Jormungandr thinks on this for a moment, growing more and more downcast. He crosses his arms over his chest as if trying to coil up, despite being in his human form.
“I suppose…my worst nightmare would be to lose my mind or memory,” he begins in response. “Knowledge and learning are my great passions, and to lose all of that would’ve made so much of my life for naught.”
His focus turns to Loki. “Losing you for good would follow close behind. You have always motivated me not just to seek knowledge, but to break conventions and see outside of the norm.” Jormungandr’s mood slowly picks back up. His arms relax. “You taught me the difference between learning and exploring. You are my greatest inspiration, mother.”
“Oh, love. I am sorry that in a version of this life you have had to endure one of the things you fear most. But I shan’t leave you again.”
A pale long-fingered hand rests against the side of Jory’s neck.
“Thank you for confiding these fears. Would it help if I cast a protective sigil upon you, so that you are especially impervious to mind control spells?”
Green eyes are uncannily gentle.
“It is the least I can do, for knowing one of my children considers me his inspiration.”
For a protracted silence, the God of Mischief examines the mutant, mentally tallying the knowledge that Logan is in fact one of earth’s shamefully foisted outcasts. Head tilted down, body in a prepared, predatory crouch, favoring magic over daggers, he cradles a ball of lime green energy.
“Wrong pantheon,” he leers. “But I’ll forgive the slight in favor of safe passage, Mister… . ?”
LOGAN SENSES AND SEES THE DANGER HE’S IN. He isn’t as bone-headed as some people take him for. He takes a step back, his eyes focused on the green energy currently being. sort of, aimed at him. This is, in a word, not good. He doesn’t fuck with magic because more often than not he ends up on the short end of the stick of things.
“Hey, woah, no need for that shit here and it’s Logan,” he says, hands outstretched, palms flat in the universal display of “Stop.”
He sighs though and knows he’s going to be roped into something ridiculous again and says, “Yeah, sure. Ah’ll get ya where ya wanna go.”
“I don’t need your help obtaining transportation, you troglodyte,” Loki hisses. “I merely wish to pass by you without engaging in combat.”
He turns the blades of his daggers hilt-out in a gesture of deference and peace, despite his impatient words.
When Tony Stark woke up this morning, he immediately knew it was going to be a Very Bad Day™, given the fact that he found himself standing at a mere 3 feet 4 inches in height and looking to be only about 5 or 6 years old at best. His memories as an adult seem to remain intact, at least.
Eerily calm, he pulls his too big t-shirt closer about his waist, having to forgo anything else because nothing else fits, as he leaves his bedroom to head for the common area where he hopes at least someonein the tower has some idea of what the hell happened to him, or better yet, how to reverse it.
“So, I’d say ‘good morning,’ but that’s up for some serious debate right now,” he says by means of greeting, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.
Loki’s standing in front of the doe-eyed, smartass kid who’s swaggered into the common room with Tony Stark’s inimitable cocksureness. He’s holding, hilariously, a tv tray, on which sits a buttered fig scone and cup of herbal tea. His goal was to eat this breakfast uninterrupted, while binge-watching a historical drama (The Crown, as it so happens) on Netflix, before resuming his experiments in the intersection of magic and quantum physics.
But one doesn’t always get what one wants.
“Oh goodness. Did you get into my potions jars while I was sleeping?” he marms.
That he is unfazed is cause for amusement but not necessarily comfort.
The loss of his realm, the high loss of his people, and Loki.. it had all hit the King hard making not only his heart hurt but then the battle that had proceeded everything filled his very bones with the ache of how little he had managed to save. When Thor had created his new weapon and nearly died from the power of the star, the thought that allowed him to hold on was the one of vengeance, and specifically the need to avenge Loki. But even that regard he’d failed.
With the snap, the god found himself wishing the universe would take him. Once again he was denied and the ache of loss settled down a million times more heavily in his bones.
Months later found Thor and the remaining Avengers struggling to cope with losses and to assist where they could with reuniting what families had been separated during the chaos that had reined, comforting others when no such happiness could be found. Missing posters were everywhere even Wa’kanda wasn’t free of them. Shuri had allowed them to stay, and while the Captain and Bruce managed to assist her with restoring some semblance of order, Thor’s soul held only misery.
On the worst days it thundered so loud buildings shook, lightning lit up around the dome they’d restored to once again protect the kingdom, and rain poured till new measures were put into place to prevent the high tech city from flooding. Everyone knew the cause in the change of weather, but no one could handle the electricity that flowed off the anguished god in waves to get close enough to even try and comfort him. @icyxmischief
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.
“Aye,” he says, smiling softly as he looks more at the frog. As Loki speaks, Thor can feel the grief welling up in his chest, no matter how hard he tries to shove it back down. He turns away, knowing that it is precisely the one person he can truly be himself around, that if he’s not careful, his mask will fall and he may not be able to pick it up again.
“A while,” he says at least, throat thick as he tries to swallow the tears down again.
Loki turns an ever-vigilant eye on Thor, reading his noble struggle for composure like a large-print text. He knows him by heart. He knows him better than Thor knows himself.
The vantage point, in close proximity, though in shadow, is piercing.
“ … Thor. You must let go now. You are ready.”
The Trickster God places his hand on the side of his brother’s neck; he who is never confrontational now urges his sibling, the sun around which he orbits, to purge.
“I am here, and it is safe now. Let go.”
He doesn’t move at first, solid and still like a mountain face. But then, like an avalanche, that mountain face crumbles and falls, and Thor nearly collapses into his brother, burying his face in his shoulder. It takes a few moments after that for the tears to come, but his shoulders start quaking almost at once, the tension starting to leak out of him like crackling summer lightning.
He isn’t even mindful of what precisely he is weeping over. His lost family and friends and home, yes of course. But also the unanswered questions and stories that were now buried with them, the inability to ever learn the truth of too many family secrets. He’s even weeping over the fact that they had to kill their only sister. Perhaps they would never have reconciled with her (okay, very probably), but they were hardly given the chance.
It makes him angry, too, and he feels unspeakably betrayed by the father he had so idolised to be denied these opportunities. Perhaps things would have turned out differently had there been less secrets from the very beginning, perhaps Asgard would never have been destroyed and he would have never lost brother so many times, never have lost his mother and his father and even his sister to all these lies.
Loki watches the descent as it transpires.
It brings him vividly back to childhood: to an odd, half-circumstantial memory, seemingly insignificant save for what it betrays of their ironclad sibling bond. They were seven and five, vivacious little godlings, and because Frigga had just shown Loki how to turn inanimate objects into toads, Thor had been on a toad kick. The pair had wandered away from a picnic party one scorching summer afternoon, and Thor had caught a marvelously wart-ridden toad, one with a beautiful chirp, and had placed it in a box for safekeeping, intending to place it in a tank full of water and rocks with plentiful crickets and worms on which to feast, when they returned to the palace.
Unfortunately, the noonday sun had been too much for the amphibian, and it had died before evening. Thor, emulating and adulating their father, had striven to put on a brave face as he does now. The same stoic features, the same swimming cobalt eyes. Loki, hardwired from infancy to be Thor’s comfort and confidante, his foil and his buffer, had embraced his elder brother, and declared, “But brother, don’t worry: I can make you another!” It was the kindness of these words that had sent a flood of tears down the little Thunderer’s face, alongside plaintive wailing.
It’s with sad fondness and familiarity, thinking on moments like that, that Loki watches Thor descend into sobs of bottomless grief and rage.
He catches him without effort, and seizes him around the shoulders, and braces him while he purges.
“Good, that is good,” he soothes.
Dagger-sharp jade eyes scan the environs, for anyone who might intrude, for anyone who might dare lay a finger on the golden warrior who is Loki’s to protect.
Caaan‘t stop, wooon‘t stop making comics on lazy sundays :3
But I am too lazy to clean it up in Photoshop.. Hope you can still read those intellectual dialogues :p
Part 3 of that other comic will follow soon :3
Have a nice evening y‘all and click for better resolution 😉
icyxmischief 