Archive of Our Own

i.
Wanda knows her cycles have not always been regular - may not ever be regular - but there are things, even drifting as she is, that she notices. She may not be measuring time as precisely as she used to, unmoored as she is, but it easy to see that which is not there as clearly as that which is. Some things, some cycles, are obvious in their absence.

Wanda can feel the new life growing within her.

ii.
She tells Loki as they lie curled about each other in bed, fingertips tapping over the barest curve of her belly. It is early days now, so early there is barely a sign, but Wanda knows her own body and what she can do. Her fingertips, tapping, press smooth and close as Loki says, “We can’t .”

“It is my body,” Wanda says, and she is almost startled at the flint in her tone. “If I wish to have this child you cannot stop me.”

Loki sits up, runs cool fingers down the side of her face. “No, no,” he says, eyes bright. “No, that is not what I mean. But we must think of the situation right now. None here but you know who I am, they all think me Odin, and they all think you my guest. You have been here so long that someone here must be the father, and there are none you are close to but me. What would we tell them for that? That Odin grieving his wife took a Midgardian to his bed?”

Thoughts, ideas, possibilities run through Wanda’s head. She shrugs. “We can tell them it was my magic. Human, made infinite by the stones, allowing me to make life on my own.”

“And if they see the child?” Loki says. “It will not… it will not look human, nor Asgardian. You have seen beneath this face I wear.”

Blue skin, carved lines, eyes as rich a red as fresh blood, richer even, as clear and definite as her own scarlet. “Then we say my magic mimicked that which it has come across, lingering magic on the sceptre that awoke my powers.” She pauses, half-smiles. “In that story we can even reinforce that you are dead.”

Loki’s eyes are still bright, tight at the corners and Wanda lifts a hand to cup his cheek. “I want this,” she says softly. “Why do you not?”

He pauses, and Wanda can see the silvery snakes of his mind turning. “It is dangerous,” he says and Wanda nods.

“Maybe,” she says. “All pregnancies are.”

“No,” Loki says. “For us. For the secret. For it when it’s born. There are people who would hurt it, try to use it to gain leverage. And who is to say we would be sufficient parents, what could we do for a child with all that we must do, with the work to bring back our dead, the ruling of Asgard-”

Wanda watches his bright eyes, so bright it is almost like a fever, and lifts her head to press a kiss to his cool lips. “Let us think on it,” she says. “We have many days yet.”

iii.
Wanda watches Loki unwind as, day after day, she holds to her choice. She can feel the new life within her, the least flicker of scarlet in her belly, knows it has magic like hers and like Loki’s and entirely it’s own. She feels it turn from the least flicker to a bright flame and knows, knows, that after losing Pietro she is loath to lose any more of her family.

Loki… Loki does not seem to understand this, goes off wandering for days at a time and Wanda does not know how to impress upon him all that this means to her.

“I do not think he understands,” she says to Heimdall, sitting with the great Watcher of Asgard. “He has always wanted to shed so much of his family - Laufey, Odin, Thor. The only one he did not want to lose he has taken vengeance for, is working towards returning and Frigga was not… was not half of him, as Pietro was to me.”

Heimdall’s golden eyes are watching something distant. “As he is to you, I think,” he says, and Wanda’s breath catches in her throat.

iv.
He’s alive, she thinks. Alive, alive, alive, alive. “Show me,” she asks Heimdall. “Please, just a moment’s memory, please.”

Heimdall pauses, his eyes cast back towards the great towers of Asgard. “I can do better than that,” he says. “I could send you to him.”

Wanda glances to the towers, to where she can glimpse Loki’s silvered mind turning. “Loki-” she starts.

“Is not my king,” Heimdall says. “Odin is, and Thor in his stead, and both would have me send you home, if you wished to go.”

Wanda’s head turns, Asgard’s towers to the chasm of space. Home she thinks, Pietro and safety and a place she can bear her child without warring with the father over her right to. Asgard, safe, with Loki, Loki who loves her… but Home, Pietro who is Home to her, who has been Home since they were ten years old.

Loki cannot bring back those who are already alive, she thinks. Loki fears being a father.

Wanda stands, nods. “Please,” she says. “Please send me home.”

v.
She lands, a single certain thing in her mind: Loki will be furious.

The thought is brushed aside. She can handle Loki, if need be, to pit their magic against each other would be dangerous but with Pietro back…

With her brother back she feels as though she could do anything.

vi.
“Wanda,” says Pietro as soon as he sees her, as soon as he feels her mind against his. Wanda tucks herself into his arms, breathes him in.

For once in so long everything feels right.

vii.
For the first few days after her return Pietro sticks to her side like glue. She understands why of course - to come back from the dead to find your only family left in the world vanished is no easy thing to bear, least of all for Pietro so protective he always is, always has been, always will be.

(Wanda saw the scars at his wrists no matter how he tried to hide them.)

(“If I had known,” she says, holding his wrists, thumb running over the scars, “I would have returned sooner.”)

(Pietro’s reply, distinctly damp, “I am glad you returned at all.”)

viii.
It is to Pietro she tells the secret. Her brother, her twin, half of herself - who else would she tell? They are woken by nightmares, Wanda’s head resting on Pietro’s stomach as he finger-combs out her hair–

(“I can be patient for you,” she remembers him saying. “It is easy to be calm and patient for you.”)

–and she has not felt so safe for a very long time. Her hand reaches up, cups her brother’s face.

“I never said why I returned,” she says. “Not in full.”

Pietro’s knuckles brush gently over her brow, almost a kiss. “You never have to,” he says, “if you do not want to. That you have returned is enough.”

“I should,” Wanda says. “But there is a lot to tell.”

Gentle fingers stroke over her brow, through her hair. “So show me,” Pietro says. “You can always tell me anything.”

ix.
Pietro’s cheeks are pinked when Wanda finishes showing him what had passed.

“I probably shouldn’t have shown you all of that,” Wanda murmurs. She’s sitting now, kneeling on the mattress beside her brother.

“It is better to know,” he says. “Even if I wish I didn’t.”

For a while there is silence, the twins sat hand in hand, thoughtful. It’s a comfortable silence, peaceful, almost restful until Pietro says, “You have to tell the team.”

Wanda freezes, almost blanches. Pietro knows why, it is obvious, easy to understand his sister’s fears. Loki is not loved by anyone, and a child of his would be an easy target for hate. Pietro squeezes Wanda’s hand.

“That or we leave,” he says. “I will carry you anywhere, keep you safe in any place you wish to go, you know that. But those are the choices we have.”

Wanda leans forward, presses her face to her brother’s shoulder.

“I know that,” she says, “But I wish it was different.”

x.
“Loki’s child?” Steve says when Wanda tells them. “Thor said that Loki was dead.”

Wanda shakes her head. “He’s glamoured himself as Odin. He rules Asgard.”

“Well that explains how he got you to Asgard and why no one knows he’s still alive,” Sam says. “But it doesn’t explain the other thing.”

Wanda’s gaze is fixed on her hands in her lap. “He promised me he could show me how to bring Pietro back.”

On her shoulder, Pietro’s hand squeezes gently.

(Pietro doesn’t need Wanda’s ability to see minds to recognise the thought passing through Sam’s mind at Wanda’s words. After his attempt at suicide he’d grown used to recognising Sam’s expression for They need therapy.)

“We should contact Thor,” Natasha says, and then, drumming her fingers on the tabletop, “And get you a checkup. How far along are you?”

Wanda’s only response is a shrug. “I wasn’t always in my own head,” she says. “I only barely kept track of one day to the next. I only noticed because some things are obvious in their absence.”

(Pietro thinks the whole room sees him squeeze Wanda’s shoulder again.)

xi.
“This is…” Thor seems, honestly and truly, at a loss for words. “Asgardians have had children with Midgardians before but there is nothing anywhere in the records of Jotuns having offspring with any but their own. There is no way to know how this might go.”

“You’re a fertility god, right?” Natasha asks. “In among other things.”

“Technically,” Thor admits. “But that is more because when you have many Asgardians who have just finished a battle, and who are high on victory, we are generous with our magics. We would make harvests yield twice as much when we visited. Myths develop, change,” Thor gestures. “It is an association of the myth. It is not necessarily me.”

They are sat in medical, Wanda fidgeting in a chair, Pietro by her side, her hand in his. Doctor Cho is tapping at a tablet, comparing readings and test results. Everyone else is quiet.

“Well it looks like it is developing normally,” Helen says. “I need to run it by someone better versed in this but… it looks normal.”

Thor shifts from foot to foot, Mjolnir hanging from his wrist swinging slightly. “Precautions should be taken,” he says. “Wanda has magic and her own powers. Loki has magic and he is a Jotun who has lived his life surrounded by the magics of Asgard. There is no saying what this child might do. There is…,” his voice gentles. “There is little chance it will be anything close to normal.”

Pietro, so serious before, breaks into a smile. “When has anyone here been normal? Those of us that were are not any longer. Normal is not… none of us are normal. And yet we do well.”

“That is not a guarantee,” Helen says. “We don’t even know how compatible human and Jotun biology is, the foetus might not -”

Wanda’s voice is quiet but clear. “I can see the scarlet of his life. He will live for now.”

xii.
Her son is born and he is… he is not human, nor Jotun, but perfectly between. Human skin marked with Jotun lines, dark hair, dark eyes that turn Jotun red when magic wisps unknowingly from his fingers. He is small, even for a newborn, the midwives say, and Wanda cradles him and lets him nurse, leaning against her brother.

Thor, looming, quiet, stands in the doorway. “Do you know what you will name him yet?”

Wanda shrugs. She has had thoughts, considerations, but a name is not a thing given lightly, not to a child with ancestry never-before tested, not to a child not yet formed into it’s own self. Her son, she knows, might not survive long, even if he seems perfectly healthy now. There are names she has considered before, yes, in dreams and hopes she has long since disregarded, but now… now she is uncertain. She is a mother now.

“Back on Asgard,” Thor says, softly, gently, carefully, “When we were younger, Loki helped a warrior named Vali, who had been cursed. They carved runes into Vali’s skin to control the curse, and Loki loved him as family.”

The twins watch Thor quietly, carefully. Thor, slowly, shrugs. “He died,” he says, sadly. “One of the runes was cut by accident, by Vali’s own brother. The wolf Vali was cursed with got out and they both died. Loki grieved for them as he did for our mother.”

Wanda thinks Frigga, that one person in Loki’s mind who was absolute, for whom he cared for unreservedly.

“Vali was a good man,” Thor says. “A good warrior and a good friend. His loss was a loss to everyone.”

Wanda nods slowly, considers. “Magnus,” she says, glancing to her brother. “Magnus for our father. But for your friend Vali, for his Asgardian heritage, Vali. Magnus Vali Maximoff. My son.”

(Scarlet - her own and her magic’s - wisps from her fingers as she says that. Magnus Vali will be her son and her son alone, and she will not allow his father one iota of say in his life.)

xiii.
“Who is his father!?” one of the reporters yells.

Wanda cradles her son close, rocks him and soothes him and thinks. They can’t say Loki; he is hated by all and Wanda will not inflict that on her son, will not speak of the devil and make him appear. But she cannot refuse to answer either, cannot say nothing, not with Pietro so close at her shoulder. People already assumed much, both true and not, and Wanda refuses to feed the flames.

Wanda looks up from her son to the reporter who’d yelled. “His father,” she says, “is a mistake.” In the calm of her mind she firmly thinks one thing. Fuck you, Loki.

xiv.
Loki-

Loki doesn’t seethe, Loki is better than that. But Loki watches, Loki listens and somewhere in him…

He is angry.

He is more than just a mistake, he knows this - he rules Asgard despite Thor and Odin and Laufey. He rules well. He had won the witch to his side with only words, words and the promise of the world-warping magic she already held within herself, that she only needed to learn of to begin to wield.

He may not have cared for the child she carried, but the child was his all the same.

He refuses to be only considered a mistake in his own child’s history.

So Loki watches. Loki waits.

xv.
Vali’s early days are quiet, mostly. There are few incidents, really, barring Vali’s first wilful expression of magic, a reflexive glamour put up when one nurse had gasped to see his Jotun markings, a glamour that covers them even now.

(On human skin, Wanda knows, they look all too much like scars.)

Vali’s early days are quiet, yes, but the base is no place to raise a child. Clint’s eyes are wary as he watches Vali, cradled in Wanda’s arms, but his mind is clear, his words are true.

“Come stay at the farm with us.”

xvi.
The farm is loud, sort of, but it’s peaceful in it’s own way too. Laura has her Nathaniel Pietro nearby, set on a playmat only a metre away with various toys. Lila and Cooper start a frenetic game of tag with Pietro within minutes of arrival and Laura welcomes Wanda with a hug, invites her to set Vali down by Nate or to just sit down.

“Tea?” she offers, going to the kitchen and pulling down mugs. “We have herbal ones.”

Wanda, cradling sleeping Vali carefully, nods. “Please,” she says. “Vali does not travel well, he has only just begun to sleep.”

They chat over tea and cinnamon biscuits, compare the fractiousness of their babies and their various quirks.

“They’re a lot, at first,” Laura says. “But you learn how to handle it all quickly enough. Besides,” she adds, lifting her mug, looking outside to where Clint is refereeing the ongoing tag game. “We have people to help out, when we need them.”

xvii.
They have been at the Bartons almost a month and a half before Wanda has a bad day, spiralling off into her own skull or someone else’s, not quite there to those around her.

“Give Vali to me,” Pietro says to Laura, who’s juggling Vali and Nate carefully between herself and Clint. “And just… be quiet. Wanda will snap out of it when Vali cries or if something happens. But it is best not to force it. Wanda startled is-”

He trails off, smiles slightly at the gurgling Vali who smiles back at his uncle in the vague way of very young babies. Pietro doesn’t flinch from the scarlet wisping from his nephew’s fingers as they all head quietly downstairs.

“It was going to happen eventually,” he says, setting Vali down on the playmat, Vali’s hands grasping at his thumbs. “She will be all right. Just not quite… there for a while.”

(Wanda is all right thirty minutes later when Vali cries in hunger, running downstairs to her son in moments.)

xviii.
Vali is still small, even as he grows.

“Loki was small for his age for a long time,” Thor says when he comes visiting when Vali is two and a half. His search for information on the Infinity Stones is still yielding mostly shadows, and he dares not return to Asgard until he is certain he can prove to all that it is Loki and not Odin who sits the throne. “Loki was small for a long time, but he did grow.”

“Wanda’s always been short, though,” Pietro replies, and is elbowed in the ribs for his trouble.

“Vali will grow to the height he is meant to,” Wanda says. “Whatever that will be.”

xix.
Vali’s first word is ‘mama’, and it’s a word he keeps using even as he learns to say “mother”, “mum”, “mom”, “Mutti” and “Mutter” and a myriad other terms in a myriad other languages for it. His first language is Sokovian, taught to him by Wanda and Pietro, by visiting Thor and Vision. Thor teaches him Asgardian Allspeak, after that, and Pietro and Wanda teach him what Hebrew they remember. The Bartons’ teach him English, Natasha teaches him Russian and Wanda teaches her son German and Serbian, Hungarian, Polish, French, every scrap of every language she knows.

“Learn all you can,” Wanda tells her son, stroking back dark hair from his brow. “You can never know too much.”

xx.
Vali learns of his mother’s Bad Days before he is four, and develops an uncanny knack for predicting them.

“They are in each other’s heads,” Pietro jokes, sometimes, for he is in Wanda’s head more often than not and even he cannot predict them with such accuracy. “Both of them with their magic. Wanda knows when Vali is in trouble, and Vali knows when something is wrong for Wanda.”

(Vali only shrugs when he is asked how he knows. “I know,” he says. “Is that good enough?”)

(Pietro’s hand is gentle on his nephew’s shoulder as he says, “It’s more than enough.”)

xxi.
Vali is five years old when he starts to arrange his own playdates. He has a room at the facility for when Wanda is working, and there’s always a spare bed for him in Nate’s room at the Barton’s. He knows very well where he is welcome and where he isn’t, and figures out quickly how to sneak a phone call to Nate to ask to be invited over for the day when his mother needs space.

“Just for a few hours,” he says. “I’ll get your Auntie Nat to come?”

xxii.
Wanda knows her son’s mind well, has been aware of it from Vali’s first moments of consciousness, but is careful to only reach out gently, to never affect it even as she touches it lightly. His mind is, in many ways, like hers: a huge vast thing, filled with scarlet power, but his takes more after the halls of Asgard, the caverns of ice people have carved here on Earth. Vast and glorious and slightly terrifying, reaching upwards, stretching downwards and filled with blood red power.

It is, Wanda knows, power and magic, just like hers. Not just a means to move material and minds, but the means of magic, world-warping, reality-rewriting power kept tied into a few simple shades of red.

Wanda is never not amazed at the careful hold her son has of his power. It runs delicately through his fingers, is wielded with a careful precision it took her months to master and she thinks (she fears) that this might be Loki’s influence on their son.

But Vali is nothing like Loki. Oh he can trick and redirect and charm, but it is as much like Pietro’s nature, as much like Thor’s than it is anything like Loki’s silver slipperiness. He is powerful, yes, and knows what he can do with his power even as he is barely five years old, but it is more like her own calm awareness, her own near-fear of what they are both capable of than it is Loki’s power-gladness.

Wanda fears for her son, constantly, it snakes through her mind like Loki’s slippery silver albeit in shades of shadows, but Vali, over and over, proves to be her son, his own person, his uncles’ nephew more than he is his father’s son.

xxiii.
Vali’s kindness, Wanda knows, is entirely his own, born of watching her, of watching Pietro, of growing up with the Bartons, yes, but it is his own in how it manifests, in how he lets it show. She sees it first - sees it easiest - in how he stands back when it is one of her Bad Days, gives her space to ease out of it even though he starts doing this when he is but four years old.

(At first, at first Wanda thinks this is Pietro’s influence, but it does not take long in her brother’s mind to see how he is blind to Vali’s little choices, his small decisions to play with Nate and let her ease out of the nightmare-spaces between minds on her own. Later, later she wonders if it is Loki’s misdirection coming through, and maybe it is in part - Vali never makes it obvious that he does it because he knows it is a Bad Day - but he is honest in all else, she sees that, sees gold and bronze and brass gladness shining through his mind at the idea of playing with Nate, sees how his mind is warm and affectionate and gentle at the idea of giving her space to recover.)

(Wanda never quite gets over it, that Vali is not-quite five years old as he does this, and yet is so aware of his surroundings.)

(Wanda wonders, Wanda fears that this might be the motions of minds around him shaping him before he has a chance to shape himself.)

xxiv.
“Do you ever get headaches?” Wanda asks. “Like I do? Of find yourself drifting between minds?”

Vali is five-and-a-half, as he insists to Nate when they are visiting, and sat beside his mother at the table, practicing his handwriting. His letters are large no matter the alphabet he uses, as might be expected for his age, but they’re neat and precise, and Vali rewrites them over and over until he writes them out smoothly and tidily.

“Not really,” Vali says. “I know who I am.”

Wanda passes him a pen, lets him begin to practice his spelling with a tool he cannot so easily erase. “You never drift?” she asks. “At all?”

Vali shrugs, finishes writing out the second ‘f’ of his surname and sets the pen down. “Sometimes,” he says. “But I can always find my way back. You always …-” he gestures with small hands, tries to indicate something he doesn’t have the words for and Wanda stretches out gentle scarlet to her son’s mind.

This, he thinks, as her mind touches his. It’s… he sends images, a tent in the wind, held down by it’s cables, a ship kept still by its anchor.

Anchor, he thinks, taking the word from her thoughts. “Anchor,” he says aloud, mouth sounding out the new word, making into anka. “You always anchor.”

xxv.
Far away, Loki watches.

Not always, not incessantly, he’s not obsessed.

But he watches, all the same, searches through scrying bowls, ventures into visions, finds his way through other means so he can see his son grow, see if he has the power that might make him useful.

( His father- echoes through Loki’s mind, Wanda’s words over and over. His father is a mistake.)

(Loki will take vengeance for that insult, and what better way to hurt the witch than by taking the thing she loves, the only human thing more powerful on that Earth than she?)

xxvi.
Clint cannot deny he is wary of Vali, even when Vali is but days old. Wanda he trusts, mostly, even when she fled to Asgard he could understand why, see how much her brother’s loss had hurt her, see why she might want space from those so closely tied to her brother’s death (space from Stark, so closely tied to her parent’s deaths). He can trust Wanda, understand what it had meant to her to lose someone even dearer to her than Nat was to him.

But Vali is Loki’s son too, and Clint recalls Loki’s fingers in his mind too well to trust any part of him easily.

Vali looks a little like his father, but he also looks like his mother. His hair is his mother’s brown, but it is as smooth and sleek as Loki’s. His eyes are darker than either, except when they flash red with magic (“Frost Giant eyes,” Thor had said, when had asked. “Frost Giant eyes are red like that.”) and Vali’s skin…

Clint had not seen Loki beneath the glamour he wears but the knowledge is wearing enough in the form of the markings on Vali’s skin, (“Frost Giant markings,” Thor had said) and it was very hard to look at the baby Wanda held - younger even than his own youngest - and see anything but the child of the person who’d turned him inside out and made him fight his friends.

It was Pietro who saw it first, saw how Clint edged around Vali’s presence those very first few days while Wanda cared for her son. “Do not hate him,” he had said, “Distrust him if you must, but please… do not hate him. Wanda will not let Vali do anything to you.”

Now, near to six years on, it is easy to see Vali as Vali and not Loki’s son, easy to see Vali as Wanda’s son, Pietro’s nephew, his Nate’s best friend. Vali plays with Nate and the pair make cookies under Laura and Wanda’s watchful eyes.

Sometimes the glamour Vali wears near-constantly slips, just slightly-

(“I wish he did not have to wear it at all,” Wanda says some evenings when the kids have all exhausted themselves and she and Pietro and Laura are all sat in the kitchen cradling mugs of tea. “But humans think they look like scars, and would think we have hurt him, and those that know what they are … ” she swirls her mug, mixing up the dregs and tiny particles of tea-dust. “That Vali is Loki’s son has to remain secret. There are too many who would not forgive, and who would hurt him just for being.” Pietro and Laura had glanced to Clint then, standing in the corner, and all he could do was shrug.)

-but around Nate and Lila and Coop it’s only ever met with cries of “cool!”, even when his eyes glow a brighter, richer red even than Wanda’s.

It’s a week from Vali’s sixth birthday that Clint, standing with Laura in the kitchen, watching Wanda and Pietro playing with all the kids, realises: Vali might as well be family.

xxvii.
Vali’s sixth birthday party is held at the Barton farm, because most of Vali’s friends are also Nate or Lila or Coop’s friends, shared between the four of them and loved by all. It’s a bit manic, as might be expected with so many small children gathered together in the presence of sugar, lots of space and two large trampolines.

One child is sick, of course, acrobatics on a full stomach of ice cream making quite a mess, but Vali, with Wanda’s help, cleans up the mess, and ends up sat by the kid for the rest of the party, making sure they’re all right.

(Wanda can see her son’s mind, gentle curlicues of worry and concern and affection for his friend reaching outwards, towards the soft star-glow of the other child’s.)

(Wanda, in this moment, is reminded of just how unlike Loki her son is.)

xxviii.
Vali knows of Wanda’s nightmares - he always has, really - but he does not see all that they are until after one of his own. His own, he thinks later, is a childish nightmare, a monster under the bed that has him bolting upright and screaming loud enough to wake half the team. Uncle Pietro is at his door in a moment, scooping him into a hug, gently soothing, warmly reliable, undeniably there and not the monster Vali had dreamed up.

“Mama,” Vali asks all the same, “I want-”

He has barely finished speaking before he is at his mother’s room, Pietro’s arms secure and stable around him. He can see Wanda’s mind, wide awake, already moving towards the door, and reaches his arms outwards to hug her even as her scarlet opens the door, as her arms wrap around him and gently lift him from his Uncle’s arms.

“Shh,” she whispers, soft in his ear, and he can see her scarlet around their minds, soft and gentle as silk, warm as the blood that binds them. “Shh. Come, you can stay with me tonight.”

Vali might be six-and-a-half years old, but nightmares are nightmares and he curls next to his mother, settles into sleep, with all the trust of his childish age.

xxix.
He is woken but a few hours later, jolted into wakefulness by the sense of his mother’s magic gone from calm to scared, to outright battling, the sound of the door suddenly opening, the weight of Pietro sat at the edge of the bed, hugging Wanda to him with all of the gentle force he’d held Vali with earlier.

“It’s ok,” Pietro is whispering in Sokovian. “It’s ok, it’s ok, it’s ok, none of us are hurt. None of us are dead.”

Vali scrambles over covers and the dip in the mattress to sit with his mother and uncle, presses a hand to his mother’s shoulder where it shakes against his uncles.

“Mama?”

He is drawn into the hug without question, a warm, almost stifling thing, and he can see his mother’s magic, invisible, hovering around her hands, almost like a heat-haze to him, but nothingness to those without the ability.

Wanda’s scarlet touches his mind soon after.

Nightmares, she sends. You are not the only one who gets them.

Vali’s eyes are wide and dark and watchful until he yawns, snuggles against his mother’s side, and says, simply, “You can stay with us tonight.”

Wanda’s laugh is a half-choked thing, followed by a kiss pressed to her son’s forehead. “Yes,” she says, still in the Sokovian, Pietro was speaking to her, the Sokovian Vali has already learned so young, the vanishing language of his mother’s home. “Yes, let us stay together and keep each other from nightmares.”

xxx.
Wanda wakes in the wee hours of the morning, pre-dawn light filtering through her window. She knows the breath that presses, soft and rhythmic, against her neck is Pietro’s, in part from the one arm wrapped over her shoulder and the one tucked between them across his chest, and in part because she knows her brother. For a moment, though, she almost does not recognise Vali, curled against her chest, his glamour slipped off entirely, the scarlike Jotun markings that cover his skin standing out in the soft light and strong shadows of the room.

His face is peaceful though, relaxed, and it has been so long since Wanda last saw him let down his glamour that she is almost relieved to see his true face again.

It is almost without thinking that her fingers stretch out and begin to trace the lines that mark his face, that come down from his brow, under his eyes, down his cheeks to his lips. The lines beside them that follow his jaw and trace down over his neck, Jotun markings, yes, but standing out clear on human skin.

Vali snurfles slightly, a small noise that makes Wanda pause, but her son does not wake.

She can see the colours of his mind, see his soft and sleeping thoughts as he snuggles closer.

Trust. Safety. Security.

Peace.

xxxi.
Vali doesn’t hit his “why” phase until he’s about seven. No one’s entirely sure why it takes him so long - though Clint suggests it's because he watched Nate go through the exact same thing and didn’t see a reason to repeat every single question - but it hits and they all take it in turns to answer, over and over, “Why?”

Somehow, despite being originally intended as a prank, Tony manages to keep answering longest.

(“Look,” Pietro had whispered to Vali. “Stark is Stark but he is smart, annoyingly. He will know many answers to your questions.)

(FRIDAY had recorded the rest, Tony spotting Vali in the lab, Tony going:

“This is Dummy.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s an idiot.”

“Why?”

“… He just is.”

“No, why ‘he’? Did you ask him?”

“… No. But he’s Dummy. That one is Butterfingers. That one is You.”

“Are they all ‘he’ too?”

“… I didn’t ask.”

“Why?”)

(Pietro may have laughed himself silly at it all, but they all had to admit that Vali left Stark’s lab with a much better understanding of engineering.)

xxxii.
Vali was raised to know what he was. Half human, half Jotun, Asgardian magic in his bones.

“We are Jewish, too,” his Mama told him one day, when he was thinking on it. “We may never have one thing, one place. But we can know what we are.”

Vali watched the red magic spilling over his hand with red eyes, watched as it wove over the markings that marred his skin.

“You are my son,” his Mama told him, when he looked pensive like that. “Frost Giant marks, human skin, my enhanced powers. Your father is your father, but you are my son, my Magnus Vali. You do not have to be like him if you do not want.”

xxxiii.
Wanda and Vision finally, formally, get together when Vali is about eight, and honestly Vali doesn’t mind that much. He knows Vision - he’s always known Vision - and he considers him something akin to a distant kind of family.

It’s a bit weird at first, Vision becoming a part of the immediate circle - himself and Wanda and Uncles Pietro and Thor, and the collective Bartons - but…

It makes his mother happy, and Vali is such a person that it makes him in turn happy. Pietro doesn’t mind it either, or if he does he doesn’t think it’s enough of an issue to bring up, and Thor seems delighted to see Wanda and Vision hand-in-hand.

It’s quite a peaceful happening, really, so much that it almost slips completely beneath the radar of the gossip rags.

xxxiv.
Things are peaceful, things are peaceful, things are peaceful and Wanda could almost have screamed when that peace was upset except for this: Vali needed her not to.

“Mama,” he says, soft and scared and there is blood on his knuckles and he teleported to her out of nowhere, a flash of scarlet in the room and suddenly there he is, perched on the table looking, for once in his life, frightened.

He is nine years old, nine years old and still so small for his age, and Wanda knows they have been considering treatments but no one has any idea what they would do to his mixed physiology, and there are a million thoughts beside this running through her mind as she reaches for her son, picks him up and balances him on her hip as she had when he was smaller still.

What happened? she asks, scarlet rich in the shadows between minds, mingling softly with the scarlet of his own mind, soft as silk, warm as the blood that binds them. She strokes back Vali’s fringe with one hand, where it obscures his eyes, and asks again. What happened, Magnus Vali?

The image that rises from her son’s mind, the glamour wavering to Vali’s sight - wavering because of blood and magic binding them to know each other - is of a face she had wished to never see again. Magic rises around her, and her powers, scarlet rich and lashing like vipers even as her thoughts (soft as silk, warm as the blood that binds them) link their minds.

Show me where he is.

xxxv.
Loki is still slumped on the ground when her scarlet - warping, ripping, tearing, twisting through reality to take them there - drops them where Vali’s memory said to go. His nose is bleeding and there’s a gash where Vali must have hit him (Wanda has never been more grateful for Thor and Pietro teaching Vali how to throw a punch, just as Pietro had shown her when they were twelve).

(In her heart, something balks to see him. He who manipulated her and lied to her, he who, she now knows, tried to steal her son from her.)

(But this is for Vali. She will face her fears for her son.)

Vali’s face tucks into her neck, as he had when he was six years old and woken from nightmares and Wanda lets her scarlet loose and singing, bright around them both like a halo of blood.

His glamour is gone, that is one of the first things she notices, and maybe anger has untethered some part of her mind because it is easy, linked to her son’s, watching Loki’s to see how it happened, Vali’s burst of magic to take him to her shattering magics around him until he had arrived and remade his glamour for her.

(It saddens her, even now, that her son must wear this glamour.)

“You tried to kidnap my son,” Wanda says, words spat like venom. One of her hands cradles Vali against her, one gently touches her son’s head where it tucks into her neck.

Her scarlet is wholly under her control regardless.

Loki looks wild without his Asgardian glamour, and Wanda does not think he entirely realises that he has shed it. He looks up at her though, red eyes burning, bright like Vali’s are when he uses magic but coldly fierce like the ice of all Jotun.

(Like the ice of his hands when they had held hers.)

(She can feel Vali shaking against her though, not shivering but shaking and her anger wells up even over her fear.)

“How dare you.”

Loki is wild, almost snarling back, Jotun blue and red and ice darting from his fingers almost instinctively, his voice a hoarse and angry and violently possessive snarl of “He is mine too!”

Wanda goes still. Wanda goes cold, cold as the ice that drips from Loki’s fingers, colder than the depths of the ocean, the oldest ice. Colder than space.

(Inside, she is burning.)

Her voice is barely a whisper. “You never wanted him. You never cared about him. You do this… for power, or for some twisted vengeance, but not because you care because you don’t care. You never have, you never will. You aren’t capable of caring.” Her hand, where it cradles Vali’s head, strokes through soft hair. “That is why I wanted to leave. That is why I did. That is what Vali knows of you. That you don’t care and that those who care would not try to kidnap their son.”

Wanda is burning, Wanda is burning, this is not a candle nor a campfire, is not a furnace nor an inferno, this is not the building she and Pietro had burned arsonists to death in, this is a supernova, fire filling everything there is, burning away even Loki’s primordial ice.

“Those who care do not lie like you have.”

xxxvi.
It is Thor who arrives soon after, in the blinding beam of Heimdall’s Bifrost, and he stands over his brother, Mjolnir in hand and is at least as terrifying as Wanda has been.

“If you would think,” Thor says, anger making every word a rumble as deadly as an earthquakes, “to hurt my nephew, I am afraid, brother, that I would have to hurt you.”

Pietro arrives soon after, sprinting, Vision, flying, Wanda knows that if he’d had the means Clint would have come too, all their close-knit family there to stare down Loki.

Vision’s hand is gentle when it touches Vali’s back, Pietro’s smile soft as he lifts his hand and gently fistbumps Vali, shows no sign of fear or flinching at the blood on his nephew’s knuckles.

“You did well,” Pietro says. “Would you like me to take you home?”

Vali glances between mother and uncle, nods when Wanda smiles softly at him. Pietro’s arms are gentle around his nephew, cradles Vali with all the care he would carry Wanda with. I will get him home safe, Pietro promises, I will help him as much as I can.

He is gone in a split of silver and now there are only three of them standing guard on Loki.

“He should be taken back,” Thor says. “Like this, so all can see he is alive and has been lying to them all.”

Wanda’s anger, bright, burning, provides a backbone for the spell she twists out of her fingertips, sets like a shackle around Loki’s throat.

“This face,” she says. “His old face. Those are the only appearances he can wear.”

Thor nods, Vision, gently, reaches for Wanda’s elbow.

“You will not,” Thor promises, “ever have to see him again.”

The Bifrost glows once more, leaves a seal on cracked and shattered stone, leaves no sign of Thor and Loki, of the confrontation that had happened but it’s great twisting knot.

“We should return,” Vision says, voice gentle, so gentle, as he watches Wanda. “Vali will need us.”

He does not have to say the words that Wanda can see glowing against the green neurons and orange databanks of his mind. You need us, after seeing him.

xxxvii.
They end up curled together on Wanda’s bed, Wanda in Vision’s arms, Vali in Pietro’s, Pietro’s eyes fiercely protective as they watch Wanda’s face, how, even now, both she and Vali shake.

I hate him, Wanda sends to him. For his lies, for trying to take Vali from me.

Echoing, behind all this is a thought Pietro recognises well. I fear him, too.

Pietro’s hand is tight around Wanda’s, his arms a warm hug around Vali, Vision’s hands gentle and cool as they massage out knots of stress on Wanda’s shoulders. (Not cold, though. He may be made with metal but he is not ice. He is not like Loki.)

“I hate him,” Vali says, soft and certain and oh, but Wanda has wished Vali would never have to know what hate is, nor anger, nor anything horrible. She would have shielded from the whole world, if she could, her son, the only good to come of Loki, would have shielded him wholly from his father if she had known but how. Vali is still wrapped in his uncle’s arms but he burrows against his mother as he says, soft and certain, “I don’t want to be anything like him, ever.”

xxxviii.
Wanda manages, Vali heals. Loki has scared them, but they won’t allow him to influence, not now Thor visits periodically to let them know how the search for Odin continues, to assure them that Loki remains locked up.

Vali worries, though, constantly and quietly, spotting so many things in himself that he thinks might have come from his father.

(I don’t want to be like him, Vali thinks from when he is ten to when he is fifteen. Not at all.)

He tries not to be manipulative, even in the mild way he’s known his mother has noticed, the way that does no harm, that he uses to help. He tries not to be charming in the way Pietro and Thor encouraged, tries not to use his magic in the sideways ways it likes.

He tries until he is fifteen years old and he wakes from a nightmare to a room coated in ice.

xxxix.
“I didn’t mean to,” he says as soon as Wanda slips through his doorway.

(Mama, he’d sent to her mind, quick and quiet and in colours laced with worry. Mama, please.)

Wanda looks around, looks at the ice, looks back to him, her son.

“Vali,” she says, soft and certain and quiet. “It’s all right.” She crosses to his bed where he’s sat, upright, crosslegged, trying not to touch the ice that surrounds him. Her fingers are gentle as they brush back his hair, her movements careful and slow as she sits on the ice-crackling sheets beside him. “It’s all right.”

Ice, ice, ice, like Loki, like him, I don’t want to be like him, not at all, not ever-

“Vali,” Wanda says again, cutting through the riot of his thoughts. “You are not, and have never, been like him.” Her hand is gentle against his cheek, warm, and he looks at his mother with wary eyes. “You are you,” she says. “Human and Jotun, with Asgardian magics and my magics, and powers from the infinity stone hidden in the sceptre. Just because you have ice… it does not mean you are like him.”

She takes his hands gently, warm over warm skin, lets her scarlet magic wash over his glamour, wash it away. “He does not have markings like these. He has Jotun markings on Jotun skin because that is what he is. But you have Jotun markings on human skin because that is what you are. He has ice magic because he is Jotun. You have ice magic because you have magic from both parents and ice from one. That does not mean you are like him.”

Vali’s mind calms and settles, starts searching for the ice that he’d let out, tries to rein it in.

“You have always helped people,” Wanda says gently. “You sat with your friend, Mattea, who was ill at your birthday, remember? You have friends, who you care about, you helped me when I had bad days, even though I should be the one helping you.” She brushes his hair back again, looks him in the eye, smiles warm and gentle and entirely loving. “Really,” she says. “You don’t need to worry. You punched him remember? Broke his nose. Pietro fist-bumped you for it. You are nothing like him. You never have been.”

Something inside Vali’s chest loosens, something lets him snort-laugh, tuck his head into his mother’s shoulder as she gently hugs him, gently rocks him side to side even as they’re still sitting.

“You’re you,” she says. “And you’re fantastically powerful and very clever and I am certain that if you want this ice to go away you can make it do that.” She pulls back, looks her son in the eye. “And, if you decide you like the ice, that you want to learn to use it, I am certain you can do that too.”

xl.
Vali keeps to himself, for the most part. There’s the Bartons, of course, but they are family, and keeping to himself does not mean staying away from those he cares about.

But he doesn’t get into the public eye, though he’s used his powers in public he hasn’t given any indication of joining the Avengers.

He just keeps to himself, makes friends when he wishes to, and learns how better to manage his magic and the powers he inherited from his mother.

(He grows up, many gossip rags will say, to be quite handsome, though the don’t know what to make of his dating preferences.)

(“I don’t have preferences,” he says when a reporter finally decides to ask. “I like people for who they are, not anything else. I don’t see why gender should factor into it.”)

(He’s at Pride that year, with his mother and his stepdad and his uncle and, to be honest, most of the Avengers who can be there, all either there because they’re part of “the alphabet soup” or because they’re firm allies. He’s arm-in-arm with Nate and both in turn are arm-in-arm with their current partners, and he’s pretty sure he can see half of their friends somewhere in the crowds around them.)

(Fox News nearly has a conniption.)

xli.
Vali gets good with glamours, as he gets older. Not just from his own, which he wears like a second skin, like his father had worn his glamour, but from throwing them over their chosen family when out in public, allowing them - Stepdad Vision with his magenta skin, Pietro with his hair, Wanda with her scarlet and all of them Avengers to boot - to pass unnoticed.

He gets good enough with them he starts to shed his at home, walk into the Facility, throw himself into a sofa, shedding his glamour like a coat so everyone can see the Jotun markings on his human skin.

He plays with glamours though, in his free time, learns how to make ones of people and creatures and dragons, create illusions that feel almost lifelike, almost there, ones which feel as though they might as well be real.

In his cell, on Asgard, Loki cannot wear other faces, but he can watch from afar.

He watches his son’s powers develop, his skill grow, and it might almost scare him, to see how good Vali is getting.

xlii.
Sometimes, Vali still asks Why. Why are people cruel, why did Loki decide to try to kidnap him, why must people keep on try to hurt other people. Why does the Earth spin around the sun, why is the Bifrost a bright beam of light, why this and that and this other.

He still, after all his years, loves to learn.

xliii.
He is twenty when he goes to Asgard, sits outside Loki’s cell and asks him, simply, “Why?”

xliv.
He doesn’t fear Loki anymore. He understands that Loki is dangerous, but since his ice came through he’s found it easier to see what Loki did and does, to understand Loki’s modus operandi in Wanda’s thoughts and Thor’s.

He might not manipulate people as Loki does, but he can see manipulation, spot it from a mile off, and he can deflect it with ease.

He thinks, sometimes, that this is because he is Loki’s son.

“Why?” he asks the man who is supposed to be his father. Why did you lure Mama in. Why did you make her want to leave. Why did you try to kidnap me? Why did you hurt Uncle Thor, lock away Odin, try to conquer the Earth? Why?

He sits by the cell, just outside it, turning something between his fingertips. (The first time Loki looked it was a knife, the second time a pencil, the third time a twig. Loki cannot quite see through the glamour to see what it really is.)

He doesn’t need to know, and he thinks that hurts Loki in some way. Loki cannot bait him with it, try to lure him into a position of weakness in order to get the answers. Vali doesn’t need to know, even though he wants to, is secure enough in himself to sit there and ignore what Loki says that is not an answer.

(He can hear lies, too, almost. At the least, he knows when what he is told is not the truth. That helps.)

Loki can’t bait Vali. Vali is too certain of himself, sure in himself. Loki cannot taunt Vali, cannot manipulate him. Vali manipulates him straight back, in his own subtle, circuitous ways.

It is almost an impasse for the longest time.

“Power,” Loki says eventually. “Being treated as I deserved. Not being second best, just because I was Jotun, even if no one - even I - knew it for a thousand years, except Odin and Frigga. That is why I sought to rule.”

Vali nods, slowly, quietly, turns the chopstick between his fingers until it becomes a long stick of chalk. “And my mother?”

xlv.
Vali ekes out every answer and leaves Loki all alone in his cell with his answers and his issues. He makes his way up the steps, out of the bowels of Asgard and goes and sits with his Uncle Thor.

Thor is poring over blueprints and holograms of Asgard, trying to discover where Odin has been hidden, but he pauses his work, sets it aside for his nephew for a little while.

“You spoke to him?” Thor asks. “How did it go?”

Vali is quiet, paces over to the bench beside Thor and Sif and the Warriors Three, lies down with his head beside Thor’s lap.

“You all did better with me than with Loki,” he says, softly. “Thank you.”

His eyes shut - not asleep, but processing, almost dozing.

(When he wakes, he finds Thor and Sif and Fandral have braided his hair into battle-plaits.)

xlvi.
Vali goes home, sits with Wanda, hugs her with one arm around her shoulders.

“Loki is a shit,” he says, and the emphasis on a swear word is unusual enough that Wanda takes notice. “He has issues and reasons, but he’s a shit.”

Wanda is silent. There isn’t really much she can say to that.

“Thank you,” Vali says, softly. “Thank you for making sure I wasn’t like him.”

Wanda hugs him back, cries hot tears into his shoulder because if anything has made Vali dissimilar to Loki it is that Vali is Vali and is nothing like Loki in nature at all.

xlvii.
No one knows what to make of Vali’s relationship with Loki. It’s quiet and constant, infrequent conversations that last for hours. They don’t seem to like each other at all, but they can and do talk for hours, Vali sitting outside Loki’s cell (“I could project,” he had admitted to Wanda. “But there is something important about being there in person.”), and seeing what his father has to say.

He can hear Loki’s lies, know when Loki’s trying to manipulate him or get under his skin (Loki never succeeds. Vali is nothing like Loki in personality, but he is enough his father’s son to know what he is trying to do).

Sometimes, Vali can see flickers of what might almost be pride snaking across the icy surface of Loki’s mind. He does not think that is what they are, really, but he cannot be certain, not without dipping into Loki’s thoughts.

He won’t dip into Loki’s thoughts.

xlviii.

Vali is the one, later, to help broker a lasting peace between Asgard and Jotunheim, despite Laufey’s death and despite Loki and despite Thor. He who is human and Jotun and learned in Asgardian magics and Jotun ice and the chaos of his mother… he is something  with enough of Jotunheim and Asgard and something else entirely in him to broker peace for all.

(Loki hates him for that, for making a peace he had tried to end, but he cannot help but feel some kind of pride to see Vali so skilfully manage everyone.)

(He hates that he’s proud, and so he never says it, even as he knows that saying it aloud could be one of the few things that could hurt Vali.)

(It is not love, he would always deny that. It is, however, respect, and that he might own to if pressed.)

xlix.
Vali has his family, he has Wanda and his stepdad Vision, and he has Uncle Pietro and Uncle Thor and he has all of the Bartons including his best mate Nate. He has other friends, too, and all of the Avengers, and over time three partners he cares about deeply and with whom he keeps giving Fox News conniptions.

And he has Loki, the father no one but his family on Earth realises is related to him.

(Loki is always Father, never Dad. Vision is Dad, because Vision cares and hates to do harm and is Family where Loki is not.)

(But Loki is still Father, even though neither of them are always necessarily pleased by the fact.)

But Vali keeps visiting and keeps talking. He wants to remember where he came from, what he came from, so he can keep from ever becoming that himself

(He would never become that, though, Wanda would tell him so over and over if he asked. Vali is too good to his heart to be like that.)

l.
This is the story, in the end: Loki sought power in the form of another person, but forgot that a person lost, a person alone, a person trusting, is still their own.

This is how it goes, in the end: The person with the power Loki sought to make his left, and took with herself a child yet to be born.

This is what followed, in the end: The child was born, was let to live, was loved. The child had the power of mother and father both, and knew where it’s loyalty lay.

This is what happened, to the one who would have been king: He fell. His work undone, his might removed, he was left to despair.

Sometimes the child visits it’s father, all there is left of attempts to rule and gather power.

Nothing beside remains.