How sweet is the day, I'm craving a darkness [open]

[sorcerous]

WHO Loki and OPEN
WHAT Moping, but what else is new.
WHERE The stables, in the stable of his horse.
WHEN RD12
NOTES None so far.

He'd shouted at the palace servants. Sent one of them cowering and quivering, sobbing in fear. Find her, he'd cried, but none of them had been able to. Frigga is gone. Returned to Asgard, perhaps; perhaps to return here later without any memory of what's already come. Sif, missing, though there are some who swear she has fled to the forest.

He storms away to the stables and dismisses the stablehands with a snarl. Slips inside the stall of the horse they'd given him, the little dark-colored mare. She is lying down, her forelegs curled. He collapses next to her. Leans against her, heavily -- such is his exhaustion.

He sleeps, on and off, for the rest of the day. Perhaps she senses in him kin, of a sort, for she stays with him, not standing, not wavering.

Comments

[sorcerous]

Loki's skin is still blue, and he radiates an aura of cold. His red eyes are half-lidded, closed.

"The danger is over," he tells Faolan, softly. "The Hero is defeated." He reaches out and strokes down Faolan's tousled hair, and again, as ever, he sees the children he failed. The ones he abandoned in selfishness -- the ones who didn't want him in the first place. It is one who isn't even his flesh and blood who would accept him as a father.

[greatsquirrelhunter]

Faolan cuddles closer, looking up at Loki. "Then why is Loki sad?" he asks plaintively.

[sorcerous]

How easy it is to let the boy have his closeness. How difficult, to push him away.

"The Queen of Asgard has come and gone," he tells Faolan. "I wished that she would stay."

[greatsquirrelhunter]

Faolan whimpers. He knows what that means. "Loki's Mutti is gone?" He throws his arms around the man, ignoring the cold, because Loki must be so sad.

[sorcerous]

Loki twitches, flinching away from the touch, relenting to it only reluctantly.

"And what do you know of it?" he hisses. "You are nothing but a child."

[greatsquirrelhunter]

"Faolan's Mutti is gone too," the boy answers, eyes down in sadness. "Is sad without Mutti."

[sorcerous]

"You are a boy," dismisses Loki. "And I am not."

Yet he acts as one, as a wounded infant, abandoned and hurt.

[greatsquirrelhunter]

"Doesn't matter," Faolan says firmly. "Mutti gone is sad."

He reaches out, clutching Loki's arm as he snuggles, face turned into the man's shoulder. "Even for Loki, even for Hawk, is sad."