Five Choices
Infinity War
Eirian Erisdar
The first thought that went through Loki Odinson's mind as he died - and he was keeping that name now that he took it for himself, thank you very much - was that dying was such an inconvenience, really.
Enough of one that he didn't put mild in front of it; mild inconveniences included the time he thought he was dying on the black sand of Svartalfheim, and poured out his heart like a maudlin, weepy, rapidly-expiring thing held by his equally weepy brother - and then he had woken up, because apparently there was stronger side to his magic he hadn't known about, before.
So he had decided to pay a little trip to his dear old adopted father and immortalise those last, very poetic words in art.
And then this happened.
And this...wasn't that.
This was about as inconvenient as anything could get.
And painful. Thor's scream, muffled by the metal gag around his lips, was worse.
Loki had known in a way, from the moment he slipped his last dagger out of a pocket of dark energy he always kept in his sleeve; that it had come down to him, trickster, survivor, twice prince and twice king, the words of a liesmith and the dance of Loki lightfoot. He had also known that he would most likely die.
But that would not mean he would fail, because in that moment, he was not thinking of his own survival, as he had always done from the moment Thor's friends began shunning him for his magic.
He was thinking of Thor's survival. At any and all cost.
Perhaps he would see his mother again in Valhalla, at least.
He wished he could tell Thor-
Loki became aware that he was aware, slowly.
And then he kicked himself for it (mentally, not physically, because in that moment he also became aware that he barely existed, if at all) and decided to wait until his thoughts rearranged themselves to fully comprehend I think, therefore I am before going further.
Once he was reasonably sure that he was a disembodied thought, nothing more, he tried magicking himself a pair of eyes, because there was nothing he could feel, see, hear, taste, or really sense at all.
His magic fluttered somewhere in his consciousness, and fell still again.
So. No body, then.
Judging by his magic, he was probably best described as an identity without a house; no tools with which to wield the energy of magic at all, because he was energy.
A soul.
Hmm. This wasn't quite just inconvenient, then.
This was downright annoying.
All the more so because he was quite sure that there was a way out of this, and there it was niggling in the back of his mind - a lesson Mimir taught him when Loki was a child sitting attentively at lessons while Thor drew doodles of bloody battles on the edge of his parchment.
Hel take it, he was sure it was something about personality, the nine realms, and the essence of character; how each person born under Odin's reign had an element that tethered them to the world tree - how Thor's was lightning, and Loki's was-
Fire.
Loki imagined himself as a solitary flame.
Nothing.
Not that way, then.
Perhaps...perhaps fire was simply the path, not himself.
And with that, the world popped back into existence. Or Loki did, from another point of view.
He became aware he was on fire.
No, no. Not quite that way. His soul rested on a splinter of burning fuel jutting out of the side of a - what was this, a giant metal hoop?
A startlingly familiar red-gold figure flew past, buffeting him until his host flame almost went out. Mentally growling, Loki barely reoriented himself to glimpse Stark reaching a smaller blue-red figure halfway up the curve of the circle, with more desperation in his flight than Loki had ever seen before, even in the worst of the battle of New York.
He flickered to a flame closer to them, and it became apparent that the smaller figure was in fact little more than a child.
Curious. He did not know Stark had children.
And then the world shivered, and Loki realised that the entire structure was rapidly entering hard vacuum and that his host fire was about to extinguish from lack of oxygen.
Grumbling slightly, he casted out a trail of thought for another fire in Yggdrasil's branches, and snapped himself towards it - through even less than nothing, because dimensions did not matter, now.
He found himself clinging to the wreckage of a midgardian train, flickering fire all across its frame. It was night, in this part of midgard.
Someone screamed.
Loki noted that yes, it was the voice of that young woman, and that it was very impressive, what she was doing with her magic - but more importantly, the figure beside her had a gold-flamed stone in his forehead - one that flooded his soul with ice, and the memory of a clammy, white-fingered hand stabbing agony into his temples.
The mind stone.
How had he not known what it was, even with it in his hand?
And then, of course, the good captain and his friends arrived. If Loki had a mouth, lungs, and vocal cords, he would have commented loudly on the futility of speaking to your enemies when killing them would certainly prevent future problems - but see, now, that was the problem with the captain. He tended to attempt to preserve life, even when the likelihood of success was close to nonexistent.
Loki was still stewing over this when the backwash from the landing quinjet abruptly extinguished his flame.
Oh for goodness' sa-
The world tree shivered, and Loki flitted across the flames in its branches until he reached the source.
Vormir.
There was hardly anything there to burn at all; bare stone and lonely wind, and a tiny cluster of embers at the base of a tall double-spire. The stone-keeper's meagre watch-fire, it seemed.
Loki settled there, a tiny ember huddling in a harsh, fate-borne wind - and watched.
Thanos, with the reality stone already in his gauntlet - that was the end of the collector, then - and a woman next to him, obviously a prisoner of some sort. Her hands looked like they were itching for any weapon.
But then they spoke, and Loki understood.
Thanos was to this woman what Loki once thought Odin was to him - an adoptive father who had no use for his child but as a weapon or bargaining chip, who held no love for him but only fed him lies.
Loki had been mistaken, regarding his own father.
Thanos was everything that Odin was not, because the stone-keeper proclaimed the soul stone's price - one that Thanos loved.
For a moment, Loki was tempted to laugh in his mind along with the woman; what love could Thanos, destroyer of worlds, slaughterer of children, have for any soul but his own?
And then a chill entered Loki's thoughts, because he remembered.
He remembered that Odin was once Hela's father.
Odin, conqueror of the nine realms, slaughterer of Jotunar, Asgard's iron-fisted king - before there was Thor, Loki, peace.
But had Odin not loved his daughter in a way, despite it all?
Thanos was everything Odin was not, yes.
But part of what Odin once was - Thanos is.
The worldkiller was crying as he reached out.
His adopted daughter was backing away, now, slow horror on her features.
Something akin to disgust coiled in the ember Loki rested in, spitting sparks. This was not love. Not even close to it. Love favoured the loved one above the self. It was what pushed him to lie through his bloodied teeth and guided his fingers to palm a dagger in order to save Thor, despite knowing that his own life would be most likely forfeit. It was what led his mother to take the dagger for Jane Foster. It was what allowed his father to overcome his pride and say the words I love you, my sons.
The woman screamed and beat her fist against Thanos's chest as he dragged her to the cliff edge.
Loki wished for a dagger, wished so hard he felt like he should have hands, breath, a heart that coursed anger and rage. Not because he wished to save the woman, in particular - he wanted, instead, to take this disgusting creature, this plum-coloured sack of flesh and rip his head from his body for his mutilation of love, and parenthood.
Loki knew what good parenthood was, now. Now, when he had no parents. No friends. Possibly no brother, too.
This was...not love. This was the giving up of a possession.
Thanos threw her over the edge.
Loki, for all his stomach for chaos, could not bear to watch - he slipped away from the ember, and felt, even as he left, the wind snuff it out completely, leaving cold ashes where a fire once burned.
It seemed the fourth dimension, time, was also different - Loki was startlingly sure that a half-day or so at least had passed when he settled on a flame again.
This one was small, enclosed - a glow-lamp on the wall of a small spacecraft, it seemed.
And then if Loki had lungs, he would have forgotten to breathe, because Thor was there.
His brother sat by the side of a viewport, purple-hued stars lighting the still-fresh cuts on his face with darker bruising. A strange animal sat before him - a Midgardian Racoon, if memory served - and they seemed to be in the middle of conversation.
Loki's mind caught up to Thor's words just as the first and only tear slipped out of Thor's eye.
In the next moment, Thor brusquely brushed it away and smiled; but it was enough that Loki wished for hands.
He refused to hug Thor.
Though he wouldn't mind if Thor were to hug him.
Thor would cheer up immensely if Loki were to throw a handful of mud at his head. It always did, when they were children.
Knowing Loki wasn't quite dead would be a major part of it.
But bound as he was to flame, Loki had no voice to say I'm here, as he so carelessly did when he still had hands to catch the trinket Thor threw at him to confirm he wasn't an illusion.
He also had no voice to sarcastically wonder what in their forefathers' name Thor thought he was doing when it became apparent that the ship was heading to Nidavellir - really, he should have expected Thor to solve the problem of the guy with a weapon of ultimate destruction by forging another, equally powerful weapon.
Loki made the mistake of soul-flitting - that was an excellent phrase, he was so going to use that phrase now - to the flame of the neutron star when Thor activated it again.
He felt - he was the starflame that seared into Thor's skin, and wished he had eyes to close.
Idiot.
Stupid, heroic, bull-headed idiot of a brother.
Well, congratulations. An axe, of all things. No, Thor would never go for a spear. Or a bow. Or a knife. No elegance or wit.
But then a far-off branch of Yggdrasil burst into new flame, and Loki was snatched away almost before he could do anything about it.
He flickered to existence on a pile of burning shrapnel.
The scene before him was so delicately balanced and a masterpiece of control that for a moment, Loki dared to hope.
Thanos, incapacitated - a woman with both hands latched firmly to his temples, every other limb bound by magic or brute force.
And Stark-
Stark and the boy in the spider-etched suit were removing the gauntlet.
Hope was such a sweet, unfamiliar thing that Loki almost felt an ache where his heart should have been.
And then a man, Quill, whose energy signature read half midgardian and half something else, something extremely powerful - stepped forward, and growled a question.
Gamora?
Was that the name of the-
Oh. Oh no.
Stark apparently had the presence of mind to warn Quill off letting his anger get the better of him - but Loki could tell, even as his hope turned to horror, that it would not do.
Thanos woke, and the moon shattered.
Loki soul-flitted to the burning ropes the midgardian sorcerer cast at Thanos, and strove to lend what little magic he could to strengthen them; he shouted a wordless scream as Thanos snapped the seidr of the strings as an axe to vines. There was pain in his soul now, something Loki had felt in dreams, eons ago, but such a physical pain that he nearly forgot to reach for the nearest fire, which were sparks on a piece of flying metal that even as Loki awoke in, felt Thanos catch the shard and and reverse him and plunge him into-
-Stark's stomach.
Loki rebounded into a spluttering flame in a hollow a few paces away, and wondered how he could feel so ill, with no body to do so.
Stark staggered.
And the sorcerer Strange opened his mouth, and spoke.
Loki knew then that everything was lost.
Strange should have let Stark die, instead of giving up the time stone.
But had Loki let Thor die for the space stone, the Tesseract he hid for himself? Had he not met Thor's eyes, and saw the silent agreement in them, and yet found his hands and lips moved of their own accord to save one above all else?
They were all fools. He most of all.
But there was a new fire blooming between Yggdrasil's eaves, and Loki's soul flitted away, to the ice-breathed flame of a new bifrost.
It ended where it began. On midgard.
There was ample flame to flit between, on a battlefield such as this. Loki had no knives, nor hands to use them, and so he simply watched, and calculated, and waited.
In the end, it came down to the young woman. The young woman they called Wanda.
She was strong beyond all meaning of the word, Loki could see. Brave was insufficient to describe her; she could be a Valkyrie of legend, leading the soul of a nearly-dead man off the battlefield.
And the man she was killing loved her so, so much.
She succeeded, and Loki felt the fire he inhabited settle from a wind-blasted blaze to a flickering, almost-still flame.
Here there was finally someone who did what was necessary - beyond Quill, who did not kill Gamora despite her knowledge of the soul stone; beyond Gamora herself, who had revealed the stone for Nebula's sake, leaving her sister to tell others of it; beyond Strange, who did not withhold the time stone for Stark, bleeding out on the ground of a desolated planet; beyond Loki, who had lied and watched his brother's pain for all of two seconds before giving up the gateway to the nine realms for him.
Here there was the girl who had understood that she was the last - the last one, upon whom all those people before, older and with seemingly more authority than her, had deferred that choice.
The man she killed had been right.
It should not have been her. Not personally, nor physically.
Thanos's gauntlet glowed green.
And Loki knew it was over, even before it began. Time could not stop it.
Half the leaves on the world tree withered and disintegrated into dust, a movement of death that originated on midgard and spread like an unstoppable plague through branch and bough.
Yggdrasil was forcefully, violently pruned.
Loki was selfish, and he knew it - but it did not stop him from flickering to the softly burning edge of his brother's cloak, just so that should Thor dissolve, Loki would lose his grasp on the world, too.
Thor did not.
When Loki was sure, he soul-flitted back to Stark's group. Because some part of him wished to see whom fate had chosen, and whom fate had not.
He arrived just in time to see the boy - not Stark's son, it would seem, but as close to it as could possibly be - collapse into Stark's arms, body already flaking into dust and ashes.
"I don't wanna go I-"
The expression on Stark's face was one of numb horror - one Loki recognised with a stab of agony. It was the same expression Odin wore when Loki fell off the end of the bifrost, all those years ago.
"I'm sorry."
Last words from a child who should not have been there, in the arms of one that was not his father, but almost was.
Even as Yggdrasil's pruning left it crippled, threadbare, where once-vibrant leaves thrived on its branches - new flames burst from every corner of the nine realms, as chaos-
No.
This was not chaos, that Loki loved so much. It was not even order in the manner he used to roll his eyes at.
This was order in its worst form; order without justice.
But as Loki's soul flickered from world to world, on flame and fire and spark and ember, something occurred to him.
The Avengers were still there.
All six of the warriors who fought him in New York six years ago were still, impossibly, alive.
He had gone into battle with them when they were inexperienced as a team; a fledgling alliance, something he had exploited at the time.
But now they are different.
It was never in Loki's nature to hope. Hope was reserved for uncalculated moments, and Loki had made it his business when he was still alive to never not calculate.
But he hopes here, in this moment, that although the battle might be lost, that the war would not be.
He settles, eventually, on a candle on a porch of a cabin by a Midgardian sea; an old man is sitting there calmly reading a book by candlelight, and judging by the lack of radio aerial and the darkness in the cabin behind him, a hermit. Perhaps news of the pruning of Yggdrasil has not reached this place yet.
Loki waits in the small flame, and watches the stars.
I wrote this in an effort to express my writer's soul geeking out over the gorgeous themes in the story that was Infinity War. I'll probably continue this after Infinity War 2. Whenever that is. I also posted this to my tumblr (eirianerisdar tumblr com) - just replace the spaces with dots.