🎭 - How does your muse handle their emotions? Do they bottle them up or pour them out as soon as they start to feel?
Loki doesn’t handle his emotions which is… pretty unhealthy, and a significant factor in a majority of his relationships, with some notable exceptions. He feels in spades; almost too much, so much that he wishes he could stop feeling at times, because callousness or sheer lack of care is decidedly less painful then seeming to forever orbit (because he does care) things or people that hurt him. He’s inherently an emotional person, but with great skill and capacity for concealing it, discounting it, and even lying about it. Chances are when he is upset his emotions are actually a war of rage and sadness and desperation, but he’s going to iron that out of his expression and leach it so far from his voice that he actually sounds irritated, or short, or even tired instead of actually…. feeling.
So, the short answer is, he bottles them up.
Why, you ask?
He’s always been a private person. It’s something in-born. He’s naturally (over) thinking, perceptive, and even sensitive. Add that to being literal royalty from day one, and he’s both taught to, and by nature of the environment going to, hold back his emotions to avoid being manipulated, mocked, or coming across as offensive. He wasn’t the favorite son, and being as perceptive as he is, took little rejections, or instances where he was shut-down, hard. He also discovered early being quiet was safer (until he had something calculated, premeditated, and useful to say), at least as it pertained to not being snapped at or told to ‘be quiet’ or somehow otherwise silenced because what he was saying wasn’t wanted.
His emotions went hand-in-hand. The court environment meant he had to keep them close. The nature of being royalty, and being the (as he felt and took it) less-loved son, also predisposed him to hiding, or at least managing his emotions.
Fast-forward to his fall from the Bifrost, and you had a whole ‘nother layer of “messed up” to his habits of hiding his emotions. He was pretty beaten down and scraped raw even before he landed on Sanctuary, but he learned from day one that he couldn’t reveal his real emotions and feelings about the things he still cared about (because these beings, this being was a threat to them, somehow). He used his anger and sarcasm and wit as a weapon, but the closer he was brought to the bottom, the more his emotions bled through… and when they did he was told they were weak, and that to ascend he needed to let go, and they punished him, brutally, for the emotions and feelings and old habits and ticks and loyalties until he knew he had to chase them far, far, far away into some place of himself where maybe they couldn’t find them.
So yes. He bottles everything up. By instinct, by habit, by necessity. It’s hard unlearning the horrible depth of acquiescing it takes to submit to being tortured for habits/emotions, etc, or something even worse might happen but that is whole separate headcanon session.
But! There are some exceptions, but more because the exceptions are people who have known him for a long time and shown themselves trustworthy and accepting of him when he does show emotion OR they’ve slowly learned why he bottles up and conceals etc. and he’s gotten to the point where he is comfortable working through that with them.
