Trigger warnings because Thor is a great big mourning mess, vaguely alcoholic and suicidal. Good thing Loki never stays dead. :-)
12.
It felt to Thor as though somebody had turned off the volume on his life. The world had gone out of focus and the people who tried to talk to him in those next few days swam in and out of vision like the sun through water as he drowned. He reeled and staggered from place to place, feeling always as though he was about to fall and nobody would be there to catch him.
Loki could never have caught him anyway. He knew that. If Loki had ever been in the right place to catch him when he fell, he would have skipped aside at the last moment and let him hit the deck. He would have laughed about it afterwards whilst Thor nursed the bruises.
These bruises felt more like breaks and they were impossible to nurse. That night, when he finally found himself alone, and all of the swirling, babbling, silent crowd was gone, he drank to make the reeling make sense.
He figured if he got incredibly blazingly drunk it would no longer feel so strange and awful to feel so disoriented. He would have a reason. It might make something better.
There was nothing to make better. No way in which anything could be fixed. That night he wandered from room to room in the latest temporary apartment they had shared trying not to look too closely at any of Loki's things, unable to look at anything else. He wondered how much he would have to drink before he just stopped – aside from that he could not even get his head around the thought of oblivion. It seemed he just carried on. It was all he had done before Loki, it was all he could do now.
He woke up the next morning with a volcano in his brain and Loki's devastating death screaming out at him from the face of every newspaper and magazine that came through the door . There were a lot – he realised. They were all Loki's. Loki liked to read everything printed about himself, liked to admire himself in the mirror of the public gaze. Thor could not help but think how delighted he would be right now.
But he was not delighted because he was dead.
Loki was dead.
Loki was dead. The words still did not make any sense. They did not reduce him to sobbing fits or mad wretchedness. They did nothing. He stared at the papers and made coffee. When Fandral came to see him he replied to everything sensibly and measuredly. Said that he was fine. That he'd be alright. Asked about the police reports.
There were a curious lack of police reports. What there were was hundreds – no thousands – of eye witnesses who all wanted to talk about how they witnessed the famous death. There were reports from ten times the number of people who were even at the show.
"Strangely," the papers said "All reports are consistent" – the stories of those who had been there and those who had not. But it was not strange at all, Thor thought; the first stories had painted the vision of what happened so clearly that those who had not been there wished they had been so hard they could almost see it. They had drawn pictures of the figure Thor had seen in the stands but as far as he was concerned he looked like a creature out of fantasy. A cloaked figure in a wide brimmed hat who walked as though he could not fully see where he was going. Strange Thor thought – was how everyone's eyes had been drawn that way the same time as his.
What nobody seemed to have noticed was that Thor had been in the audience himself and over the next few days the papers started in on the idea that he had done it. He was the Jealous Boyfriend, the Lesser Star, the Tag Along to the main feature which had always been Loki. Of course it had always been Loki. The papers spoke so headily about him you would have thought a saint had died. Thor could imagine Loki reading the stories and grinning his head off. He could see Loki sprawled across their sofa or the bed, laughing at the stories and reading them out to him whether he cared or not. Every room of the flat he walked into Loki was there, grinning at him.
"The music will never die," Loki said to him one morning, perched at the breakfast table in an emerald silk nightgown tapping the paper with a finger the way he used to – "The sweet and haunting sounds will live on forever, singing out the legend that was Loki Laufeyson". Loki turned to him and grinned, all teeth, morning sunlight glinting in his eyes. Then he was gone.
Another morning he woke up from a dream, clutching his guts and reeling from a dream that Loki had stabbed him.
"You killed me Thor!" Loki had screamed in his ears and in the wind all around him "Why'd you kill me Thor?"
"I never –" Thor had started to say, but they were so high up, his words got eaten up by the wind – "I would never – Loki I love you."
Loki was crying, enraged, shivering all at once;
"Sentiment," he spat and stabbed him.
That day Loki appeared everywhere he went, following him with accusing eyes.
"I told you I was scared," he would say, or "Why didn't you listen?" One time he threw a newspaper across the room – "They say you killed me – they don't know you really did!" he snarled. When he looked back Thor saw that the newspaper really had been thrown across the room. He did not remember that happening.
Thor tried not to go out; everywhere people looked at him with a depressing mix of sympathy and horror. He was torn between that and staying in the flat with Loki's ghost.
When he finally left the house officially it was almost a week later and he was mobbed before he had walked down the front steps;
"Thor, did you kill Loki? Thor what are your feelings on Loki's death? Thor were you there? Were you jealous of Loki's success? What's your best memory of Loki? Thor did you kill Loki? Did you kill Loki?"
Thor retreated back into his flat, back into himself. The question that rang in his ears was what was your best memory? He was living in memory, as much as he was living; he felt it was up for debate at the moment. Loki on stage, in those early days when he hated him, his arrogance and flashiness and attitude – he remembered how beautiful Loki had been, how much he had been taken in, enthralled.
He remembered taking the stage together, him on his knees to mime fellating that guitar that Loki could not actually play but carried with him on that occasion just for that purpose. He remembered the first time Loki had taken his hand in public, almost shyly, not wanting to look at him. He remembered all those meals and the ridiculous amount that Loki could eat, remembered how sweet he looked asleep; all his features relaxed so much he looked like a child, innocent as the day through which they slept. He remembered the feel of his skin, Loki's breath against him, remembered every touch like they were painted onto the inside of his head in glorious renaissance detail; a Sistine chapel of carnality.
More than anything, he remembered that first time on the roof. It felt like a dream now, or an enchantment, or the one time in his life anything had been really real. He remembered the taste of Loki's skin, of his sweat and sparkle. He smelled of greasepaint and cream and leaves. The impossible smell of burning rain. He remembered fantastically the sound of cars far below echoing on the night air in a roundel of noise, a poem in a language he could understand for that night only. He remembered the colour of the sky; the green fire and silver sparkle of it. The stars had flashed in every shade of rainbow that night and yes, if he listened hard enough, he could hear them twinkle. He remembered wishing on the multitude of stars that fell to earth while they watched and waking up with silver glitter on his skin.
He remembered the magic and he remembered fucking it up. Finally he started to cry. He cried until he felt he would die before he stopped. They might find him dead and still crying. He had never really formulated an idea of how much he loved the world. Maybe he liked it some, maybe he didn't – all he knew now was that without Loki it was all gone to shit. All poetry had fallen from him with the falling stars. Loki was the only star and he had not caught him.
The next day Fandral tried getting him out of the house for the second time; there were people, Fandral said, he had to take him to see; his band members and Loki's. Thor was reluctant; Fandral insistent. This time they made it a few steps down the road before they were besieged;
"Thor did you kill Loki? Thor what do you have to say to recent suggestions that Loki faked his own death? Thor did you kill Loki?" Thor had not heard the recent suggestions. He had given up on the papers. The idea had not even occurred to him. Loki would have told him if he was pulling a stunt like that, there was no way he would have left it like this in the knowledge that Thor would presume him dead. Thor could not even think it. The crowd pressed and clucked so loudly after all the silence in his life this past week it was too much; Thor screamed at them to fuck off and when they did not he broke through and ran.
He did not know where he was going, but finally, down an alley between two city blocks he felt the quiet come back and with it his knees gave way and he slumped hard against the brick, head in his hands, defeated.
He did not know how long he had sat there, time had stopped for him a week ago, maybe a year or two - on a gunshot. Eventually he heard footsteps. He did not look up until a voice called his name –
"Thor Odinson?"
"Go away."
The footsteps came closer.
"I said go away!" He had not known he could feel lower than he did; but he felt like he might break through the pavement he was so heavy. A persistent and unshakeable reporter was the last thing he wanted –
"I'm not interested. I just want to be left alone."
He could feel the person standing over him, watching him.
"For fuck's sake," Thor mumbled into his hands – "If I just tell you I did it will you go away?"
"Did what?"
"I did it. I killed Loki. Are you happy now?"
"No not really. In fact I strongly suspect you may be lying. You're not very good at it, you know."
"What the –" Thor heard the voice properly for the first time and finally he looked up – "Loki". His heart came back to life as his eyes turned to flint.
"Miss me?" Loki smirked.
_x_
Here, have a bad Loki to brighten up your day! :-)
