8AM. On the dot.
Every morning, Loki would come by your room and you would go to the breakfast room together. But for the last few weeks, you had made it clear you didn’t want to see him. He had broken your heart, and there was no fixing it.
You swing your legs out the bed and place your feet on the cold ground. It had been too long, staying in bed and crying over the same thing over and over again. You had to move. Get out. Leave. Someplace far away.
Everyone else in the tower was starting to wake up and get ready for the day - you can hear some of them in the corridor, chatting. Their cheery tones almost feel like an insult, so you go into the bathroom and drown them out by running the water at the highest possible pressure.
You pray for the scalding hot water to either weld you back together or burn you, it unkindly does neither.
A few minutes later, as you sit to dry your hair, there is a knock at the door.
“What?” you call rudely.
“Y/N...” a familiar voice comes, “Can we talk?”
You freeze with the dryer in your hand, and look into the mirror before you, almost not recognizing the person you see in there.
“Y/N?”
Tears stain your already red face. Your hand falls to your lap and you watch yourself crumble.
“Y/N, please” Loki pleads in a small voice. “Give me a chance to explain...”
You get up and open the door.
Loki looks bone tired, almost as hollow as you, with dark circles under his eyes. You’ve never seen him like that, even after the most grueling of missions.
“What can you have to say to me?” you ask.
Now that he’s at your doorstep, it seems he has lost his tongue. You know this, but hope lingers that he will say the right thing. You don’t know what the right thing is, but you’ll know it when you hear it.
Two months ago, you left for a family vacation. A big one, with all your cousins and their parents. You hadn’t grown up with a big family, and watching the Avengers just gave you a feeling of nostalgia for something you never had. Inspired by the love and camaraderie in the Tower, you arranged for a huge family vacation. It was a different matter that it didn’t go as well as you’d hoped. Turns out there was a reason the cousins didn’t speak to each other. You confided in Loki when things got hard, which was nearly every day after the first 3 days of the holiday. A medical emergency on your uncle’s part only prolonged the holiday and you ended up staying two months.
Two months of talking to Loki over the phone. He always made you feel better by recounting Tony’s lab mishaps and Thor’s adjustment to Earth life. You missed him, but it seemed those calls brought you closer together. You couldn’t wait to be back in his arms.
That was until you got a call from Clint just a few days before your arrival. Normally you wouldn’t believe a word Clint had to say, but this time he had no reason to lie. This shattered you enough to want to stay with the family, and you would have were it not for Tony’s orders to return to work at the lab.
“Did you switch your lab timings?” Loki asks after over a minute of silence.
“What is this, high school? We work on different things, we don’t need to be together all the time”.
“Sorry”.
Silence.
“Loki, why are you here?”
You can see he wants to cry, but he doesn’t. He clears his throat. This is it. This is the last time either of you can imagine what happens next.
“I can’t expect you to forgive me, and I won’t ask you to. I only beg you to give me a chance to prove I’m sorry and make amends”.
It was short. You wanted more. You wanted a speech. Something to justify him cheating on you with Maria Hill for two whole months, all the while comforting you and telling you he loves you.
“That’s it?” you ask.
“I don’t believe speaking for ages will help my case”
You could at least try you think. But he was right. You just wanted something to hold on to.
“You hurt me” you say. That simple sentence took so much out of you, you wanted to sit down.
“I swear she meant nothing, Y/N. It was just... a moment of weakness”.
“A moment doesn’t last two months”.
“I thought of you every second I was with her”
“Bullshit”.
It seems you had already made up your mind, and Loki sensed this.
“I’m moving out. I told Tony I’m getting my own place” you say.
He looks at you in surprise. “Y/N...”
“I can’t stay here and look at you two. It’s too hard. I can’t live in the same space as you”.
“I’ll move out...”
“No, just... Loki, stop”
“We could both leave! We’ll go to Asgard. Far away. It’ll be just you and me”.
You almost want to. The temptation is so strong to be whisked away into a different world and exist in a bubble far away from hurt and pain and self-pity.
He reaches out to you to touch you, and for moment you want to be the fool and let him embrace you. Fall into his words and promises, because it would be so much easier. You want to let him kiss you to patch your broken wings...
But you aren’t broken. Just angry. And anything good he does from now won’t be love, it will be to fix a mistake.
“No” you say. You step back into your room. “You should go, Loki”.
You can almost hear his heart shatter into a million pieces as you shut the door in his face.