A/N: Hey guys. Sorry for the delayed update this time. A close friend of mine (who I was supposed to write a show for and was also supposed to be in my wedding later this year) passed away very suddenly at the age of 33. Please be patient with me as I attempt to get back into a regular writing schedule and also respond to your comments. It's a shorter and more expositional chapter than usual, and not really part of the original plan as far as the plot, but important at least for me. Grieving fucking sucks. This chapter is for you, Steph. I fucking miss you.

CHAPTER TEN – Left behind

The water was cool because it had to be.

It came down in a steady stream behind the glass enclosure of the Midgardian washroom.

A small yet controlled form of chaos, his body being the further division into even more, as was typical.

He lost track of time. How long he stood there. Under the spray.

He hadn't thought about them in years.

It still hurt.

Time dulled them in his memory, but would never succeed in taking them fully. This he knew. This he told himself many nights when he needed some sliver of comfort before attempting to sleep. This he also told himself when he woke from nightmares, from the memories of watching them wither and die.

Sigyn would have taken his head, laid it in her lap, and sang to him had she seen him still mourning thus.

Angrboda would have clapped him on the back of the head and enjoyed his subsequent surprise and likely offense.

They were polar opposites, his northern and southern stars at either end of the moral spectrum he subscribed and, if he were completely honest with himself, clung to out of desperation. Because it was in his mind where they now lived; the last bastion of existence before they would inevitably pass completely into the nothingness.

He was their caretaker. Their protector. Defender still.

He shouldered that weight for centuries without complaint, because of the guilt, because he hadn't been all of those things in the moments when it most mattered, because it was his fault they were dead.

He was still standing under the spray.

It made it easier to hide the tears.

If there were any still left to shed.

At a certain point grief changed from a waterfall to an empty cavern, continuing to widen and deepen as the years passed by. It created a void where all the missed opportunities and dreams of future milestones and events for memory-making would go. In that void, happiness was painful and sadness effervescent.

And yet, this was where memory persisted, where imagination was kind and generous, where life continued and their presence was semi-permanent, no matter the damage it continued to do to himself.

If Loki so desired it, he could rewrite history in this place inside of himself. But for all the lies he spoke and spun, to change anything about Sigyn or Angrboda was too much to bear, because even then he would begin to lose them, their unique selves. He would keep their truth intact, and would always.

"My prince," the lady Sigyn said softly with a curtsy, and a gentle upturn of her rosy lips.

"My lady," he said with his own bow after an embarrassing moment of distraction. He fumbled for what to offer after that delayed introduction, eventually settling on the first thing that came to mind. "What are you doing here?"

Her face fell.

A tactless question, he admitted. He scrambled for a form of apology. "Do you not enjoy the festivities?"

She recovered with grace, as he expected her to. "I care not for dancing, my prince."

He hadn't expected her honesty, however. "Tis a tiresome pastime."

"And quite frivolous."

"Vain in some cases."

The lady smiled, half turning away in what he guessed was shyness. Her golden hair was in a thick, but loose half-crown braid that circled about the back of her head. Her dress was a deep blue with fur trimmings. If he hadn't known she was lower nobility, he would have mistaken her for a princess. "My sisters can be relentless in their efforts with me. But I have gotten rather good at thwarting their attentions. Forgive me for intruding, my prince. I will leave you in peace."

"Why do you hide from them?"

"I am the oldest."

"Ah. And they have sweethearts of their own, I imagine?"

"They like to think they do."

"You have my most sincere apologies."

The lady burst into laughter, quickly recovering to quiet herself in embarrassment at her outburst.

He reached out a hand. "Would you stay with me a while yet?"

She hesitated, but not out of modesty. "Do you not normally prefer solitude?"

"Normally, yes. But tonight I would not mind an exception."

Learning Sigyn's name had been part of their game at first. She would answer all questions truthfully (as would he) but divert that question alone for a later time with a smile. It wasn't until the fourth feast when they found each other up in the rafters again that he'd gotten her name, and the first taste of her sweet lips.

"My name is Sigyn," she whispered, after pulling a breath's distance away. "But I think you knew that."

"Guilty," he whispered, before pulling her back to him.

Soap. Lather. Rinse. Everywhere.

Screams. To this day, after seeing her last moments filled with such pain and agony, he willingly tortured himself with endless questions of how and why someone could endure that kind of punishment for another. For him.

He should wash his hair. Or had he already? The bottle was still open.

Sigyn had been a balm. There had never been judgment with her. Always thoughtful kindness. Always generous comfort. Always acceptance.

He would have nightmares tonight. He would need to plan accordingly so he wouldn't wake anyone else. Was all of this reality? Perhaps he was in another nightmare and hadn't woken from it yet.

The soap stung when it dripped into his eyes.

Pain.

That had been his distraction after she'd died.

That had been what grounded him after he gave in to the chaos surrounding him.

After he'd willingly gotten lost and damned his own consequences by vowing to quit Asgard forever.

He'd been a coward, then. Young, idiotic, and weak. Stripped bare by the pain of loss.

But he deserved every ounce of it.

"You're someone's royalty," the forest witch said with a smirk, the pale light of winter catching the rich green of her eyes. "I can smell it on you."

"Not by choice, I promise you," Loki replied, carefully, with the blade of the sharp spear at his throat.

She assessed his answer, head tilting in consideration. The hair on the left side of her head had been shaved, combed over to the right. On the skin laid bare there were tattoos. Runes he couldn't immediately decipher. "What's your name, little prince?"

He could lie. Protect himself. But what was the point? "Loki, of Asgard."

She raised an eyebrow at him. "You're Odin's?"

"I would say I hate to repeat myself—"

The witch pressed the spear against his throat in warning.

"Not by choice," he repeated.

"Ah. I see," she said, taking the spear away and standing back to let him rise to his feet. "You're the tribute child he took from Jotunheim."

"That is the story he likes to tell," Loki replied with bite. "Whether it is true is another matter."

The witch studied him with amused eyes before turning her back and proceeding into the forest. "Come along then."

Loki didn't at first, which forced the witch to stop and turn around to face him again.

"Do you intend to be eaten by the beasts? I am offering you shelter."

"I understood that," Loki replied, rubbing his throat and feeling a little irritated, like a child about to have a tantrum..

"Then what did you not understand?"

"Why."

"Because contrary to Odin's lies, of which it seems you are more than familiar, the witch of the ironwood is not without a heart. You hurt. The cause may be your business, but the hurt itself is now mine. Come, little prince. I have tea brewing. You will like it."

Only when they had sat down at Angrboda's hearth to drink had she given him her name, and eventually her body. Even after he'd told her of Sigyn and his sons… son… she took him into her again and again without apology or acknowledgement. He'd admitted with shame later that he found solace in the witch, and that the nightmares of Sigyn's death began to relent. For a time he was even able to forget he had a child still.

Until Angrboda predictably fell pregnant, despite their efforts.

The days that followed that revelation had been difficult.

He even returned to Asgard for a time. He told himself it was for Frigga. Foolishly tried to plot a way on his own to steal his son back and raise a family away from Asgard instead of secretly within it. Running and hiding turned his stomach, but continuing to leave Sigyn's last child without a parent, chained and alone, turned it even more. He told himself that for three months before admitting his own inadequacy, his own fear, when the opportunity for failure was so high, and the consequences so dire.

"We will not give up on him," Angrboda promised, cradling the side of his face with her callused hand. "Your heart and mine will not allow it. A piece of you is missing yet and we need you whole, my love. Once you are, when this family is complete, nothing can break you ever again. This I promise you."

The water stopped. Drips persisted. The silence that followed was full.

The smell and sight of flesh turning to ash ripped an animalistic rage and pain from somewhere deep inside of him. There was nothing to hear, for his ears had gone silent with her last gasp of breath the moment she withered and died by Odin's sentence. Another to add to his list.

His heart broke when Sigyn died.

His soul shattered when Angrboda was murdered.

In front of their children.

He broke free and fought with every ounce of rage he could, but it was stained with his grief, which made him weak, made him lose, and nearly lose his life. Odin had him imprisoned for a century after that. His first taste of madness came to him then. Over and over again he witnessed the high violation as the last bit of the witch's magic was separated from her soul.

Loki felt it.

When it happened.

He didn't think of the children for decades. And when he did, he wept for just as long. He raged against the cell, the guards, and even Frigga when she eventually found him. She probably thought him mad, believed the lies Odin told her because he did not see her again for a long time after that. In hindsight he was thankful for that small mercy. Because after he'd been moved to a more fortified cell, and stronger magical chains placed upon him, he'd gone completely silent and immobile.

It was when he refused food and water that Odin came to him, spitting fire and fury when Loki refused to acknowledge his presence.

His lips were sewn shut in further punishment.

And so he'd begun to waste away.

Time was of no consequence.

Because here he could forget with ease.

When remembering hurt.

Perhaps it was the masochistic part of himself.

But in that darkness they were both there, on either side of him, keeping him a hair's breath away from the edge of the true abyss.

They whispered names.

Fenrir.

Jormungandr.

Hela.

Sleipnir.

His children.

Their children.

And now there would be another.

Loki took a deep breath, and stepped forth from behind the wet glass wall.

He took the towel, ignored the softness, dried his body, dried his hair, and dressed in the same clothes as before.

Was he different? He felt no different. Because it was more of the same, despite the fact that everything was continuing to change around him without mercy.

As time went on he learned to channel his rage properly, how to lie better, how to survive one moment at a time when all he wanted to do was give in to the empty cavern within.

He'd seen a glimpse of that familiar depression in Stark that night. Recognized it, felt a moment of irrational fear, and then given himself over to be the comforting one out of …need (but whether for himself or for Stark he could no longer tell). It almost felt like Loki was returning the favor he'd been given all those centuries ago in the Ironwood, and all the centuries past that in a little house at the edge of Asgard's spice market.

Loki paused in the hallway before the inevitable descent down to the laboratory where the others were ensconced, waiting for Stark to wake.

Grief held no candle to any of the tortures Loki endured within his lifetime, because it didn't have to. Grief would always be the ultimate weapon with no match or equal in any part of this universe or the next. Grief was a ceaseless fucking bitch.

Along with his rage, Loki learned to see through the fallacies of others. Perhaps it should have been frightening, to see through another with such ease, but that also came with the duties of being a god, of being hard to kill, of having the blessing of near-immortality. Countless hours had been spent bargaining to the air around him. He'd give it all up just to have either of them back for a single moment, to be able to embrace them, apologize, tell them he loved them…

Loki unclenched his fists and examined both palms.

He could see both their hands perfectly, to take his into their own.

But he was alone.

So… he took a breath, closed his eyes, and sighed.

Put on the familiar mask.

Step into the room.

Wear the indifference like a shroud.

No one would know different because they would never care to look beyond the surface.

It took him a few centuries to perfect, but at this point if anyone was going to see him for all his vulnerabilities and emotional nakedness, they would either have to kill him or Loki would have to be driven to the final stages of insanity.

And given his track record he wasn't that far off the mark.