Chapter 224: Shocking — The Second Prince Learns He's Adopted and Literally Stresses the King to Death
Deep within the vaults of Asgard, Loki had finally arrived at the thing he'd come for.
The Casket of Ancient Winters sat at the far end of the chamber exactly where it always had, exactly as powerful as it had always been, and Loki looked at it with the expression of a man who has spent a long time imagining this moment and is now in it.
Beside him, Kaito Kumon was leaning against the wall with the ease of someone who had found himself in an alien interdimensional palace and decided the appropriate response was mild interest.
"This is the treasure you were talking about?" Kaito tilted his head, studying the Casket with the evaluating gaze of a professional. "Decent. That gauntlet next to it, though—" He nodded toward the adjacent display case. "I'm taking that one. You don't mind."
Loki's eyebrow moved. "If you're taking anything, it's one item." His tone communicated that he minded considerably, but that this was not a battle he had chosen to fight right now. He had not expected the strange human to be able to summon an army of armored warriors, and he had recalculated his options accordingly. He would deal with Kaito Kumon later, from a position of greater power, once he was king.
Kaito appeared entirely unbothered by Loki's displeasure. He had a talent for that.
He'd ended up in Asgard by accident — a dimensional gate, an unfamiliar address, and a city that appeared to be operating simultaneously in three different historical eras, which he'd found interesting. Loki had found him first, or vice versa, and the arrangement had formed the way Kaito's arrangements usually did: through mutual recognition that the other person might be useful, combined with the comfortable understanding that neither of them was particularly trustworthy.
He was curious where this would go. That was usually enough reason.
Loki stepped toward the Casket.
"Stop."
The voice came from behind them.
Loki stopped. Something about the voice made stopping feel like the correct decision before he'd processed why.
"Am I cursed?" he said, without turning.
"No," the voice said.
"Then what am I?"
"My son." Odin's voice. "You are my son."
Odin stepped forward, and then his gaze moved to Kaito, and something shifted in the quality of his attention — the specific attention of a very old and very powerful being who has just noticed something in his vault that he didn't put there.
"You shouldn't have brought a stranger into the treasury," he said. "Especially one who looks like that."
Kaito, to his credit, read the room immediately. The old man's presence was — considerable. He'd met impressive people before. This one registered differently. He tucked his assessment away and kept his expression pleasant.
Loki had stopped listening to the room. He was somewhere else entirely.
He'd known, in the way you know things you've pushed into the back of a very deep cabinet, that something about his place in Asgard had never quite added up. The coloring. The temperament. The way certain things came to him differently than they came to Thor. He'd filed it under Asgardian variation and kept moving.
But standing in the vault with the Casket in front of him and his hands changing color — the cold blue spreading up his fingers the way it had when he'd touched the Casket during the Frost Giant incursion — the cabinet had come open.
"You have Thor," Loki said. He turned around. "Your own blood. A worthy heir. Why take me? Why raise me, if I was never going to be anything except—" He stopped. Then: "Tell me there was a reason."
Kaito had become very still. He was watching this with the quality of attention usually reserved for things that were genuinely interesting, which in his experience were rarer than people thought.
A family drama, he thought. In the treasure vault. The second prince discovering he's adopted. He was going to remember this.
Odin's eyes moved to Kaito.
And then his presence shifted — the way weather shifts before something significant — and the air in the vault changed.
"This family's business," Odin said, "is not for outside ears."
He moved.
Kaito decided that this was probably a good moment to not be here. The old man was not something he wanted to test directly, not with this particular opening position. He reached down and picked up the nearest object — a stone tablet, dense, clearly significant — and opened the dimensional gate with the ease of someone who had done this many times.
"I'll see you around, Loki," he said cheerfully, and stepped through before Odin had time to follow through on whatever he'd been about to do.
The gate closed.
The vault was quiet again.
Odin looked at the empty space where Kaito had been, then at the display case where the Tablet of Life had been, and something crossed his expression that might have been exasperation under other circumstances. This was not other circumstances.
He turned back to Loki.
"It was never about using you," Odin said. He was choosing his words with more care than Loki was used to seeing from him. "The war with the Frost Giants — an alliance was possible. A lasting peace, between our peoples. You were the bridge. You could have been."
"A bridge," Loki repeated. "A bridge. So not a son. A political instrument shaped like one."
"You are my son—"
"Don't." The word came out quiet. That was somehow worse than the anger. "You have a son. You've always had a son. I have been a useful thing that lived in the same palace."
He took a step forward. Then another.
"You love Asgard," Loki said. "I know that. You love Thor. I have watched you love Thor my entire life and I have spent my entire life pretending that what you gave me was the same thing." His voice was still quiet. "Was it?"
Odin opened his mouth.
And then he stopped.
His hand came up to his chest. The color went out of his face in a way that had nothing to do with anything Loki had done — the sudden, clarifying pallor of a body failing from the inside. He had been carrying this for a long time. Longer than Loki knew. The Odinsleep had been coming for years, and the confrontation had moved a timeline up.
He went down.
Loki stood over him, and the rage and the grief and the thing that was both at once moved through him without resolution, because there was no one to direct it at anymore.
Kaito, somewhere in a dimensional gate between Asgard and wherever he was going next, was reading the tablet he'd taken.
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