#delyth88

There is a wound deep inside Loki’s mind. He is aware, when he allows himself to think about it, that he has carried it for some time—not as long as some of his wounds, like the one that quietly festered most of his life and broke open after Thor’s aborted coronation—but that he does not know quite when he acquired it, or rather when he acquired an awareness of it. He is fairly certain the wound itself is roughly a year old, no more than two, and he is yet more certain of where he acquired it. The fact that he became aware of the wound on his own is, he thinks, a tentatively good sign as far as the integrity and resiliency of his mind are concerned, but rather less so in terms of what he is going to do about it. For his first several days forgotten in Asgard’s dungeons, he was aware only of a growing sense that something was not right, distinct from the itchy restlessness of confinement that plagued him after the first day, or his fury toward Odin and Thor, or his humiliated rage at having been beaten by such a ridiculous team of misfits. These are not pleasant, still, although as long as anger remains uppermost, the thoughts are not actively painful. But when that level of rage became unsustainable for his exhausted mind and equally exhausted body, he became aware of…wrongness. It is not simply a gap in his memory, although that is part of it—gaps, rather, dark spots he is not sure he wants to contemplate, but with little else to occupy his time, he finds himself edging closer. It isn’t a gap, it’s a chasm, depthless, and as he flinches back he feels quite sure that if he were to go over the edge, he would never stop falling, and that thought sends a stab of ice down his spine. The Void was—bad. He knows this. What he does not know, he realizes, is much in the way of specifics, and now…now the abyss is in his head, trying to lure him back for another fall. And it is not just a rift—it is raw and suppurating, comparable only to an injury covered by a layer of skin that has begun to heal while infection still rages beneath. He has a perverse desire to poke at it, because that is what he does, and if his analogy is at all accurate, the wound will not heal properly unless the infection is drained—but for once, he backs off.

The general idea is that he remembers the Void but not anything that happened with Thanos, so he doesn't 100% know why he did everything he did on Midgard or how he got his allies, just that his mind is extremely fucked up about it and he's avoiding it like a pro.

The second major thing is that Kurse reaches the obvious conclusion that "you might want to take the stairs on the left" implies Loki knows something about the layout of the place, and he agrees to let Loki out in exchange for guidance to whatever enchantments protect the palace. Loki does it because he's in a "fuck Asgard" mood, but it also means he's there to see Frigga get stabbed--in fact I think at that point Malekith had realized who Frigga and Loki were to each other and what Loki could do, and he told Loki to teleport them all to safety, Loki hesitated because he wanted them to let Frigga go first, and that's when Kurse stabbed her, so Loki teleported them all outside the city to give himself a chance to heal her. He manages it, but then they block his magic and threaten him until Frigga lets them block her magic too, and they're both taken hostage onboard one of the Svartalf ships.

At this point I don't entirely remember the specifics but I think Malekith figured he had an opportunity with the two of them, because Frigga could potentially be persuaded to retrieve? give up? the Aether to keep Loki from torture. Unfortunately for Loki, a huge part of the point of this for me was torturing him, but also he figured Frigga was only useful to Malekith as long as he kept thinking she might eventually agree, meaning, Loki gets tortured a bunch to force her hand. The way they actually do it is by figuring out he's already been through some fucked-up shit, realizing they can be lazy, and giving him a drug that tears open those blocked memories and makes him relive everything Thanos & co. did to him, so now he has to deal with that on top of everything else.

“I have forgotten worse things than you!” “Have you,” Malekith says, advancing on him, and his teeth gleam when he smiles. Loki’s stomach clenches, because he’s misstepped again, given Malekith another weapon to use against them, and he doesn’t even know yet how he’s done it this time, only that he cannot seem to stop failing. Malekith seizes Loki’s chin, forcing him to meet the dark elf’s gaze, and leans in close. “Would you like to remember?”

and then there was pages and pages of Thanos torturing Loki, like, every idea I ever had about that got stuffed into this fic. finally we got back to the actual TDW stuff, where Malekith offers to trade Frigga for the Aether and sends Loki back to the palace with the message. Odin doesn't believe him and has him imprisoned again. Thor goes to him and finds Loki losing his shit because the guards left him in the dark and he's Super Not Good with the dark since the Void but especially since getting his memories back. They talk and canon more or less gets back on track here, except the road trip on Svartalfheim is longer and Jane and Thor get to watch Loki have a nightmare and a panic attack and get a little more insight on how fucked up he is. Frigga's there for the confrontation with Malekith, so I guess they do more of a hostage exchange but otherwise everything is pretty similar to canon. She manages to heal Loki when he's on the brink of death from being impaled. They go with Thor and Jane back to Earth to defeat Malekith, but that was where things really petered out because I couldn't figure out a good way for Loki and Frigga to be involved in the final battle, and then I wasn't sure if it should end with Loki returning to Asgard (but not his cell) or not.

And I wrote 42,600 words of this. It was a mess that would have been a nightmare to get into publication-ready condition even if I knew how to end it, but there was a lot of it and a fair amount of it was pretty good, and sometimes I'm just kind of sad that I put so much effort into it and I'll probably never post it because long projects are very very scary and it would take massively more amounts of effort to get it coherent.

Odin's B+ parenting: I've long thought that it could have changed things in a big way if Odin, instead of saying "No, Loki," just said "I know" instead. like "I know you could have done it. I know you tried. I know you're not a monster. I know you're fucked up but you're my son." so this was supposed to be an ultra-short fic where he did just that, and it did change everything, but then I got stuck because I had to go and make things more complicated with figuring out what happened after Loki let Odin pull him back up onto the bridge.

Thor sees Other scene: the more behind-the-scenes and supplementary stuff I read, like the novelization, the Avengers art book, the character encyclopedia, etc., the more I'm like "I am very grudgingly coming to the conclusion that a lot of the people involved probably did not intend to indicate that Thanos tortured Loki because it just seems like that would come up in behind-the-scenes info somewhere, but also there is stuff in the text (+ some extratextual stuff) that frankly makes it kind of dumb if nobody actually intended that because it makes more sense than the alternatives," and the scene between Loki and the Other is the one I keep coming back to that is just...if nothing else, very easy to interpret as "yeah, they already did hurt him" because what we actually have onscreen is the Other threatening him, hurting him, and implying he knows something about Loki's experiences with pain, and Loki reacting like prey. so because it's actually in the text rather than something speculative, I wanted to do a short fic where Thor somehow sees this scene and is like. what the fuck. hey Loki what the fuck was that. why is your ally threatening you like that. why did you react like that. Loki what the fuck!! my handwavey excuse was, Loki shot at him with the scepter while they were fighting on Avengers Tower and it did a mindfucky thing that transferred the memory, giving Thor the chance to realize Things Are Not Quite What They Appear. and then I didn't know where to go from there.

Rejoice: well it's one of the words in Ebony Maw's creepy monologue at the beginning of Infinity War, and I had this AU ages before a whole lot of canon, now (pre-Wandavision for sure), where Loki either survived that or got brought back, I forget which, and he's living in New Asgard with everybody else, and Steve and Wanda are both staying there for the time being helping the Asgardian refugees because they're just kind of at lost ends. The three of them end up becoming friends because I like them. It's Christmastime and they all go to a Christmas Eve service in a nearby church, mostly because Steve wanted to, and it's one of those where they have everybody hold a candle, and at some point they sing "O Come O Come Emmanuel," which prominently features the word rejoice, and Loki has a flashback and almost sets some things on fire with his candle before teleporting out of the church in a panic. Steve and Wanda go after him and they all, like, bond over having trauma.