The Trickster God stands a calculated distance from the Thunderer. Fey and fine-boned, like a lean young wolf, he examines his complementary other soul with wary jade eyes.
“ … Thor.”
His tongue is dry; the word brother suits the golden creature, the chaos after which Loki chases in one strapping frame, far better. That word is so much more … ineffable, resistant to erasure, than Thor’s mere name.
“Eheh. Are we going to recite each other’s titles next, or will you explain the reason for your … rather abrupt appearance?”
The fact that Loki is ALIVE lingers like a roaring chasm between them.
“ … tell me. You must tell me.”
The words are at odd disjunction with any claim that the brooding Thunderer has just made. But there is a mounting, almost savage desperation, to what Loki says next.
“Is it so much easier to condemn me of the crimes that make me ‘your brother’s murderer,’ than it is …”
His voice hitches, soaked with tears of rage and grief and frenzy and loss, which he will go to the grave thought a murderous maniac and dirty filthy treasonous pit viper before shedding.
“ … than it is …to simply ASK ME what HAPPENED to secure my ‘death’? Brother! Norns, will you not but ASK me this, just once? Will you condemn him who saved your life and the life of your beloved to such a loathsome exile before learning why it is that I must never again yield to the will of Odin Allfather? If you would speak to me, let us speak of that!”
Will you never ask me where and in whose clutches I landed when I fell from the Bifrost: with your face, screaming my name, straining to reach me, as my very last epilogue?
Would you claim that the father who told me it was my birthright to die was not the true denouncer? I, who adored him frightened to touch him with my dirty blue Jotun hands when at last I learned the truth? What if your skin turned the hue of a bottomless ocean and suddenly you knew nothing? Brother, does it mean more to make me your father’s scapegoat, than it means to ask me why I was trying to commit s u i c i d e ?
B r o t h e r … ! ASK me WHY I am become a killer and a weary wolf ever running.
Brother, please do not let me down.
“There was something I once told you never to doubt. Trust may be broken past mending, but that thing which I told you ever to believe REMAINS TRUE.”
Sometimes I’m envious, but never doubt that I love you.
Old words from a time that was too long ago. Back when Thor thought that they were happy. He hadn’t told Loki that day of his coronation of how nervous he truly had been, that despite knowing that he had been one who had been chosen to take the throne that he wasn’t sure if he could be the king that Asgard needed. Yet, he had done what he always did when he felt insecure, hide behind a smile and false confidence.
He looked at Loki before him, wishing that somehow they could go back in time to when they had been brothers and friends. Life has been simpler back then.
He let out a breath. “Tell me what happened. What caused you to become like this, to put behind all that loved you. We were brothers once. I can still see my brother in there, hiding deep. You were the son of Odin and Frigga as much as I am. You were meant to be great, to have your own patch of sun, and yet here you are.”
Thor looked Loki directly in the eyes. “Why did you let go?” He asked, his voice soft, a whisper. How many times had that nightmare plagued him, seeing his brother let go and fall with him unable to do nothing but cry for Loki.
“ … . I fell and fell. Screaming uselessly into a void. Screaming for want of an outlet to vent my grief and my RAGE. Through a wormhole. I managed to produce enough air magic to have oxygen, yet … it was so c o l d … and my Jotun body prevented me the mercy of the death I craved so much.”
Loki cannot open his eyes. He doesn’t dare. Looking into Thor’s face will cause him to balk, for fear of rejection, of scorn, of disbelief. But if there is anyone in all the Nine Loki needs to hear these words, it is the brother who has ever been his fixed point in a bewildering universe: even as that brother overshadowed and failed to truly look at him.
“The Chitauri found me, snatched me up from space, barely alive, starved, dehydrated, and took me to one of their fieldmarshals. He put me in a bright, hot, white fishbowl, very like Asgard’s own prisons, and he told me that if I entertained his leader, I might become one of his …”
Loki’s lip curls. He swallows back a retch.
“ … children . . . and war generals. I asked what his leader wanted. ‘The Infinity Gems,’ was all the creature said. I was made to undergo … experiments … tests, to see … how far a Prince of Asgard could be pushed before breaking … with heat, and cybernetics, and poisons, and blades, and … ‘enhancements,’ and … !”
His bodily tremors prevent him from keeping a steady voice. For a mere instant his fine boned pale features crumple in horror, against tears. Then he is again composed and cold as sleet.
“ … anyroad, you surely grasp … the basic idea. I was released under constant surveillance by the creature’s leader, and granted the temporary use of the Infinity Gem your friend Vision calls ‘the Mind Gem’ in return for a promise. I would retrieve yet another Infinity Gem: the Tesseract. Brother … I am aware that you have consulted the Norns about the Infinity Gems. Please tell me you know that I never thought you would be put in line of fire. You were stranded on Asgard, last I knew, by the broken Bifrost. I only wanted my freedom from the MONSTER who had made me his plaything …”
But freedom is life’s great lie. Freedom from tyrants who would pervert you. Freedom from the doubt and disgust of your own family. Freedom from your own dirty bloodline and the curse of your Destiny to FALL SHORT.
“I could not accept your offer of reconciliation at the moment you requested it. He was watching. Even now, his agents are drawing nearer, the more you choose to involve yourself in his quest to gain all of the Gems, and court Death. Do NOT ask me to disclose his name, and seal your doom.”
icyxmischief 