AU sometime after Avengers, probably.
I wrote this a few years ago now & recently found it again & quite liked it.
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Threads
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"That's impossible," Loki is saying, over and over again. "He's fine. Someone. Do something! He needs healing."
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It's missing. A piece of his soul has been ripped out and left his chest gaping, empty. He opens his eyes and the walls are golden. He is alone.
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"Move out of the way!" he is shouting, pushing them aside as he kneels. Magic swirls about him. Healing has never been his specialty; it is illusions, the twisting of perceptions, of minds, that he excels at. Energy swirls between his hands.
"Stop!"
It doesn't matter. His life is worth nothing.
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He opens his eyes. The empty feeling is still there, worse than ever; it lingers along every vein; pools beneath his shoulderblades like the memory of wings. Steals itself into his gut, his mouth is dry. Something dances before him, threads and threads and threads tangling themselves through the air so that he can hardly see.
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The threads don't leave. They are there, shining, distracting, and he begins to get annoyed. He pushes them away, but cannot destroy them.
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He can see again. He doesn't know when or how it happened; before, there had been only the threads, myriad gossamer thick shining every color of the bridge, now—they are still there, but underneath the surface of the air. He can make out walls, and, if he lets himself feel along the threads, the tangles of people.
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The empty feeling hasn't left. It is as if he has lost a limb, but everything is accounted for. He wishes someone would enter. If he could speak to someone, they could explain. He has tried to call out, but his words makes no sound.
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He wanders. It is a large enough suite of rooms; food appears when it is needed, the baths are large and warm, and from behind the lattice at the edge of the balcony he can see a city. The threads have smoothed themselves away behind the surface of things; still there but without drowning out normal sight. They are woven near the lattice, in and out of it, shining gold. If he could push them aside he could take the lattice down, but they have been locked in place by carvings and knots. He wishes he could move it. It makes him feel restrained, and it blocks his view of the city.
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Finally someone has seen fit to enter. He is annoyed, but realizes it was probably for the best they did not do so before; their threads are too bright to look at and drown out their words unless he concentrates very hard. He could not have borne it before, in all probability. "Where am I?" he asks. "What has happened? Why am I in this place?" And then, "Can I walk in the city?"
"You are in a place for healing," "You were hurt," "So you can heal," and "No."
They are answers that do not answer. He frowns.
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He thinks he can bear being out of the place for healing, now. He tells that to the occasional visitors, but they never listen. The visitors have come more after the first one. A stern-faced man, a maiden, a laughing one, a quiet one, so many one after another he cannot keep track. They are all sad. They pretend not to be, but their threads are clear. He wonders why. They seem to be sad for him.
He sends threads at the door until he can untangle the locks. Then they open, and he walks out.
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They are surprised. It is perhaps expected that they would be surprised, but he does not understand the tinge of fear that enters. There had been no fear before.
He wishes he remembered. He has realized that he does not remember, and that other people know more than he does. They are keeping something from him, and it grates on him.
The empty feeling is still there. He has become resigned to the fact that it will probably never go away. He has lost something very important. He has lost some part of himself. He remembers thinking it may be his soul, but that is not quite right.
He remembers a feeling of not-emptiness.
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There is nothing to do after they put him back in the place to heal and strengthen the knots and carvings around the door. Also there are no more visitors. It is because of the fear, he thinks. Something was frightening about him walking out of the healing rooms, and he does not know what.
He begins to wonder if it is not a prison instead.
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He has been trying to remember, because the remembering hasn't happened by itself. He doesn't think it will happen by itself. He thinks if he could only untangle the threads in his own mind perhaps he could unlock the memories. It is probably not possible to erase memories, only lock them in with threads, the way he has been locked in, because he was healing, and then because of the fear.
He has to be very careful, because the threads are very complex in living things, and very important. He does not want to ruin things. He loosens the threads that are around the spot where memories are hidden. He knows he is right because he starts to dream. He had not dreamt before.
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"That's impossible," Loki is saying, over and over again. "He's fine. Someone. Do something! He needs healing."
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It is not a good dream. He wakes up feeling tight and uneasy, as if a storm were waiting. For the first time the calm that has suffused him, laying itself over his emotions, is gone. The unexpected harshness leaves him breathless. Tears leak from his eyes, and another kind of empty feeling opens in him. Not a physical one this time. He has lost more than he thought.
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He remembers, now. The threads had been loosened, and the memories shook loose in a dream. One was enough to follow the trail of them. He remembers Mjolnir being destroyed, the feeling of losing half of himself. It wasn't his soul after all, but his life-force. And that is the emptiness: the space where his life-force should be. She had sung when he first lifted her, but even before that the winds and rain had called to him and responded to his touch.
They no longer do.
Now it is the threads that move. He creates a fire, because that was the first thing Loki made with his magic. He was hardly any older than a boy, and he had burnt his entire chambers in the blast. They feared him dead, but coming in, found him sitting within the flames, grinning, dark eyes alight. He was a wild thing, and it was many months before Thor had been allowed inside the place where they'd taken him, and Loki had been able to speak once again.
He thinks he understands now.
Fire dances from the tips of his fingernails, rolling between his palms as he stares down and thinks. He does not cry, not now. He wonders why.
His brother is dead, but not-dead, because he carries his life-force within him. He wonders if it shows in his eyes; if when they see him, they do not see Thor but someone who is Thor and Loki. He wonders if Loki has left more in him than his magic.
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He wonders what would happen if he walked out the warded door and went to their old chambers. So he does. The rebuilt spells had been able to keep him easily contained memoriless and untrained; but with Loki's instincts and spell-knowledge it is laughably easy. He wonders if they know that.
Loki's chambers have been sealed off. They have been that way for years, ever since he fell; they had not been reopened. It was as if they were waiting for him to die again. He touches the doors gently, remembering without knowing how the old locks and picturing in his mind with overlapping thoughts the way they might appear, but covered in dust and with drawn drapes. He lets his hand slip away.
He goes to his own rooms, wanders within them for a time. They are at once familiar and strange. He does not wish to speak to anyone. He knows he must eventually. He may be a prisoner in truth; Loki's crimes could haunt him even beyond the grave. The emptiness inside him aches.
"Why?"
He asks the room, but the threads do not answer.
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Golden, ripe apples hang upon the boughs. He reaches up, fingers brushing against the cool skin of the fruit, but when they curl around it, there is nothing but air.
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