An Unseeing Shadow

Chapter 2

**Trigger Warning: Feels and grief**

The next time the adolescent met Loki was on accident. Peter was sneaking a small stack of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches back towards his bedroom in Avengers Tower, when he heard the soft whimpers and low hiccups.

Peter froze like a deer hearing the foreign sound it couldn't place of a halting car and he looked about wide-eyed in his anxiety.

Even while part of him-arguably the smarter part of him-told him to keep walking away, the humanity within his soul told him to venture towards the noise.

He slid the paper plate onto the ground and walked as quietly as he could down the hall-one foot, then three, then eight.

He came across a lonelier, shrouded in darkness, hallway and, with a fast glance over his shoulder; he moved down it and turned left.

There: a door was open a few inches.

Peter tried to peer inside but could barely make out any details.

He let out a small, but long breath, tongue licking his lips as he pushed the door open more.

He thanked Mr. Stark's architecture for the singular fact that the door didn't squeak in any manner. And now, now he could see what lay beyond it.

There sat the shadow of the older demigod, at least older compared to the teenager.

Peter's brows furrowed as he took in the shuddering shoulders before he felt his heart break inside his chest.

If this wasn't some weird hallucination, Peter was about ninety-five percent sure that Loki was crying-crying to himself, alone, in his bedroom, in a room within a tower full of people.

Peter caught himself feeling baffled by the notion that Loki did in fact have feelings and that the god was so isolated from the lives within the tower that he'd had to resort to crying quietly, distantly, on his own.

Peter's heart broke more as his frown deepened.

The dude had been through hell and if feeling empathy for the guy who had single-handedly messed up New York a few years ago wasn't a grave indication that Peter was naïve but caring, he would never know what would.

Peter felt his own hazel eyes well with tears-he remembered how he had been so high strung, so resolute to not cry when his parents died, when Uncle Ben died, that he had pushed away Aunt May, and Ned, and everyone he came into contact with. He, too, had felt he had to cry alone, cry without anyone's watchful eyes, cry because he thought of himself as weak, cry for what he had lost and everything else he was in danger of still losing.

The grief never really fully disappeared-sometimes attaching to himself like a tick, making him quietly retreat inwards, but Peter knew the paradoxical reaction truly helped the most: surrounding yourself with supportive friends and loved ones. It was through talking about the good times that Peter could manage to hold onto a relationship he would never, could never, truly forget or leave behind. Grief was an odd creature, in that way.

So, because Peter was still in so many ways just a kid and because he could relate in too raw a way, he lightly knocked on the door-ever the gentleman-and proceeded to walk into the room.

"H-hi, Mr. Loki," nervousness bubbled up inside the teen. "S-sorry, I don't know your last name but I-I saw you crying and I know how-how shit-awful that feels and I-I think you may need to be around people right now." Peter swallowed the elephant caught in his throat. "Un-unless you don't-you don't think so." Peter couldn't have face-palmed any harder than he already was.

His gaze flicked over Loki, whom had gotten rigid with an air of hesitance. His back was still towards Peter and his crying seemed to have stopped completely.

Peter was just deciding he'd leapt too much, too fast and was slowly extracting himself from the situation when Loki shifted his head to a profile position, his form a darkened silhouette in the fading light.

"Peter, was it?" Loki questioned softly.

Peter swallowed hard, hand still hovering over the doorknob. He lowered his appendage to his side, almost shakily responding with, "Yes?"

Instead of a snarl or threat, Peter was startled when the demigod pronounced slowly, "What do you know about grief?"

Peter exhaled loud and hard, creating a draft of warm air around them.

"What don't I know about grief," Peter implored to himself. His eyes took on a sad look, a pain so deep running through them than he'd been able to breathe passed in a long time.

"It's like…like a soul crushing intensity that knocks you backwards into oblivion, not caring where you land or who you hurt in the process." Peter's face appeared grim. Gradually, after a brief pause, Peter opened up, "I was an orphan and my Uncle Ben…my Uncle Ben passed away too and I'm still not over it-not over them. It's hard…hard to be without them. Harder still to face the days I know that are ahead without them." He stopped again, adding, "I keep expecting Uncle Ben to shoot me one of his dazzling smiles when I bring home my good grades, or for my Mom to give me a hug so strong it makes me breathless. I keep thinking that I'll hear Uncle Ben's voice again or that he'll be there in the crowd when I graduate. But…but he's not. He…won't be."

Loki remained quiet for such a significant amount of time that Peter thought he'd fallen asleep sitting up or that was the end of the conversation or Peter had just pulled so many all-nighters lately that he had dreamt this entire scenario. He'd dreamt a lot about Uncle Ben, the grief he carried of this loss, lately. Not necessarily his Uncle in the flesh but the day that he found out he'd passed or even fake days, days that could only be imagined in sleep, about how he had passed away, as though his dreams just comprised the mention of him, the notion that he was nearby. But every time Peter got close, every time he felt Uncle Ben was right there, it would be the same moment that Peter woke up and the grief would be there, hanging in front of his eyes, as though caught in a web.

He felt like he'd been chasing a dream within a dream and this time, here, was no different. He was about to pinch himself awake when he heard this spoken:

"…Can you grieve for what never was? What never came to be?" his voice was small, emotional, pained. It was like someone had stripped down everything of the trickster and encased all that was left into a tiny tin can.

Peter couldn't help but gasp at the marks Loki's words left behind like cigarette burns placed inside his skull.

For a moment, he felt it hard, too hard, to breathe.

"Of course," he managed to say, he managed to get the words out-too late, he felt.

Loki nodded, eyes returning to his lap.

"Yes…I lost my mother to a wickedness I'd never before imagined. Someone I could not stop within my cell in the dungeons. I…I blame Thor, partly, for it all, but I know it's because of the last conversation I had with her instead…" Loki hummed, softly. "When in pain, I lash out. If my mother could see me now…I don't think I could bear the fact that I cannot see her back." A few tears slipped down Loki's cheeks, falling onto the comforter from his chin. He sniffled, unable to breathe through his clogged nasal passages. His pain was raw, palpable almost, but his voice was constrained, as lost as he felt with his place in the world. "I'd begun to envision a future so different than this for myself."

He muttered something so quietly that Peter didn't hear it but he did hear this when his voice returned with a greater sense of conviction:

"Maybe I was a fool to think I deserved anything better."

Peter's head tilted, almost as though he were confused and hell, maybe he was, because he found himself uttering back, with confidence, "You didn't-you don't-deserve this."

Loki smiled bitterly. "Then why does it feel so much like a fitting punishment?"

Peter opened his mouth to retort, but he found he didn't have any answer to that. He instantly felt like he was swelling up with guilt.

He never could have imagined himself in this type of circumstance. It was…horrifying in many respects and he felt like he was doing everything wrong that could go wrong. He opened and closed his mouth a few times but all the words that he had within his skull just disappeared and died before ever reaching his tongue.

Loki shifted on his bed, patting the empty space beside him, facing Peter enough that the light from the green lamp shade on the desk swallowed the demigod up in its arms. Another sad smile graced Loki's lips like a ghost were just passing through.

Peter realized that Loki may have had more ghosts in his closet than he had ever considered possible before.

Loki patted the area again; cloudy eyes unseeing but filled with so much…feeling. It was as if, somehow, Loki had managed to see through Peter's body and catch all the emotion that resided limply in the teenager's soul and reflect it back to him in a stranger's eyes.

Because that's what Loki was, after all, wasn't it? A stranger. An…outsider. Yet Peter felt so comfortable in his presence then, so at ease, so capable of being heard and understood. It was disconcerting but Peter appreciated it, he liked it, he felt…useful, safe even.

"Come, sit with me, and if you feel strong enough, tell me about your grief and I will share with you my own."

Peter edged closer without sitting, his arms jerky as he remembered all his previous amounts of anxiety, before he relaxed himself into this situation. This definitely wasn't a situation he could have ever pictured for himself three weeks ago.

"You know, there's this really nice quote, I forget who it's by, but it goes 'without the darkness we'd never see the stars.' It's about finding the light even in the darkness. Like, space, too, because, you know, space; but also about finding hope and strength through the pain. I just…I thought it could help."

Loki smiled warmly at Peter, suddenly amused.

"Easy for you to say," Loki suggested, tone light. "You can still see them."

Peter's face instantly blanched.

"Oh, I-I'm sorry, I didn't mean-"

"Relax," Loki interrupted, chuckling, gaze soft even if he was staring past Peter and more towards the lamp. "It's merely a jest." His smile held only a small ounce of bitterness and Peter couldn't help but wonder then if the trickster had always been this expressive in years previous.

"Oh, okay," Peter's voice was a little flat, and Loki observed this detail, before the teenager smiled again, a little softer this time, causing him to consider that his face was turning into mush from all the gentle, careful prodding he was introducing into the room. Where was there a window he could punch to regain his manliness?

"Are you sitting?" Loki inquired, gaze shifting sideways.

Peter forgot that's what he was told to do, so, he quickly sat down, knees accidentally knocking into the demigod's.

He made to apologize but heard instead, "Aaaa, there you are." Next he was instructing, "Hold out your right palm." Loki blinked, waiting for an appraisal.

Once Peter affirmed it, Loki asked, "Now guide my hand to yours." He snickered. "It's okay, my hands may just be-" Peter shivered lightly, taking Loki's hand before suddenly retracting it, "-a little cold." The humor was back in his voice as he brought his nails down to the center of Peter's palm.

"Now, watch this," Loki stated calmly, slowly raising his hand as a green-blue crystal appeared in Peter's open palm.

Peter watched with wide, hungry eyes as the crystal grew, transforming and heightening, sparkling in the twilight, shifting into airy particles that deepened in hue before drifting away, blinking out of sight.

"That's so awesome!" Peter exclaimed with joy.

Loki smiled, closing his eyes as he hummed to himself. He drew upon his magic, then, and with a small tear coming down his face, he showed to Peter a woman with long, golden hair; bright, warm eyes and a smile that only a mother could communicate with: something kind and compassionate. She wore a teal robe, elegant and long, and she seemed almost animated even though she was a still image. Peter's eyes watered in comradery.

"This is what my mother looked like," the demigod whispered. "She was the Queen of Asgard, my…home planet. Or, at least, where I came from." Loki's eyes scrunched up tightly, and Peter looked at him long and hard, wondering what secrets lay behind the trickster's skull. Peter's gaze dropped away until returning when Loki said so softly, "It's easier to picture her with my eyes closed, where I can still see her, like this twisted reality is just a dream." He sighed, opening his eyes and staring blankly ahead.

Peter's not sure why exactly he did it, maybe it was the heat of the moment or the fact that he was feeling nostalgic but he dug through his pocket and pulled out his brown faux leather wallet.

He thumbed out a picture, then two. He said, gently, "I carry these everywhere I go. This one's of my Mom and Dad," he pushed a small photograph, almost like a newspaper clipping, into Loki's raised hands.

The trickster nodded and let his fingers explore the age of the paper, apprehensive on whether he would damage it, thus taking his time and feeling the cracks over it from being folded up and protected for so long.

"And this one's my Uncle Ben and Aunt May. She's still alive," Peter added, and he moved the properly printed photograph over to Loki next, who guided his fingers across this one as well.

The two of them breathed for a while, remembering their own grief and making time for it, because that's all that grief ever wanted. They forgot, in some ways, that the other was still there.

"My Uncle Ben was a good person," Peter echoed into the chamber of darkness. It was like he was telling secrets to someone he'd never met before, like he was back at church, sitting in confessional. He felt like if he told his secrets here, like he did in those wooden seats, that it'd be kept here forever. Like he wouldn't have to face it or its consequences again in the future; the realization more liberating than he'd felt in months.

"How did he go?" Loki responded in as much delicacy as he could manage.

Peter was floored by the question, for some reason not expecting it, as he struggled out, "He was robbed at gun point." Peter shook his head. "I-I could have stopped it but I just… I just…didn't."

Loki dropped a hand onto Peter's, Peter's that still held the photographs of those he'd lost.

"Put those away so you don't lose them again," Loki said, another sad smile on his face. His once green eyes blinked past the tears. "You'll want them for the future."

Peter's head jerked about as though he were twitching as he looked longingly back at the photos before tucking them back and away in his wallet. He sniffled and his hazel eyes trained, unfocused, to the flooring. Even if Loki couldn't see him, physically, it felt like he could see through his shell and it was marginally unsettling.

Loki squeezed Peter's hand, a gesture of such immense compassion that Peter felt was so immensely contradicting.

He didn't know if he asked it because he was trying to weakly lash out himself but he blurted out what had been eating away at his mind for days: "Why did you...attack New York?"

Loki nodded, as if he'd been expecting this, and maybe, maybe he had.

"My thirst for power overrode my sensibilities. Even Thor pleaded to my humanity, towards the end of the fight, but I was simply too lost to realize I was so far gone." Loki's staring took on a dreamy look, as though he were flicking through files in his mind of the right possibilities to fill his jaw. "The Allfather didn't appreciate my unabashed incapability of being controllable. He punished me to the dungeons, sparing my life only for Frigga's love of me." He sighed. "The war came after that. One of His children slaughtered my mother, taking from her her last breath. It was a cruel, agonizing death. Prolonged, even, ill-fitting for a woman so strong, so powerful in every other sense."

He looked away, "I learned of it through Thor's tears. I begged Odin to allow me to avenge her death, but the King was...not understanding. He was trying to protect me, for reasons I still yearn to understand, and wouldn't allow me to. I naturally found a way around him, but not without sacrifices."

Loki looked down again and Peter wondered for a second how much he could really see. He hadn't exactly been told of it but he also hadn't asked. His vision swam with regret and it was harder than he thought possible to hear the trickster's next words, uttered with more strength to the demigod than he had emitted all afternoon.

"Thor was with me then. It took more than just the two of us, of course, but all that really mattered was that it was Thor and I. I-I remember the last time I saw her face, so clearly I can picture it now," tears swam in his eyes, "She was my beautiful mother and her end should never have come at the hands of my undoing." He paused, considering. "I remember…just remember Thor's loud cry and the sound of Mjolnir swinging in the air, and a flash of brightness and then…pain, a lot of it, and then I was waking up days later in the healing rooms. And I remember the look in Thor's eyes, sky blue eyes," Loki admired, in the present. "Face pale, worry lines etched into his forehead. And then, like my eyes had closed in finality, I saw nothing more."

Loki laid a shaky hand upon his forehead, rubbing at his temples, as if the pain of the memory brought back the pain in his head.

"Asgard could do nothing for me. Thor was hopeful that Midgard could. When all else failed," Loki remembered, "then Earth would have to do." He chuckled. "It wasn't exactly with my blessing that he brought me here. But he did and here I am, so many moons later. I didn't expect forgiveness but I've found that my current state has offered some…retribution. It's as though, because of my blindness, I've rehabilitated as much as possible in the quest of having to re-learn the way I function in the world. There's something ever so crushing in coming to terms with that fact, that it eroded me and shaped me in ways I could never have imagined prior. My relationships now are all so new with the ones I had before being….just a little different now." Loki took a deep breath. "I know that doesn't answer your question in any manner," he grinned, slyly. "But let's pretend that it did."

He grimaced; wincing in what Peter finally recognized as pain.

"Are you okay?" Peter asked, voice tiny when he realized just how much he didn't know this demigod now. He blinked and narrowed his eyes, watching as Loki sank into the cave of his shoulders, his neck tensing as he shifted.

"I will be," he answered instead, deflecting so cleverly that Peter's lips quirked in understanding. He'd say things like that to Mr. Stark, too, and he knew his father figure knew it was an evasive answer.

Loki offers instead, "I get these intense headaches, sometimes. We think it's a residual side effect." He tried to offer a smile but it didn't reach his eyes. "I will need to rest for a while, now." He continued, "But before I do," he asked for Peter's hand again and this time Loki wielded his magic to show the young boy a serene atmosphere: water trickling down over smooth, grey shades of rock. Trees, tall and full of leaves, swayed in the breeze and the entire scene capsulated peace and calm.

Peter watched it in pure fascination before it dispersed again, like the others had, into fading dots.

Loki squeezed the back of Peter's neck-at least that's what he was aiming for, instead his skin crossed the fabric of Peter's shoulder-and he slipped into the bedspread with a contentment about him that hadn't been there earlier.

Loki regarded the space Peter had already left behind, earnestly telling him, "You're a good kid, Peter. Your Uncle Ben would be proud."

Tears pricked Peter's eyes and he regarded the demigod then with a simple statement that held more weight than either being could reasonably appreciate:

"And you're no longer the bad guy or a stranger. You're an Avenger," Peter whispered, closing the door behind him as he began to see Loki fall asleep. The teenager hoped he'd have good dreams, because he really, really needed them. After everything he'd been through…

They all did, they all did.

A/N: Aaaaa, I swear, if you read this chapter listening to the second song, it'll just slam you with all the feels (at least it did for me!) Any who, sorry it's been so long since I dabbled in this story. I know it's not exactly a cohesive story, more like a compilation of bits and pieces that may or may not string together as a full story, but I was feeling the quarantine reality setting in and this looked as good as any story without too much set-up to work through my anxieties with! Hence, ta-da!

I'll probably be adding more in the future, particularly about grief because I have some non-fiction related books on the topic that I'd like to explore in my stories. :]

So, I hope that you enjoy this as much as you can! Stay safe out there, too! Leave me a review or PM me or favorite and read as a lurker, whichever fits your fancy! I appreciate it all, for sure, though. xxx

PS Stories I'm also hoping to update soon include: D&D, S, and CeC.

Music: "90 Days" by Pink ft. Wrabel; "this is what self-destruction feels like" by Marina Lin; "lost in the moment" by NF.

Dates written: 3/25-3/27/2020