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The cell they take him to has runes carved into the walls. Loki paces it once, slowly, and notes the location of each beneath the paint that conceals them from the untrained eye.
He tests them with a bit of a spell--a false flame flickering in his palm, all light and no heat--and immediately learns their purpose: the magic barely forms in his hand before the cell begins to siphon it off.
It's not enough to strip him of power completely, but it leaves him quickly drained and struggling to maintain even this weak enchantment. Loki lets the cell eat the flame and takes a seat beside one of the blank walls, away from the windows.
The position conceals his hand. Loki taps out a rhythm on the floor, slowly filling the cell with the sound until it reverberates against the walls and returns to him, bringing information with it. Seidr is messy magic, a type of shamanism Odin learned during one of his youthful travels in Midgard; Loki never took to it. He's always preferred magic that can be worked with gestures instead, since illusionism doesn't leave him at risk of losing himself.
But he learned seidr at Odin's hand all the same, and hopes that the disinclination will work in his favor now.
The cell pulls at it, but with far less force than it did the magic he's known for. Loki focuses his drumming on the runes and finds that they're glamours thrice-done: the real runes are concealed not just under paint but layers of spells as well.
Loki tries to find their true locations, but he can only get hazy estimates as the cell gradually consumes the seidr. Strangely, he senses only one ward: it's carved into the door, another restraint alongside the lock and the guards. He expected more.
The room was not hastily prepared. The king must have begun work on it as soon as his presence in Midgard was known.
Sending Thor to that realm would have cost him a tremendous amount of energy and power. If Odin started crafting the cell immediately afterward, there may be signs of weariness within its enchantments: hints of exhaustion, tiny flaws Loki can pick at until they give him an opening.
He notes the possibility for later and stills his hand. The echoes dissipate, and he shakes his head once to clear them from his mind.
Beyond the windows the guards have been watching him. Loki remains where he is until they eventually cease and settle into their positions along the hall.
Thor marched him down here along with the others. He stayed long enough to see Loki safely inside the cell, but then turned and left.
At first he does little but sleep. A healing stone lies beside the pillows of his bed, and Loki spends his first few days in prison curled beside it, temple nearly pressed to the surface. The cuts and external bruises heal first, the internal ones follow later, and the bone-deep exhaustion is last to go.
A second healing stone is embedded in the ceiling, painted over like the runes, but this one feels off. Loki tries to use seidr to determine why, but the spell around it is slippery and twisting, and he can't maintain the magic long enough to slither through to the truth. Loki smirks briefly at the irony of that and then stops, irritated.
Odin comes down once while he's still in bed. Loki recognizes his tread the moment it enters the hallway; he's known that step, heavy and measured with power and responsibility, for as long as he can remember. He keeps his eyes closed.
The step pauses outside the window.
For a long time there is nothing, nothing save an awful stillness that presses against Loki's ears. No sound breaks it--not even the clink of armor as the guards shift, for they stand straight at attention in their king's presence. Loki fills the silence with all the recriminations he knows he'd see if he looks at Odin's expression.
There's the faintest tink in the silence, like a nail on glass. And then a brief squeak, barely there before gone, as of a hand falling away.
Odin turns and goes.
Loki hears him pause farther down the corridor, murmuring with one of the guards. They're too far off for him to catch more than a few words--'sleep,' 'eating,' 'quiet'--and then that too ends, and Odin's presence departs the corridor entirely as even the echoes of his tread fade.
A long time passes before Loki can untense his shoulders enough to fake sleep.
Thor never comes.
Once he heals, he grows bored. Loki paces the cell, stretching his legs after so much bedrest. He counts the guards, then counts their rotations, then spends a tedious day counting the hours between each shift. He uses a dinner knife to cut a strip from his blanket and frays it into threads, and then begins working those into knotted patterns, hiding runes among them. It's an object with little power and no use, because he has no magic to waste putting into it; but it gives him something to do.
The next day Frigga visits, bringing her spinning.
Loki is uncomfortable in her presence, torn between familiarity and formality, unsure where his place now stands. He pulls a chair from the table--there are two, and for days he wondered if it was a jab or a promise, and hated both possibilities--and offers it to her. Frigga accepts, sweeping her skirt to the side before holding out a bundle of loose thread.
"Would you hold this for me?" she asks.
"...Yes," Loki agrees. He sits on the bed and untangles the flax enough to loop it around his hands.
As she winds the thread into a ball, Frigga tells him of all that has happened in Asheim in his absence: a bilgesnipe infestation in the north, a wheat fire in the east, a meeting with the Norns and their queen that went better than expected, and various sundry skirmishes and gossip within the court--all things a prince needs to know about his kingdom.
Loki finds it difficult to look at her. His throat feels closed off, and he knows it's hope he's choking on; this bitterness on his tongue has only ever been one thing. He stares at the looped thread instead, pressing the backs of his hands harder against it to hide their shaking.
"And your brother--" she adds, and the trembling worsens. The thread falls from his hands.
He picks it up off the floor, then stills when she lays a hand across his forehead.
"I heard you were healing," she says. "Is the stone wearing out?"
"No," Loki replies. "I am better."
His mother takes the thread when he offers it to her, but still keeps her hand over his forehead.
Loki thinks to himself that this is the best opportunity to send a spell out of the cell.
She's come to him unarmed. The servants who bring meals or clean water or laundry and fresh bedding are escorted by a guard who stands inside the door, but none have entered with her. With enough force of will, he could create a small cantrip and hook it to her hem while she's distracted. It would fall off the first time she brushes something outside and finally give him information about the wards beyond the cell.
Loki keeps his hands in his lap, and tells himself he refrains because she'll surely go see the king after this. Odin would catch the lingering touch of magic.
Frigga draws her hand away. "I'll come again when you're more rested," she says, and rises from her seat. Loki automatically does the same, ingrained courtesy at work before any conscious thought, but keeps his eyes averted.
"I look forward to your company," he replies, and the words come out stilted. He bites down on 'Mother' before it can follow them.
Frigga is silent for a moment, before finally dropping a small curtsey. Loki bows back, and then she tucks the half-finished ball of thread away and leaves.
Loki returns the chair to the table and takes his place by the wall again, drumming his fingers until he's lightheaded. He still can't slip through the spell around the second healing stone, and at last gives up for the time being.
Thor never comes.
In time there is a slip; with time, there always is.
One day it isn't a servant who brings his meal--it's a guard, who had to leave to fetch it. The rest of the servants must be busy with some grand task: a feast, a court wedding, the visit of a foreign delegate.
A coronation, he starts to think, and then stops the thought cold before it can go any farther.
A nameday feast, perhaps: the meal the guard returns with is relatively extravagant. He guesses from the dishes that the feast is Frigga's, though it could be Thor's instead. Thor would keep his favorites of the meat and fowl, making a guess based on what Loki's received pointless.
Loki has never properly sorted out the days since he dropped from the Bifrost. The Chitauri's concept of time was limited, Midgard's calendar meant nothing to him, and no one's ever told him what date he and Thor returned on--he had only a few glimpses of the outdoors before he was shunted off to the cell, barely enough to get a sense of the season. Down here he can only gauge time in meals, in the rotation of the guard and Frigga's weekly visits.
The guard lays out the meal with all the efficiency of a soldier and none of the grace of a royal servant. Loki sits by the wall and watches him. In the hand hidden from view by his position he folds up a cantrip, small and invisible but full of half the power and strength he has to spare.
As the guard finishes laying his plates, Loki summons the other half and twists his wrist, throwing a wind spell at the table.
The cell reacts exactly as he expected, consuming the spell until all that's left when it reaches the table is a faint draft that tips over his goblet. It hits the floor with a clank and rolls away.
Loki rises to his feet and walks over to it.
The guard pauses from reaching for the cup at his movement, and then straightens. His stance is loose and ready, prepared, but he keeps his hand away from the sword at his waist.
Loki picks up the goblet and examines it, tilting it to catch the unending light of the cell. Then he holds it out.
"A new one," he orders pleasantly.
The guard nods in obedience, which allows him to avoid addressing Loki. He takes the cup from his hand and Loki hooks the cantrip on the edge of his wrist guard. Then he pulls back and turns aside, resuming his seat by the wall before closing his eyes.
The spell drops in the hallway as the guard locks the door behind him. Between the ward on the door and the runes in the walls, its power is cut to a fraction before it reaches him; but Loki concentrates with all he has left and manages to hold the connection long enough to learn what's beyond his cell.
The walls outside are a forest of wards.
They're a tangled, bristling mass that turn the hallway, and the one that links to it, and those that link to that, into a maze few could navigate correctly. The only ones who would manage are the wards' original creator and those he permits to see through them; and even fewer of those granted passage would be able to remember the way clearly. Although the warriors who comprise his guard are all part of the same small group, they and the servants must have to be given directions to the cell anew each and every time.
Loki can't help a low exhale at the density and scale of the work. Never has he seen so many wards dedicated solely to keeping potential intruders away.
He told Thor nothing of the Chitauri--the mask saw to that--or of their leader's threats. But it's possible Barton gleaned some sense of the depths of their power.
He told the mortal nothing either. But whenever the man was at hand and he felt another summons arrive, Loki used him as a standing guard to ensure that none of the mercenaries untouched by the scepter tried to seize the opportunity while he was stripped of his bearings. And Barton was resourceful enough to have studied those times, even if his enforced loyalty stopped him from using the knowledge.
It's less possible that the man mentioned anything to Thor while he and the rest of the Avengers were deliberating after the battle, before Thor returned with the Tesseract and that weary gaze. It's more likely that Odin gleaned of the threat Loki's brought back with him.
Loki knows the place where he's being kept. It's deep in the heart of Asgard, in the bowels of the dungeons, far from any window or crack to the outdoors that someone might be able to slip through. Even he's never found a hidden path that passes close to here. Two of the cell's walls sit against a solid buttress the thickness of several gods, while the remaining two look out on the sole hallway that reaches the room. Nothing but empty cells and barren storerooms line the hall before it connects to another corridor in one direction; the opposite is a dead end against another buttress.
It is the perfect place to hide the shame of the family, and the best place to secret one whose blood is being tenaciously sought.
His control over the cantrip is steadily leeched by the runes until it finally snaps. When the guard returns with a new goblet, Loki is slumped against the wall, ravenous from the energy he's expended but too exhausted to rise to his feet.
He hears the guard complete the table setting and start to leave before pausing by the door. Loki lacks the strength to open his eyes and find out why.
"Are..." the guard asks. "Are you ill?"
"No," Loki replies. His tongue feels thick in his mouth. He knows this feeling of over-exertion well, but this time there is no scepter to lean on until his power is restored. Now nothing blunts the consequences of his actions.
The guard says nothing else and leaves.
Loki is still trying to find the ability to pull himself up and make his way to either the bed or the table without staggering too humiliatingly when a healer arrives. Two guards stand in the room as the healer helps him to his feet and guides him to the bed, and Loki is absurdly pleased by the compliment: even in this state, they believe him capable of doing ill.
He is becoming as legendary as Thor, in his own way.
The healer lays a cold cloth over his forehead and tells him to rest. Loki does so as soon as his cell is empty again, falling into an aching sleep even as his stomach gnaws at itself.
When he finally wakes, the guards have changed. The cold feast on the table has been cleared away, and is soon replaced with an invalid's meal: hot broth, cool soup made from one of Idunn's apples, water and weak wine. Loki manages not to slurp it all indecently.
The healer returns twice to determine that he's recovering, and then comes no more. Frigga resumes her visits five meals later, asks how he's doing, and seems tired when he answers that he's fine.
Thor never comes.
Odin returns not long after, and enters his cell this time. He brings with him a child's lesson on the nine realms.
Loki sits through the slow, descriptive explanation of what could have happened to Yggdrasil had Jotunheim been destroyed, told with a solemnity that even now--after so much has passed, after he has changed so far beyond what he once was--weighs heavy on his shoulders.
"There must be nine realms," Odin concludes. He sits in the chair Loki pulled away from the table and offered. Loki took the other, and there is more distance between the two of them than there is when he holds Frigga's thread as she winds it. The guards have relocated farther up the hall at Odin's orders, out of hearing of the cell; the king entered with Gungnir, and there's little they could do that he can't accomplish on his own. "One less would wreck havoc on those that remain."
Loki has sat with his hands in his lap, fingers pressed tight together, rubbing his knuckles against each other. It's a nervous tic he's begun to notice, one that's risen in lieu of the tiny illusions he used to summon to remind himself of his power when in the company of those he felt otherwise outmatched by. Odin's words have a pressure that's nearly tangible, that nearly presses him back in his chair; but he makes himself find his tongue, because he is not a child anymore.
"And what of Ragnarok?" he asks.
Odin stills. His fingers tighten almost imperceptibly around Gungnir; Loki notes it and pushes on, raising his chin.
"There are books in the library with pages cut out," he says, "scrolls that have been sliced and scraped and amended. But none of them deny that Laufey's people will be with Surtur and the legions of Hel in the final battle." An ugly smile twists across his face even though he doesn't want it to--it gives too much of himself away. "Yet they should live? Even when the role they'll play is known?"
Odin does not speak for a long time.
At last, he shifts his grip on Gungnir. "There are many prophecies of Ragnarok that can't be trusted," he says slowly, leaning heavily on the spear. "They come from the dead. And Hel's realm is full of grudges."
Loki watches him in silence.
Odin does not speak either. His expression is distant, drawn inward with some concern only he knows, some knowledge shared--if at all--with only one other: his wife and queen and confidant.
Loki could never have been a king in the way he is. He's always known that; he didn't even try.
The silence stretches out, distorting the space between them, until Loki finally asks, "Is there to be a trial?"
"There already was," Odin answers. He shifts his grip on Gungnir again and now he is no longer a god tangled in individual concern; now he is the ruler of Asgard. "Jotunheim's queen was already convinced that the damage was a consequence of the Bifrost's malfunction and destruction. The treaties were rewritten to lessen their yearly tribute, in recognition of the damage done. I gave them a few barrels of my best wines for their funeral feasts."
". . . And Midgard?"
"One city is not quite as bad as an entire realm," Odin replies, "and they can't reach here. But Thor favors that world. And mortals keep long records." He taps his fingers on the spear handle. "In one or two of their generations, it may start to fade."
Loki turns over the number of years that that would be in his mind, and wonders how long a generation is for the Chitauri. Short, he imagines, if their warriors were any indication.
Short and prolific, he amends, considering the number of them he had access to. But there's undoubtedly a difference between those simple foot soldiers and the ones he spoke to, and a greater difference still between them and their leader.
"But if they're developing new weapons as he said..." Odin continues, still tapping his fingers idly. "If they've created a weapon based on the Destroyer...."
Loki feels the prick of the words' recrimination tightening his shoulders. "Yes," he confirms, because Thor may have seen the weapon before he fell but Loki was the one shot with the damned thing. He knows more of its working than Thor does, and describes much of it before realizing he's fallen into the same old trap of pride as always.
Odin nods slowly as he finishes, and then says, "We'll have to see, then. Their records aren't as fragile as they used to be." He rises to his feet.
Loki keeps his seat and says, "You lied."
Odin looks down at him for a long time. Loki stares at the handle of Gungnir and the wall beyond it.
"If the destruction had been deliberate, the perpetrator would have to pay in blood. If there was none to be had, then in whatever remnants were left. His possessions, his memory," Odin says quietly. "You are my son."
Loki presses his fingers together until the knuckles go white.
"If she'd asked correctly, there would have been little I could do," the All-father continues after a time. "But she demanded retribution and recompense, not justice." He briefly lifts a shoulder. "Recompense was made; retribution was paid with the dishonor we faced in having to give it, despite Laufey's invasion."
In certain ways, Loki is more their father's son than Thor.
I killed Laufey for you, he thinks. I did it in a way Asgard couldn't have been faulted for. I would have stripped that land from the realms to prove this was the only home for me.
If you are so wise, he thinks, why couldn't you see that?
Why couldn't either of you?
The All-father waits, and waits longer; but Loki never speaks. At last he turns aside, and finally he leaves.
Outside the cell, Odin pauses briefly. He bends down a moment later, and picks up the spent cantrip lying unseen by all others against the wall.
It disintegrates between his fingers when he presses. Odin rubs them together for a time longer, and then continues down the hall.
The guards resume their places now that there's no risk of them overhearing anything that would contradict previous explanations of the Bifrost's shattering. Heimdall long ago agreed to keep his peace regarding that day, for Asgard's sake; the Warriors Three and the Lady Sif agreed for Asgard and for Thor's sake; and Thor agreed for Asgard, and for his brother's memory.
Thor never comes.
It occurs to Loki at one moment that in striving so hard to avoid the fate he thought was designed for him, he created it for himself.
He laughs until he chokes on the noise, until his throat is hoarse and his eyes sore, his hands pressed over his face in a pathetic imitation of the concealment he used to work so easily. The guards outside watch the spectacle uneasily until one at last leaves.
Loki wakes up later from a long slumber whose dreams he doesn't remember, without recalling falling asleep. There's an ashen, bitter dryness in his mouth as he does, and he knows immediately that someone has worked a spell on him.
He paces the room ferally, running a hand along the walls and emptying the small chest that sits by the head of the bed, overturning it and the candelabra and the water jug, stripping the blanket and sheets from the bed and examining all the furniture minutely.
Nearly everything is the same. There's a new healing stone lying among the heap of blanket and pillows, but no additional wards on the door or runes on the walls. There are new candles in the candelabra, and although the water jug is now emptied on the floor, before that it was refilled. The light has dimmed faintly. It's still bright, but no longer so much so that he'll have to bury his face under the thick blanket to rest.
The healing stone embedded in the ceiling is stronger, and so is the spell around it. The off-putting feeling it gives has worsened.
Loki stands under the stone and stares at it, motionless, until he eventually notices that the guards are growing disconcerted and edgy.
He forces himself to turn away then, and begins slowly putting his cell back together. A servant comes while he's in the middle of it to dry the floor and refill the water jar.
Thor never comes.
Volstagg blusters into his cell one day, carrying a hamper and a cask and so aggressively cheerful Loki stays on the other side of the room instinctively. The guards are out of hearing again, enjoying a tray of roasted goat he brought for them. Volstagg isn't carrying his axe, of course; but Loki has fought alongside the other god and knows that, ultimately, he wouldn't need it if it came to that.
"What are you doing?" he demands, and notes that there are knives among the silverware Volstagg is laying out.
"Bringing dinner," Volstagg answers, "so we can have a talk like civilized people. And everyone should have a decent meal on their nameday."
Volstagg's 'decent meal' would break his table if it weren't so solid. Loki notes that it's evening--meaning his measure of time has been wrong since the spell was put on him, and that Frigga is coming in the mornings now and not the afternoons--and exhales. "What are you doing?" he repeats, bemused.
Volstagg gives him an amused look. "They said you went mad for a while," he says. "No one mentioned deaf, too."
"I'm not mad," Loki replies, annoyed. "Or deaf."
He eyes the table when Volstagg tellingly doesn't reply, and finally asks, "Whose day is it?" Not that much time has passed since the last feast, unless he's lost more days that he thought under that spell. Thor and Frigga have months between their feasts, and Odin almost half a year between them both.
The look Volstagg gives him is a little longer this time.
"Yours," he answers. "Didn't you know?"
Loki waves a hand casually around the cell, indicating the blank walls and the windows that look out only on dim corridors. Volstagg nods once in acknowledgement and finishes laying the table.
Still standing by the bed, Loki tries, "What is this?"
"Boiled mutton!" Volstagg answers, hands spread to encompass the dishes. "Perfectly seasoned. Some excellent haddock--fish shouldn't be used for a feast, I know, but trust me--and possibly some of the last good bread we'll have for a year."
He goes on. Loki refrains from sighing this time--he supposes he gave him the opening--and edges closer to the table.
Most of their conversation is over the food, or events that he's already heard from Frigga told anew: the bilgesnipe infestation that's moved to the northwest, now described from a warrior's view rather than a royal's; the wheat fire as a tragedy with repercussions second only to the coming of the Fimbul-winter. Loki finds himself snickering into his goblet more than once.
He relaxes incrementally as the dishes empty and the cask is drained. Volstagg has a keen wit, which has always left Loki with mixed feelings: half the time he enjoys the other god's company, and half the time he sees him as a rival.
Volstagg's voice--"Don't let them touch you!"--was the last thing he heard before his old life ended.
Half the time he hates the other god for the warning too slowly given, and half the time he hates himself for not heeding it in time.
Only crumbs and dregs remain when the conversation broaches the personal. "I'm glad you lived," Volstagg says, eying his emptied stein.
"Liar," Loki replies mildly.
"That was not a death to be wished even on an enemy," Volstagg retorts. "We weren't that."
"Yes we were," Loki answers. "You committed treason."
"As did you," Volstagg replies.
Loki twists the stem of the goblet in his fingers. "A prank."
"No," Volstagg says seriously. "You've done pranks before, Loki. Even vicious ones. That was something else entirely."
Loki continues to toy with the goblet, studying it. Finally he asks: "So you think Thor was fit to be king then?"
Volstagg shakes the crumbs from his beard.
"I don't think either of you were ready," he answers, startling Loki's hand to stillness. "But I know who I felt more at ease with. So I would do what I did again."
Loki glances at the window. The guards are still far down the corridor, laughing and jesting over the remains of the meat. Volstagg is no fool.
"Brave words," he replies.
"Aye," the other god agrees. "I know you'll be released from here eventually. I don't expect things to be the same as they were before."
Loki is silent for a time, and finally sets the goblet down.
"No," he agrees quietly. "They never will."
Volstagg departs when the guards start to return, but he looks back while waiting for the door to be unlocked. "You never asked after Thor."
Loki, pushing his chair under the table, tenses. "Should I?"
"Hrmmm," Volstagg says, and leaves. Loki scowls and turns away from the windows, refusing to watch him go.
Fandral comes by the next afternoon, if his sense of time is correct again. Loki hears him in the corridor as a short discussion with a guard turns into a longer one that rambles through talk of gaming and women and a cheater who needs to be cut from the next gathering.
Eventually it tapers off. After a pause, too long to be comfortable, Fandral asks, "So he seems better?"
"Seems like," the guard replies, in a tone that can neither confirm nor deny. He and Loki didn't know each other before outside the distant connection of a prince and a member of the royal retinue, and they hardly know each other better now.
Loki has come to the impression that either Thor played up his opinion of the addled state of his mind, or that someone else has expanded on it. He's surprised it's worked as well as it's seemed to; he is not mad and never has been.
That news seems enough for Fandral, for he leaves soon after without actually coming in sight of the cell. Loki supposes he believes he wasn't heard at such a distance.
The walls don't block out as much sound as they should. Loki can hear the arrival of anyone long before they come into sight--more than long enough to ready his magic, even with the constraints of the runes. It is not a natural acoustic of the corridor; like the wards outside, it's a safeguard within a safeguard.
Neither Sif nor Hogun come, not to stare or to glare or to gloat or to talk.
Thor never comes.
His mother returns on her usual day, at her usual time. This morning she brings not only the same ball of thread she must be unraveling after each visit but also a small package wrapped in fine linen.
"I would have come on the right day," she says, handing it to him after settling in her chair. "But I thought it was better not to upset your schedule."
Loki nods and thanks her and opens it. It's a gold comb, elegantly engraved.
Some confusion must show on his face, because she continues. "It seems like we forgot one." Frigga reaches out and touches his hair. "It must have been a nuisance."
"No," Loki replies and gestures to the chest near the bed. "There's one in there."
"Ah." Frigga hesitates, and then pulls her hand back.
"Does it bother you?" he asks.
". . . Yes," she says, and touches his hair again. "You were always so...particular about your appearance."
"You can say 'vain,'" he replies, to draw a small smile to her lips.
"That would be rude. 'Concerned,'" she compromises, and a half-smile flits over his mouth as well.
"Thank you," Loki says again, and sets it beside him on the bed before reaching for the loose thread.
He begins brushing his hair after washing the days he knows she comes, but doesn't bother otherwise. When Heimdall learned his secret, when Thor and his friends did, it was as good as revealed to the court and thus to all Asheim. The skin he always thought was his own is nothing but a falsehood, and there's no point to maintaining the old pretense for a few guards and stray visitors. A lie is pathetic if the one telling it also believed it.
Odin visits occasionally, when the burden of the crown eases enough to permit it. He and Loki have little common ground these days: magic is an unsafe topic, and Odin is more reticent with news of the court than Frigga. He asks once if there's anything Loki would like, from the library or his old quarters, and then sends down the titles Loki lists.
They've been thumbed through, he notes when they arrive. Loki has no particular reason for wanting these particular books, but he reads them for something to do. The threads he cut from the blanket have long frayed into uselessness, and he's hesitant to slice up the new bedding just yet. He finishes the tomes, rereads them, and then dumps them by the chest, abruptly bored and sick of the farce.
His mother begins bringing puzzles with her when she comes. They're intricate, complicated things, and after the first three they begin to include magic in their workings.
Thor often complained--back when Loki had his ear and offered his own in return--that their father spoke less and less of his true intents. What Thor saw as insufferable riddling, Loki perceived as misguided assumptions that Odin's actions would be correctly interpreted without the need of words to accompany them.
He thinks that the All-father should have learned by now, and doesn't think how the same could be said of him.
It takes Loki more and more time to solve each new puzzle, because the next part isn't revealed until the current is completed, and he can only summon so much magic at a time. They're busywork, he knows, or else a test of whether he's managed to twist around the runes to restrict him less. Loki abandons them for long times, disgusted with the trap, with the intent, with the constricting tedium they represent by their very purpose of distracting from it.
But he always returns to complete them in the end. Without something external to occupy his mind, he has nothing but his own thoughts; and he has already spent what felt like several lifetimes falling with those. Too much time alone with them and Loki grows weary of himself.
The guards rarely speak to him, and Loki does not lower himself to address them first. But as he begins pacing the cell more and more often, suddenly two do.
It's only those two, and Loki doesn't fail to note slight changes to their appearance: they have new scabbards, fresh engravings on their hilts, and new shirts beneath their armor, as if they've come into some extra gold. They start awkward conversations when they enter the room with the servants, and Loki has to refrain from rolling his eyes.
He engages anyway, for as long as the topics interest him--he tested the matter once, and the guard remained in his cell even after the servant finished and left--because it's preferable to the quiet. He doesn't bother to get their names.
Fandral visits once, bringing an unopened bottle of wine and his own glass; they were never genuinely friendly enough to have conversations without some kind of prop at hand.
Loki examines the bottle briefly and then allows Fandral to open it, both as a return courtesy for bringing something so clearly sealed and untampered with and because poison is not to the god's style. Few ever change their habits, especially when their morals are built on them.
Fandral's gossip is mainly the kind that Volstagg didn't bother with and which is below Frigga: the messy sexual and romantic entanglements that lay the foundations for the majority of the factions and feuding within the court. Loki shakes his head often over his goblet, but takes note and asks questions wherever he desires more information.
Fandral has an easy charm and a well-honed insight into others that leaves Loki with mixed feelings: he sometimes enjoys the other god's company, but often feels his talents are wasted on shallow and worthless pursuits. He's always considered Fandral a rival.
"You might reconsider that look," Fandral says, nodding at Loki's hair, when half the bottle is gone. Neither of them have made a motion to take another glass. "It's not terribly flattering."
Loki quirks an eyebrow. "I recall you saying once that unbound, ruffled hair was always appealing."
Fandral chuckles. "Only on women," he qualifies. "And normally only in the bedroom."
Loki considers pointing out that this is his bedroom, the same as it's also his study and his main living area. But he doesn't, in favor of keeping the conversation superficial. "Ahhh."
Fandral eventually departs, leaving the rest of the wine behind and significantly never once mentioning Thor. Loki feels tired once he's gone; it's been a long time since he's had a conversation that was a sparring match. He's losing his skill.
He's to be kept in here until he becomes something else entirely. Foolish. Soft. Harmless.
He leaves the wine on the table, uncorked, souring, and has a servant take it away when they bring the next meal.
Thor never comes.
Trouble has arrived in Asgard.
There have always been four guards outside his cell at all times, barring rare circumstances. Always four, from the same sixteen that change shifts three times per day. And then one day there are two.
Loki studies the guards and sits by the wall, tapping his fingers. But he can't force the seidr through the boundaries of the cell; there may be only one ward on the door, but it's strong. For all that he can hear of the outside world, sound trapped in here stays in here.
Or perhaps it's only sound that he makes. Loki thinks again of how Volstagg shifted the guards out of hearing, and more significantly of how Odin sent them off at a distance the first time he entered, and wonders if the runes have been written only to apply to him. When he speaks with Frigga or Odin or others, do the guards hear only their half of the conversation? Has he been erased that completely?
He spends hours pacing, unable to remain still. Loki stomps his feet against the floor with each step, but the guards rarely glance inside. The servant who brings his meal gives him a wide berth.
Loki doesn't ask for news, from her or the guards.
The next rotation occurs, and now it's only one guard outside.
Loki circles the room slowly, methodically setting his own wards and cantrips along the walls. He moves the furniture when necessary, and rests when the runes have drained him too much before beginning again. By the time of the next rotation, he's built a layer of protection around the entire perimeter.
The guard leaves, but no one comes to replace him. The hall outside is barren, silent.
Loki paces until his feet ache, each step hard and sharp, a bit of noise to push away the emptiness.
Two servants eventually bring the next meal, at what could be the usual time or could be late or early--he's been famished for hours from fighting the cell to create all the cantrips, so that's no useful indicator. One remains outside while the other carries the hamper in. Both are armed.
"What's happening?" he demands as she starts arranging the table setting.
The servant only shakes her head and continues laying out the meal. Her actions are short, choppy; she's in a hurry. The naked sword jammed in her belt has blood on it.
Loki, aggravated at being refused by his lesser, increasingly frightened by his lack of knowledge and the myriad of possibilities that such absence stokes, strides closer.
The servant abandons the hamper half-emptied and flees. Her companion slams the door shut behind her and locks it, and then they're both gone. Loki stands where he is and listens to the echoes of their footfalls until those too disappear, swallowed up by the silence.
He eats, then wipes the soup bowl clean and pours water into it, and tries divining. That has never been his kind of magic either, but he still knows the workings of it.
The runes interfere, of course. Loki can discern a threat, immense danger, death; but nothing comes through with clarity.
He takes a dinner knife to the walls, scraping away at the runes only to find that what he'd thought were the true locations are yet more glamours, stronger than the first. They're strong enough to hide where the real ones are--stronger than anything he initially sensed when he was brought here. Loki thinks again of the time he was unconscious under a spell.
He tries to carve out the ward on the door and it repulses him so fiercely his hand is numb afterward. Loki throws a chair at the window, then spends what feels like a too-long time reattaching the leg that broke off with candle wax and magic; it's the chair his mother always sits in when she visits, and he thinks of it as hers.
He feels an urge to prise that unsettling, infuriating healing stone in the ceiling loose and throw it at one of the windows, but it's too high for him to reach. He would have to drag the table beneath it and then stack the good chair on top of that, and he still has enough dignity left to reject that idea.
He attempts divining one more time, but the results are even more muddled: battle, death, sorrow.
Loki tells himself that if sorrow follows the death foretold, at least he knows it won't be his own.
He now knows that for a lie, but ignores the knowledge.
Exhausted, he drains the last of the wine and slumps against the wall to wait for his energy to restore itself. He'll have to approach the ward with sense this time, with finesse: one spell to take the brunt of its defense, another to slip through and see how it works, how it was built, so he can decipher how to take it apart. He'll need time, and rest; he regrets not saving any of the meal for later.
Loki finds himself tapping his fingers against the floor. It isn't seidr; it's just noise, noise to push away the silence. Before, even when he wasn't speaking to the guards or they to him, there was still sound: the insipid conversations they had with each other and the servants, the faint sound of metal or leather against stone as they shifted.
But now there are no guards, no gods, no sense of time and no sound. Now there's only the endless silence.
It's the same silence that haunted Loki as he fell through the void, that chewed at him until he beat his hands against his temples just to hear something. The silence that made him shout and scream until his throat was raw and then to keep screaming beyond that--it was so damaged when he first managed to grasp onto a floating rock in the Chitauri's world that he was all but mute.
It's the same silence that would have made him drive his daggers into his ears just to have a reason to hear nothing, except they'd fallen away earlier as he dropped.
Loki taps his fingers against the floor, and tries not to remember, and fails.
Eventually the rapping begins to feel too small against the encroaching emptiness, as weak and pathetic as a single candle lit in a vast cavern. Loki pushes the heel of his other hand hard against his ear to hear the pulse of his blood, but over time even that seems to fade.
Erased, he thinks again.
Loki shudders and presses the hand over his face, bites his tongue to confirm it's still there. He starts to hum but then stops abruptly, irrationally terrified that, like his pulse, his voice will be reduced until indiscernible. Again.
Loki bites his tongue once more, and thinks of his family, and thinks of the pain and the blood in his throat the last time he tried to fight the emptiness of the void, and the weariness as every trick he had was stripped away in the face of it until he couldn't remember why he was fighting anymore. He thinks of what he once called his family again.
Loki clenches his jaw. He curls his hand into a fist and raps his knuckles against the floor, over and over until they ache; and then he loosens his hand and resumes the tapping. The sound is no stronger than it was before, and he can feel the silence creeping along its edges, waiting to tighten around him.
He drums his fingers until he loses feeling in them, and then he switches to the other hand.
He knows the moment Thor enters the corridor. He's known that step for longer than he can remember.
The first footfall jolts him, and sends a shiver down his spine. He doesn't know how much time has passed--minutes, hours. Presumably not days, or he would feel hungrier. Clearly enough time that the events his divining foretold have entered their worst phase: mere threat or battle wouldn't bring Thor to lower himself to visit. Loki doubts even imminent danger could be enough to drive his brother to these depths.
Which leaves only death.
Well, he thinks, if it's already come, at least it wasn't his own.
Thor's stride draws closer. Loki folds his aching hands in his lap, shifts against the wall and swallows, and then--never one to let the upper edge slip from him in any circumstances--calls out to Thor. His voice comes out steadier than he expected; he half didn't think it would work at all. He can't resist the small smile that crosses his lips.
He's forgotten his earlier thoughts that any sound he makes must be trapped in the room. Even if it were, Thor would still hear him. Even if he lost his voice entirely, had it eaten up by the silence, his brother would still know his intent.
Thor proves as much when he answers.
Desperate.