A/N: Spoilers for The Dark World.
He spends days and days pacing back and forth along the small confines of his cell. He thinks it'll prove that they can't break him.
No one notices and he feels defeated when he finally grows tired and stops.
Days turn into weeks. Annoyance grows into rage which grows into pure hatred which finally shrinks into defeat.
The cycle repeats and repeats.
Eventually he gets stuck somewhere between rage and hatred and feels fairly comfortable with it.
...
Weeks become months. Someone has to visit him.
Boredom is more overwhelming than anything else. All the books in the world can't stop the ceaseless and crushing nothingness of imprisonment.
He refuses to use his magic to keep him entertained. That would just be weak.
His rage is eating away at him again. It's a familiar feeling, but now he has nothing to counteract it—no world to let it out on, no person, not even an animal. And he won't destroy the cell. Not yet. He has dignity.
He's a monster inside already but his hatred is chipping away the parts of him that are human, that love, and soon the monster will be all that's left.
...
He gives his rage a face and a name. He lets it out to play once in awhile. It's named Thor. Doesn't look like him, really—it's like an over-exaggerated parody of him, with elements of Loki in it too.
Loki tells it everything he wants to tell the real Thor. He tells it that he had never loved it, that it has no right to be loved because it's just brute strength and nothing else. He tells it it's worthless.
One time he forgets that it's his own creation and shoves at it, feeling a kind of crushing despair as it vaporizes before him.
...
When his mother dies, he doesn't cry.
He screams and beats the walls and uses his magic to knock everything in the room over and put it back where it was so he can do it again and again and again.
He abandons any shred of dignity he has left, he is losing his beautifully tuned mind and he can feel it, he is the monster that all of Asgard and Earth alike wanted him to be. He punches and he kicks and he loses his voice again and again and he bleeds and he aches.
But he doesn't cry.
...
He thinks that his brother will come for him.
After the funeral—the funeral that he should rightly attend (and he knows that his sense of righteousness is warped, but this is his own mother's funeral)—he knows his brother will come.
Eventually.
Any moment now.
Because he is sick and tired of waiting around for some new distraction.
...
After a lot of careful deliberation (and his brother is giving him quite a bit of time to think about it), he decides he's not going to hide.
He is going to show himself, disheveled and bloody and broken. That's what he is. A caged animal, a domesticated monster, a triviality to be kept on display.
Why hide from the person he loves and hates most?
But when he sees his brother coming through the doors, his body reacts by instinct, hiding himself shaking with a sort of excited fear against the wall and letting the version of him he'd like to be talk.
His brother sees through it.
He relishes in the pained shock on his brother's face though when he does show himself—oh, it is beautiful, the thought that he has disgusted the mighty Thor.
He lives completely in the moment. Soon he'll taste freedom.
Soon the monster inside of him begging for power will be quieted.
And if it takes a little deception…
Well. What else is he made for?
A/N: All feedback is immensely appreciated.