Chapter 11: Permafrost

Niflheim was an empty, desolate place, with no color but white visible for miles. They had not taken him to Jotunheim, and Loki was grateful for that small mercy. He did not think he could have withstood the frustration of being returned to his ancestral home as unwanted as when he had first been taken from it.

His prison was a small room carved into the top of a mountain. At first, he was amused; he had the realm to himself, and they thought they could confine him to this? The opening the guards had pushed him through was sealed behind him, but that hardly mattered.

When he was certain the guards were long gone, he flicked his fingers and whispered a word so quietly it might only have been a breath. He might as well create a fire to brighten up the place.

Nothing happened.

Loki tried again, and that was all he needed to convince him that he had vastly underestimated the All-Father. Spells to keep him contained, he had expected; spells to limit his magic, yes; spells to cut him off from it altogether, no. Still, he tried again and again until angry tears stung his eyes. It is a punishment, he whispered to himself. It is meant to be cruel. You have waited longer than anyone; you have been alone in the void. This is child's play. He lowered his hand and watched his breath mist faintly in the air.

There were windows in the room, and that, perhaps, was the worst part. They were barred with icicles that Loki could not hope to break, and they offered a view of unchanging whiteness. It took Loki what might have been several days on Asgard to realize that the light never changed. There was no night or day here, just the ice. Loki tried to avoid looking out the windows, tried to keep his mind turned inward, but the slightest flicker of hope kept drawing him back to the view. Though he knew it was no use, Loki could not help looking.

After what might have been a week, might have been a year, Loki began to see things in the mist. They were dim, shifting shapes, and Loki wrapped thin fingers around the bars of his cage to get as close to them as he could. It was when Loki began to see strange lights that he realized he was going mad.

There was no food, which did not surprise him. He tried to melt a little of the ice for water, but of course it was useless. He could only eat the small flurries of snow that sometimes blew into the room, and they did little to satisfy either hunger or thirst. His lips grew dry and cracked. There was no moisture in the air, up there in the biting cold, for the mist turned to ice before it ever reached him.

Loki felt himself growing weak. He told himself it was from the boredom, and not the slow leaching of his powers that the prison had been built to do so well. He spent much of his time sleeping, curled up tightly against the wall. Flurries of snow gathered in his hair and he didn't bother to brush them away. His own warm breath burned his skin, and then his skin went numb and he no longer felt pain. He spent his time in a half-sleeping, half-waking state, and he did not bother to try to differentiate between reality and dreams, something which had once been so easy for him. He saw Thor when his eyes were closed, and heard Thor's voice in the howling wind. His eyes froze closed and he did not mind. Though the thought never crossed his mind, his body knew he was dying.

Loki's mind turned inwards on itself, as it always did when he out of options. It was strangely like falling had been. He had thought he would be nothing, feel nothing, in the emptiness with only stars for company, but instead he had been alone with his thoughts and nowhere to run. The terror and the anger had built up in him until he could stand the silence no longer. He had called out, a scream of rage –

And he had been answered. It had not been the answer he had been hoping for. But torture – that, at least, was not falling.

He drew on the magic reserves deep within himself that even the enchantments on him could not take away. Though the reserves were low, they were at the heart of who he was, a pool of jotunn magic that would always replenish itself, however slowly. He could only draw out the magic in a trickle, but that was fine. He was in no hurry.

He pressed a frozen fist to the cold floor of the room, and his breath warmed his numb fingers until he could stretch them out flat against the ice. He pressed down and fed a drop of magic through his palm, so slight it could pass through the foundations of his prison. It dripped down the mountain and deep into the snow and ice of the empty plain that surrounded it. He sent a thread after it, but that was the most he could do. Break, he thought, but that was not subtle enough, and the thread trembled under the weight of the command. He softened and the thread steadied. Shift. Melt.

And slowly, underneath the ice, the bedrock began to move.

. . .

Thor had always had a curious ability to detect when Loki was close. It was not anything he could have communicated to anyone else, and it was not always there; it was like a metallic taste on the back of his tongue, or perhaps at the edge of his thoughts that pulled him onwards. Frigga had a suspicion that it was something Loki had done unconsciously when they were young and his powers were still untrained, because the two of them had always had the ability to find each other no matter how badly one of them might get lost.

It was this feeling which had led him unerringly to Loki in the metal human contraption in the sky on Midgard, where he found Loki looking at him half in terror and half in hope. It was a feeling akin to the one he had when he looked deep into Loki's eyes and desperately wanted to kiss him, to hold him.

It was also this feeling which lingered on the edge of Thor's perception as the years of Loki's imprisonment passed. Whether he was on Midgard, helping the Avengers defend their world, or in Asgard, walking past Loki's empty room, the feeling remained. It did not grow stronger, and neither did it fade; but Thor became more and more aware of it, like a sore tooth he had begun to prod unconsciously and, now that he was aware of it, could not stop.

Loki is alive, he assured himself as he lay awake in his dark room. Loki is well enough; Loki is not in pain. But there was something he was almost aware of, something he had thought and then forgotten; and finally, after three years had passed, Thor realized what it was.

Yes, Loki had likely been tortured by the Chitauri. Yes, Loki had not been alone in attacking Midgard. But Loki had suffered pain before, and it had never affected his mind like this.

When Loki had fallen from the bifrost, he had believed he was hated by everyone he had ever known, and he had believed that Thor would come to hate him, too. He had believed himself alone when he had fallen into the void, and in the darkness, there had been nothing to distract him. It was no one's fault Loki had become unhinged, Odin had implied; it was no one's fault but Loki's. Because Loki had been alone with his thoughts, and he had looked so far into his mind, he had become lost.

Odin had assigned Loki his punishment because right now, no one could torture Loki more effectively than Loki himself. The sentence was so short because if Loki were left alone for too long, he would be lost entirely. This time, Loki did not even have the choice of letting go of Thor's hand because Thor had given him nothing to hold onto.

When the bedrock of Niflheim cracked open, Thor felt it in his bones. The metallic taste in the back of his mouth grew overpowering, as though he had bitten down on his tongue and tasted blood.

Loki had never called to him before. Thor knew that something was very, very wrong.