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The Titan’s fingers squeeze and squeeze, and Loki knows his time is up. He has been living on stolen time for many years, arguably since the moment Laufey left him on a cold altar before going to war with Odin. He has cheated death many times, but this time, he knows… this time, in spite of his words to Thor, he knows he won’t come back. He spits in the Titan’s face, or he tries to anyway, but it’s only because he doesn’t want to die like a coward. As his vision blacks out, he sees a flash of blue light, then nothing.
The first thing that comes back is… pressure. Pressure, and pain. There’s something cocooning him; he can’t move, but it also feels protective. His throat, however... he can’t breathe, and that’s when the panic hits. He can’t even open his eyes; there’s no air, no light, no-
Something explodes out of him, and he falls on something hard. Metallic. He rolls to his back, then to his side; he curls up and his mouth opens but he still can’t breathe. There are voices, and pain, and everything is too hot; he’s burning up. He’s jerked and pushed to lie flat on the floor; his shoulders are pinned down, and a heavy weight settles on his thighs; he thrashes but can’t move and then there’s even more pain in his throat, where he didn’t even think there could be more pain. It’s a sharp, searing kind of pain, but then there’s air, and the weight lifts from his legs. One of the hands moves from his shoulder to his cheek, from relentless to gentle, and they let him move to his side again. He’s shivering; he can tell he’s shivering, and his face is damp. The voices are still there, though he doesn't understand a word; someone tries to move him and there’s a thump and a surprised shout. He stays where he is. Something light but warm falls over him, and he moves just enough so it covers his head, too.
He loses consciousness again.
“..ki,” he hears. “Loki, please…”
The voice is deep, rough, familiar. He wants to open his eyes, but the lids are too heavy. He tries to turn his head in the direction of the voice, then, but a sharp burst of pain flares from his neck downwards.
“Don’t try to move; you’re safe. You’re alive.” The familiar voice cuts off abruptly, but then a soft, damp cloth goes around his face and wipes his still-closed eyes.
He finds he can open his eyes now, and he looks.
Thor, he wants to say, but there’s something in his throat that prevents him from making any sound; he only blinks and mouths his brother’s name. Thor.
“That’s right.” Thor’s face is blurry and beyond him everything is just blobs of faded colours; still, it’s something familiar to focus on. He can tell Thor is smiling; there’s a flash of bright white surrounded by dirty blond. Loki tries to lift his hand and Thor grabs it, helps him reach his face. “Yes, I’m here. We’re here, together again, brother.”
Loki curls his fingers and digs his nails into Thor’s beard, touches the shorn hair, feels the scar that bisects his eye. There's no eyepatch.
That’s when it all crashes back on him: the fear, the pain, the Titan. It’s like a clamp on his mind, trying to keep him down, control him, burning him up; the pain in his body recedes behind a primal fear. Something starts beeping behind him, and another voice, one he thinks he’s heard before, says, “Shit, his heart is going on overdrive; what’s happening?”
Loki tries to struggle up, pushes on his elbows, but he can barely move his arms and there’s a high, whistling sound filling his ears; his eyes jump left and right but they’re still not adjusted; he’s got to get away, away, away-
“Thor, the blue thing again! He’s going to…”
“I know! Take this away, as far as you can.” Thor’s face is suddenly right above his, and he’s clasping Loki’s hand so tight it’s painful. “Brother, you’re safe; we’re safe. Thanos was defeated; it's over. I swear!”
Footsteps pound away, and the pressure that had been trying to overtake his mind lessens a little.
“It’s back in the case,” the other voice says, a little out of breath.
“Loki, please. It’s over; I promise.”
The beeping slows down just a little; the whistling steadies. Loki wants to believe his brother, wants to believe that, for once, everything will not go all wrong. Again.
“He’s stabilizing.”
Loki moves his lips, but he still can’t make any sound. At least the world around him is sharpening slowly: the gunmetal metal walls and ceilings, a curtain, the harsh lights above.
“You can’t talk, brother; we’ve put something in your throat to help you breathe. There,” he says, putting Loki’s hand over a strange device embedded in his neck, “you can feel it. It’s just while you heal; Tony says it should stay for a few days.”
He can’t talk, he can’t move. He can’t even breathe without help. He’s powerless. Thor says the Titan is defeated, but what does that mean? How…
“Hey, Princess Aurora’s panicking again. What’s wrong this time?”
Loki closes his eyes, and finds enough magic in him to project a weak double.
“What the hell?”
“The Titan,” the double asks Thor, ignoring the other man. “Defeated?” Then Loki lets it fade; he can’t sustain it any longer.
“Yes. He’s dead, for good; we’ve also destroyed most of the Stones. It’s over, brother.”
Most? He mouths.
“We still have to destroy the Mind Stone, and he actually didn’t have the Tesseract with him. Though I’m starting to think I know where it is, now.”
The Mind Stone, Loki thinks. He hates it. Was it what tried to rend his own mind, earlier? No, no, it can’t be; he’d feel it still. He blinks, and rolls his eyes in the direction of the voice. Dark hair streaked with silver, a beard trimmed in a fashion Fandral would have appreciated, shrewd eyes. He looks away. His brother’s Midgardian friends don’t like him, and with good reason; this one he remembers throwing out of a window – well, through a window. Defenestration. Mortals usually don’t take too kindly to it. He closes his eyes.
“It’s with you, isn’t it? The Tesseract. You have it, right?”
Loki doesn’t reply. He can’t, anyway, not with that thing stabbed through the ruin that is his trachea.
“Loki, is Tony right?”
He curls his lips, then sighs. It doesn’t feel right, with the air whistling through the thin tube instead of his nose and mouth. The Titan, he mouths.
“Thanos?”
Loki shudders at the name, and Thor sees it. He wraps one of his big, warm hands around Loki’s arm; squeezes, gently. More gently than he used to, and Loki misses the way Thor would forget his strength, back when they had no care in the world, not really. How blind they were, he thinks. How little they knew.
“No, he didn’t have it.” Stark hops on a table near the wall, still in Loki’s narrow field of vision, and kicks his feet in the air, like he can’t sit still. “When we took the Gauntlet off his corpse, we found that the Space Stone was an illusion and not the real deal; Strange said that’s why we could get him. But he thought he had the real deal, or he wouldn’t have attacked.”
“I remembered, afterwards.” Thor clears his throat. “When he… killed you. There was a flash of blue, right before he dropped you. I didn’t think anything of it; at the time it was…” He shakes his head. “But then, as we realized there was an empty slot where the stone should have been on the Gauntlet, I remembered.”
“But he couldn't have taken it back from Than… oh come on, we can say his name! We’re not in Harry Potter, plus our own Voldemort’s dead.”
Loki frowns; half of what Stark said is nonsense but he gets that a Midgardian is mocking him, and he hates it. He turns his arm in Thor’s grip and wiggles his fingers, until Thor notices.
“Brother?”
Please, he mouths. He draws the rune for power, the rune for thunder, and the rune for magic against his brother’s palm. Of course, it takes a moment for the big oaf to understand, but then he frowns and shakes his head.
“No, it’s too dangerous!”
“What is?” Stark doesn’t sound too worried; but if he remembers Bruce’s tales, Stark thrives on danger.
“He wants me to lend him some of my power… I think so he can use magic?”
“What does he need magic for? Oh, to do the magic double thing again for a chat? Yeah, that was handy.”
“I could short-circuit the ship!”
Thor isn’t wrong, but he has more control over this than he thinks. Or he should have, anyway.
“And I could hurt you! You’re not well; I don’t want to…”
Loki rolls his eyes, and Stark sees him.
“Your baby bro disagrees, methinks.”
“We often disagree.”
“Yeah, no shit. I’m told it’s part of the sibling experience, but I wouldn't know. C’mon, Sparky, juice him up! We need answers.”
“I don’t think…”
Loki grits his teeth; of course Thor has to be stubborn about this. He puts his free hand over the contraption in his throat and braces himself, but right before he can tear it out Stark’s there, pulling his arm away.
“Are you insane?”
Loki raises one eyebrow and tries not to think that he should be strong enough to free his limb from Stark’s grip.
“Fine,” Thor grits out, glaring down at Loki. “If only so you leave this where it is.”
Loki gives him a smug smile, and he is quite certain he can hear Stark snickering. It gives him something to hang on to as his brother’s electricity starts crackling between them; he can tell Thor’s careful but when he’s done Loki’s entire body feels like it’s on fire. In fact, he can smell burnt flesh. Still, it doesn’t matter; now he can more easily project a double and focus on it while his real body heals.
“Ah,” the double says when he sees Stark and Thor are busy removing the thin scrubs they had dressed him in. Loki looks down at his own chest, reddened by Thor's lighting, the scars old and new scattered there, the prominent ribs. He’s never been thick like an oak tree, of course, not like Thor, but he didn’t realize how thin he’s become until now. Well, he spent years as Odin, and then he was too busy glamouring himself to look healthy and strong around the Grandmaster. And then, of course, there was Hela, Ragnarok, the Statesman… no time for vanity. Stark is busy wrapping a raw-looking hand in gauze, and Thor is smearing some sort of gel on his chest. They don’t pay attention to the double, standing right behind them.
He clears his throat. “I’m right here,” he said.
“Later. We’re busy with you point oh right now,” Stark says.
They’re ignoring him. All this, and they’re ignoring him. Thor is a little bit too focused on the gel-smearing, in fact. The double crosses his arms and leans against the wall, and imagines turning Stark’s goatee… pink. Purple? Green? “I’ll heal,” he finally says.
“Yeah, that’s the idea.”
“I mean that I’ll heal even without all…” He waves a hand at the cot. “All this agitation.”
“’Tis but a flesh wound, eh?” Stark finishes with the gauze and glances at Thor’s, well, thunderous frown, before turning to Loki’s double. “Shit, this is weird. You don’t even look conscious,” he says while pointing at Loki’s body on the cot. “That you there,” he clarifies. “But this you is slightly translucent, which is also weird.”
“I don’t want to waste energy on frivolities.”
“Hm. So, the Tesseract. Do you have it?”
“No.”
“Well, see, you’re lying. From the readings I took of you while you were out of it, I could tell it’s with you.”
“Why ask, if you already know?”
“Brother.” Thor finally looks up. “Did you trick the Titan? Did you give him an illusion?”
“Of course not; he would have seen right through it and you would not be alive now.”
“Did you steal it back from him, then?”
“How? How would I have done that?”
Thor shrugs. “I don’t know; you’ve always been clever.”
Loki hopes he doesn’t blush, though his physical body looks battered enough he doubts it would show. “I don’t know what happened, but I can tell you I did give him the real Stone.” He holds out a hand, but can’t make it appear. “And I can’t call it out, which I could if I’d stored it myself.”
“But my tech won’t lie!”
Loki frowns. “Hm. Can I see your data?”
Stark’s eyebrows raise; he’s surprised, but he looks more appraising than disbelieving. “Sure.”
He leads the way beyond the cloth curtain that separates their med bay from the rest of a large area filled with screens, benches, and open boxes filled with all sorts of tools, leaving Thor behind. “We didn’t think we’d need a hospital onboard, when we set out.”
“What are you even doing here, so far from Midgard?”
“Your brother wanted to come see if anything could be salvaged from your homeworld, and maybe find some stranded Asgardians on the way, so…”
“Asgard was destroyed.”
“He said some things might have survived, some artefacts, or… look, I don’t know; we don’t know, but it was worth checking out. We’ve found a few Asgardians, by the way; told them about New Asgard on Earth.”
Loki blinks. “New Asgard? Earth?”
“We’ve established a new settlement there.” Thor’s voice carries out easily from where he’s still sitting with Loki’s body. “It’s not far from where Father died. I left Valkyrie in charge.”
“Oh.” He doesn’t know what else he can say; it’s a lot.
The curtain pulls back, and Thor steps out of the curtained-off area. “It’s not much for now, but it’s a home, and we’re rebuilding. It…” He looks down, then up again, his unfamiliar, mismatched eyes heavy on Loki. “It can be yours, too. I wouldn’t dream of pinning you down where you don’t want to be, but it could be a place for you to come back to. If you want.”
Most of Loki’s consciousness is in a projection with no substance, not in his physical body, and yet he thinks he can feel his breath stutter in his chest. “We’ll see,” he forces out. It’s not a yes, but it’s enough for Thor to give him a small smile. There are crinkles at the corners of his eyes, and this quiet acceptance is so much more than the outbursts of shallow joy of their youth.
“I’m glad,” Thor says. “I know that as King, no Asgardian should matter more to me than another, but you, Loki…”
“Oh please, don’t go all sentimental on me.”
“Of course not. Wouldn’t dream of it.”
That’s when Loki spots a roll of gauze in his brother’s hand, but it's too late: it sails right through his double’s body. He can’t even hold it against Thor, not when he can see him grinning and looking so happy with himself; he can still hear him chortling as he gets back behind the curtain and pulls it closed.
“So. Siblings, uh?”
“Just show me those readings,” Loki says, and he tries to ignore Stark’s amused expression while they focus on graphs and charts.
“You’re fading,” Stark says.
“I’m not.”
“You are; we’ve been at this for hours.”
“We’ve barely begun.”
“Your brother’s been snoring very loudly for at least two.”
“Two hours and twenty-three minutes,” the computer says.
“Thanks, Friday.”
“And the boss is right; your double’s readings are getting weaker.”
“If what this says is right, then I have a virtually limitless source of energy inside of me; I can’t be fading.” He is; he can tell it’s getting harder to maintain his double. He can’t access the Tesseract, not consciously anyway, but he did earlier; Stark’s computer recorded a burst of power when he threw Stark against a wall. They had tried to move him, and he’d reacted in fear, just like when he broke the ice coffin they found him in. None of that had been conscious, just reactions to terror. He hadn’t been able to do more than react, then. Perhaps he can learn to control that power, with time and practice.
“Fine, you’re not fading.” Stark sticks a finger through the double’s arm, probably thinking he’s making some point. He isn’t; the double’s never been solid. “Maybe you’re just tired, you know; no one would hold it against you.”
“I’m fine.”
“Look, you were a bluecicle when we found you floating in space, and then you…”
“A what? What did you call me?”
“Um… bluecicle? Because, you know, you were all blue and encased in ice; remember Friday’s recording? Your brother said that was normal.”
His brother should have kept his mouth shut. “It’s not my normal, but it doesn’t matter.” From the glint in Stark’s eyes, the man would be pestering Loki about it as soon as he could. “You found me. And then?”
“Uh, and then, we tried to thaw you out; you did the blue flash thing like you saw, and we managed to get the tracheotomy done before you winked off the table. Glad you’re more in control of that, by the way.”
“But it won’t be enough, will it?”
“What do you mean?”
“You want to destroy the remaining Stones; now you’ve determined one has merged with me…” He looks to the other end of the large room, where his body is still laying. It’s hard to believe, that the Space Stone chose him over the Titan, but if it’s true then he could easily leave this ship. He could go anywhere; he’d just have to want it, and the Stone would do the rest. He wouldn't even have to wait for his magic to recover. He’s exhausted, but the Stones don’t know exhaustion. He could do it. He just has to want it. Thor is sleeping soundly; it would be easy. No one, nothing could stop him.
“We’re not killing you.”
“No?”
“You didn’t see your brother, when he thought you were dead. He was a wreck. If you died again…”
Thor. It always comes back to Thor, doesn’t it? And Loki wants to leave, but he doesn’t want to leave him. He can’t leave Thor to be King on his own; he should be there, keep him on his toes, advise him, all the things he has realized their parents groomed him for, centuries ago. To Loki the scheming from behind the throne, and to Thor, the über-Asgardian, charismatic and strong, the actual crown. He’s not sure how he feels about following orders from beyond the grave, but they’re not Thor’s, and he finds he wants to still have a place at his brother’s side.
“But I would think you still consider me your enemy.”
“Eh.” Stark pushes his chair away from the bench covered with pads and papers – Loki prefers paper, Stark favours pads, of course – and stretches his legs out in front of him. “The plan is to destroy the Mind Stone. Did you know that we have it onboard?”
Loki feels his double glitch and fade a little more; he looks around but he can’t tell… so he did feel it, before; he didn’t imagine it. He shudders.
“It’s in a lead alloy case; it’s keeping it mostly contained and hidden. It was out when you first came to, and you really panicked; as soon as it was back in the case you calmed down. Well, calmed down a little.”
“Why are you telling me this? Aren’t you afraid I’ll take it from you and conquer your world again?”
“No, not really. You’re scared of it, which tells me something.”
“What does it tell you?”
Stark shrugs, but while he’s aiming for casual he doesn’t quite reach it. “Enough.”
Bruce and Thor both told him about some of Stark’s history, and he remembers also what Barton said, years ago. The shadows in Stark’s eyes are not unfamiliar to Loki. “Ah.” He doesn’t know what else to say, doesn’t know how Stark would respond to anything else.
“We’re trying to find a way to destroy it; Thor suggested a place called… Niðavellir?”
“It wouldn't be enough.”
“Maybe, but he said he hoped to find something in what’s left of Asgard.”
“Hm. Gungnir, perhaps, could have survived the realm’s destruction.”
“And he’s got Stormbreaker, now – oh, that’s right, you haven’t heard that story yet, have you?”
Loki shakes his head, and lets Stark’s voice tell him of the creation of Thor’s new weapon, lets it soothe him like tales of Odin’s might soothed him when he was a child, like his trust in Thor’s might did, later. Maybe they can get rid of the Mind Stone, after all. Maybe Asgard can be reborn. Maybe he can find a place there, for a time at least.
He knows, now, that nothing is permanent, that safety is relative, that hiding can’t last forever. He knows peace can cover many sins and that war has no winner, only a side that loses a little less than the other. He knows death doesn’t want him, that the Norns aren’t finished with him, and that one Infinity Stone deemed him worthier than the mad Titan, somehow. He knows it’s embedded in his bones, in his flesh, in his soul, in his very magic, and that it saved him. It chose him.
As Stark wraps up his story, Loki feels his double finally fade completely, and all of his consciousness return to his body; he’s suddenly smothered under pain until Stark comes and fiddles with a bag of fluid, injecting some drug into it. The pain lessens somewhat as the medication drips down a tube that ends in his arm, and he closes his eyes, lets Thor’s snores show him the way into sleep.
His last thought is about hope, and whether he can let it trickle back into his heart, whether it would take root there like a flower in his mother’s gardens.
Well.
He will never know if he doesn’t give hope a chance, will he?