Recalibration AKA that awkward moment when you fall in love with your spouse Chapter Two: Vanishing Act
Story Summary: In this timeline, Loki finds out the secret of his heritage long before Thor’s coronation. Tensions and frustrations lead Frigga to suggest Loki take a vacation for a few years, and he decides that Midgard would be the perfect place to lay low from expectations. The last thing Loki expects is to find herself falling in love with someone she can’t help but find familiar.
Author’s Note: Thank you so much to everyone who has shown interest in this story this past week! I am amazed by how many people already seem to like it so far. I hope that chapter two doesn’t disappoint. 🙏 That said… angst incoming SO MUCH ANGST INCOMING. Also Loki makes some decision that I highly disapprove of. ✨Don’t forget that characters are unreliable and do things the author would never do.✨
Chapter Two: Vanishing Act
Bonds are broken, bonds are forged. Something dies, someone is born.
In another place, in another time, what could we have been?
February 12th 2001
Loki had to disappear. It was not that she precisely wanted to leave Anthony. She knew with a wrench in her gut that she loved him. It was an awful, awful thing to recognize, one of the worst in their culture, to fall in love with a mortal. And she knew that without Odin’s approval she would never be able to extend Anthony’s life.
The only possible way was with either Gungnir or the casket of ancient winters, and she had neither. And she knew, now, without a doubt, that she was with child once again, and that if Odin found out that there was potentially another potential harbinger of ragnarok… it would be too awful to fathom.
So Loki did what she did best, and she ran. She placed a sleeping spell on Anthony and temporarily froze Jarvis’ cameras. She wiped all of the data on her that she could, took all of her personal items that were not shared and placed them in her pocket dimension, and vanished. The spells on Anthony and Jarvis would wear off immediately.
She would not want them undefended. She waited just outside the house to make sure that she saw the lights turn on, saw Jarvis wake Anthony and explain that his systems had been compromised and she had vanished, and teleported away from Malibu to make a new life for herself getting lost in New York.
June 18th 2001
Lois Friggasen made a comfortable life for herself in Queens. She knew that her history could not be anything like Lola Freyrson, and so she did not even remotely try. Instead, she found herself work as a secretary at a hospital, feigning status as an orphan.
She made close friends with one of the nurses, named May, who turned out to actually be her neighbor from one floor down and a few apartments over. She and her husband Ben were very welcoming and kind to “Lois” as she prepared to have her baby, incredibly sympathetic to her lack of family and the baby not having a father.
When they asked, tentatively about the baby’s father, Loki simply told them that he was “gone.” She knew that they assumed dead, but that was something that Loki was not going to elaborate on. As she pondered on what to name the child, she realized that giving him her name would be a folly. If she wanted him to be able to live on Midgard in safety he could not be a “Lokison” or a “Stark”. “Friggasen” was also out of the question, despite the fact that it was the last name Loki was currently using and would be what was expected. No, Loki had to choose something else.
As she thought about it, lying on the bed in her tiny one-bedroom apartment her eyes settled on the pen she had on her beside table, one that Anthony had given her. Parker would not be a bad last name.
—
August 10 2001
Baby blue eyes blearily blinked up at her. Loki had not loved giving birth in a Midgardian hospital, but considering she was currently considering to be Midgardian, there was no real alternative. When she had examined the seidr of her child in the womb, and now as she held him, she could tell that he was… mortal. He would grow and age as a human.
There was seidr wrapped around him like a shell. It was similar to the seidr that Anthony had, now that Loki thought about it. There was something, itching at the back of her brain, but she couldn’t quite reach it.
In the next second, she forgot about the spell. She did not remember noticing seidr around Anthony, or around her child.
He was mortal, she thought sadly. He will age like a human, and I will outlast him.
Loki felt like her heart was going to break as she stared at his small face, making sure that her shields against Heimdall and the Hlidskjalf were stronger than ever.
“Hello Peter Parker. I am your mother, and I love you,” she cooed.
—
February 12, 2009
It had been eight years since Lola left, and Tony was still struggling to do anything resembling cope. He built weapons, because that was what he was good at. About 2 years previously he started sleeping with various people again, but never stayed with them in the morning, instead sending Pepper or Happy, not even able to do the goodbyes anymore. He hated himself too much, every time.
None of them were Lola.
Interestingly, he could not bear to even look at anyone who looked too much like her. Green eyes and dark hair were his biggest turn offs now. Because they were never Lola. He knew that his friends probably thought he was insane. But they were hurting too. Rhodey, Pepper, and Happy, they had all loved Lola almost as much as he had. She was undoubtedly a charmer, and had wormed her way into their friend group easily.
That she left so easily as well was hard on all of them.
At first they thought she had somehow been taken, kidnapped right out from under his nose, but the fact that all of her stuff was gone? Leaving behind only shared objects that were of more important value to Tony, but taking the ones that he knew she had a personal attachment to?
And then he found the note.
Dearest Anthony,
I cannot put to words how it pains me to part on these terms. If I looked upon your face I would never go. The truth is I am too much of a coward to tell you the truth. Except that I love you, and I will continue to love you until ragnarok and thereafter.
—Lo
Tony, his heart unbearably heavy, kept the note in a locked drawer in his desk, with the ring he had finished soldering the night Lola disappeared. With every day, every week, every month, every year that passed his hope that she would return faded.
Even as he raced Happy to the airfield, as he and Rhodey sat on the plane with dancing air attendants… his heart was lost. He made his grandstanding effort to present the Jericho and felt empty. He joked with the soldiers in his van, he watched them die. He desperately tried to make a call on his phone, then saw the bomb within feet of him about to go off, and for the next short while… he knew nothing.
—
February 13, 2009
Peter Parker was very smart for a seven-year-old, and he knew how to keep secrets.
The biggest secret he had to keep, the number one secret he was not allowed to share with anyone ever was that his mummy was an alien. Which meant Peter was part alien too. According to his mummy, his dad was human, but his mom was actually a mix of two different alien species, and she could change her shape to look like anything she wanted.
She explained to him that the face that she walked around in most days was not even what she actually looked like, and when he asked her to show him it turned out she was actually blue! He would love to tell people how awesome and cool his mom was, but he knew how important it was to keep it a secret. Not everyone would think it was cool that his mom was actually blue and shapeshifted to be white all the time.
He thought about all the Black and brown kids at his school who got bullied because of their skin and their religion and where their families came from. So no, Peter did not tell anyone that his mom was an alien. He was not visibly like those kids, but he knew that if anyone found out that his mom was an alien he would be treated similarly. Especially because once he turned six he started developing his own power to shift, which they found out when he woke up from a nightmare and was blue all over, with faint lines all over his body.
After that his mom made sure that whenever he left the house he wore a necklace that kept his shifting under control so that he only did it if he wanted to. She had kept him home from school for a week so that she could perfect it.
Peter had never seen his mom truly angry. She had been irritated or annoyed, sure. But he had never seen her truly angry or upset, until he was getting ready for school that Friday morning and saw her sitting ramrod straight watching the news. He walked over to see what had her so upset but as soon as she registered his presence she flicked the TV off and plastered a very obviously fake smile on her face.
“You have a good day at school kiddo?”
“What’s wrong, mama?” Peter was a very smart seven year old, but he was still seven, and was anxious at his mother’s uncharacteristic display of emotion.
“Nothing’s wrong sweetie. But I am thinking that I might arrange for you to stay with aunt May and uncle Ben this weekend, if that’s alright with you?”
She was not asking. If May and Ben said yes, that was where he was staying the weekend.
As it turned out, May and Ben did say yes, and so he packed up his things for the weekend and, they walked the two blocks to May and Ben’s apartment. Both families had moved since they lived in the same building, but they still lived close together. May and Ben had a spare room that Peter and his mom often stayed in when they came to visit.
As it turned out, Peter was going to be with May and Ben for a little while longer than just the weekend.
—
February 14, 2009
Contrary to what Anthony might believe, Loki had never forgotten about him. She had loved the mortal after all. But finding him was actually proving to be rather difficult. She had placed a tracker on him of course, and she knew that he was in Afghanistan. But it was quite frankly a wide area to search, and tracking Anthony had always been difficult with that mask around his seidr…
The thought slipped away from Loki again, as quickly as she thought it, and she refocused. Finding Anthony was going to be difficult, but she could do it. The problem was that for this type of magic, she would likely need to be at it for much longer than the weekend that she had planned to leave Peter with May and Ben.
She nibbled at her lip. Peter would always be her first priority as long as he was underage. But he was also safe with May and Ben. No one knew about his existence, or his connection to Loki. She had set up wards with a masked signature that she had specifically designed to look unlike her usual work to those who had an eye for that sort of thing, and all three of them had personal magical protections against attack. Peter was also capable of using the protected necklace she had given him to call on her at any time. It would work between realms even, she knew. And she was planning on calling him every two days that this went on, though hopefully it would not take nearly so long to find Anthony. So there was no need to dwell.
She wrote out a quick text message to May.
It is as I feared. I will need to be gone for I know not how long. Please relay my message to Peter. I will try to call as often as I can.
She had prepared for this eventuality, that she would need to run, need to leave Peter with May and Ben. The paperwork was already drawn, with her nominating them acting guardians in her stead. She had also left a video recording with Peter, explaining that she had to undertake a dangerous task, going somewhere that he could not follow, but that she would always come back for him. That she would call to check in as frequently as was safe.
We understand. Hope to see you soon.
Author’s Note 2: Loki is the supreme master of self-sabotage. At least they’re a fairly decent mom? Or at least they try their best 😅. No parent is perfect. Also PETER! BABY! Little blue BABY! Mister man all grown up at seven years old. So mature for his small age. Basically what is going on for Peter’s aging is that he is for now aging like a human, because Tony’s human traits are dominant. I explained this in a comment but basically what I mean by a child taking on the dominant parent’s traits isn’t that one species is always dominant over the other, it’s that in each child it’s custom. I think the example I used in the comment was of how two children in the same family can have different hair colors, but a better example is how two children in a mixed race family can have different skin tones. You see it all the time where one sibling will have darker skin than the other. It is just genetics that some children will have more melanin than others because of a random sequence of genes. In this case, some children will age slower or live longer than others because of a random sequence of genes. Also, there may or may not be magic at play, but that is for future chapters to explore…
Next chapter: Tony has a realization on Valentine’s Day. The god of lies experiments with honesty. Jarvis takes no shit.