Title: Behind the Scenes
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2,471
Characters: Loki, Thanos
Genre: General, Angst
Summary: "I remember you throwing me into an abyss." Loki falls, and instead of getting rescued by a therapist, he meets Thanos, who does not need a magic glowstick of destiny to nudge Loki onto the road to self-destruction. Intended to address part of Loki's character striketotally unexplained/strike growth between Thor and the Avengers.
Notes: Sorry for all the talking heads. This fic was a culmination of some ideas that had been brewing in my brain for too long and I kind of ended up barfing them all over the page. Contains way too much dialogue from a character that appears for like two seconds in Avengers and whose comics I have never read, which is why this is only coming out after Thor 2.
Warnings: Emotional manipulation, discussion of suicide, false memories

When he lands he does not break.

He cannot break where he is already broken. His is a mind half empty, its contents tumbling out across the unimaginable span of the fall like a child's treasure outgrown and discarded. His is a body cold with the void but slowly thawing with the hot crimson that runs out of him, a sharp jabbing like many accusing fingers of vital mechanisms gone awry. His thoughts run fleetly ahead of memory, shadows from a guttering torch thrown on the crumbling walls of his mind: cracks in the foundations of a golden palace, blazing rainbow light raining death upon a frozen realm of monsters with his eyes and his skin. The hunger of the void had pulled at him, as he had hung suspended between two paths, two worlds; and then, when there was nothing left to pull him back up, he had—

—he had—

NO

His fingers of his right hand curl in reflex, and close shut around nothing. His heart wrenches in its rusty moorings, dragged to and fro on unruly tides. Long ago and far away he fell from a bridge and yet the strength of the chains upon him are such that they would bind him still; their linchpins anchored a greater depth than any distance he could ever flee.

His name is Thanos, and Loki has come into his domain.

His servants the Chitauri drag Loki unresisting into their hiveship; where he spends an uncertain amount of time screaming and retching and raving as he is slowly put back together as best as they can with their clever instruments, in mind as well as in body. The roads between realms are always treacherous and many of them came unmoored with the breaking of the Bifrost, vanishing or warping beyond safe use—or changing their destinations altogether, when the rainbow shards flew through the void and ripped tears through the fabric of reality...

Loki will never speak of what he saw through those windows, or what he experienced when he attempted to win his way out from the void with the last, fading embers of his magic. Neither will he forget for the rest of his life however long it may be. His nightmares are a curse and a blessing both at once for the reminder of what he has lost but also what he has gained in exchange. Loki has grown beyond what his false brother can comprehend or embrace and that certain knowledge is a bulwark that guards against all but the most insidious of regrets.

When Loki wakes finally from a troubled sleep murked with an amalgam of vision and memory it is in the shadow of his unwanted savior, a broad-shouldered shape looming tall above him out of ancient legend. There is a familiarity to him deeper than the stories of his childhood and it is with a shiver Loki recognizes the signature of his alien craft in the shape of stitches in the unseen patchwork places buried beneath his skin and his bones.

"Walk with me," Thanos says, a statement phrased as a request that is, nevertheless, an order and Loki is obliged to comply.

Thanos shortens his long strides to match Loki's slower steps, and side-by-side they emerge from a sterile metal corridor to—an observation deck, Loki realizes too late to avert his eyes, facing a window stretching from wall to wall overlooking the rest of the fleet that orbits the hiveship quick and darting as silvery fish through a sea of stars. A visceral terror grips him and he flinches back as if from a blow, the solid press of the wall against his back a shamefully needed reassurance from the unending drop opening up beneath his feet mere metres away.

Thanos laughs at him, not with his voice but his eyes, deepset pools full of mockery for his weakness. Loki flushes with humiliation and his anger gives him both strength and will to speak. "What do you want? I doubt you rescued me out of the well-renown kindness of your heart...Thanos the Mad Titan."

Thanos does smile then, pleased; the craggy line of his mouth pulling away to bare his square blunt teeth. "You know of me," he says, his voice rumbling out of the vast barrel of his chest, resonant as the rocks before the shaking of the earth: "I must give the All-Father his credit; though golden Asgard feels free to label as mad those she cannot or will not understand she is at least not quite so ignorant as to discard readily the tales of her greatest enemy."

"Many have sought to lay claim to that title," Loki says, lifting his chin in ingrained instinct, though, perhaps, that old pride may no longer be his to bear, a thought that draws a truer and redder cut than it ought, "and many have fallen with more ignominy than should be expected from their grand boasts to Asgard's might, over the many millennia of prosperity she has enjoyed."

He braces himself for Thanos' angry reaction but the titan only seems amused. "Such harsh and swift judgment," he says, "from one who has lately added himself to that illustrious list."

"I was never Asgard's foe!" Loki snarls, goaded into stepping forward towards Thanos, into forgetting his fear of the abyss. "From the beginning to the end, everything I did was for her sake and hers alone! The All-Father, who should have been on bended knee thanking me, crowning me as his heir—" He draws in a quick breath and cuts himself off, remembering his audience. He remembers his feverish dreams, open to anyone with the ability and desire to read him as a book while he had lain in the sick chamber recovering from his wounds, and from there glean more intimate knowledge of him than he could have wished.

Loki says, carefully, "I ask again: what do you want from me? If you expect gratitude for retrieving my life from the abyss, paltry thing that it is—if you expect some sort of repayment—"

"Tell me," Thanos answers, with a mocking grin, "how grateful were you when your would-be father stole you away from certain death, and gave you a princedom, a brother, a loving mother—"

Loki's breath hisses out sharply. "Be silent," he says in a deadly whisper,"in private matters that do not concern you."

"How grateful was the All-Father," Thanos says, the laughter now bright in his eyes, the white expanse of his teeth, "when you would have delivered his ancient enemies into his hands utterly, decisively defeated without a single drop of Asgardian blood spilled? How grateful was your beloved brother who so carelessly started the war that you ended as a true king would—"

The world explodes into red. Loki slides down the door into which he had been thrown, doubled over his hands pressed over the bright flower of pain blooming in his ribs; conjured dagger skittering away over the stone and flickering into nothing. He licks at the blood coating his lips, taking wary measure of the titan's strength. More than one rib has just been snapped like a twig and his entire torso would have been crushed in the bargain if the titan had not intended the demonstration to serve as a relatively gentle warning.

"Remember your place," Thanos says, still unruffled but merrily contemptuous as he lowers the massive slab of his hand; how easily he had swatted Loki aside like an impudent fly. "My lady Death was willing to surrender you to me for a price but my patience is short and she is a far better nursemaid of stubborn fools than I."

"You prodded deliberately at scars still tender, and I will not apologize for defending myself," Loki says as calmly as he can, invoking the green glow of a healing spell with a gesture. "Nor will I submit myself to being nothing more than a tool to be picked up and used and discarded when done with...again."

Thanos nods, seeming strangely satisfied. "Gratitude is a paltry leash, unreliable and easily twisted into a noose upon the would-be master who holds it. As you would know best." Thanos only smirks at Loki's scowl. "Rest assured," he says, "I have no intention of throwing you into the abyss. That was poor reward indeed and I have much more to offer you than Asgard ever did in return for your service. Revenge is only the start of what I promise, for every wrong committed against you."

Loki frowns, distracted from his self-examination to ensure the spell is going well. Something Thanos had said rings oddly to him, but he also cannot deny that he is intrigued by the titan's proposal. "Yes," he says slowly. "Every wrong...from the beginning to the end." Rising to his feet, for the first time he brings himself to move his gaze beyond the floor and look upon the star-dusted sky stretching above and around him. It is an image engraved in acid upon his brain and he shivers in a mixture of nausea and loathing for the injury that has been inflicted upon him that he can only hope will heal with time—and with certain actions he can take. "It must be a long way," he murmurs, "between Asgard and where we now stand."

"It is a very long way," Thanos agrees with what is almost certainly feigned sympathy but Loki can appreciate the courtesy behind the pretense. "The most terrible punishment any king could devise for a traitor, a secure prison where you could contemplate your crimes for seeming eternity. You would be there still were it not for my aid, courting my lady most assiduously with desperate entreaties, the fleeing scraps of your sanity…"

"And yet you lived, where others would sooner die cowards than fight their demons in the void. Still you could be repaired where others would have shattered into pieces too numerous to be retrieved. I appeal to your wrath, Asgardian. It was your salvation in the winter of the void when the rest of you might have gone quietly into my lady's embrace. Place your purpose alongside mine, so you would work together with me of your own will rather than my compulsion; and thus earn the throne that should have been rightfully yours."

Loki's right hand twitches spasmodically; he curls the other over it to control himself before the shaking can spread. A punishment...was that what it was supposed to be? It is unthinkable, unfathomable...so unbearably unjust that he almost gags at the notion of it. Thor's face swims to the surface of his vision, vague as though scryed through the cold fog of Hel; dimly he recalls that large hand reaching out, stretching as far as it could go across the growing chasm between them—but no, the bridge is breaking, the bridge can never be fixed, and Thor does not pull him up after all and he is falling away into the dark…

He was falling, he has landed and now he is here.

Loki stares at his fists clenched together into one. The pain is so small and insignificant next to the confusion beating at his skull that it takes a moment for him to realize he is bleeding. Casually he separates both hands and slots them behind his back in a thoughtful pose. "I would hear more," he says, as though there were other choices he could possibly consider. In truth there are not, for the choice meats laid on the silver platter Thanos is holding out. He is on his guard of course for it seems too good to be true but that does not equate to passing up on opportunities that present themselves right before him. "Where is this throne that is supposedly free for the claiming? There are so many lying around that I cannot be sure which exactly you mean."

"Midgard," Thanos says. He elaborates, at Loki's clear surprise: "The Tesseract has recently awakened there and I wish it for my own, in preparation for future plans long in the making. The mortals are a weak-hearted people and the Tesseract is too mighty an artefact for the likes of them; in time it would have corrupted the most covetous and ambitious and consumed the rest." He chuckles. "Truly the mortals ought to be thanking me, for taking away a weapon they are only capable of misusing, and gifting them a king who I am certain will rule them with a strong and capable hand."

Loki accepts the flattery with a slight inclination of his head. "Asgard's histories have long reported the Tesseract lost," he muses, though his thoughts are galloping along an entirely different road. In his initial dismay he asks himself: what could he possibly want from the world that Thor so inexplicably loves, with its short-lived, fragile inhabitants; where the mortal woman who taught Thor her people's brand of sickening sentimentality lives? He repeats that question to himself, more calculatingly: and with a smile he finds that he likes the answer that comes to his mind. He could, of course, betray Thanos and abscond with the Tesseract but it is a difficult and dangerous tool to master for power he does not need and besides Thor will rage so much more entertainingly over an invasion and usurping than a theft.

And Loki with a throne is in a better position to challenge Asgard than Loki without a throne, the proof of the birthright that comes so easily to Thor...

"What was hidden away can someday be found again," Thanos says as if in response to his deliberations, pleasant tone unchanged: "As I found you in the void, and will find you again if you fail. I make this offer only with every expectation of success. Disappoint me and the consequences for wasting my time and my power will be as great as the reward you could have had. To be plain: you will suffer longer and worse than you ever did in the void, and Death will pass you by without a care for all your pleas until I am sure I have wrung every single drop of satisfaction from your worthless hide. Have we an understanding? "

"We have," Loki says, and in truth he is as relieved as he is shaken by Thanos' quiet menace, for his cruelty is far more reliable than any compassion. There is little difference that he can see between Thanos and Odin save that the former has the decency to be honest up front. His faith such as it is that Thanos will keep his bargain is bolstered. "It would not do to let that throne of mine grow cold for too long...tell me, where do I begin?"

-end-