Chapter Text
October saw his fall from godhood.
Or, at least, that was how he thought of it in the privacy of his own thoughts.
He and Mike both acquired their driver's licenses, though how Mike managed remained beyond even Loki's ability to comprehend. Jack celebrated his twelfth birthday, which saw everyone to a place called Chuck E Cheese, and Loki and Mary spent the entire time chasing fifth graders around, making sure no one got lost. He began to help Joe and Jack with their scant amounts of homework in the evenings, and read stories to Lyn at night. He even considered getting a job.
Mary and Bob, who had once spent at least one hour a week on the phone with the local police, seemed to have given up finding his family, which was for the best, really. It wasn't as if Thor would look for him.
Thor, it seemed, had settled himself in with a group of individuals styling themselves the Avengers. When they weren't running around in spandex, proclaiming the most idiotic statements and slaying evil, they lived with Tony Stark in California. Jack assured him, when he asked, that California was half a continent away from Chicago, but they could go there. Maybe. One day.
Jack's major impetus for visiting California was not the Avengers, but rather a pair of theme parks. Magic Mountain, which he assured Loki really was magic, and Disney Land, which was apparently the fount of all things good in the world.
Contrarily, Joe, who began taking as opposite a stance to Jack whenever possible, wanted to see the Avengers desperately. The child's space ship bed sheets were exchanged in the first week of October for Captain America branded sheets, and Joe would talk, at length, about how amazing the Captain was. It amused Loki to no end that Joe thought Thor a dumb butt (which scandalized Mary and was promptly followed with threats of mouth washing) and Iron Man an idiot (which seemed to bother Mary less, as, in her muttered opinion, Tony Stark was a womanizing bastard).
But it was the final week of October that truly saw Loki shed what little remained of his Asgardian pride.
"You can't be serious."
He stared at Mary and Bob, hoping they really weren't serious, and that he was somehow experiencing a very vivid hallucination.
Of course they were very serious. Bob was incapable of being anything but serious. "Very serious," was Bob's reply. "This is a once in a lifetime opportunity for me, and one I actually can't say no to."
Bob could say no. In the span of a second, Loki had thought of at least one million ways Bob could say no. One of them involved setting half the eastern seaboard of the United States on fire and watching it burn. Another involved pickles. He wasn't sure of all the details on that one, but pickles were definitely a large part of it.
"Meeting Reed Richards…" Bob exhaled, and a look of bliss briefly settled on his features. Mary, beside him, beamed. She was so proud of her husband, and all Loki wanted to do was throttle him. "It's unbelievable. I never thought I'd get recognition for half of what I do, but Richards saw my name in an annotation and wanted to meet the guy who solved Milton's Theorem."
Milton's Theorem, from what Loki understood, was some disgustingly convoluted way of understanding how light and energy worked. It was a relatively new theorem, as theorems went, and was clearly written up by some greasy haired scientist in his mother's basement and designed to lure Bob away from his family for a week and a half.
He hated Alastair Milton. Passionately. With the fervor of one thousand suns. Perhaps more. He'd figure the exact amount of hate to be given to Milton later. At the moment, he was too stunned to do complicated calculations in his head.
"And it would be a great chance for Mary and me to have a little vacation." He squeezed his wife's hand.
"It's been what. Ten years since we had a vacation, just the two of us?" she asked, leaning against her husband's shoulders.
"More."
"But a week and a half," Loki gasped out. He couldn't remember the last time he'd been stunned like this. He imagined this was how people felt when broadsided by a semi-truck.
Mary laughed. "You'll be fine, sweetie," she said, leaning toward him. There was, thankfully, too much space between where he sat, poised on the edge of the loveseat, and where she sat on the couch for her to actually touch him. He had never wanted to physically harm someone as much as he wanted to harm her.
With the exception of Thor. But Thor was ever the exception.
"And Mike can help you."
Loki wouldn't trust Mike to help him run a lemonade stand, let alone a family. A sixteen year old boy, wrapped up in himself and his hormones, couldn't be responsible for a family. Everything would fall on him, on Loki.
"But your children—"
"Adore you," Mary cut in, affecting that no nonsense tone Frigga had been so fond of when he and Thor had been children. There was no arguing with that tone.
Hel. He was in Hel. There was simply no other explanation. Hela had tricked him, had made him think he'd found a family and a home, but really, he was in Hel and he was being tortured for his many misdeeds.
She laughed, and Loki wanted to throttle her. Inexpressible frustration washed through him, and though he could easily tear the entire house down, he wouldn't let himself. He cared for Mary. He cared for Bob. For both of them, and their Hel-spawned children, and he simply couldn't move his silver tongue to tell them no.
"If you're sure you trust me with your children," he finally managed, and it was a warning to them, a final attempt to beg them not to do this without actually begging.
Mary beamed, Bob did something that might have equated to an expression of joy, and she said, "Oh, good. This is better than having mom come to watch the kids."
He froze. Her mother could have come if he had held out a little longer?
Bob nodded as he rose. "She wouldn't have been able to contain them." Loki wondered how old Mary's mother was and how sharp her tongue was. A sharp enough tongue could cow even the rowdiest of children. They were, clearly, selling Mary's mother far, far too short. "And it's getting cold. She hates the cold."
Cold. They thought the forty-five degree temperature was too cold.
"Thank you so much, Loki," Mary said, bending down to give him an affectionate hug. He reached one arm up to pat her shoulder and wondered when his life had well and truly exploded in his face.
Likely that day he let the Jotun into Asgard. Or maybe before that, the day he discovered magic.
Jack peered at Loki from where he sat at the island in the kitchen, a grin on his face. "It'll be awesome," he assured Loki.
Of course it would be awesome. It was, in fact, so awesome that two hours after Mary and Bob boarded their airplane Monday morning, Lyn's preschool called him to tell him she was sick.
"How sick?" Loki asked, rubbing his forehead.
"She vomited twice already," the nurse replied, "and has a fever. She can't stay."
"No, she can't, I understand. I'll be there to pick her up shortly."
The sick child didn't want to be left alone, either. Loki tried to put Lyn to bed, but the moment he left, she clambered out and followed him down the stairs. He put her on the couch, turned a movie on, and left her there to make himself a sandwich, only to lose his appetite entirely when she trailed after him into the kitchen and threw up all over the floor.
In the end, he settled them in the first floor powder room. Sitting next to the toilet, with Lyn in his lap, and a laptop on the floor in front of them, he was able to keep her entertained while she threw up.
As the afternoon wore on, she vomited with less frequency, but her fever continued to rage, and she curled in his lap and whimpered. "Where's mommy?" she asked him, her little fingers curling into his shirt. "When's mommy coming home?"
Loki flinched, stroking her hair. He knew that feeling, that desperate wanting for a mother. His mother had been the one who truly loved him. While Odin doted on Thor, Frigga doted on Loki. But it had never been enough for him. He had craved his father's love; Frigga's affection had been, in his estimation, a pale shadow.
How wrong he was. And how much it galled him now.
"In a week," he told her. She sniffled and shook, quaking like a leaf in the midst of a hurricane. She held to him desperately, as though letting go would see her blown away.
"I want mommy." Her tone wavered, and he realized she was close to tears.
Grabbing a tissue from the back of the toilet, he dabbed at her eyes and wiped her nose. Since the movie obviously wasn't enthralling her any longer, he needed to find something else to serve as an adequate distraction. "Would you like me to tell you a story?" he asked her.
Lyn tilted her head back and considered this. "Yes."
So he told her about Yggdrasil and the Nine Realms, building a world of magic and wonder for her. She watched him with wide eyes, slowly nibbling her way through a cracker. He painted Asgard for her with his words, drawing it in the air and filling it with color and people. He spoke of Odin and Frigga, the king and queen of Asgard, and told her about their deep and abiding love. He told her of their two sons, though he did not name them, and of the eldest son's friends.
He segued from the royal family to paint for her a picture of Nornheim's rolling, emerald fields, the lakes and rivers that sparkled like sapphires. The trees, he told her, reached to the sky with leaves the color of fire, and the fruit that grew on those trees were the most succulent in all the Realms. Biting into one was like crossed the threshold of the heavens.
Lyn asked if they were anything like oranges. "I like oranges."
"They are exactly like oranges," he told her.
"I'll try them one day, then." She looked at him expectantly.
In Nornheim, he told her, there were fields of flowers so thick you could lay down on them and not touch the ground. They smelled sweet, like roses and lilies, and their perfume was much sought after by all the Asgardian ladies. She stopped him there, demanding he tell her all about what the ladies wore, so he struggled through a description of one of his mother's gowns. He had never cared much for fashion.
When she was satisfied, he turned back to Nornheim, and he began describing the unicorns. Her eyes widened and brightened, and she clung to his words, making her way through her second cracker without even realizing she was eating. "Their coats," Loki said to her, pitching his voice low as though this were a secret for only the two of them, "shimmer with the colors of the sunset. They're not white."
To be fair, they were white once dead. But she didn't need to know that.
"And their horns look like pearl. Do you know what pearls are?" She nodded. "If a unicorn touches its horn to a wound, it will heal instantly, and a unicorn's tears can cure any disease. They don't run, they glide. Gravity is nothing to them, and they leap and soar through the air like birds, only touching down to bound off again. They—"
She lurched forward, spilling her guts into the toilet beside him, and Loki sighed.