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It was a flight worthy of remembrance, if only for the fact that he survived. That did not make it particularly graceful: quite the opposite in fact. He doubted the guard he landed on would soon forget it, anymore than his mother would. She had yet to forgive him for having taken such a chance with his life. Thor had thought it hilarious. Loki wasn’t sure his father had actually noticed, but then it was rare day that Loki could be seen behind his brother’s vast wingspan. Near death experiences weren’t enough.
He acceded to attending the classes- he couldn’t deny his mother- if they would move him to a raptor class. Loki was clearly not a swift. He might have landed about as well as one, but only Höðr could have missed that he flew like a hawk.
Still brown though. His bland plumage was in no hurry to shift.
Loki excelled in class with vindication alone as inspiration. He shed his clumsiness quicker than his fellow fledges, nimble in the air and on the ground, and smooth in the transition between. Early hard landings bred quick learners.
When it came to weapons though, there was little to hold his attention. Loki did not care to learn how to handle the danger of a blade in the air, or account for the burden of full armour. Enchantments didn’t weigh him down, and knives were as good as spears in aerial combat, should all else fail him. His teachers did not agree, but they had been wrong before. Loki gave their lectures little credence.
The brown faded with time. When he finally shed juvenile colours- five decades and a lifetime of teasing after his peers- Loki was a fine blue grey.
Shikra colours.
The teasing didn’t stop with that belated revelation, just changed tack. Beside his swan brother, and the assortment of predator minions (and one goose) that tagged after him like ducklings, a shikra was nothing short of scrawny. It didn’t seem to have occurred to anyone that Fandral the merlin was smaller, or that Loki was faster, more agile than all of the bigger breeds. No. All that mattered was that the spare prince had turned out a sparrowhawk when he should have been an eagle.
Never satisfied. Funny how something so innate, and set from birth, was his fault, and not his father’s. But then Asgard liked the Allfather. They didn’t like Loki.
He tried not to listen. He tried to be glad that he finally knew what he was, that he could deny “Silvertongue” and “Heron”- and the newly emerging gender jokes because his eyes were orange, not red- with one buffet of his slate wings, because he was no less a hawk than Sif was. Actually he was uncomfortably similar: grey plumage and fierce orange eyes were beautiful appropriate on her.
It rankled, and ruined what should have been a triumph. Each progression became a step back. He might as well still be a brown chick, but he wasn’t, and he clung to that, no matter how bitter he became. His pride, his adult colours, could not be stripped from him.
Or so he thought.
In the end, all it took was a touch. He was careless enough to let the jötunn get too close, get a grip. The leather of his sleeve withered away in the frost, as his skin would too.
But it didn’t.
He stabbed the jötunn that held him, broke the grip on his arm- blue; his skin was as blue-grey as his wings- and knocked the dying creature back with a buffet from one white wing-
White.
A swan after all?
His feathers faded back to grey as he watched, his skin white again and without blemish, let alone burnt. Frozen amidst the carnage Thor had started, he was saved from an ignominious defeat only by luck.
Laufey’s wasp yellow eyes found his as they fled, and the jötunn king smiled, flicking the pinions of his white wings in farewell.
A lifetime later, in the treasure room, Loki dared to lay a hand on the Casket. In the muffled glow, he was blue all over.
“Stop!”
The colour bled back into him as he turned. The burnished tiger’s eye ripple of Odin’s plumage mocked him in the dim light. A realisation was rushing up to meet him, one he did not wish to acknowledge.
“What am I?”
The question hung, plaintive as a cuckoo call, in the lingering silence.
For the first time in his life, Loki envied Sigyn. He wished he was a dove.