There were advantages and disadvantages to using this spell on an unconscious person. The subject didn't know it was happening—provided he didn't wake up in the middle of it. Advantage. The subject's obliviousness meant the intruder was more able to direct what he saw. Advantage. Dreams and fantasy wove together with the true memories, sometimes to the point where it became impossible to tell where fantasy ended and reality began. Disadvantage. The intruder's own stray thoughts could veer things wildly off course. Disadvantage.

Whether the subject was asleep or awake, entering someone else's mind was different every time, and it was not something determined by the intruder. Sometimes you became a bodiless observer. Sometimes you watched their memories like a play. Sometimes you could walk freely through the constructs of their psyche as though a visitor in their home, with different memories contained in the different rooms. Sometimes you watched their memories as if through their own eyes.

This time, it seemed to be closest to the third option. First, he found himself standing on the rainbow bridge not far from where the Observatory should have been, except that the great golden sphere was gone. The bridge came to a jagged end, and Father stood at the very edge, holding onto a large, booted foot. Loki peered over and saw that the foot belonged to Thor, who was clutching Gungnir. The Loki of Thor's memory was holding onto the lower half of Gungnir by one hand. Loki watched himself cry out to Odin, but he couldn't make out the words. Perhaps Thor had not properly heard them and so could not include them in his memories. The hand slipped farther towards the end of Gungnir's shaft.

"No, Loki," said Odin in quiet rebuke. Loki had no idea what this was about, but he watched a light go out in the eyes of the memory version of himself.

"Loki, no!" said Thor, his voice full of dread and pleading. It made no difference, and Loki watched himself deliberately release the end of Gungnir and fall into a swirling vortex below while Thor screamed.

Loki didn't understand. Thor had said he was murdered, but this… Before he could attempt to make further sense of it, everything blurred and shifted, and now he was standing on a ridge of ash-black soil. The place felt lifeless, and it was lit by what looked like a black hole. Svartalfheim? What the Hel were they doing here? He spun around, wanting to get his bearings as quickly as possible. Thor and another version of Loki—both with rather longer hair than they currently had—were battling...no, it couldn't be. Dark elves? But they were supposed to be extinct! A woman was standing near where the long-haired Loki was fighting four elves with daggers. She wore Asgardian garb but was rather more petite than most Aesir women and he didn't recognize her at all. What was more, even if most of them weren't fully-fledged warriors like Sif, no Aesir maiden who had seen more than six centuries would stand to the side, weaponless, while her princes did battle. Was she a mortal, then?

The long-haired Loki finished off the last of the four dark elves, then glanced over to where Thor, whose opponent looked more like a beast than an elf, was being pummelled into the black dirt. Loki watched his counterpart seize something off one of the elf corpses' belts, along with one of their split-bladed swords, and sprint over to them. He plunged the sword through the beast's back. This only seemed to anger it, for it turned and impaled Loki onto the portion of the blade that protruded from its chest. Thor screamed again while Loki gasped, though he also slipped the object he'd grabbed onto the beast's belt. It hurled him into the sand, where he convulsed around his wound. He mustered enough strength to sneer at the beast. "See you in Hel, monster."

It realized what he had done and scrabbled madly at its belt, but the device exploded, and the creature was sucked, rather gruesomely, into what appeared to be some kind of weaponized spatial anomaly, like a miniature black hole. Thor heaved himself to his feet and ran to Loki, pulling him into his arms.

The present-day Loki watched this, just as confused as he was by the first scene. Thor wasn't the most eloquent with his words, but even he wouldn't have described this as murder, surely. This was an honorable death in battle. The kind any Aesir aspired to—though Loki would have preferred his own to come a few millennia later. Soon, the Loki in Thor's arms ceased to speak, and his eyes fell closed as an ashy texture spread over his skin. Thor roared in grief. The skies darkened in this dead realm's equivalent of an oncoming storm, the loose black dirt swirling up everywhere. Within moments, it had obscured everything, and then the scene shifted again.

Now Loki was standing in the wreckage of a spaceship he had never seen before, the floor of which was littered with dead Aesir, as well as a few aliens of various species. An anguished cry that was already becoming far too familiar caused him to spin around, and he saw a large purple alien—a Titan?—pulling a lance out of Heimdall's chest. What was Heimdall doing on a ship instead of standing at his post? Where had his armor gone, and when had his hair ever been that long?

"You're going to die for that!" said Thor. Loki was even more startled by his appearance than Heimdall's. His hair was shorn down to scarcely longer than an inch, there was a patch over his right eye, and the little he could see of him that wasn't bound in strips of metal looked bruised and dirty. Another strip of metal flew to cover his mouth.

Loki had an extremely bad feeling about all of this. Only one Titan had ever been spoken of on Asgard. The Mad Titan. Father had waged war against him long ago, before the fall of the Valkyrior. But even with their help, it had been a long and bloody war, and Asgard's victory had not been absolute. Thanos had been driven from Yggdrasil and sealed outside its borders, and the Tesseract, the prize he had failed to claim from Odin, had been hidden away on Midgard. But now, Loki watched as the Titan crushed the Tesseract in his hand and dropped the Space Stone into one of the settings of the golden gauntlet he wore, which looked to be of dwarven make. It already contained a purple stone, and there were four settings remaining.

Loki barely had time to process the horror of what this meant—worse than Ragnarok, indeed—when a version of himself strode into view, past the Titan's henchmen. He wore leather armor unlike any from Asgard, though still in his usual colors of black and green. He made rather a business of pledging his loyalty to the Titan, but from where the present day Loki stood, he could see the dagger his counterpart conjured behind his back. So could Thor. Were they truly so pressed for options that one dagger was the best he could do? Apparently so, and it was woefully insufficient. The Titan caught his attack in a field of blue energy, then seized him by the throat with his gauntleted hand. He made eye contact with Thor, who strained at his bonds to no avail, and choked the life out of him.

The present day Loki sank to his knees, feeling like he might be sick. Murder. Yes. At last, the term applied. How much of this was accurate to the real events? How much was Thor's subconscious making alterations?

Shift. They were back on the shattered Rainbow Bridge, but this time it was the one-eyed, short-haired Thor dangling over the edge. Instead of hanging there, holding onto Gungnir, he made a wild grab with his free hand and caught onto Loki before he could let go. "I have you, Brother!" he declared. "It will not be as it was before!"

A cold laugh made Loki jump and Thor awkwardly crane his neck around. A woman with a great horned headdress was standing behind Odin on the bridge. "No," Odin whispered, but before he could do anything else, she had conjured a wicked-looking black blade in one hand and run him through. Thor and the present-day Loki both yelled, and Odin's grip slackened. Thor and the dream Loki both fell into the vortex. The woman picked up Mjolnir, which was lying on the bridge, and the scene remained intact long enough for Loki to see the shadow of the her headdress grow until it cast all of Asgard into darkness.

Shift. Loki found himself running in Thor's wake through the halls of the palace, running as fast as they could go. "Faster, faster! I can change it!" Thor was growling to himself. The hallway appeared to be lengthening before them. "No!" said Thor, and he pressed even faster. Loki was sure he was only keeping up because none of this was real. At last, Thor burst into the room at the end of the corridor—Mother's private weaving room. He screamed. Loki ran around him and saw that the same creature Thor that had run him through on Svartalfheim had just done the same thing to the Queen of Asgard.

Shift. Svartalfheim again, but now it was the Titan Thor fought. "Dread it," he said, "run from it...destiny still arrives."

"NO!" Thor bellowed. Instead of Mjolnir, he fought with an axe wreathed in blue flame. "I'm going to change it! This time I'm going to kill you before you can ever lay a hand on him or anyone else!"

The Titan landed a punch to Thor's chest, sending him flying back. At the same time, his other hand shot out behind him and closed around the throat of the Loki who had been creeping up on him with a dagger. "It will always end this way," he said, crushing Loki's throat while Thor watched. "We stand here on a planet your grandfather killed five thousand years ago, and you think you can prevent the consequences by going back a handful of years? Destiny is coming for you, grandson of Bor, son of Odin, brother of Hela. You and all that you love."

Thor screamed. His one eye blazed white and lightning sparked off him in every direction, and he sent the axe spinning at the Titan. It thudded home in his chest, and he fell, but there was a dark elf waiting behind him, and the woman with the horned headdress was behind him, sitting astride a massive black wolf, her head thrown back in laughter. Behind her, a fire demon, who grew and grew until he obscured everything else. Thor looked around, and the barren ground was suddenly strewn with bodies besides Loki's. Frigga. Odin. Heimdall. The Warriors Three. Sif. A dark-skinned Aesir woman in the armor of a Valkyrie. A man in a red and gold suit with a glowing light in the chest. A man in a red, white, and blue suit. A smaller man in nothing but tattered trousers, a greenish tinge fading from his skin. All three appeared to be mortals, and there were several other Midgardians mingled in with the dead Aesir as well.

Loki couldn't bear any more of this, and Thor's subconscious was plainly becoming less coherent anyway. He removed his hand from Thor's forehead in reality, which abruptly severed the connection, flinging him back into his own head.

X

Thor woke very suddenly from a terrible nightmare of death and failure, and he found Loki standing over him, his face white as a sheet. But he barely had time to register his brother's presence before Loki vanished from sight. A second later, the door flew open and slammed shut again.

It wasn't hard to work out what had happened. Loki, presented with a mystery as intriguing as what the next eight years might hold that Thor wanted to prevent, had decided that he would take a look inside Thor's mind rather than wait to be told. As a younger man, Thor would probably have been furious with his brother for that—assuming he had paid close enough attention to put the pieces together in the first place. But now, Thor's only priority was Loki's well-being, so he leapt out of bed and went in search of him.

Finding the God of Mischief when he didn't want to be found was no easy task. Loki had already cloaked himself, and no matter how hard Frigga had tried to teach him, Thor had never quite gotten the hang of sensing illusion magic, let alone seeing through it. The day after her funeral had been a rare exception, due more to Loki's misery than Thor's perceptiveness. So to find him now, he went from one to the next of all the places Loki could usually be found, calling out for him. He got no response in Loki's chambers, the library, or any of the little nooks around the palace where he'd once come across Loki reading. By the time he trudged out to Frigga's garden, he was losing hope of finding him before morning.

"Loki!" he said loudly, for the hundredth time. "Come out! I'm not angry with you, I only want to talk." He walked between beds of beautifully cultivated flowers and other plants from all across the nine realms and beyond. "Much of what you saw is what I have lived, and it isn't even the half of it, but none of it is set in stone. I know we can change it!"

"Do you?" came a voice to his right. He turned and saw Loki materialize beside a tree from Alfheim as he dropped the cloaking spell. "Do you really know that? What if it can't be changed? You can't deny that you fear it."

"I do fear it," said Thor. "More than anything, I fear having to watch those I love suffer and die all over again. But I won't let that stop me from trying. I have the advantage over our enemies this time. I know more than they do, and I know what they want and where they must go to obtain it. If I have my way, Mother will never so much as lay eyes on a Dark Elf, Hela will never harm another soul, and you will never be within Thanos's clutches."

"Then Hela does exist?" said Loki. Thor could understand why that particular point would be of greater interest to him than Dark Elves or the Mad Titan.

"Yes," said Thor. "It turns out I'm not the firstborn after all. We have a sister. She's been imprisoned in Niflheim for her crimes longer than we've been alive. Father wiped all knowledge of her from Asgard, but she's the one who slaughtered the Valkyrior when we were boys. When she got free, she massacred most of our people. All the Einherjar. Fandral, Volstagg, and Hogun. In the end, the only way we could stop her was by bringing about Ragnarok."

A long silence followed this explanation.

"And here I was worried about you on the throne," said Loki eventually, clearly attempting to lighten his own misgivings with humor, though judging from his grimace, it hadn't worked very well. "Is she what you want to talk to Father about when he wakes?"

"Not the only thing, but yes."

There was a pause in which Loki looked around at Frigga's many carefully tended plants. "The Dark Elves."

"Not as extinct as we have always believed," said Thor.

"What happened?"

"We had stumbled upon the Aether by mistake. Malekith and his army came for it, hoping to remake Yggdrasil in the form they chose, at the cost of all other life in its branches. Mother died defending it. That broke Father, I think, and then you were gravely wounded avenging her the very next day. Mortally wounded, it appeared at the time."

It was difficult to force the words out, and when he looked at Loki, he saw that his eyes were shining and his fists were clenched. "But you stopped Malekith."

"I did. And this time we will do it before any of that can happen."

Loki paused again, and Thor saw him picking at the skin of his palm with his fingernails. "Brother," he said, far more hesitant than he usually sounded. "Did I really attempt to end my own life, or was that mere nightmare?"

Thor closed his eyes, resisting the urge to grab Loki in another hug. "That was real."

"It looked like was to happen not long from now."

"Not long at all. Just three days."

"Why?" Loki's tone was one of incredulity mixed with hints of apprehension and contempt.

Thor looked at him. "I could tell you everything I know about that right now," he said, "but I beg you not to ask it of me."

Loki's brow furrowed. "Is it truly so terrible?"

"It was to you, though I have never fully understood why."

"And you think you can keep me safe by keeping me ignorant of it?" said Loki heatedly.

If Loki thought he could provoke Thor into speaking, he was mistaken. "No," he said. "I think it all could have been avoided if you had been told long ago, but I am not the right person to tell you. You deserve to hear it from Father." Loki looked away, not quite managing to conceal an air of sulkiness. "Can you wait until he wakes?" Thor pressed on. "I will speak to him when he does and ensure that you don't have to wait a moment longer than that."

Loki took a while to consider. He looked troubled, but after a few seconds, his expression smoothed into something lighter. "The curiosity may drive me mad," he said with an exaggerated sigh of longsuffering, "so it'll be up to you to keep me too busy to fret over it."

"Then you still want to come with me to Midgard?"

He rolled his eyes. "I don't know that I'll ever want to go to Midgard, but I'm not letting you make a mess of this by trying to do it all by yourself."

Thor smiled. "And I don't have to worry about you using that spell on me again if I go back to sleep?"

At this, Loki looked slightly chagrined. "I shouldn't have done that," he said. "It was wrong of me."

Thor's smile became a grin. "It's alright." He slapped Loki on the back. "You're still easily my favorite sibling."

Loki scowled, and Thor hastily dodged an oncoming dagger, laughing.

I'm back! I got stuck for a while trying to figure out how Loki was going to experience Thor's memories/nightmares. I tried to write it where Loki saw it all through Thor's perspective, but that didn't work, as much as I liked it when Loki realized Thor only had one eye. As soon as I let go of that idea, it all came pouring out, but then I got stuck again trying to figure out how they were going to react when Thor woke up. Loki fleeing and Thor having to go look for him was the last thing I needed to make the chapter work, and from there it was pretty easy to write the rest. So we have some angst and horror with Loki finding out a bit too much, but it could have been a lot worse. The reason Thor didn't have any nightmares about Loki being a villain is that he had already forgiven him and moved on by the time Thanos killed him. Likewise, Thor wouldn't dream about Loki being a Frost Giant because that doesn't matter to him at all. I should mention, though, before anyone comments that present-day Loki would've heard the lines "I'm not Asgardian" and "rightful King of Jotunheim," that even the dream scenes based mostly on memory are not 100% accurate. This is all subjective recall with additional inaccuracies because Thor is dreaming. That's why Loki couldn't hear what he was saying to Odin in the first one either.

I will most likely update "Interventionism" and "My Brother's Keeper" before I get back around to this one, but the boys are probably heading to Earth next.