1 Chapter 1: Loki
Loki released his grip and let himself fall. Thor's screams of anguish rang in his ears, yet Odin's silence was somehow ten times more deafening. As he turned towards the blue vortex below him, he felt his eyes began to water.
That was only because the light was too bright, of course. Not because of the fact that this was the end for him. It also wasn't because of Odin's disappointment. No, he cared about Odin as much as Odin cared about him: not at all. Or a bit less than that, perhaps.
He wasn't exactly sure how it was possible to care for someone less than not at all, but he was good at beating impossible odds.
Except when he wasn't. Like now, for example, as he found himself failing in his plan to destroy Jotunheim. Then again, those odds hadn't exactly been impossible.
The chance of surviving this, however, was impossibly low. Logic dictated that Loki would, therefore, survive.
Loki smiled as the swirling abyss of oblivion enveloped him.
-----------
If he had been conscious, Loki would have been screaming—if the pain hadn't already torn his mind apart, that was. In fact, more than that was happening now.
Splinters of his very being were lashed off by the power assaulting him. Each shard of Loki was sent in a different direction, and subsequently destroyed by corporeal and spiritual energies alike.
All but one.
A fragment of Loki, slightly bigger than the rest managed to cling to its former body until the very last moment.
Any physical part of it was destroyed as it re-entered the universe, but the spirit–the soul, the tiny piece of one, at least–remained.
The energies of the broken Bifrost picked it up like a tornado and sent it spinning through space and time, and in a matter of massive coincidence, it happened to land on Midgard.
The fragment was a being of animalistic instinct, and all animals desired to eat. This entity needed to feed upon magic–not much, but it would need to latch itself to a source.
In its extremely weak state, the source would need to be vulnerable. It scanned across the Earth, omnipresent and yet without form, looking for something to consume.
And there it was. A being much like it. An entity that was less than a hundredth of a human's soul that had connected itself to a host in an attempt at survival.
Unfortunately for the said piece of human soul, a hundredth of an Asgardian soul was far more powerful than even a whole human soul—and it most certainly was not a full human skull.
Whilst the fragment of Loki was far too small to measure, it had little trouble ripping the despicable creature into shreds and banishing it from its host's mind so that he could replace it.
If the six-year-old Harry Potter had been awake, he would have seen a cloud of writhing blackness burst from his scar, letting out an eldritch screech before a bright white light consumed it and forced its own way in. In fact, he did awake at this point, but by this time the light show had vanished.
With a small frown, he attributed the light he had seen to his imagination–there were no windows in his cupboard, after all–and went back to sleep.
-----------
For what seemed like an eternity to him, Loki could do naught but observe and think. Thinking.
He had certainly been doing a lot of that. The first matter he had decided to contemplate was the simple subject of whether or not he was actually Loki.
He had retained partial memory of his time as an untethered spirit, his supernatural intelligence the only thing that stopped his mind from being driven insane as he perceived the concept of nigh-on omnipresence.
He knew that he had been a part of Loki, and that with the fact that the "real" Loki was most likely dead, he decided that he was now Loki–even if he didn't have a physical form and was confined to the mind of a child. How he had fallen.
Whilst he had never paid much attention to the affairs of the great majority of mortal kind, he had occasionally interfered with wizards, spreading chaos among them and teaching them spells that would further their strife between themselves.
He happened to now inhabit the mind of one of them, and an apparently powerful one if his estimations were correct.
Well, not powerful now seeing as though he was a six-year-old, but he would be when he was an adult—if he managed to make it to adulthood.
Loki would have been happier with the power levels of his host if not for the fact he couldn't figure out how to take over the boy's mind.
For mortal months he had recharged his strength, leeching off the boy's soul until he was once again full. By all logic, he should have been able to dominate the child's mind with the slightest effort. Unfortunately, logic had abandoned him.
He supposed the reason he was not able to was that he was essentially composed of the boy's magic, having fed off of it to reconstruct his mind.
Being a master of magic, Loki of all people knew that some types of magic refused to strike against itself. It was just his luck that he managed to come up against it in this child.
For what must've been the hundredth time, Loki found himself wishing that he had ended up in the mind of an adult. For one, they would be a lot more powerful.
There was also that Loki was not exactly a patient god, and although he had fathered–and mothered–children of his own, he did not think he had the kindness to cooperate with a child's immaturity.
He sighed. Yes, an adult would be much easier to cooperate with. As evidenced by the fact that Loki had been a mother, he was not adverse to changing forms to obtain his goals—well, he hadn't been back then when he hadn't known how badly it would damage his mind—and an adult or a hormonal teenager was considerably easier to seduce.
