Chapter Text
Prologue
Thor sat nude astride his direwolf’s back, high on one of Jotunheim’s many lonely peaks. The snow-flecked air felt like a caress over his bare skin, and from this vantage point, his keen red eyes could make out the distant fires of Asgard’s war camp and the neutral-zoned parlay camp one valley over from it. Dreams had roused him from his bed and left him restless enough that he’d given up sleep entirely, fetched Fenrir, and ridden her out to find a patch of freshly fallen snow to roll naked in, the common Jotun healer’s remedy for stress and troubled sleep.
But while the snow bath had been refreshing, it had done nothing to free Thor from the fact that the dream had felt prescient, as his dreams often did. Prophetic, but not clear: this time he’d been lying on the roots of Yggrasil, wrapped in the coils of a great serpent. His first instinct had been to fight, to grope for a knife with which to slay the creature and cut himself free, but then it occurred to him, in the logic that only dreams have, that the snake wasn’t intending to harm him. He forced himself to relax, to fall back into its grip, and all at once the slow movement of its body over his felt more sensual than threatening.
It had raised its diamond-shaped head, blinked its emerald eyes, and kissed his cheeks with its forked tongue before striking him in the chest. The creature's fangs dwarfed his own, burying deep in the flesh over his heart and causing his whole body to tense with pain, but when his blood flowed from the wound, it formed into the blooms of red flowers scattered across his chest, a symbol Thor knew to represent love—or lust—on many realms where such flowers grew. Then the snake loosened its grip, and he rolled onto his side, spilling the flowers to the ground beside him. When he looked again, they had turned to peace lilies, white as snow.
It was a flower common to and beloved on Asgard, and also Alfheim, where Thor's grandsire’s folk heralded from. And, well, peace was in the very name.
“I cannot make sense of it, Fenrir,” he mused to his wolf, rubbing a palm along the curve of her powerful shoulder. “Am I destined to bleed for it, but ultimately peace between Jotunheim and Asgard will prevail? And why the red flowers? Am I to be romanced by a serpent?”
Only Thor had already bled for it, on more occasions than he cared to count, leaving his body littered with pale scars.
He scrubbed at his face with one hand, recalling the intimate way the snake had gripped and released him with its muscled coils. He’d sought novel experiences on many worlds in and beyond the Nine Realms before Asgard’s invasion had locked him here in defense of his homeland, but a snake? He let out a laugh and took one last look at the far off enemy war camp. Sniffing the exotic scent of their crackling fires on the wind—audaciously fueled with wood they had to bring over via the Bifrost, the wealthy bastards—wasn’t likely to solve anything.
“Well, we have fought them to such a standstill they are willing to negotiate, and that is more than I had hoped for when this all started.”
Fenrir, who had carried Thor into countless battles and had the matching scars to prove it, bent her massive head around and licked his shin, making a soft whining sound. He usually carried bits of liver to feed her as a treat, but being naked, he had nowhere to keep any.
He gave her a pat and dug his heels into her thick, soft-furred sides. “Are you hungry? Let us head back to camp and find you fresh fish to eat.”
They streaked off down the mountainside, a blur of yellow and blue and black, Thor trying his best to outrun what it might mean to embrace a serpent on the roots of the World Tree.
Chapter 1
Loki watched his father and sister bicker from his vantage point in the far corner of Odin's council tent, the only place he seemed to belong in their eyes. His hands were shoved deep into the pockets of his thick fur and wool coat, yet still Jotunheim's depths-of-Hel frigid temperatures left the digits white and stiff and painful, sitting inactive for so long. His toes were fairing little better in his fleece lined boots. It was a truly pernicious sort of torture to endure.
"They will never give up the Casket," Hela repeated, punctuating each word with a finger jabbed into the hard surface of the table she and Odin stood before, littered with treaty drafts and counter offers. With each thump, Loki flinched. "And falling for such a blatantly false promise will only compromise our authority in the eyes of the other—"
"—Laufey and his heirs have yet to give us any reason to doubt the sincerity of their terms," Odin interjected.
His and Hela's various advisors waited at a respectful step back, their silence uncomfortable.
"An ideal position from which to string you along on this front. It is their only source of magic, without which their world will shrivel and crumble to dust. Are you truly fool enough to believe they will hand it over willingly?"
"Watch your tongue!"
On, and on, and on they went, in a circle, like they had the day before, and the week before, and the month before…the year before, even. And, Loki thought in exasperation and chagrin, never the twain shall meet. He was miserable. He was not supposed to give input or even agree, only to sit in silence and freeze; they cared not what Odin's defective younger son thought. The negotiations would go on for eternity because Odin was too old and blind to see Hela as the warmongering bitch she was, working to sabotage the peace deal at every turn.
"We must proceed in good faith—"
Everyone has their limits, and abruptly, Loki hit his. "Send me in to find out," he cut in, his voice clear and sharp.
Odin's mouth shut with a clack and Hela whirled on him. "Excuse me?"
Loki swallowed down the lump in his throat. "S-send me to spy. I have the necessary skills in sorcery, I can render myself invisible, use muffling charms, get within arm’s reach of Laufey and his sons, capture audio echos to bring back…"
He trailed off as Hela's howling laughter drowned out his words. Odin looked incredulous, and somehow that was worse.
Loki leapt to his feet, bristling. "You both think that's funny, do you? I don't recall you being able to wield seidr in such refined and subtle ways, Hela, and it's not like father can go himself."
She scoffed. "Sit down and know your place, ergi."
Loki drew his head back as if slapped, then turned to Odin and there found…nothing. No defense against the insult, no reproach for Hela, he merely looked away, muttering, "Peace, Loki."
Peace.
A long simmering, buried rage thrust up within him like a blast from a long dormant caldera.
"No."
Every pair of eyes turned toward Loki, shocked, angry, amused, so he barrelled on.
"I cannot stand another second of you two uselessly talking yourselves in circles, wasting all of our time as if it is our greatest privilege to simply hear you speak. I would do something, rather than waiting about crippled by indecision!"
No one spoke for a spell. Odin's one eye looked into the distance and a muscle in Hela's jaw twitched. Loki's heart pounded in his ears.
At long last Odin sighed, looking ancient and weary to Loki's impulsive, youthful eyes. "Guards, take him to his tent. Make sure he stays there, for his own safety."
Loki paced about his tent, his frustration causing halos of seidr to glow green around his clenched fists. It was luxurious as military camp tents went, spacious and well-insulated against Jotunheim’s inhospitable climate, a far cry from what Asgard's infantry men were forced to huddle in to sleep. It had never felt more like a cage to Loki, with guards outside the tent's flap with explicit orders to keep him in.
He knew deep in his bones he could be helpful; he was smart and educated in politics and military history, on top of seidr craft and lore. Now that he'd come of age at long last, what excuse did they have to punish him for exercising his voice? He was treated as nothing but a royal ornament in rich green and gold and black robes.
Sure, he was no terrifying warrior of Asgard, materializing knives from nowhere or known as a herald of death trailed by cawing ravens the way his sister and father were. He had been drawn to the feminine art of seidr weaving like their mother, and was brushed aside and ridiculed for it; for failing to live up to any of Asgard’s brutal masculine standards. To be softer than his own sister! Oh, it was a constant shame upon the family in their eyes, and filled his belly with a simmering resentment that slowly blistered him from the inside like acid. Frigga was ever his one and only champion, and dragged off to Jotunheim on the war campaign like this, he didn't even have her.
He would have wondered why they bothered to bring him, except he didn't have to: With neither Hela nor Odin in Asgard to threaten him, no one really tried, much less succeeded, at keeping him cloistered in the palace and out of mischief. Loki hadn’t only been caught sneaking off to carouse with the common folk; there were the starting of fights, the theft, and the questionable magical experiments…not to mention the "unprincely sexual conduct". Damn Heimdall and his golden eyes; he always had Hela after Loki like a hound in no time flat, to drag him back and beat him for good measure.
Loki flicked his hand and lit one of his books on fire with magic just to give his boiling anger an outlet, and regretted it straight away. He ran over and dropped to his knees on the thick rugs that made up the tent’s floor, taking the book in his hands and muttering a repair spell to reverse the damage. See? That was something his sister couldn’t do—she only destroyed things, never created them, or fixed them. He tossed the book across the room, growling in frustration.
Fuck their short-sightedness and indecision, their lack of faith in him, and their orders to stay put: Loki would take his spying plans into his own hands. He wasn’t some animal to be caged, be it in Jotunheim or Asgard. He would show them just how useful his unconventional skillset was.
Loki strode over to his traveling chest and yanked his warmest clothes free, using seidr to dress himself in impatient flashes of green. He pulled the fur-lined hood of his long coat up over his head last, before stepping to the tent’s door flap and gathering himself. He took one, two, three deep breaths and gathered a well of seidr with a spreading of his arms, and cast a simple illusion of himself—he lacked the skill for a true duplicate as of yet—that lounged in a chair with a book, infusing enough responsiveness in it to snap at anyone who dared interrupt his reading, not that anyone would miss him. Then he shifted into a snowmouse and scurried out under the side of the tent and into the camp.
His guards didn’t notice the ball of white fur darting past; in fact they looked half asleep there under the dim, watery light of Jotunheim’s weak sun. Loki weaved his way through the sprawling camp, around crackling fires lined by grizzled soldiers, big as trees and stinking of charred meat and piss to his keen mouse’s nose. Their bawdy, laughing voices sounded like no less than a dragon's roar. A boot like a mountain came stomping toward him and Loki leapt away with a squeak, abandoning careful sneaking for a panicked beeline run to the edge of the camp. It felt like leagues on such tiny legs, panic gnawing at his mouse-belly that he’d made a miscalculation and would meet an indignant end on the sole of someone’s shoe.
When it at last petered out, and the valley the army had gathered in gave way to rocky bluffs, Loki scurried behind a rock and changed back, shaken and gasping for breath. Once he’d recovered his composure he worked up a new transformation spell with words and gestures, this time shifting into a great ice hawk with wide, powerful wings.
He rose high into the grim sky, barely visible from below, his underside naturally camouflaged with neutral gray feathers, his sharp red eyes spotting the smallest bit of movement leagues away. The frigid air was wild and fresh beneath his wings. He beat them hard and headed west, the distance falling swiftly beneath him, all sharp jutting rock and indifferent ice. It was beautiful, in an ominous, dreary sort of way, all glittering grays and whites and blues. A few ridges and valleys later, the strange blue-green fires of the Jotun war camp came into view, and Loki raised high on the air currents to circle above it. The enchanted fires served the purpose of light rather than heat, he supposed, for what need did the Jotnar have for warmth?
He made out the wooly, jostling shapes of the gigantic direwolves scuffling in their pens, those terrifying mounts Jotun soldiers rode into battle, and in the center of camp, a tent more rectangular and neat than the typical lumpy ones used by the foot soldiers, surrounded by torches. Loki dared dive lower to get a closer look, hoping in the quiet of his heart to spot the Jotun army’s legendary general, Thor, the Bringer of Storms, but no such luck. Once he’d roughly memorized the layout, he winged back out, far past the edges of the camp, where he could transform safely out of range of the mysterious and feared Jotun ice sentries.
It was a simple enough plan: revert to his true form wherein he could actively cast spells, put an invisibility charm over himself, and sneak into the Jotun camp. There he would get close enough to their revered general to gather intel about the Jotnar stance on the peace talks, take a magical record to replay even, and bring it back to Odin. If they were being true to their word? Fantastic, Loki could put to rest Hela’s further warmongering, thus gaining favor in the eye of his father. If the Jotnar planned to betray the peace? Unfortunate, but his insight would save Asgard from potential catastrophe and humiliation, and gain his father’s favor all the more. His heart sang with the promise of it. No longer would anyone be able to deny the usefulness of his skillset and his worthiness to stand at the Allfather’s side.
That was why Loki stood there on the outskirts of an enemy encampment, waist deep in snow and bundled in every layer of warm wool, leather, and fur he owned, with no protection other than the daggers stashed in his dimension pocket. It certainly had nothing, nothing, to do with his long held, secret obsession with Prince Thor.
It had started when Loki was a mere boy on the cusp of adolescence, when peace had seemed possible and things hadn't completely fallen apart between Asgard and Jotenheim, and before Asgard’s drawn-out siege of the worthless ice ball. A delegation of Jotun royalty had come to seek an audience with the Allfather in hopes of settling one of the many unending quarrels between the realms. Loki had stood silent and still like a good prince on the dais beside his father and sister, despite his giddy curiosity to see beastly Frost Giants in person; hoping it was true that the top of their heads scraped the sky, and that they were hideous and terrible to look upon.
What appeared before him had been a disappointment to his youthful imagination: they were perhaps twice the height of an Aesir, not the size of a small mountain, merely ugly rather than twisted and hideous, and mostly naked, with noses and eyes and mouths just like anyone else. All except Thor, King Laufey’s eldest offspring and heir; he was something else entirely.
Loki had been too young to understand what he was feeling as his gaze lingered over those expanses of blue skin, richer and brighter in color than his gray-blue brethren, knowing only that it quickened his breath. Thor looked tiny next to his kin, not much taller perhaps than the tallest Aesir Loki had met, and while the other Jotnar were hairless, his head was crowned with shining golden hair decorated with small plaits, and a matching beard bristled on his face. Loki gulped and squirmed in his place next to his father’s throne as the strange Jotun drew nearer, crimson eyes steady and defiant and fixed on Odin. He showed not a bit of fear facing the Allfather, which in of itself was a revelation, and everything about him was just so audacious: his contrasted coloring, the thick, curving muscles of his arms and chest bared for all to see, dripping in strange, rough ceremonial jewelry.
Loki had continued to stare throughout the negotiations, and eventually Thor noticed, turned toward him, and winked one pale-lashed, ruby-red eye. Just touched by the beginnings of adolescence as he had been, Loki was mortified by the stirring in his trousers occasioned by the wink. He’d blushed and stared at his feet for the remainder of the audience, suddenly desperate to get back to his chambers and explore what kind of new sensations he could chase by touching himself.
He never got over the encounter, not isolated in the palace as he was, a strange and friendless young mage, solitary besides his family and the flights of fancy he could concoct in his mind. Not when the negotiations got more frequent—causing Prince Thor to appear with the Jotun delegation what felt like every other week—and then eventually failed, Loki only vaguely noting the disagreement hinged over the Jotnar’s possession of some kind of dangerous casket.
Odin declared yet another war on Jotunheim, and Thor, already a warrior in his prime, became the scourge of Asgard, the winter realm’s most feared soldier and leader of her defense against the Aesir invasion. At times Loki was allowed to accompany Odin on his Bifrost trips to observe the latest battlefront from afar. As Odin prattled about tactics and supplies, Loki would pretend to listen while he watched Thor lead charges on his coal-black direwolf, rendered breathless as Thor cleaved Asgardian soldiers in two with his great ice axe until he dripped with gore, and summoned lightning down to smite all who had the misfortune of being in range of him. It was horrifying and beautiful to behold.
Thus Thor only loomed larger in Loki’s pubescent mind, lovely and terrible, a beast reoccuring in his dreams that held Loki down and forced pleasure from his body as he screamed for mercy, and woke in a puddle of his own sticky mess, echoes of the orgasm still shuddering over his skin. What was worse was he often dreamed his sister and father were there, made to watch and understand how low their family was brought, and rather than being shamed by it in these visions, it filled him with a sick sort of satisfaction that lingered long after he woke. He’d take himself in hand drowning in thoughts of how all he’d need to do to destroy them would be to lean into his own violation, throw his head back and moan like a whore for it.
As Loki got older his own fist and wet dreams were no longer enough to quell the obsession, and he attempted to purge himself of it by offering his body up to the largest, roughest, most frightening Asgardian warriors he could find, starting at an age young enough his mother would have wept of it. With his princely identity disguised just enough under a glamor, he was able to coax and taunt them into using him as roughly as he craved, in back rooms of taverns and in the darkness of alleys. Yet still it wasn’t enough; nothing could compare to the calculating intent in those red eyes, the wall of blue muscle and the terrifying well of elemental seidr he could feel radiating off the Jotun general from miles away.
He resorted to two, three men at once, until not even his clever preparation and assistive spells could save him from returning to the palace limping and bloody. Loki knew then, in his very bones, that he was truly a twisted and broken creature, for he gloried even in the depths of these degradations, flopping on his bed in rent and ruined clothes to stroke himself to another climax while he fingered the mess between his legs, fantasizing it was Thor’s cold seed turning sticky on his thighs and in the crevice of his ass, Thor’s hands that had rendered him mottled and stiff with bruises.
It left him with as much resentment as longing for the Jotun prince. Whether his sick obsession had caused such perversions, or he was born with them, or simply believed, in his truest depths of his soul, that it was what he deserved, he couldn’t say, for he refused to look at it further, shutting it down tight and tucking away in a dark corner of his heart.
Now…now he was so close to sharing space with Jotunheim's most feared warrior for the first time since before the war resumed, but it was not the time to let his fantasies get away from him. He would sneak in, stay hidden, remain outside of the notice of important people like Thor—as he always was—and bring priceless information back to his father.
Loki shook himself out of his wool gathering and realized he’d gone shaky with cold despite all the layers, standing exposed out in the biting wind as he was, cold enough to kill a human in a matter of seconds. The intensity of it drew tears to his eyes that obscured his vision and froze to his cheeks, so he waded through the deep snow and around the nearest lump of icy rock and leaned against it, sheltered from the wind and better able to concentrate on casting his invisibility spell the best he could with the snow melting onto his gloves and making his hands damp. With the howling in his ears lessened he pulled the threads of seidr together and a wavering line of cloaking magic descended over him, just as he felt the stone behind his back give way.
A grating chuckle rose over the wind while Loki struggled to catch his balance, and fear prickled his skin with gooseflesh. He whipped around in time to see the rock uncurl itself, unfolding into the limbs and torso of a crouching Frost Giant. Loki might have been saved by his invisibility, if only he had moved, but in that critical second the use of his feet abandoned him, leaving him gawking, and huge blue hands shot forward and crushed him in a rib-grinding grip. He yelped, feeling his invisibility spell falter as his vision swam and spotted.
“Oh ho ho! You think you’re so clever do you, witch?” The ice sentry said, voice gravelly and mocking. “Well you look like fresh meat to me.”
He dragged Loki close, foul, cold breath huffing against his face as the sentry scented him. Loki turned his head aside and shut his eyes, refusing to tremble, but unable to formulate in his mind a single spell to cast.
The sentry grinned. “I bet you’re awfully warm inside.”
Every thought went blank in Loki at those words, only a ringing in his ears added to the roar of the wind all around him. The hideous blue-gray face that filled his vision blotted out all else.
“Aye!” Another voice grated behind him. “We’re on strict orders from the general to bring any magic users we find straight to him unharmed. I've got these special cuffs for them, eh?"
The giant holding him growled in frustration, his nostrils flaring. "Fine. Bind them and let's make haste, we wouldn't want our prince's special prize to freeze to death on the way, now would we?" Loki was treated to a smile at that, all sharp teeth.