Finally Belonging

Chapter 1

This is a fanfiction I started years ago. I want to clarify that I do not in any way view neuro-divergence as brain damage, but Loki was abused to the point of sustaining brain injuries as well here.

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Nobody had ever really wanted Loki around. After all, he was a Frost Giant, a monster. But for some reason, Odin had rescued Loki as a baby when he'd defeated Laufey, Loki's father and leader of Jotunheim. Apparently, Loki could make a good bargaining chip.

So everyone in Asgard put up with the Jotun, if only barely. Not that they were particularly nice to him. Loki was never loved. Even Frigga had been turned away by the coldness of his Jotun skin, before he'd been disguised to look like an Asgardian. But everybody knew what he was underneath that fake skin, and they bullied him relentlessly for being a Jotun monster. They claimed the fake skin was so they didn't have to look at his ugly blue form.

So Loki grew up alongside the royal family but never considered a part of it. He spent most of his life trying to avoid people as much as possible. But somebody always found him and tormented him for something. For being a scrawny weakling (by Asgardian standards), for being a complete failure at fighting. If they ran out of new reasons to bully him, they always fell back to the fact he was a Frost Giant.

When his magic started to show up, naturally but unwanted, things got even worse. Magic was frowned upon in Asgard, and Loki didn't have a good grasp of his magic in the beginning. When he'd accidentally turn somebody's hair pink or blow up a vase or have three illusions of himself running around, he would be punished.

Loki had received countless beatings in his life- often for no reason whatsoever besides boredom or annoyance from whoever was beating him- and had apparently suffered one too many blows to the head. Although his body healed quicker than anyone in Asgard (most likely because of his hated magic), injuries to the brain were different. They stayed. People started voicing the idea that damage to his brain had made him weird, and even more of an idiot than they already thought he was.

Eventually, everybody grew tired of Loki. They doubted he'd make much of a bargaining chip in his state. So why put up with him anymore?

Most of Asgard would have been just fine locking him away in the dungeons or just killing him, but Thor had convinced them to dump him in Midgard, where Thor himself was a member of a group called The Avengers.

So Loki had been sent off to Midgard, and the last Asgard saw of him was him reveling joyfully, semimaniacally at the sight of Heimdall's dome and the rainbow-colored Bifrost.

A voice with a British accent interrupts the silence. "Sir, a man just landed on your roof." Jarvis says. Tony is busy in his lab, so it takes a bit to pull his mind out of what he was working on and register the words. When he processes what the AI had just told him, Tony's first thought is "What the hell?"

"What is a man doing on my roof and how did he get there?" Tony asks. Is he some sort of evil megalomaniac villain trying to break into the tower? Should he suit up? Jarvis can't supply an answer other than that the man appears to be unconscious. Well, Tony supposes that there's no need for his suit. Tony closes the holograms he was working on and exits the lab. As he climbs the stairs leading to the roof, he has no idea what to expect.

Still, once he gets on the roof, he's surprised at what he sees.

Tony stares at the unconscious man lying in front of him in shock. He is almost absurdly pale, which contrasts with his black hair reaching just past his shoulders. The man's dressed entirely in clothes that would have easily fit into a renaissance festival.