Of course, he's crazy.
You don't know how you managed to forget that. You'd seen it back in Stark Tower, and you're seeing it again now: because really, can you outrun a thunderstorm on foot? This has the feeling of a old chase, long played out, and you're just along for the ride. You'd read once that the definition of madness was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
So Loki's crazy. No doubt about that.
Loki makes a snarling half-laugh as he picks up on your thought through the link, and gets a firmer grip on your hand.
You're running through what is now battering rain and enfolding dark, and you can feel the oppressiveness in the air as more than atmospherics. You can feel Thor. Bigger brother, older brother, stronger brother, favoured brother. His shadow is long and deep and you can't get out from under it no matter what the Hel you do.
The storm makes kettledrum noises in the sky. Thor's now that feeling you get sometimes, fleetingly, when you check your phone ten seconds before it rings. He's the sensation of being stared at in a bar. Something familiar, something coming, closing in. And he's that close: the equivalent of a few barstools away.
Loki's hand suddenly squeezes yours almost hard enough to snap fingers and he goes even faster. The idea of sitting in a safe house, writhing in pain, while they torture Loki, is clear and Technicolor in your mind. The fact that he could have been lying by exaggeration is irrelevant. He's Loki, father of lies, mother of invention. His belief, however, is unshakeable and in your combined heads it is as powerful as truth.
If he dies, you die. If he hurts, you hurt. And he's unequivocally stronger than you. Your fear of pain has defined and restricted you for as long as you can remember.
The dirt track has turned into a dirt road, one of those big dirt roads with a worn surface that probably only ever see long-haul trucks and lonely farm vehicles. It's currently trying its best to be a river, and you and Loki splash up it at Loki's best speed (which is considerable) and your best stagger (which is at least improving). There's nothing but darkness behind and deeper darkness ahead.
Until the lightning. So bright, your vision whites out for a few seconds, because it's so close you're staring right at it. Fork lightning, hitting the ground in a white-blue electric ribbon. But it doesn't go. Lightning should strike once and dissipate. This is staying, a flickering, spitting ragged column of electricity, arcing from ground up into the boiling, unhealthy night sky. It hisses and crackles as the rain pelts across it.
And Loki just - stops.
Sick dread spills down the link. It's a feeling you're incredibly familiar with. You've lived with it your whole life. Exam-room dread. Job interview dread. Doctor's surgery dread. The whole gamut of what-will-become-of-me horror that makes up the core of the human equation is tied up in that jagged electrical beam only a few feet away.
It's only afterwards you remember that the ravens had gone. Because it didn't seem relevant to be looking for birds when there was an armoured figure looking roughly the size of a mountain stepping out from the blackness behind the lightning, and you would have known who it was even if you hadn't seen him on television because he's imprinted on Loki's mind in permanent ink.
The rain around the three of you abruptly goes away in a widening circle, and you're lit by that stark, eldritch flare of the lightning.
Thor just stares sadly and doesn't say anything, and you can feel everything that Loki wants to say but doesn't bubbling around like poison through the link. As it does with every kid who's ever said "Am not! Shut up! I'm so not scared." Loki's bravado is seething to strike out, making the best defence out of a primary offence. Having that detachment it's easier to see it: living inside it, you doubt Loki sees it at all. The lord of lies is best at lying to himself.
And that's the moment. For the first time you feel a hint of what it must be to feel sorry for Loki. Because that lurching, unknowable dread of the future is suddenly his. No more being in control. Up until now he had the game plan, held it in his clever hands and formed it, nurtured it. Twisted it, even.
Now it's gone.
You know that feeling so intimately. Except you never even had a game plan. Your tiny sliver of fellow feeling slides across Loki's consciousness, makes him blink in surprise, seems to spur him to speak.
"Well," says Loki. "Aren't you going to hit me?"
The huge balls of Thor's fists clench and relax, clench and relax. The famous hammer is hanging loosely from one of them. He seems unknowably immense and part of you (or is it part of Loki?) wants to go to him, find protection from that sheer, unyielding immensity.
"No?" Loki muses, in the face of Thor's silent scrutiny. You can feel his confusion. No hitting, no talking. What else is there? "Your human's made you soft, brother."
The silent bulk of Thor shifts, uncomfortably, foot to foot.
"Hasn't yours?" he says, in a bass rumble that still manages to sound sorrowful. Loki makes a wordless scoffing sound, but his fear and defeat snaps along the link. You make him weak, is the overwhelming feeling. He knows that was the point.
"Father told you."
"Told me what?"
Loki's brain leaps back onto track. Thor doesn't know anything. As usual. Misses everything important, Thor. You have to hit him in the face multiple times with the bloody obvious before he sees it, and even then he might need you to draw him pictures as well.
"Told me what? Speak, Loki."
But it's Loki's turn to be silent. Giving up on the direct offensive, Thor looks to you, now, sizing you up. His eyes are blue, even in the nuclear illumination of the lightning, and his blond hair is dry.
"Come," he says. "I will not hurt you."
Again, you can't be sure if the overwhelming desire to do as he says, to believe there could be safety there, comes from you or from Loki. But Loki's conscious mind has other plans. He still holds your hand, and now he draws you to him in a single motion, pressing you tightly up against his body just as he did when hurling himself out of Stark Tower. His other arm curls around your back, holding you fast. You're not going anywhere. Water from his clothes and hair drips down onto you as he raises his head above yours, his sharp chin jutted forward challengingly.
And, looking at the two of you in that moment, Thor's expression changes markedly. You don't need the benefit of a link to see the conclusion he's jumped to. It's written all over his face. Thor wears his heart on his sleeve, always has done, making it easy for people to see where to stab. You can hear Loki's heart beating deep within his chest, the rhythm calming as it had before in the most tense of situations. And this time, you too begin to calm right along with him. It feels wonderful, to be calm.
"Loki -" Thor begins, his tone more urgent, stricken.
"Just get on with it. Hit me, tell me I should regret my heinous actions, I tell you no. Or we could just take all that as read." Loki's tone is a smooth, pseudo-bored purr. The sensation as he starts to feel in control again is like a balm. You feel light-headed with it. "Get to the part where you beg me to give it all up and come home."
Thor's golden-labrador hangdog look is etched even deeper. He shakes his huge head, in genuine regret. Held in Loki's encircling arms, you stare at him, confused.
"Not this time," he says.
The lightning suddenly dissipates into the ground with a crackle and hiss, leaving your retinas blind in the blackness. And ahead of you on the road, a gathering of square shadows previously invisible against the night turn on their headlamps to pin you and Loki in yellowish spotlights.