The Confectionary Chronicles || HP/SPN

Lollies and Loki- CH32

A/N: Hi, sorry for the hiatus everyone, I've been dealing with some shit. I'll be going back over the comments people posted for the last chapter and replying, so please don't think I've been ignoring you out of rudeness, I appreciate each and every bit of support, advice, feedback, etc. that people leave <3

I hope you enjoy the update! xxx

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CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO:

The first thing Hermione did after crying her eyes out all over her god was have a very, very, very long steaming-hot shower. She'd agreed to talk to Dr. Mia, but wanted to wash first– she needed to scrub away at her skin until she'd cleaned Odin's taint off her, the memory of her vulnerability at his hands, of her helplessness, pinned to that altar like a skewered butterfly who'd been put up for display.

Loki had seemed reluctant to let her out of his sight, and Vashti had downright refused, her angry screeching sounding like nails on a chalkboard until Hermione stopped trying to untangle her from her hair and just took the little phoenix into the shower with her, where Vashti proceeded to aggressively preen her curls.

The shower's scalding hot water (which Vashti, as a phoenix, was clearly unaffected by) did little to burn away the memory of Odin's hands on her, around her throat, or how she'd pressed her own forearm against Muriel-Munnin's throat as hard as she could—

No, she couldn't think about that, she just couldn't. Not yet.

Maybe not ever.

(She didn't ever want to think about that ever again)

Despite the slight relief and cleansing the hot water brought her, the shower did also reveal the new scar. Most of her injuries had vanished without a trace– including, to her relief, the venom-burns that had horribly seared and blistered her face, as those would have been both impossible to hide and a constant reminder of what had happened to her. There was only one injury had actually left scarring, and that was the dagger to her stomach– except, it wasn't the scar of a stab wound that had been left behind, there was no puncture mark where the sharp blade had been driven deep into her flesh.

No, the scarring looked more like Lichtenberg figures, the tattoo-like fractal patterns left behind by lightning strikes whose heat could reach upward of five times as hot as the sun. Despite technically resembling a burn, the scarring reminded Hermione of frost spreading along a windowpane, oddly beautiful in a haunting sort of way; it also resembled branching lightning, she thought... and maybe feathers too, fanning out across her lower torso, from her hip to halfway up her ribcage.

Hermione felt like she should be disgusted by the marks on her body, but when she touched the silvery scarring, the power simmering within them didn't feel like Odin's heavy, foul magic, all dark and bloody and skin-crawling. It felt like wild, crackling, compressed fire– like Loki. Fresh tears mixed with the hot, cascading water from as she crouched on the shower floor, pressing one palm to the scarring and one over her mouth, sobbing silently into her palm.

(She wondered if this was how Ness had felt, when she'd been betrayed by her classmates, left bound overnight in that football field by the peers that should have supported her... she wondered if Ness has felt this soul-crushing agony of anger-grief-hate-disbelief-sorrow-despair—)

The water never went cold– likely Loki's influence, a vague part of her noted absently– and Hermione didn't get out of the shower for nearly two hours, at which point an increasingly-agitated Vashti nipped her ear hard enough to draw blood. She felt as if she was moving through some sort of fog, her overworked brain glitching after having been forced to experience overwhelming relief, crushing grief, sickening panic, hateful rage and more, and all in the short span of time since she'd woken up in the strange bed. It left her now feeling numb, like she was moving through heavy mist.