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Odin once took Loki to the root of Yggdrasil. Dvalinn looked on placidly as Loki contemplated eternity, and came to his own conclusions.
“Are you ready now?” Odin asked.
Those were the same words he used with Thor, Loki knew, when Thor was finished with training. So, of course, “Yes.”
He never did forget the gaze of the animal—the idea—that fed upon the Tree.
*
Weak. Slippery. Liar.
Well, if they insist. There’s something in him that wants him to do his worst, to prove how right they were to fear him, except for—
*
– Thor. Not a brother, never anything less. Odin betrayed Loki, Laufey abandoned him as a bastard, but Thor… didn’t. A thousand games, a thousand opportunities, a thousand tests from Odin, and stupid reckless golden Thor was never corrupted by anything but his own pride.
At the time, Loki looked at the politics. He let Thor take the glory as well as the burden. He kept his games private and his hate hidden, the naïve yearning for justice buried until it soured.
Loki was to be the poisoned arrow-tip. (He thinks, Is this what you wanted, Father? An arrow and a hammer?)
Thor is a body, golden though he may be, brother though he may be. Loki knows this body like he knows his own mind. He knows he’ll never break them.
In his great wisdom, Odin never predicted that his perfect offspring would be split in two. There might be a lesson here, if anyone cared to learn, if there was anyone but Loki to mistrust Odin. If anyone but him had the courage to doubt.
*
Humans have a lovely story to justify their guilt: They say that in the beginning there were but two of them, innocent like the other beasts. A serpent came to their garden and offered them a choice. The woman saw that nothing stopped her from learning what her god kept from them, so she did what was forbidden. She set them free.
Loki despises humans for many reasons, but the way they hate that woman is what tipped the scales to action. They hate freedom more than any creatures Loki’s seen. If he could meet Eve, he’d teach her to kill Adam in his sleep.
He’d give her the choice she didn’t have.
*
At the root of Yggdrasil, Loki and Thor fight. The terrain keeps shifting as one or the other gains the upper hand. Loki doesn’t know if Thor understands that they are fighting at the root of all worlds, all realms; that the rocks and grass are not rocks and grass.
Loki can make them smooth as silk with a flick of his mind. Razor-sharp against Thor.
“Stop fighting,” Thor grits out.
How?
Between them, Loki’s the one who is called to more than one world. His fight is never over. There are no songs for that, no boasts.
Thor grinds Loki’s face against a shoot-that-is-a-world and kills it, and Loki laughs, startled and bloodthirsty. He knees the body that is his brother (the god that is his brother) between the legs. And he can’t stop laughing as he turns into a woman, a dozen women, just to see the look on Thor’s face.
“Your own face, brother,” Thor asks slowly. Loki stops flickering and waits, aware of Thor’s hands gripping his arms, pinning him in place.
He can see the future splitting into strands, paths like red strings to follow, and all the ones that start with him making more room for Thor end badly. But they tug at him with promises of leverage, like Thor tugs at him now, and Loki’s best-laid plans can only be unraveled by his own childish belief that he can’t be outsmarted. That he can’t be swayed.
The future settles in its tracks with a groan. Loki stays silent and watches Yggdrasil above; tells himself the new story.
*
Is this what you wanted, Father?
*
Loki has never found magic to change the past. Trees cannot ungrow, skin can’t be untouched, regret can’t undo the damage done to him.
He doesn’t change for Thor. He still wants the same things. Midgard will do.
It’s about temple steps and tainted blood, fingers slipping through his own, quests granted to others who were deemed worthy. It’s about being the bastard and the foundling, the mother, the destroyer.
It’s not about Thanos or free will. It’s not about armies. It’s about love, like the mortals tell each other. It’s a love story, and it ends badly for everyone.
*
Is this what you wanted? A broken arrow and the hammer that broke it?
*
Loki has all the time in the worlds to think.
Dvalinn’s eyes, golden apples, Thor’s eyes, the thousand-eyed beasts that he, Loki Odinson, Loki Laufeyson, brought to heel. All the lessons that he learned with blood and magic and lies, everything that led him to his prison. He thinks about them because he has nothing else to do.
If he finds magic to change the past before he regains his freedom, he would not use it to change what happened. He would take the tangled thread of his life and cut out the moments of doubt. Thor is a body, and he used that body to make Loki doubt his strength. There were times, bitter even then, when he would’ve let Thor keep him safe, no matter the cost.
There were times when Loki doubted himself because of Thor.
He thinks he would forget that, if he could. (If it wouldn’t undo him.)