This one-shot is guest-starring Natasha Romanov/Black Widow. It's second-person, the first section being Natasha's POV, the second being Loki's POV, and the third being Thor's POV.
This piece is a more hopeful one - it's metaphorical for second chances, and having somebody to believe in you and help you become better. I just love the similarities between Loki and Natasha, what with them both having so much red in their ledgers, and Natasha coming to the good side, with Clint's help and faith, and trying to wipe out the red because Clint believes believes in her and she believes that she can be better.
So this is basically exploring if Natasha and Loki sort of met on the dark side, neither of them really wanting to be there, and they sort of recognize each other, before Clint comes and shows Natasha the way out.
Then Natasha eventually confronts Thor and tells him that he seriously needs to go help Loki, because if Thor doesn't believe in Loki and give Loki a second chance, then Loki's just going to descend into darkness and he'll never be able to escape, once he forgets what it's like to love and to be loved.
And so Thor goes to retrieve Loki. Because he does love his Brother - just sometimes he just needs a push in the right direction when it comes to dealing with Loki.
He's dressed all in shadows with but a scarf of silver moonlight. His cat-green eyes are gentile.
You ask him with a quirked smile: "What level of hell is this, exactly?"
And he dances laughter in his voice. "Not Hell—Hela has better tea than this. This is somewhere worse. Somewhere in between."
A steaming mug in his hands,with black, black English accented tea, and his dark hair drips rain.
Standing next to him there, it somehow doesn't feel strange; both of you waiting.
This was a side of him that you hadn't seen when he'd attacked New York, and he might as well have been a complete stranger, for the softness of his smile and the sensitive, demon-repleted green of his eyes.
You idly twirl a black umbrella over your shoulder, your red hair nearly black in the inky lighting, but it's dry and curls just below your chin, dragging softly across your neck each time you turn your gaze from the road to the lost god and then back to the black asphalt.
Water slides and rolls down the street, glittering silver in the white light from the streetlamps.
Wind howls like the coyotes in their nighttime chorus—not beautiful, but chilling and grating and wild. Sometimes it will moan like a dying creature, shuddering and low, sending a guttural battle cry through the shivering trees, bare without their crowns of leaves.
The rain lashes out like a cornered beast; all blinding claws and icy teeth as it arches its back of clouds.
A dark purple car pulls up under the streetlight a few feet away, sending oily water splashing up over the both of you.
"My ride home," you explain.
And you take the hot tea from his hands, steam spiraling up in tendrils, wispy as woodsmoke, and you hand him your umbrella.
Maybe it will keep away a bit of the chill.
You hop into the car, shut the door, tea to your lips.
It tastes like second chances.
It's cold; so very, very cold. And all you want, in your twisted, hardened heart, is to bury and burrow under red covers where it's warm; so very, very warm.
But those days are long gone, submerged in the dusk of the past, and here and now it's so cold that breathing hurts. You can't feel your nose, your fingers or toes, and your lips are blue and even taste cold, like icicles and frost and snow.
It's a bold cold that lets you see your breath when standing in full sunlight, a bold cold that chases you with its rain or frost or ice and dove-gray skies of day that bleed black at night as if the moon was a bullethole in its flesh, keeping you in siege as you hide within the metal-coated walls of your heart, huddling beside the dwindling fire as you try to keep yourself from freezing completely, all the time the world pounding rain and hail against your armor with echoing, metallic, unceasing patters.
As for your body, you're soaked completely through, your body temperature having dropped so low that the frigid rain the pours over your hair and suit and skin feels blissfully warm.
The Black Widow had given you her umbrella, and you had wanted to laugh as derisively as the wind that nips at your face.
What will keeping more water off do when you're already saturated? You might as well as just stand there in the rain and let it eventually drown you.
Yet you tried for words, maybe a "Thank you," for her belief that you might find some redemption, but though the Hawk came for her, you're certain that no one will ever come for you.
As if all this water could ever wash away the red that you've bathed in so completely it's forever collected in your eyes like embers.
Glancing down, you notice that your hands are discolored blue, and your skin is so dry it's literally cracking, flaking away like frost, and the words fall right through your numb, clumsy fingers; it's so, so cold.
You were standing in the sun with the golden warmth spreading through your tanned skin, the hammer on your belt feeling unusually heavy, when the woman walked up to you.
Orange hair curled like flames around her head, dancing in the warm, morning glory scented breeze, but the warm, soft tones of her skin and lips are pulled in a hard expression, green-blue eyes intense as they meet your own.
The Hawk walks beside her, the fingers of their inside hands just touching, like they wanted to hold each other.
In her other hand she carries a ceramic mug of tea, and as she pauses before you, she brings it to her full lips, taking a moment to savor its flavor on her tongue.
She lowers the mug, and suddenly you can't stop staring at it, does it so resemble one you can vaguely remember throwing repeatedly against the wall until it shattered.
"Your brother," she says, and your eyes snap up to meet hers again. "You know, the fucked up one?"
"Take care how you speak of Loki," you say warningly, clouds you hadn't noticed creep across the horizon passing briefly over the sun, their shadows falling over you like the ghosts of corpses.
"Maybe you should take care how you treat him," the Black Widow retorts, and there's real venom in her voice that you can feel pulse through your veins, making your heart constrict.
She continues, "He's currently lost and alone somewhere dark and cold and labyrinthine, and he's forgetting what sunlight feels like. He's freezing, and he's forgetting what it's like to feel warm, and hope was showed in him far too late. He's already drenched and shivering. How long do you think, before he starts to enjoy it? Before his heart turns to ice and he thinks that cold is all he's capable of feeling? Before he loses all faith that he could ever be something better?"
"Where?" you rasp, your throat feeling suddenly raw, your eyes inexplicably beginning to sting.
You lost him, you know that; but you don't know where and you don't understand how.
You'd thought he was beside you. Oh, you'd tried to walk together, but the night was growing dark, and when you reached... when you reached, he was gone.
"Follow the cries," the Hawk says, and you can't read his expression behind his dark sunglasses. "Follow the whispers, and look for the glowing eyes, masked as they will be with nebulous lies."
"You speak in riddles!" you protest.
Full lips quirk as the Black Widow once again stares you through. "Then maybe," she suggests, "You should start trying to figure things out."
She finishes the tea, and hands you the mug.
"Everyone," she advocates, "Deserves a second chance."
You reach—oh how you reach for him, follow the bloodied footsteps and the echoes of your name into Hell, and then into the spaces between; the ghost cities with their steel skeletons that climb naked and bare into the clouds and tremble with each tremor of the unsteady ground.
Any moment, you think, the concrete beneath your feet will crack open and send both you and your brother falling.
It's raining (hailing, pouring, freezing, snowing), the storms just keep going, the water keeps flowing, and you know you're not the same, even as you squint against the sleet and follow each dot of lamplight hovering weakly along the streets like dying fireflies, and you connect the dots like a child, unable to figure out what will be the finished design.
It's raining like the sun has died and the sky shall evermore be mourning (it rains relentlessly) and whether it's night or day is indiscernible through the heavy quilt of clouds, lit by lightning and broken by thunder (loud), and you stand with your eyes cast down, watching the puddles on the ground grow.
Raindrops burst on their surfaces with little splashing sounds, the rain soaked all the way through your clothes, the cold biting down to your bones.
And how you shiver, raindrops tickling as they trickle down your face like frigid tears, and the drumming of the rain and the growling of the thunder is all you can hear.
And your looking for him. Looking for Loki behind you, in every puddle's reflection; looking for Loki's silhouette behind your eyes after every burst of lightning; listening for Loki's voice tucked unheard within every thunder's cry.
Silver droplets clinging to blond eyelashes and maroon leaves; even the wind grieves, mournfully moaning. The sky is breaking, and out pours the blue, churning gray clouds filling in the void and smothering sun and moon, leaching the world of color and contrast as it gilds everything in chrome.
And oh, it's too cold for you here. It's too cold.
Even the trees, still bedecked in cloaks of leaves, even the trees are shivering.
It smells of wet asphalt, iridescent oil, and both fresh and stagnant blood, gilded over with the fresh scent of rain that hasn't quite managed to clean the stink away.
The water floods the rivers, gushing through their gaping maws; the water collects in puddles and turns soil to mud; the water washes the dirt and grime away, leaving things all the more painfully clear.
And well there are words collected in your head, gathering together like rain clouds.
And you can't assuage the storm.
But there in the night are two stars, scintillating red, and you find your brother standing in the thick, dark, whipped cream shadows just outside of a streetlight's ghostly glow.
He leans upon a closed black umbrella, and his black hair is plastered wetly to the blue skin of his face, his clothes to big as they cling to his skeletally lean frame, and there's ice beginning to frost his eyelashes.
With each breath you exhale, you billow out warm, white steam.
There is no sign when he exhales breath, if he even breathes at this point.
He smirks at you.
"Brother," you say, your voice lost in a rumble of thunder as you place a hand on his shoulder.
Flinching away from your touch, he backs up like you burned him.
"Why?" you ask him. "The sun is out, yet you insist on hiding in the gloom, hatred congealing like the blood of your every wound."
We don't see you, you think silently.
Your voice cracks. "I don't understand you, all the things you do: tell me that you love me then you stab me through; cry when you fight me, laughing too; say we're not brothers, but continue to call me so; say that you hate me but don't let me go."
Is everything to you a game? you wonder at him. (A game, a game, power and fame.)
His silence has teeth, and he never removes his red gaze from your blue one, subconsciously ripping apart with clawed hands a limp strip of silver that you think might once have been a scarf before the rain drowned it.
You can't stand it. "Take what you want from me," you plead. You're suffocating in uncertainty, light dripping out your door and filled with gossamers; of darkness, lightness, lightning, lightening, enlightening.
What can you do?
"I love you, Loki," you say softly, striding forward and almost slipping in the puddle he stand in, and there's both sob and shivers wracking your body, both tears and raindrops cascading down your face. "I love you, Brother. Come home."
You press the ceramic mug into his long-fingered, slender hands, the warm, sweet scent of chamomile wafting between you, drops of rain sizzling where they meet the hot tea.
"Please," you say.
Haltingly his fingers close tighter around the mug, and you let go as his sanguine eyes cast down and he brings the tea to his thin lips, letting the hot liquid slip down his throat, feeling as if it flowed around the cold, numb chasm of his heart.
"You think it wise, to give me a second chance?" he asks wryly.
"You are not a monster, Loki," you say. And there is nothing but heartfelt truth behind your words.
"No," Loki agrees, blue lips curling up further. "I'm a failure."
But he takes another sip of tea as his gaze dances with some semblance of amusement at your partly sorrowful, partly horrified expression.
How are you going to answer that? he seems to goad you. Call that a lie.
Instead, you give him a truth. "You're not a failure to me, Brother," you say, and before he can protest you've thrown your arms around him, one of your large hands pressed against his back, the other cradling the back of his head.
His hair is sopping and starting crystallize into ice, his clothes are no better, and his skin is so cold it burns you to touch; you embrace him anyway.
You bring him home, into the sunlight and out of the cold, and you're certain that you can thaw is icy heart, as you smile at him, feeling an ache in your chest as he widens his eyes in surprise at the brightness and tries to shrink away, back to the shadows.
"No Loki," you shake your head, taking one of his spider, pale hands in your own large, warm ones, and guide him to a shop where you buy him fingerless gloves and a scarf.
When you exit, your brother wearing the fuzzy green items, there's the woman standing there on the sidewalk, waiting for the both of you.
"I knew you had it in you," she says, and though she directs her voice at Loki, her sharp gaze is on you.
Loki inclines his head to her with a gentle smile, pulling a black umbrella out of thin air and, with two hands, handing it to her.
"Thank you for letting me borrow it," he murmurs, meeting her gaze intense stare for intense stare. "It was unneeded, but nonetheless appreciated."
"And that," she smiles, "Is exactly what made it needed."
His brow crinkling, Loki inquires with confused green eyes, "I beg your pardon?"
"Hello," she says instead of answering his question, holding out a hand for him to shake. "My name is Natasha Romanov. Do I know you?"
And Loki laughs blithely. "No," he answers, as he shakes her hand, his grip cold but firm. "I don't believe you do. My name is Loki."
"Well Loki," Natasha says, her usual mask breaking into a smile, the light of which reaches her blue-green eyes. "I look forward to getting to know you."
Further Explanation: With this ending, Loki is getting a second chance, and Natasha is allowing him to start with a clean slate, letting him know that though he did awful things she's not going to hold those against him, because she knows what that's like to having past deeds held against her when she was trying to change for the better.
And so here she's basically saying that the Loki she knew, the Loki that tried to take over New York, was a lie of Loki's, and so she's essentially telling him that he can be his true self here, and that she wants to know who he really is when he's not hiding behind that armor of hatred and anger.
I was writing it thinking of it being more Friendship, though if you want to think of it as sort of pre-BlackFrost you can ;P
I hope I managed to clear up any confusions, but if you have any further questions don't be afraid to ask - I don't bite :3