When Loki woke, he was confused to find himself in the healing hall instead of his own chambers. Then he tried to roll over, only for pain to shoot outward from his shoulder. Ah, yes. The trip to Midgard, the frozen soldier, and the Frost Giants. He had underestimated his foes and been skewered through the shoulder as a result. He prodded gingerly at the spot where the ice had stabbed him. It was heavily bandaged, and he could feel a salve at work inside the wound. He was no healer himself, but he'd read enough books on the subject to be able to estimate that it would take no more than two days for his flesh to knit back together, and the awful metallic taste in his mouth meant he must have been given blood replenishing potions while he slept.

Having taken stock of his wound, he turned his attention to another, more troubling matter. He flexed his hands in front of him, carefully examining the skin. Definitely Aesir. He felt for those lines he'd seen, but there was nothing. It had to have been a trick, and the pain had made him fall for it.

"Leave us."

Loki looked around to see his father near the door, waiting as the three apprentice healers filed swiftly from the room. Once they were gone and the door shut behind them, Odin walked towards him. Loki tried to sit up, but the effort made his vision swim.

"Do not trouble yourself," said Odin, raising a hand. He reached Loki's bedside and took the seat there. Loki ceased his efforts and lay back, but he did not fully relax. Father was not normally one for sickbed visits. "I'm glad to see that you are mending, my son. Will you tell me of your time on Midgard?"

"Has Thor not already done so?" said Loki, confused. Judging by the quality of the light coming through the windows, it was nearly sunset. Thor rarely required prompting before regaling Father with his tales of valor, and it never took him this many hours to find an opportunity for it. And if not Thor, then what of Hlidskjalf or Heimdall?

"I would hear of it from you," said Odin. "I saw the aftermath of the battle through Hlidskjalf, once the cloaking magic faded. The image suggested you and Thor were separated during the fight."

"We were," said Loki. So he recounted his side of it. He was somewhat distracted in the telling by his father's nods and appreciative chuckles when he described himself doing something clever, such as his use of Mjolnir's movement to gain momentum for his own attack and not falling for the Jotun's trick with his illusions. It wasn't that Odin never seemed impressed with his accomplishments, but Thor tended to draw all attention to himself to the point where Loki's tricks and strategies became something of an afterthought, even if they had played an equal or greater part in winning the day.

When Loki arrived at the point where the Jotun woman had decided she would kill him as vengeance for the war, Odin's expression turned livid. "Laufey is fortunate they were acting alone, long separated from their people, and that they failed," he said, teeth bared. "What did she do then?"

Loki hesitated. He had hoped to leave this part out, but with Odin's fierce eye upon him, a suitable lie or evasion failed to occur to him. "She put her hand on my throat. I've never felt cold like that before, but it didn't hurt. At first, she was surprised, but then she laughed. She said…" He swallowed and looked down at his hands, remembering what they had looked like after that. "She said I was no son of Odin."

"You fear she spoke the truth."

"Did she?" Loki shot at him before he could stop himself. It was only a jest to cover how afraid he truly was, but the sad, weary look in Odin's eye brought the sensation of a pit opening beneath him rushing back. "It's true?"

"It is true that Frigga and I are not your parents by birth."

Fear gave way to despair. "I'm one of them, aren't I? A Jotun."

"Is that such a terrible thing? Being Jotun saved your life this morning."

Loki laughed. He tasted bile and his entire body felt numb. "Better to die one of the Aesir than live as the monster parents tell their children about at night."

"You are not a monster, Loki." Odin sighed. "If anything, it is the line of Buri that are monsters, and you are better off not being bound to us by blood. If Thor does not have to struggle as hard as I have to be a good man, it will be because half of him is Frigga."

"So what am I, then?" said Loki, refusing to be distracted by the absurd notion that Odin felt no pride in his own blood. "A political hostage? A pet? An experiment to see if an Asgardian upbringing can civilize a Frost Giant? Or merely another stolen relic like the Casket?"

"You're my son," said Odin firmly. "Second Prince and proven warrior of Asgard. Heir presumptive to the throne. Master of seidrcraft. Brilliant and learned scholar and strategist. None of that has changed. With your many gifts, you might have been the making of Jotunheim, had Laufey not been such a vain and short-sighted fool."

"Laufey? But then—"

"Yes. You were born the third son of the King Laufey and Queen Farbauti."

"Still of royal blood, then?" Loki snorted, as though that did not make this even worse. "Loki Laufeyson."

"No! Laufeyson should have been your name by right of birth, but he denied you it and refused to give you a name of your own. He forfeited any claim he might have had over you as a father when he cast you aside to starve for the crime of being born too small."

Loki had never heard Odin speak with such contempt, but it did not soothe the hurt of learning that the creature who sired him had judged him too shameful and worthless to live. He hated that Laufey had any power over him to cause this hurt. "And how did you acquire an enemy king's deformed castoff? I suppose I couldn't have been a political hostage or a trophy if Laufey already didn't want me, which leaves experiment or pet."

"Stop this, Loki!" said Odin, and before Loki saw him move, he had a hand around the back of his neck and was forcing him to make eye contact. "You attempt to bait me into giving truth to your unfounded self-hatred, but I am not so easily led. You will hear me."

Loki grimaced, unsuccessfully fighting a sudden rush of tears. "Yes, my King."

There was a long pause in which Odin slowly withdrew his arm and ran his hand over his own face. "I courted war for millennia," he said at last, "in the tradition set by my grandfather and upheld by my father and my elder brothers. Long after they fell in battle, I eagerly carried on that legacy. We were unstoppable, and I believed that meant there was no reason to stop. We spilt oceans of blood in the name of Asgard. When legitimate existential threats arose from within Yggdrasil and without, we would of course quell them, but how different is one tyrant from another to the people on whom he treads?" He stood and walked to the nearest window, gazing out at the city that was the crown jewel of the Nine Realms. "Asgard has become something better in your lifetime, I think. Now we fight to protect the weak and the innocent, where once we sought to conquer and rule them."

"Why the change?" said Loki. As easily as he had dismissed this kind of talk at first, he couldn't help being a little curious now. Odin had never spoken of the past as though there were parts of it he was ashamed to remember. The rest of Asgard certainly didn't speak of it that way. Not that Loki had the faintest idea what any of it had to do with him.

"It began with Frigga. She made me want to be a better man, and to win her heart and hand, I had to become one. But that was a gradual change, and it still seemed that war would be a constant, even if I took care to lead my people into battle only for the right reasons. We had Thor when the war with Jotunheim for the fate of Midgard was at its peak, and I feared what his life would be. The first time I felt hope that the future might hold anything other than war was the day I lost my eye...and gained my second son."

Loki stared at him, dumbstruck. His chest suddenly felt very tight, as did his throat. He'd spent this entire conversation so far wishing that the bottomless pit would simply swallow him, but now he desperately wanted Odin to continue.

"When I held you in my hands inside the temple on Jotunheim, you smiled at me, and then, though you were only days old, you changed your appearance to mimic what you saw before you."

"What? Then...I did this?" said Loki, looking at his hands. He'd been prepared to hurl the accusation that Odin had used his own skin to lie to him, and so was completely blindsided by the revelation that it had been his own doing. "It wasn't you?"

"It was you, Loki. You crafted your Aesir skin, taking me for a model." He chuckled, his one eye crinkling. "Considering the state I was in, that could have gone very poorly, but your seidr was already remarkably strong. You did it instinctively. Your first act of mischief, and you won a smile out of me for it when I thought I might never have cause to smile again. After that, I couldn't bring myself to leave you there, nor to give you into anyone else's care. With the capture of the Casket of Ancient Winters and the destruction of the Frost Giants' gateway to Midgard, the war was won. I brought you home, where you charmed Frigga and Thor as easily as you'd charmed me."

"So you kept me because I amused you," said Loki. The jab was a feeble one; in spite of himself, he wanted to believe the sentimental tale was true. Odin seemed to realize his heart wasn't in it, for his rebuke came gently.

"Do not twist my words. Thor is the son we were given. You are the son we chose, and we have loved you as our son from the first."

Fresh indignation welled up at that. "Then why show Thor such favor? If I am as much your son as he, why give him Mjolnir when he came of age and throw a feast every time he swings it? You never even considered me to wield it!"

Odin raised his eyebrows. "You think I did not watch you as boys and see which weapons you preferred? Thor was given Mjolnir because it suited him perfectly. He fights like a battering ram, throwing himself directly at his enemies with tremendous force. You favor quick movements, careful deception, and calculated strikes. Where, precisely, does a cumbersome warhammer fit into such a strategy?"

Loki opened his mouth, then shut it again. He knew perfectly well that Mjolnir would have been a poor fit for him, but it seemed childish to admit that he still wished he had been offered it. He had felt overlooked when Mjolnir went straight to Thor. It hadn't occurred to him that Odin had simply understood that it didn't match his style. When he came of age two decades after Thor, Odin and Frigga had presented him with a set of the finest daggers in the Nine Realms, forged by the dwarves of Nidavellir and specifically attuned to his seidr, as well as a chest of the rarest spellbooks from Alfheim. These were priceless treasures worthy of a Prince of Asgard, and perfectly suited to him, and he had resented them for not being a hammer he didn't even want.

"If I was never to wield Mjolnir and bring glory to Asgard with it, then what was my purpose to be?" he said, endeavoring not to sound sulky.

"Is there only one purpose possible for a Prince of Asgard? Do you think you must be the same as Thor in order to be his equal? A strange and self-defeating notion for one who always pursued his own interests and never tried to best Thor in his."

"Then you did have plans for how you might make use of me."

"Of course I did," said Odin, dismissing Loki's accusatory tone with a wave of his hand. "A king must always consider the strategic utility of every member of his court and his household. In you, I saw numerous possibilities. You might have been betrothed to a Jotun maiden from a prominent family and served as ambassador between our realms. We might have persuaded Laufey to name you heir over Byleistr and Helblindi, then betrothed you to an Aesir maiden. If either you or Laufey refused these proposals, there were many other alliances that could be forged or strengthened through you instead."

Loki mentally recoiled at the thought of becoming Laufey's heir and ruling over that frozen wasteland, but none of these options was truly surprising given what he now knew.

"Whichever course you eventually choose," Odin went on, "I have always planned to entrust the Casket of Ancient Winters to you. It would be an invaluable negotiating tool with Jotunheim, but it will be yours to use as you see fit."

It was fortunate Loki was already lying abed when he heard this; his shock might well have knocked him off his feet. "You would give the Casket that nearly froze all of Midgard to a Frost Giant?"

Odin turned to face him. "I would give it to Loki Odinson, and no other."

There was no conclusion for Loki to draw from this except that Odin truly did view him as a son, while fully appreciating what he was. He couldn't comprehend it, and yet the bottomless pit began to shrink. "Why couldn't you have told me all of this from the beginning?" he asked.

"I should have done so," said Odin, returning to the seat beside the bed. "But I convinced myself all these years that you were better off—safer, happier—not knowing the truth. Keeping it from the court and our enemies was certainly wise. It is within my rights as king to legitimize an adoptive child, but with tensions still so fraught between Asgard and Jotunheim, you would have been in grave danger if your true heritage was known. However, I see now that it was foolish to imagine you would never learn of it, clever and curious as you are, and that when you did, you would not have the tools you needed to make peace with it."

He reached for Loki's uninjured shoulder and squeezed it. "I know I have broken your trust and wounded you deeply, my son, and for that I am sorry. I hope you will not blame Frigga. She would have told you everything as a child, but I insisted on silence. And do not blame Thor. He has been as ignorant of it as you. If you require more proof than my word, you shall have it. I will speak with Heimdall, and if you ask it of him, he will show you your history."

Loki nodded, unable to speak around the lump in his throat.

"I implore you to consider carefully what this knowledge is worth to you. Seeing it will be very different than hearing of it. I would spare you that pain if I could, but it is for you to decide."


Odin being well-rested certainly makes a difference, doesn't it! Also, it seems to me that the only good reason for him to keep the Casket of Ancient Winters rather than destroy it is that he planned to give it to Loki eventually. Until everything went wrong.

I've thought a lot about what I wanted to do with Loki's Asgardian glamour. I used to take it for granted that it was Odin's magic, but rewatching the flashback scene over and over had me increasingly convinced that baby Loki did it himself. And maybe Odin thought it was an endearing trick (hence smiling and impulsively taking Loki back to Asgard to raise him), but I think it was actually more of a desperate attempt to earn the affection of this stranger who was kind enough to pick him up after he'd been left there for days. Simply by responding to his crying and holding him, Odin became baby Loki's favorite person, but he'd already learned to expect rejection and neglect. You might be thinking these are emotions too complex for a two-day-old infant, but stuff that happens to us as infants can have profound, lasting effects on our psychological and emotional development. In Loki's case, fear of abandonment, an inferiority complex, insecure attachment, and a deep-seated need for Odin's approval. All of which obviously tracks with adult Loki's behavior. I suspect the real disconnect between Odin and Loki is that Odin never realized Loki had these issues, so he inadvertently fed them.

Regarding Odin's extreme contempt for what Laufey did to Loki, it seems to me that a man who was forced to banish his daughter because she was trying to take over the universe and refused to back down (I'm on Odin's side about that), would utterly despise Laufey for leaving Loki to die just for being unusually small. This is *personal*.

Please let me know what you thought! Reviews are food for the muse!