[ which is the point, kind of. he has a few in mind, but secrets were a tricky thing. anything having to do with shardbearers or the gem or the war could have easily been lost and found again. there may be others that knew it. ]
But I'll keep my mind open. I'm sure we can figure out something enticing enough.
I said us at most. If you come up with one you think is too good to share with anyone, we'll work on that. But it's not like this world is short on secret supply.
No, but the details are a problem, if you catch my drift.
[ he drains the cup of coffee and then tosses it on the table carelessly. the cup jiggles in the coaster before rotating down to the porcelain in patterned echoes. ]
How do you know just how many hold these secrets? You don't.
So then we come up with something we're sure no one else knows.
[Which is obviously easier said than done, but it's the first thing that comes to mind, so it's the first thing he says.] I kept my little sister a secret for most of her life. If something like that is possible, there's something else in this world that can be used here too.
[ easier said than done—way easier said than done. Loki had kept his own secrets from Thor, the current and most damning one always at the back of his mind. there were some secrets that wished to come out, others that were kept hidden between two people, and those someone kept hidden to themselves. (that's where that came in, the crime that haunted him.) ]
The realm of family is different than the realm of politics. That's far more people to muck it up for you.
[ Loki leans his chin on his palm and looks at him curiously. ]
... Tell me, what do you want out of all of this?
[ curiosity, maybe. this wasn't the first time he did something for Bellamy. seeking out the means of finding the Secret and the Whisperer had been personal, but it seems like it was for Bellamy as well.
this would be the second time he was doing something for Bellamy. ]
[He raises an eyebrow.] Everything's a pretty broad spectrum.
[Bellamy doesn't think as well in the long term. His decisions and choices are so immediate, based on what needs to happen now. And right now, shards felt like something important enough to look into.]
I want to keep my people safe. My sister, Clarke, Hiro, the ones back home. [The list is longer, but he doesn't feel the need to expand. But that's it. That's always his priority above everything else - not systems or rules, just the people he has a compulsive need to keep safe. That's not a secret.] If shards are a weapon, we need to know how they work.
[ he meets his eyes with two inhumanly green ones. without asking, once again, he invades Bellamy's personal space and leans forward, pressing a gloved palm to his collar, the weight pressed in a diagonal down to where his shard would be. ]
They respond to each other, like they have memory. Like they know they're the same. Clarke says she feels as if the gem itself is trying to stay alive, perpetuate a continually cycle to preserve its own sentience. I told her that it was awfully mortal of her to think so.
[ he with draws his hand and leans his elbows on the table. ]
This is something else. Not a weapon, nor a means to anything. This is a divine plan, something wrought in hiccups through timespace, expanding and contracting. This is much bigger.
What would you keep people safe from? The end of everything? It's going to happen again.
[Bellamy's frame tenses, if only because personal space; the number of people he's comfortable having that close is minimal, countable on one hand. He stares down Loki anyway while he talks, shoving his hand away after the invasion of space is too much to deal with.]
Even if it's not a weapon, it's still useful to us and what we can do. It's our connection to home. It's still something we need to learn about to keep ourselves alive.
[What would he protect his people from though? The answer is as easy as always.] Anything. Everything I need to keep them safe from. If I need to fight in another war after this one, at least I'm getting the fucking experience.
[He'd rather not, honestly, but at least violence has become something familiar to him.] But yeah, I've gotten the whole impression of a cycle here.
[ as Loki withdraws the hand mid-Bellamy-talking he holds up a finger like he's on to something. not a weapon, no, but something far more valuable. Loki had begun his pursuits in shardmagic when he realized just how desperately either side wanted them. ]
Impression is putting it lightly. [ Loki says distastefully. ] The Matrons confirmed it. They're stuck, we're stuck, everyone's stuck. All you need to do is think about it for a moment ... If the Unseelie had one, even once, we wouldn't be here.
[He's never had much interest in this war at face value. He fights in it because he has to for the same reasons he already outlined, not because he believed slaughtering the other court was the right thing to do.]
[But still, he makes a face at the idea.] How many times have we lost?
From experience I can tell you that it doesn't matter if you've fought and lost once, or if you've fought and lost a million times—it hurts just as much to be screwed over and forced to suffer again. Morla had mentioned how she was bound after the gem itself shattered, though she didn't mention how long. Time gets all fuzzy when it comes to this kinda thing.
[ his expression changes from something of disdain to a more serious sort of thoughtful scorn. memories were strange for him, but there are a few things he does remember, and some of the great battles of Ragnarok are some of them. ]
[He doesn't respond right away, mulling over what Loki says. There are a handful of things he could say, thoughtlessly, and it's only because he's actually caught up in thinking about it that he keeps quiet for once.]
Sounds like it matters. What's the point in repeating the same bullshit over and over? [It's all very personalized for Loki, he's picked up that much, but he's not gonna ask. For him, if there was one thing he refused to do when he got to the ground, it was repeat the methods of the Ark. He might not be aligned to the court, but Bellamy knows he fits right in.] So, what, the Seelie court kills us, or the Void kills everyone? Every time?
[It's mostly rhetorical. He's just annoyed.] There's gotta be a way to get unstuck.
For the Aesir it was someone. There were the gods above the gods that perpetuated the cycle for their own divine-ly benefit. [ he tosses his fingers again. ] It was called "fate" or "destiny", but of course those are just pretty words to cover up the truth: that we were all fodder.
The universe likes cycles and patterns. It has a memory that lives through us, you could say. They've just been around so long that they're perceived as "natural."
So, yes, we have to get unstuck. We just need the unsticking to stick.
Edited (that looked weird to me) 2015-08-21 00:32 (UTC)
"Natural" just gives people an excuse to subjugate, to keep following cycles and patterns that do shit in the end. [He is drawing from the Ark here, clearly, but it's more than that. "Whatever the hell we want" might have backfired in a lot of ways, but he still refused to follow rules that were expected - and some of it worked.]
I don't buy fate as unbreakable. [Spoken like a true anarchist.] Is that why you're so focused on shards? You think they got something to do with all this?
Morla said that she was bound to fate after the gem broke by some fellow appropriately named the Drabkeeper. I want to know the details of it, the whole thing. Everything plays together, you see. The gem, the Void, the Drabkeeper and the Monarchs.
You don't think that Morla would want to end everything just because it's her nature, would you? [ there's a spark in him that shows. the cadence in his voice flowing as he becomes electric with defiance. ] She's forced to fight someone she loves over and over and over again because she was damned to it.
Everything intertwines. The shards—whatever you want to call them—are a piece of that puzzle. I want to know what they were fighting over.
[This is no time for a commitment like that, Loki.]
[Bellamy likes Morla well enough, for a monarch. He doesn't trust her, but that largely stems from the whole monarchy thing, and his distaste for the court system as a whole. Even if she is tied to it without choice, it doesn't immediately warm him up to her.]
[Some of it's already familiar to him though, just not necessarily all as shoved together like Loki offers.]
So when the time comes, see if our secretive god friend has any of these answers, too. Someone put this cycle into place, which means it's far from natural. It's just convenient for whatever they want.
[ ties to Martin Maskmaker. ties to the Avatar of the Void. ties to the Drabkeeper.
this was the end; it was coming to a head.
he knew it, he could feel it. the desperation boiled. he couldn't let the tendrils of fate do this again. the thought of it made him ill. starting over, becoming what he was and reaching this point, never able to go any further. ]
You catch on quickly. [ he says it as if he's pleased, tipping up his empty cup as if in toast. ] Now, to think of a proper offering.
[Bellamy shrugs. He has to catch on quickly in most things, or he'd have been dead many times over.]
It's not like we need to think of something immediately. Obviously, sounds like the sooner the better, but if breaking the cycle is your priority, then the offering needs to be worthwhile if you want to get anything relevant out of them.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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[ did he just do that? he just did that. ]
Unless you had something in mind.
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[He nods a quick no.] Not off the top of my head. But anything good enough isn't going to be a quick thought. Sit on it for a couple days.
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[ which is the point, kind of. he has a few in mind, but secrets were a tricky thing. anything having to do with shardbearers or the gem or the war could have easily been lost and found again. there may be others that knew it. ]
But I'll keep my mind open. I'm sure we can figure out something enticing enough.
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[ he drains the cup of coffee and then tosses it on the table carelessly. the cup jiggles in the coaster before rotating down to the porcelain in patterned echoes. ]
How do you know just how many hold these secrets? You don't.
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[Which is obviously easier said than done, but it's the first thing that comes to mind, so it's the first thing he says.] I kept my little sister a secret for most of her life. If something like that is possible, there's something else in this world that can be used here too.
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The realm of family is different than the realm of politics. That's far more people to muck it up for you.
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I'm not saying it's the same thing, but I'm not unfamiliar with keeping shit to myself.
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... Tell me, what do you want out of all of this?
[ curiosity, maybe. this wasn't the first time he did something for Bellamy. seeking out the means of finding the Secret and the Whisperer had been personal, but it seems like it was for Bellamy as well.
this would be the second time he was doing something for Bellamy. ]
Not just this. Everything.
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[Bellamy doesn't think as well in the long term. His decisions and choices are so immediate, based on what needs to happen now. And right now, shards felt like something important enough to look into.]
I want to keep my people safe. My sister, Clarke, Hiro, the ones back home. [The list is longer, but he doesn't feel the need to expand. But that's it. That's always his priority above everything else - not systems or rules, just the people he has a compulsive need to keep safe. That's not a secret.] If shards are a weapon, we need to know how they work.
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[ he meets his eyes with two inhumanly green ones. without asking, once again, he invades Bellamy's personal space and leans forward, pressing a gloved palm to his collar, the weight pressed in a diagonal down to where his shard would be. ]
They respond to each other, like they have memory. Like they know they're the same. Clarke says she feels as if the gem itself is trying to stay alive, perpetuate a continually cycle to preserve its own sentience. I told her that it was awfully mortal of her to think so.
[ he with draws his hand and leans his elbows on the table. ]
This is something else. Not a weapon, nor a means to anything. This is a divine plan, something wrought in hiccups through timespace, expanding and contracting. This is much bigger.
What would you keep people safe from? The end of everything? It's going to happen again.
[ there's a tip of his head and a sigh. ]
And again, and again, and again ...
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Even if it's not a weapon, it's still useful to us and what we can do. It's our connection to home. It's still something we need to learn about to keep ourselves alive.
[What would he protect his people from though? The answer is as easy as always.] Anything. Everything I need to keep them safe from. If I need to fight in another war after this one, at least I'm getting the fucking experience.
[He'd rather not, honestly, but at least violence has become something familiar to him.] But yeah, I've gotten the whole impression of a cycle here.
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Impression is putting it lightly. [ Loki says distastefully. ] The Matrons confirmed it. They're stuck, we're stuck, everyone's stuck. All you need to do is think about it for a moment ... If the Unseelie had one, even once, we wouldn't be here.
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[But still, he makes a face at the idea.] How many times have we lost?
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[ his expression changes from something of disdain to a more serious sort of thoughtful scorn. memories were strange for him, but there are a few things he does remember, and some of the great battles of Ragnarok are some of them. ]
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Sounds like it matters. What's the point in repeating the same bullshit over and over? [It's all very personalized for Loki, he's picked up that much, but he's not gonna ask. For him, if there was one thing he refused to do when he got to the ground, it was repeat the methods of the Ark. He might not be aligned to the court, but Bellamy knows he fits right in.] So, what, the Seelie court kills us, or the Void kills everyone? Every time?
[It's mostly rhetorical. He's just annoyed.] There's gotta be a way to get unstuck.
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For the Aesir it was someone. There were the gods above the gods that perpetuated the cycle for their own divine-ly benefit. [ he tosses his fingers again. ] It was called "fate" or "destiny", but of course those are just pretty words to cover up the truth: that we were all fodder.
The universe likes cycles and patterns. It has a memory that lives through us, you could say. They've just been around so long that they're perceived as "natural."
So, yes, we have to get unstuck. We just need the unsticking to stick.
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I don't buy fate as unbreakable. [Spoken like a true anarchist.] Is that why you're so focused on shards? You think they got something to do with all this?
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Morla said that she was bound to fate after the gem broke by some fellow appropriately named the Drabkeeper. I want to know the details of it, the whole thing. Everything plays together, you see. The gem, the Void, the Drabkeeper and the Monarchs.
You don't think that Morla would want to end everything just because it's her nature, would you? [ there's a spark in him that shows. the cadence in his voice flowing as he becomes electric with defiance. ] She's forced to fight someone she loves over and over and over again because she was damned to it.
Everything intertwines. The shards—whatever you want to call them—are a piece of that puzzle. I want to know what they were fighting over.
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[Bellamy likes Morla well enough, for a monarch. He doesn't trust her, but that largely stems from the whole monarchy thing, and his distaste for the court system as a whole. Even if she is tied to it without choice, it doesn't immediately warm him up to her.]
[Some of it's already familiar to him though, just not necessarily all as shoved together like Loki offers.]
So when the time comes, see if our secretive god friend has any of these answers, too. Someone put this cycle into place, which means it's far from natural. It's just convenient for whatever they want.
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this was the end; it was coming to a head.
he knew it, he could feel it. the desperation boiled. he couldn't let the tendrils of fate do this again. the thought of it made him ill. starting over, becoming what he was and reaching this point, never able to go any further. ]
You catch on quickly. [ he says it as if he's pleased, tipping up his empty cup as if in toast. ] Now, to think of a proper offering.
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It's not like we need to think of something immediately. Obviously, sounds like the sooner the better, but if breaking the cycle is your priority, then the offering needs to be worthwhile if you want to get anything relevant out of them.
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[ and with a sigh of "I'll do it myself"ness, he gets up to go get another. so, case closed. it was time to pull a few strings.
he knew where to start. ]