A/N: I DID NOT FORGET. This story has been on a semi hold due to multiple reasons. Not anymore. Chapter updates will be more consistent. I will post the date for the next chapter at the end of each one.

Enjoy!

Disclaimer: I may have left this a long time, but I still do not own Marvel or it's characters.

Vision of Reality

He forgets how old he is. It's happened before, and each time the want to remember wanes a little more. He did not need his age when dealing with the Chitauri, or the Allfather, or in prison. There was never a need to remember.

Thus he forgot how old Thor was, too.

This made Loki pause on the edge of the white sheeted bed, bare feet on the cold floor.

It was not a large problem, certainly not amidst other pressing issues they had been saddled with. Age did not matter.

The door opened at the end of the room, the thunder god himself walked in, eyeing Loki and taking the nearest stool. The lights were half turned off, very, curtains kept dull city light at bay. Loki watched Thor move closer, slowly, and finally looked up.

"What is my age?"

He only asks out of curiosity, of course. Not because he needed to know. Just curious. It would also help knowing Thor's age if he ever cared to know in the future. Unlikely, because Loki did not care.

Thor raised a brow and considered it. "Two thousand and eleven?" The consideration rings a bell in Loki's mind, soft and too far away to correctly place it in his already displaced timeline of memories. "You were between realms for a long time" Thor doesn't wait for Loki to gain his bearings, and Loki suspects his face must look confused. "I am sure it's normal to feel… forgetful about such things." Thor waved a hand distractedly, focusing on what the city was doing outside.

Loki wondered if the city lights were more troublesome than he had been lately. He knew with absolute surety there wasn't much of him left, but was unclear how he had diminished so rapidly. Asking Thor wouldn't be useful. He knew less. Trusting his brother with such delicate information as his state of mental decay was not in Loki's best interest.

Loki did not understand why he was suspicious. Or why Thor still didn't prattle on about the day's events. Loki bolstered himself and opened his mouth to ask, but failed. His failure culminated in a noise at the back of his throat.

Thor came back and sat, Loki noticed a little closer than last time. He would allow it for now. "Lady Cassandra says you're doing better."

Loki didn't respond, facts don't need replies. Loki shook the feeling that he'd heard that from someone before. Facts didn't need replies. He stayed silent. Thor began steadily talking. Loki did not mind hearing about the day. Barton and Romanoff were still missing. It had been two days. Loki had been asleep for most of that time, delirious.

Pepper dragged Tony away from his lab long enough to sleep and eat, and now the man was back at work with Bruce not far behind. It was the first time Loki received entertainment from the security screens Cassandra set up with his comfort in mind. "Seeing you aren't alone," were her words. Bruce took more breaks than Tony, according to Thor. Steve spent a lot of time in the gym, he was there with headphones punching out frustration.

No mention of Sigyn, no sight of her on the two screens all evening. Loki did not pine for information, but the nagging consideration of asking for it got the better of him the seventh time Thor asked if he was hungry yet.

"Sigyn?"

"Asgard."

Loki tasted the lie in the air between them, floating crystalline specks on the cold conditioned air venting from the ceiling. It was hurled like a rock and may as well have pitched Loki off a cliff for its sudden impact. Perhaps plunging off a cliff was less frightening. He had certainly done that before, again the timeline wasn't clear on when.

"What?" He bit the word, still imagining himself plummeting from a cliff in the way that blue bird the coyote chased in the cartoon Barton had watched.

Thor glanced at Loki for longer than he had the entire night. "Heimdall called for her."

"And you let… let her go." His voice faltered, regaining though on the many times he had let her leave. He could blame Thor; he did, but with his mouth closed tightly.

Loki forgets to breath and pulls in air after black dots encircle his vision and neon imprints flash when he blinks. If only he could forget why his bones hurt, why his heart sped at the thought of leaving the room without company. The clock on the wall ticked away, and Thor's eyelids began falling.

Was he tired? Or just bored? He got bored as easily as Loki. At least that detail wasn't lost with the others. Loki had the edge of an idea and it only came together once he was speaking. "Jane Foster is in Mexico still? It would do you well to visit. You look like Hel, brother, and mother and father see it as well."

Loki did recall enough of the previous days to know they thought him delusional. He was forgetting things, where he was and when. This time it was to his advantage, and he would use that to get rid of his brother.

One less spectator to his increasing madness. Rotting in a cell on Asgard was more appealing than being… well, Loki loved being on display but these were not his terms.

They were Odin's, that he be exiled here. Kept like a prisoner of a war that only raged in his mind.

Thor of course was rightly on edge once Loki mentioned Odin and Frigga. "Loki…"

Sour and halting, Loki's tone reflected a neutral face. "Go and let me sleep…brother."

He suffered less with her eyes upon him, sucking away the pain within their deep irises, locking them with their lighter heart, their optimism.

Her smile could stop wars.

Stop the screaming.

Warm soil soaking in cooling blood of enemies and allies to water the grass. He was stepping over friends like weeds, pale faces marked with lasting pain, scarred with blood on bone. A sword thrust into breast as if to say to death, send me.

Loki kept running towards her, eyes never leaving her mouth or hands as they futilely waved. She was not dressed for battle- the army had just arrived for the slaughter and hadn't given notice of the skirmish. The treelines hid their advance until it was too late to sound warning bells.

The town had been overtaken once the sun dipped and the moon was yet to rise. It was short, the army moved on to leave the dead and wounded untended.

She was in the middle of the road among the fallen guards and townspeople protecting their burning castle. Blood collected in her mouth and droplets of it clung to her clothes, the simple wool shawl the colour of precious gems and hair as dark as the soil that served as her bed splayed out as if it too were slain.

Those deep eyes that had often served as a balm were now stuck eternally looking up but not seeing. Her exposed flesh was cold, right hand clutching tufts of grass and the other caught on the hem of a child's dress.

The Allfathers army marched up behind Loki on the road, halting on the rod. Thrum of boots stilled in the air left no sound to latch onto except the memory of her voice.

"Sigyn?"

The name did not wake her, skin frosted in the light of a still burning town.

Loki screamed with the flames as if he, too, had been scorched by the enemy

"No," The plea made his skin itch. A numbness spread throughout his body, weighted down by tangled sheets he did not dare struggle out of. Thor slept in the chair. With every tremor of his hands Loki feared waking someone. His was not the state you wish to find anyone, friend or foe. Words could not satisfy his fear, raging against itself as Loki tried calming his mind. It was a dream; surely Sigyn had not died that day.

Loki remembered blasting her against the wall of his lower cell. Not real.

Taking stock of his limbs, stretching silently and counting to ten, he sat up. Only dizziness stalled his attempts acting on an urgent feeling something was very wrong.

Do not wake Thor. Do not alert them. Escape.

Loki had never once begged since his imprisonment, but now bargained with himself. He wasn't as mad as they believed. He had his logic, his sharp tongue. The Chitauri had not cut that off quick.

The taste of his lies brought about more tremors.

If he could not lie to himself, how would he have others believe this treachery?

Loki had grown into fear and deceits, permitting it mask his plans from the Chitauri on multiple occasions. Now he forbade that twisted fantasy his mind had dreamt would become reality. Sigyn would survive that monster.

A moment passed when Loki could not remember if this monster was him or the beast Agents Barton and Romanoff had been lost looking for. As the days in the dungeons on Asgard came trickling back like a poisoned stream, he sat diligently waiting for the imagined pain to render him unconscious. Struggling with his every breath rattling in his chest, Loki slipped back into memories of his waking nightmare.

They continue to invade my mind.

She's never asleep long enough to dream. So when the man across the street defies all laws of physics by melting into the sidewalk and sirens sound like small bells and children's laughter, Natasha knows something is wrong.

She never sleeps long enough to dream. Conclusion; I'm not sleeping.

A drop of something wet and warm falls on her cheek, dampness seeps into her back and legs, through her suit. Her head aches awfully and she blinks up at bright green canopy. Through leaves and branches and holes where birds sing there's blue sky. The moss is soft when her fingers flex around it, pushing herself up.

That's as far as she moves. It's unfamiliar forest, a jungle. Unzipping her suit only alleviates the crushing heat while the sweat still collects at the nape of her neck and runs down her back. Pushing her curls out of her eyes she surveys the glen she'd dropped into. Her parachute hanging out of the nearest tree, morbidly reminding her of the third Jurassic Park movie Clint made her watch recently.

"Clint," Her words were a soft moan, throat parched and head still spinning.

Birds didn't seem like a threat, their singing covering up the crack of smoking flames licking the horizon. She could see black swirling smoke in thin pillars reaching towards the sky at a break in the treeline.

Considering the Quinjet had fallen out of the sky and her with it, she'd only been launched a few hundred feet. With broken branches lying around her, the dense trees must have slowed her descent. Saved her from certain death.

It meant Clint could be a few hundred feet in the other direction. "Clint!" Raspy but loud her voice was good to scare a few birds above her, but nothing more.

The slow whine of the engine still permeated the forest, and once she was able to get herself standing, worked her way over roots and boulders towards it.

They had managed to navigate the jet into a valley, but she couldn't remember how, or what shot them from the sky. They had been over water… but in every direction from the raised vantage point were dry.

For she'd landed above the jet, on a few joined cliffs, and leagues away in every direction laid land with trees and predatory animals.

"Clint!"

Assuming her echo would go unanswered, she'd begun to scale down the hill among lush short grass and into taller, golden reeds near where most of the jet broke apart. Halfway down the hillside an echo reached back on the tails of her grunts of effort.

"Tasha!"

Clusters of colourful birds flew up on the other side of the smoking ruin, and Natasha began running for it. Again she heard him call out, and she answered until her throat clenched and she was forced to breathe again.

He was propped against a rock and from the small trail of blood on leaves and grass he had pulled himself from up below the valley where a wide river ran. She cleared most of the brush away, realizing that the overhang of strong reeds and branches growing into the riverbed had saved Clint from falling into the rushing waters and being washed downstream who knows how far.

"What happened?" She did not mention his injuries, which seemed various on closer inspection, or that he had a seldom used knife already out and bloodied, but the smoking mess behind them.

"Navigation failed, and something big smashed into us."

Natasha assumed the hole ripped into the side of the jet was from impact, but perhaps it wasn't. They could think about that if there was a later.

Clint sheathed the knife in Natasha's belt as she helped his sit straighter.

"Oh, no band aid in the world big enough for that." Natasha peeled her eyes away from his back, where she could see flesh hacked in small splinters away from his skin, like cheese after being grated. Swallowing hard Natasha rested him against the boulder again, putting what was left of her suit behind him. Outfitted in pants and a tank she climbed back to the wreckage to find radio pieces.

Stark was good adding to her skill set at least. Natasha knew the basics of making a long range SAT phone and would hopefully get to thanks Tony for those lessons.

Gathering the wires and casing material she needed, Natasha also brought over some pieces of smoking jet and leaves to make a fire where Clint sat. It was hot then, but ranging from where the sun set when she began and where it was headed, night wasn't far.

Climbing down to the river she filled a soft plastic bottle up and began boiling it hanging over the fire on copper wire held by two rocks at either end.

Clint woke up just as she was tweaking the home made radio. "Tasha,"

Her head snapped up, "SHIELD might be looking, Stark definitely will be. Judging from the temperature this time of year and the water level, we're in West Africa… we need to be extracted."

Clint shuffled himself over and handed her the first aid kit. "Tony teach you to sew?"

A/N: Hope that was long enough to satiate you all. Next chapter update will be January 2nd 2015!