Chapter Text
It should have only taken him a few moments to knit together his bones, crooked and smashed from his interminable fall from the shattered Bifrost, but Loki decided to lie there instead, reveling in the sharp pains stinging all over his body. He was only dimly aware of it, encased in pallid Asgardian skin, the freezing cold that stiffened his broken body in the snow-drift.
Jotunheim was ruined.
He knew this only because it was his own damned machinations that had wrought the destruction he saw, warping on all sides of him like a hellish fish-eye mirror. The crumbled ruins on either side of him slumped like corpses, and it occurred to him he had never had a point of comparison. Had the structures been palaces, courts, homes once?
He had never seen it at the height of its glory, didn’t have the slightest idea what “life” was like in this wasteland before he had happened to it.
Too late now.
Loki tapped a strange tattoo on the hard-packed snow beneath his chapped red fingers and winced as his ribs, ulna, and wrist bones slid slowly into place. The warm glow of magic suffused him with relief and tamped down pain-induced nausea.
Or was it the pain that made him need to vomit, really? His eyes blurred by the sensation of rent nerves knitting together and he watched smoke mingle with the snow-filled clouds to douse the weak light. He smirked to himself, teeth digging into his lower lip. He hadn’t even known Jotunheim was capable of receiving sunlight; he had only ever seen it at night, tossing about in the dark maelstrom of a blizzard.
He sat up stiffly, rolled his shoulders and looked about. Loki couldn’t see anything, neither roads nor buildings, not even the promise of a distant campfire. There was only the gentle, calm snowfall drifting to rest placidly in Loki’s mussed hair.
“What would I even do, if I found someone?” he said, frowning, “’Oh, greetings fellow monster! Fancy a new king? I’m afraid I’ve wasted your last one.’”
He couldn’t pretend that the idea hadn’t occurred to him. He was, after all, a proper Laufeyson- more son to the blue brute than he ever was to Odin.
Looking about at the eerie stillness, no longer an illusion of its quiet inhabitants but the genuine echo of a ghost-town, Loki felt his stomach lurch. Here and there on the ground he saw irregular lumps, like toppled snowmen mottled with blood.
“I’m a monster,” he said, voice flat, “more of a monster, even than them.”
He scrubbed at his eyes impatiently and spat onto the frozen ground, rising to his feet carefully.
“I don’t even deserve to rule this freezing limbo,” he snarled, kicking a chunk of ice.
“Are there any among us who do?” The croaking voice came from dangerously close to Loki and he spun around, mouth agape.
“Who’s there?”
A shambling Jotunn stood a few paces behind him, infernal red eyes regarding him with malicious amusement. He wore only a knotted loincloth, and boasted a healthy spattering of bruises and bleeding cuts.
“You’re looking mighty pale there, stranger,” the frost giant said with a sneer, “I’m willing to bet you’re not from around here. Fancy clothes you’ve got.”
The giant lumbered closer, exposing crooked bone-yellow teeth. Reaching forward, his meaty fist brushed a loose gold ornament dangling from Loki’s shirt and plucked it off. Loki took a defensive step back, trying to keep his chest from betraying his labored breaths.
“Who are you?” Loki demanded.
He took another step back as the Jotun advanced.
“Matter of fact,” the giant continued, eyeing the golden bauble, “you look an awful lot like one of them Asgardian princelings, with all those tarted-up jewels. One of them princelings stirred up a lot of trouble here. Maybe you’ve noticed.”
He gestured expansively around him and grinned, watching Loki flinch and kick up flurries of fresh snowfall in his backwards retreat. He was still buckling at the waist and cringing from the tingling pain of his magical restoration. His clothing, his diminutive stature, his pallid complexion seemed to have been a dead give-away. So soon after an obviously Asgardian cataclysm had claimed the Frost Giants’ lives and welfare, he had to stroll in, radiating “Asgard” from every wretched pore.
“Idiot,” he whispered to himself.
The Jotun lunged forward at the sound, grabbing him by the scraps of cape trailing from his shoulders.
“What’d you say,” he hissed, “you little nithing?”
Loki’s mouth worked silently, his eyes wide as he continued a staggering retreat. The giant’s eyes flicked wildly over his face before he tossed Loki lightly onto his back again. He squatted over him and scrabbled over his erstwhile finery; yanked off shining chains and loosened plates of armor in frenzied handfuls.
Loki kicked him in the stomach with a grunt and flipped himself over, stumbled to his feet and ran, desperate for the cover of some craggy overhang or a copse of scrub pines. He just needed somewhere to hide. He stared straight ahead and ignored the bright blue that had crept over the exposed skin of his arm the frost giant had touched, ignored the indignantly burning pain of his injured body, ignored the frigid sting of tears in the corners of his eyes.