Chapter Text
9:15 AM.
Loki sat down at his desk with an iced oat milk matcha frappuccino, covered in chocolate sauce and whipped cream, fashionably late, but just by fifteen minutes on the dot. Just like every day.
He flipped open his laptop uncaringly and with a sigh as he took a long sip off his glorified morning dessert.
Fridays were always like this for him.
They were the absolute slog of his workweek. Nothing ever happened besides deskwork. No client meetings, no interesting puzzles to solve, all reports, write ups, and emails about what he had accomplished.
So, he blew it all off.
He refreshed his work email with eight fast clicks, hardly giving the page time to refresh once let alone eight times.
He quickly scrolled through the forty new messages he didn't care to answer, and then clicked onto his personal browser and opened up his personal email.
After all, what could management do if they found out he was unproductive and apathetic; Fire him? They should've done that twelve years ago when he was hired. Well, that is kind of what you get when your father is the president of the company. But, to be perfectly fair Loki wasn't a bad employee.
He was a liability, sure, never on time, a bit of a drinker, and not particularly interested in following his job description, so he was pretty much never qualified for a promotion, but every now and again, he'd find the perfect project and have the sudden, and sometimes frightening, ability to channel every ounce of his energy into cracking the code, solving whatever the puzzle was, and fixing it without a hitch, just as long as no one ever interfered.
On top of this, he was a master with his words. Even the most stingy, uninterested potential client found themselves bending to his will and seemed to come out of each meeting in a strange dazed state before agreeing and signing up for their mailing list.
A few times, quite a few at this point, he had been commanded to train new employees, but due to his lazy nature, he usually only taught them how to slack off without a supervisor seeing and how to get by on the bare minimum.
It was a weird feeling being the younger and adopted son in a family of robber barons, but he had given up long ago trying to fill his father's place. He knew damn well that by the time his father retired he'd probably already have drank himself to death, and if not that, he'd be still stuck at his desk with the ol' 9:15 to 4:45 just with Brunnhilde, his father's right hand lady, at the helm instead.
He was not the favored child by any means, but at least he was capable of a college degree, three actually, and paying his own rent.
For comparison, one sister chose to do some soul searching and never came back from France after college and was never heard from again, the other was disowned very publicly about four years ago now at a New Years celebration, then there was his brother-- who was a little, and would never properly function in the adult world--, and him. So as far as Loki was concerned, he was doing pretty well by laying low and attempting the bare minimum.
Even if he wasn't next in line to take on the "family business", Loki at least felt some comfort in the idea that once his parents passed, he'd be left with a cushy fortune and easy living for the rest of his days.
As he looked at his email and wondered why he was there, waiting for messages he didn’t want to see to load, and prepared to click off-- ready to play some computer solitaire or an online game, perhaps the daily crossword that The New York Times put out-- one stopped him.
An urgent email, starred and right at the top.
It was from his mother, whom he had been in a phone correspondence with over the past few years.
The actual message was brief, only a couple sentences, but they were very clear, precisely worded, and conveyed a very specific message: That Loki needed to come home as soon as he could.
Loki scrunched up his nose in annoyance and thought very briefly about typing a quick message back about how frustrated he was, couldn’t she just say why? Why be so cryptic? Couldn’t she just text him like she normally did? Why even bother with email? But she had never been a direct woman.
Loki checked his clock, 9:18 AM, the time of the email-- two days ago-- and quickly typed in flights back to Norway, finding a 4:00 PM one right into Oslo, with about a thirty minute car ride home, if he could call one of his father’s chauffeur’s to take him. Not his current home, gods no, but the fancy modern mansion his parents had moved into when he was in second grade that he had grown up in, right on the seafront of Nesøya.
He stood up, stretched, and stuffed his computer into his bag. Taking a long sip off his only half-consumed drink before knocking on the glass door of his newest appointed supervisor.
When he received no answer, he slowly opened it, and waited for the man behind the desk to acknowledge him.
Eventually, he did, and in a way that suggested he hadn’t heard or seen Loki walk into the room. He gave Loki a warm and inviting smile quickly to save face and asked him to sit down.
He was new here, but he seemed to already have a pretty strong grasp on who Loki was, even though they had probably only spoken one or two times.
The supervisor reached across the desk to shake Loki’s hand. “Hey there, what can I help you with?”
Unfortunately, it seemed Loki didn’t have this same grasp.
“Hi, um, sorry to bother you, but I’ve just got an email and it says I need to go home.” He had presumed that this would be enough.
“Alright, let me see that.”
Loki panicked and froze a little bit. “I assure you it’s from my mother, you know, Odin Allfather’s wife?” He showed his boss the laptop anxiously.
The man leaned forward to examine it, an amount of scrutiny Loki wasn’t exactly used to from the management around him, who usually just let him do what he wanted. He also wondered if he could read it, as it was not in English, but Norwegian.
“Alright, go on ahead. But bring me a souvenir.”
Loki felt a wave of relief wash over him as he snapped the laptop shut, even though he wasn’t quite sure if the man was joking or not. “Thank you so much,” he said, in a way that he assured himself was just playing the game, making this man think he had any bearing on his life in any way.
And with that, he slipped into the elevator to rush home.