He is aching all over, and yet he cannot remember ever feeling so... light. Every step he takes causes another flash of skull-splitting pain behind his eyes, but that seems entirely inconsequential compared to the hooks that used to tear into his brain like white-hot steel claws until he was barely able to think, barely able to remember who he was, why he was even still struggling against the ropes that had him dancing like a puppet, a mere plaything in the hands of those who were pulling his strings.
No more. He is being taken back to Asgard, where he will face the tender mercies of an executioner's axe or (if Odin is willing to let it become public knowledge that he has tricked the Golden Realm into mistaking a stolen Jötun changeling for a prince of Asgard) the hangman's noose, but either way, it will be over. If the Allmother has her way, he might be locked away for eternity instead, and even though that prospect seems less desirable, even Asgard's deepest dungeons hold little terror for one who has endured the hospitality of the Mad Titan and his children. It isn't that Loki is longing for either death or unending imprisonment, but given the alternative, he will gladly take either and consider himself –
Without warning, the world tilts sharply sideways like the deck of a ship hit by a strong gust of wind, making his stomach lurch and his vision grey out for a second. The blue glow of the Tesseract is suddenly right there in front of him, at his feet, in his hands, and Loki feels his own magic surging in response, ripping a tear into the fabric of space and dragging him through before he even realizes what he's doing.
He hits a hard, flat surface and stays there for a moment, dizzy and disoriented, until the universe no longer feels like it's spinning in a mad dance around him.
The first thing that registers is the smell, familiar and strangely comforting, of dust and leather and something that might be... parchment?
Loki pries his eyes open, but to no avail; wherever he is, he has landed in complete darkness, and he has to bite down hard on the panic that wants to rise at the realization. Remembering what allowed him to come here in the first place, he carefully raises his head to look around, and sure enough, there's the soft blue glow of the Tesseract only a few feet away from him.
The cube comes to him without hesitation when he reaches for it. He knows the power it contains, is fully aware of the risk he is taking by touching it with his bare skin, but it seems content enough in his hand. Its gentle song fills Loki's mind and calms his racing heart until he can finally bring himself to pull enough of its energy into himself to dissolve his shackles and the thrice-damned muzzle.
Then, working some feeling back into his sore jaw, he pushes himself up on his elbows and looks around by the illumination the Tesseract provides.
He's on the wooden floor of a vast hall, entirely empty and filled with darkness. The Tesseract's light is reflected in the huge panes of windows that show nothing but blackness outside, although Loki's ears pick up a whisper of wind and rain from the other side of the glass. Wherever he is, it appears to be the middle of the night, which might be the reason the hall is deserted.
He climbs to his feet in spite of the protest from his aching bones and gently nudges the Tesseract to provide a little more illumination, caution be damned. It may be frivolous to use a source of cosmic power for a nightlight, but Loki is well aware that his seiðr is in even worse condition than his body, so he's willing to utilize every resource at his disposal. He assumes that the Tesseract will forgive him, considering how willingly it took him here when it could have left him stranded in the eternal darkness between realms just as easily.
Do not think of it, do not think of it –
Suppressing a shudder, Loki raises the cube to look around – and then almost drops it when he finally realizes why this place feels so familiar.
What he first took for walls are actually bookshelves, row after row soaring up towards the vaulted ceiling, thousands and thousands of books filling the darkness with a smell he has always associated with the peaceful joy of reading and exploring. Loki spent several decades here during his youth, and looking back, he probably has to consider those years the happiest time of his life.
He is standing in the Great Library of Vanaheim, unrivaled center of learning and study among the Nine Realms. The Tesseract has taken him to the one place in the universe he is still allowed, in his heart, to consider home.
.
The Great Library is like its own city within Vanaheim's capital, with plenty of smaller buildings that provide lodgings for the scholars who come here from all over the Nine. While Vanaheim is less unchanging than ever-static Asgard, Loki is still familiar enough with the layout of the City of Learning to know exactly where to go. Tesseract stored away in his pocket dimension, he casts a quick glamour on himself, light enough not to put too much of a drain on his depleted magic, but strong enough to make sure nobody will recognize him as the fallen prince of Asgard. He cannot afford to do more since he must, at all times, remain strong enough to shield himself not only from the Titan's gaze, but from Heimdall's eyes as well (and doesn't it feel strange to hide from the watcher again after such a long period of desperate, futile hope that Heimdall might still be able to see him).
Once he's safely disguised, Loki has no trouble finding a place to stay for the rest of the night, although he can barely keep his eyes open long enough to ward the door and window of the small room before he collapses on the bed.
His dreams are filled with the blackness of the Void and the hiss of voices whispering in tongues he doesn't understand.
.
It is bright daylight when Loki wakes groggy and disoriented, with a strange sensation of wrongness niggling at the back of his mind.
It takes him a while to get his bearings and to convince himself that he didn't just dream up the previous day's events – this really, truly is Vanaheim, not Midgard.
Not Sanctuary, either.
Loki takes a deep breath and, like exploring an unfamiliar taste, tries to wrap his mind around the idea that he actually might have gotten away, that he managed to avoid both captivity and death, which he had considered his only choices if he pulled off the near-impossible feat of slipping the Titan's grasp. And now he's here, his body healing, his magic likely to recover quicker than he could have hoped thanks to the power of the Tesseract, yet he can't shake the uneasy feeling of disbelief. The Norns have never favored him with an abundance of luck even in his smallest endeavors, so it seems unlikely they should start now, at a time when the only boon he would still have asked of them was to cut the thread of his life swiftly and cleanly.
Still, here he is – and whether he truly is free or merely living on borrowed time until his fate catches up with him, Loki finds himself determined to make the best of the respite he has been granted.
.
It has been centuries since Loki had the leisure to spend entire weeks in the library, yet it's surprisingly easy to slip back into the familiar routine of studying. He finds himself a small, comfortable nook in one of the many smaller reading rooms adjacent to the library's main hall, where he can disappear for hours on end behind the stacks of books piled on his desk. It would be tempting to start browsing at random, to chase after every interesting tidbit he comes across, but Loki knows better than to waste the unexpected opportunity that has been dropped into his lap.
Instead, he starts methodically researching every last bit of information he can find on the Mad Titan, sparse as it is (and no matter how much the few things he finds make his skin crawl), then moves on to the Tesseract and the scepter he left behind on Midgard. In this search, he succeeds beyond his wildest expectations, although it also leads him to the conclusion that even his worst fears didn't come near the horrifying reality of what he's dealing with. The first time he realizes just how high the stakes might be in this game the Titan seems to be playing, he has to leave early and spend the evening curled up on his bed with his knees drawn up to his chest, the hum of the Tesseract like a mocking laugh at the back of his mind now that he understands just what he has stored away in his magical pocket.
He doesn't sleep at all that night, but he is still back at his desk at the first light of dawn the next day. If Thanos is truly trying to gather the Infinity Stones, Loki is well aware that he cannot afford to miss even the smallest scrap of knowledge although he finds himself doubting that there will really be anything he can do to stop the Titan.
Yet you kept the Space Stone out of his grasp, and you even lost him the Mind Stone, he reminds himself, even though the thought fills him with dread rather than pride since he doesn't even want to imagine the price he will pay if he should ever find himself in the Titan's clutches again. He tries not to dwell on it too much, just like he tries to avoid the memory of the scepter's hooks in his brain, of his frantic struggles to keep enough of his mind to himself in order to thwart the invasion that would have provided Thanos with a stepping stone right in the center of the Nine. Whenever he can't keep his thoughts from straying in that direction, he nudges them towards the memory of those hooks snapping, a sensation like being allowed to draw breath after almost being choked to death, glorious enough to almost make him forget that his bones were being smashed to pieces at the same time. Not a good plan, the mouthy little mortal had berated him, never guessing that he was unwittingly granting Loki just the reassurance he was looking for. Loki suppresses the mad urge to giggle when he ponders what Stark and his "Avengers" would say if they knew that he has experienced no greater triumph in his life than the moment he crawled out of the hole in Stark's floor, his mind finally, finally his own again.
Whenever his eyes start burning and his back aches from hours bent over book after book, Loki returns to his small, sparse room and spends his evenings sitting cross-legged on his bed, eyes closed and mind focused to the best of his ability. It takes painstaking, diligent work to rebuild the mental wards that Ebony Maw and the Other had left in tatters even before Thanos placed the scepter into Loki's hand. As the weeks pass, he gets better at drawing from the power of the Tesseract once his own magic tires, and the cube seems content enough with it, since Loki can distantly hear it singing to him when he finally drifts off to sleep.
.
After many weeks of solitary study, Loki feels confident enough at last to venture out of his private little nook and into the subdued bustle of the main reading halls. His seiðr is all but recovered, allowing him to secure his disguise with a stronger glamour (ginger hair and beard, a freckled complexion and bright blue eyes) as well as garments that are actually transfigured instead of just glamoured so he will be safe brushing against other people in the throng of readers filling the bigger halls. As much as he has needed and enjoyed the time of quiet solitude, he's starting to get restless in his almost-seclusion, and he remembers how the vibrant mix of scholars from all over the Nine used to fascinate him during the studies of his youth. While most of the library's patrons are Vanir, there are numerous visitors from other realms as well, although Loki is quite relieved to find that there are still very few Aesir among their number. At the end of his first day spent in one of the main reading halls, his work accompanied by the comforting murmur of carefully lowered voices, Loki steps out into the balmy evening air and feels like he can breathe again for the first time since the day of Thor's ruined coronation.
Of course, he should have known better than to let himself be lulled into an illusion of safety. The very next day, someone brushes past him in an aisle of the main hall, almost causing Loki to drop the heavy tome he was about to put back on the shelf. A deep, gravelly voice mumbles an apology, but Loki's intended reply freezes in his throat when he turns around and finds himself facing a Frost Giant with an armful of books.
For a moment, his mind goes utterly blank. He knows, of course, that the occasional Jötun will visit the library – it was already so during the days of his youth, when Loki would surreptitiously stare at the fabled monsters from behind a bookshelf or far across the hall, wondering how it was possible that any of those beasts should even be able to read, let alone do serious scholarly work. Now, however...
Don't. Go. There. He brutally reins in his thoughts that want to drift back to that fateful day when his arm turned blue in a giant's grasp, to the Casket's terrifying magic sweeping over him in the Vault, turning his own body into a thing to be hated and despised. Loki focuses on the giant in front of him instead – not much of a giant, in fact, since the creature is merely a good head taller than Loki although it is easily twice as broad. Perhaps this one, too, has been discarded as a useless runt and was therefore taught all those tricks real warriors have no business learning?
Loki clenches his teeth and quickly turns away again before he draws attention to himself. The Frost Giant, seemingly unperturbed, puts one of the books he's carrying back on the shelf right next to Loki and then departs without sparing him a second glance. It takes Loki a while to regain his composure, but finally morbid curiosity outweighs his unease, and he goes to retrieve the Jötun's book to see what such a creature could possibly want to study.
The book looks old, old enough to have been written before the last war between Asgard and Jötunheim. It contains a treatise on ice magic by an author whose name is unfamiliar to Loki, even though he once prided himself on his knowledge of every magical scholar of note throughout the Nine. Torn between indignation and reluctant interest, he takes the book with him to his own desk for further investigation.
He quickly finds out why he has never heard of the author or of the specific brand of magic discussed in the book – the author claims to be a Frost Giant himself, a sorcerer working on exploring the inborn magic that allows the Jötnar to shape ice at will. Such a book would never have been allowed within the sacred halls of Asgard's royal library, and once this thought occurs to him, Loki finds himself reading on out of sheer spite even though there's a part of him that would rather toss the damned thing out of the window.
The text is even mildly interesting, but Loki is still glad of the distraction when two Vanir youths – young enough to be students – meet behind a shelf across from Loki's desk and, sticking their heads together, start whispering excitedly among themselves. They're careful enough to keep their voices down, but Loki still catches a question that makes his heart stop for a moment.
"Is it true they killed King Odin?"
"The Dark Elves? I thought they were all extinct?"
"Hardly, since they're besieging Asgard! I heard the king is grievously wounded, but he's still leading his troops."
"The old man? But why –"
"They say the prince is dead."