bygone.
Twenty-nine year-old detectives are not the norm, even in fairly barren precincts. It takes a lot of drive, a lot of persistence.
David Loki has both in generous measure.
He didn't always know that he wanted to make detective—hell, for a long time, he didn't even know he wanted to be in law enforcement. He was what social workers liked to call "troubled," though he wouldn't agree with that descriptor even then. At least, no more than any pubescent kid. Different, sure, but he wasn't exactly drowning kittens and picking on the littler kids. Quite the opposite, really.
Loki can't pinpoint the exact moment when he'd become committed to law and order. His parents weren't murdered by some fluke of the parole system (his dad had never been around; his mom died of a particularly aggressive strain of lung cancer when he was six—of course, it didn't help that she could barely make rent on her waitress's wages, let alone medical bills). He wasn't abused (at least, no more than was normal for foster parents before he grew tall enough to make them think twice about dealing out casual swats) or molested, though he knew kids who had been. Even as a child, Loki emanated something that made it clear that he was no one's prey.
Quite the opposite, really.
He supposes, when he takes the time to think about it, that it was the environment in which he had grown. Huntington Boys' Home where he'd gone into right after his mother's death, the home sponsored by the church where she had attended mass faithfully every week, toting little David along with her, wasn't so bad. The dog-eat-dog dynamic wasn't as pronounced as he'd find it later in the foster system, not with the severe Sisters watching over them with the constant reminders that Jesus expected them to love one another. Still, there was no shortage of bigger kids picking on little ones, sometimes to the point of really hurting them, and as little as he was, it was there that Loki took up the habit of fighting bullies.
It was a habit that got him expelled from temporary homes over and over again, starting with Huntington once he finally drove them to the end of their understanding and continuing well into his teenage years. It didn't much bother him, though. He'd never grown close to the Sisters, even as young as he was when he came to them, and he definitely never bonded with his foster families. It bothered him a little as a teenager ,the way he seemed incapable of developing relationships with people, but eventually, he let it go. It wasn't that he didn't care about people—he did, he really did. He just was only capable of caring from a distance.
Which was an understanding that actually helped him determine his career path.
As a child, Loki himself wasn't much for getting in actual legal trouble outside of his boyhood skirmishes, but he certainly had foster siblings that were, so he had plenty of opportunity to observe police officers at work. The good ones embodied his drive to protect those weaker than himself. The bad ones—and there were plenty of bad ones—were, in his eyes, bullies who would best be dealt with by someone their own size.
He wanted to be more than just a cop, though. He never thought about it in such sentimental terms, but… he knew there were hundreds, thousands, even, of people out there who desperately needed help, people that the system had given up on or overlooked—people like the little kids at his foster homes who got their faces shoved into brick walls every day on the way home from school.
Loki could help those people. Whether it was his personality, the patently unboyish solemnity and the willingness to fight back that seemed to repel would-be attackers, or whether it was something less logical, he knew he was designed to help.
Once he found a purpose, he encountered not a single quandary that was a match for him.
First goal: a bachelor's degree in criminal justice.
Easy said.
First, Loki had to repair his dismal record in high school. He was far from stupid, but grew impatient with mundane tasks with little payoff, and so his track record for the first few years was not impressive. Once he decided that he was going to be a detective, though, his grades made an abrupt about-face and stayed high until he graduated, miraculously on time and with a decent enough overall GPA to get into state college.
That was where things got tricky.
Newly eighteen, he'd finally been cut loose from the foster care system. They didn't just drop you, of course; you were assigned a social worker to make sure you had an apartment, a job, things like that. Being out of foster care wasn't the problem—the problem was that he had his own bills to pay, not many job options with his limited qualifications, and he was planning on four years of college with all its related expenses—and given the first few years fucking around in high school, his overall GPA, while enough to get him into school, was nowhere near good enough for scholarships.
He bit the bullet. He took out student loans.
It wasn't so bad, really. Tuition hadn't gotten quite as expensive as it eventually would, and the interest rate was fairly low. He supplemented the loans with a full-time job, working nights in the kitchen of a local diner—not exactly glamorous, but it paid minimum wage, and given that most jobs available for high school graduates dealt in customer service (i.e. required people skills, something Loki did not possess), it wasn't terrible.
And he liked criminal science. Even working forty hours a week and going to school full-time, he didn't have to struggle too much when it came to grasping his major. The texts made sense to him, another point in favor of his chosen career path.
He graduated a year late—there was only so much a man could do even if he was working as hard as he could—and spent the summer getting in shape (a diet of ramen noodles and multivitamins to ward off jaundice was hell on a man's body, making him soft in the wrong places and bony in all the other wrong places) and preparing for the physical tests and entry exam.
He cleared them with flying colors.
His first day, he made sure the precinct captain knew of his aspirations—not arrogantly or with any sort of presumption, but steadily and matter-of-fact.
Captain O'Malley just looked him over and said, "Well, we'll see about that, son. First you gotta pay your dues."
And Loki, who had been paying dues towards this job in one way or another since he was six years old, said "Yes, sir" and got to work.
Five more years passed. The work was hard, dangerous, and often ugly, but Loki never faltered, often putting in sixty hours a week—it would have been more, but the captain utterly drew the line there, saying that the work was dangerous enough without sleep deprivation making his officers clumsy to boot. Loki found a way to make his hours off-duty matter, anyway—he spent the time at home reviewing his textbooks, committing helpful information to memory, testing himself constantly.
And once a month, he submitted an official query, in writing, about the detective job.
Shortly after he turned twenty-eight, one of the older detectives on staff, Laprey, retired. Loki upped the queries from monthly to daily and doggedly refused to get his hopes up. There were officers that had been there longer than he had that wanted the job, and seniority meant a lot on this business.
One day, he walked in and the badge was sitting on his desk.
Captain O'Malley knew him as well as anyone could at this point, knew he wouldn't appreciate a big announcement in full view of everyone, so it was just that, the badge, laying solitary in the center of the neat surface.
Loki reached down and ran his fingertips along the cold edge of the metal.
And, what felt for the first time in ten years, he smiled.
A/N - I've seen the conclusion drawn that due to his tattoos in such visible places, Loki must have had some kind of criminal past before becoming detective, but I found that idea unlikely given how young he is and how much time it takes to actually become a detective. I figured there's no way he'd make detective that young if he'd had any sort of criminal record past the age of eighteen. He also seems to genuinely respect the law- not that he abides strictly by the book all the time, but he's a far cry from the "uncontrollable rogue cop" trope, and his work is very meticulous and attentive to the rules (even when he's flouting them). I think someone with a criminal past even as a teenager would be way more on the rogue cop side of things than the opposite, so I don't really see him getting into trouble except that which he encounters in trying to protect people. So. There's the reasoning behind that.
I also think that given his exchange with the waitress the first time we see him, he's probably deeply in debt. Given that you pretty much have to have a degree if you want to make detective before you're fifty, it's not hard to guess why.
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