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Playground

Chapter 13: Storytime

Luckily, Ollie was too curious about the strange room he'd woken up in to question Loki's dubious story about how he'd wound up in it. He and Jane had gone for a late-night walk and taken Ollie with them, then wound up near Tony's other house when they grew tired. Plausible enough for a four-year-old, apparently.

Ollie didn't like having his teeth brushed, but it was routine and normally he submitted to it. Every time they departed from their typical routine, though, Ollie took it as a license to try to avoid it. Loki didn't want the battle this morning and was tempted to give in. But he knew Jane wouldn't approve, and he knew Jane was right. Ollie whined and pouted, but his teeth got brushed and the ordeal was behind them.

"Were you and Mama arguing?"

Loki stilled and looked up at Ollie, a sock half-way on. "No," he said, then deliberately finished pulling the sock onto his son's foot. "What made you think that?"

Ollie shrugged.

He knew Ollie had heard them before, at least once, perhaps several times if they hadn't been as discreet as they'd thought, so he didn't ask. And four years old or not, he wasn't going to try to tell Ollie that he hadn't seen and heard what he had in fact seen and heard. "We argue sometimes. Everyone argues once in a while. Like you and I just now."

"I hate toothbrushes."

"I know. But you still love me, don't you?"

"Not when you brush my teeth."

"Ollie!" Loki said in mock indignation that wasn't entirely mock. He knew it meant nothing, but it had taken him by surprise and it still managed to hurt.

In the next second, though, his face was full of minty-breathed four-year-old hug. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean it. I love you all the time, Papa. All the time, all the time, we're happy all the time," Ollie continued, breaking into an unrelated Asgardian children's song about seasons and the passage of time.

Loki wrapped a hand around the back of Ollie's head and his freshly-combed hair and wished that there would never come a time when a hug and an I love you couldn't take away the sting of pain.

"But I really don't like it when you brush my teeth."

"Sometimes we have to do things we don't want to do."

Ollie made a face, seemingly contorting every muscle in a different direction, quickly going from trying to mimic disgust to simply trying to look ridiculous and making himself laugh in the process.

Sometimes we have to do things we don't want to do.

"We weren't arguing, your mother and I. But we were talking about something."

"What? What? What? What, cried the eaglet." Another children's song, this one an old favorite from a year or so ago. Ollie grabbed onto his ankles, stiffened up, and tipped over onto his side on the bed before going limp. "What will you bring me? What? What? What?"

Loki could see it coming: that burst of morning energy that could easily turn frenzied and challenging to control. It might not be a good time. But there was never going to be a good time for this. "We were talking about you. About all of us. We decided we needed to talk to you about some things, now that you're old enough to understand."

"Me, me, me, what will you bring me?"

Those weren't even quite the right lyrics. Ollie was at the start of a spiraling path Loki wouldn't easily pull him from. But it might not be too late to redirect him.

"I've brought you a story."

"You can't eat a story."

"I thought you'd prefer a story to worms."

"I like worms."

"That's true, you do," Loki said with a laugh. "But not to eat, right?"

Ollie frantically shook his eyes with eyes wide enough they looked like they could burst.

"Because you are not an eaglet. You are…"

"I'm me. Oliver Foster Lokasson!"

"That's right. And most children only have one realm to call home, but you have two."

"Asgard and Midgard!" Ollie shouted, going from standing on the bed to jumping on it.

"Yes," Loki said, wrapping his arms around Ollie, lifting him up, then setting him back down on the bed. "And I have a story for you about that."

"But it's not bedtime. I just got up," Ollie protested, trying to get back up where Loki was trying to get him settled down.

Loki sat on the side of the bed. "Look at that sun streaming in through the window. This is not a bedtime story. It's not meant to help you fall asleep. It's an important story. A true story. A story about me, and in turn also a story about you. It's one you should be wide awake for."

"What about Mama?" Oliver asked, all his attention now on Loki.

Loki hesitated, at first because he had to consider how best to filter this for his son's ears and because he wondered if waking up in a strange place with his father but not his mother was more troubling than his son knew how to express, but then because of what the question meant to him personally. Jane had joined this particular story whether she wanted to or not, part of a package deal that came with him, but this was not Jane's story. It was his. Ollie had also gained it as a package deal that came with his father, but this story was written on every cell in Ollie's body, making it Ollie's in a way it would never be Jane's. He felt a flash of shame at having tried to ask Jane to do this for him. Of course she couldn't. It had to be him. And though fear still nipped at his heels and dread still squeezed at his heart, a strange kind of calm settled over the larger part of him. This was right.

"This particular story happened long before I met your mother. Long before your mother was born."

"Before I was born?"

"Yes, Ollie, before you were born, too." Loki smiled and ruffled his son's hair. Ollie was a very bright child, but his grasp of how time worked was still lacking. Perhaps his son wasn't old enough to understand any of this after all. But this was only a first conversation, a first story. They were no longer following in his parents' footsteps. They would not be burying this. There would be a second, and a third, and however many more were needed.

"Shall we get comfortable?" Loki asked, tugging off his boots and swinging his legs up onto the bed.

"I'm comfortable," Ollie said, standing again and looking down at Loki.

"Would you snuggle with me then, please? I really want to share this story with you."

Ollie shook his head, but the obstinance thankfully lasted only a few seconds before he got down and curled up in Loki's arms.

"That's my boy," Loki said, twisting onto his side and kissing Ollie's nose. He lifted himself up on one elbow, the better to watch Ollie and his reactions for signs of trouble.

"Are there dragons in this story?"

"Mmmm, no. No dragons. It's a true story, remember? About you and me."

"I dreamed about baby dragons."

"That must have been an interesting dream. Ollie, do you remember those portraits of your mother when you were growing inside her belly?"

Ollie nodded. "I don't know how I fitted in there. One time I was sitting on Mama's lap, and I tried to pretend I was inside her belly, and I could not fit inside."

"That's because you won't stop growing. You were so tiny then. Sometimes I can hardly believe it myself, but you did fit inside there, until you were big enough to be born."

"I already know this story, Papa."

"You know that part of it. Did you know that I used to be tiny, too? Just as you once were."

"When you were a little baby?"

"That's right. And Uncle Thor, too."

Ollie laughed at that. "That's silly."

"It does seem rather silly, doesn't it? But he also started out as a tiny baby growing in his mother's belly."

"Grandmother Frigga's belly."

"Yes, exactly," Loki said, taking a moment for a couple of deep breaths to steady himself. Ollie knew his Grandmother Frigga from portraits and stories; one of Loki's greatest sorrows in life would forever be that Ollie would not know her in person and she would know not know Ollie. "It was a little different for me, when I was born."

"Why?"

"I didn't grow in Grandmother Frigga's belly." One of his other greatest sorrows in life, though he would not say so to Ollie. And even now, the statement – the idea – held a form of shock and disbelief.

None of that registered on Ollie's face. "How did you get born?" His son had stilled and quieted and was listening with more attention now, perhaps reacting to Loki's own seriousness and lack of distraction.

"Well…I grew in someone else's belly."

"You did?" Ollie asked, wide-eyed, lifting his head from where it had rested on Loki's arm.

"I did. And when I was born…." Loki swallowed. He could do this. For Oliver Foster Lokasson, he could do this. "When I was born, I looked just like you, when you make yourself blue."

Ollie's face fell and Loki's heart dropped. Every malignancy that had festered in him for years fed on the naked worry and fear in his son's eyes. Its growth exploded and threatened to consume him. He had let Jane talk him into this. He had let Tony – Tony Stark of all people – talk him into this. Manipulate him into this. For what? To destroy his son with the very thing that had nearly destroyed him?

"You were bad?"

"I—."

For no more than a second, Loki was so off kilter that he thought Ollie was asking about his misadventure on Midgard.

Then the floor fell out from under him.

He didn't know what he looked like when he was born, but having seen Ollie, he could imagine: blue, bald, red eyes, those darker marks on his forehead. The idea of it had always disgusted him too much to linger on it.

You were bad?

The relief of Ollie's birth, the joy and wonder of holding a squirming newborn baby, his baby, in his arms. The tears in his eyes, the salty kisses shared with Jane. The first time Ollie fell asleep in his arms, how he hadn't dared to move or speak for fear of disturbing his son from slumber. The first time giving Ollie a bottle, moved to tears with emotion he couldn't quite explain to himself much less to Jane when he told her, something about being struck by the weight of his responsibility to this new, innocent, vulnerable life.

Bad?

How utterly nonsensical.

There was no "bad" to be found in the tiny infant Eir had placed in his arms and he had placed in Jane's, and not because of how Ollie looked or didn't look at birth. Likewise, there was no "bad" to be found in him either, just because he was born looking as he did, being from where he was. He, too, had been a new, innocent, vulnerable life. Innocent. The same as any other infant. Not bad. Not wrong.

Why, then, should he be ashamed of it? Why should his son feel any shame? That – that his son should feel shame, that he should feel shame – was wrong. That was bad.

He ran a hand over Ollie's hair. His son had gone from quiet to subdued, picking at the neck of Loki's sweater.

"No," Loki said, then repeated it when the word came out shaky and weak. "I wasn't bad." It came as a fundamental revelation, and one that made him feel as foolish as though he'd just discovered that one and one made two after a lifetime of being certain they made three.

"I wasn't bad," he repeated, dipping his head to try to meet Ollie's gaze. As much as this moment was about himself, it was ultimately about his son, his innocent, vulnerable son to whom he still owed unwavering responsibility. "And you weren't bad, either. I'm so sorry. I was wrong to tell you that. It isn't bad to be blue."

"Morgan likes blue people," Ollie said, glance flickering up from Loki's sweater.

"Yes. Morgan is a sensible child. It's just that…you surprised me, that's all." A terrible, unbelievable lie. But he hoped Ollie wouldn't question it. Ollie would find out what others thought of Frost Giants one day. Not today. Today, his son would feel no shame.

"You see, I was born on another realm. A realm called Jotunheim."

The sweater was forgotten. "Jotunheim?"

"That's right. Have you heard of it?" Loki hoped the answer was no, or at least that nothing his son had heard had made enough of an impression to stick in his memory.

Ollie thought it over. "I don't know. It's one of those heims, like Vanaheim."

Loki sputtered a laugh, incongruously reminded of Jane's offhand reference to Vanaheim last night, the one he'd thrown back in her face as a ridiculous example for her point. In these circumstances, he was hardly going to argue with his child. And regardless of circumstances…they were speaking of babies, in which case, yes, Jotunheim was no different from Vanaheim, or Alfheim, or Asgard or Midgard, for that matter. "That's right. It's another one of those heims. The people on Jotunheim, the…ahhhh" – he made a quick decision – "Jotuns, they all have blue skin and red eyes. And they're very tall."

"Like you and Uncle Thor?"

Another light laugh escaped Loki's nose. Jane was unusually short among the Aesir, but to Ollie, he and Thor were unusually tall. "Taller than me and Uncle Thor."

Ollie's expression began to shift to confusion, and Loki realized he'd gotten off track.

"As I said, then, I didn't grow in Grandmother Frigga's belly." Loki paused, startled at how much easier it was to say it the second time. "I grew in a Jotun woman's belly." That was all Ollie needed to know about it for now. Tales of Laufey and Farbauti could wait for some other distant day.

"Grandmother Frigga wasn't your mother?"

Before Loki could consciously react, the first of the sudden brimming tears was escaping. The face before him wavered between his son's and that of the woman who'd stood in his prison cell and asked him the question he'd replayed in his mind countless times since: Am I not your mother?

He knew she loved him. He knew she knew that he loved her. Some days, that eased the pain of the last words he'd ever said to her, the answer he'd also replayed in his mind countless times since: You're not.

He stared hard into the wavering eyes and spoke with every ounce of conviction he possessed. "She was my mother."

Ollie wiped a hand down Loki's face. "Why are you crying?"

"Oh…." He mustered a smile for Ollie's sake. "I just miss her very, very much. She was every bit my mother. It doesn't matter at all that I was born to someone else. Do you remember the story about Jack?"

"Jack and Jill went up a hill to fetch a—"

"Not that Jack. Jack who has the little white dog named Fluffy."

"Jack Stack! Jack was adopted. His mama and papa chose him."

"Exactly." He owed Erik a thank you for finding that book. Jane as well, for continuing to read it when Loki had threatened to use it for kindling.

"Were you adopted, too?"

"I was," Loki said with what he hoped was a steady, comforting smile. To aid him, he tried to imagine that it had all happened for him the same way it happened for Jack.

"Can I have a dog?"

"No." The answer came automatically. Loki's only initial objection to that book, before he learned its true purpose, was that it led to incessant begging for a pet dog, something which was simply not done on Asgard. On Midgard, however…but Ollie's pouting was brief this time.

"Grandmother Frigga and Grandfather Odin chose you?"

"They did," Loki said, his slow nod growing more confident. They had, hadn't they? Frigga could have refused to accept him as her own. Odin could have pawned him off on a trusted underling to be shaped into whatever Odin hoped to make of him. The murky gray areas were undeniable, but at the core, yes, Frigga and Odin, his mother and father, had chosen him, and had loved him. Ollie, certainly, needed no more than the core right now.

Loki jerked back when Ollie bolted upright, head hitting Loki's chin. He knew what was coming – the flavor of it, at least – before the words emerged.

"Can you be blue, too? Like when you got born?"

"I, ahhh…." The answer was complicated, both the facts of it and the feeling surrounding it, and Loki found himself tongue-tied.

"You said it wasn't bad."

"No," he quickly got in. "It isn't bad." Ollie's sudden turn to worry faded, but didn't entirely disappear. The damage Loki had already done there was going to take time and effort to undo, if it could be undone at all, but he had to do everything in his power to try. "It's just…you see…I…don't know how to do what you can do."

"You don't know how?"

"I don't."

Ollie sighed, so reminiscent of Jane when she was grappling with an intransigent scientific challenge that it calmed much of Loki's anxiety. "I don't know how, either. I just do it."

Loki nodded. Ollie would see in him no criticism or disappointment. Only support. "I could do it, too, when I was a baby. My father told me so. And then as I grew…perhaps I forgot how." Or perhaps his father had bound him in Aesir form for so long that he'd lost the ability entirely. It wasn't as though Loki had ever tried once Odin released the binding.

"Maybe you can remember."

"I don't think so," Loki said with a chuckle. "Do you remember anything from when you were a baby?"

"Ummmm…I was so tiny!"

The laughter grew. "That's true. You were so tiny."

"I wish you could remember," Ollie said after a minute.

"Why?" Loki asked, the remains of his smile artificial, forced. A wall stood before him. He could not see beyond it, but on some level he knew what lay there, because he fiercely dreaded it. He saw the Ice Casket presented on its pedestal before him, humming with latent power, ready to destroy him as soon as he picked it up and saw its effect on him, yet he continued forward, powerless to turn away from what it would reveal, no matter how poisonous.

"I want to see you turn blue."

I want to see you turn blue. The words echoed around Loki's head; he struggled to clear it. "I don't know how." His voice sounded mechanical to his own ears, an automated denial.

But more words were mixing in with Ollie's, forming a cacophonous swirl and leaving Loki breathing as heavily as though in the midst of fighting a physical battle.

I've never experienced what he has. Not exactly.

He said it feels like an itch.

Maybe he can teach you.

One of them touched me.

He drew in a deep breath, air hissing over the clench of his teeth.

"There…might be a way," he said before the fear could overcome and silence him. Ollie wanted this. What better way to show Ollie that it wasn't bad than to change himself, too? To allow himself to be changed.

Ollie was up on his knees now; Loki sat up and settled back against the headboard. Ollie scrambled to sit facing him on his lap when Loki patted it.

"If you, ah, turn blue first" – Loki disliked the phrase and its trivialization of everything turning blue meant as nothing more than a cosmetic change of skin color, but for the moment it served – "then, if you touch me, it's possible that I will also change."

Ollie's eyes blew wide again. "I can make other people turn blue, too?"

Loki had to stop himself from shaking his head. To him, this idea would have seemed a nightmare. To Ollie, it apparently seemed better than ice cream with chocolate fudge. "No. Only me. Because I…I came from Jotunheim, originally, remember? And I don't know if it will work. But we can try it, if you want to."

Ollie nodded so hard it was a wonder his head didn't snap off.

"All right then. I suppose…you can go ahead and…"

The change in Ollie – his expression, not his appearance – was swift. It was Loki's fault. He'd faltered, and his apprehension had become visible even to his four-year-old child.

"It's not bad," he said. "I just got a little nervous."

"Why are you nervous?"

"I…." He swallowed, started again. "Sometimes when we try new things, we feel nervous. Like when you were nervous about the bicycle car at Mr. Stark's other house."

"Oh. But you won't get mad at me?"

"No. No, Ollie, I promise I won't." He leaned down and wrapped Ollie in a tight hug. "In fact," he continued, hands clasping Ollie's shoulders as he pulled back, "I'm very curious to see how you do it. Perhaps I can learn from you. How about this." He ran his hands down Ollie's arms, then deliberately removed his hands, planting them flat on the bed on either side of him. "Let's count to five, and when we say 'five,' then you try to change. Do you think you can do that?"

"Okay."

"One," Loki said, Ollie chiming in and bouncing on his lap with anxious energy.

Ollie watched him closely for the next number and jumped in as soon as Loki said it.

When they said "four," Ollie squinted, not quite closing his eyes, and changed.

His son looked down at himself and sucked in a breath. "I did it too soon."

"That's all right," Loki rushed to say. His heart rate was picking up again, his breathing soon to follow, so he focused on maintaining his smile and calming himself. A Frost Giant was sitting on his lap. His son was sitting on his lap. His son with blue skin and enormous red eyes and those marks on his bare forehead. Still…somehow recognizably Ollie, from what he could tell while trying not to study him too closely for fear of Ollie noticing and being bothered by the scrutiny.

"Are you mad?"

"No. I told you I wouldn't be. You did…very well. You see? I was prepared this time. You didn't surprise me. You simply have to be careful about surprising people."

"Can I make you turn blue now?"

"You can try to make me turn blue now. It's all right if it doesn't work." They would have to talk more about not surprising people, a concept Ollie was paying no attention to. And another difficult, fraught conversation, though perhaps one that Jane could help with. But for now…how utterly peculiar that part of him wanted this to succeed, so as not to disappoint Ollie.

One little blue hand reached out, not for Loki's hand, as he'd expected, but for his face. Keeping his smile plastered on and not flinching away was a challenge, but he managed.

When it made contact, the skin was baby-soft, just like Ollie's regular skin, and cold, like bare hands outdoors on a wintry day. The cold sensation faded quickly, though, and from that alone Loki already knew it was working, that his own pale skin was rapidly retreating, overtaken by the blue.

He started at Ollie's other hand coming to rest on the other side of his face. Loki had averted his eyes without realizing it; when he looked again, Ollie was staring at him, gaze fixing on one spot on his face after another, wearing an expression of wonder.

"Do I look like that?"

"You do," Loki said, a little breathless, even though he didn't know exactly what he looked like.

"Why do your eyes look like that?"

"I…I don't know. It's what Jotun eyes look like."

"They're so big."

"Yes."

"And they're all red."

"Yes."

Ollie's hands slid up into his hair. "Your hair looks the same."

"Does it?"

Ollie nodded, then his hands flew back to his own head. "But I don't have any hair." He frowned, a familiar pouty look despite the strangeness of his face. Then he sucked in a breath. "You're changing back! Don't do that yet."

Loki lifted his hands from where they'd been gripping the sheets and took Ollie's, pulling them from his bare head. "It's because you stopped touching me."

The room turned warmer again, his perception of color and light subtly different again, enough so that he felt the first small spike of curiosity.

And he'd reached for Ollie's hand. Ollie's blue hand. The touch was instinctive, and utilitarian, but still he took a moment to focus on the familiar sensation of his son's hand in his, even as Ollie spoke up again.

"I want my hair back."

"You know how to make that happen."

The pout returned. "Not yet. Why do you have hair and I don't?"

"I have no idea."

"Maybe I did it wrong?"

"No. It's…it must be something about me. It's not you. You cause the change, but not how I look with the change."

Ollie didn't seem to understand that, unsurprisingly. Loki didn't understand it, either. His son was examining their hands now, pressing them palm-to-palm and turning them this way and that. The inspection was so close that Loki wondered if Ollie's vision was affected more than his own.

A few seconds later Ollie sucked in a dramatic breath, eyes jumping back to Loki's. "I wonder what my feet look like!"

Loki smiled. Amazingly, it wasn't forced at all. "I don't know. But I know how we can find out."

Ollie immediately let go of Loki's hands and dove for his socks, but Loki grabbed for Ollie's again. "You have to keep touching me if you don't want me to change back, remember? Let's work together to get one of your socks off."

Ollie liked that idea. Coordinating their efforts with one hand each was a challenge, but they managed to get the sock off. Loki allowed himself to study Ollie's feet, while Ollie did the same.

"My toes look funny."

"Hm. They do look…a little thicker? Your toenails also look a little thicker."

Ollie's hands went straight for his feet, again dropping Loki's; this time he wrapped a hand around Ollie's arm to maintain the contact. Little toes wiggled while little fingers poked and prodded and pried. When Ollie's head moved for a new line of sight, Loki knew what would follow.

"What about your toes, Papa?"

"Well…perhaps I should get my own sock off…but I think I'll need both my hands for that."

"Ummm…I'll hold onto your ears!" Ollie exclaimed, an outburst of giggles following.

Loki leaned forward, Ollie working his way behind, and they shifted positions until Ollie indeed had a grip on Loki's ears. The pull was uncomfortable but bearable as Loki leaned further to get his sock off.

"Why does it feel rough here?" Ollie asked as his hands began wandering over Loki's face.

"Where?" Loki asked, freezing for an instant before tugging his sock off the rest of the way.

"Here," Ollie said, rubbing his hands over Loki's eyebrows. "Oh! And here!" Hands rubbed over the bones ringing the outer orbital socket.

"I don't know." Loki reached up with one hand to feel the areas for himself. The skin was rougher there, and the tiny laugh lines normally there felt a little more prominent. The area around his eyebrows protruded slightly. A few raised lines trailed over his forehead.

His son, meanwhile, slid around to his lap again, this time keeping a hand on Loki's neck the entire time. Ollie's other hand traced over his own face.

Loki again tried not to look, focusing on his own exploration.

But then Ollie jerked and gasped; Loki looked at him to find his face marred with obvious fear. Fingernails dug into Loki's neck.

"What is it, what's wrong, Ollie?"

"I don't have any ears!"

"You—." Before Loki could get any further, or even think about Ollie's ears, he became aware of the increasing cold where Ollie's hand clutched at his neck. He shifted a little and gently drew Ollie's hand away, clasping it in his and confirming with a glance that a thin layer of ice had formed on it. Ollie didn't seem to have noticed.

His son could make ice. And freeze non-Jotuns with a touch, he was certain.

Loki's heart raced. But this was still Ollie. Still his child. And his child was frightened. Loki's fears and whatever else it was that turned his breath shallow and made it hard to think clearly would have to wait.

And another difficult conversation lay in the future.

For the first time, he looked closely at Ollie's other face, trying to control his breathing as he did so. "You do have ears. Two of them, just like always."

"But I don't feel them!"

"They're…different. Smaller. The, ah…here. Feel this?" Loki asked, drawing the hand he still held up to his own ears, which felt no different from their normal shape. "It's only this upper outer part of the ear you don't have. I think it's called the helix. But you definitely still have ears. Besides the fact that I can see them there, do you know how else I know?"

"How?"

"You can hear."

"Oh!" Ollie laughed a little, still cupping a hand over his reduced ear, still looking a little uneasy despite the laughter.

"Feel it, it's right there."

Ollie rubbed the ear tentatively with his whole hand, then in the next second Loki was grasping his wrist and pulling his hand away. "Nothing smaller than your elbow goes inside your ear." That one came from Jane, and thinking of her now sent a shiver down Loki's spine. Not only was it right that he be the one to talk to their son about this, the very idea of her presence here now was almost unbearable.

Ollie switched to more pointed rubbing with the pads of his fingers, and when one briefly and shallowly dipped inside, this time Loki let it pass.

Now that he was looking, he couldn't stop. He'd been aware before, in a general sense, that Ollie's face like this was off in some way. He hadn't dwelled on it, had hoped he wouldn't be seeing it again. The ears were one of the things that was off. Clearly ears, but also clearly not Aesir or Midgardian ears. The eyes, obviously. The childhood nightmares he'd had about those eyes! Waking up in the middle of the night, his chambers pitch dark, nothing but huge red eyes visible, staring at him, ready to attack, to devour. The marks on Ollie's forehead, not simply marks but thin shadow lines created by slightly raised areas, like the scar from an improperly treated wound, and not haphazard but in a clear pattern, one not so dissimilar from what Loki had felt on his own forehead. On Ollie's cheeks, hints of protrusions, bony growths he knew to be both more numerous and more prominent on grown Frost Giants – bones still growing in children, then, perhaps.

"Do I look like you?"

Ollie was watching him, had caught him staring.

The answer to Ollie's question was complex and difficult, made more so by gaps in Loki's own understanding. He could have written a book on it, if he didn't drive himself mad with it before finishing. Why Ollie looked as he did, why Loki looked as he did, what was real and what was not, what all of it meant.

None of that mattered. Jane was right. Ollie only needed the basics. And, at least for right now, Ollie wasn't the only one.

"You look like my son. No matter what you look like, my Oliver, you look like my son. And I love you very much."

"To the very very top?" Ollie said, letting go of Loki's hand and quickly wrapping them around Loki's neck.

"To the very very very top, whether you have any hair there or not."

Ollie laughed and launched himself forward to hug Loki. "I love you, too, Papa."

It wasn't quite as instantaneous as he knew it should have been, but Loki's arms did rise and encircle Ollie, accompanied by an embarrassingly audible hitch in his throat, something between a groan and cut-off whimper. He was embracing what he had feared as a child, what he had trained to fight and kill as a youth and young man, what he had tried to make extinct a scant few years ago. That awareness, those memories, were all still there. But no matter how large those long-ingrained ideas loomed in him, when he closed his eyes and breathed in the scent of mint toothpaste, he was also keenly aware that he was embracing his son who he loved more than his own life. The incongruity of it needled at his flesh and his mind, but it did not control him.

"Oh, Papa!"

"What is it?" Loki asked, mustering a smile and dreading the new crisis. But when Ollie drew back, arms still around Loki's neck, his expression was one of excitement, not fear.

"If I don't have any hair, then I don't have to get a haircut!"

"We can discuss that later." Ollie liked his hair being cut about as much as he liked his teeth being brushed. Loki's chest tightened imagining Ollie switching to this form every time he or Jane tried to take him to a barber.

Ollie remembered Loki's bare foot, then, twisting around on Loki's lap, but this time he remembered to grab on to Loki's hand immediately after.

Loki thought his feet and toes looked exactly the same as they always did, other than the pigmentation. Ollie thought so, too, and seemed disappointed when he said so.

They made a game of it for a few minutes, Ollie playing with Loki's toes and Loki feigning ticklishness. Loki appreciated the moments lacking in new drama and exploration as a chance to catch his figurative breath. Before long, though, Ollie bored of that and turned around again, going back to examining Loki's face, this time prying at his lips and looking at his teeth. Loki shuddered to think what Ollie might see there. He'd seen images of Frost Giants with sharp, jagged teeth, the better for ripping into the tender flesh of Aesir children. Looking back on those he'd seen in person, he couldn't recall seeing such teeth.

Loki drew Ollie's hand away from his face before Ollie could comment on it – those fingers were probably headed for the inside of his nose next, anyway. "I think that's probably enough of that for now. We should get you some breakfast. But do you have any questions? About…about me being adopted? Or…that I was born on Jotunheim? Or anything at all? You can ask me anything, Ollie."

While Loki watched and waited, Ollie looked deep in thought, eyes wandering around the room, until he looked back up at Loki and nodded.

"All right," Loki said, steeling himself for it. How foolishly arrogant he'd been, less than twenty-four hours ago, coolly informing Tony that he did not fear questions from a four-year-old. "Ask me."

"Can I have some LEGOs?"

"So—. What?"

"Like Morgan has in her room. Pleaaaase, Papa?"

"I, ah, I'll ask Mr. Stark about them. Or your mother. She may have played with them when she was your age."

"Mama played with LEGOs? Yay, yay, yay! We'll play LEGOs together, all three of us! We'll build a telescope for Mama. Can I have Raingrain for breakfast?"

"I don't think they have it here," Loki said, instinctively reaching for Ollie's hand when his son started bouncing around on him and let go. "Raingrain" was Ollie's invention from a couple of years ago, an early garble of Rainbow Grain children's cereal.

This time Ollie yanked his hand away. "You can change back now. I want my hair back."

The blue receded, last of all from the hand that had just touched Ollie's; Loki sighed with relief when at last he was fully himself again.

Then Ollie started thumping his leg on the bed and Loki looked over at him to find his face screwed up in frustration. Before Loki could say anything, he changed forms and visibly relaxed.

He should ask. If his son had struggled to change back, or was otherwise troubled in any way by this experience, he should ask. But he didn't think he could take any more of this at the moment. And Ollie, now busy searching for his sock, didn't seem bothered by it anymore, whatever it was.

The sock was hiding under Loki's leg, and in a few minutes all shoes and socks were back on and Ollie was racing out of the bedroom, head on a swivel as he took in the place where he'd spent the night. They started down the stairs, and despite Loki's warning not to, Ollie took the last three at a jump. Loki didn't have it in him to scold at the moment.

"Mr. Stark! Where's Morgan?"

"Ollie, say good morning." Ollie knew how to be polite. Midgard seemed to be sucking the manners right out of him. Tony was still there at the kitchen bar, putting down a tablet when Loki followed Ollie into the kitchen.

"Good morning, Mr. Stark. Where's Morgan?"

"Good morning to you, too, Squirt. Morgan's hanging out with her mom this morning. But you know what you look like?"

Loki's eyes instantly went to Ollie, heart recovering from its skip when he saw that Ollie looked entirely normal. Ollie's first reaction was also to look down at himself, perhaps also wondering if he'd changed back.

"What?" Ollie asked; Loki recognized confusion in his voice.

"You look like a young man who needs some breakfast."

"Raingrain, Raingrain!"

Loki opened his mouth to correct his son, but in the end sighed and ran a hand through his hair. Ollie clambered up on one of the raised chairs at the kitchen bar and Loki came alongside him, dropping the bag Jane had packed for Ollie onto another of the chairs. So much for heading right back to the hotel.

"Hm. You know, I'm fresh out of rain grain. Gotta remember to put that on the grocery list. You like oatmeal?"

"It's sort of similar to Raingrain, but it doesn't make a rainbow."

"We can give it a little bit of a rainbow. Blue and red, anyway. Blueberries and strawberries? Oh, and there's a little bit of mango left for some yellow."

"He likes all three. Blueberries are more exciting. We don't have them on Asgard," Loki explained while Ollie expressed his giddy enthusiasm for blueberries. Ollie's morning surge of energy clearly hadn't gone away, it had merely been postponed.

"Papa! Can we show Mr. Stark?"

For a few seconds, Loki could do no more than blink. His vision tunneled, wind rushed in his ears. Tony was saying something. "Show me what, Squirt?" No. No, they could not…. Ollie was reaching for him. Everything rushed back into focus and Loki twisted away before Ollie could touch him.

"Uhhhh, maybe later, huh? Let's get you some breakfast now."

"Okay. But we have to show you later. And Morgan. Oh, and Mama! Papa, where's Mama? We have to show Mama!"

"We have to show Mama."

"Loki. Hey, Loki. I know it's early but it's time to wake up now. You listening?"

Tony's face swam into focus, right in front of his. When had he gotten so close? Why was it so hard to breathe? It felt like someone had bled the air from the room.

"The newspaper should've come by now. You mind getting it for me? Outside, by the front door."

"What?"

"Newspaper delivery. Will you go out and get it? Take a few while you're there. Go for a walk if you want. Ollie and I'll be fine."

In lieu of words he apparently wasn't capable of forming, Loki nodded. He glanced around Tony to find Ollie absorbed by Tony's tablet, started to say something, nodded again, then headed for the stairs.


Notes

I was thinking, in editing this chapter and working on the next (it's not finished, I don't strictly follow that rule with this story, it's finished "enough"), how very very much of what I write is personal. Not personal-personal, but just little things that make it in that come in some way from my own experience or observation. When Ollie says "I could not fit inside" and "I was so little," I hear my friend's son (and see his grin) who speaks, or least used to, with that pattern, which is where I got it. Ollie's excited about the blueberries because I really like blueberries and have only been able to get frozen ones where I currently live; I got used to frozen blueberries on yogurt and the local cottage cheese, but then for months I couldn't even get hold of any frozen ones (I finally got some today in a grocery delivery order! so freaking excited!). But it's not like I'm looking for ways to reflect my life in here, it's just what comes to mind, but of course it comes to mind because it's in fact on my mind, from my own life. I imagine all writers do this, that's is simply a natural thing, but I don't really know.

In any event, I hope you enjoyed the chapter! You know I love me some angsty Loki and this is such a different window to look at some of his issues through. Also, I am pretty sure I made myself cry while writing it. Finally, I waffled and in the end decided to go with "Lokasson" for Ollie's patronymic instead of "Lokison." "ildragodoro" tells me this is how it would be in Old Norse (though with a diacritic over the "a"). While I don't write these guys as equivalent to the Old Norse people, somehow to my ear this sounds so much nicer. See ya next time. One more chapter? Not entirely sure. :-) 3/28/21