If Odin had taken a Moment in the Observatory...
The Bifrost slowed and its distinctive humming died away. Odin's shoulders slumped, the adrenaline making him feel closer to the sleep than he could remember feeling in a long time.
Now he would need to hold it at bay until he could make peace with Laufey. If Frigga left him alive after he told her what he had done to Thor.
It had to be done. The boy was reckless, arrogant, prideful to the point of foolishness -and Odin had almost made him king today.
Perhaps it was for the best that the Frost Giants had gotten in to the Vault.
A slight movement made Odin remember himself, remember his other son who was standing not far away from him. His son who should never have gone to Jotunheim. He looked at Loki and in the split second it took to realise he was being observed, Odin saw the raw, brittle fear on Loki's face. It vanished like a curtain dropping down before a stage, all emotion gone in an instant.
"Are you hurt?" Odin asked, his tone sharper than he intended. Loki twitched, then shook his head, picking at his left palm. Something about the action nagged at Odin. Certainly he had noted time and again how Loki mimicked his mother in so many ways, and it gave him a soothing warmth in his chest to see it. But something was odd about it now.
"I will need your help pacifying the Jotnar," he said, watching for anything that might be going on under the impermeable mask. When had Loki become so stoic? He had never been like that as a child.
"Yes, father," said Loki, voice tight and controlled. He was still scratching at his left palm. Anxious.
"None of you should have gone to Jotunheim," said Odin curtly.
"I couldn't dissuade him, and I did send a guard to warn you. I was afraid of what he might do if I let him go without me."
Odin snorted. Loki looked stricken and shrank back a little into the shadows. Odin sighed, he was remembering how easily Loki used to be able to talk Thor into trouble not long ago. Then again, this seemed beyond Loki's usual remit of pranks.
"You still broke my decrees, consider it your punishment to help ensure no more blood is spilt."
Loki's face tightened even more, and he nodded without a word, still picking at his palm. Odin was tempted to order him to stop, he was ruining his glove.
Loki's right hand had a glove and light mail armour covered his arm. His left was bare up to the elbow, and the fabric was frayed and tattered.
Odin stared at it, a distant sense of unease in his mind.
"Are you sure you are not injured?" he pressed. Loki's eyes flickered down to his bare arm, and his shoulders visibly tightened.
"No father. They did not injure me," he said. The words were loaded, but Odin did not know how to verbalise the alarm that was starting to go off in his head.
Frost bite would damage the chain mail and leathers the way Loki’s sleeve was damaged. But unlike Volstagg, whose skin had been blackened, Loki’s looked the same as it always had.
... Odin had been too late.
The moment this realisation slammed into his mind was the moment Loki obviously came to the same conclusion, because he gave Odin one wild look of panic, and vanished without a sound.
Odin span around and hollered for Heimdall,
“I cannot see him, my king. He is cloaked from me,” said Heimdall.
“Since when is that even possible?” Odin demanded, his heart hammering again. He needed to find Loki before anything else went wrong.
“It is something he has done for many years. It never threatened Asgard’s security and thus I deemed it no harm,” said Heimdall, regarding Odin carefully. “You did say to adhere to such a policy when I began my watch.”
Odin wanted to snap that it had only been to keep Heimdall from bothering him every ten minutes with minutiae that a king did not need to know about. Heimdall had been a touch... overeager when he had begun his duties.
But Loki... Loki was a different matter.
Odin strode past Heimdall and leapt back atop Sleipnir, kicking the horse to gallop as fast as his eight legs would carry him. The first place to look for Loki would be his chambers.
He needed to find his son, now, before the boy had time to work himself into a frenzy of suspicion and paranoia, as he was wont to do.
Odin had enough problems with one son, he did not need the other to fall apart at the same time.
