On Punching Gods and Absentee Dads

Enigmaris

Chapter 14: Let's Talk in Private

Summary:

Odin has a few important realizations and Harry really, really needs to figure out how to keep his mouth shut. It's going to get him in trouble at some point.

Notes:

I'm back!!!!! The field work was amazing! I got nearly eaten alive by mosquitoes, it snowed at one of our campsites, we camped next to a forest fire a week after that. And! at the last place I almost got bitten by a Rattlesnake!

Thankfully I didn't get sunburned tho.

Thanks so much for the amazing comments the past two weeks every time I got signal the emails from AO3 made me grin with delight!

Chapter Text

His first reaction would have been rage. It should have been. An upstart demi-god that looked so weak that a stiff breeze could send him tumbling to the marble floor was telling him off. It should have been nothing but enraging. Odin should have slammed Gungnir on the floor and forced him to the floor. The utter gall of the child to look up at the most powerful man in the nine realms, on whose good graces he was relying on to get him and his family back to earth safely, and call him a bag of dicks. It should have ended in a rage.

To his left he saw Frigga stiffen and almost reach for her own sword. Loki had the most naked expression of emotion Odin had ever seen. Not even the painful scene on the broken Bifrost compared to the sheer terror that Loki displaying. The unknown human was holding his magical focus ready to jump to the demigod's defense.

It was all entirely unnecessary.

Odin wasn't enraged. He should have been but he wasn't. He looked at the young half human and saw the exhaustion in him. That boy had been ground down to near dust by his short life. Trauma had settled itself on the boy's shoulders like a cloak. For all the pain, the boy wasn't cowed. He looked at Odin as if he were nothing but an inconvenience, as if he were just one more ridiculous problem that the boy would deal with because no one else had the guts. His green eyes sparked, not with magic or madness, but with indignation.

If there was one thing that Odin could respect it was someone with mettle.

"I do not honestly believe so." The tension in the room snapped with his words. The young man blinked a little stupidly at him. "That is the answer to your question."

Loki looked so very lost while the unknown human looked absolutely delighted. Frigga had lowered her hand away from her sword. He should probably be bothered that his beloved wife had been willing to threaten him over the boy.

"I…right." The boy said, looking at him with slightly less tenacity in his eyes.

"Will you answer a question of my own?" The boy nodded a little. "Your mother, who is she?"

"My mother is dead. Her name was Lily, she died protecting me from a dark magic user when I was a baby."

"And where was your father?"

"Doing the same."

"I see. Faking his death once again to run from the consequences of his actions."

"No. You're not listening to me." The demi-god said in a tone that made it clear that he would be listened to. "My dad, Loki, had placed himself in a human body with a lock on his magic. That body, the person he was, was murdered the same night my mum was. He thought I'd been killed too. For the past 14 years he's been mourning the loss of a wife and son."

Odin glanced over at Loki to see flashes of half suppressed grief. The same flashes that Odin had assumed were jealousy and bitterness. Flashes that had been as common as a cloud in the sky. The past decade came into focus for him in a way that was less than pleasant.

"I find it hard to believe that Loki would ever willingly play human."

"As a human he found people who loved him." The demi-god spat making it clear what he thought Odin had felt for Loki. "He had friends, a family that choose him because of who he was not despite it."

"A pretty lie."

"I don't lie." The boy shot back. "And you can have that promise in my blood."

The demi-god lifted his right hand up so that Odin could read the words written in scars on the back of it. He recognized the cause of it immediately. A blood quill. No one sane would ever willingly use something like that enough for a mark to sink in so deeply. The hand dropped when Loki literally growled when he saw it.

"I don't lie." I can't lie.

"Who did that to you?" Odin asked.

"A teacher who didn't like the truth." He said like it was nothing, perhaps it wasn't to him.

"Midgard is far more depraved than I previously thought."

"Funny. I was about to say the same for this place."

"You have no idea what…"

"Do you even know my name? Did you even listen to your wife when she told you?" He was chagrined to realize that he hadn't. A huge breech in protocol. "That's what I thought."

"Perhaps this isn't a conversation to have in the throne room." Frigga suggested. "We should retire to a private room, and clear the air."

"As always, dear wife, you have impeccable advice. Come, we will speak in my study."

All of them moved as Odin stood and he lifted up a hand.

"Only the boy."

"No." Loki said. "He will not-"

"Dad. It's fine. How about you find us some food while I talk to him?" When Loki looked doubtful, and even tempted to make a run for it the boy tried again. "He's no Tom Riddle."

"Fine." He said before sending Odin a very murderous look. Loki didn't trust Odin with his son but he had very little choice in the matter, Odin had made sure of that. Frigga sent a very similar look to Odin that he did his best to ignore.

He had no plans on hurting the child.

The demi-god followed him, head held high out of the throne room and into his private study. Odin motioned for the boy, who was swaying with exhaustion to sit, and was firmly rebuffed. He sighed, not even Hela as a child had been this willful and Odin had had to banish her to keep her from destroying the universe.

"You are tired." He said. "If we're to get through the conversation we must have, then you must sit."

"I've had worse."

"Sit or I will order that your father and the other mortal not be given food or shelter until you have."

The boy's eyes narrowed, frustration and anger in his posture. Stiffly he plunked himself down onto the very edge of the chair. Good, they might actually get somewhere.

"I want you to tell me why Loki became a human instead of studying magic in Alfheim."

"Why don't you ask him? He's the one who did it."

"I cannot trust his word."

"He's your son."

"He is lost to me."

"Maybe, you'd be able to find him if you didn't act like a dick all the time."

Odin narrowed his one eye in anger at the boy. Once was forgivable if only for the shock value but the boy was pushing it.

"You should not question me."

"You still haven't even asked my name. I've been in the same room as you for less than 10 minutes and I already know you that you don't know how to apologize or admit you were wrong. You spent the first half of me knowing you yelling at my dad without having any real context as to the situation and then you took me in here and you're going to do the same to me."

The boy's hand had words of warning on them. He didn't speak lies he spoke harsh truths. The boy had crossed his arms over his chest as if daring Odin to try and argue it. Odin found that he didn't want to. The words had struck true, there was very little Odin could do to deny them.

"I was a king first, a warrior second, and a father third." Odin said. "Kings don't have the luxury of being wrong."

"So, you just made all of your mistakes at home then?"

"None of my children turned out the way I hoped they would." He wouldn't mention Hela but he had tried to teach her to be a warrior like him, it hadn't turned out well. Thor he tried to teach to be soft and kind and while Thor was that he was also far too trusting and Odin had instilled in him a sense of arrogance. Loki? Odin had tried to do something in between how he'd raised Hela and how he'd raised Thor and that compromise had just resulted in bitterness.

"Do you think you were the father they'd hoped you'd be? You seemed really focused on how they've disappointed you."

"Must you always speak so bitingly?"

"When someone attacks my family and still hasn't apologized for it? Yeah I think I do."

Silence. Odin couldn't deny that he had the same protective instincts. If something were to happen to Frigga for instance, Odin knew he would have no limits when getting revenge. In comparison the boy was showing a great deal of restraint, far more than Odin had had at his age.

"What is your name?"

"It's Harry. Harry Potter."

"And your father's?"

"James Potter."

"Why did Loki become James?"

"There is a hidden community of magic users on earth." He said. "They went into hiding 400 years ago because they were being attacked for having magic. They used powerful spells to hide their existence and remove knowledge of them from the nine realms. My dad discovered the magical world and fell in love with it."

Of course, he had. Odin had no doubt that a magic only world would appeal to Loki in the way few things did.

"So, he stayed?"

"He wanted to experience it." Harry corrected. "He wanted to know what it was like to feel normal, to be normal. So he gave himself a human body that he entered as a baby, locking away his memories and keeping a lot of his magic back, so that he could know."

"So he lived fully as James then."

"Until he turned 18. But by that point he'd fallen in love with my mother and found friends so amazing he couldn't even think about leaving them."

The boy, Harry Odin corrected, looked almost comically dwarfed in the large chair he was in. Were all humans so small and frail looking? His limbs looked thin as sticks, with hardly any meat to them. Weren't demi-gods meant to be formidable?

"If he loved her, why not bring her here? Gain permission to marry her?"

"Would you have given it?" The boy shot right back. "Travel to earth was illegal, because of accidents like me. Loki feared he'd lose everything important and you'd keep him from the one place he truly felt happy."

The truth was that Odin would have been furious had Loki come to him. He wanted to deny it, to pretend he would have been reasonable. But Odin knew the truth. If Loki had told him the truth then Odin would have done something very drastic, he would have done everything in his power to tear Loki from that world before a demi-god, a force of destruction could be born. Odin could still remember the chaos and pain that the last one had brought to them. He had been a young child then, hiding behind his father's shield and trembling with fear.

So much death and corruption had spread out from that one man. His eyes had been flames of madness and with every sweep of his hand more of Asgard's foundations had been torn asunder. Even after Bor had beheaded the demi-god Odin hadn't stopped fearing him. His dreams had been haunted by the being that was neither mortal nor god but an unholy combination between the two. The very idea that Loki had helped create a being like that?

It should have been too terrifying to consider.

But Harry wasn't terrifying. He was annoying.

The boy was glaring at him, looking so tiny that he wondered if Frigga hadn't been mistaken. There was no madness, no thirst for innocent blood, no malice in the boy. He looked upset, angry and most importantly sane.

"You must understand." Odin said. "Demi-gods are not…"

"I am the only demi-god in the universe." The boy interrupted. "That means I get to decide what they are and what they're not. Not you and definitely not some asshole who died 4000 years ago."

Well. That was difficult to argue with.

"Then what are you?" Odin asked looking at the boy with his one eye, wishing he could see things like his wife could.

The boy looked…lost. Gone was the righteous indignation and the spunk that had kept Odin's rage from boiling over. Odin's question had blown the wind out of his sails. Now there was not even a single hint that this boy was anything but exactly what he appeared. A half-starved exhausted child. Harry said nothing for a while but slowly his hands began to curl into fists.

"I…I don't know." He said, looking up at Odin with the greenest eyes Odin had ever seen.

It was an answer that no one in the House of Odin would have ever uttered. Frigga always knew who she was even in the most confusing of times. Odin knew he was a king, and anything else was secondary. His children were all like him, prideful and stubborn to a fault. To admit to ignorance was too mortifying a thing to even consider. They were gods, they were meant to know who they were.

And yet while there was fear in Harry's eyes, there was no shame.

"Tell me about the man who murdered your mother."

And that was when the conversation went from humbling and revealing to shocking and painful. The boy, even when he wasn't trying to actively attack someone with his words, was blunt to a fault. For the next hour Harry laid down the ruin of Loki's family and the war in the magical world at Odin's feet. He spoke of murders, tortures, and dark magic that thwarted death. He spoke of 50 years of pain that Loki had tried to stop, all on his own, ultimately paying the price of everything he cared for.

Tom Riddle, an evil monster of a man. A man who had given up his very humanity in the name of power and destruction. A man who was now running around in a magically constructed body powered by the blood of a demi-god.

"I don't know if dad's realized that yet." Harry said. "That Tom took my blood to make his new body. But you know what that means don't you?"

"I do."

"There's a prophecy."

"Of course, there is."

"Don't sound so upset, you're not the one with the safety of the universe on his shoulders."

"I have born the weight of that responsibility for millennia."

"No, you haven't. You dropped it as soon as you could." Harry snapped out. "I don't know about the other realms but if you call the exactly zero number of things you've done in the last 2000 years for earth 'protection' then I shudder to think about the state of the realms who actually know you're in charge of them."

"Earth has not been attacked by outside forces for the entirety of…"

"You had 50 years to do something about Tom. And now there's a snake faced monster getting ready to not only reduce my planet to rubble but every other one." The boy said, his voice as final as the downward slice of a guillotine. "If I fail to…to kill him, nothing will stop him. He'll come here and every other realm and he'll destroy."

And the fear was back. The very first fear he'd known as a child struck his heart again and he found no comfort in the boy's eyes as he had in his father's all those millennia ago. He found no comfort there because the child was just as frightened. He looked even smaller now, the bravado long forgotten.

The enormity of his crime, of his failure, finally became real to him. His deliberate ignorance, his hands-off policy, his decision to leave every realm but his own to suffer while still claiming to rule them all. It was all coming to fruition now, in the form of a monster that was too powerful for him to slay. A monster that would swallow his kingdom whole as if it were nothing but a tiny morsel on the world tree. And unlike his father, he wouldn't be able to do anything but die along with his people.

Odin had tried to make peace. He had finished his father's mission and conquered every realm, corrupting his first-born daughter in the process. He hadn't realized until he looked at Hela's mad face just what he had become. He was a warrior, just as cruel and merciless as his father. So, he had attempted peace. But Odin didn't know peace, he never had. He had thought that doing nothing would be the same as making peace.

What a fool he had been.

He had lost his eldest to the madness of war, his youngest to apathy, and now he would lose his home. He closed his eyes and let his chin dip down, shame and guilt and horror threatening to drown him.

"I'm sorry."

The words weren't enough, they never would be. But Odin never apologized, and those two words were all he had to give. A measly offering to a demi-god who had every reason to strike him down for it, like a disobedient acolyte. He should be struck down. There would be no absolution for him. Not for his failings as a father, not for his cruelty as a king. And still he offered up two stupid, pointless words. Words that when offered to him in the past had been rebuffed for the useless things they were.

"I forgive you."

Odin's head snapped up to look at the boy. He looked surprised for a moment at the words that had left his mouth.

"What?"

"I forgive you." The boy said sounding much surer than he had the first time.

"Don't jest, child. My pride and apathy led to your mother's murder." If Odin had been better, Loki would have come to him and asked for help. If Odin had been better then Lily would have lived and Odin would have killed that monstrous viper before he could do one more evil thing.

"I know." The boy said.

"I contributed to your father's madness. My failings led him to invade your planet."

"That's true."

"The entirety of the nine realms is on the brink of destruction because of me."

"And I forgive you." Harry's voice was firm but still so kind.

"But I don't deserve..."

"Don't you get it?" The boy interrupted again. "Nobody deserves forgiveness."

Oh.

Odin didn't know what to say. He didn't know how to react. So he just sat there, not acting like a king with 5000 years of life experience under his belt. No, he acted like a child younger than the one before him.

"Look, do you promise to try and not be a dick all the time?"

"I…I'm not sure…how?" The enormity of what the boy was offering him had tied his tongue and made his words trip stupidly out of him.

"You could try listening to people?" The boy offered. "And offering to help instead of yelling at people when they do things you don't agree with. I dunno. Your wife seems pretty nice, try to be like her."

He finished that with a shrug. Odin wondered if he could. Change seemed impossible. And yet…hadn't he already begun? Instead of striking the boy down where he stood when he spoke today, Odin had…Odin had chosen something different.

"I'll try."

"Then I forgive you." He said it simply, as if he hadn't done something so impossible that it defied comprehension. The boy looked at him, and Odin knew he wasn't lying or even twisting the truth anymore. He had been forgiven. "So…what do you want to do now?"

Fly perhaps? The sheer relief from the boy's words made him feel as if he were flying. His head was too light for his shoulders. He shook his head just slightly.

"I imagine your father is crawling the walls with worry for you." His words caused the boy to snort.

"Yeah no kidding. You should have seen him when he found out about the basilisk I killed."

"A basilisk?"

"Yeah I killed it like…three years ago and he freaked out like it was in the room with us! Can you believe?"

Laughter escaped Odin before he quite knew it. He started to laugh, harder and harder. Odin had been quite wrong about this demi-god.

He was insane.

"What did I say?"

"Nothing." Odin said getting himself under control. He stood up from his seat and straightened his back. "Come on, let's go find your father and discuss how Asgard can help you with this Tom Riddle problem."

"Really?" The boy squeaked.

"Yes. It's high time Asgard…It's high time I answered the call of those I've sworn to protect."

"Cool." The boy said getting up from his chair and then looking at the door. He looked back at Odin slightly sheepish. "I don't actually know where anything is here…er All-Father."

"Follow me." Odin said leading the boy back to the door. "Tell me about this basilisk?"

"It's kind of a long story."

"Trust me, Harry. I've got the time."

"Well, it all started with a diary…"