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The door seems terribly far away; perhaps there isn’t a door at all, and if he could only find the strength to stand, he might walk out of there and back into the abyss. Anything is preferable to this. Loki gives the door a bloodshot look, for he of all should be able to discern such an illusion, but already his mind is hurtling on ahead— scanty but welcome relief is offered whenever he willingly chooses to think of his purpose, his new purpose. Glorious purpose. The only word for this phenomenon that he can conjure, in his haze of unnervingly slurred words, is reinforcement. If ever that word possessed any deeper meaning than the mere sound of it, such a meaning is now lost to him, but now and then it surfaces as if from a great depth. Always reinforcement.
Thoughts are now assigned value. Some of them hurt (an old man, the door, sun, trees, a woman, a woman with a clever face—her name is Frigga—though he suspects it is not Thanos alone that renders this particular thought a sting), some of them do not hurt (Purpose, Earth, betrayal, scepter, cold, Bifrost, Thor, the Lie, king, should have been, might be). At first Loki prefers the ones that hurt. The pain is a welcome reminder that he is still alive, somewhere, rather than simply falling for a time without an end. This dark thought soon loses its potency, however, as time wears on, and the pain with it.
There are no chains, no manacles. Nothing half so clear as that.
“You are here with a purpose.”
Yes. He is here of his own accord. He is in exile; all exiled find their way here.
“You serve a greater calling.”
Of course. How could he not? He is not kneeling, he is only on his knees because he lacks the strength to do otherwise; he will regain it yet.
“You will turn their lies against them and become all that they feared.”
He will regain what was taken from him. He will stand.
Loki’s attention is, dangerously, returned from his musings to that temptress the Door, although this time there is a person in its place. It takes a moment for the person to resolve into something lucid and solid which he can talk to. “What do you want?”
She is a dark blueish metal in the gloom, a creature of sharp edges. Like nothing Loki has ever seen on Asgard or elsewhere. Not a pleasant sight exactly, but in this place, it is difficult to find much better.
More importantly, she has water.
She splashes it on his face and he manages to drink only a little, coughing angrily.
“I don’t care for prisoners,” Nebula says, in what may be a mocking voice, distorted and amplified by whatever mechanisms pinch her metallic form together. “I just wanted to see my father’s newest friend. An Asgardian. A god of darkness.”
“I’m not any of those things,” Loki says, and she sneers. “Not darkness. Afraid I have to disappoint you.”
“What are you, then?”
Loki fights to summon his hard-earned eloquence, betrayed by another one of his arts. Not a prisoner. Not an Asgardian. A king. Cold. Wind, and endless winter.
“It hurts, doesn’t it,” Nebula says, quiet, studying his face as if from great height. “Having Thanos take a sieve to your mind.”
“How long?” he manages, now fighting for denial as well as his voice, lest he panic.
The sneer deepens. She must relish their shared agony. “How long what?”
“To reacquire faculty of own thoughts. How long does he...?”
Nebula, daughter of Thanos, shrugs. The pitiless black of her eyes swallows up his gaze; he knows she is weighing how much Thanos or the Other is listening through him.
—
The Sakaarian ship is adrift, sinking through the star-strewn abyss of space as one of its more pensive occupants so often has. It is, perhaps, overworked--there is far more life here than its systems have known prior, and its drivers urge it onward towards that uncertain hope, Earth. Yet something has broken in it, perhaps irreparably. A silent splintering somewhere, and there are no telltale sparks, no gears or knobs which Valkyrie might mend. This is a deeper trouble.
“I wouldn’t ask you to do something which you fear to if it was not extremely important.”
Loki gives Thor a furious look askance, and for a moment that tenuous peace between them threatens to dissolve, as it always does eventually. The man who never paces breaks his habit and walks the length of the cramped room and back, though his brother’s remaining eye looks no less grim upon his return. “I’m not afraid of that green lug.”
“Excellent.”
“But that doesn’t mean I’d like to get inside of his head,” Loki snaps. “I hardly know if it would work. It’s not the sort of mind I’m well-versed in meddling with.”
Of course, both of them know his magic is not confounded by such a thing as minds, and both of them know that Loki will give in. He does not fancy an eternity with recycled air. The drinks are running low.
“Just find her in his memories,” Thor says, as if it is no more difficult than rifling through a book. “Or—better idea. Much better. Seeing her in person.”
“No.”
“The recording of her on the Quinjet made him return to being Banner, and unless you would like to be lost in space until we all go mad or run out of food—”
“This is exactly why I travel alone.”
Thor folds his arms and grits his teeth, a picture of perfect stubbornness. “Come now, Loki, this is no different than one of your childhood games.”
No one recognizes the scarlet-haired woman when she parts the milling crowds to find the beast. She walks with strange clothes and a light step, her face set in solemn unease. The unknowing eye—for she draws more than a few—might think she was going to her death. The Hulk is easily spotted, about to contemplatively bend a chair in two. It falls with a crash when he sees her.
He presses back against the wall, joy and fear warring on his face, which usually has room enough for only one emotion.
“Hey there big guy,” she says, as gently and steadily as she can muster. “Sun’s getting low.”
“No,” the Hulk growls. “Go away. Hulk not hurt you.”
Loki reaches out with Natasha Romanoff’s pale hand, and thinks grudgingly that the woman must have a heart of steel to willingly touch the beast, considering she is all but made of paper. The illusory shade of Romanoff holds her breath. Air itself seems brittle.
All might well be lost if this fails.
“The sun’s going down.”
“Natasha,” Hulk mouths the word. He moves out of the shadows a little, reaches out to mirror her—
She moves like lightning, moves with saidr, pressing a palm to his forehead and following the threads of the universe as they hum, bracing for the moment where his hand will surely close around her throat.
The barrel of a gun, a stranger, a woman all red and courage and fear, his desire to soothe that fear though he has no reason to trust her—
Dawn, years of running from the fight, and now running towards it because she is the fight, she is the new reason—
Not rage but gentle—must not hurt her—
The forest, and the lullaby, the sun is going down, a room in a farmhouse—
A kiss—
A flight—
Loki is batted away and slams, hard, into the metal wall. His concentration breaks and the scarlet-hair woman is gone, there is only the wide eyes of a man trying to find his feet as he anticipates the next blow. But it is needless. The beast is diminishing, losing in the fight to exist, and by that strange magic is overcome by the strength of a weak man. The man whose mind he had just tapped.
It takes a moment for Loki to return to himself again, Banner’s aching sentiment lingering like a bitter taste. He will, of course, never get any thanks for this. Damn Thor.
When he looks back, there is only Banner, and Loki is actually relieved.
“Whoa,” Banner shouts. “Stay back. That was weird. Did you—were you trying to kill me? Was that someone else?”
Loki brushes himself off. “No, I believe that was Fenris, the giant wolf.”
“What?”
“Welcome back. The ship needs fixing.”
And so part of him is still lost in those universal laylines, his thoughts blurring between the past and now, when he weaves his way back to somewhere quiet. To that lost part of Loki, it all feels like an odd kind of defeat; another willing act of empathy, and a thankless one at that. Sure enough, the ship is revived and plunges on into the dark. Asgard is again saved, though it does not know it.
Loki is almost overcome when his mother finds him. Morning has lost its meaning in a place without a sky, but it is morning when he feels that sense of being watched and is no longer alone.
It is not so much seeing her as it is being enfolded in presence. Being awake to the texture of someone else’s soul.
“I’m sorry,” he gasps, awed, and sinks back to sitting, staring with a wild green gaze at the motionless room. “I’m sorry.”
“Why? You came back for your brother and your people,” she says. “You stayed. I am very proud and not entirely surprised.”
“Pure theatrics, I was never planning to—”
“You cannot deny it. You’re as sentimental as you say you’re not.”
Loki takes a deep breath and braces his head in his hands. This is altogether a jarring day, almost certainly one of the last of a stream of jarring days; ghosts are a sure sign that the end is ever nearer. “Where are you? Why can’t I see you?”
“Where I always am.”
He thinks fleetingly, not for the first time, that this must be what it is like to talk to him, the half-truths and the thinly-veiled humor—how he has missed her.
He wastes no time in giving voice to a long torment.
“I sent those monsters deeper into the palace and right to you, Mother. Right to your death.”
“My end was my own,” Frigga says. “Of the things for which you could be blamed, Loki, I would not have you fret about that.” Her voices grows softer. “I thought you were of the opinion that I was not in the least your mother.”
“You know that was a lie,” he says, after a heavy pause. “A lie I did not believe. I am the god of them, after all.”
“To Earth, perhaps. You were never that to begin with.”
Loki spreads his hands on his face so he can see through his fingers, though there is still nothing to see. “What do you mean?”
Odin always maintained that they were not gods at all. Gods are few and often false; humans make gods of everything, even Asgardians. Now more of them are godless, preferring the natural state of things, the intricacies of invisible laws, like the scientist Banner. Most of them still crave the wisdom of higher power, and put their hope—and fear—in the greater creatures of the universe. Gods of thunder. Gods of lies.
Loki does not remember when he was first called by that name. He had gloried in it, sometimes, but of late more often found it lacking.
“Did you never wonder?” Frigga asks, in that tone of a ready teacher, even now opening his eyes to the unseen. “Your sister knew from the beginning what she was. Your brother, only now.”
When Loki does not answer, he feels the presence shiver, as if in a laugh.
“Did you never wonder,” she goes on, “how death has loosed its hold on you so many times, how you slip from it even now, and hold it at bay?"
“Alright,” Loki says, compliantly. “What am I the god of, then?”
—
“Life,” Nebula says, long ago, in the cell without a door and the hell without fire. “Thanos will likely always have some claim on your mind. He never gives up what he gets a hold of.”
Loki of exile faces this fact with quiet horror, and suffers for it. Should he not welcome the Titan’s wisdom? He is his own master, but he has a new purpose now. A glorious Purpose. And not one idly cast aside. The subjugation of Earth, the reclaiming of what is his, the power of the Tesseract—all of these things, and more, are within his grasp. It is a simple reality.
Should he ever find the Tesseract and fail to keep his word, Thanos will know it. He will come for him.
—
“Life,” Frigga says, in the ship without morning and the Asgard without gods, and she is gone.