⭐⭐ called my demons (but gave them back) ⭐⭐
I’m answering these super slowly because, again, people ask me this question and I immediately forget everything I’ve ever thought about my own fic. But! I can at least respond to this one because I actually do have a thought. This is a fic where that favorite thing of mine happened, where someone commented expressing something I was trying to do just perfectly and I was like “yeah!!! that’s it!!!!” and it was about the conflict between Loki’s inner monologue about himself and how he’s reacting to the situation.
Like, he keeps telling himself that this is No Big Deal, that he’s used to it, that this is totally normal and he can deal with it just fine, really it’s what he’s good for now, good at, it’s the only thing he’s worth and therefore it’s only natural and makes sense and isn’t an issue. And in some ways that would have been very true, up until recently. But he’s made just enough progress in crawling forward out of his previous mindset that he’s no longer as able to dissociate as well as he could before.
It’s like...that position where sometimes when someone’s out of an abusive situation things actually get worse, because they have the space to stop the immediate survival response and process, which is. Messy and hard in a different way. He’s thinking about what happened in a way he was managing not to, because that was what he had to do - he can’t avoid that anymore.
As he thinks at one point in the fic:
He bent forward, shuddering, and tried to stop thinking. He’d gotten fairly good at that, but now that he was free (are you?) it seemed he’d lost the way of it. Loki missed that: the ability to erase himself, to make himself nothing.
In some ways his Grandmaster inner monologue is an expression of this, too. He has that thought process, but it is expressed as coming from someone else. It’s not his own thoughts, it’s what he’s being/has been told. And those two things are separating, now, as he starts to reform his own self. The Grandmaster’s commentary comes up when he’s hesitating, or struggling with himself, or hurting in some way.
It’s also, too, an attempt to remind himself of what he still sees (or is trying to see) as the truth of what he is, and, too, a mark of how stuck he still feels - how present the Grandmaster still is, for Loki, always right there even when he isn’t physically present.
