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1. You will receive a body. You may like it or hate it, but it's yours to keep for the entire period.
*
The dark was Loki's friend, once: a companion in time of need, an ally who defended him when danger threatened, a guardian who let him walk unseen.
A friend. Perhaps his only friend.
But not any more.
Not now, not in this prison where he languished day in and day out, awaiting trial and judgement from the man he'd once called "Father". This dark was friend to no-one but bad memories and hidden truths here, those haunted him like ghosts, like a bad dream, like the memory of his skin turned cobalt at the touch of frozen fingers so cold they should burned but didn't, or of his true form when he held the Casket in his hands and it stripped away the lie wrapped around his flesh, showing him for what he truly was: a red-eyed abomination, one of them.
A Jötunn.
A monster.
They came out to play at night. Every night. The darkness of his cell became Jötunheim, became the weapons vault of Asgard, changing in a heart beat to play out his pain before his eyes over and over again, reminding him of the body wrapped inside the one he wore that ached to escape at the touch of winter. And when he came back to himself, the shadows of it still remained: the darkness painted his hands Jötunn until he closed his eyes, pressed the heels of his palms into his eyelids until it hurt and willed it all to go away, go away, go away.
And every morning, the walls were etched with frost that melted away at the touch of the dawn light.
He tried to pretend that it wasn't there, but it never worked. The Jötnar bring winter's grasp wherever they tread and his body, beneath the false layer of Aesir skin, was Jötunn. A betrayal cloaked in a deception. A cage he cannot escape.
The mortals of Midgard claimed that he possessed the ability to shift his shape, change into any creature he desired, but not even a being as powerful as he could accomplish that. Even when he despised his flesh with every ounce of his being, that skill was beyond his reach, a dream that brushed the ends of his fingertips but never came within range of his hands. This form, this body with which he'd been cursed by the circumstances of his birth, this was his prison. Not the four walls that stood around him.
He was the captive of duplicitous flesh that would not leave him be.
And the dark was no longer his friend.
*
2. You will learn lessons. You are enrolled in a full-time informal school called, "life."
*
Time dragged in the prisons of Asgard. Night and day crawled across the landscape of Loki's world like dying things, the former bearing dark memories and dreams to play around the corners of his mind, and the latter dragging behind it nothing but the tedium of waiting for a sentence that never seemed to come.
Few events occurred to break up the slow and tedious cycle. For most of the time, he was alone, with nothing and no-one for company bar his own thoughts.
His lonely, bitter, twisted thoughts.
His thoughts that dwelt in days gone by, relishing the taste of childhood happiness soured with revelation, of bonds that had once been loving and strong revealed twisted and broken like shattered limbs, of the way his own heart had been slowly torn to pieces inside his chest, rebuilt frozen and scarred and beyond recognition as his own.
What joy.
He tried to think of other things.
After his escape from SHIELD and before the grand implementation of his plans at Stark Tower, he had once asked Thor's pet mortal scientist – what was his name? Selvig, Doctor Selvig – what it was that mortals contemplated when they were alone. Solveig had said that it varied from person to person, naturally, but that he himself liked to consider the meaning of human life itself and what they were created for. It was so pathetically quaint how he considered mortals to have some kind of purpose to their existence that he'd asked what Selvig thought it was.
"To learn," was the reply. "To discover and to enrich our lives and the lives of those around us. But most of all, to learn. Life is filled with lessons and we are here to find them and to learn them."
What naïvety. It astonished Loki to realise that the people of Midgard thought like this. As though their tiny, pathetic little lives mattered. As though life itself was a giant school through which they stumbled, deaf and blind, eternal children hunting for lessons. It was lies. All of it lies and self-delusion. There was no such purpose to life. Not at all.
There was no inherent meaning to existence. No great secret. No great lessons to be learned or revelations to be made. It was empty. Hollow. Pointless.
And nowhere was it more so than inside the walls of a prison.
*
*
His most recent failings in Midgard weighed the heaviest on his mind. He had lost everything: his army, the Tesseract, his self-control, his dignity, everything, conquered by Thor and his group of pathetic pet mortals. He'd been beaten. He'd been humiliated. He'd been smashed into the ground by the monster as though he'd been nothing more than an insect. He'd been led, gagged and chained, before the mortals of Midgard, the mighty fallen beneath even their lowly feet.
But more than that, he had failed the Master, He who could follow him wherever he went, whatever he did, He who was – even now, surely – waiting to get His hands on him, to punish him for his misdeeds.
He shied away from that thought when he could like a nervous colt. It did not do good to dwell on what that which would make pain seem sweet would feel like.
Then there was his attempt to destroy Jötunheim, another time when his brother had snatched victory from his fingertips and turned success into failure before his eyes. It was always Thor. He was at the heart of every strategy Loki made, every plan he'd built that fell apart.
It was always Thor.
And even when Thor did what was required, it still ended poorly when it was a scheme of Loki's design. The carnage in Jötunheim was the opposite of what he'd wanted, but Thor's pride – his insufferable pride – had brought him into ruin, had led to his banishment. Loki hadn't wanted that then, but events wrenched themselves from his grasp and fled from his reach. Soon he'd become the King of Asgard, the disregarded ruler of an insignificant reign, during which he had tried to kill Thor and yet had not killed him: both were mistakes in their own right, an impossible dichotomy where no matter whether Thor drew breath or not, Loki was wrong.
Even in death he was unsuccessful.
At the moment his fingers had released the spear, the only thing between him and empty space, he had wanted nothing more than to die. But even that simple plan was for naught. He'd fallen into the stars and they had spat him out again, alive and breathing, his mind filled with images that burned, mocking him with his continued existence, the existence that was a mistake to begin with. He'd been born with evil wrapped around his throat like strangling fingers, his whole being wrong from the start.
Because he was born Jötunn.
Because he was not born Thor.
That was his biggest mistake of all.
*
*
Sif and the Warriors Three came quite often at first to gaze on the spectacle of him bound and muzzled like a common cur. They demanded answers of him, explanations as to why he did what he did, but he laughed them away and their questions went unanswered. After a while they did not return.
Mother had visited once, weeping at the sight of him; Father, never.
Then there was Thor.
The size of the interval between his visits varied: sometimes two days, sometimes three, occasionally four or five. Once, it was a whole week. But he always seemed to come back.
They shackled his wrists and ankles but left his mouth free when Thor visited, at his request, evidently. At first, neither of them had spoken. They had sat staring at each other across the room for the entire duration of the visit, both silent, both motionless, time stretched to an eternity.
Then Thor had stood up to leave.
Loki had smiled at his retreating back and broken their silence, lashing out a little in the only way he could.
"What? Nothing to say to me, brother?"
Thor had turned, face a mask of composure, still as the surface of a deep river, and had said in a slow, even voice, "Never doubt that I love you, brother."
His smile had faded. Then Thor had gone and he'd been left alone again.
Thor's behaviour never changed during his visits, no matter what Loki did, no matter how he tried to escalate. Not when Loki needled him with every vicious little barb he could think of. Not when Loki pushed at him to go over the edge into a rage as he had so often done when they were children. Not even when Loki had lost control of himself and screamed at Thor until it felt as if his throat had torn, rage turned to fire and knives inside him, every piece of anger and resentment and pain he'd ever felt pouring out of his mouth in a torrent of recrimination.
Thor never moved and he never spoke until he stood to leave. Then it was always the same thing.
"Never doubt that I love you, brother."
A week passed between Loki's outburst and Thor's next visit. Perhaps a sign that Loki's barbed words had stung more than it had initially appeared. But when Thor came back, the desire to bait him was gone. Every visit since had been soundless but for those words.
"Never doubt that I love you, brother."
Loki merely laughed at the thought that he'd ever believed it.
*
*
He'd always been a fast learner.
When they were children, Thor had lagged behind him in strategy. His plan was always hit hard and hit fast: he never thought of subtlety, of carefully laid plans and traps. That was always Loki, Loki who used illusions to fool his enemies, Loki who shrouded them in mist to give them clear passage, Loki who thought his way around a problem while Thor barrelled straight through. And he'd seen the way their father had looked at them, the way his smile had creased the corners of his eyes when he looked at Thor and his mighty strength and how those creases had smoothed away when he looked at Loki and his guiles. The clearest message he could have sent that it was strength that mattered here. Not brains.
He'd always been a fast learner.
He'd seen the fear in Odin's eyes after he returned the Casket to its place in the weapons vault, how taut the muscles were beneath that falsely placid face, that tension that spoke of mistrust. It had vanished in an instant, but he'd seen it and he knew what it meant. He was one of them. He couldn't be trusted. And he'd demanded answers although he hadn't wanted to hear them from Odin's mouth, to have confirmed what he'd already worked out because he learnt fast from little clues and he'd already known it, deep down inside.
He'd always been a fast learner.
But in the end, it didn't matter in the end how fast he could learn when he had learnt all that he needed to know: that he was a monster. Born a monster to live a monster to die a monster.
And what did learning matter in the face of that?
*
*
It was always an "if only". Just another "if only" on his list of them. He'd lived in a world of "if only" for so long now that he couldn't remember what it was like to look at his feet and see the grass green there instead of dry and dead.
His first had been small, just like the first taste of any addiction. If only he could fight like Thor could. Then Father would value him just as much and everything would be better. So he'd studied magic and learnt how to fight in a way that fitted him, but that hadn't made things better at all. The disdain was still there in Odin's eyes.
So he moved on to the next one.
If only Thor could be taken down a peg or two. Then they'd realise that Loki was just as good, that Thor wasn't the perfect golden son that they believed him to be. But time passed and nothing came to dent the pedestal, so he'd had to take things into his own hands and Thor had been banished. That hadn't made things better either. It had made them worse. He'd learnt things then. Things he hadn't wanted to know.
If only the Jötnar were gone. Then Father and Thor and everybody else would see how much he loved Asgard, how much he rejected those creatures that gave him blood, how much he was one of them. Then his attempt failed. The Jötnar lived on and Thor had trampled his plans into the dust once again. Things were worse. So much worse.
If only he were gone. If he just... let go. Then everything would be quiet and silence and the pain would be gone in a moment. But he'd dropped through the universe and come out the other side still breathing, fallen right into the hands of Thanos and the Chitauri, and things had been worse still.
If only Midgard were his. Then Thor and Odin and all of them would see what he could accomplish. Then the world would be free of freedom, of the delusion of choice, the pain of deception. But Thor had come and crushed his dreams again and now he was here, in a cell, left to languish and rot.
Always in view. Always too far to catch. His grass was always dead and dry beneath his feet.
But he dared not stop chasing the green for fear of what would happen if he stayed put.
*
*
Forgotten.
At least they would remember him. The Avengers. The six self-proclaimed heroes of Midgard.
He thought about them often, the ones responsible for his current incarceration. They weighed heavily on his mind. Sometimes, he would picture exactly how he would kill them one by one if he got the chance. But it gave him no satisfaction – what was the point of wishing them ill now? – and he soon gave it up. Instead, he just remembered how much he hated them.
Banner, slave to his emotions, nothing but an uncontrollable monster; Romanoff, gullible child, stuck in the belief she can heal the hurt she'd done; Barton, victim of freedom, convinced that he has choice in his actions; Stark, preening peacock, a pathetic little blowhard braggart; Rogers, hopelessly naïve, desperate to believe the best in people; and Thor, the biggest fool of them all. The one who believed that a few empty words would bring Loki back to Asgard again.
He listed them off one by one in his head, pictured their faces, the way they acted, reminding himself again and again of the things they did that he despised.
Banner losing control and destroying everything around him (letting go of the spear and fall into the abyss of his pain, wreak havoc to soothe the jealousy burning in his soul).
Romanoff willing to sacrifice anything to clear a little of her conscience (what could he possibly sacrifice that would redeem the ill he'd done now?).
Barton choosing to spare Romanoff rather than kill her (when did he last have the chance to choose his course?).
Stark letting himself be thrown out of a window to change his suit, subtlety forgotten (open a portal in the middle of one of the biggest cities of Midgard and let the world see you bring its destruction).
Rogers jumping in to fight a god in order to protect a pathetic mortal he had never even met before (nobody would have jumped in for him like that).
And Thor begging him to give up the dream he called poisonous and come back to the place he called home (he had no home and all his dreams were crushed – there was no coming back for him).
He hated the Avengers.
It hurt less than hating himself.
*
*
Delusion. They were delusional, one and all. There was no such thing as freedom. No such thing as choice.
Not for him.
There never had been.
From the moment he was born, Loki's life had been controlled and directed by others; from the moment Odin had stolen him from Jötunheim, his fate had been sealed, his agency torn from his grasp, his choices trampled underfoot. His hand had always been pushed. He'd always been driven further than he'd wanted to go.
If people had listened to him, he would have told them of his concerns about Thor's leadership. But they didn't. They cut him off, silenced him, closed their ears to his words, so he had to take direct action. He had to.
If Odin had not fallen into the Odinsleep, he would never have had to take control of Asgard. He would not have been king. He never wanted to be king. But he was the only one left. He had to.
If Thor had not returned from Midgard, the Jötnar would have been destroyed and things would have worked out. But Thor had come back despite his best efforts and everything he'd worked for had been destroyed and he'd tried to let go because he had to.
If he had never been found by Thanos, he would have escaped it all and he would have been at peace. But Thanos had found him and taken him and he'd done all he could to escape because he had to.
If he had never been born, he would not have become this. A murderer. A tyrant. A traitor.
A monster.
He never chose this. He never decided that he wanted this blood on his hands. So much blood. They were thick with it, painted inches deep. At night, he could almost see it there, deep red against his skin, its thick, coppery scent filling the air around him like a veil of choking smoke.
He never chose to do all this. Never. He'd been born to do it, born to do nothing but kill and hurt and destroy because he was born a Jötunn and he had no other course to take.
There was no such thing as freedom.
*
*
And his sense of time had drifted away. Left him behind without a second thought.
It was the last in a long list of senses that had let him down, his sense of time, following his sense of pride, his sense of decency, his sense of right and wrong and so many others that had deserted him upon finding out who he truly was. It was as though those pieces of his inner self had worked themselves loose like rotten teeth, and when he fell into the stars, they'd just dropped out, leaving him so ragged and damaged and full of holes that he was struggling to hold himself together even now, to stay in one piece, to keep the emptiness from ripping through him and leaving him torn asunder.
Before all this, he'd been filled with life, with pride, with the desire to make his father proud. Then he was filled with pain and grief and rage that he had poured out onto the people of Midgard in a torrent that rivalled the greatest storms of their world. And now? Now there was nothing.
There was nothing inside him but the shells of old lies like empty snake skins left lying in the desert of his soul, and a bitter well of hate run dry and useless, full of dust. And the harder he searched for answers there, within himself, the less he found. The more empty he felt. He looked. He listened. And there was nothing and nobody there.
Perhaps he'd been lying for so long that the man he'd once been had been lost inside it. Consumed by the beast. Lost inside the stars. Gone for good.
Or maybe he'd just been lying to himself for so long that not even he could trust his own word any more.
Only a fool would trust the word of a monster.
Only a fool would trust Loki.
And he would not be the fool again.
*