.-.
Playground
Chapter 8: Daddy Issues
When Loki pivoted back around, he looked as reasonable and amiable as Tony had ever seen him. In other words, Loki was putting on an act worthy of a stage. As performances went, this one had going for it that Tony was likely to stay on his feet.
"In every way that matters…except one, Oliver's other half is Aesir. My appearance is no illusion, and it does not stop at the surface. I lived for over a millennium unaware that I was not born Aesir. If you sliced me open – not an invitation, mind you – you would find Aesir anatomy, and Aesir anatomy alone. There is nothing whatsoever of Jotunheim in me. Ollie was conceived by Jane and by me, in this form. His true form is the one you first met at the playground. I spoke poorly before. It is more accurate to say that Ollie is half human and half Aesir. And that his Aesir half has a…an additional latent expression, as you put it. It is not his true self. He doesn't understand now, but he will, and he will cease this behavior."
A fresh round of connections, patterns, causes-and-effects all came rushing together as Loki spoke, in one massive headrush. Unless that was just from the impact with the ground a few minutes ago. But the feeling was familiar, because this was how Tony designed. He visualized the problem, and things fell into place. Loki had gone through a dark time when he found out that he wasn't biologically Aesir, no matter how thoroughly his anatomy had been altered. He'd taken that news colossally badly. And no wonder – the Frost Giants were the enemy after all, monsters and savages. Nobody would've been celebrating that little doozie. So, Loki had gone to hang with Thanos for a while, still reeling, then shown up on Earth strutting around like a civilized but savage monster. Maybe he'd thought conquering another planet and setting himself up as king would make him feel better. Stroke his ego. Piss off the old man. Okay, maybe the broadest of broad strokes had a tiny bit of metaphorical overlap and Tony was letting the insights he'd gained into his own occasional less-than-stellar life choices bleed into Loki's. It wasn't like Tony had ever tried to conquer entire planets.
Unless you looked at it through a particular lens, from a particular angle.
He needed to focus. Loki.
After being dragged back to Asgard in chains, Loki had pulled himself together. Reclaimed his identity. Of all the many routes that could have taken – Thor had never told them much about what happened with Loki after the attack and they hadn't pressed – the one route Loki definitely didn't pursue was learning to appreciate his biological roots and love his inner Frost Giant. However much the rest of Asgard might hate their Jotunheim enemies, Tony was certain Loki hated them ten times more. The surest way to prove you were Genuine Certified 100% Aesir, after all, was to reject those nasty Frost Giants with every single atom of the Aesir body you were bound into to hide the Frost Giant one.
The sudden sympathy for what it must do to Loki, to the foundation the man had rebuilt for himself, to see Ollie turning Frost Giant, to know that those roots he thought he'd eradicated had reappeared in the child he treasured, was unexpected and uncomfortable. Loki's reaction upon seeing it was visceral, stemming from deeply ingrained beliefs formed over a lifetime of viewing them as enemies, with his own personal issues stacked on top; it probably wasn't entirely under his control.
But that sympathy didn't get far before hitting its limits. The first time? Yeah. No one was likely to win a parenting award in that moment, in those circumstances. But Loki knew now. And apparently his plan for dealing with it was to traumatize his son into never doing it again – over and over until it took – and saddle the kid with a lifetime of mental health issues. And daddy issues like woah.
The sympathy did temper the initial anger, though. Loki had dug his head so far into the sand his entire body had wound up buried in it, but at least he was aware he'd screwed up. Maybe attacking wasn't the way to go.
"My back's killing me, can we sit again?"
For a split second it looked like Loki would apologize, but then he simply retreated to the gazebo. Tony smiled to himself. Maybe it was weird, but he could respect that particular lack of apology.
"Hey, FRIDAY," he said to the phone that was still on the bench where he'd left it, "are the kids still doing okay?"
"They're doing just fine. Morgan got the cookies from the oven. They paused the movie and are now playing with the new modified Lego set in Morgan's room."
"You ever stepped on a Lego, Rudolf?" Tony asked as he sat.
"Not to my knowledge."
A little subdued, but definitely still going for reasonable and amiable, with a notable lack of arch superiority. "You'd know it if you had. Or maybe not? I've never been jealous of you Asgardian types until this very moment. Stepping on a Lego without wanting to collapse on the floor and cry or maybe amputate a foot is a legit superpower."
"I'll…keep it, ah, under advisement."
The words were halting and uncomfortable; Tony suspected both that Loki didn't know what Legos were and that Loki didn't care, and just didn't know how to respond at the moment, especially when steering clear of the Saharan insults he would probably normally have gone for. He was probably also still holding out hope for Tony to acknowledge and agree with that not a drop of Frost Giant in me or my kid, no way BS. He'll just cease this behavior and we'll forget it ever happened. Tony feared for Ollie's sake what Loki might think of next to try to get the little guy to cease this behavior.
There was more though. A lot more. It was niggling at him. If Loki just found out a few years ago, how many other people could possibly have known? More importantly, how many knew now? If his suspicion was correct, then a lot more pieces snapped into place, and everything he'd heard and seen today, everything he'd already known about Loki, every last detail fit together. One giant puzzle, completed. Not a symphony. Wrong metaphor. Symphonies were harmonious blends. This was a cacophonous tangled mess that went back a thousand years minimum.
"It's still a secret, isn't it? Where you were born."
Loki took a deep breath, then stood and walked to the edge of the gazebo with the clearest view of the house. He'd hoped he might have gotten somewhere. Why did this have to happen here? In front of Tony Stark. Morgan, at least, did not seem to have been harmed or even particularly frightened. She'd been more curious than anything. Small mercies.
"Yes," he finally said, back still to Tony. With every bit of resolve he could muster, he turned back to face him. "And I would appreciate it if it stayed that way."
"Because you're ashamed of it?"
"Do not resume this line of questioning. I am not ashamed of my son. I am immensely proud of him."
"So you're ashamed of yourself."
Loki waited for a few moments. A few more steadying breaths. "What I think about it doesn't matter. This isn't about me. It's—"
"Enough, I can't listen to this anymore. You're a smart guy. Sometimes your own issues muddy the waters, happens to the best of us, but you're too smart not to see what's going on here. You're going to give that kid a complex. You're going to make him think there's something wrong with him, when objectively there isn't. Look, if the Frost Giants are savage monsters, and let's just be clear that I'm not going to take your opinion on that as fact, then…FRIDAY, you got that video ready, the one from today?"
"Ready to go, boss," the disembodied voice said, as Tony gestured for him to sit back down.
"Come on, join me. You're all…loomy up there," Tony said, waving a hand about.
Loki considered refusing, but Tony's tone was more friendly than confrontational. Strange though it was, there was a form of peace in this. So few knew the truth. And like Morgan, like Jane, Tony did not intrinsically loathe the Frost Giants.
"See this guy right here?"
Seated beside Tony, with a small but carefully maintained gap between them, Loki leaned over to look at the phone Tony was holding up. On it, he was doing his best to enact Baloo's part in "The Bare Necessities" while his precious Ollie stood on the bench and laughed.
Ollie's joy was so captivating, a wonder of natural unselfconscious beauty. Other images came to mind. The look on Ollie's face when Tony had found him changed. Ollie's face screwed up and red from crying – bawling – when Loki yelled at him the last time. The innocent wonder and giggles from the first time, and the shift to tears, because Loki had made clear it was neither cute nor funny.
"That's one savage monster all right. Didn't know monsters came with such flexible hips."
"He loves The Jungle Book," Loki said, losing his breath at the end of it.
"You know what he loves more than The Jungle Book? His father. But watching this, seriously, even if they are all as terrible as you say, it's in their culture, not in their DNA. If you can't see that you're more delusional than I thought. Ollie kept telling me he didn't mean to do it. But you saw the video. He didn't sneeze and accidentally turn blue. He knows, at some level, that that's also him. And he wants to be accepted. He wants to be liked, whether he looks like a pint-sized red-eyed giant or a brown-eyed kid from Earth. Or Asgard."
Loki shook his head. The mortals simply didn't understand. Jane had at least had a small but stinging taste of reality. "He would never be accepted on Asgard looking like that."
"What about you?"
"What about me?" Loki asked, bristling. He didn't look like that.
"Will he ever be accepted by his father, looking like that?"
"He…it isn't…it's not—"
"Ollie may only be four, but trust me, he's already perfectly capable of getting the message you're shouting at him, even if he can't put it into words yet. You're telling him your love is conditional. You love him more than your own life. Except when he looks like that."
The phone was held up to him again; Ollie, in Frost Giant form, looked up in wide-eyed fear.
"That's not true," Loki said, swallowing over a tight throat. "I love him always. That I don't want him to look like that is for his own good."
Next to him, Loki was vaguely aware of Tony sighing and shifting around. He took the phone out of the other man's hand and held it to his chest. He knew he was close to falling apart, and looking at any more of these images might be enough to make him lose what tenuous control he had left.
"I know that's hard to hear. And I think deep down you know it's true and you just can't admit it. I don't mean to me. To yourself. But the sooner you do that, the sooner you can work on changing it. You've got a great kid. He's happy. And he loves you. You're his hero. He worships the ground you walk on. And if you don't change course? You're going to destroy all of that."
Something in Loki's head cleared, just a little. His surroundings, tunneled down to such an extent he'd barely been aware of them, opened up and came back into focus. "I'm not a hero, Tony. I would think you'd know that better than most."
"You are to him. Look, man, I'm just saying, you're going to have a lot of regrets if you don't start dealing with this. Really dealing with it. Wishing it would go away isn't dealing with it, and yelling it away clearly isn't working, besides being an all-around bad plan. Talk to him, tell him the truth. He's still young enough to adapt to it, and to feel reassured by sharing it with his dad who he loves, and who loves him. All of him. The human part, the Aesir part, and yeah, the Frost Giant part, too."
Loki shook his head again, capable of little else. Tony was spinning a tale, one that seemed logical and right, and yet utterly impossible. How was he supposed to reassure Ollie about being a Frost Giant? There was nothing remotely reassuring in that.
"Do they have a more…I don't know, scientific name? Genus species kind of thing? Because it makes me think of the Abominable—no, bad example. It sounds like a cartoon character."
"Sometimes they are called Jotuns," Loki answered absently. Tell him the truth. He's still young enough…
"Jotuns? All this time we could've been calling them 'Jotuns'? That sounds much better, and smacks of at least 75% less prejudice. 'Jotun' just sounds like a name. Aesir, Jotun, Midgardian, if you m—"
"Jane wanted to tell him."
"Yeah?" Tony said after a moment of silence. "I was wondering where she fit into all this. Figured I was sticking my nose in enough places."
"I refused. My mother wanted to tell me. She said…she said there should be no secrets in a family. But my father insisted it be kept from me. He thought it would protect me. She said he didn't want me to feel different."
Another silent beat passed.
"How'd that work out?"
Loki leaned forward, rested his forearms on his thighs, and clasped his hands tightly together. He'd already been avoiding the gaze that weighed heavily over him; if he looked at Tony now he would not be able to continue. "I was very angry."
Tony watched, afraid to open his mouth for fear of sticking his foot in it and shattering something important and palpably fragile. All this time they'd been out here, Loki had answered his questions, and not just because Tony wasn't letting him back in the house until he did so, like at first. Loki had been trying to convince him. That Jotuns were despicable and that he loved his kid even though Ollie was Jotun except that Ollie wasn't Jotun because even though Loki was 100% Jotun with an extra-fancy magic disguise on top, Loki wasn't Jotun, either.
This was different. This was Loki being honest. Tony didn't really care if Loki was honest with him; Tony didn't really care about Loki. But if Loki could be honest with himself, brutally honest, and if Tony could avoid Foot-In-Mouth Disorder – the Abominable Snow Monster was a brilliant move – then maybe the guy would wise up about how he was treating his kid. Tony cared about that kid.
"I didn't want it to be true," Loki eventually continued. "Can you imagine it? I found out I was the son of the enemy. The son of the king of the enemy, no less. They fought each other, the father who raised me and the father who conceived me, during a great war. Odin lost an eye to Laufey in one of those battles. Laufey lost the war. Odin found me and took me to Asgard. Raised me to believe I was as much Aesir, as much their son, as Thor was."
As much as he'd already pieced together, Tony hadn't anticipated that. Loki was raised a prince but was also born a prince…a prince of the enemy. Prince of the Monsters. I was very angry. Loki apparently appreciated a good understatement from time to time.
"I was angry because I wanted the lie to be true. I didn't want to be this…this thing. The Aesir…they are a race of warriors. Honorable warriors. Heroes," he said, a bitter smile ghosting over his lips for a blink-and-you-missed-it instant. "But I was also angry because I didn't know what to trust anymore. If I could not trust my mother and my father with the truth about the most basic facts of my existence…how was I to trust anything else? So I chose to believe everything was a lie. I told myself that I'd never belonged with them. That he took me only to use me. That I was a pawn and not a son."
It was more or less what Tony had imagined, but as linked nodes in a complex 3D diagram. Facts. Hearing it aloud, with Loki's flat tone and expressionless face, felt like being tossed into Prince Humperdinck's Pit of Despair. A dark time in my life. Understatement, check. Around the edges it was also resonating a little unpleasantly close to his own issues, with a father he hadn't always felt like much of a son to.
"Ollie's situation is different. He is mine and Jane's. And yet…perhaps it isn't different at all. I thought he didn't need to know about this…other…. It wasn't supposed to affect him. I'd hoped it wouldn't. There were signs, but…I was hoping it would just go away. I was even considering the possibility of binding him into Aesir form."
Tony cringed but held his tongue. Magic wasn't his field, but the thought of binding anyone into anything gave him the creeps and set off all kinds of primal Bad Wrong Escape alarm bells in his head. His reaction had a lot to do with being literally bound while his head was shoved underwater back in Afghanistan, but this Asgardian version of bindingwas at least a little creepy all on its own. He hadn't missed the past tense in what Loki said, though.
"I don't actually know how, or I might have done it already. Odin told me only in general terms how he did it to me." Loki paused for a quick, loud breath. "I didn't realize how closely I was following their path. Mimicking their mistakes. I told myself it was different. But it isn't, is it?"
The instinct to answer was strong. But it sounded like Loki had already figured out what he needed to, at least about a couple of things, and comparison-parenting was one of Tony's sore spots. The extent to which he had no idea what he was doing was terrifying when he stopped to think about it, especially when he second-guessed himself on whether sussing out his dad's footprints so he could stay out of them was a valid parenting strategy. Any advice he might be tempted to give in that arena was suspect at best.
"He does need to know the truth."
Once the surprise passed, Tony couldn't help giving himself a virtual pat on the back. Okay, so maybe Loki had gotten there mostly because Tony had managed to shut up for a while, but he had at least gotten Loki thinking in the right direction. That particular step was only one out of a hundred, though.
Loki shot up from the bench, and Tony jerked back; Loki had barely moved during this one-sided portion of their little chat other than to breathe and speak and maybe even blink once or twice.
"I'm going in now. I assume your concerns have been addressed."
"Um, yeah. Sure, of course. All good, FRIDAY," he said as he reclaimed the phone from where Loki had left it on the bench. "But, can I just…"
"What?"
Irritated Look, Variant Sixty-Two. The normalcy of it was a breath of sweet fresh air. "Did you notice you called yourself a 'thing' a few minutes ago? Don't you think you ought to come to terms with all that yourself before you talk to Ollie about it?"
Loki looked at him like he'd lost his mind. "I'm not going to tell him right now. And I have to talk to Jane before any final decision is made. She has a dinner engagement tonight."
"Oh. Okay," Tony said, then followed when Loki turned toward the house. So Loki's are you crazy? reaction was to a question of timing, and not to referring to himself as a thing. That wasn't encouraging. He'd said what he could, though. Maybe Jane would be able to make progress on that. He barely knew her, but she seemed friendly and competent and most importantly rational, and no rational person was down with someone they loved calling himself a thing.
Poor Jane. And Tony thought Pepper had it bad, dealing with his neuroses.
Meandering around in his own thoughts, he barely noticed Loki coming to a stop in time to avoid running into him. They were paused at the back door, and Loki's head was down, hand motionless on the door handle. A moment later, Loki took a deep breath and pushed the door open.
Tony followed without comment. He felt for the guy.
Yeah, okay. Maybe he cared a tiny bit about Loki, too.
./.
./.
Colorful pieces of plastic surrounded Ollie and Morgan on the floor. Ollie was holding onto one little piece and looking up by the time Loki entered, behind Tony. The visible fear was immediate, and crushing. Loki hadn't meant to cause this.
"Hey, Pumpkin, what have you and Ollie been up to?"
Tony strolled right over, swept aside a few of the plastic bits, and got down onto the floor between the children with a grunt. Loki didn't miss the wink and the smile Tony gave Ollie, or the wave of his pinky finger and the brief smile it pulled from Ollie.
"Come talk with me for a minute," Loki said, holding out his hand.
Ollie was slow to come, but he did come, the hand soft and warm in Loki's. Trusting, despite the damage Loki had inflicted on that trust.
How had he not seen this before? What he was doing to his son, to their relationship? This light of his life, would he extinguish it within a mere five years? Years, decades, centuries spent trying to be enough for his father. Good enough, brave enough, worthy enough. How could he have wound up on such a similar path?
He would turn from it. Come what may, he would turn from it.
He led Ollie through the living room and into the kitchen, where he thought Tony might try to grant them a little privacy. He scooped Ollie up and sat him on top of the table, then pulled a chair in close and sat down. Ollie wore a worried frown, which his knuckles came up to cover. Loki brushed a hand over Ollie's forehead, a thumb over his cheek. He left the hand alone; Ollie had preferred knuckles to thumbs once his teeth started coming in, and Loki and Jane had decided early on not to interfere with this apparent form of self-comfort.
"Ollie, Mr. Stark told me what happened. I want you to know that I'm not mad, and you're not in trouble. And I'm not going to shout at you. I'm sorry that I shouted before. I shouldn't have. I always love you, Ollie. Always. You always fill my heart up to the top."
"To the very top?"
"To the very very top. Every moment of every day. Even if I shout, it doesn't mean I don't love you. It only means I've forgotten that I shouldn't shout. We'll talk more about this later, but I promise I won't be angry at all."
"Pinky promise?" Ollie asked with those big wide eyes.
Tony was right. What could he possibly refuse when his child looked at him like this?
Loki dutifully held out his pinky; Ollie's damp hand came out of his mouth to take hold of it.
This path wasn't going to be easy. But it would have to be better than the one he'd been dragging them down before.
Ollie's smile was all the confirmation he needed.
./.
Notes
Ch. 9 is done, along with a little of Ch. 10. (I mean...Part 5 of Ch. 4...or something like that ha.) FWIW, for those of you reading Beneath, too, I expect to return to work on Beneath in about one week (typing this on Jan. 13, 2021). And somehow keep this one up 'til completion, too. It remains really constrained despite being longer than originally intended.