

He runs round and round and round the snug, cosy stone dwelling, then; scrambling under and in-between the huge furniture every so often, pursued by the mock-angry littlest giant, who feigns offence at their parents being laughed at by him.

It surprisingly feels… fun.

He feels childish doing this, but somehow unashamed about it.

It is… freeing.

To think that they are frost giants, and this is maybe the commemoration day of their sound defeat by Asgard….

The mood of the Asgardian youth plummets again, on that reoccurring thought.

And the littlest giant, goofy and childish though they behave most of the times, notices.

They snag him, plop him onto their lap, and ask why. Worse – for Loki – is when the parents join in, and then Elder Ekki.

He rarely, rarely gets a good kind of attention from adults or older youths, or sometimes any kind of attention at all, so this overflow of attention daunts him.

But it works.

At last, cornered, he blurts out, "I miss my family." A half truth, quite a childish one at that, but hopefully a good cover for why he came here.

Because he does not really know, himself, why he came here of all places, of all times.

Fortunately, apparently in keeping with their strange view of his age, he is not rebuked for this show of weakness, of clinginess while he is supposed to seek the best, fastest way out of his family's influence. The jötnar instead fuss over him, although they do not crowd round him. They try to soothe him with offers to play with him in the meantime, to make him some sweet snow (whatever it is), to… literally unearth?… some toys for him to play with from "Rekki's toy-scattering phase" (from the one who talked about "nightmare glider," that), to bring him home themselves after the storm, to explain to his guardians that he has been a good guest at this home….

He feels like a king, waited hand and foot by adoring, well-meaning courtiers.

A very, very nice illusion, he knows it well, in both his own situation and the reality of kingship that he observes weighing down his father. But he shamelessly clings to it, still, and revels in it.

The little family plus one confused, ambivalent guest soon settle down round their dining/kitchen table to, as the giants promised, make some sweet snow. It involves stirring the fresh syrup of some kind of red thumb-sized fruit cluster – which actually tastes more sour-bitter than sweet – into a bowl of freshly picked snow, followed by each person throwing whatever kind of food they wish into the mixture.

Again, it feels fun, and Loki marvels quietly at it, as he picks the "full version" of the red little fruit from the bowl – which is as big as his personal bath tub at home – alongside a good scoopful of the base "sweet snow" for himself. The mixture in his much smaller bowl looks like large droplets of æsir blood landing on a blood-saturated snow, but the fruity smell and taste chase the illusion away.

The cheeky, playful mate seems to want to say something, after looking at him and perhaps noticing his pensive mood. But their partner swiftly brings a – huge, huge, huge – hand down on the side of their snow-coloured, bushy-haired head, which triggers yet another wounded squawk from them. And, in turn, the littlest giant – "Rekki," or so he hears – sniggers, which causes "Elder Ekki" to – rather jokingly, Loki thinks – admonish both them for egging on their mother, and the said… mother?… for "damaging the already dull head."

They feel truly like a family. A civilised family: living in frugality but not poverty, and taking in a stray "child" with no question asked just because he was "so foolish" as to have strayed too far from home during "storm season." Not monsters, let alone just vicious, unthinking beasts intent on hacking and ripping enemies into pieces.

After the communal treat, Rekki even shows him how they use the claws at the end of their fingers and toes to scale up the inner walls and ceiling of the abode, which are just as rugged as the exterior is. It makes the fearsome-looking black things useful instead of barbaric, and Loki cannot even deny envying the littlest giant about it.

"You are under a foreign enchantment that makes you stick to the warm-weather skin most of the time. You have not even changed fully back," Elder Ekki suddenly says to him when, daringly, Rekki launches themself from one wall to the opposite one by only the help of their claws – and, perhaps, some ice to glue them fast to the wall like that. "It feels old, deep. Elder does not think you are truly aware of it. Do you wish for Elder to try to undo or negate it? So you can learn how to climb and jump about like Ýto Rekki?"

It feels like a very, very loaded question to Loki. But Elder Ekki treats it lightly, almost offhandedly, as if….

"Is… Elder…. I mean…. I have not even…. No, I am going to be gone once the storm ends. But thank you for the offer."

Alarmed and hypervigilant, now, the second prince of Asgard tries to squirm free from the hugest giant's hold, which he has been somehow stuck in again. But smoothly and still gently, Elder Ekki keeps anticipating his moves and preventing him from ever sticking a limb out of the cocoon they have made out of their own arms.

The hold feels like a prison to him, now, instead of a safe, comfy nest.

And the giant notices.

"Elder will not ask again, child. Apologies. Hush, hush. You are safe, little one."

And the beleaguered prince is cuddled closer, being rocked back and forth to boot, complete with a fearsomely tipped paw carding through his hair, gently scraping his scalp at that.

If only the action were not so cosy, homey, even warm….

Loki slips into slumber between one breath and the next, and slides deeper as what sounds like a wordless lullaby is added to the so very potant combination. He only stirs when, in seemingly a moment yet an eternity afterwards, a commotion sounds from far, far away.

He stirs further, but feels too comfy to wake up fully, when his bed somehow gets mobile and moves outside. A new but so very familiar freshness greets his senses, but he does not feel curious enough to try to wake up by himself.

He does wake up, with quite a start at that, all the same, when his bed somehow… unravels… and his elevation changes. Wide-eyed and flailing, he tries to escape his misbehaving bed, which has suddenly heaved upwards.

He is dropped into a new… bed?… instead, which has similarly tenacious and mobile characteristics as his old one, if smaller and slimmer.

And now he remembers that, last time, he has been tricked into sleeping by Elder Ekki, instead of going to bed on his own at home.

`So… now…? Who…?`

He struggles into a seated position, which his new captor reluctantly allows, and stares into the wide, red eyes of… Laufey?

He freezes, and helplessly locks gazes with… Laufey!

And there is no way to deny it. The markings, the features, the skin and eye colours, they all match the renderings of the King of Jotunheim that he found in the more trusty manuscripts about these… beings. `But… but… but… Laufey?!`

Well, unfortunately for him, while he is thoroughly petrified by this quite unexpected and very, very horrible twist in his plan, his captor is taken aback only for a little while.

The only warning that the hapless captive gets is the huge, huge hand, coated with a somehow familiar flavour of seiðr, laid on his chest in an equally familiar gesture. And then the foreign but familiar seiðr floods into him, and all throughout every bit of him from head to foot, tearing all foreign enchantments off of him with a vengence.

He screams, and screams, and screams, and still screams even when the foreign but familiar power no longer hurts him. He is all too aware of the tears coursing down his cheeks, but he cannot stop it, either. The hand that hurt him tries to wipe the tears away, but he bites it instead, hard, until he can taste a strange liquid spurting onto his tongue.

He kicks free of his restraints when the owner of the hand yelps, but his feet never touch the ground.

"Child, please." Elder Ekki. It is Elder Ekki who has caught him mid-air.

Loki bites them, anyway. `I am never going to be caught off guard; never, ever, ever again!`

And, bless the not-so-monstrous frost giant, he is put down gently on the snow-covered ground, instead of him having to kick free again.

He uses the chance well.

The monster who hurt him yelps again, as he dives into what he recognises as the home Rekki brought him into to shelter from the blizzard. Fortunately for him, he still remembers the tight little places that he went into to avoid Rekki in their game, which now feels like an eternity ago. So, without further ado, he makes a beeline to the most inaccessible spot that he remembers: the empty lower shelf of an open, built-in, triangular cupboard, which is set in a corner that is also populated by an open chest of clothes on one side and a wide, low table of miscellaneous tools on the other side, not to mention one corner of the dining table across from it.

Rekki had to crawl under the wide, short-footed dining table to reach him during their impromptu game, and it allowed him to climb to the chest of clothes unmolested and use its rim as a bridge to escape the cluttered corner altogether. Now, he does not sense Rekki anywhere close, and surely none of the bigger frost giants will deign to crawl under the dining table to reach him, especially that one, and the biggest ones will not be able to do so, either, so he is safe for the moment.

But then, after a short exchange of tense, low-toned words, one does.

And it is that one.

Loki sits, wide-eyed and petrified once more, as Laufey, King of Jötunheim, does creep under the dining table meant to be used cross-legged by the frost giants, and lies curled up sidewise facing him. The clearly bite-marked hand is even reached out to him, as though he were invited to bite it again or do something worse.

And the King, somehow willingly debasing himself so, is silent, just staring back at Loki with – or so the literally cornered youth imagines – equally wide eyes, as though he realised that he had done something both inexcusable and unforgivable.

`Father would not do this,` the bewildered prince thinks, dumbfounded even more, if it were possible. `Norns, Mother would not do this, and she is the kindest person I know. – Why him, then? Why would a king ever do this for anybody? Did he somehow realise that I am the second prince of Asgard? But… no… this does not make sense!`

"Why?" he bursts out at last, on the cusp of his frustration.

But, instead of a verbal or physically gestural answer, the same power from before reaches out tentatively to him and winds gently round his sense of self.

Loki flinches, all the same. He only relaxes, a little, when the power just winds round and round and round, without doing anything else. Daring to close his eyes for a moment, he concentrates and tentatively reaches back with a tendral of his own power, his own self, letting himself slowly but surely soak in a bit of the sense of self that is so new and yet so familiar to his psyche, like sucking on a bit of flavoured meat whose taste he has almost forgotten.

And, the longer he wallows in the bit of power, the more he drifts into it, until the vague memory of a warm, safe, comfortable little place dances at the edge of his mind, filled with a constant, soothing noise and wordless songs.

He is only aware that he has moved when the noise from his faded memory plays out loud and clear in his ears, in the present. The power is all round him and drenching him again, now, but lightly and not to hurt him, just like in the memory, and there is even a cocoon of flesh round him, made by two sets of limbs and a curved body.

A curved, shaking body, which now he realises has been emitting half-stifled distressed noises since… he does not know when.

Dimly, he acknowledge that he should be alarmed, or worried, or frightened. But the memory, mingled with this reality, has created a feeling of home so perfect that he does not wish to shatter it with anything, if it is only an illusion after all.

Well, but the shaking and the distressed noises is incongruent to the feeling of home, is it not?

The bubble of trance-like contentment breaks, just so.

Loki eels out of the giant's hold, refusing to acknowledge what and who the said giant actually is. He stops before his legs wriggle free, however, now entranced by another thing.

The sight of a king weeping, to be exact. The king of the monsters, at that, who has acted monstrous, himself.

"Why?" he whispers, at length, as he breaks free of the state with an effort.

And, this time, slow and haltingly, with his eyes never leaving the one he wronged, Laufey speaks.

"I…. The barrier. We… put it up. When… the Paths… when they are used. Only… only our kind, can come through. And you…. You came. You came through. During a storm. I have, been waiting, searching…. For you."

The huge arms that are still wrapped round Loki's legs tighten in an odd embrace.

"I never stopped searching. Never. I lost you. You and your sibling. But them to death. And you were alive. I knew it. Only lost. Only lost. I still…. I still hoped. And then you came. You were… different. But the barrier… it did not lie. I was… impatient. And angry. With Voðen. But not with you. Never with you. I…. Loptr, forgive Amma? Please?"

There is no more word spoken, as great sobs rack the broken thing that lies before him, now. The huge, bald head is pressed gently against his front, as though he were to offer it comfort or judgement as he wished, as though he were the king and the other were the subject.

He shies away.

"You hurt me," he whispers, past the lump in his throat, past the pounding of his heart, past the stuttering breath of his lungs.

A soft, keening sound is the response. An acknowledgement, from one who has no more to give.

"It was… nice. I… remember. It was supposed to be good, safe. It was…. I was…. You were… so familiar. And I thought… But…."

His own eyes burn again, but with a different kind of tears than before, although he does not know which kind it is now.

"Why are you so familiar?" he whispers at last, just as brokenly as the creature before him. `Why do you feel like home?` his heart demands. His innermost being, long caged, knows the answer, but he shies away from it, too.

He cannot shy away from what he hears as the answer, however.

"I am your mother."