Barton says, "They're sentimental."
Loki smiles, his lips a thin curving line. He has not slept for what felt like centuries; his skin itches, burns; the memory of the emptiness between stars crawling along his back, between the indents of his bones—he is lucky to be alive at all. "Oh, yes."
"Stark is a diva," Barton says, the tesseract glowing inside his eyes. "Rogers is a relic. Banner is uncontrollable: he's like to rip up S.H.I.E.L.D. as fight alongside them. And Natasha—"
Barton's voice catches, and Loki leans forward. The pads of his fingers are alight, thrills shooting up his hand and alongside the bones of his arms. Sentiment, sentiment, he chants. You are not quite rid of it yet.
"Natasha Romanov is ruthless," Barton finishes. "But her ledger is dripping red. She pretends she doesn't feel it, but she does. She's as sentimental as the rest of them."
He is polishing an arrow tip. Loki's gaze traces the curve of it, and there is something clanging within his chest, like a piece of metal someone had sewn into the confines of his heart and then forgot about: a small weight, do not think on it. Natasha Romanov is ruthless, he repeats in his head. But her ledger is dripping red.
He is a child, and Sif's hair gleams in the sun.
She is his brother's constant companion. Her hair, bright enough to rival the sun of Eternal Asgard, falls messily out of its braid, and she bounds alongside Thor to the dismay of her mother.
She is gangly and lengthening, the lines of her body hard and not yet curved like the maidens of the court; he has often told her during heated arguments that she looks like his father's stallion. She had often replied by cracking her knuckles bloody across his nose and mouth.
He is a child, and Sif is about to cry.
She is sitting alone against a fallen tree, in the deep forests beyond the palace. Her jaw is clenched and her eyes are brighter than they should be; her mouth is twisting in on itself. She grips a knife hard in her fist. He approaches carefully, his boots soundless against the grass.
"Go away," she snaps, and he starts, but then again, she's always been more aware than Thor of her surroundings; Thor only pays attention to his back on the battlefield, and even then, rarely. "I am in no mood for your trickery today."
He nears, silently, and does not avert his gaze when she wipes her tears angrily away. Thor is always uncomfortable when others show such inward feelings; he perceives it to be a weakness, and the warriors of Asgard must not be weak. If any feels such things, then Thor shall be the gentleman and disregard it.
Loki files it away for future reference. Tears, like fear and anger and hatred, are weapons like any other; pointed and polished like his throwing knives. You must know when to use them. Sentiment, well-aimed, can be just as effective as a blade.
"You are crying," he states the obvious. "What's wrong?"
"Like I'm going to tell you," she says. "You'd spread it through the palace before the day is done, and I'll only have myself to blame."
His eyes are keen; his gaze traces the shaking lines of her arms, the way she is hardening her jaw to stop her lip from trembling. Sif is standing on the brink, he knows. And a whole world sprawls out beyond her, a single path stretching straight and true to the great halls of Valhalla.
He wonders if he alone is not blind to these things.
"Has your mother said something?" Loki asks, sitting down beside her. "About your training?"
A long silence; her fingers tighten on the knife. And then—
"I do not wish to marry Thor," Sif says finally. Her voice breaks. "I do not want to marry him, and sit quietly next to him, and listen and smile and play the queen. I don't—" she swipes a hand angrily against her cheek. "I have no quiet within me." She looks at him, for the first time since he sat down. "Your mother is kind to me, had been kind to me my whole life. But I cannot be her."
His mouth curves. "You have no taste for court."
"I have no taste for intricacies," Sif breathes. "I have not the gifts that you have, of words and language and trickery; and it is a gift, Loki. I know I tease you for it, and mock you, but it is a gift. I would make a poor queen. And I must let them know."
Her hair has fallen out of its braid; the wind blows golden strands into her face, against the long nape of her neck. His fingers twitch.
This entire world is made of intricacies, he thinks. Asgard itself is built on the magic of elders, on the fruit of a woman, and not of warriors and bravery, as the legends would have you believe. Why then, being the offspring of magic and fruit, is Thor the sole ideal? Why then, are we anomalies?
This is a world built on sentiments which scorns sentiments. He reaches forward; takes the knife out of Sif's hands.
"Then let them know."
Her lips part, and her eyes are bright. "Ah," she says.
Natasha Romanov had killed an orphan girl in Sao Paolo for her silence.
Barton tells him that Sao Paolo is a city in South America, as if he did not know, as if he would come down to another realm without knowing every intricacy. Barton tells him a lot of things; not all of them useful, and not all of them unfelt.
Natasha Romanov had killed the daughter of a Serbian businessman to send a message.
He files away these snippets of information—Stark's suit, Rogers' bygone paramour rotting to her death in an elderly home, the innocents Banner had killed in a fit of temper. There is nothing he values so much in the world, not even the coiling tension of magic in his core, in his every cell, as his own mind. He remembers the topography of the forests beyond Asgard, remembers the Hall of Kings, remembers every carved indent in the Allfather's throne. He remembers the bellowing rise of Thor's laugh in the training ring, the falling tendrils of Sif's golden hair.
He remembers it all, and had only very recently torn away every piece of sentiment from his memories. He has left them sharp and hard, polished and honed to a point; one day he will use these memories, and he will bring the fight to Asgard. He will take an army of untold numbers, and burn the palace down. He will raze it to the ground, salt the earth; the Realm Eternal itself will pay for the sins of its king.
Natasha Romanov had set fire to a hospital in Moscow to kill a single man, Barton tells him. The casualties resulted to seventy eight and thirty more had died of injuries. She was paid well for her services.
He listens to Barton speak, his hands smoothing along the lines of the suit. The entirety of Midgard bears witness to Romanov's crimes; the topography of earth is splattered in the blood she had shed. She has killed in every city. His fingers twitch, and Barton says, "She's trying to repent."
He has to bite his tongue.
Sif pulls the golden thread out of his flesh with shaking fingers.
"I'm sorry," she whispers. "Loki, I'm sorry."
His tongue sits still, leaden, in his dumb mouth. This is not a silence that he is used to—this silence is not filled with twisting mechanics, with words humming about him unsaid, every syllable processed and weighed. This is a silence of terrifying stillness and terrifying shapeless sounds—he wants to scream, he wants to hurl, he wants to yell, but his mouth is dead.
His blood wets Sif's fingers, sinks into the minute creases in her skin; spreads along the back of her hands like scarlet webs. The thread, tangled between them, is coloured dark and red.
These scars will not fade, he thinks. I will have to magic them away every day.
(Thor had screamed, Thor had yelled, Thor had to be restrained.
Oh, brother, he says later, when he regains his tongue. One would have thought you were the one getting your mouth sewn shut, instead of me.
His brother, the great oaf, had leaned close, cupped a hand against the side of his neck. "But I was." He says. "You are my mouth.")
"I've got red in my ledger," Romanov says, crossing her arms. "I'd like to wipe it out."
Red; the colour of Thor's cape. Red; the colour of Sif's lips after she's had too much to drink. Red; his own blood staining the thread. Some days, he wonders why he bleeds red, and not blue ice, like the stories said.
"Can you?" He asks. "Can you wipe out that much red?"
Natasha Romanov had killed the daughter of a Serbian businessman to send a message. Natasha Romanov had killed an orphan girl in Sao Paolo for her silence. Natasha had set fire to a hospital to kill a single man.
A mere smear in the great score board of the universe, compared to his. He had turned the eye of the Bifrost upon Jotunnheimr, he had killed his own father, and he had committed the greatest weakness of all in letting go of the spear. In the shadowy corners of the universe, creatures murmur tales of Loki Silvertongue, Loki Liesmith, Loki whose rage had killed entire worlds; had murdered gods; had slain himself. Natasha Romanov and her crimes are nothing.
But still: Drakov's daughter, Sao Paolo, the hospital fire.
"Your ledger is dripping. It's gushing red," the words tumble from him, unchecked and unbalanced—there is a great pleasure in letting loose words like knives, he knows. Syllables honed to a point and low guttural hisses forced from his throat: this is a performance. He advances, his body hunched forwards, and he realizes for the first time that she is not much smaller than Sif—Sif, who had lived ten of her lifetimes, who had battled all the creatures of the universe, who had pulled golden thread out of his flesh with trembling fingers. "And you think saving a man no more virtuous than yourself will change any of that?"
Sentiment, sentiment, base sentiment, he thinks, and his breath hitches. Romanov's eyes are full of old ghosts, and he can almost hear the thoughts whirring around in her head—her hands around the orphan's throat, her fingers lighting the match, the knife sliding into the throat of a child. Laufey's last gasp, before breathing a word, his hands turning the eye of the Bifrost, his fingers letting go; letting himself fall into the vast abyss between planets. He blinks, and Romanov's face seemed, for a terrifying moment, thinner; gaunter, the hollows of her eyes sunken in, the curves of her cheeks sharpened into angles. For one terrifying second, he is looking at himself.
He presses close to the glass; his nails bite into his flesh. "They will never go away."
His brother's face is limned in gold from the firelight, and he says, "I've been looking forward to this day as long as you have."
When the Allfather had announced his heir, Loki had smiled. He had clapped his brother on the back, told him what a horrid king he'd be, had teased him about his gaffes in the diplomats' meetings, had grinned when Thor laughed in reply. In his room, he had taken off his cloak with careful hands, had sunk his teeth into the back of his hands; face hot.
Telling a lie is like telling a story. Words, like stones, one on top of another; smoothing over the edges, making sure that the angles fit, exact. You have to believe in it. When the lie sits in your mouth, tripping off the end of your tongue, you have to live it. You have to believe.
When he was a child, the Allfather had said, both of you were born to be kings. He had thought then, instinctively: not Thor. Thor is thunder and might and bellowing yells of victory; a king is made of bendable stuff. A king is silver-tongued and wise, a king knows how to rouse the emotions of his people, a king must never let his heart overwhelm his vision. Sentiment, he thinks, and then thinks—Thor does not know how to use his. Thor does not know how to use sentiment like knives.
"Sometimes I am envious," his voice is soft, and for a moment he is not sure if the words are false or if they are true, if he had pulled it out of his head or his heart. "But never doubt that I love you."
Love can be deadly, when well used.
On top of the tower, the city burning all around them, Thor cups a hand around the side of his neck.
"We can end this," his brother, his golden foolish oaf of a brother breathes in the space between them. "Together."
When he had let go, Thor had not spoken for a week. When he had let go, Thor had wandered the halls of the palace at night, tracing their old haunts when no one would notice. When he had let go, Thor had woken up every night, terrified.
A king must not feel. Loki thinks. I have cut out my heart and locked it away.
The knife is in his hand, and in Thor's side, before he blinks again. "Sentiment."
(The sentence falls, and Thor screams. For your crime, Loki Silvertongue, we shall seal away your tongue. We will deny you words. You shall be silent. When the sentence falls, he is still. When the sentence falls, he is already silent.
"No!" Thor screams, and the guards pull him back. "No, please! Loki!"
He is oddly calm as he is forced to his knees, his head yanked back. Thor's shouts echo through the great hall, and he thinks, oh, my brother. The needle bites into his flesh. This heart shall be the end of you.)