Chapter Text
You have dug your soul out of the dark, you have fought to be here; do not go back to what buried you.
-Bianca Sparacino, The Strength in Our Scars
Being alive was a plus, at least. Loki was grateful to be alive.
He’d keep telling himself that.
Chest tight, stomach roiling, Loki opened his eyes and faced one of his worst nightmares. Considering his nightmares were pretty terrible by most standards, that was saying something. The things he’d faced in battle over the years would give anyone nightmares. Add that to the Black Order, a year in Asgard’s dungeons, his mother’s death, his father’s death, Ragnarok, and Thanos, his own death—well, when it came to nightmares, he had plenty to choose from.
This was worse.
But he had to do it. This was something he had to face. There would be no fixing it if he couldn’t even face it.
Steeling himself, taking a deep breath, Loki looked into his own eyes.
Red. Red eyes stared back from the mirror. Red eyes in a blue face. Raised lines traced over his forehead. His stomach balled into something tight and cold, but simultaneously burned its way up his esophagus.
His hair was still black. That was something he still recognized about himself, anyway.
And he was alive.
He was also a Frost Giant.
So. Things could have been going better.
“Loki?” Thor’s voice said. It was hesitant. Quiet. It was how he talked to Loki these days. These days? As though there was some kind of new normal for them. Loki didn’t know what normal looked like between the two of them; hadn’t known what normal looked like for years. Back when he had, back before the coronation, Loki hadn’t liked normal.
This, though—there was nothing normal about this.
His existence was still baffling. He kept trying to put it in order in his mind, but it was like…he couldn’t. As though the laws of nature had been broken and his mind couldn’t be put in order. What he remembered was how much his neck had hurt. His neck had hurt so badly. And then he realized he was coughing, gasping for air, air that didn’t exist, and his back hit something hard and his eyes were—open? And he was staring into brightness that slowly, around the edges, dimmed to blue.
Blue. It had been the sky. Earth’s sky. But it could have been his horrible Jotun skin.
He’d breathed in again, because what was he supposed to do? And he’d coughed again, but this time there was air, clear, fresh smelling air. Air that smelled like—green. Plants. Dirt. Brine. The sea? His neck had hurt so, so badly.
“—went wrong with it.”
“Hey, it wasn’t my spell. I made my feelings pretty clear on what I thought about this.”
“I’m not a sorcerer, you are, and you agreed—”
“I’m just here for supervision.”
There was a gentle touch on Loki’s shoulder. “Brother. Brother.” The voice was Thor’s. Thor. Pieces came back. Everything came back. Loki had wanted to weep. Had he saved his brother? Had they survived Thanos? Was it just them? Heimdall—Heimdall was gone, Banner sent back to Earth. Just Thor and Loki; but Thanos had had his hand around Loki’s neck and there had been pain, so much pain—
He would have the Tesseract. The Tesseract and the Power Stone.
Loki had kept coughing. His neck hurt. His neck hurt. It felt broken.
“Strange, do something!” Thor said. He sounded wild, panicked, and Loki wanted to say It’s just that I can’t breathe, that’s all.
Hands had touched his neck, then jerked away with a cry and a curse. If Loki hadn’t been struggling to take a breath, he’d have wondered at that.
Well, he understood now. His skin. His stupid Jotun skin had burned whoever had touched him.
He’d gotten a breath, somehow. His neck had still hurt, but he’d twisted it to the side as nausea welled in his gut and he’d been sure he was going to vomit and he’d been drunk enough to be sick many many times in his life and that was something he knew; turn your head, vomit to the side, don’t drown in your own sick.
“He wouldn’t be able to do that if his neck was broken,” a voice had said tightly. Not Thor’s voice, but the other one. Loki had thought he’d recognized it, but couldn’t place it. It hadn’t seemed important at the time.
As Loki stared at himself in the mirror, the floor creaked outside the bathroom. Thor’s voice came again, just as hesitant. “Loki, are you here?”
“Where else would I be?” Loki asked, hearing his voice come out cold and bitter. That hadn’t changed.
Nothing happened for a moment. Then, the door opened slowly, hinges squealing. They had a layer of rust on them. Everything metal in the house did. Loki thought it was because Thor left the windows open. They’d been open when Loki had set foot in the house two weeks ago, and presumably had been open long before then. Maybe months. Maybe years. It was too cold outside, but they were still open. The air in New Asgard, blowing off the gunmetal gray water of the fjord, was damp and thick with brine. Loki couldn’t get it off his skin no matter how hard he scrubbed his hands, that layer of salt that coated everything.
When he started scrubbing at his skin, he wished he could scrub the blue away.
Thor peeked his head into the bathroom. Loki couldn’t get used to the way he looked—the robotic eye, bright brown instead of blue, the tangled mess of his beard and hair, the extra pounds he carried. The way his shoulders slumped forward, bowed under the burden of grief. The lines in his face. The crushed expression in his eyes.
That had been the first thing Loki had seen when his eyes had focused, that day out on the cliffs. The grief in Thor’s eyes. The grief in those furrows in his face. Loki would find out later that it had been five years, but in that moment, he’d wondered if it had been five hundred.
The door opened wider. Thor’s bulk filled the space. In the mirror, Loki’s eyes flicked towards him. “What?” he asked.
Thor ran his thumb over the edge of the door. “Have you eaten anything today?”
Oh, gods. Was Thor trying to mother him? Loki tasted bile. “No. I just got up.”
This wasn’t true. He’d actually been up for over an hour. He’d been standing in the bathroom the entire time. He’d planned on showering. He couldn’t really remember the last time he’d done that. He was pretty sure it had been here in Thor’s house. He was pretty sure the last time hadn’t been on The Statesman.
It was bizarre. It felt like much longer than two weeks ago that he’d been on The Statesman. It had been. For everyone else, it had been. But he’d been dead.
He’d been dead.
He’d been dead and then Thor had brought him back. But whatever spell he’d used, whatever magic he’d tapped into, it had stripped Loki of his Asgardian form. Loki had never understood what magic had turned him from Jotun to Asgardian in the first place. It had been more than a glamour, more than an illusion. It had been deeper than that—but now it was gone. It was gone, and he was Jotun: blue skin, red eyes, and lines etched into his face, the backs of his hands, his chest, his arms, down his legs and across his feet. The only part of him that was unchanged was his hair. Apparently that part had always been Jotun.
Loki had always hated himself, but now his reflection made him sick.
Thor’s thumb moved up and down over the edge of the door. It was annoying. It set Loki on edge. Before, Thor had never had nervous tics. Now he was full of them. His fingers moved constantly, worrying at his clothing, at those horrible, fingerless wool gloves he wore. He picked at things, ran his fingertips back and forth, like he was doing now.
“I thought perhaps we could eat breakfast together,” Thor said.
“We have been eating breakfast together,” Loki said. Not through any choice of Loki’s. Loki ate his meals and Thor joined him. They didn’t speak. At least, they spoke so little that it may as well have been not speaking. At first, Thor had tried. He had told Loki about the past five years, about Thanos and the Snap; time travel and regaining Mjolnir and then sending it back; the Battle of Earth. New Asgard. The Guardians. The decision he had finally come to, that he didn’t want to rule without Loki there.
All Loki had needed to do was listen. Thor had seemed…happy? No, that wasn’t quite right. Thor had seemed victorious. He had been happy that he’d accomplished the thing he’d set out to do. There was no way it could be sustained—not with Loki as miserable as he was. Once the thrill of not being dead had worn off, once it had sunk in that he was Jotun, and none of his magic was turning him back, Loki had fallen into a misery so profound that nothing seemed capable of raising him out of it.
He couldn’t believe it had only been two weeks. It felt like two months. Possibly longer. The days were all the same. Autumn was turning to winter in Norway, and the days were short. They felt shorter in Thor’s house—or rather, they felt darker. Thor didn’t seem in the habit of opening curtains, and Loki didn’t feel the need to disabuse him of it. He didn’t want people seeing him, anyway.
“Not here,” Thor said. A hesitation. “There’s a café in town. It’s…well, it’s not that good, I suppose. But it’s something different.”
“I don’t think so,” Loki said immediately.
Thor looked crestfallen, but not particularly surprised. “Why not?”
Turning to face Thor, Loki asked, “You must be joking.”
Thor’s fingers kept moving on the door. “You haven’t been out of the house in two weeks.”
Loki raised his eyebrows. “What do you imagine I’m going to do, Thor?”
A shrug from Thor. Loki thought he’d won. Thor would leave him alone now. But then, Thor took a breath and said, “This isn’t good for you. Locking yourself away in here.”
“Again, what do you imagine I’m going to do?” Bitterness rising in his chest, Loki turned back to the mirror, catching sight of himself again, his horrible blue skin, those lines like scars running down his face. The sleeves of his sweater were bunched up around his elbows; savagely, he yanked them down, clutching at the excess fabric. It was Thor’s sweater and it was much too big. Loki didn’t have anything of his own. All of it was Thor’s.
Waving his hand, he cast a glamour over himself. It didn’t fix anything, but at least he could stand to look in the mirror. He didn’t want to look at Thor because he didn’t want to see the relief on his brother’s face. And yet, he couldn’t not look at Thor, because he had to torment himself with that relief.
Thor didn’t look relieved. If anything, he looked worried. Preoccupied. He was still thinking about how to get Loki to go to this café. Unbelievable.
“I think it would be good for you to leave the house,” Thor repeated. “We don’t have to have breakfast if you don’t want to. We can take a walk.”
Ah, yes. A glimpse of the old Thor. Do something, take action, don’t sit around. Take a brisk walk and your problems will disappear.
“I don’t want to,” Loki said.
“Well, we don’t have any food. So there’s nothing to eat in the house.”
“Presumably you know how to acquire food for yourself? You’ve been living on Earth for almost six years.” Loki wanted to leave the bathroom now. He wanted to go back to his room and lie on the bed and stare at the ceiling.
Thor breathed in through his nose, then out through his mouth. It looked like the sort of thing one did when they were trying not to lose their temper. “You live here now, too. You should come with me. We’ll get food together.”
Laughing bitterly, Loki said, “First it’s breakfast, then it’s a walk, now it’s shopping. Make up your mind, brother.”
Finally, Thor’s hand dropped away from the door, but only so it could clench into a fist at his side. “I told you. It would be good for you to leave the house. We do need to eat breakfast. We do need food.” He planted his feet. “I’m not moving until you agree to come with me.”
Loki snorted. “Ultimatums aren’t a good look for you.”
“You can’t stay shut in here forever.”
“Can’t I?”
Something flashed in Thor’s eyes. At least, in his blue eye. The other was curiously emotionless. Loki didn’t like it. But he did like seeing that flash of storminess, of lightning. Being on the receiving end of it had never been Loki’s favorite thing, but he had always been good at provoking the response. He’d been worried that Thor’s blood no longer contained the same storms.
He didn’t want to leave the house. But if there was a tiny bit of the old version of Thor in this person, then perhaps doing what he wanted to do would draw a little more out. At the very least, if they were walking and grocery shopping, Thor couldn’t fidget as much.
Loki chewed at the inside of his cheek. Then, slowly, he asked, “What sort of food does this café serve?”
There was another flicker on Thor’s face at these words. Not lightning or thunder. Hope. It made Loki feel tired. But he couldn’t regret it, much less begrudge it. “Norwegian food,” Thor said. “It’s for the tourists.”
Loki glanced at the bathroom’s small window, not that it allowed him to see outside. The curtains were drawn—though it was open a crack. Loki had tried to close it. His strength would have made it possible, but he’d felt the casing splintering and left it alone. It was too cold in the bathroom once all the steam from the shower escaped out the open window. Perhaps he’d talk to Thor about fixing it.
“Are there many tourists here?” he asked.
“No.” Thor hesitated. “Not anymore.”
For the first time in two weeks, Loki felt the pull of curiosity. Not anymore? What did that mean? There had been tourists before, but they had stopped coming? Why?
In the end, he didn’t ask. He didn’t want to have a conversation. He would get out of the house and he would eat at this café.
This was the most planning he’d done for his future since Thor had resurrected him. It already felt vaguely overwhelming.