Part 7
White tiles.
Loki blinked and peered at the fluorescent glare between his lashes. Did he care enough to look around and see where he was? He felt like he was made of lead, or like he was passing too close a black hole and he would be sunk down into the floor. So no, he did not care to raise his head, even if he could.
His hands couldn't move. He pulled at one hand, then the other, grimacing as he yanked on one hard, then harder. There were cuffs around his wrists holding him down. The slight effort left him panting weakly, and he lay still, taking some solace in how he felt no pain. Just a cloud of weariness and a pleasant haze numbing his mind.
"Are you awake?"
Deep sigh. Should he feel exasperation or relief at his brother's presence? Loki felt both. At his lowest point, he trusted no one else more. Big, stupid, kind, stupid, loving, stupid Thor. Giant blundering puppy that stomped in puddles and wrecked the house and wondered why you were yelling at him.
It was enough to persuade him to turn his head a few inches, opening his eyes just enough to see the blurry outline of his brother. Then the glare was too much and he flinched. Thor got to his feet, starting around the bed.
"Of course, the light—" Thor said abruptly. "It's too bright in here—"
"No," Loki said as if he was trying to talk underwater. "No—l-leave it...leave...it..."
At the opposite wall, Thor paused, hand at the switch, and looked over his shoulder at him.
"Are you certain?" he asked. "The light seems to cause you pain."
With some effort, Loki managed a nod.
Not happy about it, Thor left the lights on and returned to the bed, sitting down beside his brother. He snuck one hand under the blanket and grasped Loki's fingers, holding him around the cuff, then cupped his jaw, felt his forehead.
"You somehow burn cold," Thor murmured.
"Mm..."
Loki smiled. Thor was all-encompassing, the sunlight of Asgard, holding him and warming him like a summer day. The smile faded. Summer days meant summer storms. If Thor was not angry at him now, no doubt he soon would be.
"Do you thirst?" Thor asked.
Making a tiny noise, Loki allowed himself to be gently manhandled, lifted to sit up against Thor's chest. His mouth was prodded open and a cup pressed to his lips, and the water that flowed after was startlingly cold and clear. It took an effort to swallow, and when he'd finished, a sudden disoriented vertigo turned the room sideways. He grabbed the edges of the bed, wincing.
"—falling—" he gasped.
"No, you are still," Thor said, grabbing his shoulders as if he could force him to feel that he was upright. "It is the fever on you."
His brother's heavy weight was comforting, but why did Thor insist on speaking? They would go back to hating each other in a few minutes, as soon as Loki had strength enough to turn his heart again. For all of Thor's maturing on Midgard, he had yet to learn how to keep his mouth shut, prattling on as he touched Loki, examining his face.
"You are nearly unrecognizable as my little brother," Thor said. "Pale, exhausted, worn ragged...what happened in that lost year?"
Nothing Loki wanted to speak of, but Thor was not worth wasting the breath to curse, not when Thor was pressing something soft and damp and cool to his forehead, parting the cloud in his mind. He let his head tilt to one side, gazing wordlessly at his brother.
There had been a time...
"You are ill," Thor said. "We never fall ill."
A half-smile.
"I'm mad," Loki breathed.
"You...are you?" Thor said, genuinely confused. "Can the mad know of it?"
"These..." Loki licked his lips, gathered strength to speak. "Moments of lucidity are far and few, brother."
"You did not seem mad," Thor said. "Exhausted, crazed or enraged, but never mad."
"It is easier," Loki admitted softly. "Without the Chitauri staff in my mind."
"Magic," Thor said with a note of disgust. "Nothing good comes of warping the world around you. Your studies only bring you pain."
"Such concern." Loki laughed once without humor.
"Of course I feel concern," Thor said. "You're my brother. I would have fallen after you if Father had not grasped me."
Loki glanced at him. Thor seemed in deadly earnest, and his brother never lied.
"Truly?"
"The revelation of your birth unbalanced you," Thor said with a nod. "I should have been there with you."
"If you had been," Loki whispered, "you should have hated me."
Thor frowned, considering his next words. "Arranging my banishment to Midgard is not the worst you have done to me."
Loki groaned deep in his soul. If his brother had never been banished to Midgard, would Thor have attacked him when he discovered Loki's true nature? If he'd never learned to stop hating Jotuns? Loki couldn't know the answer, and it twisted inside of him so much that he refused to give it voice.
"Midgard curbed your tempestuousness," Loki murmured. "Your rash temper."
"It did," Thor agreed. "Perhaps it was the best trouble you have led me into. I learned much on this world, more in mere days than the centuries in Asgard."
Loki squeezed his eyes shut. More than in their long nights together.
"I would have your answers," Thor said, continuing the pleasant cooling touch on Loki's face. "Where were you for that year?"
"Falling," Loki said. "Through the darkness."
Speaking came easier. His head felt lighter than the rest of his body, and the answers slid out of him smoothly. Thor's voice drifted somewhere over him, lulling him into a sense of safety he hadn't felt since long before Thor's almost-coronation. Like they nights they spent on an alien world, resting between hunts, and Loki told stories to amuse Thor as they sat by the fire. Nothing dared attack while Thor sat with him.
"You did not fall forever."
"The Chitauri..." Loki frowned. The campfire faded from his mind, swallowed up by a sky without stars.
"They found you?"
A twist of the blanket in his fingers—tensing and turning on his side as if the memory burned—Loki winced and shook his head. His voice worked without his permission. Teeth—the Chitauri were claws and teeth, chattering teeth when the bloodlust came on them. Their world, a barren rock of a dead moon, in the cold of space, with nothing but the roar of their monstrous pets and the crack of rocks crumbling into dust.
Darkness, no sound, all sensation reduced to claws and teeth, and the Chitauri could chase him into the furthest corner of his mind, boring into his brain no matter how tight he closed his thoughts.
"Loki—" Steel audibly groaned as something broke nearby, but all he heard was Thor calling his name. He thrashed, trying to find his brother and only sinking deeper into memories he felt compelled to divulge.
No sleep, he could never sleep, and his nightmares chased him into waking. They wanted every world—Asgard, Jotunheim, Muspelheim, Midgard. To have the spare prince drop into their hands was a gift, and they dug at his brain like worms burrowing deep, demanding answers.
"-you're panicking, stop—Loki, wake—"
When the torture started, his monstrous pride made him laugh. Every sorcerer first learned how to protect himself, to ward off death and render himself nigh invulnerable. When the torture deepened, gouging and cutting and burning, he cursed his own ingenuity and wished for an end. And when the torture turned to humiliation, when they dragged their mounts into his prison and laughed in hollow voices as he screamed, his world irrevocably warped.
Where there had been mischief, he discovered cruelty. And if he must break, then he would choose what part of himself would fragment. Shattering his soul before the Chitauri could, he cut the grooves and snapped each edge, shaping himself to make all the right decisions even at his most broken.
He was mercifully mad by the time they brought the strange insect-like dragon to his cell-
"Loki!"
An eyeblink. Loki snapped back to the white room, glaring lights, a low rumble of engines and a heartbeat at his ear. For a moment, the two worlds merged, the living tomb of the Chitauri, the warm safety of his brother's arms. The heartbeat was Thor's, a little rushed but unmistakable.
"Brother...do you know where you are?"
Chitauri? Earth? Asgard?
"With you."
Nothing else mattered. Loki breathed, caught his breath, lay still and listened to himself breathing, falling into rhythm with Thor out of habit. His brother adjusted minutely, put his arms around Loki more securely, turned his leg so that Loki nestled in comfort. It was a familiar position but one he had almost forgotten, a century spent as a boy afraid of Jotuns under the bed and Thor held him against the dark, asking stories in exchange. Even so young, Loki knew how to craft tales to rival those in the meadhall.
And Loki would not owe Thor anything. A story was such a cheap price.
"The lake was still," Loki mumbled, his voice grinding in his throat. "Its waters dark and dreary, where no living thing dwelt and trees died when their roots spread too far, turning black and leafless."
"Stop," Thor said. "You hurt yourself further—"
"Even a deer pursued by hunters would balk," Loki continued, "preferring the piercing arrows and spears than to sleep on those shores. Truly this was no nice place."
"Brother—"
Thor touched Loki's throat, and the raggedness of his voice, the bloody flecks on his lips, made him swallow painfully. He carried on regardless.
"But to the monster on the shore," he said, "it was deep and dark enough to hide him, a peaceful home where no one would look."
The embrace around him tightened. A long pause.
"And," Thor said, hesitant about what answer he would receive, "why did he want to hide?"
"Disgusting...dark skinned, small, weak, alone even among monsters." A deep twinge ran down Loki's side and he wriggled closer. "He went into the water and slept, floating in nothing."
"Wasn't he lonely?"
"It was quiet," Loki said. "And he kept everything out. And he drank the dark water and grew powerful, and even if he was still small and ugly, he could at least take care of himself."
Thor snorted, his opinion about Loki's ability to take care of himself obvious but unspoken. He did not ask for more, hoping his brother would fall silent, and as the minutes grew long, Thor found Loki growing heavy in his arms, his breaths deepening.
Asleep at last. Thor sighed and looked at the mess of the room, sheets strewn across the floor, the chair and table overturned, scorches left in the walls and the bed mangled. The mattress lay on the cold tile and Thor held Loki in his lap, nestled between his legs, the cuffs dangling broken chains from where he'd torn his brother free. Loki, in his panic and delirium, had not even noticed he was no longer locked up.
"Is he asleep?"
The tin voice came from the ceiling, and Thor glanced up at the exposed camera in the shattered tv set in the corner. Humans put their electronic ears and eyes everywhere. It was an irritating practice.
"He is," he said softly. "Do not wake him."
The voice did not come back.
TBC...
