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Kvasir is on a table and all he knows is pain. There is blood dripping from runes carved into his cheeks and forehead and he cannot move an inch, do anything to wipe it away, and so it seeps into his eyes blinding and stinging and it seeps into his mouth and it does not taste like how blood should taste. Sickly suffocating sweetness and it is wrong and he is choking on it. Things are nonsensical and strange here, the touch of something that is not from here lingering and twisting everything just enough so that it is warped and deformed.
His vision is blurry and clouded, but he is aware- from sound and sensation if not anything else- that Loki is kneeling by his side, driving a knife further down into his restrained arm, her tears mingling with his syrup-wine blood. The chains binding her seem to change in shape as he looks, from silver to something of sinew and string.
He thinks she is apologizing. His ears are ringing and it’s hard to tell but he tries to smile at her anyway even though his mouth cannot turn up at the edges without sending an aching stretched-out pain through him. It is just him and Loki here, and she is just as much a victim as him.
It’s odd to see her as this much of an equal. They talked, the first day, him trying to restrain a cocktail of fear and excitement at being trapped and afraid but knowing Loki was going to save him, and only having thoughts for how she would do it. He had met Sigyn, briefly, but still held both of them up to the highest regard. They were resistance leaders, after all, and he was only an idealistic writer.
Mentally composing poetry should be a solace, but he thinks it would come out wrong. His dreams now are in a language that he does not speak, snarling and screeching like something that should never exist, and written in the same runes Loki scrapes out on Odin’s command.
A burst of pain from Loki stabbing the knife in to start a new design makes him throw his head back involuntarily, slamming against the table. There is a cut on the back of his head, a tree of runes all down his back and up his neck that aches to lie on pushed against the table like this. His hair is clotted with blood and honey and something else sickly-squamous-sticky he cannot identify and does not want to.
He used to want to learn everything he could, about the world, and about the truth. Hunted through propaganda until he could find gold, read banned texts authored by resistance members with bated breath, feeling a little like a child under a blanket with a flashlight, dodging being caught by his parents. Became a journalist for the rebellion, tried to share that knowledge. Backfired, badly.
Loki drags the knife along his skin, etching out apocalyptic blueprints on the glass canvas that is his broken and shattered flesh. A small whimper escapes his lips as he tries to pull away from the aching and unceasing pain, but he is tied down firmly and there is no escape, and the chains bite and scrape against the parts of him that are already carved out.
Kvasir doesn’t want to know what will happen to him anymore.