Chapter Text
Forty minutes and a bath later saw him seated in a high-backed, overstuffed armchair and the object of much attention. The woman's youngest three children stared at him with unabashed interest, which truthfully made him a little uncomfortable. Loki did not like to be the center of attention; he preferred to go unnoticed, skulking through shadows and secret places.
The eldest girl, Anna, was once again glued to the strange hand-held device, and the eldest boy seemed to be similarly transfixed with a device of his own. He stared at it in his hand until it made a faint chiming noise, and then he was a flurry of activity.
His mother – Mary she said her name was – plucked it from his hands, to which he managed half a protest before a severe, cutting look stopped him, and then she took Anna's as well. "No cell phones," she told them, and Loki had to admire the way three words and a single expression could cow any objections.
"But—"
"Your personal drama can wait," the father said, settling on a couch beside the eldest son. He turned a sharp gaze on Loki, and Loki assessed him in an instant – academic, thoughtful, generally quiet. The type who thought before speaking, was usually soft-spoken, relatively erudite. A complete contrast, then, to the rest of his family who seemed to take after their mother with sharp tongues and volatile tempers.
After placing the devices on a small side table, Mary moved to stand beside Loki's chair. The gesture, he thought, was strangely protective. But, then, a woman with five children would likely fall with relative ease into a mothering role with any seemingly wounded individual. He loathed that they thought him so weak, vowing at the first opportunity to leave them.
"Kids, this is Loki," Mary said. "He's had an accident and can't remember anything about himself, so until something comes up, your father and I have decided to let him stay with us."
Anna's hand shot in the air, and she said nothing until her mother acknowledged her. A curious manner of requesting permission to speak. Loki filed that tidbit away, too. "Okay, so, wait, is this going to mess up the shower schedule? Because Jack showering in the morning already cuts into the time I need to do my hair."
Contentious little bitch. "I can shower in the evening," Loki said, and this statement made her flash him what she surely thought was a winning smile.
"We can rework the shower schedule later." Mary pointed at the youngest child. "Loki, this is Lyn."
Lyn held up four fingers. "I'm this many," she told him proudly. He gave her an indulgent smile, and she squealed, curling around the monstrously large stuffed rabbit in her hands.
"That's Joe." She pointed to the youngest boy, who looked quite like his father, likely between seven and eight, but judging mortal ages was next to impossible. One moment they were babies, and then they were dead. Loki had never felt the need to pay that much attention to their short lives. He resented his own short-sightedness. "And Jack."
Jack, with the same brown hair and brown eyes as his brother, just stared at him, silent.
"Anna, who you've met." Anna gave him another brilliant smile, and Loki managed to catch his grimace before it flashed across his face. "Mike, our eldest."
It was impossible not to despise Mike on sight. The boy had Thor's strong features, broad shoulders, and sparkling blue eyes. That sky blue eyes seemed to be common in this particular family didn't matter. The curling brown hair atop his head didn't matter either. They held themselves with the same casual arrogance, exuded the same self-indulgent charisma and self-assured charm.
"Yo," Mike said. Oh, and he was just as erudite as Thor. Wonderful.
"A pleasure," Loki managed, not trusting himself to say anything further.
The father leaned forward, offering his hand. Loki took it, only because it was expected. "Robert," he said. "Everyone calls me Bob."
There was a moment of silence wherein Loki was keenly aware of the fact that he should say something appreciative. "I am humbled by your kindness in taking me in," he finally said, putting as much sincerity as possible into his voice.
With a laugh that sounded a little flustered, Mary patted his shoulder. He had been conscious perhaps an hour and had already received more physical attention from strangers than ever he had from his family. "It's the least we can do," she said.
"So are we done here?" Anna asked. Mary gave her a look that Frigga would have appreciated, but it didn't do a thing to the girl. "What? Look, I have stuff to do, okay? I've got a math test tomorrow."
"Aw, shit, so do I," Mike said. His father smacked him on the side of the head, and Loki fought the burst of sympathy and anger that rolled through his stomach. "The hell, dad?"
"You're not big enough that I can't wash your mouth out with soap. Go set the table," Bob replied. Loki highly doubted Bob was capable of doing anything to Mike that Mike didn't want to allow, but the child, sulking, muttered an apology for his language and tromped into the kitchen.
He watched with relative amusement when the rest of the kids scattered en masse. Mary caught Joe and Jack before they could vanish to their room upstairs, and Bob stopped Anna with a finger in one of the belt loops of her pants. "Kitchen," Mary said, turning the children around and pushing them forward.
"But I have a math test—"
"You also have a dinner to help me make," Mary said, cutting Anna off and pointing to the kitchen. Anna groaned and followed the two boys, pushing at them when they didn't move fast enough for her.
Lyn, meanwhile, had dragged herself and her rabbit behind Loki's legs, under his chair. He looked down at her, and she gave him a toothy grin. "New rabbit," she said to him.
"Does she say anything else?" he asked, somewhat exasperated.
With a shake of his head, Bob rose from the couch, his knees popping. "Nope, not with people she likes," he replied. "You like sloppy joes?"
It was, Loki thought, a sad commentary on his life that his brain conjured an image of Joe covered in mud, clothing tattered and torn, in response to that question. "Ah… I don't…"
The look of sympathy that passed over Bob's face before being replaced with an energetic smile infuriated him. "Don't worry about it. We'll figure out what kinds of foods you like as we go."
As it turned out, sloppy joes were surprisingly edible. They lived up to their name, and watching Lyn and Joe eat them was perhaps the highlight of Loki's evening. By the end of the meal, Lyn's front was painted with the meat sauce, as were her arms up to her elbows. Mary seemed to take this with good nature; if she was bothered, it did not show. Joe managed to keep the meat mostly in the bun, a feat even Loki had to appreciate (his first two bites were almost as poorly executed as Lyn's entire meal), but still smeared it over the lower half of his face.
There was a single, dangerous moment at the start of the meal when Loki nearly lost hold of the bun, and Anna mocked him shamelessly for it. Before he had a chance to retaliate (and he thought she should count herself lucky he could not use his magic), Mike, on Loki's left, kicked his sister under the table and reminded her of a time when she had covered herself in something called ice cream.
To his surprise, a round-robin game of who can embarrass the other most began. Mary and Bob joined in at one point, Mary recalling a time when Mike had ripped up all the flowers in a neighbor's garden. Bob's story left Anna gaping, her eyes swinging from Loki's face to her father's, as she alternately gasped out "Dad!" and "oh my God, I'm going to die."
And when the meal was finished, the whole family moved as a remarkable unit to have the table cleared and the dishes cleaned in no more than fifteen minutes. Mike took up a position rinsing dishes and scrubbing the pots and pans, Anna dried them, and it fell to Jack to place the dishes into a large contraption beside the sink and the pots and pans in their right places. Joe ran back and forth from the table to the counters, moving the plates to the sink for Mike and putting away the condiments and placemats. Mary vanished to clean up Lyn, and Bob settled on the loveseat in the family room; neither seemed particularly concerned that the jobs wouldn't be done.
Loki would have expected griping and complaining. He would not have been surprised if the children, as soon as their mother was out of sight and their father distracted, dropped their duties and scuttled off. But they did not. They worked in amicable silence, and he found the easy way they dealt with each other as surprising as it was uncomfortable.
When they were finished with their chores, they dispersed. Mike and Jack went down a flight of stairs to the basement, Mike saying something about Call of Duty to which Bob replied Jack was too young for it and they should play something else. Anna disappeared upstairs, likely to her room, while Joe clambered onto the couch beside his father, stole the plastic slab Bob held in his hands, and began pushing buttons. A lighted screen – television, Loki thought idly – switched from one image to another until Bob took the plastic device back and set the television to what was clearly the preferred station.
"Grab a seat," Bob said, gesturing to the longer sofa that backed up to the kitchen wall.
Loki settled on one end, perched on the edge of the seat. "Your children are well-trained," he observed, and Bob laughed.
"Only because they know their mother would take away their cell phone privileges in a heartbeat if they didn't do their chores," he replied. "Mary deals with the discipline. I hide in my office in the basement and crunch numbers. You remember any of the shows you like?" He lifted the plastic in his hand, and the word remote filtered through Loki's brain like an afterthought. "We can flip through the stations until you recognize something."
He shook his head. "Whatever you prefer is fine."
"Home Makeover?" Mary asked as she came down the step from the tiled foyer into the family room. Her husband nodded, and Loki watched them surreptitiously as she settled with Lyn on the couch beside Bob and Joe.
Almost as soon as Mary was down, the children began jockeying for position, and Loki suppressed a wince, certain there would be shouting and yelling in a moment. But there wasn't; Lyn settled happily on her father's lap, and Joe squished himself between his parents' legs. His expression a study in neutrality, Loki pretended to watch their show of choice while studying the four mortals.
Lyn was asleep within ten minutes, curled up in her father's lap. One of his hands rested easily on her hip, and from time to time, as if he didn't realize what he was doing, he would drop his lips to the top of her head and give her a light kiss. Mary leaned toward her husband, their bodies a protective canopy around Joe's, and by the end of the show she was drifting to sleep as well with her head on Bob's shoulder. Joe was the only one who seemed at all interested in what was on the television, but he sank lower and lower into the couch as the minutes ticked by, until he slouched so far down that he barely managed to stay on the couch.
All this, Loki took in and catalogued, intending to mull over it at great length later that night. But when he climbed into the bed he had been given, he was asleep within moments.