...the answer to the child's dream of a miracle...
...who won't die for something is not fit to live...
... what fools these mortals be...
I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true.
They were strange words, alien, unfamiliar. They echoed, spoken in a thousand tongues, with a thousand tongues, a thousand times, stretching through eternity, and somehow all at once.
They followed him through the void beyond waking, down frozen corridors and beneath bronze arches. Through space, into the jagged spaces of reality and the jagged spaces of his mind. They oozed, like congealing blood, between his fingers and into his eyes, where they stung and stuck and rotted.
...people will never forget how you made them feel...
...that grief felt so like fear...
...what is broken is made whole again...
Every sinner has a future.
The golden halls vibrated as Loki stumbled after his brother on chubby toddler legs.
"Brother! Brother!"
Thor looked back into Loki's eyes, and laughed. The sound was light, bubbling around the columns of their home, frothing around Loki like the pale caps of waves.
"Brother," he choked, the salty, bitter giggles clinging to his tongue. "Please, Brother!"
But Thor was turning from him, tall and proud, his cape fluttering like the wings of Memory. He laughed, and laughed, and laughed.
Loki laughed with him, and ran, his tears red and tasting of iron, and cold, so cold.
...tragedy need not have blood and death...
...our own heart is our temple...
...a little word from the fingers of another fell into my hand that clutched at emptiness...
"Where are you, Loki?" the gilded lips of kings of Asgard spoke, towering and terrible. "Where are you, where are you?"
"Where are you?" his mother sang, her marble face turned to him, eyes unblinking. "Where are you?" she pleaded. "Where are you?" she screamed, tears cracking her stone cheeks.
He payed her no mind. She was only stone.
"She is your mother," Thor said gently, stroking his brother's back.
Loki sighed. "Will there be dancing?"
"Of course." Molten kisses burned Thor's name into his shoulders. "There is always dancing when you die."
...travel too far that road, and the way is lost...
...what is soiled is made clean again...
The stretch of icy hallway reached the end of the universe, and Loki was so tired, so cold, but the long shadows that tickled his toes told him that Thor was there, had always been there.
He stepped into the shadow, and it ached so, through his flesh and into the bone. His breath was snow, swirling pale and sharp around his head. As he walked, the shadows stuck to his feet, sucking at them, clinging like tar to his limbs. It sucked at his skin, pulling his soft outsides away until he was only bone. It flowed into his throat and nostrils, stinking of death and sorrow, and it filled his brain with blackness.
From the deepest desires often come the deadliest hate.
"You talk in your sleep, you know," Agent Barton commented from the other side of Loki's prison wall. "Weird shit about shadows and stone."
"Oh?"
The archer leaned against the barrier, angry eyes burning into S.H.I.E.L.D.'s captive god, and grinned with all the cruelty of a tortured man facing his tormentor. "You must have some pretty fucked up dreams," he drawled gleefully.
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting...
Loki swallowed, the taste of death lingering on his tongue.
"I do not dream."
...dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.