Loki (![[info]](https://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} fiorvalr) wrote in ![[info]](https://www.insanejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small} noexits,@ 2021-06-30 11:38:00 |
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Natasha tries to find strength and solace through ballet. Loki interrupts her training session. She asks him what's true in Norse Mythology. He tells her about his children. They banter. They have a moment. They talk about some of the other people at Derleth that they used to know in their old lives. OMG, are they really friends? And then Derleth resets.WARNINGS Emotions
NOTE This log is beautiful. It's warm and witty and sad and funny. Thank you, Dawn. ♥
His voyeurism hadn’t been intentional. Loki was avoiding the people of Derleth. Or, at least, the people that were supposed to matter. He’d made more than one mistake over the last week that he wasn’t ready to face. To distract his conflicted mind he wandered the campus. Most people were asleep, tucked neatly in their uncomfortable beds in Butler Hall, waiting for the morning to bring about something new. Hopefully something better. Because tomorrow was the reset. And everyone wanted to put this week behind them.
But Loki wasn’t ready to sleep off the final hours of this chapter. And so he found himself drawn to the gym. Not by music, but by sound; the delicate patter of slippers on a smooth floor.
Natasha could dance.
He wasn’t surprised. She had the lean muscular physique of a dancer. And he knew from their past battles together that she had a control over her body that could only come from professional training. Secret Agent. Superhero. Why not ballerina as well?
Loki didn’t consider himself a romantic, but he had a deep appreciation for the arts that was often overlooked because of his own public performances; his ego and his rage. But as much as his mother had raised him on magic, she’d also raised him on art, literature, music, theatre, and dance. All the subjects necessary for a prince. And for a boy who wasn’t as strong as his brother. Who never fit in with his peers. Not that any of them were truly his peers. Loki stood in a class of his own. Frost Giant. Asgardian. Son of Odin. Brother of Thor. Raised on tricks and lies and needless competition. Bitter for all the reasons one should be and all the reasons one shouldn’t.
There was no music in the gym, but Loki could put together a tune in his head to match Natasha’s movements. Languid stretches of andante where she twirled across the floor. A couru. An arabesque. Loki watched her ankles, the crux of her body’s strength for many of the more difficult positions. She flowed like a leaf floating downstream, but there was an undercurrent in her motions that told a different story. To the untrained eye, ballet was a weaker form of dance. People saw a small, thin body on their toes and didn’t see the endurance underneath. The struggle to move gracefully whilst conveying emotions that words could never do justice to. The pain, the hardship, and the brutalizing passion that went into expressing memory and ecstasy and grief through the body.
It reminded Loki of battle. Every slash, cut, jab, dodge, effort was precision. It was passion. And it triggered a nostalgia in him that he hadn’t expected. Loki wasn’t the kind of person who loved effortlessly or on a whim. He didn’t love himself enough to be able to feel that way about anyone else. Not yet. But if it were possible for him to fall in love with the image of someone in a flashing moment, he might have felt his heart stutter at this version of Natasha.
There were routines that played themselves out in her head when she couldn't sleep at night. The cover story of a prima ballerina had been another lie, but the training behind it — that had been real. Natasha had come to love ballet, and she used her body much in the same way when she fought.
After they lost against Thanos, Natasha spent much of those five years inside the Avengers compound. She was not going to be taken off-guard again, and the only way that could happen was to be ready at all times. To be in the place she was needed, to have the remaining Avengers report to her on all the happenings.
She'd been incredibly lonely and stretched thin, so she filled her time with activities. The punching bags had to be routinely replaced with the use. It wasn't quite Steve Rogers' level of destruction, but a quiet wearing away at a bag. She'd made sure never to run out of ammunition or targets in the range.
And when the nights were too long, she'd take a pair of ballet slippers to the gym and remember those old routines.
She found the slippers when she'd returned to her room some time during the day. With too many people out and about, she waited till she couldn't sleep (yet again) to slip out and work through a routine. Her body remembered every movement as if remembering to breathe, and before long she was lost in music only she could hear.
When she finally stopped, Natasha would swear she heard something inside her give way. She realized that nothing had really changed. Maybe back in their world, everyone was saved, but she was stuck in this world without even more of her family. She was even more alone and stretched thin. She dropped to the floor and covered her face with her hands.
The performance ended and Loki watched as Natasha crumpled to the floor. She looked the way he felt. Except if he finally expressed what he was feeling, there wouldn’t be anything silent about it. He had a rage boiling inside of him. This last week had turned up the heat on his simmering pot. The lid was clinking, threatening to blow off. Anyone with experience in anger could see that through his responses to people on the network posts. Catty sarcastic comments here. Boldly indifferent comments there. It was as though Loki were looking for a fight. Searching for a reason to lose his cool.
Because what he really wanted was to scream. He wanted to reach deep within himself and expel that fury in one giant roar. He wanted to shake the ground beneath him. He might not have had the power of storms. He couldn’t call on lightning or thunder. But that didn’t make him incapable of destruction. If he got angry enough he could probably bring down the gym.
Hopefully, however, he’d have the sense not to do that while he was standing inside it.
He should have left. He had no business being there. He was already intruding. If he was quick and quiet he could slip out through the entrance without her noticing. And he was prepared to do just that, but something stopped him.
I don’t judge someone for their worst mistakes. Isn’t that what she’d said? Loki wasn’t oblivious to what that meant. True friendships involved give and take from both sides. They involved understanding the other person when they did something wrong. And helping them find their way back to what was right. Loki had never been very good at friendships. He’d always assumed the worst. He was always afraid of being pushed away or left behind; remnants of his childhood that he’d never gotten over.
Natasha had already given him a lot since he’d arrived and he hadn’t been appreciative of it. He was typically Loki about it. Shrugging it off. Pretending like it didn’t matter. If he continued eventually the offer of friendship would no longer stand. And if he wanted to find a way to live in Derleth with the things he’d done, he’d need a friend.
Loki’s body disappeared in a fading glow of green and then rematerialized next to her on the center of the gym floor. It was Casual Friday in Loki Land with his official Derleth hoodie that he found buried in a box in the theatre. Same ridiculous leather pants though. Some things he wasn’t willing to change. “Need a shoulder to cry on?”
He grinned. But this time he was only half teasing.
The friendship would have turned into mere acquaintance. For some people, that was enough. Natasha had spent most of her life being what other people wanted or needed at the moment, and never more than when she turned Avenger. Atoning for all those mistakes meant putting herself aside. Once more.
Ever since the Sokovian Accords, Natasha felt the strain of a broken family. It wasn't the first time, but it never recovered. And then Thanos came and swept it all away. Then everyone else dropped away until she was all that was left in the compound.
There were things that Natasha regretted about her fall on Vormir, the main one being that Clint had to be there to witness it. That she'd forced him to let her go after he'd lost his other family, but it was with the hope that he'd get them back. From what she had heard, he did. Along with (almost) everyone else.
It would have been enough if that had been it. The end.
It wasn't though, and she was stuck here with another version of her best friend. He looked like him, talked like him, but so many things were just wrong. And Tony… their friendship had been reset all the way back to the beginning, and even though he was caught up on current events, he hadn't been through them. Some experiences just couldn't be told.
"Shouldn't you be in bed?" she asked, dabbing her hands against her face. "Doctor's orders or something?"
“Captain Feathers snores.” That wasn’t entirely true. Well, it was true, but that wasn’t the reason why Loki was out of bed. Besides, he was a god. He didn’t need to sleep a full eight hours to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in the morning for their next week of terror. Whether he slept for an hour or ten he’d still wake up feeling like a hand was gripped around his neck — bones crunching, windpipe shattering, the light in his mind fizzling.
Loki shrugged. “And isn’t exercise supposed to be good for the soul or something?”
Loki used to wander on Asgard as well. He would wait until the city slept and then he’d venture out of the royal palace and through the streets. Asgard had a specific kind of quiet about it at night. The only sounds were those of nighttime critters. Mostly birds perched high in the trees, warning of an impending dawn. Above was a rolling dark sky with a glimmering blue ridge that caused the stars to shine a bit brighter than in other realms. If it were a clear night, and it almost always was, he’d be able to see the distant mountains. Sometimes he’d even wander to the Rainbow Bridge and gaze out over the water, admiring where the land jutted to the sea, and the fjords cut through the cliffsides. It was beautiful at night. And he’d never felt unwelcome when he was alone and everyone else was wrapped in the arms of slumber.
Wandering Derleth didn’t have quite the same effect. But it was still peaceful in its own way.
“Shouldn’t you be doing the same? Or is there an upcoming talent show I don’t know about?”
Like her dancing, her fingers began to deftly undo the ribbon at her calves. The slippers were unlaced with care, and then pulled off. Bandages around the toes just kept the blood from soaking into the slippers. En pointe wasn't as effortless as most people believed. It was hell on the feet.
Natasha curled her hand around one of her calves and squeezed it into feeling again. She could feel circulation returning with each gentle touch.
"It doesn't matter. At one-thirty-two am, I'll be in bed asleep no matter where I am." And in the morning, she'll awake with a jolt. She'll immediately remember the cold air of that cliffside and the wispy, falling snow.
“Right.” Loki hadn’t tried to stay up late enough on the last day to see what would happen. Part of him didn’t care because he realized he didn’t have any control over it. And part of him was worried that if he did stay awake that it would ruin his chances of being there in the morning. What if the gods of Derleth — or whatever was puppeteering this experiment — decided to use his wakefulness as an excuse to make him disappear.
He didn’t want to stay in Derleth, but he didn’t want to disappear. Where would he go? Back to the brief blip of nothingness he experienced after his death? He had no place to go. Which made Derleth better than nothing.
Loki tugged on one of the drawstrings for the hooded sweatshirt, tying a tiny knot into the end. Then he watched as Natasha removed the slippers from her feet. A piece of the tape on her toes was reddish brown, the blood trying to seep through. There was a weightiness to that, like to the bruises he still felt around his abdomen from Not-Ted, that made him hope Derleth was more than it appeared. If they could bleed and hurt and die, did that not mean they were alive?
“You’re a lovely dancer. Good enough to have been able to make a career of it on Asgard,” he said softly. He picked up one of her slippers while she loosened the muscle in her calf. “Maybe that’s what I should have done. Certainly would have made for a less dramatic ending.”
"Thanks." Her reply lingered a little, like she wasn't sure if he wanted to take the compliment back.
But then the idea of Loki as a dancer...
Natasha started laughing. It wasn't anything he said, directly, but the image of him dancing at the final Fillorian ball had suddenly forced itself to the front of her mind. He'd had her crown on his head, and he was dressed in his finest, but damn that hip and arm motion had spoiled her image of him forever.
"I'm trying to think of you as a ballet dancer, and not whatever that hip thing was a few days ago." The tears leaking out of the corner of her eyes were from laughter.
A small, slightly insecure smile tugged at the corner of his lips when she laughed. It hadn’t been his intention to strike a humorous chord, but even he could recognize when he walked himself into a good joke.
“To be fair, I had quite a few drinks in me before I approached you. I promise my dancing abilities go far beyond the snake hip twist. Or whatever it is people on Midgard call that.” Loki set her slipper back down on the gym floor. “And I’ll have you know that I was often talked about in the Asgardian palace as being the brother with grace on the dance floor. Thor always did have two left feet.”
The memory of Thor and him when they were younger, going through the motions of some of their required royal tutelage, broadened Loki’s smile even more. But nostalgia was a dangerous thing for a dead man. Too much delving into the past and he risked realizing he wasn’t quite as bad of a person as he thought — or as he tried to be.
“I like to dance,” Loki said with a shrug. “I like performance. Obviously. But dance is … You can be intimate with someone and not at the same time. You can be complete strangers and, after one dance, know everything there is to know about a person. Their character, their personality. What they like, how they see themselves, who they are in the bedroom. Everything shows. You can see that, but at the same time you don’t have to be beholden to them as you would if you learned those traits through other means. You can dance together and then you can go your separate ways.”
Natasha stretched her legs out in front of her, resting her upper body on her arms locked at her sides. She wasn't sure why, but she didn't think Loki had ulterior motives here. She was good at reading people; she'd even outwitted him. She tilted over sideways to nudge Loki with her shoulder.
"Thor definitely does not have the grace to be a dancer." Did you really need it when you were the god of thunder, though? With a magical hammer that could destroy almost anything? She tried not to think about him having even less grace after the Snap. "You, though. You would have made a great dance partner. Long, lean, effeminate but not too effeminate. The only drawback for you?"
She paused to look at him. "It's prima ballerina, not the danseur they're looking at."
Loki made a sound that was something akin to a half-laugh that didn’t leave his throat. A knowing scoff. He hung his head forward a moment then he sat up straighter, shaking his hair back over his shoulders. Natasha was amusing. She amused him. That continued to surprise him. And when she leaned into him, nudging his shoulder, he did the exact same motion in kind.
“Your compliments on my physique are very flattering. But not entirely correct.” His smirk crept up higher on the left side of his mouth than it did on the right. “I can be whatever I want. Including too effeminate.”
He stretched out his legs beside hers. They were longer and for a moment he considered doing something he very rarely did. But in the end he didn’t. He’d keep that surprise for another time. Perhaps when it would leave a stronger impression. He clicked his heels together.
“But trust me. If I were on the stage, prima ballerina or otherwise, it would be me the audience would focus on. I’d make sure of it.”
"I have absolutely no doubt that you'd make sure of it." She tilted her head to one side. "You do enjoy being the center of attention." She didn't begrudge him that. Some people wanted it, some didn't. Natasha didn't particularly enjoy it, but she wasn't sure if that was because she still, often, though she had no place in the world.
Funny. She wasn't in the world now. Just this little slice of something.
"I have read Norse mythology, you know. I've heard stories. Just not sure which ones are true or not."
“I do.” Loki had no qualms about admitting that. He did enjoy being the center of attention. It gave him purpose. Gave him life. That was a large part of his king obsession, after all. Granted, he did deserve a kingdom and a crown. Twice over, in fact. But it wasn’t so much the act of ruling he desired as the attention. The admiration. The unconditional love and respect.
Those last two were the most important. They were the ones Loki felt he’d missed out on most in his life. And while he couldn’t force anyone to love him, he could try to force people to respect him. Granted, that hadn’t worked out well for him yet, but there was still time. Assuming Derleth ever gave him the opportunity to prove himself leadership worthy.
Doubtful.
He raised a brow when she mentioned mythology. “Well, if it’s a story about Thor being a thick-headed twit then it’s absolutely true. One hundred percent. You can take that to the bank. Same for any stories involving Heimdall being a dick.”
Heimdall and Loki had never gotten along. Probably because Heimdall saw literally everything. That made him notoriously difficult to fool.
“For everything else…” Loki shrugged. “You’ll have to be more specific.”
Natasha listened to him, reaching out her hands to grab onto her feet. Then she stretched, pressing her forehead to her knees. Cooling down after a workout was important too, and it gave her some extra time to sit here with Loki and keep talking.
"I imagine that a person who could see everything would make our jobs very, very hard." She tried not to cringe. She'd known about Heimdall before, but it wasn't something she thought about for too long or hard, lest she get incredibly uncomfortable. There were a lot of things that Natasha was not proud of in her past. She'd tossed them out on the internet for everyone to see, but that had been at her own hand.
"Clearly Hel wasn't your daughter." She'd heard the story from Thor, but she wasn't eager to bring it up considering it ended with Thanos. So she asked, "Jormungandr? Fenrir? Just how flexible are you?"
Odin’s beard, was she really asking about that? She was really asking about that, wasn’t she? Loki made an uncomfortable face. He pursed his lips together and turned his gaze up to the gymnasium ceiling while he tried to decide how best to answer those questions. Then he laughed.
“Look, the thing you have to understand is that sometimes we would get bored on Asgard. Thor, especially. He was always coming up with some nonsensical reason to go to Midgard. Why Midgard? I don’t know. It’s everyone’s favorite. Probably because the people are so gullible. Anyway, we’d go to Midgard, have a few drinks at the local tavern. Thor would show off his hammer. Fandral would woo the ladies. I would tell stories. Sometimes they were true. Often times they were lies. Well, white lies. Sometimes they were allegory.” He ran his fingers back through his hair. “You know, craving a little bit of attention. As one does when they’re a bored god among wide-eyed believers.”
Loki licked his lower lip. “And sometimes you have too much to drink and you find yourself in situations you didn’t intend. Sometimes, for example, you—I don’t know—turn into a mare. Because that’s fun. And you frolic in the fields with a stallion who is both handsome and faster than you are. And a year later you’re presenting the Allfather with an eight-legged horse.”
He paused. “Or a snake. Or a wolf. Maybe.”
Loki gave an awkward laugh. “It was a different time. You had to be there.”
Natasha had to admit: she did not expect him to answer, especially not so honestly. The nervous laughter told her he was being honest, or at least as honest as Loki knew how. He was also right: the people were very gullible, and they evolved a special part of their brains to believe in God. Or gods as the case may be.
"Do you miss them?"
His children, but she could have been talking about Thor or Fandral or any one of the Warriors Three. Odin. Frigga. Asgard. She'd never gotten to see it, but the way Thor talked about it, it was a sight to behold.
Loki blinked. “Do I miss a giant snake that encircles the world causing earthquakes and threatening to bring about the end of days?”
He scratched the side of his face and then gave another loose shrug of his shoulders. “I miss the horse. Sleipnir, the eight-legged one. Not the one from the fields.”
Another pause. “Well, not that there was anything wrong with him. But he made me feel a little bit like a cheap date, if you know what I mean.”
Loki gave a playful wink. Sly and knowing. Just enough to add uncertainty to the conversation and call into question everything he’d said in the last few minutes. Then his expression softened. “I do miss Asgard though. It was my home as much as I didn’t appreciate it most of the time. I miss my mother, but I’m certain she’s in a better place. Not like Derleth. She’s in the real place. And I miss…”
He frowned. Well, he didn’t really have to say Thor’s name, did he? That much should have been obvious. At least to Natasha.
“You know, he was the strongest and fastest horse in the Nine Realms. Odin’s favorite.”
Natasha was thought as he spoke, even as he tried to lessen the certainty of the conversation. And hey, just because a snake caused the end of days didn't mean you couldn't miss it. There were people from the Red Room that Natasha missed, even if she didn't miss the things they'd made her do.
No, they didn't make her do anything. They taught her and used her, but she did all those things herself.
And no, he didn't have to say Thor's name. She found she liked hearing him talk about Asgard and silly things that Loki and Thor had done in the name of boredom. She was learning this whole different side of him, and honestly? She liked this side of him.
Now if she could just make sure he wouldn't stab her. Or try to take over the world.
"You know, I feel like every once in a while, we all need to feel like a cheap date." Natasha cocked an eyebrow in return. Clint may have told him horrible things she'd done, but he didn't go into all the details. "I've never given birth to an eight-legged horse though so you're one-up on me."
“It’s all fun and games until four of those legs get stuck. And not even magic can heal that amount of stretch marks. But, thankfully, I don’t spend many of my days as a mare anymore. So no one has to see them. Lesson learned!” The next time Loki decided to drink beyond the point of no return he would make certain he was not in the vicinity of any well-bred and singularly attractive four-legged beasts.
Actually, he just wouldn’t ever drink that much again. Time to let someone else learn the hard lessons in life.
Loki twisted the drawstring of his sweatshirt around his finger. “I’ve always been reckless, but back then things were different. It was fun. It wasn’t about power or control. It was just boyish competition. Sibling rivalry. We were young and we did foolish things. You know, Thor actually got in trouble way more than I ever did. He would really get on father’s nerves. Always doing dumb show-off things. Challenging people to petty bets that embarrassed Odin. I was always just along for the ride. Thor was…”
Loki hesitated. “I looked up to him. Obviously I knew I was smarter and more cunning. Craftier. But everybody loved him. Him and his stupid games. He was like a light in a room. A flame that everyone flocked to. Like moths. I could never stand up to that. The golden child. Quite literally. I was nothing next to him. And then it all fell apart.”
He sighed. Then he shook it off and cast a sidelong glance at Natasha. “What about you? Who do you miss?”
She stretched further and pulled her feet together, her knees splayed out and touching the floor. Natasha straightened her back. Then shrugged, looking down at her feet.
"One of my covers — with the Red Room — was a family one. Mother. Father. Annoying little sister." Even after these years, Natasha wasn't sure she wanted to talk about them. "Yelena."
Natasha looked wistful, staring off into the distance.
"A lot like Thor. The kind of person you want to protect with your whole being even though you knew she was just as capable as you. Straight forward. Well, as straightforward as you can get for a spy."
She drew in a breath. Natasha was not really ready to go into more detail about her. "I don't know, maybe the Clint from my universe. The Steve who went through those long five years with me. They're here, but they're not really, you know?"
“I know,” Loki said, his tone somber. It seemed the appropriate response to everything she’d just said. He knew what it was like to want to protect someone who didn’t need protecting. And he knew what it was like to be around people who knew him, but didn’t really know him. People whose memories of him were broken up in time or based on a single event. Natasha fell into that category too, in a way. But her situation was different.
Because they were the same. They’d both made the same decision. Possibly for the same reasons. Loki should have been comforted by that, but he wasn’t. It just made him angry. Not because he didn’t think it was the right decision, although he’d already stated on multiple occasions that he regretted his choice. He couldn’t keep up with his own lies anymore. But because from his point of view it hadn’t amounted to much of anything.
He died. Thor apparently threw his life away. New Asgard sounded like a disaster. And what?
“I could ignore a lot of things when it was just me here. But when Fandral arrived—” Loki ran his tongue over the front of his teeth in thought. “It can be both a blessing and curse to have them here. I feel…”
He frowned. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to finish that sentence. He’d already told her too much. More than he’d ever intended. And while he wanted to say more. Maybe even needed to say more. He still didn’t know if he could trust her.
“Perhaps it’s wiser to leave those relationships in the past. Maybe that’s where they belong.”
Let the dead stay dead, Natasha thought to herself as she settled into something of a more normal sitting position. No more stretching to occupy her body while she thought things over. She swallowed in a dry throat, but remained silent for the moment.
Eventually, she agreed. "You're probably right. Things there really only matter as long as we're there. We're not. We're here instead. Here keeps resetting. People, like Wanda, disappear multiple times and come back without memories."
It was exhausting having to deal with other people's grief and guilt over her choice on Vormir. She already had to live with that decision here. Comforting someone else felt like a cruel, cosmic joke. "It was easier," she admitted, "when Steve wasn't here. I promised him a long time ago that I'd be a friend, and I don't take my promises lightly."
That was one of the reasons why Loki was glad Thor was not among them. It was difficult enough hearing Natasha speak of what his death had done to his brother. But to have to face him? To see him in person after all of that? Loki didn’t think he could handle that much of an emotional revelation. And if Thor arrived without all of his memories, as Tony Stark had?
Loki’s heart, which was not as strong and shielded as he claimed it was, would break.
“You can still be a friend to him.” But Loki knew what she meant. It was different if Steve didn’t remember her promise or her sacrifice. That perhaps explained why Loki rarely saw her with Clint. Different universes. Different times. They were all different versions of themselves. Mismatched puzzle pieces that didn’t quite fit together. “Years ago, if someone had told me that one day I would be discussing ballet, my feelings for Thor, and Sleipnir with Natasha Romanoff…”
Loki laughed. The sound of it was both amused and sad.
“I suppose the only thing you can do is give him time to show that he’s the same man who’s deserving of the friendship you once gave him. And then go from there.” Advice which Loki should have somehow used himself with Fandral, although he wasn’t quite sure how to at this point. He may have already gone too far there.
Natasha's own laugh was just as duplicitous. She'd already felt fragile enough, but Fillory — the idea of a wish that could send them all back home — had made her realise that she was not ready to go back. At the time she'd made her choice, she was done. She was ready. Everything fit.
Now she was here, living whatever weird life this was. The stakes, while sometimes higher than other times, weren't universe-snapping. Or rather, the number of people was significantly smaller. Protecting them was easier when most of them had powers of their own.
Even Natasha had powers now. She'd gone through a slew of wishes, none of which the White Lady could do, and settled for a standard sort of superhuman package. She hadn't tested it out much. There hadn't been anything to fight.
"He's from the Snap, so we've just lost. He doesn't have the five years of desperation. Of watching everyone leave and do whatever it is they're going to do then." She thought of Clint going absolutely apeshit, Tony retreating to a cabin. "I don't think it's sunk in that we lost yet."
“It feels wrong to be here with them. It’s like standing on the opposite side of a road and watching life continue on as normal without you, but at the same time being on a slow winding loop that hasn’t quite caught up. I see Stark and Jane Foster’s friend, I can never remember her name, and it’s like watching people through blurred glass. I can’t really make them out and I know there’s a barrier between us that they’ll never cross. It’s…” Loki shook his head. “I’d rather be in a place where everyone was dead.”
Then he wouldn’t have to worry about what he would do if Thor showed up. Or his mother. Or Odin. If they were all dead then they’d all be on the same plane. In the same time of ever expanding nothingness that occurred after death. Valhalla. The great hall. They could share their stories without feeling like any of them were secluded. They’d be the same and together.
They’d be happy.
Putting the dead with the living was just cruel.
“Well, as someone who’s used to losing, I’m certain he’ll get over it.” Spoken in true hypocritical fashion, of course. Because when had Loki ever truly gotten over anything?
He leaned into Natasha’s shoulder. “But you didn’t lose in the end. You said so yourself. Midgard’s Mightiest Heroes eventually win out. A few losses on the side constitute a small sacrifice, do they not?”
Natasha had a lot she could say about those five years. Thanos's plan was idiotic, really. Snap half of the people, indiscriminately, out of the universe didn't make for balance. It made for brilliant minds being wiped out, minds like Shuri's. It made for a hole in farmers and scientists. In doctors. It left entire industries sometimes without a single person with the knowledge to teach a new group. The universe may have been finite, but he could have snapped his fingers and wished for more habitable planets for the population they did have. He could have snapped for infinite resources.
"The universe wasn't meant to lose that many people with a snap, and five years, ultimately, was enough time for people to get accustomed to a new normal before we got them back. Was it worth it? Yes, and I'd make the same choice again, but it's not without its issues."
How many people have bought houses? Moved to another country? How many people have moved on and remarried? Or had children with those people? Only for the missing to come back at the exact moment, not realizing how long it had been. It must have been utter chaos, and all those systems they've put in place would have to be redone again.
She glanced up at the wall. The gym's clock was ticking down till the reset. Natasha tried to brace herself for the unknown. "Wanna countdown with me?"
In truth, Loki didn’t know how to respond to Natasha. He agreed with her. And he supposed that if he’d lived long enough to witness everything that had happened following the events on the Statesmen, he would have found himself aligned with the people who once hated him. It was a waste. And he could say what he wanted about ‘small sacrifices being worth it,’ but deep down he didn’t really feel that way. Because there shouldn’t have been any sacrifices. He learned that the hard way. It literally took death to force him to see that.
But if he were in the same place, in the same moment, with the same people, would he have made the same choice? Would he have been as strong and stalwart as Natasha had been?
He didn’t know. Hindsight was a dangerous thing to a man who’d never felt like he’d belonged anywhere. To a man who’d never known true love or friendship or brotherhood. At least, not until it was too late.
But he hoped he would make the same decision. Because as foolish and as wasteful as it had been, it had been the right one.
He followed Natasha’s gaze to the clock on the wall. The second hand ticked steadily. 1:31 AM. Less than a minute before it happened. Whatever it was. And Loki felt the muscles in his stomach clench and his heartbeat increase, preparing for the inevitable crunch in his throat.
He watched as that second hand edged closer to the twelve. He was trying not to think about what would happen. About what had happened. Trying not to worry about whether he’d wake up in his bed or if he’d disappear, only to be returned to the nothingness. To a space where he ceased to exist. Or worse, to another time and place where he could experience his death again. And again. And again.
Ten seconds to go and he took Natasha’s hand in his own, giving it a gentle, if not a tad nervous, squeeze. Then he quirked a rare honest smile. “See you on the other side, Tasha.”