No excuses: POV (Happy Lights if you have it in you :P)
Happy Lights, ho! Thank you to @eak1mouse for beta and sounding boarding.
This is Loki’s POV of the scene at the end of Chapter 7 of Strange Turns. Enjoy!
~*~
Loki woke to a rhythmic motion that took him several painful moments to identify as breathing. He kept his eyes closed and maintained the illusion of unconsciousness while he pieced his fractured memories together. They were increasingly hard to hold on to, sliding in and out of time, merging with dreams and nightmares and the glow of Purpose.
He remembered being chained to a flyer, a Chitauri drone pressed suffocatingly close to the line of his back. He also remembered laying on his back in the grass under the boughs of a flowering tree, watching the sunlight turn green through the leaves. Both of those things seemed equally close and equally distant.
The air around him was quiet, but not empty. It did not smell of metallic steam, or the strange sharpness of the ships, or the offensive odor of the drones. It was a different smell, something familiar and half remembered, body odor and lightning.
When he cracked his eyes open finally, Thor was looking down at him. Loki went very still. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d woken exactly like this, his brother all glowing smiles and approval, shaking him awake for a hunt or a fight or we never talk anymore, brother, I miss you.
This version of Thor did smile, but he did not glow. He looked older than Loki remembered from the golden age of their childhood, when they were still the best of friends. Old, and very tired, with his eyes lined in worry and his face streaked with drying blood and smudged greasy dirt.
Thor didn’t speak, and neither did Loki. He knew better than to initiate a conversation with one of their illusions. If he waited long enough, it would start to speak, and he could place when they were, and how he was expected to behave. Over Thor’s shoulder, he could see only shadowy shapes, but nothing alarming, no sharp edges.
Thor shifted slightly, and Loki moved with him. He realized that he was being cradled like a child, wrapped up in cloth and held to Thor’s chest. It was not new, one of their illusions holding him, comforting him. What came next would remind him of if he’d failed most recently, or done something to please them.
Silence stretched endlessly, and then motion over his shoulder. Loki automatically ducked closer to the comforting bulk of his brother’s body, and then stopped, expecting the laughter. The rebuke. The form under him to melt into some new horror.
He looked up to see Steve Rogers sitting on Thor’s other side. Loki reacted instinctively, flinching away from the new element. Deep in his chest, violence stirred to life. He controlled it, forced it down. Reacting violently to any of the Avengers usually earned him praise, but he was at a loss to explain the strange position, Thor cradling him as if he were precious, and now, now that Loki was paying closer attention, the writhing mass of tentacles on the floor. One of them was coiled around Rogers’ waist, and he petted it absently as he stared at Loki.
They didn’t know about the tentacles. They didn’t know that Loki had sent some of them to Earth, and they didn’t know about the single, agonizing telepathic connection he’d managed in order to get the warning out.
Thor and Rogers were speaking over his head as he did his best not to stare at the tentacles moving lazily just out of reach. It never worked that way, but he thought for a moment that he could just stay quiet and they might forget him, carrying on with their reality as if he didn’t exist.
Rogers waved his fingers deliberately in Loki’s line of sight to get his attention. Loki looked up to his face, projecting calm that he couldn’t feel. After the months, the years, the eternity, he was mostly just tired. That didn’t mean they couldn’t come up with some way to entertain him if he seemed bored.
“I’m going to ask you a question, and I need you to tell me the truth,” Rogers said with exaggerated care, as though Loki didn’t speak the same language, as though Loki hadn’t invented so much of his language. “I’m going to believe what you tell me.”
You shouldn’t, Loki wanted to tell him. Loki was a liar, as much now as he ever had been. More. He kept his mouth shut.
“Were you with the Chitauri willingly?”
A laugh hammered at the inside of Loki’s ribs. He couldn’t answer, or it would pour out like madness sliding over his tongue. Loki wasn’t sure he had ever done anything willingly in his life, had ever not been manipulated to one end or another, had ever been master of anything at all.
“Did you willingly aid the Chitauri in attacking Earth?” Rogers tried when Loki’s tongue didn’t unbind.
“Yes,” Loki snarled. He remembered that first invasion, the Purpose singing brilliant and blue inside him, and how badly he had wanted it, how dearly he had believed - still believed, still wantedneeded to be crowned king of this miserable muddy rock and it’s miserable stinking apes who thought they could look him in the face, who thought they could make him a joke, who thought they knew him.
He had wanted to take it because it had been his brother’s, and he had wanted to break it because his brother had loved it, and because in all their thousands of years, it had taken only three days for Earth to make Thor worthy.
“Why would I want that?” he asked himself, confusion returning. He hadn’t, always, had he? In those days, weeks, months after he fell. He’d never thought about Earth at all.
“This invasion… was that your idea as well?”
Loki recoiled. Oh, no, he had been well and truly abused of any notion that he had ideas by then, but he had tried to tell them that the Tesseract was gone, that Earth was useless. He had wanted then to… save something, hadn’t he? Loki felt himself speaking, words tripping foolish and honest off his tongue, but what did it matter? If he was still in their clutches, they knew about his pinpricks of betrayal, his whispers, his dishonesty. Denying it now would only draw out the farce, and he wanted them to know then, he wanted them to know that he hadn’t been beaten entire.
“I tried to warn you, and I tried to just… just stop breathing, but they wouldn’t let me, and they came anyway, and I wouldn’t fight so they… they….” The Void closing around him, cold, cold and screaming and pulling him apart one atom at a time, and then his mother brushing his hair back, kissing his forehead, he’d been ill, there’d been a fever, he was better, but how she had always hated him, how she wished he’d just died in that frozen wasteland before Odin ever brought him home, and again, opening his eyes, it was just a nightmare.
It was just a nightmare.
“Do not take him away from me,” Thor said, wrenching him out of the spiral, returning him to the illusion.
“No one is going to take him from you,” Rogers said, a sweet promise that made Loki want to sob for frustration and anger and hatred and longing. Rogers reached out to touch him. Loki flinched automatically, expecting the pain so acutely that he felt it burning in his skin even as Rogers withdrew.
Rogers’ voice was maybe tight with anger or disappointment, and Loki would need to get himself under control and learn which it was and what it meant. The illusion would break eventually, he didn’t need to hasten it along with carelessness.