Chapter Text
When they threw him into the cell, Thor hit the cold, grimy floor face-first and he didn’t move for a long time.
His stomach writhed and lurched, sometimes gurgling to his throat, and waves of freezing cold nausea pulsed through his brain like a second heartbeat, foreign and overwhelming and sickening. At every moment of reprieve, he sucked in breath to fill his lungs, and then he held it when it felt like the cell, the ship, the universe itself was spinning, spinning, spinning.
How long he lay there, vulnerable and shaking, Thor did not know. He could not think well enough to know.
It was only when an urgent shred of thought-- Asgard, what is happening to the people of Asgard --that Thor finally blinked. And steadied. Or perhaps the fact that he was finally steady was what freed him to the thought of his people.
Either way, Thor blinked at last and saw the tiled floor stretching into a stone grey wall lit orange by the glow of a single lamp. Cracks and indentations of shadow promised years of negligence, revealing the architecture as ancient. Maybe Thanos had owned this vessel for centuries--or maybe the vessel once belonged to someone who wasn’t him. Thor pretended the latter. It was more comforting that way.
The floor, pressed against his cheek, felt soothingly cool to his throbbing head, and as he blinked again, he felt its soothing touch along the pads of his fingers and his palms, as well. He gave himself another few seconds of peace before he braced himself and pushed.
At once, the room spun, his stomach twisted, and Thor heaved.
Vomit spat from his dry throat, and the smell burned through his nostrils, bringing tears to his eye. Luckily it wasn’t the nausea from before. Thor steadied again, rather quickly, finding himself panting on all fours and staring at the brown, flaky grains coating the floor beneath him. It looked like he’d vomited a fair amount of blood.
Fear surged through him, awake in his veins. Thor registered every pain in his body--from the smallest dull ache of bruises all the way to the throbbing churning of his brain.
He gasped in relief when he felt the sharp bite of a cut on the inside of his cheek and ran his tongue over it, tasting a metallic wetness. Good. So he wasn’t dying. He’d just swallowed too much blood.
Groaning, Thor threw himself away from the vomit and into a sitting position a couple feet away. It took him several seconds of dizziness before he could register what he was seeing--an arched stone frame and a sheet of metal comprising a sliding door. Without even having to try, Thor knew the door would never budge under his weight.
He tried anyway.
He forced himself to his feet, pressed both palms against the cold metal until he was steady, and pushed. He pushed so hard that he let loose a muffled roar, the veins in his muscles throbbing. But, even on his best day, Thor knew he wouldn’t have been strong enough.
And this wasn’t his best day, no, this wasn’t even a good day. It may even be his worst.
Thor shook with a heavy breath and rested his forehead on the metal door. Tears burned at the corners of his one eye, but he couldn’t-- wouldn’t --cry. Not here. Not now.
It was in that silence, that melancholy, that he finally noticed what he should have noticed from the very beginning--there was a second series of breaths that were not his own, there was a second person breathing, a second person here, in the cell.
His tears vanished. Thor stilled.
And looked.
In the corner veiled most of shadows sat Loki himself.
Curled there, he looked almost like he was at home. His head was tipped in rest against the wall and his knees were drawn up to his chest. Aside him, blocking him into the corner, was a crumbled pillar hindering any light from reaching Loki’s face, concealing him in darkness. The golden lamplight licked orange only across Loki’s pale knuckles, where his stiff fingers locked over his legs as if in a silent plea.
At the sight, a muted rage stirred in Thor’s heart. He remembered only one thing between the flashes of agony searing through his skull, and it was this: his brother, his dear, beloved brother standing alongside the compatriots of Thanos, stepping forward as a blue light sprung from the palm of his hand. Loki had given Thanos the Tesseract. Just as he’d tried to do all those years ago.
Thor swallowed a mouthful of adrenaline. Fighting was pointless. It was too late and he was too tired. “So,” he said instead, “this was your plan all along.”
Loki didn’t answer.
Perhaps Thor hadn’t been as tired as he’d thought, because the rage swelled in his throat, clumping there like blocks of stone. His heart pounded. “Tell me, Brother,” Thor spoke, his voice nearly shaking, “how long did it take to come up with this one? Did you think of it on your way to the vault? Make one quick stop on your way to Surtur’s crown for everything you needed, hmm? Or did you grab it on a whim and work out the details on the Commodore? As you were flying back to--to us--”
Thor choked on an unexpected ragged breath. How real Loki had seemed, catching the cup-holder and smiling, his lips parting to form two words that Thor had never dared to hope for again-- I’m here . Stroking Thor’s false sense of confidence, goading him into thinking that this thing between them was salvageable--and for what?
Maybe it had only been to make the betrayal hurt that much more.
Pain stabbed through his skull like a sharp blade. Thor pressed his back against the door and sank to the floor, but no matter how hard he rubbed his temples or squeezed his nose, the throbbing wouldn’t go away.
“You should try to throw up again,” Loki said at last, his voice soft and quiet. “Sometimes that helps.”
Thor lifted his head with every intention of glaring at his brother, but even the thought of opening his eye roiled through his brain. Instead he worked moisture through his throat, enough to speak. “Why?” he asked. “So you can attack me while I’m prone before you? I think not.”
Once again, Loki went silent.
It was becoming clear in this silence why Thor hadn’t noticed him before. He sighed. “I’m tired of your games, Loki,” he said. “Why are you here?”
Just as the question left him, Thor realized that it was quite possible that Loki wasn’t here. Since Loki still wasn’t answering, Thor drew upon his reserves of strength and fished for something, anything. His fingers curled around what felt like a piece of tile that had been chipped from the floor, and Thor looked just long enough to throw it in Loki’s general direction.
His one-eyed gaze struggled to penetrate the correct distance, and the nausea returning full-force threw off his aim entirely. The piece of floor tile hit the wall, a ring echoing through the walls of both the cell and Thor’s skull. Thor shook with a renewed urge to vomit.
“You don’t need to throw things,” Loki said after the ringing stopped. “I’m here. I promise.”
The words burned through Thor’s veins like poison. “Don’t say that.”
“Look,” Loki said after a sharp breath. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for this to happen.”
“Oh? So what did you mean to happen?” Thor tried to push a bitter smile on his face, but it wouldn’t come. He went on, desperate for the words that would make any of this right, or any better than it was. “Would you have rathered succeeded on Midgard? Given the Tesseract to him then?”
When Loki spoke, his voice was low and cold--and almost sounded upset: “No.”
Thor gritted his teeth, his throat swelling with hurt. “Then why ?”
Nothing.
Thor waited a while longer, before he shook his head, wincing at the way his brain seemed to bounce around. “I might be able to forgive you for Midgard,” he said, meaning to sound sardonic but only sounding tired. “You were angry. Lashing out. I can forgive you for pretending to die a second time, ruling Asgard to ruin, and being willing to turn me over to that mad immortal.” He paused. “I don’t think I can forgive you for this.”
At last, there was a sound--a reaction--from Loki’s corner. A choked breath cutting through the silence. Loki’s fingers detached and folded behind his knees, leaving his entire body a mere shadowed silhouette, unreadable and unreachable.
Thor refused to feel guilty. “I just want to know why you did this. Why did you let him take me? Why did you give him the Tesseract?” Thor said. “Can’t you at least give me a reason?”
“I’m sorry,” Loki breathed. “I had no choice.”
Thor’s fists clenched. “Do not insult my intelligence. You chose to be there in the first place.”
“I did not --”
“Then why were you just standing there?” Thor growled. “You stood among those creatures who are loyal to him, I saw you standing with them. Why did you just stare at him while he--while--” while he turned my mind into mud , Thor thought, but couldn’t say.
This time, when it came, the nausea won. Thor barely managed to roll onto all fours before he was spitting bile and saliva onto the floor and gasping from the misery of it. Afterwards, while he crouched and panted, he realized the throbbing did abate some, just as Loki had promised--how did he know?
“In case you weren’t well enough to see properly,” Loki said, small and quiet, “those--creatures--that I stood next to? They were pointing their weapons at me.”
Blinking, Thor shifted to get a better look at his brother, but the shadows persisted.
“If I had moved even one step towards you, they would have killed me.” Loki paused, and a laugh puffed into the air, shadowed and empty as his face. “You should be glad I have more restraint than you do--if I’d reacted the way I wanted to, he would’ve seen how much I cared and hurt you all the more for it.”
Thor felt like the world was inverting itself all over again, but this time, it wasn’t because of any pain or dizziness. “What?”
“Do you truly think me so evil?” Loki said, and his voice wavered with what sounded like hurt. “Did you think all he had to do was ask it of me, and I would let him torture you? That I would hand over the Tesseract as if the ruin of the universe means nothing at all to me?”
Thor’s eyelashes fluttered as he tried to make sense of this new Loki, one who apparently hadn’t betrayed him. “Then why did you give it to him?” he asked.
“Is it not obvious?”
It wasn’t. Thor sat back and stared at Loki, waiting for an answer.
Ages passed. At last, the silhouette of Loki’s head turned, showing Thor a perfect profile of his face. “Because,” Loki said in a whisper, “I knew I could only watch him hurt you for so long.”
Stunned, Thor stared at his brother for the longest time and waited for the blow to come, for the axe to fall and destroy the hope blossoming in his chest. Not hope for Midgard or any of the realms, but hope for them --for the sincere return of his brother. When nothing came to contradict what Loki had said, Thor sucked in a breath and let the tears gathered in his eye fall.
Maybe he should have guessed at why Thanos would call his brother to watch him be tortured. Or maybe he could have wondered longer at why Loki shared this cell with him. He hadn’t done either of those things; instead, he’d jumped to the conclusion that Loki had betrayed him.
And yet, somehow, it hurt more to know that Loki was as helplessly stranded as he was.
“Norns,” Thor said and rested his head against the door behind him. “I’ve made an ass of myself, haven’t I?”
Loki huffed a relieved laugh that a little too breathy to be joyful. “Well, you do that a lot,” he said, and Thor relaxed at the sound of his teasing. “Besides,” he continued, “can I blame you for that assumption? After . . . after everything I’ve done, it wouldn’t be so surprising for me to do this as well, would it? You’re entitled to suspect me.”
“No, I’m not,” Thor said, sure of himself.
“No?”
“You’ve done terrible things,” Thor said, shrugging his shoulder and wincing at the way his sore muscles stretched, “but you’re a far cry from Thanos, Loki. I cannot easily see you doing the things he plans to do simply for sadistic satisfaction. That’s . . . why, I think, the thought that you’d betrayed me had me so upset.”
For another uncomfortable stretch of time, Loki said nothing. Then he shifted again, his fingers locking once more in sight over his knees, knuckles paling with his stiff grip. “Thor?”
Thor squinted. “Hmm?”
“You should move away,” Loki said, “from the door, I mean. When they come back, it’s better to have enough time to stand.”
As far as Thor knew, they’d barely been captured for a couple hours, and yet Loki acted as though he’d dwelled in this cell for months, knowing the in’s and the out’s and the rites of passage. It was unsettling. However, the suggestion made perfect sense--imagining the underlings of Thanos rough-handling him to his feet made him cringe--so Thor nodded and went to push himself up.
He got as far as halfway, before the throbbing seemed to stab straight through his eye, piercing him with a startled moan of pain. Cradling the eyepatch, Thor sank again to the floor and struggled to breathe slowly. He didn’t know how he’d managed to stand before.
On the other side of the room, in the farthest corner, Thor could hear his brother shift, as if Loki didn’t know what to do.
Thor swallowed his pride. “I think I’m going to need some help.”
…
Together they heaved Thor over to the other side of the room. Every other step, Thor’s knees would buckle under his weight and rely entirely on Loki’s arm hoisting him up by the waist. It took everything in Loki to breathe, to keep his mind fixed on the present and not on what it’d been like alone years ago--
his mind fragile and brittle and ready to crack, fingers clawing across a grimy cold floor to reach the other side, just so he could curl up with his back to the wall --
He shook the thought free and lowered his brother against the wall.
“There,” Loki said and wiped his hands on the sides of his pants, as if he had any hope of escaping the dirt and the blood and the grime. “Even if you can’t get up, at least your back isn’t to them.”
Against the wall, Thor looked rather shell-shocked, his one eye glassy as it stared at the door, his hands clenching and flexing as if gearing for a fight. Ignoring the fact that he had no hope of standing when Thanos’s brutes returned to take him.
Loki pressed his lips together, wishing he could trade something, anything, to set his brother free of this trauma.
“Are you alright?” Thor asked, his eye narrowing.
Before Thor could get a good look, Loki whirled around to sit beside Thor and simply nodded his head once. It wasn’t enough. Thor’s gaze lingered on him, concern radiating from his presence, and Loki felt naked before him. All of his pain and vulnerability leaked into the very essence of the cell--all the way from the collapsing pillar to the grimy, cold floor to the pools of vomit near the door. He was laid bare in this place, even though Thor couldn’t possibly know.
And before Thor could figure it out, Loki reached for Thor’s shoulders. “Here, lay down,” he said and encouraged Thor’s head into his lap. He watched carefully, when Thor’s face went a palish green, and waited to make sure Thor wouldn’t start heaving again.
A part of him longed to relish this, to find satisfaction in the fact that Thor now knew how it felt--but that longing wasn’t successful. There was no satisfaction in this. There was nothing but heartache; Loki knew that if he could somehow take Thor’s place, then he would do it, because Thor, no matter what, didn’t deserve to go through this. No one did but him.
So he twisted his fingers into Thor’s hair and pressed at the pressure points that would ease the lingering pain. At first, Thor flinched and made to scoot away, but Loki held him in place. “Stay still,” he said, “and try to relax.”
Loki expected an argument at that, but Thor seemed to trust him now.
Shoulders shaking, Loki closed his eyes and dug fingers into Thor’s skull, loosening tendrils of his magic as a balm to the carnage Thanos had made with his. It was quick work to massage the tension out of Thor’s neck, for his one good eye to close and his frown to fade. After all, Loki had an abundance of practice.
“How do you know to do this?” Thor asked after a while.
Loki considered his answer. “Trial and error.”
Thor hummed in acknowledgment, and Loki waited. It took no longer than a moment for Thor to hear the hidden meaning; his eye shot open and focused on Loki, narrowing with worry. “Are you . . . When did you . . .”
Silent, Loki focused on rubbing his thumbs into the flesh behind Thor’s ears.
“Before Midgard,” Thor eventually said, gaze clouding over. “After you . . . fell.”
“Yes,” Loki said, because there was no point denying it now.
Thor pushed Loki’s hands away and sat up, wincing at the movement but persisting. It was so Thor--to ignore his own pain to the point of stupidity, merely because he was worried about something long past.
Struggling not to shrink, Loki met his gaze with a set jaw. “It doesn’t change anything.”
Thor frowned like he wanted to argue, but he didn’t. Instead his hands clenched into fists, and he set a glare upon the door, as if he could see through metal and stone all the way to wherever Thanos was--sitting on his throne maybe, looking out across the stars and considering which ones to ravage into extinction. Thor would stand no chance against Thanos, but something in Loki rioted to know that his brother would try, for his sake.
Overcome, Loki pressed his lips together so hard that they burned between his teeth.
“I’m sorry,” Thor said. His fists were shaking.
It hurt to part his lips, to speak. “What could you possibly have to be sorry for?”
“I thought you were dead,” Thor breathed, ragged and raging.
Loki stilled.
“I thought . . . I was sure that you had died in the void,” Thor went on, “and I didn’t look for you, I didn’t even try. And--you were here, all alone-- suffering .” Thor choked on the word, and his fists rose as if they sought a target and finding none, they hung in the air, trembling with might. “And when you came back--to Midgard--I didn’t question it . . . I took forever to even question it now .”
Heart thumping, Loki sat frozen in place. These were words he’d always wanted to hear, somewhere in the dark recesses of his mind, and now that he was hearing them, he didn’t know how to feel, how to think. There was no relief, no triumph--only a numbing emptiness that stole all life from Loki’s body, leaving him a barren shell.
On the nights filled with agony, Loki remembered screaming Thor’s name. He remembered clinging onto the last shreds of his sanity, because he foolishly held himself to Thor’s standard. Thor, he had thought, wouldn’t break from any amount of torture. Thor, he had told himself, would endure all pain, like a true hero, never flinching, never wailing.
But Loki had been wrong. Under the weight of Thanos’s power, Thor hadn’t taken any longer than Loki had to scream.
Maybe Thor would never be convinced to attack Midgard, but he had still been driven to do un-Thor-like things. Like vomiting brokenly on all fours, trying not to cry, or like asking for Loki’s help in order to stand and walk a few paces.
In part, it made Loki pity the image of himself curling and crying on the floor of a cell much less.
Yet it also made everything heavier. If Thor was powerless now, then Loki had to admit he’d been just as powerless years ago. If Thor was a victim to Thanos’s whims, then there was no pretending Loki hadn’t been one as well.
Loki blinked at the epiphany and folded his arms around his chest. The weight of the universe crashed in on him and filled his lungs with lead, because there was nothing-- nothing --that either of them could do but sit here and wait to be made into pawns.
“Loki?”
At the sound of his brother’s voice, Loki realized how close he was to hyperventilating. He closed his eyes and shook himself of the panic. “You had no way of knowing,” he forced himself to say. “You did what you thought was best with the knowledge you had, and there’s no use apologizing for it now. The past is the past.”
He opened his eyes and found Thor staring at him with an expression of worry, one hand outreached, fingers spread, as if he wanted to touch but was afraid to find empty air sitting where Loki sat.
Loki shifted, so that his shoulder brushed lightly along the tip of Thor’s thumb, and that was all it took for Thor’s hand to close around his shoulder and squeeze comfort into Loki’s soul--Loki breathed in deeply and wished, more than anything, that they could stay like this in lieu of facing their fate.
“I wish,” Thor said, voice uncharacteristically soft, “that I could have been there for you.”
Loki swallowed. He wished so, too.
“And I am grateful that you are here for me now.”
At that, Loki leaned into Thor’s side and rested his head on Thor’s shoulder. Thor’s blond hair pressed against Loki’s ear, and Loki closed his eyes, relishing the faint smell of a storm--lightning and thunder and ash raining from the heavens and soaking the ground with an intoxicating, earthy bliss. It was the smell of home, the smell of Asgard, and Thor kept it alive with his heartbeat.
If there was one thing, in the entire universe, that could stop Thanos, then it was this smell, this unstoppable force, this truth. The person Loki sat right next to. Inklings of thought merged into a plan, and Loki lifted his head to stare at the door ahead of them.
For the first time, he dared to hope.
“Thor?”
Thor looked at him. “Hmm?”
“I’m going to get you out of here.”