Chapter Text
“M-mom,” Thor gurgles as Frigga crawls over to him, unspeakable terror washing over her. Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. She doesn’t realize that the words are actually coming out of her mouth in a trembling whisper as she reaches for a pillow from the bed to press it onto her son’s wounds.
Mark my words, Frigga, learning the truth will destroy him but, hell, you didn’t listen to me sixteen years ago and you’re not going to listen to me now, are you?
“Shshhsh, keep still,” Frigga whispers but Thor is still already, isn’t he, yes, OH MY GOD, he is passing out and there is so much blood, instantly soaking the pillow as she presses it against his side. “Hold on. Oh my God, please, just hold on. I’m here. Please, you’ve got to hold on, honey. You’ve got to stay strong.”
Mark my words.
Frigga tries to lie Thor down to keep his circulation going, gently cupping his neck, hot tears streaming down her face, her own heartbeat thundering in her ears, and she thinks about how she cradled him in her arms when he was a baby, how she pressed his tiny, bald head against her chest to let him hear her beating heart and, please, he’s only twenty years old. You can’t take him away. She can’t lose him now. She can’t. No mother is supposed to lose her twenty-year-old son. She doesn’t know how she keeps herself from succumbing to the horror of the sight in front of her or burst out sobbing but she does, somehow she does prevent herself from breaking down even though Odin might die and Thor might die and Loki is out there and might die too if he suddenly decides to kill himself and, no, can’t think about that, not now, no, no, but there is so much blood, Loki’s blood, Thor’s blood, there’s the bloody shards, the shattered mirror, everything shattered, splitting apart in the blink of an eye, and Loki is so confused and, gosh, how could he DO this to his own brother, Odin was right, wasn’t he, she didn’t SEE, she didn’t ACT, she didn’t TAKE RESPONSBILITY for him, no, can’t think about that either, NOT NOW, and she holds Thor close, applying pressure to his wound on autopilot, pressing her forehead against his, whispering absurd prayers to deities and powers she never believed in, whispering her son’s name, pleading with him to hold on, pleading with him even though there doesn’t seem to be any air left to breathe or any spit left to swallow.
“Frigga,” pants Odin, struggling with his breathing as he drags himself towards her.
“Don’t move,” sobs Frigga. “You fool. Just … rest!”
Which, she knows even in her state of terror, is an impossible thing to ask of a father when his child is lying crumpled on the floor, blood pouring from his body.
Odin groans as he puts his hands on top of her bloody hand, pressing the pillow down with her, his body bent forward to ease his labored breathing. “It’s … gonna … be …”
“Don’t speak,” sobs Frigga, almost choking on her tears. “Just breathe.”
On the pavement below, Hela is leaning against the hood of her car, sucking on a spliff with trembling fingers, trying to calm herself down, trying to dull the oxy high. She should never have rang the doorbell in her fucked-up state. She should’ve waited until her head was clear enough because if she had done that, she wouldn’t have told them that she thought the baby had died and she wouldn’t have lashed out at them, wouldn’t have insulted them, wouldn’t have thrown away her only chance of survival in the doomed battle against leukemia. Okay, she would have insulted them anyway, that’s for sure but the kid … Maybe she would have made more of an effort with him but then again, he was acting like a fucking child for the first ten minutes and then he just fell into hysteria like he did as an infant. Screaming, crying. Always crying. Always screaming. Never silent. Never content. Always loud. So unbearably loud.
She squeezes her eyes shut to keep her vision from spinning and to block out the memories of giving birth in that dark, sticky room all those years ago but it does nothing except for making her feel nauseous because this is one of those times she got far too high by accident—it really was an accident, she just wanted to take the fucking edge off—and now there’s nothing she can do to sober up. She’s completely at the mercy of the drug and it won’t let her go, won’t let her see, won’t let her breathe without vomit sloshing up inside her throat, and why the hell did she drink the wine??? Why the hell is she smoking dope right this fucking minute???
And why the hell did she even fucking bother?
Any bone marrow donation she receives will be a total waste anyway because she’s been a fucking addict for almost twenty years and if leukemia doesn’t kill her within the next year as the doctor predicted, the drugs probably will do the job soon enough. There’s literally no point. And yet …
“You’re still here.”
Hela forces her eyes open, sirens blaring in the distance. The kid is standing in front of her, nothing more than a fuzzy blob, and she squeezes her eyes shut again and opens them again, another wave of nausea submerging her.
“I, uh,” stammers Hela.
“You still want my help?” asks the kid.
“W-what?” Hela stammers. “Yes, of course.”
What the hell is happening? This isn’t the same kid he was earlier, is it? She can’t be so high that she’d have imagined—
“Very well. I’ll help you, if you help me first,” he says and even though she can’t properly see his features, she can hear the smirk in his tone. “Get in the car.”
Hela tries to sharpen her vision with mental force alone. “Wh-what?”
“I need to get away from here, so you’ll have to—” He interrupts himself with a chuckle. “Yeah, okay, you can’t drive. Give me the keys.”
Hela swallows. “Wh-what is going on?”
“What’s going on is this,” says the kid. “You help me get out of here and I’ll have my tissue tested in return, which, I’m afraid, might not even help you at all because only about thirty percent of people who need a bone marrow transplant can find a donor that matches their exact tissue in the immediate family, but it’s better than nothing, isn’t it?”
“Sure,” Hela gasps because she’s still fucking high and none of this even makes any goddamn sense but if there’s even a slight chance … “But didn’t … you said you wanted me to die. You said …”
“Yeah, I’m emotionally unstable,” says the kid as the sirens draw closer. “I change my mind a lot. Now, give me the keys.”
She hands them towards him and he snatches them from her palm. “Get in the car.”
Hela does as she is told, halfway convinced she is just hallucinating, and she flicks the rest of her joint onto the sidewalk before collapsing into the passenger seat. “Are you even old enough to drive?”
“Sure,” says the kid as he puts the keys in the ignition. “I’m almost sixteen. I got my learner’s permit months ago. And you’re driving automatic.” He chuckles and Hela suddenly thinks of herself on the beach as if she was a cheap actress in some B-movie, dancing across the sand, entirely cancer-free, and she’s still high enough to pine after that stupid vision.
“That makes it a lot easier,” says the kid as he starts the car, pulling away from the curb. “I took lessons in a stick-shift.”
“In one of their ridiculous sports cars, I imagine?” Hela scoffs.
“Thor’s Tesla, yes.” The kid laughs. “Gosh, I hate that status symbol of a car. It’s disgusting.”
“He is disgusting,” Hela grumbles. “No offense.”
“None taken.” The kid chuckles and what he’s saying about his adoptive brother right now really contradicts what she saw when they walked into the kitchen together earlier. “He’s so arrogant and so damn simple-minded, it’s exhausting.”
The kid acts a lot different now too, come to think of it. He’s no longer a child or a hysterical teenager. He’s a full ass adult.
His state of mind kinda varies from moment to moment.
Something jolts through her body, something like fear or unease, finally clearing the drug-induced mist in front of her eyes and only then does she notice that the kid’s sweater is drenched in blood. His hand is bloody too and there’s tiny splinters of glass imbedded in the wounds on the back of it and there’s an ambulance and two police cars speeding past them as they drive out of the neighborhood.
“W-wait, what … happened up there?” Hela gulps, staring at the blood on his clothes. “What did you do? Did you …?” The words are fleeing her befuddled mind.
“I did what I had to do,” replies the kid, his eyes devoid of any emotion.
“D-don’t tell me you hurt someone up there,” Hela blurts out, gripped by a sudden horror because even if she hates them, hates Odin with a fucking passion, he’s still a fucking human being.
“What if I did?” The kid actually fucking chuckles. “You, Ma’am, killed an infant. Well, almost killed an infant. You thought you did, anyway, and you were ruthless enough to use a dead baby to get back at your abusers. I did the same.” He shrugs. “I just defended myself.”
“That’s not,” gasps Hela. “I didn’t kill … i-it was an a-accident but … you can’t be saying … The old bastard roughed you up, didn’t he?”
“He got rough sometimes, yes.” The kid’s face is an angry grimace. “But if you’re talking about my eye, that was Thor.”
Hela swallows the vomit down. “Did you—”
“Just relax,” the kid cuts her off. “He will be fine.” He chuckles. “I think. And even if he won’t, what’s it to you? You hate their fucking guts. Plus, you want to live, right?”
“They’re gonna track us down,” Hela wails, the paranoia inevitably kicking in. “I left my number. I … They will …”
“Oh, you mean this?” asks the kid as he fishes her business card out of his pockets, crumbling it inside his palm. “Don’t worry. They don’t know anything about you except for your name and with your kind of lifestyle, I suspect you’re staying under the radar as much as humanly possible.”
“You cunning little shit.” An astonished chuckle rises in Hela’s throat because she recognizes so much of herself in him in this moment that it gives her the fucking creeps.
“I take that as a compliment.” A wry smirk plucks at the kid’s lips. “So, where do you live?”
Hela gulps. “LA.”
“Nice.” The kid whistles. “We’re going on a road trip.”
Frigga’s knees almost give out when she stumbles down the stairs after the doorbell finally rang. She only realized how close she is to actually breaking down after all when she scrambled to her feet and she has to grab the banister with both of her blood-drenched hands to keep herself from falling and her own heart is beating out of her chest and her vision is blurry and she is so beyond terrified that they’re going to be too late because Thor … She crosses the hallway and heads for the door, astonished that her feet are still carrying her somehow, and when she opens it, there are four paramedics and four uniformed officers and they stare at her and ask her questions and it’s not until that moment that it truly hits her with full force what just happened.
Loki stabbed his own brother.
He stabbed … Because …
“Ma’am?” urges the paramedic, his gaze on her bloody clothes. “We need to know what happened.”
“They’re u-upstairs,” stammers Frigga. “My s-son stabbed his brother. He’s … bleeding and he’s unconscious and m-my husband is … He’s … I think he’s having a heart attack.”
The paramedics all nod at each other and then they push past her, two of them carrying a gurney, two of them carrying equipment, one of them radioing for backup as they clatter up the stairs in their heavy boots, one of the officers charging after them, their footsteps like a heartbeat echoing through the house.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
Frigga wants to follow them even though she suddenly has zero strength left. Now that help arrived, she doesn’t seem to be able to move anymore. Her vision is blurry, her legs wobbly; her exhaustion threatening to fell her like a tree right there even if those officers expect her to deliver some answers. She sways a little and one of the cops reaches for her arm, steadying her. It’s a woman with red hair, her name tag identifying her as Officer Romanoff. “Where is your other son now, Ma’am?”
“I-I don’t know,” Frigga whispers. “H-he just left and …”
“Any idea where he could have gone?”
“N-no, I …” Hell, she really has no idea at all. She drove herself crazy thinking about where he was in between the time he jumped out of the car when she picked him up from school after he showed up drunk for class and then came home, catching her going through his things. “H-he spends most of his time here, in his room, alone. He …”
“Where do his friends live? Any chance he might have—”
“He doesn’t have any friends,” Frigga whispers and the officers exchange a meaningful glance that fuels her anger and gives her a bit of her strength back. “Look, I know how it looks but my son, he’s not a violent person. He has some serious mental health issues. He’s self-harming and he’s suicidal and he just found out he’s adopted and he just met his biological mother and then he … he just snapped and I … Please, you need to find him. He’ll … I’m scared he’ll hurt himself or … worse. He can’t …” And just like that, her strength leaves her again, streaming out of her body like air hissing out of a pierced balloon. “He really isn’t in good shape.”
The officers exchange another glance.
“What does he look like?” asks Officer Romanoff.
“He’s … Here, let me …” Frigga stumbles back into the living room area and reaches for a photo from the wall. The officer who went upstairs with the paramedics comes back down, informing the woman that he called for backup.
“Wh-what do you mean ‘backup’?” asks Frigga.
“Well, your son assaulted and gravely injured his brother,” says the officer who has dark blond hair and looks like he never smiled in his entire life before. “A detective will be here soon to handle the case. You need to stay put.”
“Th-there’s no case here,” Frigga stammers even though there is and she damn well knows it. “Loki is … He just …”
The male officer whose nametag identifies him as Barton pays her no attention as he takes a quick look at the photo and then he and the other two swarm out to comb through the neighborhood and more sirens ring out in the distance and Frigga glances upstairs and wonders how it could have come to this because Loki loves Thor and he isn’t violent except for when he’s going against himself but then again, he isn’t Loki all the time, is he, no, Thor addressed him as Nikias and Thor apparently knows so much more than she does and—
“Ma’am?”
“Yes?” Frigga gulps.
“You said his birthmother was here just now,” says Officer Romanoff and Frigga gives a weak nod. “Where is she now? Could he have gone with her?”
“No,” Frigga replies instantly because Loki told Hela exactly what he thought of her request, didn’t he? “He’s … We’re his … No. There’s no way.”
“Could she have taken him?”
“No,” Frigga says again but that doesn’t sound quite right, does it? “Yes. I mean, I don’t know.” I thought he was already dead … You gave me your child because you hoped I would pick up a fucking corpse. “She’s an … addict. She was high when she …” Tears spring to Frigga’s eyes and she sways again, her body failing her when she needs it the most.
The officer catches her, gently leading her to one of the chairs in the dining room area but then the paramedics descend the stairs and Frigga sees Thor on the gurney with an oxygen mask on his face and everything inside her shatters. “Your husband is stable,” says the paramedic. “We administered a glucose-insulin-potassium solution and a second ambulance is on the way.”
Just as he says this, she hears the sirens drawing nearer. “Wh-what about my son?”
“His condition is critical,” says the paramedic and there are no words to describe the sheer and utter terror slamming into her. “I’m sorry. We’re doing the best we can.”
“I-I need to g-go with him,” Frigga whispers.
“No, you need to let those people do their jobs while you tell me exactly what happened here,” says Officer Romanoff. “I’ll drive you to the hospital as soon as we’re done here, I promise. But in case we don’t find Loki, we’ll need to put out an APB and—”
“An APB?” Frigga echoes, her voice cracking as she watches Thor being wheeled out of the house because how, just how, could this have gone so wrong? “He’s not a criminal. Loki isn’t—”
“He needs to be found though,” says the officer and what little fight remained in her leaves her body at once. “So, tell me.”
The entire story comes out in between sobs and more paramedics waltz into the house as Frigga talks and they take Odin away and then another cop walks into her home, a guy introducing himself as Detective Coulson who looks trustworthy enough but who’s still a cop investigating her son who just committed a crime by assaulting his own brother, stabbing him in the side, almost killing him, and there’s no going back from that, no, Loki is a suspect now, a wanted suspect, and wherever he went, they’ll hunt him down and they’ll arrest him and throw him in jail because that’s just how it works because there’s so little regard for mentally ill people in law enforcement.
“Here,” says Detective Coulson, handing her a glass of water. “I know how utterly disturbing—”
“You don’t know a goddamn thing,” Frigga screeches as she slaps the glass of water out of his hands. It tumbles to the floor, breaking into pieces. “Loki is … He’s not … I need to call … You don’t even know … He’s …” A sob tears through her chest. “She left her number … Hela … She …” Frigga scrambles to her feet and wobbles into the kitchen. “She left it right here … I don’t understand …”
“It’s okay,” says Officer Romanoff.
“No,” screeches Frigga. “She left it right here. It was here … It was … A-and Thor saw her car! He … he said her car was parked out front! You n-need to …” Yes, they need to ask him but they can’t fucking ask him because Thor is fighting for his life because … because …
“I’ll handle it from here,” Coulson says to Romanoff. “You drive Mrs. Fjörgyndottir to the hospital. I’ll have a look around, if that’s okay? We leave a unit here in case your son returns to the house.”
Frigga nods weakly.
“Where’s his room?”
“Upstairs, first room on the right.”
Detective Coulson gives a nod and Frigga walks with the officer, who tells Coulson that he might want to switch off the oven in which the roast she so foolishly prepared in the naïve hope that they could just have a normal conversation like any other family on this planet is still cooking merrily.
Hela snaps awake when something jabs into her side. She blinks, trying to shake off the drug-induced nightmares taking her back to her years on the streets, and her vision is finally clear. She straightens in her seat, realizing with no small amount of terror that it’s fully dark outside already.
“Sleep well?” asks the kid.
Holy fucking shit.
“Where are we?” Hela asks, perplexed that she managed to fall asleep with a sixteen-year-old kid driving her car. She was pretty damn stoked, yes, but still. She shouldn’t have … For all she knows, they’re on the run, for fuck’s sake!
“Just passed San Bernadino,” says the kid and somewhere along the way, he managed to clean up his hand. “I’ll need directions soon.”
“Just keep going on the I-10,” Hela mumbles, her throat drier than the Sahara desert. “How did we even get this far?”
The kid shrugs. “Luck’s on our side, I guess.”
“Will you tell me what happened?” asks Hela, a lump forming in her throat. “Back at the house?”
“Will you tell me what happened right before you rid yourself of me sixteen years ago?” the kid asks back. “You said it was an accident. What kind of accident?”
Damn him.
But, then again, Hela does not want to be like those lying bitches who kept the truth from him because the kid’s got a right to know, doesn’t he?
“I got high,” Hela whispers and her past comes back to haunt her like an angry medieval mob chasing a witch with forks and torches. “Y-you were asleep in the car next to me. I don’t know for long I was out, I really don’t. I never did. All I know is that, when I snapped out of it, you were …You were cold and blue. You didn’t cry anymore. I was sure you weren’t breathing anymore and then I got angry and I … I guess I really wasn’t thinking straight.”
“I stabbed Thor,” the kid simply says in return, his voice flat, his eyes still devoid of any fucking emotion whatsoever.
Hela’s stomach fills with ice. “Like, to death?”
The kid shrugs.
“Wh-why?”
“Because he deserved it.”
The statement is so brutal in both its simplicity and its honesty that it sends a chill trickling down Hela’s spine. “So, you’re basically an offender?”
“So are you,” the kid reminds her with a mirthless chuckle. “A multiple offender, from what I heard. Did you know, by the way, that there’s no statue of limitations for child abuse and endangerment cases in Nevada? You can still be prosecuted for what you did to me and Odin has cameras installed in every room of the house. They have both your confession and the impeccable demonstration of your non-existent maternal qualities on tape.”
That feisty little shit.
Hela swallows because, suddenly, she’s pretty damn uncomfortable with this fifteen-year-old kid in his oversized, blood-drenched sweater who is almost the exact same age she was when she gave birth to him and all she can do is stare, stare at his dark eyes, his razor-sharp cheekbones, his sinister expression. “Pull over. I’m gonna drive the rest of the way.”
The kid takes his eyes off the road, eying her suspiciously.
“Pull over,” Hela says because she is finally sober enough to seriously freak at the thought of this seriously messed-up, homicidal child being in control of her car. “There’s gonna be tons of patrol cars once we enter the city and if we get caught, we’ll have a lot of explaining to do.”
He hesitates at first but eventually, he complies and they drive the rest to her place with an almost oppressive silence hanging over them.
“Hello?” Hela calls out when they enter her studio apartment, her chest swelling because the lights are on, which means that her boyfriend is there and, holy hell, she needs his strong arms and everything else he has to offer after everything she went through tonight.
“Cozy,” remarks the kid as he scrunches up his nose even though it’s not a bad place. It’s certainly smaller than the suburban palace he grew up in but it’s still not exactly small. It’s also reeking of dope and booze though and maybe that’s why he’s scrunching up his face like that.
“Hey,” says her boyfriend as he appears in the hallway, wearing jeans and a white tank top exposing his enormous biceps. “What did the doctors …” He interrupts himself, leering at the kid. “Oh, hello. Who’s this little cutie you brought home to me?”
“He’s not,” Hela stammers, suddenly regretting bringing the kid here with every fiber of her being but that’s the story of her life, isn’t it? She never learned from past mistakes. She’s thirty-two years old and she fucked up again and again and again because she was high, unable to think anything through, unable to consider the far-reaching consequences of her actions. It’s why she’s here now. Why she got involved with that man who she kinda sorta loves—which, in her case, means that he fucks her in a way that isn’t triggering all the time, finances her habit and puts up with a lot of her shit—but who she still despises for the things he does to earn his money. The things she helps him with sometimes. “I didn’t … That’s Loki. He’s, uh, he’s … my son.”
His face falls. “You … you have a child?”
“It’s a long story,” Hela mumbles because she doesn’t want to talk about it. She wants to get high again and sleep for ten million years. “And I’m—”
“It’s not that long of a story actually,” interrupts the kid, a sharkish grin playing upon his lips. “She got knocked up on the streets when she was my age but she was too young and too high to care for an infant, so she dropped me at her ex-stepdad’s house. They ended up raising me and she tracked me down to ask me if I’d be willing to donate some tissue because I’m her only living blood relative. Which is, ultimately, why I’m here.”
“I see,” says her boyfriend.
The way he phrased it does sound fucking plausible, thinks Hela but it also alarms her because, damn, he really is fucking smart and he’s so good with words that it scares her. How could this person have come from her womb?
We all know you can’t have inherited your intelligence from your birthmother.
“I’ll probably be living with you for a few days,” says the kid. “Do you have a guestroom of sorts?”
“I have a couch in my studio,” Hela offers.
“How come you didn’t bring anything?” asks her boyfriend because he too doesn’t miss a goddamn thing, his gaze lingering on her duffel bag for a moment before he looks up again, locking eyes with the kid. “If you intended to stay.”
“My ‘parents’ didn’t want me to,” replies the kid, making quote marks in the air. “We kinda left in a hurry.”
“I see,” he says again but he doesn’t sound convinced at all and how could he when the kid’s sweater is still fucking drenched in blood and Hela’s heart sinks because she’s a stupid ass addict whore who’ll never get anything right for the rest of her sorry existence.
“How about a drink?” asks her boyfriend, flashing the kid a disgusting, wolfish smile. “I’m sure you’ll want to celebrate this rather unexpected reunion.”
“Hell, yes,” murmurs Hela because the prospect of inhaling a bottle of gin to help her pass out again sounds very, very promising and maybe it is for the best that the kid came here after all, considering how Odin and his abusive shithead of a son messed him up.
Meanwhile, Frigga is sitting by the hospital bed, holding Thor’s hand, absentmindedly stroking over the back of it with her thumb. Another hospital bed, another son lying helpless. They gave her a sedative after she finally broke down sobbing when she saw Thor surrounded by all these machines in the ICU, unable to make sense of what the doctors were telling her, her legs almost giving out. She refused at first because she knew it would make her feel like she is feeling right now, dull and somewhat detached from her emotions, but maybe that is for the best. Officer Romanoff is still there, at least she was there a while ago. Not that Frigga actually knows how much time passed between then and now. Time no longer matters. There’s been nothing but the faint beeping of Thor’s cardiac monitor and the hustle of the ICU around her for what might have been hours or even days.
By some miracle, Loki missed the most important organs. “As if he knew where to stab,” said the doctor, which is what she actually remembers.
He’s critical but stable.
That too.
Odin is stable.
But Loki … Loki is out there, Detective Coulson’s team searching for him and there’s nothing she can do to help them because they won’t let her and, even if they did, she no longer feels quite like herself. She is too weak to stand up—she tried several times—and her mind shuts down every time she tries to think about what happened, what Loki did, because she is so confused, so angry, so disappointed, so confused, yes, she’s mainly confused because Loki … Despite everything that happened, she never thought he would … What he did …
It wasn’t Loki who I hit.
Someone else took over for him and tried to get us fucking killed.
And then Nikias got mad at both of us because he doesn’t want us to spend time with Thor anymore and it’s Nikias’s fault that Thor never came anymore.
But how could her son not be Loki anymore? That doesn’t make any sense. The child she spend the weekend with was still Loki, still her son, even if he was different.
She should call Loki’s therapist.
What was her name again? Dr. van … something.
Frigga keeps stroking the back of Thor’s hand, keeps losing focus, keeps drifting off.
It’s the sedative’s fault.
The sedative makes it really, really hard to think and Frigga closes her eyes, imagining the cops finding Loki, bringing him to the hospital, the doctors taking care of his wounds, his therapist explaining what happened to the cops.
After a while, it does feel so real that she sinks into sleep, fully convinced that both of her sons are safe and that everything will turn out fine after all.