Thor's words wrapped around his heart, around his throat. It was a bitter feeling, and his mind felt more burdened than when the All-Father delivered his final judgement. What could Thor want with him now, so long after he had been exiled? His thoughts raged like the storm just outside, chaotic and frighteningly powerful. He weighed his options. If Thor was here to return him to Asgard, Loki realised he would rather die out on the ice than return to the glittering kingdom. No matter how he dreamed of it, Asgard was no home for him anymore. It ceased being so when he learnt Odin's secret, the secret of his own parentage, when he realised his entire life was a lie, that he could never be accepted, loved or respected. How could he live in a place where he could trust no one? But if Thor was not here to drag him back to the All-Father, what did he hope to ensure? Merely that he was suffering enough on this barren land but not dead?
The King's words about his appearance cut him deeply and tore from him his rage and the sharpness of his tongue.
"Still who? The exiled one? Or your brother?" Loki paused, his blood red eyes connecting with Thor's despicably beautiful blue ones. "That pathetic soul died the day Odin revealed his true parentage, and died again when he fell from Asgard and once more when his heart was torn out and his body thrown to this frozen wasteland! There is nothing left of him here." Loki held his tears again, afraid they would freeze on his face. For too long he tried to protect that small part of him that made up who he was when he was still a prince of Asgard. Loki wanted nothing more than to return to that way of life, but it was robbed from him and left this calloused, bitter, haunted man in it's wake.
"You've told me nothing of why you've come. What do you want of me?"
Loki watched as Thor backed away from him. It reminded him of the way a hunter backs away from a beast he had no hope of controlling but had no way to kill. Loki felt like a beast standing before Thor, with his patterned blue skin, his red eyes, his pacing.
"What do you wish to know, king?" Though Loki had always wanted nothing more than for Thor to be a great king, the word fell off his tongue like acid. A king only came to the exiled for judgement or punishment. Thor had come as a king, not as a brother. "Do you want to know how the jotunns tried to kill me, thinking I had come to claim the throne? Or do you want to know how I've never known loneliness like the small cottage surrounded by ice on a planet of those who wish me dead? Or perhaps the nightmares I've had of such a moment as this, when the All-Father sends an envoy when exile no longer was a severe enough punishment?" Loki's voice cracked at the end of his last question, and as he turned, his eyes faded from red to green, his skin from blue to a pale white.
If Thor was here to bring him to his death, he would make it as hard on him as possible.