I made a Marvel neighborhood in my Sims game, and at one time it seemed that Loki’s daughter was going to marry the son of Doctor Strange.
which would have been funny
because her name would have become
Hela Strange
“But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
“Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”
— Leonard Cohen, Anthem
techmagiclightxnshieldedsoldier:
It is raining.
When Loki was a child, and even into adolescence, he would ask one thing of Thor, in return for serving as his confidante, his apologist, his advocate and friend: he would ask it to rain. The rain was evidence of Thor’s omnipresence, and Thor was to Loki a hero and standard of excellence. Thor was, to Loki, home. So when it rained, home enveloped Loki in a warm mist, which was always, despite soaking him to the bone, strangely comforting.
It is raining today in Wakanda, as Loki summons the courage to reveal himself–plucked forth in time by a message that, in the future, he would sacrifice his life to Thanos in exchange for his brother’s, and christened an agent of rewritten history. An agent of Thanos’s ultimate demise. The pretender, the vile bruise-colored cockroach who played at immortality for the sake of mass genocide. The arbiter of Loki’s worse torments, by the hand of Ebony Maw. Loki will enjoy pissing on Thanos’s corpse.
But today is something more important still: the easing of Thor’s grief.
Reconciliation.
As Loki slips through the palace security in the guise, down to fingerprints and retinas, of a member of the Dora Milaje, he wonders whether Thor will believe the truth, that he truly died, or will scoff in a fury at being “had” yet again. He wonders whether this will disinter ghosts for Thor, and make his suffering worse.
Regardless, formless and fleeting as running water, wet from the rain that comforts, Loki-as-guard sets down his spear and knocks on the door to Thor’s chambers.
“Your Majesty, a word.”
I told you never to doubt.
Now you know I was being sincere.
Now you know I have ever loved you, brother.Thor was more in control today, at least that’s what everyone else thought, but even the very rain reminded him of Loki. The lack of lightning and the absence of booming thunder gave those who were less aware this thought, this appearance. In realty, the lightning had merely found another home, in his very room.
Nightmares, those which really weren’t nightmares, but memories plagued him. Those were the worse because they were inescapable even when ones’ eye opened. Yet his method of coping with them really wasn’t coping at all but instead..a freeing from the excess power flowing through his veins in his grief through the form of blackened walls and flashes of what could’ve been.
The thunder too had found another home. It echoed in time with his very heartbeat inside him.
The knock at his door was startling. As were the words spoken. Few had ventured down to the part of the castle he’d claimed as his own, however temporarily that it might be. Less of them had used his proper title in their shared grief and he hadn’t demanded it. What had changed now, besides the fact that for once he’d gotten out of bed and actually changed? It wasn’t acceptance… just a numbness and a need to move that had propelled him to do so.
A minute stretched on like an eternity as he debated what to do, but in the end..Wa’kanda’s people had been understanding of him… so maybe it was time to pay them back. The wary King opened the door. Immediately he noticed odd things, like the fact the guard was wet from head to toe and that the spear was on the ground instead of in her arms. Despite being their ally and in the castle, even he had noticed the spears were never not in the ladies hands. They were an impressive force and always prepared for battle. “What brings you down here?” Thor questioned, though he summoned his axe quietly to his hand from behind his back, just incase.
Guised still as the guard, Loki swallows, and steadies himself, and ventures,
“My king. Please, look out the window. There is something you must see.”
He waits for Thor to oblige, and when his brother has turned, the glamour about his person vanishes. It’s a merciful effort to break the overwhelming truth gently.
He gazes at his brother’s back, and never more has the sight of (burdened, now so burdened) broad shoulders and careless golden hair been the sight of safe haven. The Trickster God’s eyes are soft in a face still more gaunt than usual, starved by solitude and secrecy, and stress.
He steps toward Thor, one pace at a time, quelling the childish urge to turn and run, for how could this moment ever meet the standards established in his mind? How could it ever measure up to the elation of reuniting with the only family he still has? The hope of just one person in Loki’s life who might greet him with gladness and pride, and not disappointment?
He swallows again.
Ever since learning that his future self, the self who was and yet will never be, was strangled to death by Thanos, Loki has found it difficult to swallow, even to breathe. His throat always feels a little too tight.
He says nothing now, only comes to a halt shoulder to shoulder, on even terrain, with the Thunder God, and waits for Thor to turn and look at him.
And realize.
//It’s the end of September and it happened in April but sometimes I just miss him and start crying like a real person died. I guess he was real to me.
I can’t imagine how it feels to be Tom Hiddleston. He must have genuinely grieved.
This makes me cry and I’m not sure why but I have a visceral and powerful reaction to it, thank you to e-soulu, it’s beautiful.
Tom Hiddleston and Chris Hemsworth in ‘The Avengers’, (2012). Dir. Joss Whedon.
Remember when something like this caused me outrage, and caused me to spawn paragraph after paragraph of enraged meta?
Lmao. Simpler times.
icyxmischief 