Going Down, Down Together
Ridiculous.
You sprinted through the corridors with an undeniable lack of poise and grace the royal family might have laughed at you for, struggling to not run against the next column that was totally standing directly in your way and not quite some space aside. Each step appeared calculated, difficult as you felt the side effects from the medicine you had been provided with, felt the side effects of missing death by an hair’s width.
Ridiculous.
The book, tiny enough to fit into pockets of regular space, was now tucked into one of those hanging from the belt around your waist after you had discarded whatever little weapons were left inside. All the while your steps sounded without any rhythm as you stumbled to and fro through the corridors, trying to catch up with the friends you had left to solve some sort of galactic problem no one assembled deemed you to be fit enough to participate in. Your physical exhaustion weakened your body greatly, but your mind was still a mess as well—yet you did all you could to suppress whatever might bleed through to Loki as it scrambled around in your head.
Infinity Stones, yes. Nothing you were completely unfamiliar with by now, even though no topic you wanted to be familiar with either. The book was about the abilities and proper usage of the very stones which the entire universe was made out of, nothing too shocking after everything you had seen and heard from Thor and Loki. But what the book had actually been all this time was clear now you had seen it, had seen the handwriting in the corners, between the lines, smeared over words to cross them out and replace them in a hurried burst of ideas. It was clear once you had seen the writing you shouldn’t be able to read for it was a language you didn’t speak, yet could read anyways as if it had been you who had written these thoughts down in the first place.
The book functioned as Loki’s diary.
It could have sounded weird, a potentially funny thing to joke about, for the fact that someone who was going to, and already had lived for over a millennium feeling the need to write down his daily routine seemed a joke at best. Yet what he had written down was far from being anything short of mundane.
The thoughts, the words, the dreams were scribbled all along the pages. The dreams, the memories of the titan, of Thanos. Of Loki being in his services after having been mind controlled to do so, of Loki fighting before he even got into this mess, of him fighting against what appeared to be more than just a decent amount of torture, and with no little effort you forced yourself to keep the bile down in your still hurting throat. All these things, snippets of situations that had no doubt come to haunt his mind after you had retrieved the initial memories that he had lost, after you had erased the blockade keeping his other traumatic remedies at bay.
All of this was the price he had to pay to remember who he had once been.
You stumbled through the corridors shaking your head as you went, which honestly did not help with your already apparent lack of balance and general strength, yet trying to keep yourself from falling did shake the thoughts circulating in your head. You were going to get to Loki, you were going to get to him in time to keep him from whatever he was planning to do, and you were going to ask him all you wanted to know.
Your steps sounding against marble could not rule out the heartbeat ringing in your ears as you took in the wreckage surrounding you, minding the broken pieces of architecture littering the floors while you scrambled through the hallways. There was so much destruction, in some places gleaming crimson painting the walls and floor and debris a picture of loss, of despair. Few people strewn about barely spared you a glance, too busy salvaging the torn and broken bodies of their fellow comrades, and should they decide to indeed give you even the tiniest glimpse of attention, you dimmed their suspicion to a spark before it could grow out of control.
The tug you felt in the far, far back of your mind seemed far, far away, and as you followed the marble hallway to a gigantic, ripped hole in the wall you realized that the other half of your soul was beyond the city, beyond the masses of water and a weak trail lead your mind to somewhere in between heaps of rocks to a gap between the mountains. Which meant you needed a space ship.
You bit your lip as you realized that all of this could have been at least a bit easier, if you had invested learning your ability of flight while you were younger, much younger. As it was, it felt slightly akin to learning a new language—the younger you were, the easier it seemed to be, while the older you got, the more challenges you faced to make space for it in your head. You had neglected training your ability like a muscle you had only noticed now and needed to rely on, realizing it wouldn’t get you far. Having been in a coma for a year and now being forced into a sprint—it just didn’t work.
Everything surrounding flying had always seen so uncertain, so doubtful. Yes, it had saved you a couple of times out of pure instinct, but whenever you wanted to use it yourself, actively thinking about how you were about to try and fly—it failed you and you had more than once broken an arm or a leg on the occasion, until you decided to never ever try again.
Something you regretted now, truly.
So you were in need of a ship you couldn’t fly either, but needed to use in order to get where you had to go. There was a part within you trying to fight your already blossoming decision to use one of the many guards surrounding you, wallowing in their grief amongst crimson roses; grief, which was only visible to you, for their faces remained stoic and strong. But the tug inside your chest only continued like a string getting pulled taut, tension keeping you on edge and making you feel as if on the bring of snapping as it desired to push you onwards, further and further out to the sea. An apology arose from within you as you closed your eyes and grabbed one of the many men’s attention, trying to suppress the words echoing in Loki’s handwriting and Loki’s voice around your head.
“Goodbye Little One”
———
It had been surprisingly easy, and you didn’t even want to think about how much you had probably used your mind manipulation in the last year alone to get to the level of skill you were at now. If you hadn’t been completely sure that this did feel sort of like an emergency to you, you would have been frightened by the possibilities this opened up for you—or rather, opened up for someone pure evil of heart with the same batch of powers you carried.
As it was, you couldn’t help but repeat how sorry you were in your head as you made the stranger lead you through the hallways, mindful of other people’s attention as he lead you into a room filled to the brink with dusty debris, and a couple of ships that seemed to still be functioning. The other half of space ships was either gone or destroyed, caught by rubble of falling architecture that had squished them from above and created the dust stinging in your lungs as you took a deep breath. The sun cast an ominous glow onto the destruction, and you felt almost mesmerized by the golden light reflecting off various shards of glass littering the floor, before you finally followed the man into one of the ships.
You bit your lip as it started to levitate and could but hope that everyone else was still too busy with the disappearance of the princes and the salvaging of the dead to notice a single flying object not so stealthily making its way out in a flurry of gold and white.
Not even the gentle breeze of saltwater from afar could calm your raging nerves as you could feel the stress of battle bleed through to you even though it seemed that Loki had the same idea of cutting you off as you were currently doing to him. That certainly wasn’t good news.
You glided over the city, marveling in horror over its demolition; statues cleanly severed with debris still tumbling from it and down to the roads below, a couple of buildings blown up and clearly in flames, smoke rising from half the entire planet, while the sun shone as brightly as it had always done before, as if trying to make the entire situation seem absolutely ordinary with its warm, natural glow. The water soon came into view and you braced yourself as the connection tore through you stronger and stronger with every seconds your destination came closer and closer. In the distance you could make out the gap in the mountain range, eyes lead by your mind only—for you could have never possibly found it otherwise—as you made the man in your mental clutch slow the ship down so you could evaluate the situation.
You were nearly a breath away from the gap, wondering what exactly you were staring at as Loki felt so far away yet still, when suddenly a surge of unfathomable pain rang through you and made you topple to the floor and to your knees. Your lip started bleeding as you bit down on it hard, droplet of crimson dripping into your mouth and spreading its metallic taste over your tongue as you stumbled to your feet once more, mind growing blank.
Something was wrong, oh so very wrong.
On instinct you grabbed the lever and pushed it forward, setting the ship into immediate motion as you had watched the man standing dazed next to you do it before, speeding inhumanly fast directly towards the gap in the mountains. The sound of metal scraping against the edges of stone was numb to your ears as you could only feel the pain spread in your stomach, further and further, when suddenly you felt yourself getting swallowed up by nothingness, before emerging in a completely different surrounding.
Everything around you was dark and green, no water left behind and instead replaced by rocks and sand, cliffs and dirt as you jerked back to make the guard take control over the ship once more, world painted in loneliness and solitude, a black ship floating off very far into the distance. You stumbled back and to the floor, medicine and pain mixing together and making your head swim more than before while your hands desperately tried to clutch onto it to make it stop. The speck of darkness, the floating object far away was starting to disappear, leaving the atmosphere and you could do nothing but watch in confusion and anticipation as you wondered, whether you should try and hold on to suppressing your connection as much as you could or whether you should open up to call for him.
Something within you screamed to keep holding, so you merely closed your eyes and ordered the guard to hurry towards wherever you told him to.
——————
Maybe he shouldn’t have done it.
Maybe he shouldn’t have tried to actively play the hero for once in his life—but he couldn’t help himself. His brother had shown so much faith in him, so much more than he deserved that it was merely an instinctive movement to shove the sword cleanly through that wretched creature’s chest seconds before it could have harmed Thor. In every other situation he might have been better off, analyzing the situation with his mind rather than acting purely based on feelings, and he couldn’t help but writhe on the ground in partial rage as he condemned having emotions.
For his brother had actually been the lesser of his worries as he buried the blade in the monster’s body, as he pushed it into the thick skin, hearing it crack beneath the force of his blow as the sword pressed through and into the muscles or whatever it might have been holding it together. The rage he had felt was undeniable, even though it scarcely showed on his face. After all this time of being alive, all this time of hurt and disappointment he had learned to hide the most ugly of feelings radiating from his core, dimming them to a spark and letting them rot as if they had never even been there.
But the rage had been there, clearly.
For that monster had nearly murdered you, the other half of his soul, and had murdered his mother. Two of the few people in his life he had ever deemed trustworthy enough to let beyond his facade of sarcasm and coldness, of apathy and ignorance. Two of the few people that had ever bothered to even know him beyond what he showed the outside world, even though one of them had technically merely been forced by their unusual predicament.
But it was not what he wanted to think about as he took what felt to be his last few breaths. The creature was dead now, he had made sure of it as he had used one of its own bombs to evaporate it into nothingness right after the monster resembling death itself had turned around and stabbed him with the very same blade he had initially struck it with. He closed his eyes as he took a shaky breath, hands fumbling with the wound, with the glowing red soaking his clothes and running down, down, down his skin and onto the dusty, dirty ground.
Thor was by his side but he would be leaving soon, he wanted him to leave soon—they had important matters to intend to and he had just seen his dead mother; he didn’t need to add a dead brother onto his list. Again. Barely two years ago he had not bothered with the thought of dying, had even greeted it with open arms as he had let go of the spear, of his brother’s hold, silently hoping for death’s harsh, cold claws digging into his body and dragging him to wherever he was to reside after breathing his last and final breath.
Where would he go now that this was over?
Valhalla perhaps? He died in battle after all.
Hel maybe? He was sure that there were quite some people that would rather see him descend into the depths of despair during his afterlife than giving him any sort of credit for the good deeds he had committed. Who knows how all these realms were even connected—he would just have to close his eyes and find out.
Thor’s and Jane’s steps shuffling through the dry dust and dirt had just faded in the distance, leaving him to be left alone with his thoughts after he had pretended to have already died, leaving him to wallow in solitude until darkness would inevitably claim him. Would it be selfish to stop suppressing the connection to you just so that he could say his goodbyes?
A hollow, dry chuckle eased out of his lips which soon turned into a cough, blood spluttering out of his mouth and dripping down the side of his face as he laid on his back, hands having moved to grab onto his wound fiercely again in a desperate attempt to delay the inevitable.
Technically he had already said his goodbyes, he knew that. Even though he hadn’t necessarily planned on dying, he had indeed planned to not ever return, or perhaps, not return to Asgard as himself. For that wretched creature was still out there somewhere, looking to claim him back as a marionette—he could feel it, could feel the titan’s wrath for having managed to, albeit involuntarily, escape his physical and mental grasp, and he couldn’t risk falling back into his hands, couldn’t risk being forced to wait for him locked in a cage buried deep underground. He only hoped that you had found the words written down in the book he had given you, would maybe even understand why he had to leave after taking a look at the very book you had eyed since first setting foot into the dungeons below; back when the two of you had done nothing but exchanged snarky remarks, you had asked nothing but questions and he had given nothing but death threats. He found himself already missing your honesty whenever curiosity had won over him and led him to ask something himself, miss the pleasant feeling blooming in his stomach upon knowing you told the truth; a stark contrast to whenever the world presented him with yet one more lie.
Another surge forced his heels to dig into the ground as he decided to leave it at that.
Back two years ago, he had indeed not cared about dying. But now he felt as if he had so much to lose.
——————
You unceremoniously fell out of the ship once you had forced it to land, knees colliding with the dried soil below, stones digging through your clothes and into your skin. He was fading, he was fading and only now you could see why. Despite your legs feeling like fresh jelly you jerked into a standing position, breaking out into a wobbly sprint that almost had you fall to the ground face first before you came to a halt at his side, sinking to the floor without any spirit left within you.
“Loki...?”
The word was barely a croak, but something in him stirred for a second before his eyes blinked open with sluggish movements. You almost couldn’t hear the way he slurred your name past pain and blood dropping from his mouth in a deep, dark red, own eyes wide and frantic as your hands moved to the wound in his stomach, desperate to stop the bleeding. His own hands found their way on top of yours, blood smearing against your skin; warm, hot, burning even though his skin was deathly cold.
“I’m sorry—“ he spoke, words slurred together, a cough interrupting his speech and sending more crimson spilling down his face as he strained to look at you with half-closed eyes.
“Don’t—“ You tried, choking on a sob clogging your throat feeling like the blood clogging his— “Don’t do this, don’t say this.”
This couldn’t be happening, this wasn’t allowed to happen. You could live with knowing that he was alive, even though you would inevitably be separated for the rest of your lives. You could live with the aching, hollow feeling inside your chest telling you that the other half of your soul was living his life, far, far away from you. You could live with the grief you would undeniably feel every single day, following you even as you tried to forget, knowing that you would have to leave him behind for the second time and knowing that you could never, ever forget, no matter how much you tried.
You could not live with him dying, could not live with him apologizing for whatnot as he deliriously died in your arms. You could not live with it, whether that might me metaphorical, or physical—for you were not aware of how much your souls were bound to one another, unsure whether you would die along with him and finding that it was the least of your current worries. In your mess of thoughts clogging your sensations like a dirty drain you didn’t even feel how you grew weaker with every single second dripping away like time on a clock.
“I’m....sorry—this had to happen...”
“Loki,” you interjected past the tears spilling from your eyes blurring your sight, hands pressing a little stronger onto his wound, still desperately trying to keep his blood from leaving him, leaving him to grow paler with each broken breath, “Stop. Loki—“ A sob escaped your throat through clenched teeth, chattering teeth in the face of death— “Don’t apologize.”
You only caught the faintest hint of a smile on his face.
“I’m sorry for how I’ve....treated you...and—“
The words passed his lips with obvious strain, his hands giving yours a weak squeeze just as his eyes closed, final thoughts swirling inside of your head as he accidentally let go of his hold on the connection, let go as death attempted to claim him and you couldn’t help the scream tearing through your lungs.
[Thank you.]
His voice, broken and hoarse from exhaustion and lack of oxygen was the last thing you heard; the blood flowing from his wound, running down your fingers coloring the ground a bright red the last thing you smelt; his face, slightly gray and terrifyingly lifeless the last thing you saw; the cold skin of his hands sliding from yours, the texture of his clothes beneath your clutch the last thing you felt; the salt staining your lips as the tears didn’t stop spilling from your puffy, reddened eyes the last thing you tasted—
Your eyes fell closed as you collapsed beside him.
——————
Words akin to garbled nonsense filled the silence that had spread across the planet once its last, current inhabitants had collapsed motionless in the dirt. The guard had long since scurried off; your last command having lead him back to his ship and forced him to retreat through the mountain range you had initially come from, wanting to at least show him the way back to Asgard before you felt your body give in to the call for apparent death.
Instead of guards, there were two creatures standing above the two, huddled figures on the ground. Shallow breathing came from the both of them, appearing distressed but otherwise peacefully asleep and the two creatures looming above them casting suffocating shadows in their wake could only give a satisfied grin as they shuffled through one of their many bags hanging across their shoulders to retrieve blindfolds and shackles, fixing them around the limp bodies in no time. One of the two, the one with red skin much like the blood which was still sticky on the floor and three horns protruding from his head, crouched next to the bodies and pulled up the shirt from the Prince, inspecting the skin for whatever might have left behind such amounts of blood before motioning to the other with a frown and shake of his head—for there was nothing. His friend, built more bulky than the first and with skin as monochrome and grey as the sky on cloudy days gave a nod back, hoisting both of them up from the ground and onto its shoulders, dragging them into the makeshift space ship they had arrived with.
“These two will give us a nice price on the market.”