#48

Loki was not with anyone except for the voices blathering inside his skull as they always did in times of crisis. Other than that, he was still alone in the blackness of the non-space that had existed before Creation—Can you even speak of existing in the case of non-existence? … Fine, you can change the verb if you prefer although I would not know to what—and he was still straining to tap into the magic of the Infinity Stones that might have seemed out of reach but was not. Although, maybe it was, but trying to do something was better than screaming his lungs out for his life and his brother and receiving no response from the void. Loki had tried to detect a magical signature for hours—at least he thought it had been hours but who could tell, really, in the absence of time—because, in the midst of a crippling panic, he had suddenly come to a realization. After overcoming the initial terror of being confined to that freakish, torturing non-place with no air and no gravity and no sound and no light, Loki had become aware that his body was still in its Aesir form and that this meant that Nemesis had merely concealed the signatures of his own glamour and those of the stones. She had not extinguished their magic. There was still hope. He was still wearing the gauntlet with Mind, Power, Time and Space, and Reality was still locked inside of him. The fabric of the universe had not yet unraveled. He just needed to break the spell Nemesis had cast upon him in order to use the stones.

Just.

Well, good luck, you halfwit, snickered his inner voice. However, you seem to be blatantly ignoring the tiny little detail that Nemesis is the mother of all things. Her power has no equal and you cannot hope to rival the omnipotence of her magic with your puny sorcery.

I must do something, Loki countered with a growing annoyance over the fact that his own mind would not let him focus on the task he had set for himself.

That you must, replied the voice, but do not be so foolish as to waste all your energy. You cannot know for how long she will be keeping you here.

Loki gulped and a slick sheen of icy sweat chilled his neck and crept down his spine. "I shall name you Myrkriᵭ," he said aloud to distract himself from his accelerating heartrate and his quickening breath. You cannot panic now. Not now. There is no one here to calm you down. "Yes, that suits you."

Pardon me? enquired the scorned voice.

"Since we have known each other for quite a while now, I really think you should have a name," Loki chattered away to stifle the panic rising up from the depths of his stomach at the prospect of spending eternity in this non-place. "So that I can call upon you in times of need. You know, as the mortals do with their peculiar communicative devices. Hello, Myrkriᵭ, this is Loki speaking. It just so happens that I am in an awfully self-destructive mood today. Could you please make an appearance and abuse me verbally?" He giggled and the sound echoed through the void. Well, it did not really echo in the truest sense of the word, but once uttered, the words seemed to be gaining a lot more force than they had possessed as unspoken thoughts.

You are losing your mind.

WELL, YES OF COURSE I AM LOSING MY MIND! I AM TRAPPED HERE, YOU DISEMBODIED, FEEBLE-MINDED LITTLE SHIT!

You should ask yourself for what purpose, said Myrkriᵭ.

Well, that directive was helpful at last, because it calmed his racing thoughts and roused his intellect that had been numbed by fear and pure survival instincts. There had to be a reason that the Goddess was showing him—and maybe the others too—how she had existed before the beginning of things. There had to be a lesson he was to draw from the experience. There is always a purpose to everything, Frigga's soothing voice trickled into his ear.

"I see," murmured the soothing and simultaneously glacial voice of Nemesis, "your mind is open now, Trickster."

I am seriously beginning to despise that name. "Open to discuss my purpose in all of this? Hardly." Loki snorted a laugh even though he had never been in less of a laughing mood in all his life. Well, except for the time that he had spent with the Mad Titan, maybe. "Where is my brother?"

There was a faint smile in her words when the Goddess replied, "I am currently telling him the truth about the Allfather's reign."

"Ouch," Loki said casually but still felt a stab of pain inside his chest when he realized how Thor would suffer under the revelation of Odin's cruelty because the God of Thunder could not simply smother the love he felt for his father; not even after everything that had transpired. And Loki was truly amazed too that no matter how desperately he had wanted to hurt his oafish, self-righteous, condescending brother in the past, his first instinct had always been to keep their father from hurting him in his own, much more impactful way.

That is irrelevant now, you dolt. Focus.

"Since my humble self has been under no more illusion regarding Odin's, well, I suppose you could call it character for years, what is it that you are going to reveal to me?" Loki brought himself to ask. "Or are you simply testing whether I am foolish enough to try to undo your magic?"

Another smile he could only hear. "You are many things, Loki of Jotunheim and Asgard," said Nemesis, "but a fool is not one of them."

So far, so good. "What is your," Loki began and then paused to think of the right word, settling for, "objective? Why are you showing my brother how Odin built his empire?"

The voice of Nemesis smiled once more in the darkness. "What do you think?"

"Being the omnipotent being that you are, I am sure you are aware of my every thought," Loki answered and found himself unable to keep his voice from turning into a soft growl.

"I am. And your mind's eye should not be fixed on your brother right now. You brought grave imbalance to the universe with your actions," said Nemesis, her voice suddenly as chilly as a snowstorm raging deep within the heart of Jotunheim, and Loki gulped, involuntarily. "Some of it was the Allfather's doing, some of it was the Titan's doing, some of it your own. You are beginning to understand the many layers of your conflicted mind but it still remains a mystery to you what your purpose is, even if the spirit of your mother dwelling in Valhalla told you that, deep within yourself, you already know."

Loki swallowed a sob.

"You do not," Nemesis clarified. "Not yet. When your hands touched my book, you had the intellectual capacity to understand that a cancer has been growing inside the belly of Asgard since the beginning of time, spreading throughout the universe, infecting everything in its wake, and that Ragnarok would purge creation of this cancer. And you accepted this, because you long ago discovered the simple truth that there are no truths. That creation and destruction are one and the same. That light has no meaning without darkness. That righteousness has no meaning without immorality. That order has no meaning without chaos."

Loki's lips parted but there were no words that could have uttered what he felt.

"Your first impulse, stirring deep within your own self, hidden from your consciousness, was to let it happen," said Nemesis, "because you believed, and still believe, that some things can only be redeemed through obliteration and rebirth. That some people cannot be saved and that change and growth are impossible for some things in this life."

"Th-that is not true," Loki protested even though he could not be sure. Myrkriᵭ's lingering presence in his own mind was testament enough to that.

"So, the question I have for you," said Nemesis without heeding his interjection, "is overwhelmingly simple and devastatingly intricate at the same time: Do you wish to remain in the lockless prison you have built for yourself? What lesson are you willing to take from your past?"

"The t-truth of my p-past?" Loki repeated in a small voice as the darkness around him exploded in colorful lights and showed himself as a small boy, tiptoeing through the garden of his mother, studying every plant with an expression of awe stamped across his innocent, pale, little face. He watched his child self and saw his aura swirling around him like wisps of clouds in bright shades the colors of emerald, lime and foliage leaves. It was in his mother's garden that he had understood with a breathtaking clarity at a very young age that reality as such did not exist. That, if anything, what those around him referred to as reality was just a mashup of an unlimited number of individual perceptions. Such as the rose that was both beautiful to look at and painful to touch. Such as the apple that was both deliciously sweet and in the first stage of decay and corruption. Such as the sky that remained the sky even when veiled by clouds. Such as the rain that was a curse to the people but a blessing to the plants.

He had been so enthralled by the realization that he had started to play tricks upon the people of Asgard to test their perception and was amazed when he found out that they fell for them every single time because they wanted to believe in their reality so desperately that they remained blind to all others. He began to tell lies then—the innocent lies of a child with infinite powers of imagination—just to see if people would believe them and they did.

There was power in that, young Loki recognized. Much more power than there was in a blow to the ribs, and that satisfied him deeply. There was even more power in the magic pulsating through the veins of Asgard and Nemesis showed him the moment in which he had first sensed that power. It was in the dining room a few years later when the family was seated around a bountiful dinner table and Odin was expressing his frustration with his sons' "indecent behavior" that was "improper for princes" and "served only to reflect discredit on Asgard".

"But we meant—" Thor began and Loki knew that he would have said "no disrespect" because that was his brother's favored excuse had Odin not cut off his words with that menacing stare of his. Their father continued to remind Thor that the successor to the throne should conduct himself better and then he fixed his gleaming eye on Loki even though playing a trick on the Prince of Alfheim during his annual diplomatic visit to Asgard had not been his idea—miraculously, really—but Odin chided him anyway because he was convinced that Loki had been the mastermind behind the charade even after Thor told him otherwise.

Loki felt small and helpless, and anger rose inside of him. He yearned for the power to stifle his father's harangue and he focused all his thoughts on that single wish, the Allfather's words fading into a wordless murmur, and Yggdrasil granted it to him, allowing him to tap into the magic that filled the air for the first time. Loki was surprised, curious, and frightened all at once when he felt the unlimited potential of the glamour pulsating all around him and he tapped into it without a second or even a first thought and the wood in the fireplace, unlit during that time of the year, exploded into crackling flames that startled both his parents and his brother.

A satisfying smirk appeared on Loki's lips and Odin's one eye glowered at him. Loki glowered back.

"You can wield magic," said Frigga with a smile and a flicker of admiration in her eyes.

Odin grunted his dissatisfaction. "Now, that was all that we needed." He rose from the table, scolded his sons once more and then excused himself with a warning, one-eyed glance at his wife that articulated perfectly that she was to attend to the matter of disciplining the unruly princes further.

And Frigga did attend to it. To him. She schooled him in the ways of Asgardian magic and taught him how to focus his thoughts in order to manipulate the impulses of the glamour that could easily corrupt him, practicing with him for two hours every morning after breakfast. She gave him books to read and discussed the dangers of the spells explained inside of them with him. Soon, Loki became a skilled sorcerer and he found that casting illusions and shrouding himself in the guise of others or entirely from view was an even better way to test people's perception of reality. The more he became aware of the magical veins permeating the Realm Eternal, the more he discovered and the more he discovered, the more he learned. Telekinesis. Teleportation. Astral projection. Hypnosis. Molecular arrangement. Levitation. Yet, most importantly, he learned how to shape-shift instead of casting mere illusions and how to unveil secret pathways to the other Realms that could otherwise only be accessed via the Rainbow Bridge and that the Allfather did not wish anyone to discover.

Watching his young self thrive with every new spell he mastered through Nemesis's projections, Loki slowly began to understand where he had gone wrong. He had taken such incredible pleasure in wielding magic that he had aspired to be a powerful sorcerer and he had believed, firmly and beyond all doubt, that a powerful sorcerer was who he would grow up to be. Until Odin had made it abundantly clear to him that excelling in wielding magic was not enough for a prince of Asgard and that Loki needed to be a warrior as well if he was ever going to ascend to the throne. Listening to the Allfather speaking these words now, Loki could recognize the true intent behind them: Odin feared Loki's powers, feared the magic he would wield one day, feared to be surpassed in knowledge, and thus sought to control his adoptive son by diverting his attention to techniques he could not so swiftly master in order to diminish his confidence.

Yet, hearing those words as a young man, Loki had taken them as undisputed evidence that his own skills paled in comparison to those of his mighty brother, who excelled on the training grounds and bested everyone who fought him, and that, as a consequence, he would never be good enough if he were truly to be himself. And this realization, as well the jealousy and anger at both himself and his brother that began to stir inside of him, had corrupted his mind. Slowly, at first, but the more Nemesis revealed to him, the clearer he could see the bright green colors of his aura darkening. Loki saw himself withdraw from the world, from his family, spending more and more time alone, in the library or in other quiet places, nursing his jealousy and his anger and his self-doubts until Myrkriᵭ's voice rose from the depths of the turbulent waves raging through his mind for the first time.

Loki opposed it at first, knowing that it was a mere thought and confident that he could silence it, but he had withdrawn so far from the world around him that he no longer dared to ask for counsel when he found himself unable to silence it. Instead, he tried to fight this battle alone, oblivious to the fact that some battles were not meant to be fought alone.

By the time Thor was to be crowned King of Asgard, Myrkriᵭ had been a constant companion inside his own head and commanded him to thwart the coronation ceremony. Loki knew, had known from the first, that Myrkriᵭ's intentions were malevolent and so he initially refused but then the voice convinced him that he would do the right thing if he prevented the coronation because his brother—reckless, self-absorbed and power-hungry as he still was at that time—was nowhere near ready to rule. Despite a subconscious awareness that Myrkriᵭ's counsel was and had always been foul, Loki began to believe that he would do Asgard a favor and thus he traveled a secret pathway to Jotunheim to ally himself with those he knew would disturb the peace and alert the Allfather enough to reconsider his decision.

Loki gulped when he sensed with every fiber of his being what the Goddess was going to show him next and a shiver crept down his neck and spine when the events leading to his downfall unfolded in front of his eyes. He saw himself fighting on Jotunheim, saw his lips gape open in terror, his eyes flickering with disbelief and fear when a Frost Giant grabbed his arm and his skin turned blue, a coldness seeping into his bones. He saw himself softly whimpering a voiceless 'no' when he began to suspect that the sole reason he had always felt different was because he was different. He saw himself in the vault of Asgard shortly after their return from Jotunheim and Thor's banishment. He saw himself standing in front of the Casket of Ancient Winters, his fingers hovering in the air because he was afraid to touch it, the knowledge that his life would never be the same if his silent suspicions were confirmed pumping through his bloodstream and accelerating his heart. He saw Odin coming after him and heard himself ask whether he was cursed. He heard Odin tell him how he had found him as a baby, abandoned and left to die, how he was the bloodson of Laufey, how the Allfather had taken him in to establish peace between the two warring kingdoms; and Loki's younger self's eyes painfully reflected how his world had shattered to pieces in that moment. The fear, the disbelief, the shock, the pain; they were all visible, palpable, and Loki's chest tightened as he watched himself crumble. He heard himself cry, asking, still full of hope but even more full of despair whether he was nothing more than another stolen relic, locked up in the vaults of Asgard until the Allfather might have use of him, asking why the truth had been kept from him. He felt the thought that was going to make him lose his mind grow invisibly in the darkness behind Nemesis's projections. Because I am the monster that parents tell their children about at night. The monster. THE MONSTER. YOU, LOKI, ARE A MONSTER.

Having heard all the terrible tales about Jotunheim's folk as a child, Loki had believed this instantly, and no one had convinced him of the contrary. Not even Frigga. Not even his mother had tried to convince him that Frost Giants were not monsters. On the contrary, she had told him that he must know they loved him despite the fact that he was one of them and, in that instant, he had felt betrayed by even his beloved mother dictating him how to feel in his most vulnerable of moments. But then, she had appointed him the rightful king of Asgard as long as Odin rested and Thor remained in exile shortly after that, and he had felt nothing but confusion and rage.

Much of what Nemesis showed him next was still a blur in his own memory. He watched himself sitting on the throne, most of his emotions safely suppressed until Sif let him feel that he had no right to sit on Hlidskjalf. He watched as he sent the destroyer to Midgard to kill Thor in a fit of madness in order to prove that he could do right by Asgard once Odin was dead and kingship would pass onto him. He watched how he attempted to destroy his birth planet to obliterate the frozen Hel that had spawned him as if it would erase what he had learned and how Thor returned and how he fought him in the observatory and Loki was shocked to realize how little he remembered of that confrontation. He watched the Bifrost implode, watched him and Thor fall from the bridge, falling until Odin came to rescue them. For a moment, there was hope sprouting inside his chest, but Odin crushed it with two simple words and, suddenly, Loki was no longer under any illusion that he deserved to live among the people of Asgard. He knew, or thought he knew, that he had failed and would never rise in the Allfather's esteem. Not as an Aesir, not as a sorcerer, not as a son, not as a prince, not as a warrior. And thus he let go of his need to be accepted for who he was because who he was would never be enough for anyone, not even his own family.

Loki heard Thor's outcry of pain when his brother's fingers loosened around Gungnir and he plunged into the abyss of space, falling without the insight that the only reason Odin had made him feel weak was because he feared his strength. Falling until the stars devoured him whole and spit him out at Thanos's feet with the firm belief that he was unworthy and unlovable.

The projection faded and Loki felt tears streaming down his face as the words Thor had uttered earlier that day—was it even still that day?—were clattering through his skull. How is that for a reveal? He choked on a sob when his mind connected the dots. Letting go had been an absolute necessity, yes, but he had let go of the wrong things in the wrong way.

"I see," whispered Nemesis, almost solemnly. "I do not even need to show you what comes next."

"No," Loki sniveled; not only because he still could not bear the thought of seeing his arrival in the Mad Titan's lair and everything that followed, but because, more importantly, he understood now, really understood, how Frigga's words made sense. Embrace your chaos. Embrace your power.

"Very well, then, Loki, child of the Aesir and the Giants, convince me that you no longer wish to be a prisoner," said Nemesis and then she fell silent and the blackness around him dissolved and Loki was back in Shuri's laboratory in Wakanda and his ears were ringing and the sudden, aggressive flashes of light around him were stabbing into his retinas and he sank to his knees, screwing up his eyes.

"There he is!" someone screamed and Loki neither understood the meaning of the emphasis nor did he know where the voice was coming from because the world around him would not stop spinning.

"Loki!" screamed Thor and even though Loki could not see him—to Hel with those lights—he could feel his brother sliding down beside him and looping his strong arms around his trembling frame. "Say something!"

"By Yggdrasil, let him breathe, will you?" came from Valkyrie.

"I am f-fine," Loki stammered. He forced his eyes open but his brother's face was a blur. "Wh-what did she tell you?"

"To convince her that there is still hope for the Aesir." Thor gulped. "Did she tell you the same?"

Loki drew in a sharp breath. "Not quite." He blinked until his brother's face and the room behind it finally swam into focus. The Infinity Stones, he realized, were no longer crying out. The magic in the air had stilled. Thankfully, they still had some time left. "How are you planning to do that?"

Thor looked absolutely horrified at the question. "There is no way," he whispered, and he looked so broken and doubtful and insecure that Loki's heart gave a violent lurch.

"Of course there is," Loki yelled and his voice sounded alien and distorted in his own ears. "There must be. Why else would we still be here?" He paused, groping for his eloquence that seemed to be lying dormant somewhere in his fogged head. "She showed you the history of Asgard, did she not? Father's past?"

"And she expects me to rise above my forebears," Thor answered. "But how could I ever do that if the same blood is flowing through my—"

"When will you understand that you have already risen above them?" Loki placed his hands upon his brother's shoulders and shook him; shook him much more violently than he had intended. "You are humbled by your failures still while those who came before you blatantly ignored them. And that makes you the right person to sit on that throne if there ever again should be one."

Thor sobbed and rested his forehead against Loki's, who jerked away from such an exorbitant display of affection before the conscious part of his mind realized what his body was doing.

"Sorry," Thor mumbled, then harrumphed. "But what are we—" He interrupted himself when the seventh stone containing the conscience of Nemesis broke free and the lock made of the near-indestructible volcanic rock from Svartalfheim shattered like a glass clattering to the floor.

Well, maybe they did not have any time left after all. Too bad.

Thor and Loki shot to their feet instantly.

"This can't be good," came from Stark and the raccoon.

The stone hovered in the air, emitting waves of energy that crackled and hissed and snarled.

The mortals stumbled backwards in awe.

The stone released a projection of Nemesis that looked like a mere projection to the eye but was far more powerful than that because the air inside the room was quickly thickening with magic, invisible fumes rising up and sucking in the oxygen.

"Convince me, sons of Odin," commanded the Goddess.

Notes:

~ Ok, so first of all, I'd like to know what you think about Loki giving the voice a name, which is a variation from the word "dark" in Icelandic by the way and is as such dreadfully clichéd but also has a nice ring to it.
~ Second, the "cancer growing inside of Asgard" thing is what Loki tells Thor in the 'Thor: Heaven and Earth' comic run by Paul Jenkins (2011) when he tries to convince his brother that Ragnarok needs to happen because creation needs to be purged of that cancer and that, in this way, even destruction serves a purpose and that this is, ultimately, how he—the liar, the trickster—serves a purpose.
~ Third, I really wanted to show what Akira hinted at in her last review, namely that Nemesis was taking "both Loki and Thor to apparently the same place at the same time (though there doesn't seem to be any concept of place and time) but separating them nonetheless", which is exactly what happens here and which is why I decided to use the same wording for some lines (such as the "I see your mind is open now, Thunderer/Trickster" introduction or the "Convince me" closing followed by the exact same paragraph describing how they are released back into Wakanda). Plus, they're both thinking about how their first impulse has always been to protect the other from harm as soon as Nemesis appears, which happened automatically while I was writing and thought was pretty neat.
~ Fourth, there are different things Thor and Loki need to understand. Thor needs to overcome his fear of never being able to surpass the father he held in such high esteem for almost all his life (which was made quite clear in Endgame as well) and Loki needs to truly understand why his own mind has always worked against him. You may think that this chapter is sort of 'unnecessary' because Frigga already told Loki to embrace his chaos and all that and her words already took a weight off his chest. Yet, being told something is still not the same as understanding it for yourself and I have always wanted to have a scene in this fic where Loki is forced to reflect upon his childhood and his youth in order to be able to really grasp why and how his mind has been 'corrupted'.
~ That being said, now all they have to do is to ACTUALLY convince Nemesis. Stay tuned!

Oh, and Ravenleaf, the part your story actually helped me with was the dinner conversation! Thank you again! :)