Chapter Text
The collective noun for a group of butterflies is a Kaleidoscope, the narrator sagely tells them, voice over footage of the insects in question, hundreds of twitching and fluttering wings darting around the screen. They've seen this one before, many times, but it was Hugo's turn to pick what they watched over call, and he likes this one, a mosaic of colours, the vintage voice of an old man recounting obscure facts.
'While generally solitary creatures,' Loki could quote the commentary from memory if he tried, 'some species of butterflies become highly social in periods such as migration, forming Kaleidoscopes in the millions to cross continents.'
His laptop screen flashes fiery orange as the camera pans across an entire field of them, prismatic and blinding. He diverts his gaze to Hugo, his picture sat in the corner of his computer, completely enraptured, as he always is. Shamelessly, he sizes up the panel of Hugo's video feed, He's much more interesting than this thing anyway. The rise and fall of his chest, if he strains to listen over the documentary he can hear his breathing . His eyes, dark as ever, create the perfect canvas for the film's hues to project onto from the screen, lit up in blues and reds and yellows, shifting shapes flicker, only disrupted by his slow, content blinking. Hugo watches the Kaleidoscope of butterflies and Loki watches the Kaleidoscope in his eyes.
Still, it's not the same. Not the same as it had been, the first, second, third time Hugo asked to watch this one, legs slung over each other in a dorm room, passed their curfew, his breath tickling the back of his neck. He's only in London, the flight would be an hour and a half, he's checked. A helpful infographic pops up on the documentary showing the three thousand mile journey monarch butterflies take. The distance between them is less than a tenth of that. It's pathetic how human it makes him feel, reduced to this over an hour time difference.
Hugo's got it worse than him anyway. At least in Paris he's got Charles hanging around to keep him company, send him passes. At least he's not in london. Hugo's stuck, saddled with players nowhere near as good as him. He tells him as much, forlorn texts sent after games about the cowardice of his teammates in the box, sitting back when they're one goal up and letting the time run down.
Faintly, he hears the narrator start to talk about an endangered amazonian species. He likes this part, though it's not enough to persuade him to stop looking at Hugo.
He's a bit like a butterfly, in a sense. Maybe its the boredom from seeing this as many times as Hugo has asked him to that makes him say that. Generally solitary creatures, he recalls, butterflies can become highly social. Hugo, so alone when he met him, better than every teammate he had, inimitable and isolated. And yet when they had happened upon eachother, fate drawing them together as Hugo insisted, it was like he was an entirely new person. Attached at the hip, he could tell you every mole on Hugo's back and vice versa, any idea of his past seclusion long gone. So, a bit like a butterfly, in a sense. Maybe he's going crazy, mind driven away by the pitiful distance between them.
"My favourite animals are butterflies," he had told him back then, shyly, maybe, it was difficult to read his tone. One had landed on the crest of his wrist, pale white and flickering in the air. Cupping it in his hands, he had held it out to Loki, and when he tried to hold it in turn, it's little wings had exploded into panicked fluttering, tickling against his fingers until squeamishly he had opened the cage he made with his hands and let it out into the open air. They frowned in sync, watching it escape on the breeze.
"You'll get the hang of it," Hugo had promised him, "you can be number one at that, too."
Later, when he shared his dream, bared his heart to him, he had laughed. Hugo's face had pinched a little, tensed like a fist readying to defend itself. Loki had been faster, as he always is, reassured him.
"I've never met someone," his lungs aching from the exertion of laughter and heart beating fast, utterly taken, "With a dream as adorably tyrannical as mine."
Hugo had blinked, face still stoic as ever but a sigh visibly let out from his shoulders, like the words were a physical thing that had been released by speaking them into the world.
"Adorable?"
He remembers grinning, leaning closer into him and tilting his head, "And tyrannical," And then he remembers kissing him. A delicate brush of lips against eachother. Not shy, shy would imply he had any nerves about it, which he didn't. He knew what he wanted, had known since he had seen Hugo brushing aside the other strikers. And he knew he deserved it since out the corner of his eyes he had watched Hugo's face light up in awe, awe at him when he announced his appearance, his superiority, to the french team. So the panicked butterfly flutter of Hugo's eyelashes against his own didn't disturb him. Not when as he slid closer the point of connection on their lips grew warmer, Hugo's hand drawing up to rest on his jaw, his touch dreamy, the same tenderness as his handling of every insect he'd picked up to show him.
"You believe in fate, yes?" his hand resting on his chest, pushing a momentary distance between the two of them.
Wide eyed and blushing, he nodded, jerky movements betraying his uneasiness.
"Then believe in this," Loki stood up, looking down at him, still sat cross-legged on the floor, his headband knocked out his hair leaving it askew, so cute, he let himself think, "I will be the number one striker, fate or not, and you my partner."
"Is," Hugo's hand came up to grasp at his wrist, held him there like an anchor, "Is that a confession?"
Loki grinned down at him, "A little too late reject me now," bringing his fingers to hover over his parted lips, feeling the soft breaths fan over his fingerprints.
Hugo only leant into the featherlight touch, "I would never."
Blinking away the memory, he comes to, still staring at the pixels of Hugo's face, stuck in some 2D world where he can't reach out and brush the hair drifting across his eyes away.
"Where's your headband?"
Hugo's focus on the video breaks, turning his head to Loki, "At your place, I forgot it when I left." The blue light of the screen shifts across his face as he speaks, casting it in a bittersweet glow.
He thinks to himself for a moment and then sniffs, "Guess you'll just have to come back and get it."
Smiling, Hugo replies, "Guess I will."
"Soon."
It's as close as he'll ever get to such a pathetic admission as 'I miss you' and Hugo's tone knows it, a quiet, "Yes captain."
Hugo never ended up picking up his headband. Not that he didn't come back. Loki held it out to him the first few times and he only blinked at it.
"I barely wear it anymore."
And then,"I can buy a new one."
And eventually, when pressed on his refusal, "It gives me an excuse to come back."
Loki snorted, "Am I not a good enough excuse?"
Lumbering over to him and throwing his arms round him, burying his head in his neck so Loki could only see the burgundy of his hair, muffled into his flesh, "Of course you are."
He thinks to push more, but Hugo is kissing up the side of his neck, arms round his shoulders slipping lower, finding his waist under his shirt, so he gets a little distracted in his quest to get Hugo to take his headband. Sue him, he had bigger things to take care of.
In the end though, Loki stops being a good enough excuse to come home. Maybe he stops being good enough all together.
Hugo's got big dreams and a devastatingly pragmatic aptitude to achieving them, easy for Loki to love until it stopped loving him back. Now all he's got is his headband left in his closet and a gap in their once shared calendar of four world cups in as many competitions.
It's ironic that he can so clearly recall what lead him to helping Hugo, yet the downfall of that dream is a hazy nightmare.
Now and then, he still dreams of Hugo. He's always a little exaggerated, eyelashes swooping off his face a little further, looking more and more like butterflies wings every time, hair just a shade off its usual maroon, veering into scarlet or pink. Every time it happens, every time Loki meets him in the darkest subconscious corners of his mind, He veers a little further away from the truth, Loki's regrettably human memory betraying him and dismantling his recollection piece by piece.
He could, he supposes, remind himself of Hugo, could look him of on social media, could watch his games. But he leaves it be, pang in his chest that makes him feel like weeping every time he considers looking Hugo in the eye, even through a screen and a thirty second broadcasting delay.
So, all he has left is this.
"Julian."
His head whips backwards, gaze panicked and landing on Hugo, and inch too short this time. All this practice meeting with him in his sleep and he still wrecks him on first sight.
"Vivien."
The scene around them is a collage of different memories cobbled together, somewhere between his childhood bedroom, PXG bed spread and poster of his favourite player still there from his pre-teen years, and a football pitch. The carpet blurs to grass under his feet and somehow both the static white noise of his air conditioner and the deafening roar of a crowd swarms his ears. He wishes the dream would make it's mind up, a quiet devastation or a public humiliation, the dissonance is giving him vertigo.
"You lost."
He finds himself naked in front of Hugo's drilling gaze. Not literally, though that wouldn't be a first in these dreams. Undressed by the disappointment radiating from his firm tone.
He's testing out a new argument tonight, "We lost," a dry laugh and ducked eye contact, "Football is a team sport."
"No," Hugo's always so convicted here, a wall he can't climb, He takes a step closer over the bright white lines of the pitch and picking his foot up past one of Loki's school books, "You were number one, you were our captain, you lost." The way he says captain, spitting vitriol that makes him burn, so different from the affectionate nature of the nickname he used in the past.
The one thing he can't forget is the look on Hugo's face, seared into the back of his eyelids, engraved over every neuron firing in his brain. The pursed lips, the dead eyes, the way he could see him pressing his tongue into his teeth to keep down the fight for the time being. For forever, Loki still hasn't got the screaming match he expected from the blistering expression on his face, still expects it when he wakes up in one of these dreams.
His mind can write over every physical feature of Hugo in his memory and one thing will remain, This fresh disgust for him after the whistle blew for full time and the foundations of Hugo's dream started to crack. There's a ticking clock, almost no margin for error, trying to win four times, a footballer's career is only so long and Loki has just let four years of work blow up in their faces.
So now, he finds himself condemned to this. He turns and leaves him, Loki can see the wet grass still tangled in his studs as he dissolves into the boundary of his mind. The french national team jersey sticks to his skin, drenched in sweat. This part isn't in the dream, but still he finds himself haunted by the other team lifting the world cup where it should have been him and Hugo.
He wakes slowly with his neck bent at an uncomfortable angle. These visions have made him startle before, but they get old after years of slight variations of the same thing. Rolling over he reaches blindly for his phone on his nightstand and blearily checks his phone. Five minutes before his alarm, he sighs and sits, stretching the crook in his neck.
Hugo, Like a butterfly and despite Loki's false hopes, is a solitary creature. He had been allowed in his orbit for so long, but when it came down to it he had failed, and he had no reason to expect anything more than what he got.
How the mighty fall. He had spent so long being worshipped by Hugo, the idea of being the one left behind so utterly foreign that he had forgotten which one of them was the one who held the cards. His playmaker, his loyal priest. So far from him now, emotionally, no late night phone calls to subdue the horrific human need in his heart. And still not far enough to shake the humiliation from his head.