Loki hears the rain drumming relentless outrage on the roof; aye, he knows without looking, and he fears what folly Thor might resort to in order to avenge him: indeed, he fears the palace won’t withstand the shockwaves of the Thunder God’s rage, should he disclose further information.
And, strange irony that it may be, he finds himself in the role of comforter, even sitting in a pool of his own sweat; his teeth grind and he hisses through them,
“Brother, calm. Down.”
Nails dig into his palms. He raspily inhales, and stares at the sun-bronzed, muscular arms held secure around him; an infinitesimal pause, before he rests the side of his face against Thor’s forearm; he derives comfort from it at the same time as he imparts it. Symbiotic: that’s what these two were once, and it is what they may be again.
“That was but the beginning. There was … understand, at times I can recall everything as though drawing a line on parchment, with dates and events. But mostly it is mere flashes and impressions. The seven fingers on the Other’s hand. The reek of … .thank you, by the way, I … would appreciate such measures …ehm … anyroad, the reek of antiseptics, the … combination of … the straps that held me down to a certain chair, and dug imprints in my wrists and ankles, gods, I despise fetters, and then that chair, it … it was off-balanced and pushed into the lower left of my back, you know, where I always have a catch in the muscle now? That is why, for they conducted their tests in that chair, and in between the physical trials, they took me to … so many unimaginable worlds, all the same: war, famine, rape, plunder, death, death, death, and then they would bring me back to the chair, and finally He came. He came, and …”
Loki’s limbs curl around Thor like a frightened spider’s. His hair hangs down over his gaunt face, a safe curtain. His voice is high and thin, whispered, as if even now, Thanos might hear him uttering treason: and in truth, he just might.
“He played with my memories, brother, I still cannot be certain what parts of our childhood are real, what parts were really good, really bad, what parts I imagined entirely, because he tampered with my mind until I was a violently willing servant. Yes, I … I kept enough of myself to plot my way out of his clutches via the Tesseract, but he kept feeding me exposure to the Mind Gem, the very scepter that became Vision’s gem, he kept at me until I was robbed of my own greatest weapon. As time passes, my true memories, return, and … !”
He bites down on his hand, hard.
“ … and I think the worst part is that some of my worst memories are still real . . . !”
There is instant regret from the Thunderer. For Loki should not be comforting him right in this moment. No, he should be the only one providing comfort and support right now. Yet here his precious other half was, feeling and seeing the rage coming forth and trying desperately to calm the fire that burned.
By Valhalla, how did Thor lose control so quickly? He knew that lack of control was often his undoing, his downfall. But there was little he could do to stop it? He must try harder, he resolved then and there in that very moment. He would try harder to keep his insurmountable emotions under greater control, tightening the leash around its desire to escape and be felt by the world at large.
“Brother…I’m terribly sorry, thine should not be the one doling out comfort in this tenuous moment. We should, our roles be greatly reversed, yet I once again let my emotions get the best of me and reacted before I thought.’ There is a bitter laughter, “As is entirely too common.” Shaking his head a little, Thor reaches out and gently takes Loki’s fingers, prying them out of his palm. Stroking over the bloodied skin. “Here let me clean that up for you.” He said, standing so that he could walk to the wash basin, placing a towel in the clear crystal water and soaking it, before bringing this back to his brother.
Sitting down once more, he tenderly begins to wash the self inflicted wounds, keeping his head level as he does, listening just as intently to his brother’s continued speech. Anger fuels Thor’s heart, even as his fingers remain so gentle in their cleansing, but he keeps it in check for both of their sakes.
To hear of such terrors being inflicted on his younger sibling, that such a molestation of his mind had taken place..it was almost too much for the thunderer to comprehend, let alone bear. He knew Loki had been tortured, but he had not been awares as to the extent of it, the true malice for which had taken place. Oh how things would have been different were he there!
Or..would they have been?
It is the uncertainty that Thor finds disturbing. Would he have been able to save his brother were he there? Or would he too have been left to the mercy of The Other? Left to the devices of which only Loki’s description now seemed apt to fully understand. And even he, the cocky trickster sounds uncertain of himself. Even in recanting.
‘Loki..” The horror is obvious in Thor’s broken voice, for the usual baritone has been reduced to a harsh whisper of disbelief. A tone that was not common on the even more cocky Thunder God. He takes the spider like curling and holds his brother close, as if he could tuck him into his very being and hold him there. He rubs his back in small, soothing circles, much in the way he would when Loki fussed as a baby in their shared room. Hoping that it brings him some form of comfort now when he is in such desperate need of it.
How he hated to see his brother so distraught, how he detested The Other for laying his filthy hands about his brother’s flesh. But how he hated him more for the memory distortion. Such a deep violation of one’s own being..Thor did not have an emotion that was accurate enough to express his feelings on the matter. Only that he felt intense, deep regret for his poor brother.
‘I will go through the memories with you. Our photo albums, paintings, my own recollections. Mother’s possessions. The story books we read together, the sword’s we used to spar with. Anything that will reassure you of what memories are real. Of what actually happened. Even if we have to relive every single moment I assure you that I will actively take part in it. We will recover the stolen, violated parts of your mind and make them your own again. This is a quest I will undertake wholeheartedly, dear brother.”
When Loki bites, Thor lets out a slight yelp of surprise at Loki undertaking such violent action against himself and gently-oh so gently-as though he were approaching a frightened kitten, takes Loki’s hand and pries it from his mouth
“Come now, brother.” Thor removing his arm from Loki’s back to take up the wet towel once more. “Self harm will not aid nor alleviate you in any way.” .
“Please . . , , don’t let me become a source of despair. I would rather your joy or even disgust, even rage. But do not let me become his nameless collateral, and least of all, least of all, brother, let me become your downfall. I will tell you no more before you promise not to pursue Thanos alone.”
Loki understands his brother better than Thor thinks. He understands the rawness that is the Thunder God, regardless of the sentiment that sways his great heart. Thor does not know how to be delicate, or nuanced; he does not know how to be subtle, or refined. He knows only how to pore his efforts into a cause, or how to abandon it altogether. How much more then will Thor pile bare his fury and devotion on the brother with whom he was raised, who is far more than a mere cause.
Loki knows it all; Thor is a hymn Loki could sing deaf. In a world in which utter silence now terrifies Mischief, with its promise of things lurking, the cadence of Thor and all his candor and brusqueness is a lullaby. He does not mind soothing his elder sibling.
As Thor speaks with that elegant rawness, Loki cannot help but smile; it’s furtive and it’s weary, but it’s a vow to try believing in recovery.
“You’re so … . altruistic, brother, I … eheh, sometimes pity you for it. So many people are bound to take advantage of you in the days to come, as you wear your heart on your sleeve but … but seek to learn better of your reckless past. I … listen, I … ! I shall repay you this … ! Yes, I shall safeguard you. When we were boys, and there were rumors about you, anytime there were rumors, I would shield you in ignorance of them, and I would PUNISH those who dared speak ill of you … ! You will not regret helping me … !”
From the ardor in wet, red-rimmed jade eyes, from the tremor that wracks his gaunt form head to toe, this is more important to Loki than it could ever be to Thor.
“You will trust me … ! I shall see to it, and not for ill gain, I swear, I am MORE than his fieldmarshal, more than our homeland’s end! I am MORE …because you never ‘tossed’ me into … anything, did you? I thought it a dream, but you really reached for me. You reached for me.”
Gods, gods, please tell me I didn’t imagine you being my champion still.
The Trickster’s weathered elder self instantly complies. Even, perhaps especially, in such a state of dangerous zeal, he thinks with the clarity of lightning sizzling between earth and sky, swift and violently brilliant.
Fluxing male again, afraid to align with any particular age, shape or gender in his shame, the King of Asgard growls a stream of pained syllables:
“You might want to take the stairs to the left.”
He doesn’t yield the subsidiary information just yet. No one loathes Loki more than he loathes himself, so with a staggering masochism, he watches his youthful doppleganger squirm.
“You were imprisoned by Odin. For venturing to escape the clutch of a MONSTER you cannot yet FATHOM. For, in doing so, offering dangerous leverage, which involved the conquest of Midgard, for which Odin saw it fit to punish you: a convenient way to discard the son he only ever stole in order to …”
He pauses. You don’t know yet, do you?
“ … I mustn’t disrupt my own timeline. Norns know what cataclysms could ensue. Loki,” and he flinches at the utterance of his own name, “you are loved surely by but ONE person, and that is Frigga. You mustn’t ever take her love for granted. She will make mistakes, say the wrong things … ask you to make a distasteful choice. Do not yield to the bait of responding in cruelty. She does NOT understand what you will have gone through . ..”
He is practically gasping when he releases his younger self, and visibly trembling. He draws his cloak around himself, lonely and greedy, and desolate.
“ … no one does. But when the prison break happens… trust me, you will know when it happens which one I mean … tell the BEAST nothing. Tell him NOTHING. Let the Einherjar overtake him. Let him wander lost in the labyrinth below the city. DO NOT tell him in pique where to go to find Thor and Odin. …he will find Frigga first.”
It’s then that he lifts his fingers to his face and drags them down his skin with agonizing, excruciating slowness. It’s an idle yet deliberate gesture. Little red rivulets of sliced skin . . .gods, gods, out, get the blue out, filthy blue Nothing, between damnation and redemption, neither Asgardian nor Jotun, man nor woman, good nor evil, forever in limbo and alone. Save her.
The younger’s eyes wrenched shut, trying to block out the other’s words.
I don’t want to know I don’t want to KNOW-
Imprisoned by their Father? For attempting to conquer some backwater REALM? What purpose could he possibly have for that pathetic waste of sea and rock, with mortals clinging desperately to its skin for the duration of their short, fleeting, meaningless lives.
He floundered so badly with the outlandish idea, he nearly missed what came after.
You are loved surely by but ONE person.
He would never admit it, least of all to his bitter, enraged and regretful self, but something deep inside cracked at those words. Loki felt blood well through the fissures, rapidly spreading across that wall of denial he had harbored for so long.
It was difficult enough watching his Father favor Thor, despite his efforts. Despite how badly he wished to be seen as his brother’s equal in their Father’s eyes. Both in value… and in love.
This Loki was but a child compared to its embattled Self. And there is no gentle way for a child to accept the fact their parent does not love them.
Yet, somehow, that stung less… far less… than the idea that Thor did not care for him. Yes, there were days when he thought the arrogant fool did not deserve the throne, but he still loved his brother. This self had to remember how much he idolized him. Cared for him. Had to remember the battles in which they watched each other’s back…
And for naught. Thor did not share the sentiment. That cut him in a way he could explain, not with a thousand years and all the languages in the cosmos.
How could he take his mother for granted, if Frigga was the only one who truly, truly, cared for him.
Loki’s eyes were still shut when the older Self released him, his tall frame trembling from from his raven locks to his pale feet.
“… I will.”
His voice was little more than a whisper.
“… I will save her.”
As with all faulty enchantments, there were side effects to be endured. Quite honestly, the inexperienced younger self was lucky he had faced none already.
When he opened his mouth again, all that left his throat was a strangled gasp. Pale blue eyes shot wide, pupils uneven and he collapsed back against the table he’d been slammed over minutes prior.
Sights, sounds, flashes of scenes without context reeled past his eyes. A great hole in the sky, torn open with unnatural force
The inside of a prison cell, strange creatures clicking with delight at his pain
Bleeding out, ribs broken, run through by a monstrous BEAST
His parents and his brother, smiling beside him as he climbed the steps to the throne
Brown hair. Warm, yet sightless eyes. A suit of red leather. A genuine smile for him and a curious ache in return
Blonde hair. Blue eyes above a beaky nose. A suit of red, white and blue. A soldier. A broken soul, but so was his. That same ache in his BONES-
Loki sucked in a shuddering gasp of air, as if he had not breathed in minutes. It was a long moment before he could speak again.
“… I saw a blind man in red,” he wheezed, trying to capture his breath, “and a… a soldier out of his time… they were mortal… and I loved them.”
His eyes found his older self’s in horror, unable to comprehend what he’d just witnessed. Possibilities of the future, but two of them, two of them, involved falling for mortals. Two different men in two different futures who would be dead in two beats of his Asgardian heart.
“Why… why would we do that to ourselves? Why would we condemn ourselves to love something so fleeting!?”
As his younger self falls prey to the backlash of his powerful time-traveling enchantment, Loki watches aghast. Mere seconds pass before he’s regained himself, however, and seizes the young doppleganger’s arms fiercely enough to dig his nails straight through to flesh.
“Are you well? Steady yourself.”
His hands move to his younger self’s cheeks. Envy, perhaps his cardinal emotion, fills him, but to look upon himself with such sentiment is bizarre indeed. Yet rosiness runs beneath the surface of the boy’s skin. The starved meanness of his own face is just barely softened, just barely milkier and fleshier, not yet a testimony to deprivation and gall.
“Did you have some sort of … .vision? What did y–?”
His words die in his throat, when the younger Mischief explodes in agonized query.
“ … . You saw Matthew?”
His purer self could have pressed a blade to his kidney, and the tears would not have sprung so quickly to haunted eyes.
“ … and … . I know not who …”
A soldier out of his time.
“Rogers. His name is Steve Rogers. You’ll first know him as the Captain. By the gods, you are young. And … we are somehow divided by time’s … its multifarious narratives, for never have I known the Soldier in such a fashion. But Matthew …”
Incense and stained glass. A saint called Jude. Pliant full lips, eyes so big, so brown, purer than any that can see. A smile that can fell armies. So small, so insistent on being the one to hold him in bed. Questions of children: Luke, if it was a boy, it was going to be Luke. Promises of absolution never fulfilled.
Loki shudders free of the past and all its rawness. It was beautiful, beautiful, but it is gone. Gone like mother, gone like so many other things in his long fruitless life.
“Then we are not the same person, not entirely. But perhaps this proves that you can change the trajectory for our mother. Nothing is fixed! You must hasten home, NOW!”
The sheer fury Thor feels as he continues to shake his brother is raw and burning him to the very core of his being. Like a red hot flame being stoked against his heart with an iron rod. It’s so easy to manipulate Loki’s body. so very very easy to keep control of him like this. To thrust him against the wall.
To...completely and utterly damage him, not just on a physical but on a psychological level as well. He knew of his brother needing to escape Thanos, knew of It when Loki bared his soul to him in the most extreme form of pure nakedness, but he knew not the extent of the psychological damages.
He is not even speaking now. He needs not to speak. His actions are loud enough. Hollow and raw in the chamber they fought in.
But then..something happens. Something uncoils and snaps in Thor’s brain and he’s staring at the distinctly female form of his brother-sister? Sibling. His tortured, tormented younger sibling.
Why..it matters not, for Thor drops Loki to the ground as though he has been completely scalded and reels back in sheer horror. A horror that could only manifest itself in the openness of the moment. The chamber is rapidly becoming torn in their wake, and the steps he takes back are shaking.
He hears him.
Oh, he hears him.
Hears the broken, feeble words and there is a wretchedness and Thor is the wretchedness! Thor himself is the monster here. Clearly so! For he was the one treating his brother in such a manner when he knew the truth! How could he be so disgustingly hostile!?
When he KNEW!?
“Loki!” Oh but his voice is anguished. He falls to his knees. A pleading, deplorable position for a king. One that he had no business being in. Except for in this moment.
“Loki! I have betrayed thee! Thine own heart must be feeling oh so wretched! So torn! I have done you a disservice! I have made you fear me, me! The one you sit side-by-side with! The one whom you can entreat with your very soul and being, and look to what I have done to thee! Oh mercy! Mercy it be!”
He slammed his fists about the ground of the palace floors, they shook.
“Please! Do not fear me, I implore you! I will do anything, anything to entrust your faith in me once more~!”
Loki straightens and pockets her dagger. The runes fade from her face, her nails, her arms, her mouth. The rainfall, now the softness of a tantrum spent and the exhaustion in its wake, comforts her, as it always has. Keeping carefully askance of Thor’s fallen form, she becomes he again: the form with whom Thor was raised.
Perhaps it is an unconscious effort to comfort the other half of his soul.
He approaches Thor very slowly: each leg unraveling from his core like the fluid and boneless prowls of a cat. Each step, a commitment to trust.
It takes time. It takes the upside of ten minutes. Because Loki is combatting the hell of his past, even as he faces the storm-center that is his elder sibling. Because there are flashes, flickers, of a seven-fingered jowled beast in a cloak, with a gravely snarl for a voice, telling him to genuflect before a Titan’s throne. There are flashes, flickers, of red eyes and a mile-wide mirthless grin, and purplish bruised pocked flesh, and a voice that could cause planets solar systems away to quake. There are flashes, flickers, of shackles and hot bright cells and total nakedness, the reek of antiseptics and the clanging hiss of surgical blades. All conjured when Thor so violently rose his voice, and laid hands on Loki’s neck, and threw Loki across the room.
But what is Loki without Thor? Learning, perhaps, birthing a new self, symbiotic with but not so slavishly reliant upon, the Thunder God. But the spasms of afterbirth are still there, and Loki still needs his brother.
When he reaches the kneeling deity–all slenderness and shadow to Thor’s brightness and sinew–he kneels as well.
And Loki drapes himself, shakily, across Thor’s shoulder blades. His cheek, he rests on the crown of Thor’s head.
“Gently, brother,” he breathes overhead: the very words their mother used to speak to the golden-maned warrior, in moments of churlishness or berserker rage. “Gently.”
It is a habit as old as Loki himself: to draw close to Thor in the Thunder God’s most dangerous moments, and attend to his ill humors. It is Loki’s way of saying, I forgive you.
If there was a volcano, Thor would jump inside, for Loki.
If there was a hurricane, Thor would jump inside, for Loki.
If the very world was cracking at the seams, Thor would jump between those cracks, for Loki.
For Loki.
For Loki.
For LOKI.
Thor would do anything for his brother. He knew this. He knew he would follow him to the depths of Hel and back again. And possibly not back again should the result not be doable. Either way. Thor would risk everything for his brother.
Even his friends.
Yes even his friends were not safe when it came to Thor’s total devotion to Loki.
Or..were they?
There is a crash and Thor barely has time to register exactly what has happened before he see’s Loki half laughing half screaming in that strange sort of mad way that he has. A way that Thor could never intimidate. He jumps, startled and glances back at his raving sibling.
Oh dear.
“Loki..brother..” But he cannot speak much beyond that, instead listening to the tirade, as he had listened so intensely to many that came before. And many more that would be sure to follow. “For..” The words startle him. He had not thought Loki to outright despise the Midgardians. Oh he had thought his brother had disliked them, but not outright hated them this much.
And when the truth of why is revealed. Thor feels a solid punch to the gut, consuming him the way a fire does it’s victim wood.
For tearing us apart.
Oh but he was blind, blind! Blind and blinded by his own self confidence! Yet again!
And it had caused pain somehow.
“Meant to quarrel…” Thor shook his head. “Why you are angry because I have admitted defeat? Because I have let go of my pride long enough to try and see if from your end?” Now he too is standing, facing the younger of them, shaking his head. ‘I love you as you love I. But I cannot completely allow for you to separate me from the Avengers. I made a promise to these specialized Midgardian’s and I intend to keep it. Brother I would follow you to the very ends of the realms should you ask it..but I cannot..”
He wanted a quarrel? Then they would have one!
“I cannot allow this!” He admits it then. “I tried, I considered it. But I made a pact. I cannot sever this pact, simply because you find it disagreeable!” He paces now, but then Loki admits to his own defeat. The quarrel is over faster than it begins.
“You do not have to yield to me, but you accept that I cannot leave the Midgardians?”
“That’s WHAT…! I’m trying to TELL you!”
Somewhere in the recesses of his brain Loki knows that it’s foolhardy to tempt Thor’s rage. But he too is angry: chiefly angry at himself that he cannot utilize this newfound unity between the brothers to make Thor further and further his puppet. He is ANGRY that he is still owed so much in life of which he was cheated, but the tenderness–which no traumatic calluses can fully beat out of him–stays his hand, and renders him so boringly benign.
He FIGHTS it, this poisonous compulsion to ensure power and safety via manipulation. He fights it, because all he has ever wanted is the recognition that Thor now so often lavishes on him. The recognition, the unconditional acceptance, the freedom to breathe in his own long self- hated skin. There is no REASON to manipulate Thor, who adores him: only the lingering addiction to malice.
“I’m trying to tell you that you have the freedom to DISAGREE with me! You have the right to tell me I’m being a wretch about your friends! I am not so fragile that you cannot unload your displeasure on my form with thunder and roaring! You are and ever have been feral! Do notlet your love for me TAMEyou. …!”
Loki haplessly half laughs and braces Thor’s shoulders.
“Do not mistake me for asking you to be as foolish as you were in our boyhood. But lukewarm you must never be! Not ever, brother! Be wild and dangerous! You are not solely the fertile land and the caring brother. You are also the screaming sky, commanding notice of its displeasure, offering no sanction to its enemies! You are a WARRIOR, Thor! Don’t be discouraged: not by my salty tongue, and not by the occasional downfalls of your comrades in arms.”
He steps back, face tight and pale and drawn, eyes dark with dilated pupils, impassioned. And it comes clear to him, this is why he picks at Thor until he explodes, periodically. It is not for want of conflict, not for want of quarrel, so much as it is for want of seeing Thor riled into a fighting spirit again.
They are truly symbiotic.
“I will accept your friendship with the Avengers, if you will promise me never to let them drain you. They may only inspire you: give you a cause to fight for. If they ever snuff your flame with their idiocy, I shall devour them whole,
“Eheh, oh, brother.” Now there’s sympathy overlacing the malice that had animated Loki’s words. “Your trust is and ever has been your downfall.” There is a patient yet determined exasperation in his fine pale features.
Loki is keenly, excruciatingly aware, of course, that this very fault of his brother’s is what has saved the Trickster from complete abandonment, as the pair presently stand. It is perhaps for that reason that he ceases his lupine pacing and halts beside his brother, an arm draped across Thor’s nearest sinewy shoulder. He squeezes, after gauging the tempest of Thor’s temper, and finding the Thunder God steady enough to touch, with but one alert flick of jade eyes. He knows Thor by microscopic quirks and triggers: by heart.
“it is also your greatest strength, this burden. That is why I am here, to safeguard you, when you get … carried away.”
He licks his lips, whets them as for cutting away deceits to reveal truths carefully cloaked in diplomacy. The urge to strangle forever Thor’s good opinion of his earthling friends is powerful. Loki finds himself ambivalent.
So he opts for honesty: but that which carefully highlights, cleverly underscores, all those qualities about the human race that are indeed deplorable. He sighs for effect, and rests his sharp chin on Thor’s shoulder, as though contemplating sharing an unfortunate fact.
“We’ve quarreled over this before, you know. During the Svartalfheim Campaign, when I told you that Dr. Foster, for all the glory of her mind and all the valor of her heart, will be a blink in your eye. The humans have a limited comprehension of what is worth fighting over. Eighty years, tis nothing. We are gods, and our ways may stymy for that very reason, but we also are capable of burying smaller differences of opinion for a greater good. You have said it yourself: can they not see the ‘bigger picture’? In all probability, brother, no.”
Says the half-mad demagogue who scrabbled for release from the custody of a fully mad Titan, felling anything and everyone in his path to grasp at an ounce of the control that months, years, in searing scorching heat and light, dehydrated, covered in his own fluids, starved and skeletal and humiliated, he had lost. But perhaps Thor won’t make that ironic connection. Perhaps Thor will finally forsake the Avengers.
“You’re most right, Loki.’ He says it quietly, carefully, Like he can barely bear to admit it, but it’s all so true. So very very true. His trust had and would continue to be his downfall. Such was the nature of things. The nature of his personality.
Such trust may have saved his brother in the past, but he didn’t know if he could keep it anew and fresh when the Avengers were in such utter shambles like they were at this present moment. His trust..would that be used against HIM in the future? Could anyone in his group of friends be trusted..?
Trust is a big question, and an even bigger responsibility. And when Loki touches him he does not shy away, merely leaning back into it.
“My strength might prove to be my downfall, should this current chaos keep as it is.”
He knew Loki thought less of the Midgardians than he did, knew that Loki would be perfectly happy to simply leave them in the dust as it were.
But in his own infuriating way, he’s also right. Thor allows the chin on his shoulder, allows for the slight pull of closeness.
‘Aye..but Jane is not..this is a different situation. Jane at the very least can be trusted…“ He pauses. Then heaves a truly great sigh.
"You are most likely right, and I find that fact about them truly infuriating, friends or foes, it is an inconsequential moment when I think of how they cannot consider the greater outcome for the smaller, temporary problem.”
Loki watches his brother wheedled the direction of his castigations of the Avengers … easily as causing water to flow downhill. The incredulous half smile on his face would betray him to a less trusting acquaintance, but Thor would follow Loki smiling into a wall of fire.
And he finds, right then and there, that hecan’t do it.
“Oh, Hel.”
He laughs a defeated laugh and suddenly gives in to a flare of cold fury; he FLINGS the goblet from which he was sipping wine clear across the room. It clatters into the opposite stone wall, spraying burgundy liquid into the grating. He turns to Thor with hands clenched like claws.
“It’s SO UNFAIR!” and he laughs again, hisses an exhale and slouches into a chair, booted legs sprawled, one hand clasping a pale temple. “You’re so damned trusting, brother! Look, I hate every last one of those human vigilantes. I HATE them for thwarting me and driving us apart. I’m trying to get you to hate them with me. But can I do it? Noooooooo. And you know why? Because look at you, you’re a hunkered over, kicked hound begging for scraps from its master and I cannot ABIDE seeing you so debased! So stop. Stop … not bickering with me! Tell me I’m being harsh and judgmental! Make it a challenge at least, Norns. We are meant to quarrel, and I love you, and you mustn’t … let me alienate you from your Avengers.”
He lowers his forehead fully to the table, with a protracted noise somewhere between a soft scream and a groan.
“I yield. Once again I lose. By my own volition. Huzzah to the Thunder God.”
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.”
The words hit Thor as though a meteriote had struck the nine realms. He could barely comprehend what his brother was saying. The words that came out of his mouth, the sentence, the single hanging note.
“Irrevocably”
No room for forgiveness, no place where he might be able to have made it up to him..in seconds Thor’s entire world is gone. shattered, taken away from him with such furious force that all the thunder god can do is fall to his knees and scream. It echo’s off the chambers, leaves the palace rocking in it’s wake.
No.
No, Loki
NO.
He cannot believe, cannot accpet. Cannot bear to feel that tell tale ache when his second half is torn form him, leaving him empty, cold, so cold.
‘For my shame brother! Cast me into the abyss now! Not even the realms of darkness, not even Hel could be enough punishment for what you have just sayeth unto me! There is nothing that could possibly be worse than the sentence such as this! No, nothing, nay, not a thing! To lose you is to lose my very soul! Loki..oh sayeth it not so!”
But he can feel Loki fading, the sheer inner core of him being ripped, torn, like a beast mauling his heart. Oh what could he have possibly done?! What sorrows could he have cast upon the younger that it lead them to this?! To a state where there is no possible way in which he might regain his brother yet again!?
Rain poured heavy, sudden, casting a deep gloom across all of Asgard, immediately soaking into the streets, lightening struck the palace and thunder drowned out his screams.
“LOKI”
“LOKI, NO”
“LOKI, Do not leave me like this! Please! I will do anything! Anything! I will present you my heart on a plate so that you may devour it! Give you my very soul so that you might absorb it’s essence! I would do anything anything please do not leave me so!”
But his words mean nothing, fall on deaf ears; even as they come out of him in a tidal wave, a roar, unable to be drowned out even by the sounds of thunder striking the palace. Without Loki..Thor has no reason, does he? Loki held his heart, his soul, his everything.
No.
He cannot.
Not without Loki.
He cannot.
“Curses!” He screams it out, shuddering from head to toe. ‘By the realms there is not a punishment worse than this! No torture coulkd possibly amount to a greater pain!”
He exists the palace, Mjolnir held tightly in hand as he flies himself to the very top of the oddly shaped building. He now as soaked as the palace itself, from that precarious place he screams for all of Asgard to hear his heartbreak. Not caring of the sight it makes.
Mjolnir connects with the lightening the jolt running through his powerful body as he shouts.
“LOKI!”
“Uten deg er jeg ingenting”
Loki feels Thor’s anguish before he even hears it. As is customary–for nothing summons the ghosts of trauma so swiftly as sleep–he is still awake in these wee hours of the morning, poring over a book of highly esoteric binding spells.
The book drops from his grasp with a clash, to the oak table of the Royal Library, in the usual remote nook where he is tucked. The entire domed structure ignites with a flash of lightning; Loki has to swallow, almost convulsively, and dig his nails into his palms, and shake his left thigh, to remind himself that he has not been violently thrashed back into a past full of raw and brutal torments inside a spatial wormhole. No, this wrath comes from a far more familiar–and bewildering–source.
B r o t h e r … ?
Tears fall unconscious and unbidden from eyes darkened by expanding pupils. Those eyes dart hungrily around the vicinity, seeking data to digest and subsequently employ. A cataclysm of the elements angrier than a summer storm ravaging the wilds and rolling across the plains outside the city: is Thor in danger?
Another flash, another roar in the skies, and involuntarily Loki responds: the walls and windows, the oculus above, crackle with a thin sheen of Jotun ice. Loki tilts back his chin and remembers himself; the blood hue of his eyes pales back to jade. the cobalt frostbite of his hands recedes to alabaster.
He stands and abandons his post. He tears outside into the shrieking whipping winds, across the Bifrost Bridge, where the whole trajectory of these brothers’ two long lives changed. Raven hair like leeches plastered to his skull, to his neck, he huddles in the elements and feverishly mumbles the rain in horizontally raking drops away from his body core. The torrent still makes seeing nearly impossible.
So Loki closes his eyes. His capacity for telepathy has expanded vastly in the past years. He grinds his teeth and musters all his resilience to use it now:
{ Thor. Wherever you are, stop. Think. Breathe. Breathe alongside me. I am on the Bridge. Do not be troubled all alone. Come. }
But that is when another gust of wind pushes against Loki’s slim form: against the feeble part of his trunk: his lumbar. He goes down hard on his side, and begins slipping toward the edge of the Bifrost.
All composure, then, is lost, and Loki screams, in a shockwave of psychic and physical alarm:
Pale hands are outstretched, his own body left vulnerable as his older Self shifted at the height of rage and seized him, a grunt of pain and surprise pulled from his throat as she did.
Pale hands were outstretched as fingers clawed at his hair and poisonous fury filled his ears. He knew better than to challenge his own Self. Let her speak, abuse him if she must. She would not kill him, for she would perish as well. And they were both selfish creatures. They would undoubtedly survive.
He knew, before she had even spoken, he knew something had happened to their Mother. Loki’s eyes clenched shut as she screamed, feeling the contempt and hatred toward not only her former self, but their father.
Are you yet ODIN’S son…
So the Allfather did some terrible wrong by them. A matter to be explored another time.
Loki’s blood was plunged in ice as his Self leaned closer, delivered the sentence he dreaded to hear.
You killed her…
The trickster couldn’t move. Couldn’t b r e a t h e. Time itself had ground to a screeching halt. Their Mother. Dead by his hand.
For a moment, he was left a stricken child, defenseless and desperate. Then the gears of his mind began to rapidly turn, a cool hand reaching out, gently, firmly, taking her wrist and pulling it slowly from his hair.
“… This never happened to you.”
His words were strangely calm, collected. His eyes drilled into hers, searching, analyzing, calculating.
“If you had stood where I stand now, you would have done all in your power to prevent this fate. This point in time is not fixed. It can be changed. My presence here alone is proof enough of that.”
Loki straightened, releasing her wrist.
“You don’t have to tell me where. You don’t have to tell me when. You don’t even have to tell me WHY. Just give me the words. Tell me the words I can never say, the clue I can never give, and I will d i ebefore they pass my lips.”
His own chest was heaving with emotion. Loki hated himself for this foolish endeavor, for exploring his own future. But, perhaps he could salvage something from it.
“You would give anything to change what happened to her. This is your only chance. Tell me the words.”
The rest of his fate, he would endure. He would survive, as she did. Loki would not do all in his power to prevent every ill to befall him in the future, but he would prevent this. He had to. He had to.
Blue eyes slid briefly shut as he contemplated yet another horrifying possibility.
“… Our brother… does he yet live?”
Or did we kill him, too.
The Trickster’s weathered elder self instantly complies. Even, perhaps especially, in such a state of dangerous zeal, he thinks with the clarity of lightning sizzling between earth and sky, swift and violently brilliant.
Fluxing male again, afraid to align with any particular age, shape or gender in his shame, the King of Asgard growls a stream of pained syllables:
“You might want to take the stairs to the left.”
He doesn’t yield the subsidiary information just yet. No one loathes Loki more than he loathes himself, so with a staggering masochism, he watches his youthful doppleganger squirm.
“You were imprisoned by Odin. For venturing to escape the clutch of a MONSTER you cannot yet FATHOM. For, in doing so, offering dangerous leverage, which involved the conquest of Midgard, for which Odin saw it fit to punish you: a convenient way to discard the son he only ever stole in order to …”
He pauses. You don’t know yet, do you?
“ … I mustn’t disrupt my own timeline. Norns know what cataclysms could ensue. Loki,” and he flinches at the utterance of his own name, “you are loved surely by but ONE person, and that is Frigga. You mustn’t ever take her love for granted. She will make mistakes, say the wrong things … ask you to make a distasteful choice. Do not yield to the bait of responding in cruelty. She does NOT understand what you will have gone through . ..”
He is practically gasping when he releases his younger self, and visibly trembling. He draws his cloak around himself, lonely and greedy, and desolate.
“ … no one does. But when the prison break happens… trust me, you will know when it happens which one I mean … tell the BEAST nothing. Tell him NOTHING. Let the Einherjar overtake him. Let him wander lost in the labyrinth below the city. DO NOT tell him in pique where to go to find Thor and Odin. …he will find Frigga first.”
It’s then that he lifts his fingers to his face and drags them down his skin with agonizing, excruciating slowness. It’s an idle yet deliberate gesture. Little red rivulets of sliced skin . . .gods, gods, out, get the blue out, filthy blue Nothing, between damnation and redemption, neither Asgardian nor Jotun, man nor woman, good nor evil, forever in limbo and alone. Save her.
Loki saying “i know how to defeat them”(not sure if sound is matching the video, but we don’t get this quote in the movie) (link)
Loki “If you did, you’d be the fool I always took you for” (link)
“If you did, you’d be the fool I always took you for” was Tom’s favourite line (proof). Marvel used it almost everywhere and then not included it in Final Cut – CRIME!
Loki in Vanaheim (“Hitting Doesn’t Solve Everything”) (link 1) (link 2) (gif) if you look at it closely, you can see how badly Loki is pasted (and what he says, doesn’t match his mouth), Why Marvel even bothered with doing this? What was the purpose?
Thor “I’ll find a way to save us all” (link) (final cut: – I’ll find a way to save you, Jane.)
Loki “After all this time, now you come to visit me, brother? Why? To mock?” (link) I think they cut word “brother” from final version (because now in movie is long silence between “to visit me” and “why?”) because right after this Loki is saying “now you see me, brother” and it would be strange to have “brother” twice in a row.
Because we could see B-roll andFeaturette before premiere, I count this as some kind of trailers:
my favourite moments, that I wish I could see in cinema:
-Loki in cell
– Loki In Svartalfheim
– Thor
– the best moment with Loki
– more guards
Marvel’s Thor: The Dark World – Featurette 1 Thor and Loki (link)
Marvel’s Thor: The Dark World – Featurette 2 Beyond Realms (link)
Marvel’s Thor: The Dark World – Featurette 3 Loki Character (link)
Marvel’s Thor: The Dark World – Featurette 4 Thor and Jane (link)
Marvel’s Thor: The Dark World – Featurette 5 Thor and Jane 2 (link)
Marvel’s Thor: The Dark World – Featurette 6 Malekith (link)
my favourite moment (from Featurette 3) not included in Final cut:
And Disney Channel interview – best view at Loki’s slippers (link)
so I was thinking: maybe if I buy “Thor: The dark World” on blu-ray I’ll be able to see these deleted scenes? NOPE
bonus featuresincluded onstandard Blu-ray release (source):
All Hail The King – A Marvel One-shot A Brothers Journey – Thor & Loki (Part 1) (link 1) (link 2) A Brothers Journey – Thor & Loki (Part 2) (link 1) (link 2) Exclusive Look – Captain America: The Winter Soldier Scoring Thor: The Dark World with Bryan Tyler Deleted & Extended Scenes: Extended Celebration Scene (link) Deleted & Extended Scenes: Jane Learns about the Aether (link) Deleted & Extended Scenes: Loki: The First Avengers (link 1) (link 2) Deleted & Extended Scenes: Thor and Frigga Discuss Loki (link) (gifset) Deleted & Extended Scenes: Dark Elves Prepare for Battle (link) Deleted & Extended Scenes: Extended Vanaheim Scene (link) (gifset) Deleted & Extended Scenes: Commentary by Alan Taylor & Kramer Moregenthau Jane learns about the Aether commentary by Alan Taylor & Kramer Moregenthau Loki: The First Avenger commentary by Tom Hiddleston Thor and Frigga discuss Loki commentary by Kevin Feige Dark elves prepare for battle commentary by Kevin Feige Gag Reel (link) Thor: The Dark World audio commentary
My favourite moments from “A brothers journey”:
Thor trying to run the Dark Elves ship – alternative version (gifset)
“… Sometimes my mind feels as though it is hemorrhaging blackness … for no reason at all.”
Loki turns a hooded gaze languidly on his elder brother. He licks his whittled lips and musters a half-smile.
“Divine for me the means to your merriment. It has ever aided me in my melancholy, making you laugh.”
There is a frown that crosses his features, before he turns to regard him more carefully.
“Thine mind is thine worst enemy. Gifted, wise and talented as it is. You are forever the victim of it. One who suffers the most with it’s carry on of thoughts and hopeless doubts..”
A pause.
“Sometimes I wish I could free you from it’s burdensome overthinking”
“My dear brother. You cannot save me. You can only care for me. To that end, let me, for once, not be a source of concern nor of sorrow. See, I am not coming apart at the seams. Tis only a bout of melancholy, borne of unhappy memories, which will pass.”
“Unhappy memories that still pain me to think about your suffering for them…” After all..twas’ only nature of course. And more natural to wish to save Loki..mostly from himself.
“Norns. Fine, then let us think of the means to cheer EACH OTHER.”
Thor scrambled his mind before he finally turned around..wrapped his arms about his brother and lifted him to his chest as though he were naught but a wee thing. Squeezing him. “Giant attack brother hug!”
Loki strives to maintain some semblance of authority when Thor lifts him off his feet in a crushing hug, but it’s a vain exercise. He coughs, wheezes, and leans into the embrace, where he hides his grin into Thor’s shoulder and pretends as fiercely as he can to be exasperated.
“This will look MOST undignified if a subject comes seeking an audience,” comes his muffled voice.
(
icyxmischief 