Journey into...

How different are Aesir toddlers compared to human toddlers, do you think? 🙊 Are Thor's games hazardous? Are his temper tantrums dangerous to other scrawny mortal kids and their mortal teachers? Will Loki get a call one day bc Thor broke some poor brat's bones (really, it's just a few bones)

- Anon

Yeah, that is definitely a thing, and it’s definitely a problem. Thor is far stronger than his tiny body would suggest, and he’s not even really aware of it. Around Loki, it’s not an issue, and Loki’s the one he spent most of his time with when he was very small. When he gets big enough to play with the other mortal kids? It’s a problem.

But it’s only a problem once, because in addition to his Asgardian strength, he has his overdeveloped Asgardian sense of responsibility, so when Loki rushes over to the pair of kiddies next to the swings, Thor is wailing nearly as loudly as the kid with the broken arm. The arm is easier to deal with; a flash of magic and it’s just the lingering surprise and fear to deal with. Thor is tougher, guilty panic written all over him. He takes hours to even begin to forget about it, and his sobbing makes Loki’s heart ache. Loki tries to reassure him, tells him it wasn’t his fault, but Thor doesn’t quite seem to believe it. After that, Thor is so incredibly, carefully gentle around the other kids, and that makes Loki get a little choked up as well.

Of course, Thor would forget his strength sometimes, when he was emotional or excited; he’s only a very little kid, after all. But fortunately Loki prepared for that and spent quite some time devising a means to prevent such accidents from happening again, to protect Thor more than anything else. A little magical limit. (But with a failsafe built in for if Thor was ever really in danger; if anyone tried kidnapping him, they’d be dealing with an apparent four-year-old with the strength of a dozen grown humans. And that would be before Loki found out about it, and then things would get much worse for them.)

I imagine there're quite a few people with quite a few reasons to take custody of beby Thor though... Asgard, The Avengers, Shield.... Hydra.... 👀

- Anon

It’s a balancing act, because Loki knows just how many people would want to get their hands on Thor in his current form, small and vulnerable as he is, and though Thor is already strong enough to put up quite a fight if necessary, Loki is not entirely sure he would understand the need. In their old lives, Thor was so gullible as a child, so unable to understand that not everyone was a friend. Loki hasn’t wanted to find out if he is any different now. 

Honestly, he doesn’t want to have to explain to Thor that he might in fact be in danger. That the people of this world are not all kindly and caring. That plenty of them would hurt a child, especially if by doing so they thought they could steal godly powers for themselves or claim a bargaining chip or… or any of a number of other things that Loki doesn’t really like to imagine either. 

And even the ones who believed in the goodness of their own intentions would mean to take Thor away from him. 

So it is a balancing act, never quite explaining why it is that they so often move, traveling halfway around the world on what Loki always insists is his own mere whim. Carrying Thor on his shoulders while they become familiar with a new city here, or the countryside there, small sunny villages and remote cabins hidden in shadowed forests. They are fortunate that Loki can merely transport them and their few belongings under his own power; rarely must they stoop to watching the miles pass under clacking rails or turning wheels.

(Once, truly a whim, he brings Thor on an airplane, watches the boy press his nose against the window to stare out at the fluffy clouds, a look of slightly perplexed wonder on his face, as if caught up in a half-remembered dream.)

Loki feels a bit guilty about it, about how strange and confusing it must be for Thor. How lonely that nearly as soon as they’ve been someplace long enough for him to begin to make friends, they leave again at a moment’s notice, with no time to say farewell. 

But all it took was once. One time, when Thor wandered away from him on a busy street in London, and by the time Loki found him again, there was a woman beside him. Smiling down at him, his little hand clutched in hers as he leaned against her motherly skirt.

The instinct of distrust that had so often kept Loki alive was screaming. 

He approached warily, silent. She watched him come near, her smile calm and motionless as a shark’s smile.

As was the weapon in her other hand, the one Thor could not see.  

Loki never found out who she was with, what she meant to do. But he feels no guilt at all about what he did to her. His heart stopped racing, thumping on his ribs only after he had held Thor against them for hours. Thor was safe, and he hadn’t even really seen the blood, the chaos as Loki whisked him away. They’d gotten lucky.

That one incident was all it took. Loki doesn’t let them stay in one place very long after that.

(About the Hydra ask) What if they hadn't gotten lucky? :O What if one of Loki's former supervillain allies find them, and they assume Loki hates Thor as much as they do so they're like, "Oh, excellent, you have the boy. Our doctors have been dying to get their hands on him" and Thor looks at Loki all pale and confused

- Anon

This is one of the things I love so much about Loki. Because we all know how this scene goes, right? It takes him a second because to him, his issues with Thor are somehow separate from his villainy, even when they’re at the heart of it, and hearing someone else even mention the concept feels like they’ve overstepped on something very personal.

And even though he’s one of Earth’s major villains, he doesn’t really… fit… with the rest of his alleged peers. It’s not so much Evil Has Standards and not so much Blue and Orange Morality and more that it’s just in the nature of Loki to be an outsider anywhere you put him. 

And that’s why he reacts the way he does. It takes him a second to realize what they’re suggesting, but his poker face is excellent and his former allies don’t sense the storm they’ve called down; he lets them blather on for a few moments in their false sense of security. Even encourages it, while he shuffles around a few pieces on the board and gets everything in line. And, oh, he knows most of them don’t respect him, because his ambitions on this world are so different from theirs. Many of them wish to install themselves as overlord or enact some grand scheme to fit their ideals, whereas Loki has mostly satisfied himself with whatever game seemed most amusing at the time, usually with Thor at its center. So they believe he is inconsequential, even if they have seen him in action. 

They don’t realize they have only ever seen him playing. Killing time. They have never seen him enraged. 

The result is a massacre, in which he absolutely wipes the floor with them, with ease. None of them have any chance to escape or to survive.

And Loki doesn’t really want to let Thor see it. But he also wants Thor to know, in the deepest parts of his being, that Loki will always protect him when it’s necessary. No matter what.

And anyway it’s not like they never saw any bloodshed when they were growing up together the first time. So this can’t be that much worse. 

And Loki is not the cause of it, anyway. His once-allies were the ones who chose to voice those suggestions where Thor could hear. It’s not his fault; he only took action to stop them. They really gave him no choice about it.

Loki tells himself all of that, but it doesn’t actually help much when he’s having to soothe a traumatized, frightened little Thor afterward.

Thor does bounce back quickly; he nods solemnly when Loki explains why those bad people said that, when Loki tells him that when he was still a grown-up, he and Loki used to fight sometimes, and that because grown-up Thor was so strong and powerful and their fights were thus so showy and the humans of this world are not used to gods among them, people didn’t understand that they could fight and still love each other. Thor seems to take in this explanation after only a few questions. But he still wakes up with nightmares for a while afterward, and it all leaves Loki with a sickly hollow in his belly. He knows he has to do better for Thor in the future. He’s just not sure how. Or if he can.