The Red Serpent (Chapter 2)

  Hello, again mortals. If you're still reading this, I congratulate you on being able to stand my personality. I wouldn't really blame you if you found me insufferable and left, but since you haven't, I'm going to assume you want me to keep talking.  With that being said, enjoy the second chapter of this particular garbage fire of a story.
 

  I was staring at myself the whole way back to Asgard, in the reflection of Freya's sword. It was always a habit of hers to keep its blade basically mirror like, which, now, turned out to be a bad thing. My first glance at my reflection in her sword sent me internally screaming, because seriously, what the actual FUCK was wrong with my face? Gods almighty, I hadn't seen something that hideous and hard to look at since...I actually had never seen something that bad up until this point. I finally understood why Snakey had been mocking me about my facial expressions. So, how bad was it, you mortals are probably asking yourselves. The short and obvious answer would be bad. Really bad. My face was a mess of dried pus and blood and acid burn scars, all the tissue, and scabs sort of melted and fused together to create a kind of mask of mutilated and scarred flesh. My eyes were sort of melted around the edges, and it was a wonder my eyelids still worked. The whites of my eyes were a red mist of broken blood vessels, but my irises somehow survived, they were the same emerald green they always were, albeit frosted with exhaustion. The rest of me wasn't exactly any better either. I could see every one of my rib bones, and the bones in my hands ground together audibly when I moved them. All the way back to Asgard I was screaming on the inside, and frantically mentally checking the rest of myself, making sure I wasn't anymore fucked up than what I had already discovered. My fear had reached a point where it was getting too hard to bear. So hide in your mind I told myself. Hide in my head. I'd done it several times before while tied up, and I think it kept me sane, or, as sane as I ever was, to begin with. And then I thought better of it. My old memories were a minefield, a double edged sword, bringing me both unrelenting joy and a feeling like my heart was being torn out of my chest, a reminder of everyone I'd lost, of everything bad I'd done. if I started thinking back now, my composure would shatter and I'd start crying like a bitch. Not what I wanted to do in front of these fuckers.

    My return to Asgard was rather uneventful. Except for all the glares that clearly said 'oh fuck, this jackass is alive.' nobody really said or did anything to me. I guess I should've been grateful for that, but I really wasn't. There was just this lonely chasm in my chest. Nobody gave me even a second glance, which made me paranoid all the more. That definitely wasn't normal, and I kept wondering why the ever loving fuck Heimdall wasn't coming over here to pick a fight with me. I really wasn't in the mood to be left alone to think, because that was a bad thing. My mind immediately pointed out that Fenrir and Jormungandr weren't here, and if they freed me, why didn't they free them, and then I had the heart stopping thought that they might be dead. My train of thought got darker and darker until I eventually passed out in the snow.

    I awoke to a weird feeling on my chest and opened my eyes to see Snakey, of all things, resting there, looking at me.

    "Are you alright? You passed out in the snow for like, a few days." he asked, looked...concerned of all things.

    "Wait, WHAT!? A few days?"

    "Yeah."

    "Wow, I was out way shorter than I thought. Well, if you'll excuse me, I'm going back to sleep for a couple thousand millennia. Also, why do you care, you were spitting venom in my face for a thousand years."

Snakey huffed and glared at me, offended.

    "Against my will! I really didn't want to spend my life wasting my poison on you, but I really didn't get a say in the matter. You think I'd WANT to spend years of my life sitting in a cave hurting someone? No!"

    "Oh...sorry man..."

    "And don't call me 'man'! I'm not a guy, I'm a girl!"

    "You're...a GIRL!?"

    My jaw promptly hit the ground. Snakey was...a girl? Seriously? And then I started to notice a few things about him-er her. Her voice, while definitely serpentine, did have a more feminine sounding pitch to it, and she just had this kind of look about her. Yeah, he was a she. Holy shit. I felt stupid for not noticing, but then again, I didn't really care at the time, because I was in mind numbing agony.

    "Sorry then...um, while we're on the subject of...well, you, do you have a name? I've been calling you Snakey in my head, but that probably isn't your real name, if you have one." Her expression softened a bit, and I felt a tiny bit better. Maybe I do have allies here even if she is a snake, I thought.

    "My name is Alpinia."

    I felt a slow smile cross my face. "You mean like the flower?"

    "Yes! Yes! Exactly! The flower! Also called Red Ginger! Finally, someone gets it! I would hug you right now if I had arms! Nobody ever gets it! Curses to my stupid mother who named me this way."

    "It's not a bad name, even if others don't know it's a flower. It's exotic."

    "You flatter me Loki."

    The two of us fell silent for a few minutes, and during that time I sat and thought about everything that went down. It looked like my life was going to be as crazy as ever, but maybe things were starting to look up, just a little. I glanced over at Alpinia again, her silver edged crimson scales glittering the cold, watery winter sunlight, looking like a splash of blood on the sparkling snow. Funny, how quickly things could change. I had gone from seeing her as my enemy, heck I had planned to kill her as soon as I was freed, to see her as a friend. The worlds were truly twisted, but I was used to that by now. As my friend, Herbaceous Peony would say "Faina twists and weaves the thread and we have 'naught a choice but to follow". I couldn't agree more. Fate's a bitch, and we are all her puppets, whether we want to be or not.

    Truly, I didn't want to be. But again, like so many other times in my life, I had no choice in the matter.