loki laufeyson (toberuled) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2012-06-24 00:56:00 |
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Entry tags: | iron man, loki, thor |
Who: Thor, Loki, and guest starring Tony
What: PART THE FIRST: Louis finally gets dragged through the door and Thor follows to bind Loki's magic. Including small children, swan diving off the Empire State Building, and blueness.
Where: Marvel door - Empire State Building, then Stark Tower.
When: Recently
Warnings/Rating: Beware of feels. So many feels.
Louis was tired. Exhausted, really. The ordeal with Sam’s attacker had left him feeling drained, infuriated, and completely thwarted, denied his opportunity to do anything to make up for being unable to stop what Loki had done to the people in the hotel and keep anyone else from being harmed by the maniac who’d so badly hurt her. The days had been a whirlwind of bad feeling and an ever-increasing, pounding headache, something akin to the norse god in his mind pulling at the bars to his cage, as if he was pressing against the inside of his skull.
Loki’s whispers seemed to be there all the time, so much so that holding himself together was increasingly difficult. They pulled at the insecurities already there and held them up the light, even as he got word that Eames was holding Evan through the door in some kind of punishment for his encounter with Arthur, and incident Louis had been hoping very much to pretend had never happened at all. Then Evan was gone, gone for days, and each time he spoke with Eames it only ground the anguish in deeper. Louis knew he had no right to feel jealous, or betrayed - when it had happened, the two of them had never had sex, and even now they were hardly an item or anything bordering on official. The thought was cold comfort. Appropriate or not, he felt as he felt, and it ached.
Where ever he was tired, or worn, or angry, Loki managed to be there, prodding Louis on. He’d been quiet at first, after Louis had flatly refused to let him out again, but he grew louder and louder, more and more insistent.
The breaking point came when Louis had already gone almost two days without sleeping more than a few hours. Sam had told him he couldn’t touch the man who’d attacked her, but the pictures of her injuries were still on his phone. He didn’t look at them again, but he thought about them, thought about how useless it made him feel, how ineffective. He didn’t realize he was outside until he was already there, standing under a streetlight, leaning on it for support. He’d been curled up in bed, but now he was outside, staring, a little dazed, into a park.
Louis was seized with a sudden urge to walk, and that was when he knew what was happening. He groped in his pocket for his phone and pulled it out, silently thanking the fact that Loki hadn’t simply removed it and tossed it aside. He walked, slowly, and felt the aching pain at the back of his head abate a little as he came closer to the hotel, even as the need to move didn’t fade in the slightest.
He’d have to be a fool not to recognize this for what this was. There was one thing he could still do, however, while he had the chance, the wherewithal, and the control of his limbs. Since Loki’s attention was directed elsewhere, he could send a text without fear of the god knowing. It was brief, a simple, Being pulled through, sorry, come now and no more. Benji should know what that meant. Hopefully.
In no time at all, Louis’ slow walk brought him to the hotel, step by step. It all felt inevitable, and it couldn’t have disheartened him more. Yet, there was a small amount of triumph. He’d sent out a warning. He’d managed to stand in Loki’s way some, and hold him at bay for weeks. That had to count for something. It was difficult not to despair, but that was the thought that kept him from giving in completely, even on his very last step through the door. He looked up and down the hall, but there was no sign of Benji. All he could do now was hope he’d seen the message, and was already inside.
Through the door - Midgard. New York, to be exact. The door opened out onto the Empire State Building, not Stark Tower. Apparently someone had deemed it off-limits. How tiresome.
Loki shut the door behind him and stretched his limbs. It had been much too long since he’d been in control of his own body, and he couldn’t help but feel smug. It had only been a matter of time, really, until he would be back here. He had worn Louis down inch by inch, and he’d won, just as he’d known he would. If he wasn’t going to be cooperative, it was of little importance. In the end, Louis’ resistance made not a whit of difference. He’d learn that in time.
The trickster rolled his shoulders. He was dressed in his battle raiments, his sweeping helmet and armor, and that was good - he did have so much to do, so much time to make up for.
When he'd originally talked to the anonymous man who had Loki in his head, Ben had told Lizzy about it. Hell, he'd even told Silver and he knew that Thor had told Steve. It was prudent to do so as that text might come one day and it was better to be prepared than to suddenly spring it on any of them. Regardless that the plan itself hinged on a man whose name he didn't know and had never met -- and that the text in question might never come -- not letting them know had never crossed his mind nor Thor's.
Ben was getting ready for bed when his phone buzzed in the pocket of his jeans with the arrival of a new text. The message came from an unknown number, but as soon as he saw the contents, Ben stopped, his fingers on the deadbolt of their apartment and the phone falling from his grip. There was no time to go back and kiss Lizzy goodnight, only time enough to call out that he had to go, that it was Loki, before he turned the bolt and ran from the apartment. Never was he so glad that he hadn't kicked his trainers off when he came back from his evening run.
Lizzy was right when she'd mentioned how much closer her penthouse was to the hotel and Ben was never more appreciative of it now as he sprinted down the street, arms and legs pumping in the hopes of getting him there before Loki managed to make it through. He was panting as he made it through the front door, but the hotel was quiet. Was it too early? Or worse, too late? Growling under his breath, he started up the stairs, taking them two by two until he reached the floor of their door.
Ben was nearing the door when he heard the door below open and paused. He could keep going or he could wait, see if it was Loki. The possibility was enough of a reason to wait. Walking quietly across the floor, he slid into the deep shadows at the corner of the hall where the lights did not touch. He watched the man come up (blonde, curly hair, almost wild), saw the steps that lingered until they matched Loki's gait and then he knew. There was no time to catch Thor's brother, but time enough to see through the door and see where he was before he shut it.
The closest he could get was Las Vegas and that's where he went, stepping through the door to Thor's world. The change to Thor was more physical than the sliding shock of one mind regaining dominance over the other. From Ben there was a human impatience, an urgency to stop Loki from hurting anyone and both were sentiments that Thor shared. Hammer in hand and the roll of leather cool against the small of his back, he went flying, aiming for New York. It was only a renewed crack of thunder that signaled his arrival, clouds growing dark above both buildings. Entering through the observatory of the building, he started down, knowing the sooner he caught his brother, the better for them all.
Loki strode out into the wind, onto the observation deck, and received the wide-eyed stares and small screeches of shock from the tourists clustered against the barrier. His head tipped to the side. “Come now,” he said, voice rough with disuse. “Where is the challenge in this?”
A shot from the scepter took out a chunk of the barrier, blasting a large hole, and the tourists began to scramble for the exits like rats. Loki smiled, wide and bright. There was no art to this, no planning, just an aperitif, a little something to whet his appetite before he tended to his larger schemes. The tourists gave him as wide a berth as they could, but in the narrow space between the side of the building and the fence, there was only so much they could do. A man went tumbling through the hole and off the side of the roof, and his wife screamed for his return. Loki rolled his eyes and snapped his fingers, and the man came hurtling back up in the other direction, only to hit the side of the building so hard one could hear his bones break. Alive, of course, but hardly a good deed.
He peered over the edge of the city, down the long drop, even as the tourists pushed each other down and jammed through the exit doors. The wretches. If they didn’t insist on making taking control of them difficult for him, he wouldn’t insist on killing them. Most likely, anyway.
Then thunder cracked against the roof of the sky, and darkness began rolling in like a tide of cold water out at sea, the clouds spinning larger and heavier by the second. His eyes narrowed with displeasure. No. He’d missed something, somewhere, and he hated to miss anything, hated a hole in the plan. He searched internally for Louis to grab him, demand of him what he’d done, but he was unresponsive, battened down since he could do nothing to affect Loki’s actions.
There were those who still lingered on the deck, trembling in fear or clutching half-trampled loved ones. A child clung to the side of the hole in the deck, staring down - apparently he’d lost a parent through it. He was better off without them, in Loki’s estimation. “Go,” he said, softly at first.The shivering creatures still didn’t move. “GO,” he snapped out, the word reverberating heavily through the crowd, sweeping the scepter across and startling them into screams and terrified movement.
Then, only the child remained. Loki strode toward him. The clouds grew darker by the second, and if Thor was not here now, he would be within moments.
The boy at the barrier was small, no taller than Loki’s waist. He had a shock of dark hair, fair skin and pale eyes, and they were empty of anything but numb terror. Loki stared down, towering over the child. Suddenly, the boy released the edge of the barrier and grasped the edges of Loki’s cape with small, fat fingers, looking up at him. The child seemed to think he was his rescuer.
Loki looked down at the thing, small and needy and abandoned by its parents. Was this what Odin had seen? After slaughtering frost giants by the score, when he found a child left by its own people, had he thought that by extending his kindness toward the lost child, he would somehow make up for all the lives he had ended, the destruction he’d brought to its people? No. Of course it had been no such noble impulse. For all his talk of battle and war, Odin had at his heart a clever man, a man of strategy. He’d seen opportunity. He’d seen a pawn to be played in his game.
Loki saw only a frightened child ,who had decided he was a savior because he was an adult and standing near, whatever strangeness of garb he wore. His mouth set into a thin line, and he placed a hand on the boy’s head. The boy shimmered in a dozen colors, and faded away. The child would appear down on the ground, just outside the building, where emergency vehicles would already be gathering.
The folds of Loki’s cloak fell back, released from the boy’s grip, and then fluttered in the gale. Loki’s resolve and rage kindled anew, and he backed toward the barrier. Stupid. Precious seconds wasted on sentiment and reminiscence, time he didn’t have.
He held his scepter out, glancing all around, casting about with his magic for a sense of where his brother would approach from - the needle of the building, or inside by the stair, or through the hole in the barrier. “I don’t have all day to wash the walls with your blood, brother,” he shouted, snarled words whipped away by the tempest. “You sneak toward me, but that is my tactic, not your own, and it suits you ill!”
It was the stairs that finally brought Thor to his brother. When he had seen Loki with the young boy, he had stopped, a brief flare of a very rare worry lancing him. Surely Loki would not mean to take the child as a hostage, his brother could not have slipped that far into madness. Relief came like ran on a hot summer day when Thor watched the boy shimmer and vanish, seemingly well out of danger. If Loki was going to kill him, it would have been just as easy to push him through the break in the barrier between deck and sky.
The relief was short lived, but the hope that the good part of Loki, the part that Thor still wanted to exist remained. His brother could be kind, but Thor had not seen that shard of him in so long that he thought it had been discarded along with Loki's reason. "I have not been able to sneak up on you since we were children." And only rarely then. It was not his way to hide himself, to linger in the shadows or to tuck his secrets in the black space between stars. Thor was as uncomplicated as Loki was complicated, and as blunt and raw as his brother was sharp and refined. Perhaps Odin had seen more in that little boy on Jotunheim than either of them could predict or even recognize yet.
Stepping out from the stairs, he walked slowly out onto the deck, Mjolnir at his side and blood red cape swaying with his steps. Speed was of the essence here. This was no time for a drawn out battle on the roof, no time for him to try and plead with Loki for sanity, not when cruelty lined the bright madness in his brother's eyes.
For once, Thor did not charge at his brother like a bilgesnipe and his prey. Perhaps he was actually learning, or thinking about what his brother would do, what steps Loki would always follow. As different as they were, they were also had their habits. Thor reached for lightning and Loki for magic, Thor ate and sang and drank while his brother buried himself in books and playing tricks and things Thor barely paid attention to if Loki hadn't already hidden them from him. If Thor ran at him, he would vanish as he always did. Instead it was Mjolnir that went flying and he waited the second to see which way Loki would go before charging, mindful of the gap Loki had already made in the railing.
Loki smiled, unkind, sharp and cold as the sharp crescent of Midgard’s waning moon. “No,” he said, watching Thor step onto the balcony in all his scarlet and gold armored glory. “You always did storm about, as I suppose the thunderer is wont to do.” He lifted his chin, seeming as cool and collected as if he’d known all along Thor would follow him through the door. “It’s been several weeks. Show me how you’ve missed me.”
Loki did indeed dodge Mjolnir’s path, and this time his form was no projection, that much was clear. Had it been, the hammer would have gone straight through, and Loki would have appeared somewhere behind Thor, but no - he hadn’t predicted his brother’s sudden approach, and there had been no time to prepare a trick. He knew well enough that Mjolnir could blast through his defenses, and was uninterested in eating concrete today, so he slid right. By then Thor was almost upon him, and he brought the scepter up between them, in hopes of blocking the charge and gaining enough time to dodge that blasted hammer when it came back the other way. He never could best Thor in a fair fight, hand to hand. Loki’s best tactic was to avoid, and get beyond his range again, where all he’d need to worry about was that hammer. He planned three steps ahead, as always. Yes, he’d get out of his range, lead him around the building’s corner, and let a projection call his attention while landing a blast from the scepter at an angle to throw him through the hole in the barrier. Thor would fly back up to the building top, but he could be gone by then, down to the ground floor or coasting to one of the surrounding buildings.
First, however, Loki needed to get away from Thor, which proved a little more difficult than expected as the thunderer charged headlong into him, knocking a charge from his scepter off aim and into the side of the building. Damn. He backed away, still blocking with the golden staff, and dropped a dagger into his palm, bringing it up to sting into Thor’s belly between the plates of armor, hopefully enough distraction to get around the building’s corner.
It was testament to the very personal nature of the fight that Thor did not send Mjolnir after Loki again. He was far too interested in getting his hands on his brother instead and not just smacking some sense into his brother as he so desperately needed. The sharp sting of the blade was registered a half second too late, but not so late that it bit deep before he reached down, his hand closing tightly around Loki's wrist.
As soon as he had the manacles on his brother, he was taking those damned daggers away. And that thrice damned scepter. Thor was more than tempted to have it melted down for scrap metal should he ever get his hands on it long enough to try. There were more immediate concerns though and he wasn't fooled by the fact that Loki was using it as a shield, rather than a sword. It could be both, much like his beloved Mjolnir, and he would not forget the lessons the wretched thing had delivered to him.
Thor did not wait for the second blast to come, nor for it to come out in a swinging arc to split his skin. He forced the distance between them closed again and reached for the opposite wrist, mindful still of the break in the barrier. It was a long way down, but not likely to kill either of them. An option of last resort. "Shall I show you how much I missed you, brother?" He bit off, nearly growling, thunder clacking overhead.
It had not been Loki’s intention to be captured close by his brother, and he snarled as his plan fell apart, dissolving into a bid to simply get away, and to get his hands released. He’d been in the midst of bringing the scepter up for use just as a blunt weapon with a sharp tip when Thor captured his opposite wrist. Loki dragged his hands sharply away, pulling down toward Thor’s fingers in an attempt to break his grip. They stood close to the hole in the barrier, and if he couldn’t get free one way, there were even odds he could get free on his way to the ground.
When the thunder struck overhead Loki stilled a little, and he glanced up to be sure there wasn’t an arc of lightning coming his way. He began building a spell, stretching his will out to drag a barrier over his head. A few moments more, and he could get it thick enough to shove like a physical force against his brother and separate them.
Loki cast his eyes down on Thor, and his smile twitched up at the edge, masking a touch of fear and a mad desperation not to be caught. Not after he’d spent so long captive already - no, he would have his freedom. He had earned it. He leaned in a half inch, his eyes fixed on Thor’s. “Please,” he said, all challenge. “Do.”
Never one to break away from a challenge and knowing that every minute they remained locked together was another moment that Loki had to use his magic, Thor took the chance he had. He released one wrist, his grip remaining tight on the arm that held the scepter and grabbed his brother instead. It was closer than they'd been in months and Loki was thin, too thin in Thor's estimation, yet he didn't let his brother go as he shoved forward. If he had to pick Loki up for the last step that carried them off, then so be it, but he took them over.
For a moment there was only the free fall, that little bit of excitement that always came with falling or the moment that one stepped through the Bifrost and shot into another realm. Hot on the heels of that excitement came the knowledge that he could not let Loki go, and he gripped his brother ever tighter, feeling bone and leather grind in his grip. The last time, Loki had transformed into a bird. It would not happen this time as Thor all but clung to his brother.
In the last few seconds before they hit, Thor flipped them mid air and called for Mjolnir, not to the hand that currently held Loki's wrist fast, but his free hand at Loki's back. Landing would hurt and while he was sure it wouldn't kill him, there was that seed of doubt that Loki could handle both the landing and Thor on top of him. Better that they land on him, with Mjolnir at his back to pin him down. The last thing he saw was the hammer following them down before the world exploded into pain and starbursts whited out his view.
The fall was an opportunity, unexpected, but useful all the same. Loki lashed out with his magic, pushing back against his brother. No, none of this was going as it had been meant to. He'd been caught off guard, and he wouldn't let that happen again, wouldn't let himself be ambushed like this a second time.
But Loki was beginning to think it was already too late. He tried to wrap his magic around himself again when lashing out didn't weaken Thor's grip. The scepter was still in his hand, but there was no time to charge it. He shoved and scalded and freezed with his magic, but nothing stuck. He pulled out every quickly built trick in his arsenal, all to no avail. He would shift, then, into something small - but there was no time. The ground approached inexorably and Loki shouted, furious.
Now was no time to give up, though. Loki let Thor flip them, and twisted his body, trying at the last to get out from under his brother before they hit the ground. But with Thor's fist closed so tightly against his wrist that Loki could feel bone giving way, there was no chance to free himself.
Loki hit the ground with a deafening crack. Debris, chunks of asphalt, and dust flew out in all directions as he met the street with only a small, hastily cast spell to cushion his fall. It was enough to make sure only a few bones were cracked and broken, but the wind had been thoroughly knocked from his lungs, and his vision went black. He struggled against the fire in his chest to draw breath, his eyes rolling. His vision started to return in the long slow seconds that followed, blurred and distorted, the impossible weight of Thor still pressing down on him. Loki pulled back, sliding a short inch or so, oblivious to the emergency vehicles nearby, the crowd of onlookers, the approaching SWAT team giving the pair of gods a wide berth and ushering gawkers away as quickly as possible. All Loki knew was pain, the searing of his lungs and the throb of broken and cracked ribs. What little breath he could draw was expelled in a sharp gasp as he pressed his heels into the asphalt and turned his head, trying with everything left in him to summon something, anything, enough strength to change his form or disappear, to grab one of the bystanders as a hostage, to blind his brother and, stumbling on weak legs, to run on foot. Anything to get away.
The first thing Thor was absolutely sure of was that he was alive. The second, that Loki had to be alive as well because his fool of a brother was moving. "Be still," he muttered, ignoring the onlookers, the emergency personnel, everyone in favor of trying to clear the bursts of light from his vision. Everything hurt and he was quite sure something was broken, but it was ignored in favor of stilling his brother.
He was fairly sure all his pains weren't solely from the landing, not with the way that Loki had struggled and fought, but there was only one thing Thor had to do. Reaching back for the roll at the small of his back, he winced, feeling his shoulder grinding in the socket and simply grabbed the edge, yanking it free. He could still feel Loki moving though, trying to escape, or he wasn't sure what and aimed for a less than graceful flop over his brother. "Be still!" He groaned again, dragging Loki's captured wrist closer.
"First Jotunheim," Thor started as he grabbed the manacles from the roll of leather, both cuffs open until he snapped the first one around his brother's wrist. "Then Asgard, Midgard, Nidavellir, Jotunheim," he listed. "I tire of chasing you around the whole nine realms, brother. I tire of fixing your messes, I tire of chasing you like a dog that should be brought to heel!" He grumbled as he pushed himself over Loki's body in search of his opposite wrist.
Loki's vision began to clear, and with it his pain increased, sensation flooding back with sense. He hissed as Thor flattened his body on top of him, reaching for something behind his back. The hammer, Loki expected, to beat him at last into complete submission. His forehead was cut from one of the flying chunks of stone, and the wound bled sluggishly. He couldn't focus, couldn't pull the threads of his power together and weave them into anything coherent. He snarled half-heartedly, without the strength to put up a serious fight. "You'd like that, wouldn't you?" Loki spat. The first full breath he could draw, he spent on a choked reply. "Seeing me at heel." He set his teeth. "I will not beg you," he said, with as much hate as he could inject into the words, tongue thick in his mouth. His head fell back sharply against the asphalt, and he drew another pained breath. "And I will not kneel to you, my King."
Loki focused on breathing. He would let Thor revel in his triumph for a few moments, let him drag him back to Asgard, even, if he liked. The journey would give him time to think, and to pull enough power back together to step into the shadows and escape.
Then the first manacle closed over his wrist, and Loki felt a strange, icy shock through his arm, numbing. It was strange, like nothing he had ever felt in his long life, and he lifted his head again to look. A manacle? He laughed, short and chopped off by a cough. "You would make me your prisoner?" he asked. Why, though, did he feel suddenly sick?
"I don't want to see you beg," Thor snarled in return, turning his head to blink owlishly at his brother. Where in the name of Hel was Loki's other hand? He had to feel up his brother's chest and trace the line of his arm down until he found it, finally, and dragged it close enough to snap the other manacle on. It was done and Thor finally collapsed against his brother, wheezing.
The back of his head ached and he thought he felt the slow trickle of blood coming from his scalp, but that was ignored for the very loud pains in his shoulder and his own ribs. "I don't want you to kneel. I never wanted you to kneel. I never wanted to take anything from you and would have gladly shared everything I had with you. I wanted you at my side," he all but snapped in return. Forcing one hand to the ground, the rubble sticking to his palm, he levered himself up and towards the edge of the crater they'd made when they'd landed. With the manacles on, Loki could not use magic to go anywhere and Thor was considerably less worried about him escaping.
"I would have given you everything," he griped as he started to crawl out of the hole, sliding only when he put his opposite hand on Loki's face to help himself up.
The second manacle went on, and for a moment, all Loki felt was that same cold, that same icy flood into his bones. It was unlike the cold at his own core, the blasted heritage he drew on every time he used the Casket or threw ice in the path of his foes. Then the sick feeling increased a hundredfold, and Loki gasped for breath, eyes gone wide. His body went briefly rigid, and he looked down at the manacles, which, now that they were both closed over his wrists, had begun to glow, faintly.
"What did you do?" Loki demanded, not really expecting an answer. He knew. He knew from the second he looked down at the manacles what had happened. He reached for his power, the same power he'd first found a grip on when he was still a boy and stealing books from his father's library to learn the building blocks of magic, and there was nothing. Nothing.
Loki rolled over, a little of his physical strength returned, and he bashed the manacles against the ground to no avail. He did it again, and a third time, with a short, panicked cry. There was nothing. He was as empty as a hollow vessel. Worst of all, each time he tried to conjure his seiðr again, the manacles seemed to press in even tighter into his wrists, to pull more of his strength from him. He felt feeble, and tired, and bereft, stripped of the only power he had to his name. Never a physical force in the field, his magic has always been the thing that made him a force to be reckoned with, the thing that isolated him from a court of fighters, but enabled him to keep up with them in his own way. When he had fallen into the black, it had been his sole companion, his single balm, a power he had worked centuries to build, that he had trained at and crafted of his will and his own sharp mind.
Without it, he was alone. He'd never been more alone in his life. He faced the ground as Thor stood, using his body as a leverage point, talking of kingship and how things might have been, and Loki looked down at his hands.
His skin was blue, blue as the ocean at the depths of a glacier, and run across with raised whorls and lines. Loki dropped his head. Whoever built these manacles had built them to absorb any seiðr, not just his own. Not only had he been stripped naked down to the spirit that put life in his bones, he had been stripped even of his appearance, of the skin he had always thought to be his own. It was the ultimate in humiliation. He couldn't even blame Thor for it, only his stupid ignorance. Thor wouldn't have known. He wouldn't have even thought about it, which almost stung more than if it had been purposeful.
Loki did not get up from the crater. He lay on his stomach, looking at the faint pulse of light in the iron clasped around his wrists, and the blue skin beneath them. His face hidden still from his brother, he listened as he finished his lecture. The bitterness and rage in his heart flared hot, despite the haze of pain and exhaustion. It was all so much, one thing on top of the next, that he had to laugh - what more could he do? "You would have given me?" he asked to the ground when the laughter stopped, incredulous. "You would have been so kind as to gift me with everything, as only a man of your generosity could do? What a fool I was, to pass up such an opportunity. To not deign to scrape to you and let you give me the chance to stand in your shadow, to take your scraps, to have a little of what is so obviously rightfully yours, since you would need to present it to me as a prize for my good behavior!"
Loki turned his head at last, scarlet eyes staring up at Thor, blood still dripping from the shallow gash at his temple, his teeth sharp and dark behind blue lips. The raised lines on his skin, as much a part of it as its color, denoted for a Jotun a variety of privileges, royalty amongst them. Royalty. As if such a race of beasts could have such a thing as lords. His instinct was to turn his face away from Thor, to not see his expression change, to not let his brother have the luxury of seeing the completeness of his defeat. It was difficult to tell, but those impossibly sanguine eyes were wet.
He laughed again, because he'd begun to think of his own life as a long, grand joke, and ended it with another cough. His ribs still spiked with pain, and now his limbs felt weak as a new kittens' after being thoroughly drained of his power, a feeling not unlike having a vein opened into the manacles around his wrists. In time, the binding would no doubt recognize a passive enchantment from an offensive one, and let him have the glamour, keep a shred of his dignity. For now, though, being so exposed made the perfect cap to the humiliation Thor had wrought on him.
And to think. If only Loki had behaved, Thor could have given him a place with him, standing beside the rightful king. He could have had such an awesome privilege. If he'd just been good.
As much as Thor wanted Loki's bitterness to be a surprise, it was not. It had shown that one day in the observatory, I only ever wanted to be your equal and every day since. It was an old grudge, wasn't that what everyone told him? But Thor still didn't know where it came from, when he would have gladly shared everything with his brother. That was the way of it between equals. You shared. When one man amongst you had less, you gave.
In a war it was no different. Those that fought the hardest, that were there with you at every battle took their pick of bounty. Songs were song in their name and when they returned home, they ate at the Citadel, with Odin and his kin, a favored position amongst all. That was their way of it. That was Thor's way.
If he had noticed, and he tried often not to, that less went to Loki, then he tried to fill that void in other ways. None of which seemed to suffice for his brother, who remembered only the slights, never anything else.
He stayed long enough to see those eyes. On any other face, with any other Jotunn they would have been hated eyes, but not for his brother. For Loki he felt only sorrow, as he knew exactly what he had taken from his brother. Not the glamour, he'd not even considered that, but he knew what it was to take Loki's seiðr from him. It had been the worst option of a small pool of choices, but the only one that wouldn't cause physical damage to either Loki or the man from Vegas.
Grunting softly, Thor limped over to a pillar, waving off the emergency personnel that wanted to check him, that asked if he was all right. He'd just fallen off an observation deck onto concrete, it was not like landing on a feather bed nor as soft and delightful as a lover's kiss. When they asked a second time, he simply glared at them and rammed his shoulder into the pillar. For a few brief seconds his vision flared white again and then settled, color returning to the world as his shoulder settled correctly into the socket.
Thor was still bruised, still unsteady on his feet as he returned to the crater they had made and grabbed the first thing he saw of his brothers: those lovely raven black strands. At least that blasted helmet was somewhere else or Thor would have taken that from him too. Grabbing as much of it as he could, he started to yank his brother up, one hand diving under his armpit as soon as he was close enough to do so. It wasn't a graceful exit, or even a painless one as Thor attempted to pull him free.
"Yes, bowing and scraping brother," he muttered under his breath. "No one in my father's hall ever bowed and scraped except for you, when you were having such a tantrum as to make a lesson of it." Thor did not call this a lesson, but he did not have to. Once, he too had been stripped of his powers and cast to Midgard. For Loki, he would be stripped and returned to Asgard.
[Continued.]