Summer looks up from her book and freezes. “You … aren’t Flyte.” To that self-evident remark, eyebrows high on her face, she adds, “Who are you?”
“Either. Both. It’s a sibling thing, what you said.” A few more giggles erupt from her mouth. “A family thing. The people who’ve known you the longest … ” She stops, for a second, and gulps in a breath, and begins again, slower. “They can’t see it. Change. It’s so small, in front of them, so they can’t see it. Like watching grass grow.”
Loki listens to her intently and smiles faintly. “When they do see change they pretend that nothing has happened and try to pretend everything was like it used to be. But inside, you know that things have changed, and in the end know that no matter what happens, they will deny it.”
“That’s not fair,” she objects, sitting forward. “Sometimes they think that if they treat you like before, things will go back — but sometimes they just don’t see. You curl yourself inside, you yourself hide the changes,” more pensively, “you go back to the old behaviours even when they aren’t really you anymore. That helpless kneejerk response to, oh, parental authority, when you’ve been an adult for ages, but you can’t forget when you were a child.”
Summer blinks a few times, seeing the past, eyelids flickering. “Sometimes you have to force them to see the change.”