"Growing Pains" - Loki + Thor (AU movie!Marvelverse) - {Chapter II}

[wordsworn]

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A/N: Super-short chapter. But Chapter III is shaping up to be pretty long to make up for it.

Cross-posted in the comments of Round 1 @ norsekink.


{ .II. } {In Which Loki Realises His True Nature}

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Though he spends the first few weeks following his tenth birthday feeling horribly uncertain of who he is and even what he is, Loki soon manages to accept the truth. It takes another look at the Casket and his skin’s extraordinary and odd reaction to it, this time alone and late in the night, but it feels right somehow, touching that relic. Like coming home, somehow. And that’s all the proof he needs.

Odin and Frigga are exceedingly careful not to change their treatment of him, though in actuality, if anything they become more protective. Frigga hugs him often, nearly every time she sees him those first few weeks; Odin treats him the same as ever, just as he treats Thor (or at least as much as he ever has). Both let him know through word or touch or subtle glance that they are there for him, and willing to talk should he feel the need to discuss his Jotun heritage or anything of the sort. Loki accepts these reassurances for what they are, but though their support fortifies his sense of security in the family hierarchy, as the years go by, a subtle sort of distance arises around and within him. Asgard is his home, its royal family is his family, through blood shed if not blood born, and he could never think it otherwise. Without the Casket and its undeniable effect on his skin colour, he would find it hard, even impossible to believe that he isn’t truly Odin’s child. Whatever he may look like, he doesn’t feel any different, not even when his hands, his arms, the tip of his nose, every bit of skin he can see and much more that he can’t are all a deep blue; he doesn’t feel like a monster. He just feels like himself, exactly the same as he always has. So as time passes, in a way he almost forgets all about that conversation in the weapons vault and everything he’s learned about his origins, that uncomfortable truth.

At the same time, he can never forget. Every time Thor calls him brother, every time Odin and Frigga call him son, he remembers. And every time he responds or replies in kind, he perpetuates that falsehood, until he nearly believes it again himself.

And it is through this, through protecting that heavy secret entrusted to him by Odin All-Father, that Loki Laufeyson first learns to lie without blinking.

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{Chapter III}