Kicks down ur door for a mood thingy
send 🌙 for a moodboard of our muses (no longer accepting)
“No resurrections this time.”
A bold statement from a bold Titan (was bold the right word?) who, just a moment before, was told he would never be a god.
In spite of the words being forced through a dying breath, their truth resonated ― spreading the way thunder chased lightning during a storm. Thanos’ due diligence would be for naught; he would die trying, in fact, to establish himself as something he simply was not. And the irony of the trickster’s last words, brutally truthful as they were, would remain stubbornly…
…as was Loki’s nature.
Thanos’ elimination was felt across the cosmos and in individual ways. Loki felt it in his windpipe, like there had been a frog in his throat ― a nervous energy that kept his trachea constricted ― that had all of a sudden vanished. And though it was a relief to know the purple brute was no more, Loki knew better than to rush back to Midgard so soon. As the patron saint of chaos, he could sense the discord from lightyears away. But as soon as the waves of pandemonium began to quiet, he returned to the Realm Eternal, though he would just as quickly wish he’d never come back.
Loki’s heart seized and then broke and the tightness in his throat returned tenfold. Tony was… no, no he couldn’t be…
But…
Grief firmly clutched Loki by the throat this time, its grasp was impossibly firmer than Thanos’, and even less likely survived. Every breath deepened the cleft in his heart and he was sure the ache behind his sternum would never leave him.
Behind the guise of magic, he ghosted block by block through New York City. The vigils were countless; innumerous candles burned in honor of Earth’s best defender. They added a sober tint to the city’s already sickly orange glow. Watching the flames flicker, nearly extinguished by any passerby who was walking too fast, left a bad taste in Loki’s mouth. Other memorials had homemade attempts of Iron Man’s gadgets ― there were arc reactors of every shape, gauntlets with lights in the palms, and helmets with eyes that were only dimly lit. But right in the middle of the handcrafted pieces of the suit, shining more brightly than any other tribute there, “Thank you, Iron Man” escaped from letters stamped out of metal of a cylindrical light box.
The lead in Loki’s gut was getting impossibly heavy by that point.
Every lumen of candlelight and each watt of electricity tempted Loki a little closer to the edge. His eyes were dark with righteous anger and the hatred frothing in his veins was reducing to putrid madness. Every wilting rose was a thorn in his side; every off-key piano rendition meant to console did nothing but salt Loki’s wounds. All at once the city felt like it was collapsing in and if grief’s chokehold wasn’t obvious before it certainly was then. He was suffocating.
He fled from the confines of metropolitan New York City to the reaches of suburbia, but it was scarcely an improvement. The pervasive pale glow of the city was still visible and Loki could all but see the faint flickering candles; could still hear the dulled buzz of electricity in those DIY’d Iron Man components. His bones ached in protest against the weight in his stomach that was still plunging; his ribs felt wired in place, like they’d never expand no matter the need for breath.
The last thing he felt was concrete biting into his knees through his clothing as he tried again to retreat through a conjured backdoor, slipping briefly into a nothingness that might have been a welcome relief from the all-encompassing throes of agony in which he was drowning.
The portal through which he’d slipped began to close and the cool, numbing indifference of his magic began to fade, giving way to a gush of pain that found, with debilitating accuracy, the pit of Loki’s solar plexus and nearly knocked the air out of him. He was still on his knees in the chilly darkness, head hanging heavily and hands limp in his lamp, palms up to the empty night sky above him. His breath was shaking, but he couldn’t even muster the energy to mourn; the deep gouge in his heart widened and tear brimmed, hot and infuriating, along his lashes.
It felt familiar ― the way his hurt and heartbreak and hatred radiated out and away from him in all directions, the way light sings from a star; however, instead of clean white light, his was a toxic green. The ripple of fierce energy raged outward ― chased closely by a soul-wrenching sound Loki hadn’t realized he was capable of making ― across the field he was in and then upward by the foothills of the mountains which surrounded him on all sides. Channeled upward into the sky, the magic found the low-hanging clouds and vanquished them, revealing deep, velvet blackness with millions of pinholes of light.
The pain wasn’t alleviating though; in spite of the release, Loki felt pinned by his distress. How long had he been screaming? His throat was raw, his voice likely a thin residue of the silk it usually was; hot streaks reached his jaw and then dropped into his hands and he could only watch, utterly broken, as the tears struck his pale skin. But in the glistening droplets in his palms, he saw a faint reflection of light.
His eyes turned skyward to see what his wrath had wrought: the Milky Way, coursing with chaotic purpose across the midnight sky, but between Loki and the cosmos hung what looked like remnants of his magic ― it was green, but was and shined in long, wispy ribbons.
It was strange, the muted misery Loki was experiencing compared to the bright dance above him. Stranger still how the sight didn’t pique any particular feeling the way the smothering city had. He felt safe, in an oddly exposed way, like no pain could possibly be worse than that which he was already experiencing. And in that way, the starlight combined with the brilliant streaks of aurora was easing him into catatonia. It was all he could afford at the moment not to take his revenge out on the mortal realm (“So you take the world I love as recompense for your imagined slights?” Loki could have thrown up at the poignancy of it all). More difficult still was the stubborn fatalist monologue on repeat in his head; not that Loki was much of an optimist ― as he was never one to abide by anyone’s rules but his own ― but the disturbing predetermination, which had been said at the very beginning of the end, kept marching through his mind.
“No resurrections this time.”
