It was deserved. He deserved this, the burn of familiarity mixed with agonising, bruising loss, swirling in his gut and spreading through his bones when he hears that voice. It is a nightmare, a grotesque distortion of reality, a dread and a sorrow he had buried come to fruition, and Thor's stomach lurches. The illusion feels too palpable, too real, in a way that shackles him and traps him in place, unable to move, even as the figure whom the voice belongs to enters the room, and he may just be sick.
There he stands, frozen in his steps like a crystal statue, his speech halted. It isn't Loki, not how he remembered his brother, with his overgrown hair and sunken eyes, his elegance marked by the horrors he had seen- never flawed, only darkened by experience. Instead, the green eyes that stare at him are wide and bright, full of that mischevious, youthful passion Loki had embodied at Thor's side so many aeons past. He's pouting, like an unnerved youth, and.. he is just that, Thor realises, he is just that.
His mouth runs dry, and Stormbreaker falls to the floor with a resounding clatter, his hand loosening. It's too close to his heart, to his soul, to be an illusion, and yet, how is this possible? Thor tries to speak, to ask once more who would be behind this torment, but his jaw fails him, heavy as steel and tense as though it has rusted in place. He is speecheless, and somewhere, in a secluded corner of his mind, he hopes perhaps this will make up for his ruining of what ever blague Loki had planned.
His legs move, although weakly, unlike his tongue, and he steps towards Loki, every stagger making the discrepancies between them more horribly obvious, comically absurd, if they were not so haunting. Thor did not remember a time where Loki had been that much shorter than himself, so slender it made him look nimble.
His eyes are wide with confusion, lit up with a certain kind of disbelief Thor knew was there to mask something else, and it is the familiar tone of humorous guarding that breaks whatever hope he'd had that this was not real.
Loki is here, or rather, Thor is. Loki sees him, for what he has become, for what he is now, for his mistakes and failures, for all his losses. Loki, who surely knows only the shiny soldier he was raised alongside with. Loki, who has not known the pain Thor has witnessed in the path of his future, and yet he stands before him, breathing, with a beating heart, and Thor cannot help the breathy, strangled noise he makes in stead of words, hands reaching forwards, landing on Loki's shoulders, curling around them with terrifying ease.
The gods, the allfathers, they have perceived him, his sins, his missteps, and they have judged him. They've placed him here, the broken shell of what he was once supposed to be, the shortcoming of what was meant to be a king, they've placed him before Loki, as he was before Thor's arrogance and the nine world's cruel fates could guide him astray. Loki, innocent, gentle, beautiful, his fated punishment.
Thor's eyes burn with the need to fall shut, to blink, but he refuses to close them, to shut this view out, a view he values more than oxygen, more than the blood coursing through his veins. One of his hands, trembling with the effort not to grip Loki with all his might, travels to his neck, fingers cupping the upper back of his nape, pausing when he feels the soft thumping of his heartbeat, a gentle confirmation of life, a quiet telltale that Loki lives, stood before Thor as he is now.
Tears gather in the corners of his eyes before he can will them away, or even attempt to, and his lip trembles, it shakes the way it had as he had clutched Loki's lifeless body close to himself, doubled over in heartache so infinite it had felt physical. Thor's hand on Loki's pulse twitches and moves to rest along his jaw for a moment, just a moment, and his skin is cool against the heated flesh of his palm, so very real and familiar that it weakens his knees.
❝ Im.. sorry. ❞ Thor rasps, weakly, and he feels very much as though he may fall to his knees without warning any minute, attempting to force a smile onto his face and failing at such a task miserably, his face contorting into a pained grimace. His hair, Loki worries for his hair, of all things. Thor brushes his fingers through Loki's own hair for a brief moment, before the reality of it all once again slams into his spine like a sharp nail being forced between his shoulder blades, and his hands drop from Loki's frame.
Who is he, to be holding Loki so closely when he is the cause of all the misery that is to come? The center of the tragedies that Asgard, his people, and Loki, will face. He does not deserve the solace of this, the comfort of Loki's proximity. Thor's shoulders tremble with the shudder of his breaths, and he glances down at Loki, such an unfamiliar distance away in their height, now.
❝ I'm sorry, they.. they cut it. I'm so sorry, Loki—❞
