Long before the Chitauri and the Tesseract, before the destruction of the bifrost and the attack on Jotunheimer, before exile and an aborted coronation, darkness had lurked in the halls of Asgard. Though it was rarely spoken of the House of Odin was not a house known for it’s kindness, not even to those born to it of blood.
When Fenrir was birthed— born through magic from the lust of a Jotun woman and a the darkest depths of a prince’s desire for love unconditional— Loki was already known as “the Mother of Monsters”. The addition of a massive wolf-child did not aid in the moniker, and though Fenrir thought himself to be loved by his father, he had no proof as the man distanced himself from that which would detract from the image he tried to present of himself.
Though Fenrir was kin of kings, he was treated with all the respect of a mutt on the street by his extended family. When he spoke the Asgardians could not hear the intelligence in his words, they could only see the gaping void of his maw and glistening fangs as long as a sword. His own family grew frightened of him, afraid of his size and temperment, and so they bound him. Gleipnir was crafted specifically for him, and it was through trickery that he would spend centuries wasting away beneath it’s impossible strength.
Not once did Loki come to visit him, and the great wolf grew bitter.
His magic devoured his body to keep his mind alive. Bit by bit, and piece by piece, the great fenris wolf was chipped away, form growing smaller and smaller with each passing decade. By the time his magic had swallowed up enough of him that he could wriggle free of his restraints and fall between the branches of Yggdrasil, he was smaller than he had ever been, even as a pup. A tiny scraggly bedraggled beast, too weak to even snap at the tiny scraggly bedraggled man who pulled him free of what he would later learn was the Hudson River.
Too weak to speak or use any of the magic that was his by birthright, Fenrir’s first memory of a human is that of kindness and care.
(His first memory as a human is years down the line. The shift from wolf-dog to human was hard enough, and it chewed through what reserves of magic he had gathered to him in the years since he found his freedom. So it is that he stands in human form, looking to be little more than a scrawny underfed boy of six or seven, over the empty grave of his saviour. He presses shaking fingers to the name on the tombstone, and promising never to give up. It’s the last time he will ever refer to himself as Fenrir even in his own heart.
He will be chased away from Steve Roger’s grave site in minutes, but for now Philip has his moment.)
