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Sometimes, Loki stares into the mirror in his bathroom and wonders whether he's really a person at all, really.
He's not human, he knows that much. Because he's Aesir; or rather, Jotnar. A monster in the skin of a man, walking among people weaker than him, who are different from him. He touches his cheekbones in the mirror, where he knows that his heritage lines appear on his skin when he's not in his Aesir form. Traces down his jaw and throat, lingering over his Adams apple.
She allows her form to shift, stares at the softer features of this face. Longer lashes, rounder eyes, a smaller frame. Everything about her is gentler. But still, it doesn't feel right. Her skin is shaped wrong, her body isn't meant for her.
It's strange, because as a child, it had been hard enough becoming a woman on occasion. Staring at herself in the mirror and weeping because she wasn't a woman, and no one would ever accept it. Her mother finally told her that it was alright, that it was merely who she was. A child of both.
Loki wonders if being a woman is finally wrong because she was simply never meant to be a person in the first place. Just a monster in the skin of an Aesir, playing pretend.
She sees her blue skin and red eyes, for a moment.
Her fist drives into the glass and it shatters easily, dropping into the sink in a flurry of broken glass shards and drywall. She shakes dust and glass from her skin, ignores the ache of the cuts on her knuckles. What is she? Why is she broken? The children on Asgard who would mock her, when she was one of them, who would call her a freak.
What if they were right all along?
She looks down and spots her teary eyes reflected back at her, again and again. Huffs in frustration and pushes away from the sink to hide herself under her covers, pulls her sheets up to her chin with blood smearing on them. She curls around them, hiding herself.
Maybe, if she pretends long enough, she'll be a real person. Maybe she'll go back to how everything was before Thor's coronation. Or even just when she was a child, desperate to understand. She'll decide not to worry about it anymore, go on about her life as a man under skin that itches and burns some days. It wouldn't be too bad, she supposes.
“Why do I always have to be different?” She mutters into her bedsheets, using them to wipe tears from her eyes. “Why can't I just be normal for once?”
Snowflake hops up onto the bed, walks up her legs and curls up on top of one of her arms. She sighs happily, in that cat-like way, and starts purring contently. Loki scratches fingers through the soft fur of her back.
It'll be okay, she supposes, letting her body shift back to male. Snowflake ‘mmrp’s at her in confusion, for that, but otherwise ignores the change. It's slightly less itchy to be a man than a woman, while her skin aches for something she doesn't understand.
He closes his eyes and allows himself to fall asleep alongside his beloved cat.