“Tell whatever specter, beast or demon foolish enough to intrude upon MY homestead, where MY family resides,” Loki spits, with quiet savagery, into the thick mildew of the palace cellars, “that I welcome a good game of wits, and perhaps the chance to stab it in however many eyeballs it possesses.”
Loki regards the water as if Thor is asking him to suckle the blood from a newborn baby. A guilt that he had thought his rage had long since numbed paralyzes him as he half-sits upright again. Wild animal eyes gawk at the Thunderer; even so feral, that gaze is still beautiful, a cool green more saturated than it has ever been, in contrast to the bloodshot state of his whites: the hue of grass speckling a clear creek bank.
In the end, self-preservation outweighs shame, and Loki seizes the glass of water. Gracelessly he gulps down the entire glass, as if he has been awaiting permission from the one he has wronged, and now greedily hoards it. He chokes on it, retches, and drops the glass. it shatters, and the noise violently startles him. He flings a wolf pelt over his head and shivers beneath it.
A moment passes; Loki peers out at Thor with gritted teeth that threaten to chatter. The window panes near his body freeze and crackle threateningly, frosting in incongruously exquisite natural patterns. Subconsciously, the Jotun at Loki’s core is presenting a hostile warning.
But Loki does not want Thor to go. Not ever.
It begins to snow inside the cabin, gently, as Loki ventures,
“I had not decided yet. I awaited your counsel. Surely you of all people might be able to guess at the moment when I ceased to be a person that … .”
He finds himself uncertain: how was he going to even finish that sentence?
A person. he realizes, then. When did I cease to be a person?
One who believes that one is no longer a person can doa great many awful things.
“I have always wanted you to be proud of me.”
It’s too late. The words I stuttered when you strove to bring me back from the brink, in New York, for Thanos was listening, the Other was listening, and it would have been the death of us both. Yet now the words acquire new meaning. It’s too late.
“Easy, easy…!” Thor speaks with alarm, without thinking, as Loki gulps down his first drink in who-knows-how-long. He reaches out reflexively to steady the other man, and his fingers have only just brushed against the bony line of Loki’s shoulders when the glass shatters on the floor. The sound startles Thor, as well, more than it ever would normally, and he flinches away as though scalded.
And then every instinct he possesses still fills Thor with the urge to flinch further back, to retreat, as the temperature drops and the window ices over. Rationality and understanding and hard lessons learned too latelet him stay where he is, instead, looking back at those deep green eyes as they peek so fearfully from beneath his hiding place.
Even then, he wonders for a moment if he is being warned off, but…no. This bears instead the hallmarks of what Thor does in a state of agitation, of static electricity and low hanging clouds.
He does rise, but only to return to the kitchen to grab the bowl of figs. When Loki speaks again, Thor’s heart twists in his chest, this time with something recognizable as dread. These are not the ramblings of an exhausted, sick madman. This is the hope of a plan.
Do not seek my counsel. I have never felt less wise or less able.
“I suppose that depends…who you think you have ceased to be.”
“Who”, not “what”. Thor wishes he had words as grand as Loki could conjure, to convey the idea, the truth – you are still a person. None of this would hurt so much if Loki wasn’t. It is impossible to love a tool or a thing as much as Thor loves his brother, even now – enough to hurt.
“…you are still Loki. You are…” His courage almost fails him. His voice falters, growing softer – too soft. It might be easy to speak anyway, and take it as a mercy, a reprieve, if Loki does not hear. Thor steels himself, instead, and takes care to say what he does next loud enough to be heard through the fog surrounding Loki’s mind.
“…you are still my brother.”
You never stopped. No matter how I tried to lie to myself. I have wished to be free of you in the past. I know now that I never will be. I know now that that is the better way.
Smiling tremulously, Thor gives the bowl of figs a soft shake, rattling the contents within, and sets it down on the bed within reach of the wolf pelt. He leaves a hand braced against it, just in case.
“Come. Try and eat something.”
The indoor snowfall slows. And then, with a mute breath, it stops.
– You are still my brother. –
Loki peers out from beneath the pelt; he is not looking at the bowl of figs, but at Thor. The entire mass beneath the fur inches closer to the edge of the bed: this vicious self-devouring snake of a god, keen and cunning as no other can dream to be, scurries closer to the person who has always been his saving grace. He likes to think maybe once he was Thor’s saving grace, too.
A raven head emerges soundlessly from the dark gray mass only to rest, forehead first, against Thor’s chest. Loki does not move for a very, very long time.
“ … I am dirty,” he exclaims suddenly, nose curling, lip along with it, in utter revulsion. “I am filthy.”
There’s a greatly gained lucidity in the remark. Loki is a fastidiously clean person; his soiled dishevelment is a sign of danger. And his disgust at such a state is similarly a sign of emerging clear-headed from shock and dissociation. Swift on its heels is embarrassment. Loki’s hollow cheeks darken.
“Pardon my state,” he stiffly coughs, averting his gaze, flooded with a sensation of ludicrousness; when they were boys, this would have been unfazing, as they had borne witness to each other in all sorts of thoroughly humbled positions: ill, covered in the blood of self or enemy, bruised and burned, usually laughing raucously and pointing at each other in good sport.
It’s different now, because of all that has passed between them in bitterness and miscommunication. Except that when Loki catches Thor’s eye, there’s a slightest absurd urge to grin. He yields to it, then averts his gaze swiftly, and covers his mouth with a hand trembling from unintentional starvation. Loki clears his throat but then cannot help but fall back on jests to fill the awkwardness of the moment.
“What a role reversal,” he speaks, both of his own reek and of being the recipient of care, rather than the overly-eager nurse to a heroized elder sibling. He hacks up a dry, gravelly laugh at his own joke, then catches himself and swallows it.
He’s lost the ability to distinguish between night and day, hunger or fullness, clean or dirty. The peculiar quality of it is in his detachment. He remembers vaguely the act of collapsing on Matt Murdock’s ever-dark apartment floor, a safe womb, concealing the monstrous flaws that make him unsalvageable and ultimately unlovable. He remembers telling Matt, simply, in a hollow hoarse voice, “He knows.”
After that, memory is … perilously void. Void, silent, silent like deep space, like that place without air or warmth, where he hovered for weeks without food or drink, covered in frost and yet living, growing emaciated by the minute, curse the Jotun metabolic rates that permitted him to live in the freezing emptiness of space . . . !
At some juncture he must have entered the cabin that he thieved solely for rendez-vouses with the one gone now, the one who wishes him dead. There are cuts on his arms and legs, on his feet, accidents from stumbling about and bumping into thresholds, walls and furniture, in a venomous fog, seeking without direction, a being without purpose, a thing that always survives but has lost comprehension of WHY. He reeks, his hair hangs in a stringy curtain of ink around his face, and his eyes are bruised with sleeplessness.
There was an attempt to eat some candied figs from the cupboard in the modest, dusty kitchen, but the bowl sits half eaten next to a nibbled-upon breadloaf that has long gone stale. Loki’s feet are caked in dirt and ache, and he is vaguely cognizant of having taken many soul-searching dashes through the woods, in an attempt to outrun his guilt and despair, and to come to terms with the foolish candor that has ousted him from Asgard and off the throne once again.
In the cocoon of furs, Asgard’s forgotten son wears a sloppy oversized green tunic, ordinarily concealed beneath his missing armor, his trousers, and little else. He has drawn half-wards around the bed, but they are not wards, they only spell F R I G G A over and over and over again, a halo in white chalk on the wall over his head, and next to them, over bits of talc that has broken into powdered pieces all over the wooden floor, plans for spells of many varieties, in frantically scribbled runes, with a plenitude of question marks after each sequence. His fingertips are still white from it. They twitch and curl into his palms with a life of their own. His left palm has been picked to bleeding.
When Thor enters, Loki rears up from the nest of furs, sluggish and irresolute. He wheels dizzily around to face his brother. The tear stains on his cheeks are a permanent facial feature by now. His eyes are too large and bright, and there is no doubt that even in his present state, he knows precisely who accosts him.
“You’ve come to finish me.”
It’s heartbreaking how CERTAIN he sounds.
“I understand. Make it quick.”
He has no desire to run this time.
Thor paints a strange figure himself, though in a different and distinct way than Loki does.
The clothes he’s wearing are almost aggressively plain – a shirt beneath a hoodie, along with jeans and boots. His hair is tied back from his face with a simple band, rather than braided into order. That’s how Thor normally dresses for the sake of passing unnoticed, of course. It doesn’t always work, because Thor can dress like the most average man possible, but has never learned how to stand like anything but a warrior and a prince.
That was then. Now, and this is what has left Jane so very worried for him these past few weeks, Thor looks and feels very human indeed.
The state of the cabin paints a miserable picture in a thousand words, one that Thor can only start to read at a glance around, before his attention is drawn back to the wrack and ruin of his brother.
It’s heartbreaking, how certain Loki sounds, all the more when Thor remembers why. He looks wounded, for a moment, as he often does whenever Loki accuses Thor of wishing to cause him pain…and then he looks resigned, because even if only for a moment, Thor truly had. His hand twitches and aches a little at the recollection, his palm heavy with the memory of Mjolnir’s weight – and the hammer had, for that moment, grown so perilously heavy.
And so Thor falters for a moment, visibly…but then he steels himself, instead, resolved and hardened against his own grief. His jaw takes on that familiar stubborn set it always does when he’s feeling particularly bullheaded about something, and Thor shakes his head resolutely.
“No. That isn’t why I’m here.” It feels…good, to say that aloud. As though Thor himself is also growing more certain of that fact in doing so. Whatever else Loki has done, the fact remains that it is wrong that he should seem so undone. Thor feels this in his bones, and so he takes one more cautious step forward, and then another. He holds both hands up for a moment, open and empty – it’s not an assurance by any stretch of the imagination, of course. Not as strong as Thor is. But it’s a gesture, and it’s meant sincerely.
“But why I came here can wait, for now.” It seems laughable, even perverse, to say until you are well, since Thor is the reason Loki is unwell just as much as Loki is the reason Thor was unwell. But even if he doesn’t say as much, Thor feels it, and maybe that feeling can carry him through for now until the future makes a little more sense.
Loki seems neither surprised nor unsurprised, but simply bows his head and numbly processes Thor’s contradiction. Ah. So he is to continue living, even with the doorway blocked by the being he’s most personally and egregiously wronged.
Of course, Hel is a state, and can be manifest even on Midgard, or any other realm. The punishment is to go on living secure in the knowledge of one’s own worthlessness.
A numb nod. And then another.
“ I do not know if there is sustenance. Or libation. I do not remember the day… .Matthew. Is he worried?”
Loki grants Thor no time to answer. He rolls back onto his side, facing away from his brother. Fingers drum the wall, slinking down the perfect storm of runes and question marks. They linger on the question marks, and then suddenly, virulently, smear them out. A quiet yelp of fury, miserable, pathetic, childish, and then silence. Followed by,
“I have found that sleep eludes me since … the night with the rain, so I … I work, I … think …I think a lot …a lot indeed, because it is very loud in here, can’t you hear the unnerving LOUDNESS of silence? And so I think, and hum, and … scribble ideas, and you see, I was trying to determine where and how it all went wrong, and there are cutting-edge theories out in the practice of Seidhrs now, to do with theoretical time travel, and I was puzzling out you know, if ever I had the chance to turn theory to praxis … what point in our past I would return to, to rewrite it all, so that … we do not end up here… .”
Loki is very hard to be found when he does not want to be. No, more than that – Loki, when he is at his full capacity to act, is damn near impossible to be found when he does not want to be.
Thor is nevertheless aware from the start of his search that Loki is unlikely to be at his full capacity to act. It is a strange and heavy knowledge to bear, that he is responsible for that.
Jane, bless her in every language that exists beneath the stars, has been the rock she normally becomes when Thor is laid particularly low. He can’t help but reflect glumly that she has grown far too practiced at this, but they’ve had this conversation before and she has always been adamant that he not pull away in times like this. So he tries not to. She deserves that much respect.
The first several days are very quiet. Jane works from home, and occasionally reminds him to eat or clean himself up. Thor watches TV without comprehending what he’s seeing, or attempts the same with a book, or else sits by the window watching the rain or the low, grey clouds.
He comes back to life slowly but surely, having conversations with himself that can span bits and pieces hours apart, that Jane comments on when she can. Only then does this bloom into actual discussion about What Should Be Done.
“I should inform Asgard.”
“Maybe you should. But…do you want to? The place clearly hasn’t fallen to pieces yet.”
“What he has done…there should be no forgiveness.”
“There’s only so much I can say, but…Thor? It seems like you’re trying to convince yourself of that.”
In the end, they come to agreement on one thing. Whatever is due to happen between the two brothers, it can’t end at that confrontation on the bluffs. If it does, it will eat away at both of them until nothing is left.
For now, they are both alive, against truly incalculable odds, and that needs to be acknowledged.
When he goes hunting, Thor goes without his armor, without his cape, with only Mjolnir to help him fly. For lack of any other ideas, Thor starts at all the various locations he and Loki have met up at, over the past few months, lingering for a few hours and looking around, before moving on.
This at last brings him to the little cabin Loki keeps, where he had once brought Thor to heal in secret after a battle. This at last brings him to his brother.
Thor does not initially expect to find Loki there – the door is unlocked when he tries it, all the usual wards down. He opens the door without thinking, anyway, and the sight that greets him within makes Thor’s heart stutter in his chest.
Because Loki is there, sleeping fitfully – or at least, Thor can only guess that he’s sleeping – in his nest of blankets and furs. The cabin otherwise bears signs of haphazard, halfhearted attempts at care. All of which must have taken place before this…sickness or exhaustion or both took hold of Loki and did not let go.
Thor makes to step into the cabin, catches himself, and sets Mjolnir by the door first. Only then does he move, as gingerly as he’s capable of when so anxious, towards the bed to check on…
(his brother)
…on Loki.
He’s lost the ability to distinguish between night and day, hunger or fullness, clean or dirty. The peculiar quality of it is in his detachment. He remembers vaguely the act of collapsing on Matt Murdock’s ever-dark apartment floor, a safe womb, concealing the monstrous flaws that make him unsalvageable and ultimately unlovable. He remembers telling Matt, simply, in a hollow hoarse voice, “He knows.”
After that, memory is … perilously void. Void, silent, silent like deep space, like that place without air or warmth, where he hovered for weeks without food or drink, covered in frost and yet living, growing emaciated by the minute, curse the Jotun metabolic rates that permitted him to live in the freezing emptiness of space . . . !
At some juncture he must have entered the cabin that he thieved solely for rendez-vouses with the one gone now, the one who wishes him dead. There are cuts on his arms and legs, on his feet, accidents from stumbling about and bumping into thresholds, walls and furniture, in a venomous fog, seeking without direction, a being without purpose, a thing that always survives but has lost comprehension of WHY. He reeks, his hair hangs in a stringy curtain of ink around his face, and his eyes are bruised with sleeplessness.
There was an attempt to eat some candied figs from the cupboard in the modest, dusty kitchen, but the bowl sits half eaten next to a nibbled-upon breadloaf that has long gone stale. Loki’s feet are caked in dirt and ache, and he is vaguely cognizant of having taken many soul-searching dashes through the woods, in an attempt to outrun his guilt and despair, and to come to terms with the foolish candor that has ousted him from Asgard and off the throne once again.
In the cocoon of furs, Asgard’s forgotten son wears a sloppy oversized green tunic, ordinarily concealed beneath his missing armor, his trousers, and little else. He has drawn half-wards around the bed, but they are not wards, they only spell F R I G G A over and over and over again, a halo in white chalk on the wall over his head, and next to them, over bits of talc that has broken into powdered pieces all over the wooden floor, plans for spells of many varieties, in frantically scribbled runes, with a plenitude of question marks after each sequence. His fingertips are still white from it. They twitch and curl into his palms with a life of their own. His left palm has been picked to bleeding.
When Thor enters, Loki rears up from the nest of furs, sluggish and irresolute. He wheels dizzily around to face his brother. The tear stains on his cheeks are a permanent facial feature by now. His eyes are too large and bright, and there is no doubt that even in his present state, he knows precisely who accosts him.
As for romantic love: Loki approaches romantic love with startling timidity. He may exhibit flirtation rather boldly from the outset, but once emotional intimacy begins to be established, he is perpetually terrified because of his own proclivity to devote EVERYTHING that he is fanatically, hook line and sinker, helplessly, to the object of his affection. He is a fervent, possessive, yet earnest and devout lover. Physical displays of affection are frequent, but often quiet and private. Touching is very important: Loki has been deprived of good touch for so very long that he craves it in a lover. He is startlingly gentle, and he commits almost overwhelming amounts of time and energy to finding things, words, gestures, that not only please the recipient, but make it clear that he has LISTENED to and UNDERSTOOD them. Not grandiose gestures, but small persistent tokens of affection tailored to highly specific details of his beloved, can be expected. Loki also sees vulnerability as the highest gift he can afford another person. He will divulge small parcels of personal information– fears or bad memories, often–to the other person, not to take advantage of his lover’s kindness, but instead to convey that he TRUSTS them. And trust, to Loki, who lies and conceals because he never feels safe, is more sacred than anything else in the world.
As for enthusiasm: it’s hard to answer that in this particular “how do they do it without showing words” meme because the primary descriptor of an enthusiastic Loki is chatter. He will fly off on long non sequiturs about often rarefied, obscure intellectual topics related to witchcraft and sorcery. His eyes will become wide, his face will become animated, he will gesture a great deal with his hands, he will hop up and down on the balls of his feet, when pacing he will do so with a boyish, sprightly spring in his step. Considering how diabolically he can behave, it’s rather maddening how youthful, cheerful, and generally endearing he can become. Let us not forget the infamous “tongue grin,” that is, when he grins with teeth and the tip of his tongue peeks out from between the top and bottom row.
//HICKU. Fucking “Letting Go” came on iTunes RIGHT when your post popped up on my dash. The universe is trying to KILL US.
Loki will always know, no matter what transpires in the time to come, that his elder brother was willing to kill him. For but a split second, before the Trickster donned his usual ARMOR of ILLUSIONS and DECEITS, and saved himself by manipulating sentiment. And Thor is shocked, disgusted, that Loki’s behavior is perpetually reinforced, and repeated?
It doesn’t matter anymore.
“I see....”
The child vanishes. The child hides again in the deepest nooks of Loki’s psyche, behind black curtains of jealousy and futility.
“I wished to die … you know, because I lost you all. And while I went missing, things were taken from me that make me capable of sleeping, and breathing, and trusting. And when I returned, no one … . “
It doesn’t matter anymore. You wanted to kill me. Warm dawn, scalding wildfire, compass and champion, first memory and last hope. Last hope, receding, like reaching out to grasp a star as I cascaded through a wormhole and found it too beautiful and distant, but my fingertips have not yet unlearned the itch to touch its comet-tail in orbit.
You DEFINED me, and that’s precisely the problem.
Loki slides to his feet; he is a humanoid mudslide. He licks earth off his lips and slips out of his armor, his tunic, leaving only his trousers and boots and his vambraces, and what remains is an emaciated body covered in a language of faded torments: so very many scars. It’s a bizarre sort of exposure, which scarcely even occurs to him; he is simply liberating himself of the suffocating weight of muddy attire.
“I know what it is to lose everything. And to be alone. And you will not believe me, you will never believe anything I afford you in good will again, but I would have refused this cup were I able, this lot in life, where I am doomed to be the person who wounds you past repair. For everything that I am that has taken away your light and your warmth, your sense of safety and your faith in others, I am sorry.”
Don’t send me away. I would rather have never existed than–!!!!
No. Stop.
Loki speaks, muted and barbled, hardly the rapier bravado of the Silvertongue.
“You have my permission, you know. To hate me. Think on it. Nobody whose opinion you value will blame you. Nobody will think less of you. There is no contract. You are free, brother.Free, you know? To let me go. I was already unsalvageable. I will mourn you forever, but … . I shan’t trouble you again.”
And so he is gone, gone, gone,
before he succumbs to his own weeping, and dead Odin has the last laugh.
Once there were two boys who would have run hand in hand into this selfsame driving rain and rolled in it with laughter untouchable by their father’s machinations. Two boys, sufficient unto each other, that was all.
But now one is covered in the blood of–
I DIDN’T DO IT FOR HIM!!! I DID IT FOR YOU FOR YOU FOR YOU FOR YOU FOR YOU . . . .
–one is … .
… . . one is not, because he is robbed of the other. goodbye, goodnight. the first word from his mouth was “T’or.” But he does not exist, even though he still breathes, for now.
I do not want to hate you I never wanted to hate you I never wanted to fight she wouldn’t want us to fight…
(Mother, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I don’t know what to do…)
I did not want to define you.
((Except he did, he did, for so long when he was younger and thoughtless and careless and happy. He grew accustomed to Loki’s company as a man grows accustomed to the presence of the sun. He grew dependent on his guidance and attentions.
You looked at me as though I hung the stars
and so I thought I could
and so in the same breath he grew to hate himself for what everyone else perceived as a weakness, for a King must be strong above all others.))
I did not want to destroy you, you are not unsalvageable, you are not an animal or a machine or a thing, you are a man who has done wrong, and if you can understand why then why can you not stop…?
What could cause a man to fall so far as to think himself irrevocably, irreversibly damned?
And then Thor remembers that for just a moment, he really and truly wanted to kill Loki, and wonders if that’s what.
((And when he heard that first word, the elder prince’s delighted laughter echoed through the halls of their childhood home, and he pulled his little brother close and held him tight and answered: “Loki, Loki!” The first words spoken between them, the first sign that they were at last equals in this world, and then he pulled Loki by the hand to go dashing off in search of Mother to show her how far they’d come.))
Loki has made himself so terribly exposed and vulnerable in the face of the Thunderer’s wrath. It would be so easy to at last swing the executioner’s axe…
…but he was only willing for a moment, and that moment is gone, no matter how it might haunt Thor later. He knows that to send Loki away is to send Loki to die, if not in body than in everything else that makes a man alive.
All the same, he cannot stay. And so, sobbing still, Thor turns away instead. He takes a few steps away, towards the edge of the bluff, and then a few faster steps further and further, swinging Mjolnir at his side, until at last he leapsover the edge, catching himself halfway to the ground, and flying away instead.
The storm will fade in moments, only to reappear hours later over the city where Jane is currently staying. It lasts for three days.
– Would you leave me if I told you what I’d done? And would you leave me if I told you what I’d be come? No light, no light ,in your bright blue eyes And I’d do anything to make you stay Tell me what you want me to say. –
{” How long until all of Asgard b u r n s ?” }
{ You were my last hope. My last source, my last authority, to claim that I was more than a malicious self-devouring serpent. }
{ “How long until all of Asgard B U R N S ?” }
{ I am alone. What is left to burn? }
“Asgard ….I love my home. As I have loved you….!”
Loki HAD walked a better path, BEFORE a mangled mess of poor choices and cruelly unfair circumstances had tainted him. The tragedy is not in Loki’s wrongdoings, but in the fact that they evince a devolution–whereas Thor evolves.
It is not so easy to “do” and “be” “better” when every odd, every system and institution, every lifelong expectation, every previously circumscribed role, stands AGAINST you.
Thor’s words register quickly because Loki expects them: the betrayed fury, the piety, the castigation. It’s the same leaden nausea he felt when { Frigga’s } eyes met his, as he disowned her. Only this time, he is prepared for the DISAPPOINTMENT, and meets it levelly:
“I did this whole kingdom a favor!” he snarls–no, more than snarls, because the sound of it drops to the quality of something no longer bipedal: an animal, a maimed thing. It’s strangely wondrous how ugly a creature as beautiful as Loki can become in such a frenzy; grotesque veins and blotches of pink and pallid skin mar his nymph-face, and spittle flies from bared teeth.
He realizes quickly that unchecked sentiment has lost him his cover; green eyes gape as he backpedals hastily but quickly falls again into the mud he’d used to incapacitate his brother. The dopplegangers fizzle into oblivion.
“How was I to know there was another way?” Loki wails again, in that forlorn, keening growl of a wolf. “HOW WAS I TO KNOW? You told me you would have SHOVED ME BACK IN MY CELL! You SAID that! While you returned to FORGETTING your BROTHER had ever existed, your INCONVENIENT brother! And then you and THAT MAN would have gone on fellowshipping without mother, without me! YOU THINK I DIDN’T LOVE ODIN WITH ALL MY HEART? With all my heart, once. Even though he rarely spared a glance my way, I killed my birthfather to show that tyrant the depth of my loyalty. Still, it was no. No. Always, no.”
Loki, lost, permitted sinks into the mire, belly up, and welcomes a death that seems to have only been a little TARDY.
“You keep telling me that I could have been better. . . but when did you ever provide me the chance? The frame of reference? You were a war-mongering CHILD and then you were GONE, like everyone is always gone, ALWAYSleaving me, and when you returned to a crumbling kingdom, brother, you had experienced some…some sort of...ethical epiphany that, forgive me, I did not have the opportunity to experience….!”
A child soaked in blood coalesces in Loki’s arms, lying down, a familiar child: a replica of himself. SEE ME. The young phantasm gazes up at Thor in grief and surrender.
“So if you kill me now, remember that the man I let die MADE me. He fashioned me from half-truths and tepid affections. He crafted me from ever-shifting convictions and moral frameworks: ‘Humans are beneath us. We are their natural rulers. But when you seek to EMULATE ME in ruling them, I will bind and gag you and call you Laufeyson.’”
“I beg of you … as I begged of him,on that day, when you could not even be bothered to appear at my trial. . “
“If I am meant for the axe, then for mercy’s sake:
swing it.”
Loki falls, and Thor strides forward. He hears the words but, carried away as he is on a tide of righteous fury and something beyond berserker rage, does not let them touch him. They are excuses, they are meaningless, and all he has to do is…
And then…
…and then Loki might as well have summoned the Destroyer itselfto be his shield. Thor could tear his own arm off more easily than he could strike through even the illusion of that child. The sound he makes at the sight of that perfect replica is very much akin to the sound he might make when physically knifed in the heart.
Thor staggers back several paces, one hand moving to cover his mouth against a gutteral cry of horror and pain, the arm holding Mjolnir falling limply to his side. Just like that, the rage is not entirely extinguished within him, but it dims enough for horror and despair to take their place at the forefront of his mind.
He swallows. Stammers. Chokes, as Loki’s words come to him as though from very far away.
And as they do, the dying of embers in his heart gives off just a few more sparks, and Thor’s expression twists into something very ugly, very vengeful, and very much like Odin’s.
“And if you still wish so very much to die, then…”
do it yourself.
He almost says it, in a rush of red hot rage. Thor teeters on the very edge of saying those three words, of saying perhaps the most unforgivable words he could ever say. But instead, at last, he manages to take the first step of reeling himself back in. Even then, they might be tasted and taken out of the air, in the rustle of static and the patter of rain and the growl of thunder.
But he swallows them back, even though they taste of bile and ashes, and says instead: “…then I will not be your excuse.”
Besides, Thor remembers dimly, Loki has tried to “do it himself”, in the past. Thor would have given up on that, too, if he’d failed at it as much as Loki sometimes has.
Even then, it’s despairmore than affectionthat drives him to stop. Loki’s death will not bring Odin back. Anything he does or says to Loki will not bring Odin back. His father is dead. His mother is dead. His brother…
And then something finishes falling to pieces inside Thor, and when he tears his gaze at last away from the illusion to meet the gaze of his brother as he is now, it’s not with Odin’s eyes that he looks. Thor has no gift for illusion, but in every line of his bearing he is suddenly very much the child that found only guidance and purpose and pridein Odin’s shadow. When he speaks, it’s in nothing more than a sob, wounded and betrayed.
“He was my father, Loki.” For that is at the heart of Thor’s rage. He can give all the justifications he can think of, and Loki all the explanations and reasons, and none of it will dull the pain of that one fact. “My father, and I loved him still, and you say that because of you he is gone.”
Loki will always know, no matter what transpires in the time to come, that his elder brother was willing to kill him. For but a split second, before the Trickster donned his usual ARMOR of ILLUSIONS and DECEITS, and saved himself by manipulating sentiment. And Thor is shocked, disgusted, that Loki’s behavior is perpetually reinforced, and repeated?
It doesn’t matter anymore.
“I see....”
The child vanishes. The child hides again in the deepest nooks of Loki’s psyche, behind black curtains of jealousy and futility.
“I wished to die … you know, because I lost you all. And while I went missing, things were taken from me that make me capable of sleeping, and breathing, and trusting. And when I returned, no one … . “
It doesn’t matter anymore. You wanted to kill me. Warm dawn, scalding wildfire, compass and champion, first memory and last hope. Last hope, receding, like reaching out to grasp a star as I cascaded through a wormhole and found it too beautiful and distant, but my fingertips have not yet unlearned the itch to touch its comet-tail in orbit.
You DEFINED me, and that’s precisely the problem.
Loki slides to his feet; he is a humanoid mudslide. He licks earth off his lips and slips out of his armor, his tunic, leaving only his trousers and boots and his vambraces, and what remains is an emaciated body covered in a language of faded torments: so very many scars. It’s a bizarre sort of exposure, which scarcely even occurs to him; he is simply liberating himself of the suffocating weight of muddy attire.
“I know what it is to lose everything. And to be alone. And you will not believe me, you will never believe anything I afford you in good will again, but I would have refused this cup were I able, this lot in life, where I am doomed to be the person who wounds you past repair. For everything that I am that has taken away your light and your warmth, your sense of safety and your faith in others, I am sorry.”
Don’t send me away. I would rather have never existed than–!!!!
No. Stop.
Loki speaks, muted and barbled, hardly the rapier bravado of the Silvertongue.
“You have my permission, you know. To hate me. Think on it. Nobody whose opinion you value will blame you. Nobody will think less of you. There is no contract. You are free, brother.Free, you know? To let me go. I was already unsalvageable. I will mourn you forever, but … . I shan’t trouble you again.”
And so he is gone, gone, gone,
before he succumbs to his own weeping, and dead Odin has the last laugh.
Once there were two boys who would have run hand in hand into this selfsame driving rain and rolled in it with laughter untouchable by their father’s machinations. Two boys, sufficient unto each other, that was all.
But now one is covered in the blood of–
I DIDN’T DO IT FOR HIM!!! I DID IT FOR YOU FOR YOU FOR YOU FOR YOU FOR YOU . . . .
–one is … .
… . . one is not, because he is robbed of the other. goodbye, goodnight. the first word from his mouth was “T’or.” But he does not exist, even though he still breathes, for now.
“So you decided to murder him?!” Thor at last finishes dashing the mud from his eyes, cursing himself even now for falling for yet another trick among what seem to be so many. The sight that greets his eyes is a dozen Lokis, and with his mind a tangled whirl, Thor has no idea of where to start taking them apart.
They’re the first words Thor has spoken in many moments, and they sound even over the boom of thunder and the steadily increasing fall of rain. They burst from him like poison from a wound.
“If you have decided to strike down anyonewho has ever done you wrong, then how long until I have a knife in myback? How long until all of Asgard burns?”
Loki won’t get a chance to answer – if there is any answer that can be given – as scant seconds later, a searing bolt of lightning strikes the ground between them, turning the world white and the air scalding. Even Thor can do nothing to continue the attack, briefly blinded as he is. This storm is raging out of even his control, just like his own emotions.
He’s tried. He’s tried so hard to master his temper and open his eyes and listenand understand, as Thor knows that he’d failed to do before. Loki has done so many terrible things, but he’s given reasons, he’s expressed repentance, Thor had let himself believe that his brother could be led to walk a better path, as Thor himself learned to…
…and all this time, there was this. All this time, Loki must have been laughing…
All this time, Thor had thought he was working to rebuild what was left of his family, and Loki had destroyed it from the start.
I am alone. His family has been the foundation of so much of Thor’s life, family and blood and playing and fighting and it’s all gone.
With a wild yell, Thor leaps at the nearest image of his brother, be it mere image or flesh and blood. If it is an image, he’ll keep taking swings until he finds the real one.
“You could have walked away…you could have been better…you could have found another way! There was another way!”
There must have been. He can’t live in a world where there wasn’t.
– Would you leave me if I told you what I’d done? And would you leave me if I told you what I’d be come? No light, no light ,in your bright blue eyes And I’d do anything to make you stay Tell me what you want me to say. –
{” How long until all of Asgard b u r n s ?” }
{ You were my last hope. My last source, my last authority, to claim that I was more than a malicious self-devouring serpent. }
{ “How long until all of Asgard B U R N S ?” }
{ I am alone. What is left to burn? }
“Asgard ….I love my home. As I have loved you….!”
Loki HAD walked a better path, BEFORE a mangled mess of poor choices and cruelly unfair circumstances had tainted him. The tragedy is not in Loki’s wrongdoings, but in the fact that they evince a devolution–whereas Thor evolves.
It is not so easy to “do” and “be” “better” when every odd, every system and institution, every lifelong expectation, every previously circumscribed role, stands AGAINST you.
Thor’s words register quickly because Loki expects them: the betrayed fury, the piety, the castigation. It’s the same leaden nausea he felt when { Frigga’s } eyes met his, as he disowned her. Only this time, he is prepared for the DISAPPOINTMENT, and meets it levelly:
“I did this whole kingdom a favor!” he snarls–no, more than snarls, because the sound of it drops to the quality of something no longer bipedal: an animal, a maimed thing. It’s strangely wondrous how ugly a creature as beautiful as Loki can become in such a frenzy; grotesque veins and blotches of pink and pallid skin mar his nymph-face, and spittle flies from bared teeth.
He realizes quickly that unchecked sentiment has lost him his cover; green eyes gape as he backpedals hastily but quickly falls again into the mud he’d used to incapacitate his brother. The dopplegangers fizzle into oblivion.
“How was I to know there was another way?” Loki wails again, in that forlorn, keening growl of a wolf. “HOW WAS I TO KNOW? You told me you would have SHOVED ME BACK IN MY CELL! You SAID that! While you returned to FORGETTING your BROTHER had ever existed, your INCONVENIENT brother! And then you and THAT MAN would have gone on fellowshipping without mother, without me! YOU THINK I DIDN’T LOVE ODIN WITH ALL MY HEART? With all my heart, once. Even though he rarely spared a glance my way, I killed my birthfather to show that tyrant the depth of my loyalty. Still, it was no. No. Always, no.”
Loki, lost, permitted sinks into the mire, belly up, and welcomes a death that seems to have only been a little TARDY.
“You keep telling me that I could have been better. . . but when did you ever provide me the chance? The frame of reference? You were a war-mongering CHILD and then you were GONE, like everyone is always gone, ALWAYSleaving me, and when you returned to a crumbling kingdom, brother, you had experienced some…some sort of...ethical epiphany that, forgive me, I did not have the opportunity to experience….!”
A child soaked in blood coalesces in Loki’s arms, lying down, a familiar child: a replica of himself. SEE ME. The young phantasm gazes up at Thor in grief and surrender.
“So if you kill me now, remember that the man I let die MADE me. He fashioned me from half-truths and tepid affections. He crafted me from ever-shifting convictions and moral frameworks: ‘Humans are beneath us. We are their natural rulers. But when you seek to EMULATE ME in ruling them, I will bind and gag you and call you Laufeyson.’”
“I beg of you … as I begged of him,on that day, when you could not even be bothered to appear at my trial. . “
“If I am meant for the axe, then for mercy’s sake:
icyxmischief 