"The breaks, Mike, the breaks!"

The car inched ever closer to the side of the building. It lurched forward while Mike shouted, "I'm hitting the goddamn breaks!" and his father shouted back "That's the goddamn accelerator!"

They weren't about to die. But the human predisposition toward over-exaggerating everything was endlessly amusing.

Loki, in the back seat of the car, fingers laced casually in his lap, observed the father and son with increasing pleasure. Schadenfreude, the mortals called it. Neither Mike nor Bob seemed well-equipped to deal with the pressures of learning how to drive. Or, in Bob's case, teaching a young man how to drive. The man, usually so quiet and soft-spoken, was quickly losing his patience with Mike, and it wasn't even the child's fault. Bob, Loki had realized quickly, was quite a poor hand at teaching, leaving out vital details not out of spite but simply because he thought his son should already know them.

The end result was Mike "careening" toward the wall of a building, in the middle of an empty parking lot, and the break-neck speed of ten miles per hour.

They came to a comfortable stop at least ten feet from the wall, with Mike and Bob both breathing heavily. Mike's fingers, curled around the steering wheel, were white knuckled, and Bob looked as though he might be sick.

"Why don't we let Loki give it a go," Bob finally said after several moments of silence wherein he focused on breathing.

"Awesome, great, I like that idea," Mike replied, practically throwing himself from the front seat. The seatbelt caught him, snapping him against the backrest, before he struggled free of it and lurched out the door.

Loki suppressed a cringe. "I am uncertain this is the best course of action," he said, leaning forward so that his face hovered between the two front seats.

Bob looked at him over a pair of wire frame glasses that made him look old and hollowed out, and far too stodgy. "Mary looked into it. You've got what you need to apply for a license as a non-citizen."

Loki remained uncertain on that count, but Mary claimed that a friend of a friend at the DMV – whatever that was – said he would be able to get a driver's license with a few scraps of paper that, apparently, he had. Though he suspected it a farce, several documents had turned up in his armor while it was being dry-cleaned. One was a visa, which revealed precious little about him but suggested he came from Norway. Another was birth certificate that said he had, indeed, been born in Norway.

Mary had been flummoxed. Loki recognized magic at work, and took the whole discovery with the air of one who had something to learn. He couldn't use his magic, not in the least, but it seemed more than capable of using him, especially when it was a convenience to his newfound family.

He had, to his surprise, been able to scry the location of Joe the other day when the child had gone missing. When he tried again, later, the magic sat in that corner of his mind and, for all intents and purposes, laughed at his attempt.

"Very well," Loki said, tone somewhat sour. While this would benefit not only the family but also him, he was reticent. He didn't want to settle in a mortal life. He didn't want to become like them.

But the benefits outweighed the costs.

He settled into the front seat while Mike took his place in the back, and closed his fingers around the steering wheel.

"Hands at three and nine," Bob instructed, and it took Loki a moment to realize Bob meant his hands should be on opposite sides of the wheel, where three and nine o'clock would be on a clock face.

Loki shifted his hands and reviewed what his driver's education classes had taught him. Accelerator on the right, breaks on the left. Not a manual transmission, so no need for a clutch. Turn signal on the right hand side of the wheel; windshield wiper controls on the left.

"Foot on the break. Put the car in reverse, ease off, and we'll turn around," Bob instructed.

Feeling tense and surprisingly nervous, Loki did as instructed. He tried to equate driving the car to directing a horse, but it was nothing alike. At all.

Horses, at least well trained ones, responded to the slightest touch, and none of Loki's horses had been anything but well trained. A car could not be directed by a subtle shift of weight. It relied on the motions of his hands.

It was also, from what Loki had learned, several tons of steel and metal, a death trap that hurtled along roads at nearly unimaginable speeds. It occurred to him that he could wreck a great deal of havoc with an automobile of his own, but as soon as the thought was conceived, it was discarded. Costs pitted against benefits. Destroying a car by driving it into a building, no matter how satisfying should he brother be inside the building, was foolish. Cars simply cost too much.

He had, in recent days, learned to measure the worth of mortal things. With five children, Bob was incredibly conscious of the money the family spent. That they were taking care of him had begun to astound Loki. Though Bob's job paid well enough, and Mary made a fair amount on the side doing some sort of consulting, though they were wise with their money and frugal, they couldn't afford luxuries that, to Loki, seemed necessary for survival.

Swallowing hard as he shifted the car into drive, he came to the sudden realization that he was going native. He was beginning to empathize with and understand the Fredericksons. And he did not want to. At all.

He wanted to despise them for their pity, but they did not pity him. When he floundered, on account of his missing memories, they didn't give him sad looks and condescending pats to the shoulder. They forced him to press onward, required him to learn as he went. And when he made mistakes (apparently, the detergent for the dishes and the detergent for the clothing was not the same), they didn't mock him with their laughter. They laughed at the situation, not the person, and they accepted it as collateral damage.

He wanted to loathe them for their kindness, but it was such a brisk and honest kindness that he couldn't do even that. It was impossible to hate Lyn when she climbed into his bed in the early hours of the morning, when she called him "new rabbit," her replacement for her previously loved stuffed animal. It was impossible to dislike Joe when he took permanent markers to one of Loki's suits because the patterns were wrong. It should have been easy, the clothing had been costly, but Joe's honest lack of understanding about the whole thing made it impossible.

Hating Jack was unthinkable; they were too similar, and the boy too kind. Though he wanted to throttle Anna more days than not, even she was quite difficult to well and truly despise. He watched her consistently go out of her way to help her friends on a regular basis, to the point that it drove her to tears and her mother's arms. She had a generous and open heart and let anyone into it. To her detriment, he was beginning to suspect, for her potential lover rubbed him in all the wrong ways. Ben was a mortal for whom Loki felt nothing, and that was, in some ways, worse than his animosity.

And then there was Mike.

He eased the accelerator down and turned a corner in the parking lot, with his signal simply for the practice, and glanced at the boy in the rearview mirror.

Mike, who was so much like Thor, yet entirely different, should have been easy to hate. Wanting nothing to do with Mike should have been easy. Both he and Thor were thickheaded and slow, prone to shows of physicality instead of mental acuity. Mike wanted to hit things before he thought about them, wanted to take them apart without reading the instructions, and then muddle through putting them back together. But he was fiercely protective of his sister, and watched her like a hawk. His intense disgust for Ben stunned Loki the first time it came up. Mike would have liked nothing better than to slam Ben's face into a wall and paint it red with the other boy's blood.

That desire for physical retribution was so wholly like Thor that loathing for Mike should have been like an old shirt: easy to slip into and so comfortable Loki wouldn't want to remove it. But when taken with the rest of the family, it was impossible to hate him.

Simply impossible.

"Loki, stop!"

He didn't hit the break. He knew he didn't. Yet the car screeched to a halt, scant centimeters away from a lamppost.

A golden strand of magic curled over the hood of the car, flickered like it was waving, and then dissipated into the air.

Mike leaned between the front seats and grinned at him. "At least you suck, too, man."

Unthinking, Loki reached up and flicked Mike's forehead with his forefinger. With a laugh, Mike dropped into the backseat while Bob slowly, ever so slowly, relaxed. "Let's try that again," he gasped. "Except with less near death experiences. And maybe staying under forty. How's that?"

A smirk curled Loki's lips. "How many years did I take off your life?"

"Too many," Bob said in a strangled tone of voice.

Very carefully, Loki began a second turn around the parking lot, and this time, managed to remain focused on the task at hand.

Mike ended up driving them home, crawling along back roads where his father was less likely to die of a stroke or nerves, and when they pulled into the driveway, Ben's car was there, waiting. Bob vanished into the house, but Loki lingered in the garage with Mike, who was attempting to be subtle by slamming through a crate of basketballs.

"I effing hate that douchebag," he grumbled, letting the grate on the top of the container slam against the wall.

"Your hatred is noted by all," Loki replied, catching the ball Mike threw at him.

"Yeah, except by Anna. I don't know what she sees in that asshat."

Loki lifted a brow but didn't question the expletive. Mike's creative swearing was almost endearing.

"He's a senior for godsake. Why the hell mom and dad are even letting her date him is beyond me. It's gross. Douche is just using her," Mike snapped, hitting a few things so they clattered to the garage floor.

Though the mortal school system seemed unnecessarily complicated, Loki thought he grasped enough of it to realize that Ben's being a senior made him several years older than Anna. And he remembered the journal entry, remembered that Ben seemed much more interested in a physical relationship than Anna.

"Using her?" Loki leaned against a free space of wall, turning the large ball over it in his hands, studying the pattern on it.

"She's on varsity cheerleading and she's fourteen. She spends more time with the juniors and seniors than friends her own age," Mike said, and Loki caught the serious, concerned look on his face before it melted into contempt. "Douche just wants to get laid, and he's using my sister to get it."

Idly, as though it didn't matter to him at all, he asked, "And if she did?"

"I'd ruin his goddamn life," Mike said without hesitation.

It didn't surprise Loki to find that he felt much the same. The Fredericksons had their problems, they fought often enough, but they were idyllic in many ways. They were what his family never could be. And while he had no great love for Anna, if Ben hurt her, it would ruin her. She was too wide-eyed and innocent to survive any great trauma, and far too trusting. If she broke, the quiet wonder that was her family would likely break around her.

Loki would not stand for that.

"I would help you," he murmured, and he felt a thread of magic growing between his fingertips.

Mike's gaze swung to him. "You would?"

"Oh, yes." Loki reached for the magic, felt it thrill to his touch. He pictured Anna's hair in his mind, not just that it was a drab yellow, but that it frizzed in even the mildest heat, that she spent thirty minutes every morning straightening it. He pictured the way it fell, lengthening her face and slimming it, recalled the coarse texture of it those few times he'd touched it.

The magic coiled about his fingers responded to the vivid imagery his mind conjured, and it slid away from his skin, twining through the air. He pulled free yet more strands of fabric, braiding them together to form a fine thread that grew with each inch it traveled. When it finally wrapped into her hair, meshing with the frizzy, coarse strands, it was thick, like rope, and it sank into her, became a part of her.

A simple spell, it would go unnoticed by most sorcerers unless they were incredibly observant. Of course, there were no sorcerers in Midgard, so he felt no concern. The spell would alert him to any radical changes in Anna's temperament, and while he didn't particularly look forward to knowing every time she cried, he was glad for the spell as soon as it settled.

Her boyfriend was wrong.

He could not place how or why, not so soon, not without more study, but Loki was nothing if not studious. He would discover the reason for that strange, sickly feeling that coursed through him when Ben touched the magic soaking in Anna's hair. He would learn what it was about Ben that made the magic burn and crackle. And if what Ben was turned into a threat to the Fredericksons, he would remove that threat.

A final, slender piece of magic curled about his left forefinger. It settled there, wavered indecisively for a moment, and so he helped it along. A fine silver ring. A tiny thing. An inconsequential thing, he commanded, and it obeyed.

"Oh, hey, cool ring, man. When'd you get that?" Mike asked suddenly, and Loki smiled. It was a self-satisfied smile, a Cheshire smile, and Mike had the good sense to turn his body slightly away from Loki's, as though doing so might protect him. The right response for prey in the presence of a predator. For mortal in the presence of a god.

"A while ago." His tone was light and dismissive, and he left the garage, making his way into the house.

Lyn attached herself to his hand within moments, walking with him up to his room. He shed his light jacket, forcing Lyn to release him, and the second it was down, she grabbed for him once again. Standing at the window, he watched Anna and Ben in the driveway, studying the boy.

His magic was gone from him once more, there but untouchable; existing, but unusable.

"Icky Ben," Lyn said quietly, and this startled Loki. He couldn't think of a person on the planet that Lyn, filled with brilliant and bubbling laughter, didn't like. Everyone she met was a friend, including perfect strangers in a shopping mall.

"And why is that?" Loki inquired, bending down to look her in the eyes.

She shrugged. "He hurts like fire in my dreams." Her arms twined around Loki's neck, and when he rose, it was with the child in his arms. Ben's car was gone, and Anna breezed by his room, shooting him a nasty look that he met with an implacable one of his own.

Lyn made a rude noise against his shoulder. "Kissy faces," she said, with all the aggravation of a child who knew nothing of the world.

"Kissy faces," he agreed, leaving his room to see if Mary needed help with dinner.

That was what he did, now. He helped his family with dinner.