Who: Regina Mills, Loki Laufeyson (MCU) What: That awkward moment when you find out the guy you've been sleeping with is blue. Where: Food Storage, Loki's Quarters When: Backdated to after the EMP Warnings: Loki's unhappiness about being one of the Jotnar. A bit of bitterness toward Odin's A+ parenting.
Once he had ascertained that no one he actually gave a damn about had come to any harm, Loki found himself reluctantly chided into helping handle the food situation. The genetic accident of his birth made him a prime target for preserving anything that might spoil, much to his consternation. While he had a vested interest in warding off starvation (you can outlast them a voice that felt both like and unlike his own whispered in his head), Loki had no love for exactly how he’d been asked to assist.
He remained for as long as he could tolerate the particular feel of Jotunheim’s ice in his veins. Loki rarely exercised the skill, save when it served a greater purpose, and almost never to such an extent that his Aesir guise flickered and crept back from his fingertips to reveal pale blue tipped by dark nails.
Loki grimaced and stepped away from where he’d frozen the last of the stores he’d been charged with protecting from spoilage. The icy shade of his hand lingered, the rest of his body urging him to adapt similarly and welcome the bitter cold. He forced Aesir skin back into being, and silently begged the Norns to send whatever attack was coming without further delay, both because he had no wish to be called upon to freeze the food again, and because he wished to stab something. He tended to find it cathartic.
Regina had somehow ended up working with one of the fox spirits - Kurama in this case - and was actually taking a break at the moment she ran into Loki. Quite literally, as a matter of fact. Stumbling a little before she caught her balance, a vicious, ‘Watch where you’re going!’ almost escaped her lips, before she bit it back. She was trying to be nice these days, no matter how disingenuous it felt to her character.
Then she saw who it was she actually ran into, slow on the uptake because she had been working hard for hours. “Oh, it’s you,” she said, exhaustion colouring her words, but the tiniest bit of relief also present. She didn’t particularly care for him, but with the current situation feeling like the precursor to an attack from some unknown enemy, it was good to know that Loki was around to be on their side.
Peering closer at him, she noted that he seemed a little off. Was he paler than normal? “What’s wrong with you?” She asked, instead of trying to figure it out on her own.
A bitter chill still clung to Loki’s skin, one that didn’t bother him, exactly, but that Regina would doubtless feel through the fabric of her clothing where he’d instinctively reached out to steady her. He did so not out of any care, but centuries of training beneath the palace’s vaulted ceilings on Asgard. No gentleman, and certainly not a prince, left a lady to fall, save if she were an enemy on the field of battle. Whatever else she might or might not be to him, Regina was at least an ally. For now.
His jaw clenched at her words, his mind taking them not as an inquiry, but an accusation, and he snatched his hand away. He noted, with a curl of self-derision settling in his stomach, that the skin had gone blue again.
“Nothing you need concern yourself with,” he parried, conjuring gloves out of nowhere since the rest of him didn’t care to cooperate. He’d been working with the cold for too long, and he was out of practice reversing the change. If he could get past Regina and get some distance from the ice, that might help.
“Shall we walk?” he offered, with a tight smile and a gesture to invite Regina to lead the way. He didn’t care where, particularly, as long as they were moving.
“Alright. I won’t ask what the Blue Man Group impression is about, but feel free to tell me anyway.” She didn’t buy the bullshit he was feeding her at all, but she let him have the subject change he was hoping for. Regina wasn’t one to nag, but she would undoubtedly bring it back up at some point before he left her company.
Picking the direction that led to the closest bar, she waited for him to fall in step with her before she reached out for one of his hands. Not to hold, nothing sentimental as that, but to bring attention to the gloves he had conjured. “Very nice material,” she observed, almost like she didn’t particularly care for it. Dropping his hand, she changed the subject completely. “What have you been up to since the EMPs?”
Regina hadn’t seen him on the network following the aftermath, but a lot of people had been running around trying to find a place where they could be helpful. It had been a little chaotic and it made her wonder if he was enjoying that, being the god of chaos that he was.
Blue Man Group? Loki almost asked, catching himself in the instant before the words left his tongue. At least he hadn’t reverted entirely, he reminded himself. Never mind that he had vague memories of deliberately trying to do so while horrendously drunk in Middle-Earth. He’d heard later that he hadn’t actually revealed his Jotun form. Evidently, he’d shouted about being a Frost Giant, but either lacked the coordination or the self-awareness to actually make the change to accompany his declarations.
He pulled his hand away from Regina before she could do more than brush her fingers against it. “I wouldn’t if I were you.” The chill would most likely be unpleasant, and if she got it into her head to try to remove one of the gloves for a closer look … well, he happened to like her hands. They did such marvelous things behind closed doors.
“As to your question, I’ve been doing what I imagine occupies most of the passengers on this forsaken ship - trying to make certain we survive. The food at least won’t all spoil in the next day or two, and I believe Thor is off seeing if he can do anything about the electricity, last I heard. I don’t have high hopes for that, by the way, but he has been surprising me of late.”
Rolling her eyes because he was being dramatic, even for himself, Regina dropped the subject completely. “Stasis spell? Or something more? I was going to offer my help there, but it looked like it was being handled. I’m helping in putting together a community garden in case this goes on longer than a few days.”
God if this went on for longer than a few days, she was liable to throw herself overboard. It was bad enough being on a ship. Now they were on a ship stuck on the ocean water. There was a good chance there was going to be attack before long. It was irritating just waiting for it, without any idea of who it would be coming from.
“Ice,” Loki corrected, with a level of distaste he ought to have kept out of his voice if he wanted to deter anyone’s curiosity, let alone Regina’s. “I believe the foodstores are as well looked after as they can be, for the moment. Though I dislike the idea of trusting everyone on this ship to behave themselves. They aren’t all soldiers, and even trained armies can become unruly when rations become scarce.” The garden seemed a good idea, he allowed, assuming it actually produced anything soon enough to be useful.
“We ought to give a thought to defenses with the immediate question of not starving to death answered. I believe I saw something about the water supply being secured as well. If we are to be placed under siege, we might have more at hand than an attacker believes. Provided we can keep them away from vital resources.” And there it was, that cloak falling over him that he so rarely wore this days, a prince of Asgard who served in the interest of his people, commanded men and women and fought in more battles than humans had years in their lives. How odd that it feels not at all strange, he thought.
"If worse comes to worse, I can always put barrier spells up and prevent people from crossing into wherever we're putting our stores," Regina said, smiling wryly. "Barriers are my specialty." She had kept a whole town from leaving its town limits for decades. This would be child's play in comparison, but she wasn't one to boast about her abilities. Instead she offered up help wherever necessary, a sort of penance for her wrongdoings of the past.
"I intend to guard the garden we're creating, should we come under attack. But only after I make sure that my son is safe." Her priority would always be her son, everything and everyone else could burn for all she cared, if it meant that Henry would be safe. She was almost certain Emma, Neal, and Bae felt the same. "But you're right, we should be preparing for an attack. Why don't you bring that up to people?"
“No one cares to hear the truth from the god of lies.” Loki shrugged one shoulder as though that didn’t matter to him. “It seems I am to be forever shut out, no matter my sincere intentions in the moment. The past is too painful for anyone to forget.” Not that Loki was an exception. He clung to what he had done as much as anyone, if not more so.
“There would be too many questions of motive and trickery. Never mind that I am as trapped here as all the rest.” He shook his head, and again said, “No.” There was something sad in his voice, though only for a moment. “I have been rebuffed often enough by now to know that I overreach if I offer truce, temporary or otherwise. Such an effort would distract from the more important matters at hand. Let someone else with suitable moral fiber make the observation and direct the resultant efforts.”
Her eyes narrowed, unsure if he was pulling her leg or not. Regina wouldn’t put it past him, being who he was, to be putting on some kind of front, a mask projecting the sad prince of Asgard whose daddy didn’t love him enough. It didn’t garner pity from her, but a mild annoyance. “So you’re telling me that just because people didn’t believe you for your word that you’ve changed, that you’re just giving up?” She snorted, very unladylike of her but she didn’t care. “I honestly thought you were made of tougher material than that, Loki.”
Stopping and facing him, reaching out to block him from going further, she said, “You have to show them, if you want to be taken seriously. Not just tell them. Start putting plans in place that benefit more than you and your loved ones. Keep showing them until they believe you. That’s how I was able to become an ally rather than an enemy to the people I now call family.”
Loki came to an abrupt stop. He stared at Regina, caught utterly wrong-footed. His thoughts stuttered over her words, processing them at what felt half the speed he ought to have. He hadn’t thought she’d care. He’d hoped, foolishly it seemed, that she would read his statements as mere practicality, at best, ignore them at worst. Not lecture him.
After a pause that felt longer than it likely was in truth, Loki stepped back a step and canted his head to the side. “It offends you. That I have not forced them to see me otherwise on this ship.” He wondered if she worried only for his status.
“I have saved Barton. Saved Asgard. Saved Thor and Jane Foster and the universe. None of these things have been enough. Let this ship be satisfied that I have done my part to keep us all from starving to death.” He grimaced at that last. “Against my better judgment.”
“You did most of those things in another world. Seeing is believing,” Regina explained, shrugging and continuing her walk. “But hey, no skin off my back if you want to be a grumpy ass about it all. I got my redemption arc already, did my time and became better for it. Thought you might want something similar, but if you’re going to give up so easily, it’s not going to be keeping me up at night.”
She looked at him over her shoulder, throwing him a wink. “I’ll still fuck you either way.”
“I do not give up,” Loki snarled, though even as he said them, he knew the words were false. How else could he describe letting go of Gungnir after Thor shattered the Bifrost? He huffed an aggrieved sigh and followed after Regina.
Out of old habit, his right hand drifted toward his left. Like Frigga, Loki tended to rub circles against his palm with one thumb when he was agitated. Only there were gloves in the way now. Loki focused briefly on the feel of his skin beneath, then willed the gloves out of the way. He was relieved that underneath, he appeared to be Aesir again.
“You are a curious woman, Regina,” he remarked. “A few years ago, I might have thrown you through a window by now.”
“Looks an awful lot like giving up to me,” Regina pointed out, though she followed that up by fluttering her eyelashes at him and smiling prettily. “But what do I know? I'm just the Evil Queen.”
It suddenly became obvious where she was leading them. They were nearing the corridor where Loki’s suite was located. She waited for him to undo whatever magic he was using to keep people out while the ship was out of power, leaning against the wall next to it. “And honey, you could have tried to throw me out a window. That wouldn't have ended very well for you. Now, are you ever going to explain what was up with your hands? Or am I just going to have to find out through other means? I'm sure our favorite Valkyrie might have an idea or two…”
Loki rolled his eyes at the evil queen remark. “Dearest Regina, you’ve never met my sister.” With any luck, she never would. Loki suppressed a shudder at the idea of Hela in this world. He was perfectly content to never see her again.
Though it annoyed him to have been led about like a dog drawn by the promise of food, Loki adjusted his wards to allow Regina passage. Einar and Frigga were absent, having been seen to by the other Loki. No doubt they had made themselves at home wherever their owner’s counterpart had settled them.
“Valkyrie has been away from Asgard for at least a generation, likely more. I doubt you will find your answers with her. You’d have a better chance at answers from Sif, which I do not recommend.” He carefully did not say his brother’s name. He’d rather Regina not sleep her way through every Asgardian on the ship, at least not the ones to whom he happened to be related.
As he spoke, Loki stripped out of his shirt, abandoning it on the floor of his closet for the time being. He pushed past the row of Midgardian wear and pulled out his tunic and trousers from home, then his boots. He’d want his armor soon enough, he expected, though he elected not to conjure it into being at the moment. He paused, considering, and then allowed the change. The temperature around him dropped, and sharp ridges appeared on the pale blue of his skin. He held the form for a moment, then resumed his Aesir appearance.
Loki turned his back to Regina again to pull on his tunic. “I believe the simplest answer to your question is exactly what Thor told his friends in the Avengers. I’m adopted.”
Regina had never claimed to really read up on the backgrounds of the superhero movies Henry had dragged her to go see or even pay that much attention to them while she was there, so it was a little bit of a surprise to see him turn into one of those frost giants she vaguely recalled as the villians in one or two of those Thor movies.
“Well,” she said, lips pursed as she thought over her next words carefully. “Certainly explains the strange tension between you and your brother. I’m sure ‘daddy issues’ doesn’t begin to cover it.” She shrugged, sitting down on his bed. “I can’t talk though, I have an unbelievable amount of mommy issues.”
Loki nearly choked on a startled laugh, and turned back around to face his guest as he sat on the bed to pull off his shoes and shuck off his pants. Regina had already seen all of him in this form, so he didn’t much care that he was partially naked in front of her while he changed into something more suitable for battle.
“No, it certainly does not begin to cover it. Odin was a liar and a killer, and yet, I was condemned for doing the same.” Loki shrugged one shoulder. “My … biological father, if he even deserves that acknowledgement, was worse. Prone to abandoning infants to die of exposure on a frozen world simply because they were born undersized.” He found it somehow easier to speak of these things to Regina than to his own family. Perhaps that was because their relationship so far had remained uncomplicated, based solely on what each could do for the other, without any entanglements of deeper feelings or judgment.
“I was brought up to believe that the Jotnar were monsters, rightly conquered and laid low by Asgard, the benevolent defender of the Nine Realms. Thor promised in our youth to destroy them all when he became king. Neither my mother nor Odin told me I was anything other than their natural offspring. I only discovered my true origins after Thor launched an ill-considered assault on Jotunheim and one of Laufey’s murderers attempted to freeze me to death. My skin ought to have blackened and fallen away, but instead, it turned the same shade as my assailant’s, and I was left completely unharmed. You can imagine what sort of questions that raised for me.”
“How very Shakespearan of your life,” Regina said, leaning back onto her hands and watching Loki undress and redress himself. He was gorgeous, in that pale white boy kind of way, but the blue skin and ridges made him a little more interesting than he had been before. Regina could appreciate complicated situations, having lived a life full of nothing but complications, but she was so very glad that this thing between her and Loki was nothing more than a mutually beneficial arrangement.
Yes, she probably now knew a little more about him than some others did, but that in no way changed the fact that if he was no longer useful or fun to be around, she would abandon him. There was no indebtedness that she felt for him, sure as he didn’t feel any toward her. “Considering all of that, I’m a little surprised that you can contain all of that without losing your mind. That little hostile takeover of the Earth you had attempted, aside.” Which wasn’t a judgement on her part. She had killed a ton of people and enslaved plenty. She wasn’t one to cast a stone. But she was curious. “What made you decide to turn a new leaf, start a new story?”
This time, Loki’s laughter rang out unimpeded. He stood to fasten his trousers as he answered. “Earth wasn’t me. If I lost my mind, as you put it, then that happened on Asgard.” It was an apt description at least of allowing himself to fall into the Void, where nothing good could have possibly awaited him. “The business in New York was more punishment for my foolishness than the attempt to lash out that it seemed.”
Moving with an easy grace that spoke of having gone through the motions countless times, Loki pulled on first one boot, then the other. He used the action to give himself time to think. Did he wish to give Regina the truth? Perhaps. It was a gamble, certainly. She could use the information against him … or she could interpret it as a sign of trust, an offering to further solidify their odd alliance.
“My mother,” he finally admitted. “She died, and I could do nothing to stop it. I may in fact have contributed to the circumstances that saw her struck down, with aid too late in coming.”
“So what sort of punishment has you attacking New York with a vaguely Nazi-ish attitude?” Regina asked, head tilted to the side. “Was it all a show? I have to admit, I didn’t really follow your world’s movies all that well.” Normally they weren’t this chatty. Honestly, it was surprising that they had been in each other’s company for this long and spent it talking, rather than finding more interesting things to do. Things that involved taking off clothes rather than putting them on like Loki was insisting.
So maybe that’s why Regina was letting her curiosity run rampant, not pulling back her questions like she normally did. Why she was being more honest about her own self, as she admitted, “It was my son who I decided to change for. But fortunately he didn’t have to die for me to change my path. I’m sorry that it wasn’t the same for you and your mother.” She knew the loss of a mother very well. There were many things that Cora Mills didn’t do well, but she had never stopped loving Regina even without a heart. That was the woman who Regina held onto, who she missed.
There that word was again. Loki quirked an eyebrow. He knew enough of human history to understand the degree of hatred that followed the Nazis decades later, and that the hatred was a long-lived one, by mortal standards. He hadn’t leveraged that hatred on purpose. In retrospect, he might have been trying, in his own misguided way, to rationalize what he had become.
“No one finds it pleasant to be under the control of another,” he remarked, softly. “Certainly there was an element of my proper self in every action that I took on Midgard, but I did not seek the Tesseract, nor what followed, of my own volition. That would imply I had a choice. I did not.” And then he had clung to the madness that Thanos had stoked in him, to his anger and bitterness, and struck out at Odin and Thor, and even Frigga, transferring the defiance he ought to have shown Thanos to them instead.
Loki looked down and realized he’d started rubbing at his hand again, that gesture he’d learned from Frigga and never lost, and forced his hands to still. “I’ve come to find,” he offered, “that a mother will do anything for her son.”
“I know a thing or two about controlling people. It used to be my speciality,” she said, a bit of shame colouring her words now. There was a lot that the Evil Queen had done that she wasn’t proud of, but the totally and complete submission of others? Definitely high up there on her list of regrets. “I hope you were able to break free from that control.” That was meant genuinely because anything else would be a liability.
“And my son,” Regina said, leaning forward and then standing. “Has two mothers. He’s going to turn out better than any of us, so help me.” Brushing past Loki, hand lingering on his very briefly, to leave his room and suite, she said, “It’s been enlightening, talking to you, Loki. We probably should do that once in awhile.” Quirking a smile over her shoulder at him, where she was paused at his door, “You know, to make sure we’re not going to stab each other in the back.”
“If I intend to stab you, you’ll see it coming,” Loki assured her. “It’s the least I can do out of respect for our current arrangement.” He might change his mind later, and Loki suspected Regina knew that. He’d let her remark on controlling others go for now. Their time together was pleasant, and he hoped to keep that for a while longer. To his surprise, he’d found her touch, and the talk, comforting.
“Keep a close eye on your child, Your Majesty. I am certain our current troubles will seem small before long.” He would hate to see what Regina could become in the face of losing her family.