We are now inside the 100 day mark. There are officially 99 days until ThorII comes out. I will attempt to update every five to ten days until then. I can't promise anything, my schedule is crazy ;)

Anyway, the exchange on the mountain between Thor and Loki has fascinated me since the first time I saw 'The Avengers', and this is my attempt to explain how they both have a point. The stories are mainly Loki-centric, and almost all occur during Thor and Loki's childhood. I'll try and post rough age parameters as I go. The way I play it, Thor's about three years older than Loki.

~.~

"How best to make a hero? Give him a means of defining himself, so mold a villain beside him."

~.~

A huge man, tall, blood stained, weary, walked down the crystalline bridge toward the city. His men had gone ahead. He had told them that he would come alone. There were things it were better the men not know. His head was bowed, one weary eye contemplating the bridge he walked down. The Bifrost. It was a glorious thing. The 'rainbow bridge' that connected his kingdom, Asgard, with all the other realms.

The socket where the left eye had been up until only two days previously, ached beneath the crude bandage their healer had knotted over it. The battle had been fierce, and the healing stones they had brought were for more pressing injuries. The healer had protested, but numerous lives had been saved by his action. He would not regret that. Not for all the eyes in the Nine Realms.

He leaned heavily on his war spear as he walked. Gungnir, symbol of his power and kingship. It had been passed to him from his Father, Bor, and would be passed on to his son – who was still so young - one day, when he chose to relinquish the kingship.

The King raised his head, a gentle wind brushing back his long hair and riffling through his beard. The walls and palace he ruled glittered in the sun, flashing and shining. A deep sense of peace settled in his heart. Always he was troubled by the loss of life, by the blood and destruction brought about by war, but this sight, Asgard, untroubled by carnage, reminded him why it was necessary.

The wind picked up and tugged at the torn, blood-stained grey fabric that served him as cloak and he held it to him with the hand that remained close against his side. He looked down, haltingly - almost unwillingly - at the thing he held. Yes. It was a good thing that he had let the men go ahead of him. This would be something that would puzzle them greatly.

He wasn't sure himself why he had done it.

He had closed the treaty with the injured Jotun king, Laufi, and went out of the ice-cold ruins that had once been the Frost-Keep to tell his men of the news. He had gone in alone to deal with Laufi, and alone he came out. But the blood sickened him. The blood and the stench and the death-cries and agony that war always brought about. It sickened him that it was only now that he should see them and understand their horror. His youth had lasted over-long. But his men need not know of the guilt that clawed at him as he witnessed the destruction. They need not witness his grief. As he walked toward their camp, he came across the remains of the temple. It had largely been overlooked by the men as they tore through the city, lying, for the most part, undisturbed – a sanctuary.

Slipping inside - some unknown force guiding him as a dog on a leash - he had wandered through the rocks, grimacing at the fearsome images chiseled into the ice-coated walls. A weak sound caught at his attention and he turned - not alarmed, but searching for the origin of the disturbance. A strange sense of urgency settled heavily on him and he scoured the structure, pushing aside ruble and peering around great pillars.

Finally, he found it. A tiny Jotun child. It was Laufi's son, judging by the markings across the blue-black skin of the babe's forehead. The child was small - too small - and he realized with horror that the infant had been left here to die. A sacrifice. Mayhap a sacrifice for victory in the battle. The child must not have been left long; he was still alive, though not by much. It's loud cry that had alerted him to it's life had faded to a whimper. The movements of it's – his – tiny limbs was weak. The weakness and innocence of the abandoned child twisted his heart. What was it that made this child so different from his own son? His own hands, still stained dark with long-since dried blood went out reflexively to lift the boy from the floor, but hurriedly he drew back and fled the temple. The child was a Jotun. It was none of his concern.

A cheer had gone up from his men at the news of their completed agreement, but the AllFather had barely been able to hear it, what with the blood that swam in his thoughts and the vision of the babe, left to die in the temple that had been blazoned into the underside of his sole eyelid. So haunted was he by the image, that he had sent the men home ahead of him - told Hoenir, his foolish, loyal brother, that he would come in a moment. Hoenir was concerned, leaving his king alone on a hostile realm was against both his nature and training, but the AllFather had insisted with something near desperate urgency. The child might not have time. And reluctantly, Hoenir and the men had gone.

Half knowing what it was he did, the king had watched the men depart, then, soon as they had rightly gone, he whirled on his heel, cloak swirling out behind him, and rushed back to the temple.

The child lay still on the floor, and for a moment he thought he had been too long in coming, but the infant's small body rose and fell with his breathing, all energy focused on the immediate need for survival.

The AllFather reached out his hands, allowing himself no time for further deliberation, and took up the boy - so small - so fragile. Tentatively, afraid to hurt the child further, he channeled a kind of healing magic through the palms of his hands and into the tiny body. He wasn't yet very good at it – it hadn't been long since he had begun learning from the Vanir – but he didn't know what other chance the babe had. The child twitched and opened his eyes, looking all around, disoriented, but then found the AllFather's face, and the little thing smiled.

He hardly noticed the expression, so caught up was he with the unexpected side effect of his healing. The boy's skin had faded to a soft pale color - akin to his own - becoming soft as an Aesir - his eyes fading from the red-orange of his kind to the white that was common to the Aesir, irises swirling from deep red to emerald green.

The AllFather looked down at the tiny thing, sleeping in his arms now as the wind died out around him on the bridge, a strange feeling of fate settling once more around him. Yes, the Norns had been busy this day.

After the child's transformation, he had gathered the little thing up, wrapping him in a spare cloak and had used Gungnir to manipulate the portal that would allow him to go home.

"Odin!" the AllFather's head shot up to see a figure running toward him on the bridge, skirt caught up in both hands as she came, a look part of worry, part of immeasurable relief on her beautiful face. It was his Queen, Frigga. Her amber curls flew out behind her as she ran to meet him. "You're back!" she cried, "Oh! I was so worried!" her arms came up around his back and he put his free arm around her, careful to avoid both hitting her with the spear, and allowing her to crush the burden he held. "But oh, your poor eye!" she had fluttered away from him, keeping close by, hands on his arms, his shoulders, his face, "does it hurt?"

Odin was weary. Her fretting was sweet, almost comforting, but it did nothing to ease his weariness. Rather than waste the words to explain to her what it was he had done, he shifted the cloak and revealed to her the child.

"Wh – what's this?" then she saw it for what it was and both her hands flew up to her mouth with a sharp gasp.

"I found him in the Temple."

One hand came down from her face going out as if to touch the child, then coming quickly back as if the air surrounding him had burned her, "A Jotun?" Her gaze tore away from the sleeping babe up to his face, eyes round and shocked.

The AllFather nodded, feeling that all he needed to do was to sleep for several eons, "His coloring will fade back to its natural shade when in contact with his own people, but since he is so young, the change may be somewhat permanent."

"You stole a Jotun baby?"

"Laufi's son."

"Laufi's son?"

"He is too small, unhealthy by their standards. If I hadn't come when I did this child would be dead."

Her brows were knit together in a worried frown, "But he belongs with his own people,"

Having been so unsure of the purpose behind his actions himself, her inability to understand angered him, and his voice was much louder than he had meant it to be, "Do you not understand me, Frigga? If he had been left to his people, he would have died. I have given him a chance at life. Are you saying that I have done wrong?"

The way she looked at the child was almost furtive, as though he frightened her, "No."

"You are a woman. You have never seen war. You have no knowledge of what it is we face when we go to defend our homes. You have no knowledge of the smell of blood and death and the life fading out of the eyes of your enemy and of your friend beside you. You've never heard the screams, the pleading of those about to die. And out of all the blood, I saw one good thing, one pure child. Are you telling me I am wrong to have saved him? Or should I have abandoned him to die among his kin?"

At the sound of his shouting, the child began to squirm, raising his voice in a thin squalling that drew the young queen's full attention, "You've waked him!" she scolded. She came toward the child, sighing in exasperation, "You're holding him wrong. Give him to me."

Marveling at the changeableness and unpredictability of women, Odin silently relinquished his mewling burden.

"He's cold!"

He was a Frost Giant, "Of course he's cold,"

Frigga glared at him, slate-grey eyes snapping fiercely, "He shouldn't be cold." Tucking the cloak more snuggly around the babe, she lifted her eyes back to his face, "I have seen more of war than you know," she turned on her heel and started toward the city. After a moment, Odin followed her, easily matching her quick strides.

After a brief time, she spoke, her voice calm, "What do you call him?"

It struck him how taken with the child his young wife had become, the tender way she held him, the softness in her eyes, "We won't keep him, Frigga. We can give him to one of the serv-"

Frigga cut him off sharply, "If you think that I will allow you to tear this child away from his home and then throw him at some other to be raised, you are mistaken, AllFather."

She used his title in a mockery that he would never tolerate from another, but she was his woman, and he rather liked it from her. He was reminded suddenly why he loved this woman above all others. He watched her with the child as they stepped off of the Bifrost and into the city itself, the way they smiled at each other and how he reached up to her face with his tiny white hands. Again the strange whispering of fate clawed around his ears and he shook his head to rid himself of it.

"He could be useful someday," he mused aloud, mostly to distract himself from the eerie feeling that had haunted him since he first found the babe, "He could make a powerful tool against Laufi,"

Frigga scoffed at him disapprovingly, "Speak not of 'tools' and 'usefulness' and 'someday'. Today, this child is your child. Would you speak of Thor thus?"

"No, of course not. I –"

"Then refrain from speaking of your second son in that way." The child cooed up at her, smiling in the fetching, toothless way of earliest childhood, "Oh, my sweet new boy!" Frigga kissed him on his forehead. Odin was - once more - astounded at the fickleness of women. Not five minutes ago she had been frightened of the child.

"What do you call him?" she asked him again, stroking the babe's tiny hand.

The AllFather chuckled, dismissing the problem of women in general as unsolvable, "I was thinking we might call him 'Bernhard', or mayhap, 'Gunthar'," in truth, the thought of names had not yet occurred to him, but they were good names all the same.

Frigga grimaced.

"How do they meet with your displeasure? They are good and strong, the names of warriors."

"They don't suit him."

"What would you have him called?"

Frigga thought about it for a moment, tipping her pretty head to one side, "'Loki'" she nodded briskly, "I would call him, 'Loki'."

"Why 'Loki', my Queen?"

She eyed him suspiciously at the title, gauging how seriously to take his mockery, but he kept his expression sober and in the end she answered, "He is a cold thing that needs warmth, 'Loki', means 'fire'. Also, our first son is named, 'Thor', 'thunder'. So if our first son is 'thunder', then the son to follow him should match. He can be the 'fire' that follows in the lightning, silent and swift and deadly as our Thor is loud and sudden and deafening."

"You make a convincing argument," The AllFather tipped his head back in mock thought - he meant to let her have her way - had from the beginning of the conversation, but it was best that she not know that, "Alright," he ceded, "'Loki' he shall be."

Frigga caressed the child's face lightly with the finger-tips of her free hand, "Hello, Loki," she crooned.

Odin remembered how she had been with Thor, when he was as small as the child she now carried, remembered how she would look at him just as she looked at Loki now, with all of a mother's care and fierce love, "You do understand that he is not truly our child,"

"Oh posh," Frigga rolled her eyes, "I gave him no birth. Besides that he is as much our child now as Thor is. If you were not prepared to take him unreservedly, you had no business taking him at all."

"I will remember that the next time,"

She eyed him reproachfully, then turned back to the child, twisting him in her arms that he might see the golden hall towering to the sky before them, "Welcome home, Loki," she breathed beside his ear, "See? This will be your home."

There was a pattering of feet from the hall to their left as they entered the magnificent building, "Father!" Thor came running down the pavement, faster than any knee-high child before him had ever gone, followed hurriedly by his nurse who was breathing hard in her attempts at keeping up with the boisterous youth, "Father, you're home!"

Odin crouched down and opened his arms to catch his young son who threw himself unreservedly into them as his mother laughed behind them. Thor's eyes flickered to her over Odin's broad shoulder, bright and blue and excited, "What have you got, mother? Is it a present? Did Father bring it to you?"

"Yes, Thor," Frigga knelt down so her elder son could see the child, "His name is Loki. He is to be your brother."

Thor raised his eyebrows, nodding appreciatively, "Can he play with me?"

Loki made a grab for Thor's long yellow hair and Frigga stood up, "Not yet, he's too small, but he will."

"Hm." Thor thought about it, then turned back to his father, raising his arms in a plea to be lifted. Wearily, Odin obliged. Thor peered into the bundle to get a better look at the child, his little face screwed up in thought, "You're not much good yet," he informed his brother comfortingly, "but you'll get there."