fic: desolation (thor movieverse)
darcy/loki, sigyn/loki; r for violence; ~2500
Later he understands that the madness has been in him for too long for him to be able to recognize it.
myth-based au; movie-compliant
follows there is a trace
Once in his hand, it asks: what would you have of yourself?
(and behind his eyes the shadows are unfurling already, and he’ll understand later but now he cannot that he has already spoken, that his screams have reached the farthest corners and that he has already been found)
Loki thinks, too focused and too sure of himself, the wall that keeps him together standing strong, power.
(and he has seen things in his existence as the son of Odin, the births and deaths of stars having lost their interest for him so long before, but all that is stretches around him, pulls tight like fabric shredding from the strain, and he is already screaming as he is drawn back into the start of all things, as he is swept away by the destruction of the walls, of all walls, of all divisions in all things that are the same in the beginning and the end)
He says power but the Tesseract knows all, and he has been screaming for so long it is eager to please.
And this, Loki understands now, is his frailty: he does not know who he is.
There are two memories that surface in the moment of his death, and the first, from so many years before:
From birth, Loki has little companionship beyond his brother.
Whether this is because he himself has no interest in others or because he’s long since accepted there are none who have an interest in him, even he doesn’t know, but this is the fact of his life until his death:
He will have few bed partners and fewer lovers outside of the disastrous and ill-handled affair with Sif before she marries (and even more quickly leaves) his older brother.
He has no roots except for those created by others.
Except once, just once, when he is still young and just beginning to sneak between the branches because nothing feels right, not his skin or his home or even his mother’s arms, and then it begins when he wanders by the cave lit only by deeper shadows-
She’s the last of a group her kind no longer speaks of, and explains nothing of her exile.
One half of him thinks that she is frightening in the shadows as they talk, but that is only one half of him.
She says, voice rough as she approaches death and offers what small lessons she can while refusing to allow his sight to find her in the dark, “Your hatred is a joke beyond even itself” and sounds very much like she isn’t sure whether she wishes to laugh or cry as the vague shadow wraps tattered fabric around her shoulders.
“Frost giants get cold?” he asks the second time they speak, trying to cover wariness with contempt and she chuckles and the idea is completely… bizarre to him.
She mutters in the dark, “I’m always cold” like she’s irritated and then: “Don’t you?” she asks, and before he can consider the question she is explaining how to bend light the way he can’t figure out yet and has no one else to ask.
Loki speaks to her only three times, and spends only a handful of hours with her throughout his teenage years.
The fourth time he climbs between two small branches, this time for the sole purpose of visiting her as much as she allows him to visit her, the cave is quiet and the vague sense of warmth just inside is gone.
Inside, when he searches for her with open eyes still blind and probing fingers in the dark, he finds the too-large body curled in the farthest corner of the cave, the giantess having carefully wrapped herself with blankets before expiring.
He stands there for a long time with his hands on her body in the dark before he draws back, stumbles out and away.
None mourn Angrboda.
Certainly not Loki, son of Odin.
And there is a second memory, one that he roils against in blind rage, in terrible panic at being known:
Later he understands that the madness has been in him for too long for him to be able to recognize it here.
Later he knows that he is already far-gone despite surviving once he lets go of his brother’s hand.
But right now one of his copies is silently watching the small group in the office of the fools working so very hard to keep him from reaching the cube.
As if they can keep him from the being that wants him so desperately, as if they can change the flow of the worlds.
He will be dead in a week, he notes now, but he quickly banishes those thoughts before this self can slip away.
Instead he turns his awareness to the him sitting bored but patient in the corner where they know nothing as they talk, go quiet, and begin conversation anew. Thor is very much himself even in this official-looking room (furrowed brows and vague expression of pain promising he’s already hungry only a few hours after his last meal) and Jane is making notes in the notes she’s already made on her work, on what they’ve found out about an object none of them have a right to.
He remembers his own distaste, the offensiveness of the basic idea, and now he wonders why there had been that knowledge, how like had called to like in such a way.
“-I’m just saying, dude, your Dad’s kind of nuts.” He realizes that the irritating one is babbling the way she always does, rambling about one thing or another for hours on end, and Loki has created just during this visit a dozen ideas for how to bring about her destruction, loathes the sound of her voice already.
“Darcy.”
Jane’s tone is disbelieving, eyebrows lifted in shock as Thor stares blankly at the irritating one.
“I’m just saying, surprise-adopting the enemy baby to make him gun-ho about offing his own people?” If she’s aware of their stares, she doesn’t seem to care, focused wholeheartedly on her own small computer (Loki will never admit how they fascinate him) and fingering the cup of coffee that never leaves her side as she types with her other hand. “Yeah, up the self-hate a little more, no wonder he’s trying to go all Brain on us.”
Loki finds himself staring intently at the wall of monitors behind the woman, and if something in him tightens, something that stays awful and shapeless and heavy inside him where he cannot reach it to remove it, he will discard everything from these moments later, and adds hastily in his blind fury to the dozen ideas he already has.
Thor asks, confused, “Brain?” and Jane mutters, “Later” and stares hard at the irritating one.
The woman just rambles, and Loki refuses to listen, “… guy just seems fucked up to me.”
Loki is not simply killed but destroyed.
He splinters into pieces, so many more than he had already been, and he is screaming and silent as he is torn apart.
And already he is spinning back together, and the agony is indescribable as he spills between branches not his own, pulled apart and pulled together all at once.
No self, only fragments of him and not-him, of a thousand who exist or will, of too many to count.
For just a moment, he sees:
Sigyn searches for and finds him as he lays suffering, and her fingers are soft and firm upon his neck and his face.
Her mouth is forever too large for her face, and her eyes devour him as he lays helpless.
He admits after too long, “I cannot get out” but she says nothing.
Sigyn has not chosen whether she will spare him.
And there is a tree growing from within him, around him, branches unfurling through his flesh as he shudders through his destruction- creation- destruction so many times they blend as one.
A memory not Loki’s, a tree so large he cannot begin to see every branch tangling with the trees around it, crushing some and swallowing others, the roots of the tree reaching so deeply they break through-
The woman is as much Aesir as he is Jötunn.
Her mouth is too large for her face, and her hair hangs dark and unbound as she serves Frigga like a friend that chooses not to be a daughter, and it suits her perfectly as she catches his gaze across the great hall.
Her eyes take him in, devour in a heartbeat the body and everything that it houses, and her lips part.
His breath burns inside him when his lungs fill again.
The beginning of Loki and Sigyn, and this is all it takes to start again.
This man is as foreign to him as himself.
This man with his face and his voice sits on the throne with a power that makes it hard for Loki to meet his eyes even across the distance of the great hall, and this man could make even Odin tremble with fear, with respect. His garb is the same but his hair is longer, just slightly, and his eyes are deeper, are filled with everything that is and is not.
“All you need to do is find me,” he assures Loki, and the younger god is shuddering already, his self convulsing in defiance. “Well, perhaps…” And here he considers, pausing as he watches Loki roll apart and then struggle to reform, sobbing and shuddering in anger and pain. “Perhaps this may be more difficult than usual for me.” A beat of silence, his mouth creasing with a blend of sadness and laughter, “It doesn’t have to hurt, I promise.”
On the bridge, Loki lets go of Thor- and this is his very worst lie, one that cannot fool even him, even in the ever-night.
The truth is that the young brother rejects the old brother, and cannot begin to let go.
Instead Thor is carried deep inside him, a jagged and heavy weight that shreds with every breath, and his mother is a constant ache, and his father strips him bear only to stuff him inside dead skin that is not built to hold him.
He drifts and he is everywhere, and he is nowhere, and there is no touchstone in the darkness.
In the moments when the nothing recedes and he can draw a breath, he promises to find him, who he does not know but it is all that matters, and he struggles to survive because Loki desires to live.
The black waters roll back over him, and he seethes, and gnaws his own flesh between his teeth.
His own blood is fuel enough for his curses.
Loki asks the true him, in a moment of lucidity, “Where am I?” as the halls of the false-Valhalla stretch around him.
The man with his face begins to speak and then another other man- Odin- himself- Thor- no, no, it is him and now it is him is rushing at him with a twisted face and hate-filled eyes, weapon at the ready and hungry for his blood, and already the throne sits empty before him, the true him driven away again.
The spear pierces his chest, tears clean through his heart, and he is being dragged into the cold night again.
He has never met this woman; she does not exist for him:
But Sigyn is the ever stubborn, the she who perseveres through the sorrows to bring victory, as Loki is the spark.
The wife of Loki is known well for her ability to forgive even the most stupid at least once, and those who call for her are never cold even in the darkest night, whether through her power or through her husband’s.
The mortals say that if it is Loki who first shows the people how to be warmed by the fire, it is Sigyn who keeps their chilled and exhausted fingers moving in the cold until it can be lit.
“There are nine worlds,” he says between one punishment and the next, and the man with his face chuckles beneath his breath.
“Nine branches on the tree that you have explored,” the man he should be, could be, and is unable to reach explains easily as he draws slim lines on the large sheet of paper open between them, the faint outlines of shapes blooming into life. “My dear reflection, when has a forest been made up of only one tree?”
In his lap, his own hands are smeared with Sigyn's blood and he cannot clean it off.
He keeps himself chained in the lowest levels of the false-Valhalla, and he suffers.
Sometimes Odin strangles the blue-colored babe, and leaves the tiny body on the altar.
Thor is there, once, his eyes for a moment warm and familiar- and then the hammer is coming down upon his skin, the blue color of it clear even in the shadows, and the giant killer is merciless.
His reflections are everywhere, and he is nowhere, and he is alone.
The Tesseract asks, what would you have of yourself?
His body answers, power and the cube has already heard his pleas, inescapable throughout creation.
The cube brings him together, as one.
This has not happened, and he sees it somehow while he half-sleeps in the night: there is a forest, heavy and dim around them.
And there is a monster, a beast, a shapeless thing that creates only destruction and so cannot stop.
And Sigyn is running toward him from somewhere deep inside the woods, and her hair is dark and unbound, and her eyes are too large for her face. Her mouth is open and she is calling his name, and only dimly does he begin to realize that Thor is shouting something, far away, in pain. The lost woman he can sense more than see is trying to fight her way toward them, a child’s panic on her face, and the beast is shrieking, in pain and enraged and suddenly exhilarated, the sound turning wild.
Sigyn is close, slim body unspeakably fast, and her face is alight, eyes dark-bright as she runs.
He is crying, and the beast comes apart within itself, turns on her savage and betrayed and desperate.
And Sigyn reaches him then, dark cloud of her hair blinding as she impacts him, body chaining his as her arms lock around his back and his neck, as she pants into his ear words he cannot begin to understand.
The monster screams, and Loki locks her in his embrace, drowns in her-
And he wakes in the prison where he has banished himself, and lays quiet as the halls above him shake, tremble.
Sigyn touches his face, unforgiving but still merciful, and Loki waits.
notes: title actually comes from tom hiddleston's quote: "But [Loki] is also kind of deluded in the fact that he thinks unlimited power will give him self-respect so I haven't let go of the fact that he is still motivated by this terrible jealousy and kind of spiritual desolation."
angrboda is the frost giant who is said to have born three of loki's more terrifying children, including the massive wolf fenrir and the death deity hel.
next update: jane searches for darcy, and darcy searches for the way out.
Later he understands that the madness has been in him for too long for him to be able to recognize it.
myth-based au; movie-compliant
follows there is a trace
Once in his hand, it asks: what would you have of yourself?
(and behind his eyes the shadows are unfurling already, and he’ll understand later but now he cannot that he has already spoken, that his screams have reached the farthest corners and that he has already been found)
Loki thinks, too focused and too sure of himself, the wall that keeps him together standing strong, power.
(and he has seen things in his existence as the son of Odin, the births and deaths of stars having lost their interest for him so long before, but all that is stretches around him, pulls tight like fabric shredding from the strain, and he is already screaming as he is drawn back into the start of all things, as he is swept away by the destruction of the walls, of all walls, of all divisions in all things that are the same in the beginning and the end)
He says power but the Tesseract knows all, and he has been screaming for so long it is eager to please.
And this, Loki understands now, is his frailty: he does not know who he is.
There are two memories that surface in the moment of his death, and the first, from so many years before:
From birth, Loki has little companionship beyond his brother.
Whether this is because he himself has no interest in others or because he’s long since accepted there are none who have an interest in him, even he doesn’t know, but this is the fact of his life until his death:
He will have few bed partners and fewer lovers outside of the disastrous and ill-handled affair with Sif before she marries (and even more quickly leaves) his older brother.
He has no roots except for those created by others.
Except once, just once, when he is still young and just beginning to sneak between the branches because nothing feels right, not his skin or his home or even his mother’s arms, and then it begins when he wanders by the cave lit only by deeper shadows-
She’s the last of a group her kind no longer speaks of, and explains nothing of her exile.
One half of him thinks that she is frightening in the shadows as they talk, but that is only one half of him.
She says, voice rough as she approaches death and offers what small lessons she can while refusing to allow his sight to find her in the dark, “Your hatred is a joke beyond even itself” and sounds very much like she isn’t sure whether she wishes to laugh or cry as the vague shadow wraps tattered fabric around her shoulders.
“Frost giants get cold?” he asks the second time they speak, trying to cover wariness with contempt and she chuckles and the idea is completely… bizarre to him.
She mutters in the dark, “I’m always cold” like she’s irritated and then: “Don’t you?” she asks, and before he can consider the question she is explaining how to bend light the way he can’t figure out yet and has no one else to ask.
Loki speaks to her only three times, and spends only a handful of hours with her throughout his teenage years.
The fourth time he climbs between two small branches, this time for the sole purpose of visiting her as much as she allows him to visit her, the cave is quiet and the vague sense of warmth just inside is gone.
Inside, when he searches for her with open eyes still blind and probing fingers in the dark, he finds the too-large body curled in the farthest corner of the cave, the giantess having carefully wrapped herself with blankets before expiring.
He stands there for a long time with his hands on her body in the dark before he draws back, stumbles out and away.
None mourn Angrboda.
Certainly not Loki, son of Odin.
And there is a second memory, one that he roils against in blind rage, in terrible panic at being known:
Later he understands that the madness has been in him for too long for him to be able to recognize it here.
Later he knows that he is already far-gone despite surviving once he lets go of his brother’s hand.
But right now one of his copies is silently watching the small group in the office of the fools working so very hard to keep him from reaching the cube.
As if they can keep him from the being that wants him so desperately, as if they can change the flow of the worlds.
He will be dead in a week, he notes now, but he quickly banishes those thoughts before this self can slip away.
Instead he turns his awareness to the him sitting bored but patient in the corner where they know nothing as they talk, go quiet, and begin conversation anew. Thor is very much himself even in this official-looking room (furrowed brows and vague expression of pain promising he’s already hungry only a few hours after his last meal) and Jane is making notes in the notes she’s already made on her work, on what they’ve found out about an object none of them have a right to.
He remembers his own distaste, the offensiveness of the basic idea, and now he wonders why there had been that knowledge, how like had called to like in such a way.
“-I’m just saying, dude, your Dad’s kind of nuts.” He realizes that the irritating one is babbling the way she always does, rambling about one thing or another for hours on end, and Loki has created just during this visit a dozen ideas for how to bring about her destruction, loathes the sound of her voice already.
“Darcy.”
Jane’s tone is disbelieving, eyebrows lifted in shock as Thor stares blankly at the irritating one.
“I’m just saying, surprise-adopting the enemy baby to make him gun-ho about offing his own people?” If she’s aware of their stares, she doesn’t seem to care, focused wholeheartedly on her own small computer (Loki will never admit how they fascinate him) and fingering the cup of coffee that never leaves her side as she types with her other hand. “Yeah, up the self-hate a little more, no wonder he’s trying to go all Brain on us.”
Loki finds himself staring intently at the wall of monitors behind the woman, and if something in him tightens, something that stays awful and shapeless and heavy inside him where he cannot reach it to remove it, he will discard everything from these moments later, and adds hastily in his blind fury to the dozen ideas he already has.
Thor asks, confused, “Brain?” and Jane mutters, “Later” and stares hard at the irritating one.
The woman just rambles, and Loki refuses to listen, “… guy just seems fucked up to me.”
Loki is not simply killed but destroyed.
He splinters into pieces, so many more than he had already been, and he is screaming and silent as he is torn apart.
And already he is spinning back together, and the agony is indescribable as he spills between branches not his own, pulled apart and pulled together all at once.
No self, only fragments of him and not-him, of a thousand who exist or will, of too many to count.
For just a moment, he sees:
Sigyn searches for and finds him as he lays suffering, and her fingers are soft and firm upon his neck and his face.
Her mouth is forever too large for her face, and her eyes devour him as he lays helpless.
He admits after too long, “I cannot get out” but she says nothing.
Sigyn has not chosen whether she will spare him.
And there is a tree growing from within him, around him, branches unfurling through his flesh as he shudders through his destruction- creation- destruction so many times they blend as one.
A memory not Loki’s, a tree so large he cannot begin to see every branch tangling with the trees around it, crushing some and swallowing others, the roots of the tree reaching so deeply they break through-
The woman is as much Aesir as he is Jötunn.
Her mouth is too large for her face, and her hair hangs dark and unbound as she serves Frigga like a friend that chooses not to be a daughter, and it suits her perfectly as she catches his gaze across the great hall.
Her eyes take him in, devour in a heartbeat the body and everything that it houses, and her lips part.
His breath burns inside him when his lungs fill again.
The beginning of Loki and Sigyn, and this is all it takes to start again.
This man is as foreign to him as himself.
This man with his face and his voice sits on the throne with a power that makes it hard for Loki to meet his eyes even across the distance of the great hall, and this man could make even Odin tremble with fear, with respect. His garb is the same but his hair is longer, just slightly, and his eyes are deeper, are filled with everything that is and is not.
“All you need to do is find me,” he assures Loki, and the younger god is shuddering already, his self convulsing in defiance. “Well, perhaps…” And here he considers, pausing as he watches Loki roll apart and then struggle to reform, sobbing and shuddering in anger and pain. “Perhaps this may be more difficult than usual for me.” A beat of silence, his mouth creasing with a blend of sadness and laughter, “It doesn’t have to hurt, I promise.”
On the bridge, Loki lets go of Thor- and this is his very worst lie, one that cannot fool even him, even in the ever-night.
The truth is that the young brother rejects the old brother, and cannot begin to let go.
Instead Thor is carried deep inside him, a jagged and heavy weight that shreds with every breath, and his mother is a constant ache, and his father strips him bear only to stuff him inside dead skin that is not built to hold him.
He drifts and he is everywhere, and he is nowhere, and there is no touchstone in the darkness.
In the moments when the nothing recedes and he can draw a breath, he promises to find him, who he does not know but it is all that matters, and he struggles to survive because Loki desires to live.
The black waters roll back over him, and he seethes, and gnaws his own flesh between his teeth.
His own blood is fuel enough for his curses.
Loki asks the true him, in a moment of lucidity, “Where am I?” as the halls of the false-Valhalla stretch around him.
The man with his face begins to speak and then another other man- Odin- himself- Thor- no, no, it is him and now it is him is rushing at him with a twisted face and hate-filled eyes, weapon at the ready and hungry for his blood, and already the throne sits empty before him, the true him driven away again.
The spear pierces his chest, tears clean through his heart, and he is being dragged into the cold night again.
He has never met this woman; she does not exist for him:
But Sigyn is the ever stubborn, the she who perseveres through the sorrows to bring victory, as Loki is the spark.
The wife of Loki is known well for her ability to forgive even the most stupid at least once, and those who call for her are never cold even in the darkest night, whether through her power or through her husband’s.
The mortals say that if it is Loki who first shows the people how to be warmed by the fire, it is Sigyn who keeps their chilled and exhausted fingers moving in the cold until it can be lit.
“There are nine worlds,” he says between one punishment and the next, and the man with his face chuckles beneath his breath.
“Nine branches on the tree that you have explored,” the man he should be, could be, and is unable to reach explains easily as he draws slim lines on the large sheet of paper open between them, the faint outlines of shapes blooming into life. “My dear reflection, when has a forest been made up of only one tree?”
In his lap, his own hands are smeared with Sigyn's blood and he cannot clean it off.
He keeps himself chained in the lowest levels of the false-Valhalla, and he suffers.
Sometimes Odin strangles the blue-colored babe, and leaves the tiny body on the altar.
Thor is there, once, his eyes for a moment warm and familiar- and then the hammer is coming down upon his skin, the blue color of it clear even in the shadows, and the giant killer is merciless.
His reflections are everywhere, and he is nowhere, and he is alone.
The Tesseract asks, what would you have of yourself?
His body answers, power and the cube has already heard his pleas, inescapable throughout creation.
The cube brings him together, as one.
This has not happened, and he sees it somehow while he half-sleeps in the night: there is a forest, heavy and dim around them.
And there is a monster, a beast, a shapeless thing that creates only destruction and so cannot stop.
And Sigyn is running toward him from somewhere deep inside the woods, and her hair is dark and unbound, and her eyes are too large for her face. Her mouth is open and she is calling his name, and only dimly does he begin to realize that Thor is shouting something, far away, in pain. The lost woman he can sense more than see is trying to fight her way toward them, a child’s panic on her face, and the beast is shrieking, in pain and enraged and suddenly exhilarated, the sound turning wild.
Sigyn is close, slim body unspeakably fast, and her face is alight, eyes dark-bright as she runs.
He is crying, and the beast comes apart within itself, turns on her savage and betrayed and desperate.
And Sigyn reaches him then, dark cloud of her hair blinding as she impacts him, body chaining his as her arms lock around his back and his neck, as she pants into his ear words he cannot begin to understand.
The monster screams, and Loki locks her in his embrace, drowns in her-
And he wakes in the prison where he has banished himself, and lays quiet as the halls above him shake, tremble.
Sigyn touches his face, unforgiving but still merciful, and Loki waits.
notes: title actually comes from tom hiddleston's quote: "But [Loki] is also kind of deluded in the fact that he thinks unlimited power will give him self-respect so I haven't let go of the fact that he is still motivated by this terrible jealousy and kind of spiritual desolation."
angrboda is the frost giant who is said to have born three of loki's more terrifying children, including the massive wolf fenrir and the death deity hel.
next update: jane searches for darcy, and darcy searches for the way out.