neutral_omens | (no subject)

Entry tags:

loki,
uriel

(no subject)

Time: September 28, 2000
Place: Loki's Room
Status: Private (Uriel, Loki)
Summary: Confronting and comforting.

Uriel was quite happy as she made her way back from yet another check-up. Everything was going perfectly well, she had been assured. Both she and little Bran were doing well, and things seemed to be developing at a normal pace. Activity, weight gain, everything matched her current stage.

Loki should be happy to hear this, she suspected. At the very least he might be interested in knowing what she was going to call her child.

With this in mind, she headed towards Loki's room. Knocking on the door, she asked, "May I come in?"

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"Bran, eh?" Loki tried to laugh. He didn't think John would come around. Most people didn't like him once they got to know him. So he tried not to think about it instead, put it behind him. "Not Brenda?"

So Uriel remembered that he liked the name Bran, did she? Somehow that made him feel almost loved, if only by one lonely and monstrous not-god.

"Of cours he's going to be Bran," Uriel said calmly. "For one thing, I'm calling myself Brenda and I happen to think Juniors are just ridiculous, and for another, I hardly can name a boy Brenda, now can I? And I happen to like the name, so I could just as well use it."

"So what if it is a girl, then?" Loki asked and snuggled up to Uriel so he could put his ear against her belly. "Are you a little girl in there? If so, do you want to be called Bran?"

"Bast told me it's going to be a boy," Uriel said. "She's the goddess of pregnant women among other times, so she should know. And if the child is a girl after all, well, then I'm in a bit of a trouble, right?"

"Bast?" Loki repeated slightly doubtfully. "Are you sure you can trust what Bast says? She confuses boys and girls with toms and queens most of the time."

Frigga had never been able to predict the gender of his children, though there was a tiny little rest of doubt nagging that she just hadn't wanted to.

"Well, at least she confuses them the right way," Uriel said, doing her best to sound cheerful. "She might call the baby a kitten half of the time, but I do trust her to know it about as much as I trust you not to tell the truth. And it's not like I can have an ultrasound to try to find it out."

"Why would you have to know, though?" Loki asked patting her round belly lovingly. "I never knew the gender of any of my children before they were born. Back then nobody did."

"Well, now I can at least pick baby clothes in colours that aren't gender-neutral," Uriel said. "Although I think it's just ridiculous to think that blue is for boys and pink is for girls, it might mislead people if I dressed a baby girl in blue or something. I don't have to think of any girl names, and, well, I'm curious. It's always been a flaw of mine. And besides, call it selfish or anything you'd like, but I like the thought of knowing my baby's gender before anybody else. Only Bast knows it, and now you."

That, and she wanted to know as much about her child as possible when she still could. Despite all Adam's power, she might lose him, and then it would be too late. But she wasn't about to tell Loki that.

"You spoiled the surprise for yourself, though," Loki commented, but was paying much more attention to her belly than to her words.

He hoped that Bast had told the truth. Not because he wanted the baby to be a boy, no. Girls were fine with him, too. He wanted to know the baby, though and he most likely never would. It didn't seem so much longer until it was born, but he doubted that he'd live that long.

"No, I didn't. It was a surprise to me when Bast told me," Uriel said. "And in my life most surprises have been bad ones, so it was nice for a chance to be surprised by something that would be fine either way. And besides," she added quietly, swallowing, "if Bast hadn't told me, I might have never got the chance to let you know that I am indeed going to use your name suggestion."

Loki looked up in surprise at that.

"Are you really?" He'd thought she'd been merely teasing. He was very aware that Bran was an outdated and very much not Judeo-Christian name. It was the very things that appealed to him about the name that Uriel was supposed to dislike.

"Of course I am!" Uriel said, surprised that Loki might have even doubted that. "Why would I have told you I'm going to call him Bran if it wasn't true? I think it's a sweet name, myself, in both how it sounds and what it means. Why on Earth wouldn't I use it? It's definitely better than anything I could come up with. All I can think of are artists' names and Michael, and the former would be too obvious and the latter would hardly be appreciated nowadays."

"Well, I thought you'd want something that goes with your pantheon," Loki admitted. "So how is little Bran today? He seems pretty quiet in there."

Somehow he was glad that the baby wasn't kicking all the time. He knew what that felt like. On the other hand he liked to feel the kicks when he touched Uriel's belly. It was the only way he had to interact with Bran.

"Why would I want something going with my pantheon if he isn't going to be an angel?" asked Uriel, confused. "And if he does turn out to be an angel, somebody will sooner or later start calling him Braniel or something equally silly."

Then, she started to smile. "Actually, I just had a check-up, and little Bran is doing perfectly well," she told him. "Everything is about as well as it can be!"

As though to confirm this, Bran chose this very moment to kick enthusiastically.

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