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Odin made good choices. This was what made him known. This was what had projected Asgard into its Golden Age, pulling most of the rest of the Nine Realms along with it. This was why Odin was the best king known to Asgard’s history. To any realm’s history, really. This was why he had the name Allfather.
So how could he have made ruins of the most vital heart of his life?
Nobody was perfect, of course. Odin did not always make the wisest choices, particularly in his earlier days. Stark in his memory was the incident with Muspelheim and the Titans; Surtr broke all pacts and Asgard still shuddered to remember it. Yet for the most part the Nine Realms hung in balance, and that was mostly Odin’s doing. That wasn’t pride or vanity speaking; even Asgard’s worst enemies would admit it. There were the occasional spats, and of course the long-raging war with Jotunheim. Nobody was perfect all of the time, yet Odin mostly managed to be just that.
Except for the one area he never seemed to get right. The one area where he continually made mistakes, struggled to fix them, broke relations further, until it was finally too late.
Thor was easy. The celebrations when he was born were unequaled in the Realms. Not because of Thor himself, exactly. Only because of the symbolic continuance of Odin’s own rule. Of course at first there were the usual awkward blunders that plagued all new fathers, even when the father was the ruler of the universe, even when Father became Odin’s favored, treasured occupation. A hardened, wizened warrior found handling his own tiny child to be a great difficulty. Frigga laughed at him much those first few weeks, and Odin eventually got over his frustration enough to laugh at himself. And Thor grew quickly out of that particularly breakable age, to where he could slap at Odin’s face, then crawl into laundry baskets, and soon run about much earlier than infants normally could, vibrant yellow curls bouncing. Thor was easy, and remained so.
Odin tried to think where he had gone wrong. His blunders started a chain of events he couldn’t stop, but looking back he still could not see where the first one occured.
Surely not stopping. Not turning towards the sound. Odin had no doubts of that. Despite being—how had he put it?—knee-deep in Jotun blood, nobody, warrior or maid, left an abandoned child on the ground. That had not been his first mistake, picking the child up. Perhaps it had followed soon afterward, because the babe stopped crying, and that stunned Odin. Thor had never been content in his arms, yet this child stopped only seconds after being lifted.
Perhaps that was his mistake. Believing he had made the child stop crying. Nay, he had stopped the child crying; there was no deceit in that. It was the attachment that he let grow, perhaps. Even more startling was the child shapeshifting in his hands. That was his mistake, perhaps. He should have found a Jotun maid and given the child to her. But what would she think of the Allfather offering her an Aesir babe? She would suspect him of changing the child from his natural form as an insult, or perhaps suspicious that he had changed an Aesir to a Jotun. They would suspect some trick. And Jotunheim was decimated now; Odin couldn’t deny that, or the regrettable necessity it had been. Poverty would reign now, and the probability of the child living beyond his youth was doubtful. Especially as he was clearly a runt, something scorned by the Jotuns. Odin had known he couldn’t leave the child there, so he took him with him. That was his first mistake, surely. Listening to those fears.
But he would have likely died otherwise.
Perhaps it was keeping him changed like that. Odin used his own magic to conceal the babe in Aesir form. It was for his protection, Odin told himself, and his dignity. The Aesir would not look kindly on a Jotun in Asgard, child or no.
He should have given him to some other Aesir, anyway. A trusted couple wishing for a child. Ladari and his wife came to mind. Trusted councilors, they would be willing--eager, even--to take in the unwanted runt.
The child himself ruined that. But not. It was not his fault, it was Odin’s. But the child had stopped crying in Odin’s arms, stared up with trusting, flashing green eyes, and its cold fingers had wrapped around his thumb. The timing had been most inconvenient. Odin had been running through potential parents in his mind.
“You did that on purpose, didn’t you?” he rebuked the child, without any true scorn. “I am trying to remain clear-headed. You are not helping matters.”
Surely it was a mistake to then look down at the child’s too-innocent face and have the name Loki pop into his head. It was certainly a much greater mistake to actually assign it to the child. Loki. Trickster. Odin could have sworn the babe was hiding a smirk.
He should not have asked Frigga for advice, in any case. He had known then as well as now that Frigga would never manage to turn away a cold, hungry, orphaned child, even if it was to find a better match for parents. Frigga instantly took him into her arms, which set the child to screaming. Odin took him back and he ceased again.
“Here,” Frigga had said, and prepared a substitute for milk. She took the child again from Odin, and he quickly warmed to his new mother.
All of those mistakes beside, it was a mistake to—do what, exactly? There were too many small choices to count, too many gone awry. Thor was easy. Thor wore all of his emotions on his face. Thor spoke his mind. Thor was much like Odin, and Odin could see through him.
Loki was different. He was easy enough as a babe, but as he grew he became foreign. Loki hid and laughed and lived up to his name. Loki spent his youth staring at Odin with adoration in his eyes, and silence on his lips. No, not silence. He had plenty to say, and would say it so quickly and convincingly that Odin wondered if he should have given him a name that meant Silvertongue instead. But anything of heart, anything that mattered, Loki kept to himself. Odin should have tried harder, surely. He didn’t ever chase Loki away, but Loki withdrew on his own and Odin didn’t know how to call him back out.
He had thought it fine. They were different, Frigga had told him, and he mustn’t expect Loki to share so much of himself. But he should have shared more. Odin should have made him. Somehow. Before now. Before everything fell to pieces.
Before Loki looked up at him, with broken adoration, hanging from a bridge, begging for recognition Odin hadn’t realized Loki didn’t think he had.
It was his choice to remain secluded, wasn’t it?
Wasn’t it?
It was Odin’s fault. Odin knew this, realized it, and he heard so much more in Loki’s plea than Loki said.
“I could have done it, Father! I could have done it! For you! For…all of us…”
Then Odin knew he had one more choice to make. A choice with a thousand possibilities, something he needed to do, reverse the past years. He should have told Loki sooner of his Jotun heritage, he should have done so much more, if he only knew how. He had to communicate that. And as he looked down on his son, hands clamped around Thor’s boot and wishing desperately he had the strength to reach down and grasp Loki as well. Because he wanted to tell Loki that he was loved, that Jotun heritage didn’t matter, that Odin didn’t mean to be distant, that he just didn’t know how.
He answered with his own plea, attempting to deny everything that Loki feared without Loki saying it. Odin made the choice that made ruins of the heart of his life, of the most vital part of himself. Because out of all the choices he had, of the thousands of words in the Allspeech language, Odin made the worst choice of his life.
He chose the wrong words.
“No, Loki…”
But he hadn’t meant that. He had been thinking so frantically that he hadn’t answered Loki’s actual question. He didn’t mean that. He meant to deny Loki’s beliefs, not confirm them.
But he didn’t realize what he had said until he saw the hurt in Loki’s eyes. Until Loki let go.
Only Frigga knew of what became of the Allfather afterward, coming into their private rooms and finding him there, pacing, tearing at his own hair, more helpless and anguished and exposed than she’d seen him since before the birth of Thor.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
No, he didn’t favor Thor. No he didn’t think Loki was worthless. No, Loki, you were wrong. You did not have to do this to win love that was already yours for the taking. No this was not how it meant to come. No Odin did not want this. No he desired to take back all the missteps. Because the missteps multiplied until the right path could no longer be discovered, or even believed to exist.
No was the cry of his torn heart when he tried to explain that to Loki, and No was repeated when his heart died.