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Kvasir is not alive. He was not alive when in a state of suspended animation in the train, heart beating to an inaudible and erratic tune. He was not alive when Sigyn pulled the tubes and wires from him and let him bleed out. He was not alive when Yog-Sothoth The Key And The Gate The Bifrost The Beyond One The Lurker At The Threshold reached Its power to engulf and destroy the train and he sat bolt upright, eyes glowing with an arcane light and words spilling from his mouth unbidden in broken lines of verse. He is not alive when he drags himself out of the wreckage of the train, weak and shaking, and finds somewhere out of sight to collapse.
It’s a long time before he gets up again. He’s fallen on a strip of grass outside the train station. It smells like dew and fresh earth and he has not been outside in eighty years. He’s not any older than he was, and when he cuts himself open with the edge of a stone to see if his theory is right he has no blood. The wound closes up. The runes etched into him are still open and raw and he doesn’t think they will ever heal. He has bled out; he will always be bleeding out.
He tries to reformat his thoughts into something more human. It’s hard. At some point they had stopped being. Or- human wasn’t the right word. Detached. He was detached.
Everything about him hurt.
Eventually he turns over to stare at the sky and now he was on his back and it is bright and like the fluorescent light in Odin’s lab and he can’t get up and he screams and it is not the scream of a human.
Distantly through the ringing in his ears, he can hear running footsteps, and then there is someone besides him lifting him up and it is a guard or more likely Loki or Odin because eventually she had to kill her guards because they started finding out what she was doing and tried to tell people and Odin got angry. They had been nice, or at least that’s what he’d hoped. He’d talked to them. People were people and redeemable no matter what and he tried to always show everyone some degree of kindness and courtesy. That was what had ended him up here, though. Maybe he should start being awful. He doesn’t think he’d be very good at that. He doesn’t try and fight back as he is pulled to his feet and then, unexpectedly, draped over the person holding him, so whoever it is is supporting his weight.
“Fucking Kvasir,” the person says. “Sure. Why not.” She isn’t Loki. He doesn’t know them.
He gives them a weak wave. “That’s me. I think.” Is he still the same person? That’s a question.
Before he can spiral down that train of thought they’re tugging him along, making him stumble. He’s not used to walking places anymore. “We have to go.”
“Why?” he asks before he can stop himself. “Who are you? Where are we going?”
“The Bifrost,” they respond, short and clipped. “Lyf Edda. Out of the system.”
“The Bifrost- no no no-” He grabs onto her shoulders. “We have to stop it, we have to warn people-”
“Don’t you think I’ve considered that? We can’t stop it! It’s useless, and I’m tired, and I’m leaving. You can come if you like, by virtue of being someone I encountered when I was just about to leave and also a resistance member which is really fucking cool.”
“Don’t you have people you care about? I do- my family, my parents, I-” Kvasir remembers with a start it’s been eighty years.
“No. I don’t. Let’s go.”
Kvasir cannot in good conscience leave the system, but. He really, really, doesn’t want to be back in the Bifrost. He lets Lyf lead the way.