I made Thor grieve before, so now it's Loki's turn! :D

Loki walks in a haze.

He allows himself to be led docilely through the halls of this so-called TVA in this horrendous jumpsuit of theirs. He stumbles occasionally, but he doesn't really care. If anyone is unnerved by his surely listless gaze, he doesn't notice.

Nothing matters anymore.

(The blood is still drying on his hands.)

Damn you, he thinks, though the thought doesn't have enough vigor in it, enough hate. He used to be filled with hate, but now he is just empty.

He doesn't know where he'd direct the anger at, anyways. At the TVA, for taking him away? At himself, for never being enough? At Thanos? At Thor?

Tears well up in his eyes. He lets out a shaky breath and tries to blink them away, but one escapes and trails down his right cheek.

He doesn't have the energy to wipe it away.

Who cares if these people see, anyways? They seem to have already seen his entire life, dictated his entire life, stolen his entire life.

He looks down as they enter what seems to be a court room, with the variant (he's a variant, too - defective, lacking, weak) in front of him pleading innocent before inevitably being declared guilty. He is forcibly led away to be pruned, whatever that means.

Loki doesn't really care to find out, anyways.

As he walks up to the stand, awaiting his much deserved fate, he looks down again. His hands are shaking.

"Laufeyson, Variant L1121, AKA Loki Laufeyson, is charged with sequence violation 4-23-18," the judge says, bored. "How do you plead?"

Loki doesn't look up. He leans forward to grip the curved bar around him tightly, so that maybe his hands will finally still.

He inadvertently smears red onto the metal. He stares, almost fascinated. There are hand-shaped bruises around his wrists; he probably deserves that.

"Hello?" the judge asks, and Loki looks up, startled.

"Excuse me. Can you repeat that?" he says back, but his voice is little more than a croak, and he has to clear his throat. Tears well up in his eyes again, and he scowls for all but a moment.

The judge rolls her eyes and shuffles her papers around a bit. "Ravonna this, Ravonna that," she mutters. "I don't have time for this." She looks up again. "Are you guilty or not guilty?" she asks him slowly, as if he is a child who still needs help to catch up.

As if he is still the child who wanted to catch up to Thor.

Loki's mouth feels dry all of a sudden, and he swallows.

"I don't have all day," the judge says, hand poised over her gavel.

And because Loki had failed, because he'd been a coward, because he'd had the tesseract and hadn't given it to Thanos, because he had killed Thor, he bows his head and says, very quietly, "Guilty."

Pruning is painful. (It's exactly what he deserves.)

When he wakes, he's flat on the ground and staring at a desolate sky. Is this hell? he wants to ask. It should be hell; he should be in hell.

He should get up, explore the land, catalog the threats and possible allies, look for resources.

But he is so tired.

The rustling of grass nearby. He doesn't sit up, doesn't move to look. "Before you ask," an old, tired voice says, "this isn't hell."

Loki licks his chapped lips. "Am I not dead?" he asks after a few moments of just trying to breathe. Why should he be able to if Thor-

"No, you're not," the voice says. Closer now. "How unfortunate, isn't it?"

Loki turns his head, and the sight that greets him is an old man in truly horrendous clothing. A little ways behind him stands a boy, not even of age, his black hair ruffled and a frown firmly on his face. He holds an alligator in his arms. What catches Loki's attention are the golden horns on all of their heads, and their eyes.

Loki blinks. He's seen those eyes before, in the mirror. He's seen that face before, in the mirror (long ago, when the only thing he'd needed to worry about was what book to read next). "Who are you guys?" he asks.

Loki remembers.

"The tesseract, or your brother's head. I assume you have a preference." Thanos looms over him, as always.

"Oh, I do," Loki tells him, smile widening in a way he knows looks unnerving. "Kill away."

Loki wants to do right, for once. He wants to save the universe from the decimation Thanos has promised it. He wants to stop Thanos as he should have done long ago.

But then Thanos presses the power stone to Thor's head, and he's screaming and screaming and screaming and blood flows down the side of his face in a stream, a river, a waterfall that can't reverse itself.

Something in Loki's chest twists ever so tightly, and he curls his hands into fists to keep it from showing on his face. Please don't, he wants to say. I'll do anything, he wants to say. This is my fault. Take it out on me. But he opens and closes his mouth and nothing comes out as Thor screams and screams and blood, there's so much blood.

I'm sorry!

(Thor had never told him how much being a hero hurts.)

"ALRIGHT, STOP!" he screams just a moment too late, because then Thor slumps over and doesn't move. Loki lets out a choked gasp. "Thor," he croaks out, falling to his knees and reaching out a hand and a strand of his magic for anything, for any sign of life, for something.

This was never supposed to happen. Thor was never supposed to die!

"Look what you've done," Ebony Maw whispers from behind him.

In the end, it doesn't amount to anything. He's distracted (sentiment); Maw manages to tear the tesseract out of his dimensional pocket, shredding his magic into pieces in the process.

Blood on his hands, on his clothes, on his face. He's knelt in so much, and none of it is even his.

When the orange doorway appears behind him, it's almost a relief.

"Our humble abode," the younger (not unscarred) version of him says, gesturing at the bunker.

Loki looks around, sucking in a breath. It reminds him, absurdly, of those last few days on the Statesman: crowded, hardly enough space to breathe, but homely. He'd shared a room with Thor. They'd been closer than they had in years.

He shakes his head a little, letting out the breath shakily. He seems to be doing that a lot, lately. "It's...cozy," he says.

The older version of him raises an eyebrow, and Loki wonders not for the first time how much he knows. "Make yourself at home," he says, collapsing into a cushioned chair. "It's not like there are many other places to be."

The alligator growls in what seems to be agreement, crawling into its tiny pool. Loki's still not entirely sure if it's actually another version of him, or if the others are playing a joke on him.

He sits cross-legged on the floor, leaning against the far wall. He doesn't question his younger self taking the throne. He feels tired, empty.

He lets his head fall back and drifts off to an uneasy sleep. Perhaps he should be paranoid. After all, the others are versions of himself. They would probably not be against betrayal, or killing their resting companions.

He wouldn't be against playing the victim, for once.

When he wakes, gasping, not remembering what he'd dreamed about but knowing it probably had something to do with death and blood and Thanos and Thor, he has a crick in his neck, and he's covered in a green blanket.

Perhaps understandably, he's not very forthcoming on why he's here.

His older self has no qualms in regard to telling his tale. Loki struggles to smother his jealousy, his grief, his rage. This one had done it right. This one had saved Thor. This one had been so much smarter and better than him.

They are all Loki's, but they're certainly not the same.

"You're ashamed?" his younger self asks, scoffing.

"Don't push him," his older self admonishes.

"Whatever." He rolls his eyes. "I killed Thor. What's worse than that?"

Loki gapes. "How? Why?"

"It was an accident. I turned into a snake and when he picked me up like the idiot he is - was - I turned back and stabbed him as a joke. Except it turned out not to be a joke, because he...died."

Loki thinks he remembers that particular incident. "Then it's not so bad. It was an accident."

"Does that really make it any better?" his younger (not so young) self asks, scowling. "A death is still a death."

Loki sighs. When he looks down, he realizes his fingernails have pressed little crescents into his palms. "Yes, a death is a death," he says after a few seconds.

They don't push him after that, though the alligator does move to lay its snout on his lap.

"Why save me?" he asks hours days weeks later as they stumble around outside the bunker, trying to salvage any useful materials and watching as yet another group of variants is swallowed up by Alioth. Loki almost wishes he would let himself walk into the purple cloud and just be done with it.

The child shrugs, picking up an old Midgardian radio and examining it with pursed lips. "Why not?" he asks.

"You certainly don't save everyone," Loki says, nodding at Alioth in the distance.

"You were laying there for a while," his older self says. "It looked like you needed help."

"Maybe I didn't want to be saved," Loki mutters. The alligator growls at him, almost warningly.

"I've been where you are," his older self says cryptically. "We don't fall very far from the so-called Sacred Timeline."

"And is that better?" Loki asks scathingly, kicking at a metal can. It rolls down the hill. "Why should we want to be close to the version of ourselves the Timekeepers have declared valid?"

"We'd be alive."

His younger self frowns. "Are we not?"

Right. He's never met Thanos. He's never learned how to be alive and dead at the same time. "Forget about it," Loki tells him. He misses being young and naive. He sighs and bends down to pick up a colorful 'Loki for President' pin. "What the hell."

"Oh, that," the old man says, unconcerned. He waves a hand and it disappears in a flash of green. Loki would get it back, but using his magic still hurts his core, and he's pretty sure his other selves have caught onto that. "Don't worry about it."

Thanos looms over him. "The tesseract, or your brother's head. I assume you have a preference," he says, almost conversationally.

"Oh, I do," Loki tells him, a breath almost catching in his throat. "Kill away."

Then Thor screams and screams and he's in pain, his instincts his heart his body tell him. Your brother's in pain. "Stop! Stop it!" he yells, though he doesn't know who he's directing it at, because this has already happened is happening maybe it will happen and he fails, every single time.

"Where is it, Odinson?" Thanos asks, stopping his gruesome burrow into Thor's head. Thor breathes roughly, eyes closed but still alive.

At least Thanos has the decency to call him Odinson instead of Laufeyson.

"Here," Loki gasps out. "It's here." He conjures up the cursed cube in his raised hand, and pleads at Thanos with all of his being.

This is his fault. Thor shouldn't have to pay for his mistakes. Thor should have never been intertwined with Loki's path to begin with.

Thanos takes the cube in one hand and smiles. In a few seconds, he's crushed it and placed the blue gem that's left into his gauntlet. "Please," Loki whispers. "Please."

Thanos's smile widens. "I thought I'd promised you a fate worse than death," he says, tightening his hold on Thor.

"No, NO!" Loki screams, trying to run forward and do anything, but he's held back by waves of blue, by the very weapon he'd given up. "I gave it to you! I was late, yes, but Thor has nothing to do with that! I don't even like him! I've tried to kill him on more than one occasion! This isn't a punishment." It's a pathetic lie, the desperation utterly clear in his voice.

"What have you been told about lying, trickster?" Maw asks from behind him. Loki gasps, remembering blood and screams and a cut tongue.

And then Thor is screaming and blood is dripping from his face into a puddle on the floor. Loki has to swallow back a sob. "Please," he says, voice raw. "Leave him out of this."

Thor slumps onto the floor, little more than a corpse. Loki feels that he can't breathe, wishes he could trade places with him. But then Thor snaps his head up abruptly, and Loki has to stumble back a few steps. He opens his mouth and says, voice gravelly and rough, "This is your fault. You did this. Now you have to pay."

"I already know that!" Loki screams, voice breaking with the force of it. "I never wanted this! Brother, plea-"

"Who would want you as a brother, Loki?" Thor asks, suddenly so much closer.

Loki chokes on a breath, then wraps his arms around himself and closes his eyes. (He remembers a hug from a lifetime ago - sinking into his brother's warmth, Thor wrapping his arms around him and holding his fragile pieces together.) "This isn't real, this isn't real. You're dead, this isn't real," he whispers. Except that would mean accepting that he's truly gone, and Loki doesn't think that's much better.

"What have you been told about lying, trickster?" Maw asks again.

"The tesseract, or your brother's head," Thanos says with a smile.

"You did this," Thor growls out, voice low.

The sounds whirl around in his head, echoing over and over and over (please stop), until he gasps and sits up.

The motion sends the blanket he'd been covered with to the floor.

He blinks, looking around. He's on a pathetic excuse for a mattress. The alligator snores lightly on the floor beside him. The child shifts a little from under a similar blanket on a nearby couch. The old man frowns at him from where he's sitting in his armchair. He waves a hand, and a glass of water appears in front of Loki.

Loki reaches out with two shaking hands to grasp it tightly, then loosens his grip minutely so he doesn't break it. He takes a few sips, if not to quell his aching throat then to make the glass less full so his trembling doesn't create a spill.

There are tears on his face. He doesn't muster up the strength to wipe them away.

After all, the nightmare's already happened, and it was mostly real.

"Thanos?" his older self asks quietly. It's much later, when he's almost stopped shaking, though he still feels cold.

"Thanos," Loki admits, though that's certainly not the whole story.

He has nothing against the other two (three if you include the alligator), but they remind him too much of, well...himself.

So when the boastful one comes along, with the damned hammer and intimidating physique that remind him, absurdly, of Thor, he leaves. It's quiet. Maybe he'll become a legend they tell at night, to all the other variants they decide to befriend.

Maybe he'll decide to see them again, when it doesn't hurt so much.

But for now he leaves with the clothes on his back, his other meager belongings, among them a certain green blanket, in his recently repaired dimensional pocket. The child glares at his Asgardian leathers with jealousy. The alligator seems to smile as he pats its head awkwardly. The old man stares at him suspiciously but doesn't stop him.

He walks out, telling them he's getting some air when it's not only oxygen that he needs (when it's Thor who needs to breathe).

He wanders. Time passes. He can't tell how much, though. He doesn't seem to age, here at the end of the world.

The problem with wandering around out here is that there are many other variants of himself. He tries to keep their dalliances at a minimum, but it doesn't always work out.

He thinks to off himself with a dagger, or to simply walk into the purple cloud that is Alioth, more than once. But then he stops before he can actually do it. (Perhaps life is the punishment he deserves.)

"Loki's survive," his toddler self says with a pout. Loki stares at her and wonders how he was ever that tiny. She stretches her chubby fingers up towards the sky, as if looking for something. "They also have Tor's."

A breath catches in Loki's throat. "Thor," he corrects.

"I can't say tat."

"Okay," Loki says. He backs away a little, because this is extremely odd, to say the least. The child is older than she looks; nearly everyone here is older than they look. He feels so old and young and found and lost at the same time. "Okay," he says again. And then he all but flees the field he'd found her in. Alioth is but a mile away. Let the toddler die, for all he cares.

Some of these variants seem to know him more than he knows himself, which he finds utterly concerning. "What'd you lose?" the President asks, eyebrows raised.

"New York," Loki shoots back, scowling as his henchmen - other Loki variants, probably - force him to kneel in front of their leader.

"Ouch. I'm hurt," he says, pressing a hand to his chest.

"That isn't exactly new for us, is it?" Loki asks. And because he's slightly older than this variant, because he'd had those few years impersonating Odin to research and learn, he escapes easily, using his magic in a slightly flashier manner than usual.

Loki wonders what the hell this version of himself had been thinking, wonders whether any of them are truly alike at all or if they simply share their names, wonders how many more times he can be beat down before he isn't able to get back up again.

Thor had always been able to get back up. That is, until Loki had ruined it all for him.

He starts to wonder whether their paths were always meant to diverge.

The TVA certainly thought so.

Luckily (or unluckily, he hasn't decided yet) for him, there are other variants out there who are not him.

Hela tries to kill him once or twice, but without Asgard she's fairly weakened (doesn't mean he isn't hurt). He wonders how Valhalla and Hel even work in this place, if all of the reset timelines have the same afterlife or if each one has a different, separate one. He wonders, if he were to kill himself right then and there, if he'd see any of these variants. He wonders if his Thor is waiting for him in Valhalla.

He wonders if he'd even make it to Valhalla.

Killing Thanos is rather satisfying, but a Thanos who'd thought to use the stones to multiply the universe's resources instead of kill half of the population does make it less so.

This grown Sigyn doesn't know him. In his timeline, and likely in the Sacred Timeline as well, she'd passed before they'd even become of age.

Loki avoids the Hulk.

He sees the Avengers a few times, costumes pathetic and colorful.

He doesn't see Thor.

Until...

"Loki?"

Loki closes his eyes. He's heard Thor's voice more times than he's willing to admit. "This isn't real," he reminds himself quietly. It still hurts.

"Loki!" A hand, on his shoulder.

Loki turns abruptly. The sight that greets him is a Thor with two blue eyes. He's younger, his hair longer. The lines on his face have disappeared.

Loki opens his mouth but nothing comes out.

"The TVA captured me, and then they sent me here and I don't know what's happening! What is this place? Why is that purple cloud swallowing people up? You look...older?" Thor furrows his brows, clasping both of Loki's shoulders with a frown.

Loki chokes on a breath. Tears well up in his eyes, unbidden.

This is too much. Thor shouldn't be here. Thor doesn't deserve any of this.

"Brother? Talk to me," Thor says, squeezing his shoulders gently. His eyes show all of his unguarded concern.

"You would still call me brother?" Loki forces out, searching Thor's face for anything malicious, but all he sees is love.

"Of course! Why would I not?" Thor asks, slowly. Loki swallows. "Loki, you're scaring me."

"Timeline, when, where...why did the TVA arrest you?" Answers, he needs answers. Maybe if he were a different person (a different version of himself) he would have looked for them first. He would have wondered where Alioth came from and why he's there in the first place, and why the TVA sees fit to contain the chaos of the multiverse and what the person in charge is afraid of. Maybe he could have figured it all out if he had not been drowning in his grief.

Maybe he can still figure it all out with a Thor by his side again.

"Um...I was apparently supposed to go to Jotunheim? I thought I had done the right thing, not starting an unnecessary war! You said you were proud of me, except in that underhanded way of yours where you pretend you're really not." The corners of Thor's lips are turned down in a frown. His forehead is wrinkled a little with concern. He looks so alive.

And he's so earnest about it all. It's so very nice to hear his voice again without the pain. Loki's face crumples and he throws his arms around Thor's neck, holding on tight. His tears stain the obnoxious jumpsuit but he doesn't care all that much.

"Okay, okay!" Thor says, slightly panicked. He runs a hand softly through Loki's hair, probably noting all of its tangles. "Loki?" he asks after a few seconds, bringing his other arm up to hug him back. "Loki, are you okay?" His voice is so much softer than Loki remembers it being.

"I'm sorry," Loki gasps out. "I'm so sorry. It's my fault, you didn't, I didn't, I wasn't - good enough." His heart feels like it will beat out of his chest.

"You are," Thor says, being the older brother because he still technically is, and it's too much, it's too much. "Whoever told you differently?"

Thor doesn't know. This Thor doesn't know. This Thor doesn't know anything.

But he is a Thor, and he brings a hand up to soothingly cup the back of his neck like he is wont to do. Loki shudders against him. "Loki, what happened?" he whispers.

And maybe Thor will hate him when he tells him what he did. Maybe Thor will never want to see him again. (Maybe Thor won't.) But for now, Loki allows himself to let go and be held.

So that's it for Whumptober this year! Thank you so much for reading, and maybe I'll see you guys again next year? lol

tumblr: h1myname1sv