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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"You never ..." Loki started but thought better of it. That tale was none of Uriel's business. He'd never even told Odin, though he sometimes suspected the old god knew. "There are a lot worse mothers than you," he said instead. "You care about all these things for a start and you've already learned a lot about food. You can learn the rest as well. There are lots of books on how to raise children."

Well, at least there were lots of books on how to raise them to the point where they started school, but those should do for a few years.

"Maybe." Uriel sighed. "I doubt I'll manage to accidentally kill him or anything, but I'd still prefer not to do it alone." She smiled faintly. "Can you imagine what it will be like to teach him to fly?"

"None of mine ever had wings," he offered. "But it can't be too hard. Birds do it all the time. If Odin's back by them, he can lend you a tutor or two."

Uriel snorted. "For all I know, Huginn and Muninn would teach him to fly into walls," she said. "And birds teach their children to walk by pushing them from the nest, so I don't plan on following their methods anyway."

She thought about it for a while. "Children can be taught to walk by holding their hands and helping them move on the floor, right?" she said then. "I wonder if the same can be used for flying..."

"Well, you shouldn't pull them around," Loki recommended. "You might want to lend a hand, when they try to pull themselves up on you, but you've got to let them learn in their own time. They're good at knowing when they're ready for it."

"And it's not entirely true about birds either. It's just the nests getting too small and the little birdie accidentally getting pushed out when the others move around sometimes. Usually they just go further and further to the rim of the nest and get curious about the world outside and sometimes they get an accidental push and sometimes they overbalance. And then the parents show them how to fly and where all the best updrafts are ... They're fascinating to watch. Birds, I mean."

"I know they usually get pushed over the edge accidentally," Uriel said. "However, I've also read that if the little bird is intelligent enough to stay away from the edge and thus doesn't learn to fly, the parents will eventually push it down." After a moment's thought, she added, "However he's going to learn it, I think a safety helmet might be needed."

"Like those horrid things they force children into these days when skiing? Honestly! Why don't they just give them slower skis? And do you really think a helmet is necessary for a child learning to fly on its own natural wings?" Loki had never been a big fan of most kinds of safety equipment.

"A child learning to fly on its own natural wings whose main influences will most probably be a bipolar angel, a constantly hyper alien, a demon, and -- if a miracle happens -- an easily excitable god? Oh, definitely. Or at least constant supervision -- baby heads are fragile things, Loki. If he happened to fall and hit his head, it might have serious consequences. And not that I know much about skiing, but I don't think skis come with speed limits..."

"No, they don't have speed limits, but they've been thinking up ways to make them ever faster lately. The good old wooden skis we had in the old days weren't nearly as fast as these modern high tech monstrosities." Not that Loki didn't enjoy them. "Rougher surface, blunter sides, more friction, you see. No reason why you couldn't make slow skis for kids. It'd probably be a lot easier and cheaper actually."

He stopped to think for a moment. Somewhere he'd gotten side-tracked. He hadn't meant to go on about skis.

"And Bran will be a pretty tough kid with all those influences. You shouldn't spoil that by coddling him."

"Who understands humans anyway?" asked Uriel, shrugging. "They only get one corporation, yet they apparently insist on using it up as fast as they can -- and the more dramatic the end, the better. And I'm not going to spoil anything," she said then. "I merely plan on keeping my child alive."

"You have to die in battle," Loki commented. "That's the best way to go. Well, at least with us it is. You guys probably prefer them when they fall over dead prying in one of your temp ... churches."

Uriel smiled at the little slip. "Well, I'm not quite sure what the official stand is, but I doubt it's quite that," she said. "Of course, the most glorious way to die is to become a martyr, but as those cases are thankfully rare, I think about anything is accepted... Well, except for suicide. It still isn't taken well."

She shuddered at the memories that surfaced at this remark. Then, instinctively, she unfolded her wings, stretching them to get rid of the stiffness that resulted from having them in for so long. Bending them forward, she then shielded herself, Loki, and her unborn child with a cover of pristine white.

Wings! Beautiful, white feathery wings!

Loki hadn't seen Uriel's wings since the fight in her room when he'd tried to pull her feathers out. Fluffy, shiny, white, soft looking feathers.

He remembered well how sensitive they were, but couldn't resist. Before he'd really thought the action through he was running is fingers through them carefully and gently as he would with Hugin or Munin. They were even softer than he'd imagined.

Uriel was surprised to feel Loki's fingers running through her feathers. After the initial surprise, however, she noticed that it felt... actually quite nice. The only other one who had touched her wings before with no intention of hurting had been Pestilence, but Loki's touch was different. There was nothing sexual in this, just comfort and gentle caresses.

Her momentary anxiety fled her mind as she sighed happily. It was almost like the wind running through her feathers, and she had missed that so much...

When Uriel didn't object Loki added his second hand. Her wing was so much bigger than those of the ravens, so many wonderfully soft feathers he hadn't touched, yet.

One finger got stuck on a slightly out of place feather and he gently nudged it back into line, then ran his hand through there from the very top again to make sure there were no other misbehaving feathers.

He didn't even notice that he'd started purring softly again.

Loki was purring again. And she wasn't even caressing him this time -- rather, it was the other way around. Then again, Uriel felt quite like purring, herself.

"Should I be worried?" she asked with a slightly teasing tone, a delighted smile on her lips. It was almost like grooming her wings, but this time she didn't even have to do anything. "Here I am, wings spread like a little bird, and you start purring like a cat. You wouldn't eat your little sister, would you?"

Huh? Purring?

Loki looked up from the wings, both hands still deep inside and tried to figure out what Uriel was talking about.

"Nah," he teased. "You're much too big a meal for me and I don't purr when hunting."

"And now you're saying I am fat," Uriel said. "Oh, woe is me -- the only person I have left merely taunts and ridicules me. Maybe I should just leave you to your own devices -- and take my ugly little wings with me?"

"Fat? All I said was that you're too big to eat!" Loki protested. "Just look at the size of that wing and remember that I'm usually quite content with a single chicken wing on my plate. You can't really expect me to be able to eat a bird with wings this big!"

Okay, so he also expected some vegetables and salad to go with that chicken wing, but it still wasn't as much food as could probably be made out of a single angel-wing. Not that he felt like trying.

"Well, hopefully Bran's wings will be more to your taste, then," Uriel commented. "I say hopefully, since if they get too big, somebody else will have to give birth to him. Winged creatures are meant to hatch from eggs, after all."

Then, she laughed. "Well, fat is what I definitely feel like," she said. "I may not have doubled my weight during this pregnancy, but it definitely feels like that whenever I try to get up from a chair."

"I don't eat baby wings!" Loki exclaimed horrified. What a dreadful thing to do!

"You don't?" Uriel asked, still teasing. "What about old wings? Does 'baby wings' only count for the wings of babies, or also for wings that have just grown to older creatures?"

"It counts for any wing that doesn't belong to an adult and very dead chicken," Loki decided.

It had been a long time since he'd eaten any other sort of bird at least.

"Boring." Uriel grinned. Then, after a moment's pause, she said, "...Could you please continue? It felt nice."

"Well, I've been a bird a few times," Loki explained. "I'd be almost cannibalism to eat a falcon for example."

He obediently returned his attention to Uriel's wing. Not that he would tolerate her bossing him around, but it was nice and soft and he wanted to continue. He was only doing it because he felt like it of course!