The concept of reincarnation was no stranger to me. You could find it everywhere you looked in the the twenty-first century; television, novels, manga, and animation. Ironically, reincarnation or transmigration was my favorite trope.
I had always im...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
He was not supposed to care. That was the shitty rule. The unspoken agreement between gods and mortals. They were dust and fireflies, flickering too fast to matter. He was the god of mischief, not some dumb mercy.
And yet, there was the matter of the mortal that died because of his carelessness.
Felix, or Akku depending on the timeline, had been nothing more than a stray. A mistake. An inconvenience Loki accidentally got killed during one of his more elaborate tricks gone wrong. Death had not been amused and feeling indifferent, Loki had shrugged. Gods didn’t mourn the short-lived. Mortals were fragile by design.
But Death demanded he fix what he broke. Loki was amused and a little bit guilty, the bastard agreed. In his own way. He gave the boy three co-called wishes: unnatural strength, rapid healing, and a mind built like a palace. It wasn’t out of kindness, it was a deal like a lazy fix. Death, well mostly Loki, simply tossed Felix back into the mortal world like a stray cat.
He didn’t even say goodbye, just simply turned his back and did what he usually did.
And when the child died again, there was trouble. Not the entertaining kind, either. Trouble of the cosmic, bureaucratic variety. Loki dramatically groaned, bent time, rewound events and found the boy once more. This time, Felix was bleeding in the manor, lungs barely moving, eyes half-lidded. The fire had taken his family. Again.
“Oh, not again,” Loki muttered, more annoyed than worried.
He knelt beside the broken child and, reluctantly, shared a thread of his divine essence. Just enough to tether the boy to life, to the timeline, to himself. He told himself it was temporary. Just until the boy got on his feet.
He stayed for a while after that; keeping an eye, wandering close.
Finally, the stupid child survives the fire. So Loki bent time, pushed back a few realities, and found the boy almsot spilling his guts out, barely breathing in the woods.
Again, Loki stayed.
Felix didn’t register much information as Loki hoped but that did not matter. The boy clung to the strange god who sometimes offered... 'warmth'. The boy was cautious, clever and so very breakable. Even asked how Death was doing, ha! laughable! but acceptable. Madam Langlois appeared not long after--a woman wrapped in a steel silk. Loki let her take over. He had hoped her presence might stabilize the child and it worked but only a little.
Loneliness lingered around Felix. He didn’t ask for companionship, but it was obvious in the way he flinched at silence.
So Loki made Damian.
Clay and water. Breath and magic. A boy-shaped comfort to soothe a grieving soul. A younger brother, small and strange, with voice loud as drums. How do those small humans cry so bloody loud?
“There,” Loki had said, dropping the boy into Felix’s arms like a pet.
'Something to look after. Try not to break this one.' Of course, he did not say that out loud.
It was a joke, a soft cruelty. He didn’t expect Felix to actually care but the mortal held Damian with such reverence, something tightened in Loki’s chest, which he ignored it.
Then came the strangest thing. Felix called him Father.
Ew.
Loki almost laughed. He allowed it because why not? If it brought the boy peace, if it gave him some illusion of safety, then fine. Let him believe. False hope was just another form of mischief.
And yet, when Felix called him that again, with such desperate sincerity, it stuck somewhere deeper than Loki liked. The boy seemed so unbothered, as if the death of his parents was just a simple occurance but... he remembered the first night after the fire.
When he caught the boy vomiting in the woods, after the fire that took his parents, after the dreams that twisted his mind, he didn’t walk away. He crouched beside him, wiped his mouth, didn’t say a word.
What a bloody nuisance this child was.
Why stay? He wasn’t sure.
Maybe because Felix’s shoulders had stopped shaking the moment he felt a hand on his back.
Maybe because it was amusing to see a mortal try so hard to hold himself together.
Or maybe because he had forgotten what it was like to be needed.
It should have ended there but it didn’t.
Madam Langlois never questioned Loki’s presence. She just watched with those calculating, dangerous eyes. She reminded him of the old gods; sharp, quiet and bound by strange honour.
He eventually left, of course and he always did.
By then, Felix got older and somewhat stable. Strong enough, Loki reasoned to care for the brother he had been given. Loki didn’t say goodbye this time either. He just drifted away, letting the mortal weight slip off his shoulders.
But he kept the tether.
He still felt it--moments of peace when Langlois hummed while teaching Felix to cook, or when Damian hurled a book at his older brother and missed on purpose. Shawn being Shawn, just brings Fei happiness. Loki would pause wherever he was and sigh.
Mortals and their sentiment. He’d get his divine essence back eventually. He could wait. They were just a project. A cosmic joke.
But the joke was wearing thin. Because he no longer watched out of obligation.
He watched because they were his.
His strays. His chaos-born children.
And maybe even gods, sometimes, like to linger near the fire.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
