One quick note - I'm going to be updating this simultaneously at AO3 under the same name, using the pseud IvyLee.

The only difference between this version and that version is that there'll be notes at the top/bottom of chapters so if you want to read my ramblings/get links to stuff like pictures of things the characters own, then you should read it over there.

The only other thing I have to say is that this is probably going to have dark bits, and if it does, I'll put warnings at the top of the relevant chapter (only at AO3, though!) and update the work's rating accordingly. Apart from that, happy reading, and please, please review! It means so much to me. Imagine that I'm making puppy dog eyes at you right now as you read this.

-Ivy

He was, as always, not fast enough to outpace it, and not strong enough to turn and fight. Loki could push himself to his physical limits and then, because even though he wasn't conscious enough to realize he was dreaming, he was aware of the liminality of his position, push himself some more, but it would never be enough. He was caught in a snare of snagging limbs, with a bloated red sky above him and a mass of something sickeningly pulsing beneath him, that, although he wouldn't bring himself to look down at it, he couldn't help but smell.

Loki was suffocatingly aware that he was about to die.

He waited until he felt panted breath on the nape of his neck and had no choice but to spin around, snarling, and face the monster head on, determined to at least kick and struggle, but it was no use. In one easy shove, it caught him full on the chest and sent him crashing down, winded, digging claws like wire into his collarbone and shoulders. He felt himself pressed down, down into the rotting earth, and vines like rope caught his wrists and dragged them up over his head so that he couldn't defend his face or neck.

Loki braced for the killing blow, but it never came. Instead, he was pulled further into the earth until he was completely submerged by it, and choking on the smell. That smell.

This is flesh, he realized, stilling entirely. This is rotting flesh.

And then he was falling through the darkness.

He was falling, falling, and the wind was battering him so hard that he could barely think, and he twisted around as much as he could, reaching for a handhold in the fat and muscle, but he just kept falling.

He could see now that he was falling through a shaft of mirrors, and that sooner or later he was going to have to land. He could see the end. At the base of the shaft was a pinprick of light that expanded like an ink blot, and he was falling towards it, and he realized now that he was screaming, but he just couldn't hear it over the wind and light, and the light came up to meet him as he fell, terrified, into it, and then he-

And then we finally woke up.

Clapping a hand over his mouth, he threw himself bodily out of the damp sheets, struggling to kick them off of him. The room was pitch black, the curtains having been shut before he slept, and Loki wanted to throw open the windows as quickly as he could. Instead, he knelt on the wood paneling, as still as he could, and tried to calm his breathing and ground himself.

It was just a dream. It was just a dream.

Hand on his heart, he let out one last breath before getting up to draw the blinds, pausing for a moment before thinking to check his wristwatch.

It was 3:04. He wouldn't go back to sleep.

Instead, he chose to take a long shower and dry his hair as noisily as he could in a display of childish passive aggression towards his neighbors. He was fairly sure he'd been shouting in his sleep, in which case, they'd be up anyways, and hopefully deciding not to call the cops

Loki drew out the process of hairstyling as long as he could and then used a brush to tentatively cover up the scratches where he had clawed at his own neck in his sleep, but it was still only 3:55 when he finished. Obsessively, he washed his face again, brushed his teeth, ate half an apple, felt sick, threw it out and brushed his teeth again, and then trudged gloomily around his apartment, looking to indulge his sour mood.

The apartment was slightly high-end, because he could afford it, and sported warm, clean, classic décor with a modern edge, which made it homely but spacious, which was exactly how he wanted it. Loki wasn't really one to personalize living space, but he was satisfied enough after a term here that he no longer felt like a temporary inhabitant, or out of his rights when he called it 'his place'.

He ghosted through his kitchenette and lowered living area and past the unusually cluttered 'spare' room where he stashed electronics and suchlike, useless monitors and wrenches and other spare parts and what might have been part of a cooper engine piled high next to the desk with his laptops.

He specifically didn't make his bed. He even knocked over some books, confusing the papers tucked neatly into them and losing his places. Nothing helped.

Loki had notes to revise, plants to water, bills to sort through, people to call if he needed and dubiously moralled businessmen to quietly and anonymously heckle on the net, but eventually he resolved to drag one of his scruffier dining chairs onto the balcony and wait to watch the dawn over Midgard, deliberately leaving the TV on for background noise.

Midgard consisted of the city proper and the University of Midgard, which was such a central cog in the workings of the former that they might as well be one and the same, given that they'd both popped into existence more or less simultaneously and that the city would be nothing without MU to fund and populate it.

MU functioned peculiarly – it had a collegiate system, with only one college, Iceland, situated not on the main campus but to the west, closer to the sea, where the other half of the Biology department was. Unusually, however, actually joining a college was optional.

The benefits to choosing to not join a college (or to become, as they were affectionately nicknamed, a grift), as advertised by the University, were that you could pick and choose which clubs, formals and teams to join or attend, regardless of the college that hosted them, unless they were exclusive, which was fairly rare.

Loki had simply not wanted to have to live in halls and possibly share a double room.

The city, being inhabited mostly by students, was so littered with unions and government offices that the place had become, in Loki's mind, essentially one massive safety net for the naïve or unprepared. The youth of its populace practically necessitated it.

Despite, or perhaps because of this, Midgard had an ensorcelling and genuine sort of gung-ho attitude to it that would inevitably catch you up in itself and thrust you through its taverns and kitsch corner stores, unsanctioned societies and hidden bars and seemingly endless parks and gardens; all walks of life seemed to clash brilliantly and intertwine there. As a characteristic observer, and someone who valued privacy, Loki contented himself with merely allowing all this mess to carry on around him while he kept to himself.

Still, he could appreciate Midgard for what it was, and that was a city of doors.

One such door lead to Vanir Motors, and Freya. His own personal safety net. If, Loki mused to himself, he could only survive this one last day of forced social interaction, he could sequester himself within the autoshop and spend the rest of the year tinkering under bonnets and maybe in some hard drives, with Freya down the hall and Angie at the other end of his phone. Hopefully he could spend the entire Christmas season without having to endure a single instance of small talk that way.

Loki smirked silently at the view outside and tilted back his head, letting his hair flow around his neck, intending to remain there until his phone's alarm roused him permanently.

This was obviously a pipe dream, but he knew through experience that if he kept unusual hours and put enough effort into it, he could more or less make it happen.

All he needed to do was survive the day.