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Dante pulled Odin by his silver hair and slapped his face. The sound echoed through the throne room, satisfying some twisted part of his mind.
"Old fuck."
Odin's single eye fluttered open. And in that red eye was the acceptance of his crime. The acceptance was almost worse than defiance would have been.
Dante gave Odin a back-handed slap, sending him rolling across the floor. He approached Odin with slow steps and drove his foot into Odin's ribs. The groans Odin released made him feel like he was abusing the elderly, which he technically was.
Odin had grown far too weak with age.
But then again, this was the man who intended to keep him trapped in Hel for centuries and use Natasha as a hostage. Such a man didn't deserve sympathy.
He stepped onto Odin's chest and ascended the stairs to the throne. He sat down on it and rested his hands over the carved armrests. The feeling of being in power was honestly not that bad.
"Asgard's mine," he said, looking down at Odin pushing himself upright with shaking arms. "Are you pleased, old geezer?"
Odin shakily got to his feet. "The people won't accept you… you don't know the burden of the throne."
Dante waved his hand to make his mask disappear. As the ruler of Asgard, he didn't need to hide his face anymore.
He crossed one leg over the other. "They have already accepted it. You can verify with your wife over there."
The god of mischief stood a little too quietly for Dante's comfort, so he threw him a glance. Loki turned his face away and put a hand over his mouth, as though he had been caught doing something forbidden.
This Loki acted quite suspicious at times.
Odin looked at Frigga, who barely held herself together. He closed his single eye. "My love…"
Frigga met his gaze and nodded. "Hela is the new queen."
The color left Odin's face all at once. He stood there in utter shock and then his legs gave out. He put his hands over his heart and fell to his knees.
Odin collapsed holding his chest.
Frigga rushed across the throne room, held him up, and lowered him more gently on her lap. Tears spilled from her eyes as she caressed her husband's face.
"This is… Odinsleep…"
Apparently Hela being the new queen sent him over the stress threshold and pushed Odinsleep to an earlier date.
Loki shook his head with a sigh. As much as he despised Odin, he still had love for his adopted father. It would be hard not to when they had spent close to a thousand years together.
"Please spare his life." Frigga looked up at Dante with teary eyes. "He is not a threat to you like this."
"I don't wanna."
After slapping and kicking Odin around, he had lost any desire for revenge. Odin seemed too pathetic for him to waste his time. But he wasn't going to let the old man live. Odin was too crafty and devious for his own good, perhaps the only one who could ruin Hela's reign over Asgard.
Frigga carefully lowered Odin on the ground. She ran to Loki and held his hands. "Loki, my son."
Dante felt quite an irony since she wasn't really his mother. But then again, she loved him dearly. He had seen their love for each other through their interactions.
Loki's face twisted at the sight of his mother wearing such an expression. "Mother…"
Dante hadn't expected Loki to make such an expression. The Loki before him was quite a lot better at showing emotions on his face than the chaotic goblin Loki of MCU. Almost as if they were different people.
"This is karma. Father built the trap that caught us all. This is the consequence of… Mother, what are you doing?!"
Frigga had gotten down to her knees. She was no longer a queen but a desperate wife who had exhausted every other option to save her husband.
"Please, Loki. Please help your father."
Loki closed his eyes and pressed his lips together. He was quite visibly trying to shut the door on this, trying to be the cleverest person in the room and not a son watching his mother begging her son on her knees.
He failed horribly.
"Loki," she whispered. "If there was ever one moment, when you loved me. Look at me."
Loki was forced to open his eyes, forced to witness Frigga holding a dagger to her own throat. The blade was more of a ceremonial piece a queen would carry around for emergencies, the edge of which was still sharp enough to draw blood.
"If your father dies here, I'll follow him to Valhalla."
Dante leaned forward slightly in the throne.
'Hmm. Will Silvija or Felicia do this for me?'
He found himself turning the question over and over in his mind.
'Probably not.'
He shook his head at the conclusion. The feelings were real, but Silvija and Felicia had more than just him to care about. He was only a part of their lives. Besides, they hadn't lived thousands of years to build the irrational depth of attachment Frigga had for Odin.
At least the time he spent with them was quality one.
Loki turned to him with a helpless look. "Dante, my friend, can you… let Father go? He is, in every practical sense, already dead in that state."
Dante smiled. "Give me one good reason."
Loki inhaled and straightened his robes before clearing his throat.
"First reason," Loki said, raising one finger. "You gain my loyalty. Complete, undivided. One of the most capable minds, given to you at no cost."
"You overestimate your value."
Loki's calm smile twitched for a moment. He raised two fingers. "Second: my mother's support, and with it her silence. She will not pursue vengeance against you. Her hatred will never leave the chamber where Father will occupy in Odinsleep."
"Killing her is the better option, no? The dead tell no tales, after all."
Loki's expression darkened. "Then I might harbor resentment towards you."
"I should kill you as well."
"F-Friend, killing everyone isn't the way. The path of a slaughter is one of loneliness."
Dante grinned. "I already have a companion who can't die. I don't think I'll ever be lonely with her around."
A gentle whisper caressed his face as Death quietly showed her presence.
Loki was left speechless. Nothing he could provide would be of value here when Dante had the entire Asgard in his grip. Everything already belonged to him.
The Prince—the former Prince of Asgard looked at his mother, who still held herself hostage. He looked at Dante who showed no signs of backing down.
He took a heavy step forward. "I have another reason."
Dante grew a bit interested after seeing Loki's reluctance in opening up about it. "Oh, tell me."
"The third reason… is a secret nobody in this realm knows." Loki crossed his arms. He wasn't the slightest bit happy to speak about it. "Nobody."
"Will this secret make me happy in any way?"
Loki nodded promptly. "A man of your interests will take particular delight in it. That I can promise."
"But is it useful?"
Loki held his chin, contemplating. "The information might perhaps be of use to you."
Dante leaned back on the throne and closed his eyes. Biokinesis expanded senses beyond the five typical ones—he saw the workings of Odin's unconscious form in his mind.
Asgardian physiology was extraordinary. Odin's muscles were dense and each cell carried far more resilience than humans. Even in this broken, aged state, the architecture of the man was genuinely fascinating.
He stopped himself from exploring everything. He could do that later with a healthier Asgardian later.
He found the specific neural pathway responsible for Odinsleep's mechanism. It allowed Odin to enter a deep restorative state to accumulate Odinforce. He changed the cycle to self-sustaining so that it wouldn't require any external trigger to maintain or break.
Odin would breathe, but he would never wake up. A king frozen in the amber of his own sleep while the realm he had spent millennia ruling moved forward without him.
Eternal slumber would be crueler than just killing him.
He deactivated Biokinesis and opened his eyes. "Alright, you win."
Loki's expression did not relax entirely. It seemed that his intuition had caught onto Dante's trick. But then again, he had no proof of anything. Even Asgard's best physicians and equipment wouldn't be able to find out the reason Odin wouldn't wake up from Odinsleep.
"Mother." He turned to Frigga, who had lowered the dagger the moment she heard Dante's words. "Take father to his chambers. He'll be comfortable there."
Frigga gave a grateful nod and soft smile to Loki and a quite stiff nod to Dante before she left the throne room with Odin in her arms. Outside, she called upon two attendants to help carry her husband.
"Well, where is my secret?"
Loki waited until Frigga's footsteps weren't audible. He stepped forward until he stood a few feet from the throne and looked at Dante directly.
"I need you to use your concealment," he said with a serious expression. "Whatever Death gives you to hide with. No one can see what I'm about to show you."
Dante raised an eyebrow. "Now I'm genuinely curious."
He raised his hand. Death's invisible cloak fell from above and cut both of them out of the world's perception. The throne room continued existing around them, but they had ceased to exist within it.
Death had shown no desire to take back this artifact. It was probably her compensation for putting him in this mess with Odin and Hela.
"Dante, my friend," Loki said in his usual cheerful tone, but his voice had a nervous edge to it. "Would you close your eyes?"
Dante stared at him. "Why?"
"Close them, or I won't reveal anything."
"Okay, jeez," Dante grumbled, letting the fool win this time. "I'll beat the fuck out of you if it's for nothing."
Loki shivered. "You'll be entertained, I promise."
In Asgard, he always had his Hyperion Resonance connected to avoid dying to a sneak attack. Death's Resonance would help if any attack went through and killed him. And if that failed somehow, he had Biokinesis to self-resurrect from nothing. And if Loki tried to trap him somewhere, he could always return through teleportation or just wait for Death to replenish her power.
He had backup plans for his backup plans in case Loki tried anything.
With his eyes closed, he heard a few hums associated with magic spells and rustling of clothes, and then nothing for a few seconds.
'What's he cooking?'
"You can look now."
Dante opened his eyes.
What stood before him was not Loki. Or rather it was, and it was not—his mind couldn't reconcile the two facts simultaneously.
He had become a woman.
She was tall with long black hair framing a face with sharp jaw and high cheekbones—a face that unmistakably belonged to Loki. Her bearing was identical to Loki, but the rest of her proportions weren't.
Those green eyes gazed at him with a hint of anxiety. "Well, this is the secret nobody knows."
"Loki." He leaned his face against his knuckle. "How is your genderleaping shapeshifting supposed to make me happy?"
"I said you would take particular delight in it." Her voice had adjusted to sound more feminine but still carried the dry cadence. "I know you have three lovers. How can a man with your energy not take delight in beholding Asgard's most beautiful lady?"
"You're a man," he corrected with a frown. "What the hell is wrong with you?"
For some odd reason, he was reminded of that "Sometimes it takes a real man to be the best girl" quote.
"I am not a man. I am Lady Loki." Loki took off her twin horn crown and held it in her hand. He realized that she held a chained amulet in her right hand. "I was not born in this universe."
He raised his eyebrow at that. Loki's flusteredness in the bath would make sense if this was the truth. "You aren't from here?"
"My Asgard…" She closed her eyes and whispered in a trembling voice, as though recalling a heartbreaking memory. "It was destroyed."
As a fellow survivor of a destroyed world, he empathized with her tragedy, perhaps more than anyone in this universe. She found parents in the new world. He found romance. They both lacked what the other found.
He didn't show that on his face, however. "How did you end up here then?"
"I woke up as a child here with this around my neck." She flipped her right palm to show a crimson gem tied to a chain. "It changes my body to mimic the Loki I replaced. I do not have any knowledge of who and why I have been brought here."
He rubbed his chin. Who could be so meddlesome to take her from another universe and plant her in this one? It wasn't Death for sure. She had made an exception for him.
"Can I check that?"
She was reluctant, rightfully so. Without the gem, she wouldn't be able to go back to being Frigga's good boy without this.
He stretched his palm. "I won't break it. I promise."
She put her hand under his and gently placed the gem on his palm. "Please treat it with care."
He held the chain up and observed the gem from every angle. The gem and entire chain had letters carved on it. Letters he recognized from his experience in Doctor Strange's mind. Even he would need time to decipher the meanings and workings of each letter.
'Whoever made this is at the Sorcerer Supreme level.'
The question was—why would any sorcerer help Loki in Asgard?
Lady Loki nervously stared at him.
He smiled and tossed it back at her. She let out a sigh of relief and wore it around her neck. A blood red glow surrounded her, transforming her into the Loki Dante knew.
The necklace had vanished. Or rather, it became a part of her body.
'Well, Asgard got a lot more interesting.'
He rose from the throne. "Here's my first order as your king. Commission a new weapon from the dwarves."
Loki put a hand over his forehead with a "I knew this would happen" look.
Dante smiled. "I want a scythe made from Uru metal."
Loki rolled his eyes. Of course Death's Companion wanted a scythe.
***
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