There is a particular kind of person who survives by becoming invisible.
Not literally. Not magically. Just – small. Quiet. Folded inward at every edge until you take up as little space as possible and hope the world forgets you're standing in it. Some people are born that way. Some people are made that way, slowly, by the accumulated weight of other people deciding they don't matter.
Loki was made.
He didn't have a dramatic origin for it. No single incident he could point to and say – there, that's where it started. It was gradual, the way erosion is gradual. The way water finds every small crack in stone and widens it, patient and indifferent, until one day the stone just gives. Years of being the last picked, the least noticed, the one whose name teachers forgot between September and October. Years of being the kind of smart that other kids found threatening and then, when they learned he wouldn't fight back, decided to find funny instead.
He wasn't weak in the way people assumed. He was simply – careful. He understood intuitively that reacting cost more than absorbing. That a fight responded to was a fight you lost twice: once in the hallway and once in the principal's office. So he absorbed. He kept his head down. He went to the library when other people went to lunch, and he read, and he built a life inside books that was quieter and more interesting than the one outside them.
He was a scholarship student at university when it ended. Engineering department, top of his coursework, known to his professors as meticulous and to his classmates as essentially a ghost. He had a small room, a large reading habit, and three acquaintances he saw twice a semester. He was not happy exactly, but he was stable. He had plans. There were books he hadn't finished yet.
He never got to finish them.
The details don't matter. They never do, in the end – the specifics of how something breaks. What matters is that it was ordinary. That it was the kind of thing that happened to people like him, had always happened to people like him, and would go on happening after he was gone. Boys who didn't know when to stop and a boy who had never learned how to run. An ordinary corridor. An ordinary cruelty that went, simply, too far.
He was twenty-two years old. He had never been anywhere that felt like home.
He woke up in darkness, which seemed appropriate. Cold and wet and surrounded by noise he didn't have the vocabulary to process yet, lungs working on instinct, someone's hands around him that he couldn't see. And then light – not the comfortable, fluorescent light of a library or a dormitory hallway, but something warm and amber and unsteady, like fire.
He cried, because his body demanded it.
He didn't understand what was happening, because he was newborn and his mind was not yet his own.
But somewhere underneath the noise and the confusion and the shock of existing again in a body that didn't belong to him, something watched. Something that had been very, very practiced at staying quiet and absorbing everything around it and filing it carefully away for later.
He had been here before. Not this place – not this darkness, not these hands, not this strange amber light. But this feeling. The feeling of arriving somewhere uninvited, unwanted, uncertain of the rules, and needing to learn them fast enough to survive.
He had done that before.
He could do it again.