So, this chapter turned out a lot more depressing than intended. Go figure. And Loki kind of stuck himself in there too (he just seems to need rabbit!Phil more...) though I still think Thor is the first "official" kid Coulson "adopts."
Toshiromomo4ever: I'm at a loss for words at your lovely review, thanks! And I know, I think we all wish we had a rabbit!Phil.
Coulson's first child was quite possibly older than he was. It was the sort of problem that came up among immortals. He also quite possibly didn't need a protector, but Coulson wasn't going to let that stop him; he had a feeling about this one.
Thor was a large child, already tall and broad when he only appeared about the human equivalent of ten years of age (and was likely younger by Asgardian terms). His blond hair was long and unruly and when Coulson first met him in the middle of a plain, inexplicably full of twigs.
"What creatures are these?" he veritably boomed (quite a feat for a child, Coulson noted) as he stood atop the brow of a hill overlooking one of the local rabbits' preferred fields (Coulson was forced to concede that its grasses were noticeably sweeter).
To Coulson's weary observation, for it was truly sad that his fellow leporids behaved so, the rest of the rabbits scattered, fleeing for their tiny fluffy lives from the loud and boisterous new threat. Coulson, never one to be cowed so easily (he was a rabbit after all, not a bovine; he had dignity), continued chewing idly, small grey nose twitching with every movement.
It was to be expected then that Thor, now with only one rabbit in his gaze, would scramble down the hillside in a beeline for the small furry creature, only stopping when he was looming over the rabbit and peering down at it excitedly.
Coulson hopped twice to a new patch of grass and resettled.
Thor was entranced.
He showed his interest by settling with a thud next to the rabbit and leaning close so he could stare at it in the eyes.
"You are a truly remarkable creature indeed," he praised with wide eyes, "for I have never seen such on Asgardian planes."
Coulson preened inwardly and wiggled his tail; he truly was a fantastic specimen of a rabbit, wasn't he?
Thor, enticed by the movement, took this as a sign to reach out and lay a large hand over the rabbit's side, stroking slowly along his soft white flank. A bright smile lit his face when the rabbit did not startle and in fact seemed to enjoy the attention.
"You are brave," the child stated solemnly. "You do not flee like your brethren. A fitting companion to a budding warrior!"
Coulson bit the head off of a dandelion happily. This child understood him so well. But it would take a while to get used to all of the shouting.
Suddenly Coulson found himself moving through the air before he was unceremoniously dropped in the child's lap, the hand still being drawn reverently along his back. While he could no longer reach any greens, he decided that as long as the petting persisted he would accept his new position.
"I shall keep you," the child stated. "But first I need a name befitting a warrior's companion. I am Thor, son of Odin, and you shall be-"
"Thor!" a voice called from over the hill, followed by the appearance of a slight, dark-haired figure, younger than Thor and out of breath. "Mother will be displeased when she hears that you ran off again!"
"But Loki!" Thor yelled in reply, even as the other was approaching. "Look at this amazing creature I have found!"
The new child, Loki, approached much more quietly than Thor had, and with considerably more caution. "What is it?" he asked, brow furrowed in consternation.
"I do not know, brother!" Thor cried in a gleeful tone, a cherubic grin crossing his face. "But it is soft and magnificent! Its brethren are many, but none are so fearless as this one!"
Thor, Coulson decided, was a lovely child, and even if he did not need physical protection, he was assuredly deserving of a rabbit so wise as he.
Loki knelt next to Thor and carefully, as if afraid he would be harmed, trailed his fingertips along the edge of one of Coulson's lop ears. Coulson resisted the urge to twitch his ear at the ticklish feeling, lest he startle the child.
The smaller boy began to show a hint of a curling smile before frowning suddenly in consternation.
"What is it, brother?" Thor boomed, not at all reading into the hush that seemed to have befallen his brother.
Loki's head canted to the side and he slowly brought the back of his fingers down the side of Coulson's face. "This creature," he whispered secretively, reverently. "It has magic!"
Coulson was glad that he had such a fantastic memory, because he would never want to forget the absolutely gobsmacked look on Thor's face.
"Truly?" he hissed in a voice not unlike someone else's speaking tone. "You do not jest?"
Loki sent him a withering glare that Coulson mentally applauded; it was quite progressed for a child.
"I may perform mischief in most any form, brother, but I do not jest about magic. This creature's magic is old, perhaps older than my own. It is no mere mortal."
"All the better! He shall make the perfect companion to the both of us, a creature both brave and magical."
The smaller frowned again. Coulson readjusted himself in Thor's lap so he could turn his head and press his twitching nose against Loki's palm; he was glad to see that the frown disappeared momentarily as the child giggled at the sensation.
"But will Father let us keep it?" Loki worried aloud.
Thor was not nearly so concerned. "Of course he will," he demurred casually. "Who would reject such a fearsome creature?" He held up Coulson with a meaningful look.
Coulson's nose twitched.
Loki smiled, gently taking the rabbit and settling it in his own lap. Coulson pressed up into his small hand and it was settled: the sons of Odin were going to return to Asgard with a new friend.
"What shall we call him?" Loki asked as they returned to the Midgardian site of the Bifrost, which they were to return to by sunset so Heimdall could bring them home.
His brother gave him a wide grin and stroked the rabbit's head fondly as he held it in his other arm before loudly proclaiming, "He shall be known as Puddles!"
"Puddles?!" Loki cried.
Puddles? Coulson parroted. Sadly, nobody could understand his near-silent squeak and his dismay was ignored. But that was okay, because Thor ignored Loki's as well.
"It is a fitting name for a valiant creature," Thor declared, and then before Loki could even attempt to follow Thor's logic, Heimdall was opening the Bifrost and the brothers found themselves returned to Asgard, the newly dubbed Puddles in tow.
So. Coulson was Puddles now. He supposed it could be worse.
Later, when Odin was laughing himself silly at Thor's proud statement of their new pet's name, he decided that no, it couldn't be much worse. It didn't help that Odin thought the idea of his sons bringing back something so weak as a rabbit was the funniest thing ever, and so he allowed his sons to keep Coulson simply for the amusement it gave him. Frigga, thankfully, just thought it was cute.
From then on, it was not considered unusual to find the heir to the Asgardian throne being trailed by a small hopping ball of fluff decked out in its own set of armor (Coulson was never more thankful than when Loki saw his predicament, buried under the pile of metal, and thought to enchant it to be weightless). And while Thor was Coulson's official child, he found himself spending a good deal of time with the younger of Odin's sons as well.
Loki, Coulson noticed, was the brother who needed more of his bodyguarding abilities. While Thor was off roughhousing with his friends Sif and the Warriors Three, Loki was often left lonely and friendless. These were the times when he was also, Coulson found, at his most vulnerable. Which was why his actions against a wayward drunk who had mistaken Loki for a stableboy and thus thought it acceptable to rough him up were totally justified.
"Let me get this straight," Odin said slowly, one good eyebrow raised incredulously while he rested his chin on one hand. "You're saying that the rabbit – one of Midgard's weakest creatures – the rabbit that is named Puddles, mind you – attacked you?"
The drunk's lower lip trembled woefully as he held a cloth over one of the more violent wounds adorning him. "It's a monster," he hissed, eyes flitting to the creature in question.
Coulson sat benignly at Loki's feet, nibbling on a root given to him by one of the kitchen staff. His right ear twitched from underneath the side of his helmet.
The man flinched at the movement.
Odin wondered how this had become his life and worked on thinking up a suitable punishment for the attack on his son, though really he couldn't see how he could do anything to terrify the man more than he already had been.
From that day on, everybody gave Coulson, and whoever he was accompanying at the time, a wide berth. Some wrote odes to him out of fear.
It was good to be recognized.
Though Thor did not need Coulson to defend him as Loki did, he still became very attached to the rabbit. The elder boy took to taking Coulson on "adventures" with him when neither his brother nor his friends were willing or available (and after the episode between the wild boar-like creature and a weaponless Thor, Coulson decided maybe his charge needed a bit more physical defense after all). The pair spent many a day exploring the hillsides of Asgard, eating greens (Coulson) and getting stuck in various trees, holes and streams (Thor).
But it was the nights that Coulson liked the best. At night he was stripped of his armor (which he admitted was quite dashing, but even weightless was still a bit awkward) and nestled up next to one of the boys, whoever's night it was to have "Puddles." Then he was the champion of nightmares, the defense against any monsters real or imaginary that would dare to enter a prince's bedchambers. It was soon no surprise when the brothers, who already had a bad habit of sneaking into each other's beds at night for comfort, took to doing so both for their sibling and for the Puddles Effect, for nothing bad could happen on Puddles's watch.
Coulson, however, was not nearly so infallible.
One night, when he was lying snuggled under Loki's arm, he felt a chill sweep through the room. Loki's whole body trembled, his face contorted in fear. Coulson moved closer, trying to find more warmth in the child's embrace and to quell the wracking shivers, but only found himself growing colder. Then, with an expression of fascinated horror even visible on a rabbit's face he watched as a slow tinge of blue overtook and crept up the pale flesh of Loki's arm.
At a loss, Coulson began to make sounds, a mixture of a soft coo that mothers often emitted around their kits and a high keening sound expressing his own distress. Yet neither had an effect on the child; a layer of frost began to settle and harden over the room and the blue only spread until it engulfed all over Loki's figure and the child, still trapped in the midst of some dream that not even Coulson could conquer, did not wake.
Years later, Coulson's impeccable memory would smear together the events that followed, probably as a subconscious effort to save him from the crushing feelings of guilt and helplessness when he recalled how he failed to comfort his charge, failed to fix things like he was supposed to.
But for now all the rabbit could do was nestle himself closer to Loki, twitching nose pressed firmly to the underside of the child's jaw while he emitted sounds of comfort and fear. After a long while the ice began to melt and the blue began to recede and Loki's night terror receded into the fitfulness of a common garden variety nightmare, but Coulson himself slept not a wink more that night, kept awake by guilt and his own need to keep safe his chosen children from dangers both tangible and not.
Even immortal children needed to grow up eventually, and one day long down the line, Coulson found that he wasn't needed so much anymore. To his dismay his charges were growing apart; Thor became inseparable from his friends and spent all of his time undertaking quests to prove himself a worthy heir to the Asgardian throne, and Loki fully dedicated himself to his study of magic when it became clear to him that he could never earn his father's full appreciation as a subpar warrior.
Coulson, for the first time in what felt like a millennia (for he had no concept of how time passed for Asgardians), was left alone. It had been a painful night when Thor had told Loki that he had outgrown the need for Puddles and that his younger brother could keep the rabbit every night. Loki, like Coulson, was more dismayed than pleased; both recognized the end of an era, and for Loki, he saw the end of yet another thing he and his brother had once shared.
At first Loki did his best to comfort what he astutely recognized as a depressed rabbit; despite Coulson's best efforts he was always keenly aware of the rabbit's moods. But soon Loki too fell victim to the passage of age. Never had Coulson more hated a person than when Fandral taunted Loki for continuing to carry around a weak Midgardian creature, saying that he must be even weaker if he looked to it for protection. Coulson ached to remind him of why grown men feared the Wrath of Puddles, but Loki held him tight in his arms and said nothing. Later, he could not even bring himself to look at the rabbit without some expression of disgust – at himself or Coulson, the rabbit did not know.
That was the first night Coulson found himself locked outside of Loki's room, completely and utterly alone. He curled up on the cold floor outside the door, vainly comforting himself with the lie that it would just be a phase, but inside he knew the truth: his children no longer needed nor wanted his protection.
At a loss, Coulson spent his days wandering the palace aimlessly, now devoid of his trademark armor for the first time that most could recall. Some of the cooks, who had always favored him, took pity and gave him some of their fresh lentils or a newly picked carrot, but no food could comfort a rabbit bereft of a purpose.
With a heavy heart Coulson decided that his time as Puddles had come to a close. He had to move on.
He would have loved to have said proper goodbyes to his charges, but the duo now ignored him completely, their eyes just passing over him when they spotted him in the halls. It was not their attention; they simply had more important things to worry about than a childhood pet.
Coulson now understood why normal rabbits had such short lifespans. Nobody should ever have to outlive their charges' love.
So the small rabbit shed the title of Puddles and hopped slowly to the Bifrost. Heimdall met him with nary an askew glance. All-seeing as he was, Coulson suspected that Heimdall was one of the few not only to recognize the rabbit's age and past, but to also understand his current predicament. With the slightest of nods he opened the Bifrost and silently returned the rabbit back to Midgard.
Coulson did not know if time really passed so differently on Asgard or if Heimdall had pulled some strings, but he found himself returned to the same hilly plain he had left so long ago. Not a leaf or sprig of grass had changed. He almost wished it had, just to give him something new to focus on, to adjust to. It was of no matter, though; he would make his own change of scenery.
When, after a long period of traveling, Coulson reached a coast, he easily slipped aboard a creaking wooden merchant's ship. Hiding from the ship's crew by day and working as a ratter at night, living on what meager food he could find and steal from the ship's stores, Coulson traveled across a vast ocean on his longest sea voyage ever (immortal rabbits were known to travel by ship when necessary, but only for small trips; Coulson's journey was unprecedented).
And when he reached the so-called "New World" (which looked awfully occupied and well-aged, in Coulson's neutral judgment), it was just the new start he needed.
But he would not adopt another child for another few centuries to come.