"You have no idea what you would unleash. I do."


Laufey stared at the child in his arms, trying to be furious with him—it—in the absence of anything constructive to do with his anger. "You're a shapeshifter," he demanded, as he was trying not to beg. "I've seen you. Look like me. Look like the one who's holding you."

The still-unnamed child cocked his head to one side and turned the right colors, peach skin to blue and green eyes to red, black hair disappearing entirely. Laufey clenched his jaw. The thing was still so small, so breakable where his son should be strong and hardy.

"You will not survive here." And the king could not decide what he was angry with, the mother or the child or the environment. He was angry with everything, with nothing, with himself.

Laufey heard the warning that another attack was coming, and placed his son—not my son, not my son; I can't think of it as my son or this will kill me—on icy ground.

The battle was harsh, and the last.

When Laufey returned to where he had set his child, he saw Jötunn blood, crushed building, and no small corpse. His son—the child—the weakling was dead. Such things happen.


When Laufey and Odin drew up the treaties, each had fought the other enough to recognize their shared exhaustion. Neither mentioned it.


The second time Laufey saw Loki, he doesn't recognize the man. He stood beside Thor and had grown much. If the colors of the prince's skin and hair vaguely reminded Laufey of someone, he merely assumed Loki looked like some Asgardian he'd faced when the war was still raging.


The third time the Jötunn king saw Loki, they were close enough for Laufey to see the Asgardian's green eyes. They were a rare trait, and Laufey knew he had never seen any foe with that shade, Asgardian or otherwise. Yet the faint feeling of familiarity grew stronger when he could see Loki's eyes.

Laufey thought it peculiar, and might have agreed to the traitor-king's plan in part because some part of him insisted that Loki had good reason to help the Jötunn.


The final time Laufey saw Loki was during the attack on Asgard.

It was for just a moment. Loki had always been the smallest and the smartest, and when others were still learning how to punch, he was learning how to hide, how to move quietly, how to truly fight.

When it was too late to matter, when Laufey was already struck mute by way of a blade through his chest, and when Loki was declaring himself the son of Odin, Laufey felt it click. The training was from his upbringing, but that expression, that half-desperate, half-battle-enraged expression was one Laufey had seen in anything reflective for years.

Now he saw it on a shapeshifter. One who had taken the form of an Asgardian, one who had killed Laufey, one who had declared himself Odin's child.

My son.