Chapter Text
When the limited rooms on the Stateman had been divided up among what remained of Asgard’s depleted population, Thor had volunteered himself and Loki to share. He had wanted to set an example and Loki had not complained but Thor did not have the impression that he was particularly pleased with the arrangement either. He had, however, warned Thor to keep his things on ‘his side’. In the interest of keeping the peace, Thor had been diligent about doing so. There had been little trouble between them since Ragnarök and the beginning of their long journey to Midgard. Loki had been quiet, almost uncharacteristically so. But Thor barely had a second to worry about his brother between attempting to be everywhere at once for everyone. And trying to sort out some sort of course with Heimdall, who had become the default captain of the ship. Valkyrie had been very helpful in that regard as well, proving to have excellent inside knowledge of several trading posts and planets on which they could stop for supplies or to refuel.
He was grateful for her presence and her desire to help out a people she had not seen in several centuries. She was increasingly proving to be invaluable. But he missed Loki’s presence at the meetings, which he had yet to show up to. Thor had tried to broach the topic with him on several occasions but had been met only with stony silence. He had decided for the sake of maintaining peace between them to not push the matter. But he missed his brother’s presence nonetheless.
Something else they both did not speak about was the nightmares. Both Thor and Loki suffered them and on several occasions Thor had woken, soaked in sweat and gasping for air, to find Loki standing over him with concern written over his tired features, before he had muttered something about Thor disturbing him. Loki, on the other hand, barely seemed to sleep at all. Often when Thor woke in the night he would see Loki sitting awake, either with a book of some sort or lost in his thoughts, green eyes glinting in the darkness. On the rare occasions Thor saw him sleep, it was evident his rest was not peaceful. But where Thor screamed and thrashed, Loki went still. He would lie completely frozen beneath the blankets, eyes darting rapidly below his eyelids and tremors running sporadically through his thin frame. More than once Thor had thought he had been having some sort of fit and had shaken him awake, much to Loki’s annoyance.
Maybe they would have made it all the way to Midgard without speaking to each other about the seemingly insurmountable mountain of problems between them if Thor had not woken up at the wrong moment one night.
Thor was not sure what woke him. A noise perhaps, something in the ship shifting or someone walking down the hall. But whatever it was it jerked him awake, away from a confusing dream about Hela, Loki and Surtur teaming up to wreak unholy havoc on the Nine Realms. He turned instinctively to the other bed to ensure Loki was still there and not up to anything like he had been in his nightmare.
And then he froze because as his eyes adjusted to the darkness he saw that Loki’s face looked not quite the same as it usually did. Even in the shadows of their room, lit at night only by the strange glow of distant stars leaking in through their tiny circular window, he could see that the lines of Loki’s features had shifted, though it was still unmistakably his brother. His eyes were larger and set slightly further apart than they usually were, the nose smaller, the mouth wider and full of sharp teeth. The red eyes of a Jötunn glittered in his brother’s face, studying Thor for a reaction, for a sign of concealed revulsion or rejection. Thor fought an emotionless expression onto his face through the still lingering cloud of sleep, fought down the feeling of wrongness he felt when looking upon his brother in this foreign form. This is Loki, he reminded himself. This is still my brother. This is still Loki.
The Jötunn grinned a humourless grin, seeming to almost bare those too sharp teeth at him.
“I see it disgusts you to see me in this form,” Loki said with a malicious tone, red eyes never leaving Thor’s face, searching it, seeking out any cracks or weaknesses.
“It does not,” Thor replied. “I was merely surprised. You have not chosen to appear so in my presence before.” It was true. This was the first time he had fully seen his brother in his other (true?) form. Loki had not exactly advertised his heritage after finding out everything and breaking it apart with his desperate pain.
“I see the revulsion written plainly on your face, brother, if you are still willing to have a monster call you that,” Loki sneered, narrowed eyes still firmly fixed on Thor. But something did not seem right. The clawed hands were twisting in the sheets, though Loki stilled them when he saw Thor staring.
“There is no revulsion Loki. You are my brother no matter what form you take,” Thor said carefully, still trying to blink the gritty sleep from his eyes. He pushed himself slowly up until he was halfway to sitting, leaning on his elbow.
“And what if I were to walk out among your people with this face? Would you still claim me then?” Loki did not seem to be able to let the point go, pushing further and further, seeking some reaction Thor had no intention of giving him.
Thor stuck out his chin and looked Loki straight in the eyes, wanting him to see that he meant every word with his whole being. “I would.”
Loki laughed, but there was no humour in it. It sounded like glass breaking and it put Thor’s teeth on edge. It seemed wrong, too loud for the tension sitting raw and heavy between them.
“I do not believe you.”
“I am not ashamed for what you are. Nor am I afraid. This is still you Loki, and I would not reject you over any form you take,” Thor insisted, wanting Loki to hear the truth in his words. Wanting him to take them in.
“It is so easy to claim so when you do not have to live with knowing that just below this skin lies a monster. It is always there and I can feel it taking from me,” Loki hissed back, blue hands once again twisting in the sheets. Thor had never seen a Jötunn seem nervous. It was a strange sight.
“What do you mean by that?” he asked, confused by the shift of focus on Loki’s part. His thoughts seemed less organised than they usually were. In place of smooth transitions there were jerky corners and sharp edges, as though Loki's silver tongue had grown spines and his clever mind was careering through them.
“I ignored it long enough and now I switch forms every spare minute alone. It is an open wound I cannot let heal, that I must pick at and now it festers. It steals from who I am and takes it for itself.”
“But it is you Loki, there is only you. This version of you is not a different person, though you look a little different,” Thor said quickly. The feeling of wrongness was growing by the minute and he could not see where Loki was headed with this. He felt blinded, like trying to make out the world after staring too long into the sun.
Loki did not seem to hear him, looking instead at the small window through which could be seen darkness, as if evaluating it as a route of escape. His hands were twisting faster and faster, and his breathes seemed shallower then they had even a few seconds ago. Thor shuffled slightly forward, wanting nothing more than to reach out and still his brother’s anxious hands, blue and clawed as they were.
Suddenly Loki stopped twitching his hands and shifted on the bed so he was facing more towards Thor. His eyes, glittering like the red gems Thor had seen on several occasions in the treasury on Asgard, were looking almost thoughtfully at Thor. Still looking at Thor, Loki summoned a small dagger into his hand, holding it almost excessively carefully, as though it might snap at one wrong movement.
“I wonder,” he almost whispered, eyes fixed on the little blade, turning it this way and that in his hand.
“What?” Thor asked, feeling thrown by the unexpected addition of the knife to the conversation and not liking it one bit. “What is it you wonder?”
Loki turned the knife in one fluid movement and traced the tip along his forearm, allowing the delicate blade to trace over the strange ridges on his skin until it reached his elbow. The skin dipped slightly under the pressure but did not break.
“If I were to pierce my skin would my blood be blue? Black? Would it be a monster’s blood that runs through my veins?” Loki wondered out loud, seemingly more to himself that to Thor. He was still utterly fixated on the knife and the rest of the room appeared to have ceased to matter for him.
Loki did not appear to notice the confused horror on Thor’s face as he continued to trace the knife tip over his arm, not yet piercing the skin but also not giving Thor any reason to doubt that he would do it. He licked his lip anxiously, tried to think of some way to distract Loki from his apparent desire to spill his own blood all over their floor.
“Loki…” he began, slow, cautious. The way one talks with a spooked horse or a frightened child.
“Is that even the name of this version of myself?” Loki wondered out loud, not looking up from the knife in his hand. “Odin gave me that name but only after he had shifted my form. My Aesir form is called Loki yes but this is not an Aesir.” He gestured to himself with the clawed hand holding the small knife. “This is not Loki. This is a stranger.”
“You are still Loki,” Thor insisted, concern spiking through his chest like the dagger in Loki’s clawed, blue hand. A thin coat of frost was beginning to appear on the leather wrapped around the handle, creeping up slowly towards the blade and the air itself seemed suddenly to be a few degrees colder.
“This is not Loki,” Loki repeated, gesturing again to himself. “This is a monster that hides beneath my Aesir skin and who would take Loki to be its own.”
The dagger glinted and Thor could feel the air chilling further.
“Do you not remember when you were younger? When we played together as small children in Mother’s gardens and in the palace?” he asked desperately, needing Loki to see that he was still himself, that he was still Loki. Needed to stop this delusion, feeling as though they were in a wooden boat being pulled towards a roaring waterfall and he had just seen that both the paddles had snapped. “You have those memories because you are still you. Were you a stranger you would no longer have them because you would not have experienced them. Loki was with me then, and Loki is with me now.”
“I remember but that was Loki. Loki played with you, Loki read books in the library and ate dinner with people claiming to be his family, but Loki is a lie. I am not Loki. I was hidden beneath the surface, banished because I am a monster, and none can accept a monster. A monster sits before you now and you are trying to claim it is the same as the Aesir child from your memories.”
“I am! Loki, stop this madness. You are you in both forms and nothing will ever change that.” Thor said, voice louder than he wanted it to be but the feeling of danger was only increasing, like seeing the crack in the ice a second too late.
“A Jötunn would not be permitted to play with the crown prince of Asgard, the precious golden son of Odin Allfather,” Loki raised his voice also, the consonants clipping oddly as he seemed to struggle to maintain his composure, to keep a lid on whatever convoluted thoughts were racing through his mind that Thor could not see.
“Please, Loki,” Thor pleaded, trying to sound calm but not able to take his eyes off the blade still clutched tightly in Loki’s hand.
Loki paused, looking at Thor. Then he lowered the blade slightly and Thor breathed out the breath he had not noticed he had been holding.
Then, faster than a striking snake, Loki plunged the knife into his forearm.
“Loki!” Thor shouted, leaping up from his bed and across the small distance between them to pull the knife from his brother’s fingers before pulling back with an agonised yelp as the extreme cold of Loki’s Jötunn skin burned his fingers. Then he gritted his teeth and wrapped a hand around each blue wrist and squeezed until Loki let the knife drop. Thor immediately released his hold on Loki and kicked the knife away behind him. It disappeared under his bed and he heard it hit the wall with a dull thud. Then he turned his attention briefly to his hands. His palms and fingers were are angry red, the burned skin shiny and already beginning to swell. The pain was breath-taking but he forced himself to ignore it and focus on Loki. Loki, who had just taken a knife to his arm right in front of Thor. Loki, who was still in Jötunn form and whom Thor could not touch without burning himself further.
Loki had not moved a muscle, his eyes fixed on the deep gash in his forearm which was leaking an alarming amount of blood. It was dripping onto his legs and onto the floor. Onto sheets which only seconds ago had still been white. He looked intrigued, fascinated, as though faced with a complex problem of some sort that enough careful consideration could solve.
“So it can be harmed,” he muttered, once again seeming to be speaking to himself rather than Thor in a way which was both disconcerting and alarming.
Thor grabbed a sheet off the bed behind him and ripped off a long strip, ignoring the way the pain from the action brought tears to his eyes. His hands throbbed unpleasantly in protest. There was blood on the floor beside Loki, and on the bed. And all over his arm.
Loki seemed to be almost in a trance, staring so closely at the blood on his arm that it turned Thor’s stomach. He was turning the injured limb this way and that, watching the dark blood pour down to his elbow.
“Loki,” Thor said, trying to get his attention. The whole thing didn’t feel real.
Then again, more loudly. “Loki!”
Loki looked at him blankly and then seemed to notice Thor’s hands for the first time.
“You should bind those,” he said in a strangely hollow voice. Another trickle of blood began its path down his arm. “And learn not to touch monsters.”
“Give me your arm,” Thor said, urgently. There was so much blood.
“No!” Loki half shouted, shuffling back onto the bed to put more distance between Thor and himself.
“Norns Loki, you are bleeding!” Thor went to move closer but froze when Loki flinched at the movement. The room seemed somehow darker all of a sudden, almost as if it were pressing down on them, smothering them.
“Loki is not bleeding. The monster is bleeding.” Loki’s voice sounded strange, the pitch all wrong. Like shards of glass rubbing against one another.
“You are both Loki!”
“No, nothing that bleeds this strange blood could be Loki. Loki is Aesir and his blood is red,” Loki insisted, shaking his head aggressively from side to side.
“Give me your arm and cease this madness!”
Loki pulled his bleeding arm into his chest, cradling it the way one would a new-born child.
“Brother,” Thor tried again, trying to keep his own growing panic from his voice. “Please, you are hurt and I wish to bind your wound. Then we will fix this madness that plagues you.”
Loki shook his head harder, sharp clawed fingers digging into the wound and causing more blood to drip onto his sleep clothes. He did not even seem to notice the pain.
“Change back!” Thor ordered desperately. At least when Loki was in Aesir form he would be able to touch him, hold him down until the wound was bound and the flow of blood stemmed.
“No.” Loki pulled his legs up before him, shuffling even further back on the bed.
“Change back to your Aesir form!” Thor shouted, aware of how it would sound to Loki but pushing it away.
“I thought you said that the monster did not repulse you,” Loki answered, voice catching in a manner that almost sounded like a sob as he looked everywhere but Thor’s face.
“It does not but it clearly bothers you because none of this madness was present until you started switching around!”
“So it does bother you,” Loki breathed, fingers digging into the wound in a desperate manner. Thor flinched at the sight of the blood on Loki’s fingers, at the bleeding hole in his brother’s arm that he was tearing at.
“It bothers me that when in this form you seem convinced of being a different person!” Thor answered, irritation and fear clouding his voice, his words. His very thoughts. He dug his fingers into his burned palms and used the pain to push down the encroaching panic.
“But I am.” Loki insisted hysterically. “There is Loki, and there is this repulsive being.”
“Loki,” Thor said desperately, edging forward again slightly. “Please, Loki!”
Loki shuffled back again, still clutching his injured arm tightly to his chest and scratching at the injured limb with his clawed fingers, opening more small wounds that added to the blood already flowing freely over his blue skin. Thor had never seen a Jötunn shuffle. He had never seen a Jötunn look as afraid as Loki did. He had never heard a Jötunn speak in such a hysterical fashion.
Because Loki did look afraid, far more afraid than Thor had first thought. He was swinging from fear to anger to blankness too rapidly, an uncontrolled fall that was just not Loki. Loki had always held his emotions in an iron grip until the bombshell of his adoption that had splintered everything into thousands of tiny pieces. His red eyes were darting from the window to the door and then back again, trying to locate a feasible exit.
“The monster will ever be there as I masquerade as Aesir, as I perform the role Odin gave me with the face of his making. I am not alone, I am not alone, never alone,” Loki babbled, the words tripping and tumbling over one another, increasing in volume, rushing into incoherency like water from a broken dam.
“Brother,” Thor said, as quietly and softly as he could. “Brother, please calm yourself.”
He shuffled forward once more, still crouched awkwardly and holding up his aching hands in an effort to appear non-threatening. Loki’s back hit the wall and he whimpered, wide red eyes whipping around the room wildly, madly.
“The monster will always be there, it will always hide beneath the Aesir skin like a parasite until it claims me and then there will be no more Loki, no more Loki. There will only be the monster and you will never call it Loki again because it never was!”
“Loki,” Thor said, trying to keep his voice soft as the situation escalated further and further into chaos. “I will always claim you as brother. Surely even in your madness you know this!”
He exhaled. Loki stared at him, a strange hunger mingling with the confusion and fear in those glittering red eyes.
“You will always be Loki,” he said gently. “It does not matter to me in which shape you appear and it never will. You will not vanish or be replaced or whatever else it is that you fear. You will always be Loki.”
Loki looked at him warily. He uncurled his limbs slightly, finally removing his fingers from his injured arm and facing slightly more toward Thor. He was listening, even if every inch of his posture practically screamed of his desire to bolt.
“You would call this monster by the same name as the one you call your brother?” he asked, voice catching and halting, fear permeating every syllable. “You would look upon the face of a demon and call it family?”
“I would,” Thor said without any hesitation.
“Loki, what makes you you is not how you appear on the outside. It is inside you Loki, it is your love for mischief, your magic, your wonderful mind. Jötunn or not, you remain my brother.”
Loki seemed to digest this and for a second Thor thought he had succeeded in getting through to him. He dropped his hands down, reaching for the ripped piece of bed sheet which had fallen onto the floor beside him.
Then several things happened at once.
Loki suddenly bared his too sharp teeth and a short blade of ice appeared in his hand with a flash of blue and he threw himself at Thor, who barely managed to throw himself backward to prevent the blade from piercing his chest. He had barely opened his mouth to plead with Loki, had barely read the extent of the madness in the red eyes screwed up with anger and fear when the door behind them suddenly flew open, crashing into the wall behind it with a loud bang that seemed to jerk Loki out of his rage. He flung himself back, ice blade still clutched in his hand, glamour shifting his body back to his Aesir form but it was too late. Valkyrie was suddenly in the room and upon seeing Loki standing over Thor with a knife she swung a heavy pipe into the side of Loki’s head without hesitation, hard enough that he dropped like a puppet whose strings had been cut onto the bloodied floor instantly. His eyes rolled back into his head, which banged sickeningly onto the floor by Thor’s foot and he lay still.
There was still blood trickling sluggishly from the hole in his arm.
“What the hell is going on!?”