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In the moment before he saw the ship rise into view, a monstrous behemoth looming over them, the shadow of death itself, Loki knew what was coming. Felt it, in the pit of his stomach, and knew that for all his running he’d reached the end of his very long leash.
This time he wasn’t going to get away. There was no bargain he could make. No way out.
But he wasn’t going to pull everyone else down with him, either.
“Thor,” he said, and swallowed hard because his voice came out thin, almost unintelligible. “Thor. I need you to…trust me.”
Thor turned to look at him, frowning, confused. “Trust you with what?”
Loki offered him a sickly smile. “That I am doing what I have to.”
Thor’s eyes widened a hair, suspicion creeping into his expression. “Loki,” he said, reaching to catch him, hold him, but his fingers went through the illusion’s shoulder in a shimmer of green.
Loki heard Thor’s shout of alarm and anger and quickened his pace, nearly running. He felt out of breath, winded even though he’d barely gone far at all, lungs too tight to take a full breath, strangling like he had a real noose around his throat rather than just a figurative one.
The ship he’d used to reach Asgard, to get to the vault, to unleash Surtur, was still docked where he’d left it. Loki darted inside.
Fast. You have to move fast. There isn’t much time.
He launched the ship, set it on autopilot, and spoke three words that he knew would draw Thanos’s attention. The magic he reached for - normally he’d try for delicacy, but there wasn’t the time for careful work. He just had to do it, get it done.
He called the Tesseract, licked his lips, and sent it the only place he could think of that it would be safe.
Then he poised the working he’d woven, the crudest of knives, and severed the threads of memory.
He’d anticipated that it would hurt.
He hadn’t realized how much.
He woke up blurry, confused, his head feeling like his brain had been ripped in two, and with Corvus Glaive bending over him.
“If it isn’t the apostate whelp,” he said, and Loki only did not cringe back because he still couldn’t piece together what had happened - why he was here, what he’d been doing, what was happening.
The last thing he could remember…
The last thing he could remember was catching the weight Thor threw at him, its satisfying thud into his palm. I’m here.
After that…nothing. Even before that, his memories were blurry. Jumbled, confused.
“Get up,” Glaive said. “Your Lord would see you.”
Loki licked his lips and pushed himself up to his elbows. Thor, he thought. Where is Thor? Is he alive?
He couldn’t remember. Holes.
Glaive kicked him. “Stand,” he said. “Or crawl, if you must. But even you should know better than to ignore his commands.”
Loki managed to stand, though he nearly fell. He was weak, shaky, but he managed to trail after Corvus Glaive. There was nothing else he could do, not until he understood more of what was going on. Until his head cleared.
Glaive grabbed his arm and propelled him forward. “Walk,” he said, and Loki walked. He had vague memories of - a ship. Leaving one ship for another. He’d meant to - to -
He couldn’t remember that, either.
“You do not seem to have brought what was promised,” Glaive said.
“Promised?” Loki said blankly. Glaive said nothing, just half shoved, half dragged him onwards while Loki scrambled to recover what he was doing here. What had happened.
His knees almost buckled when he saw Thanos again. Six years and he could have sworn he had forgotten but here, now, it was as fresh as if he’d just gotten away. He stopped dead, but it achieved nothing; Glaive simply dragged him the last few steps before throwing him down to his knees.
Loki did not try to stop it. He stayed there, breathing loud in his own ears.
What was he doing here? Why couldn’t he remember?
“Loki Odinson,” Thanos said. “You are very late.” His voice was cold, sending terror deep into Loki’s bones.
Loki swallowed, trying to work saliva into his suddenly dry mouth. “It seems I am,” he said, voice thin.
“I do not feel the Tesseract,” Thanos said.
Loki wanted to laugh. “Of course not. I do not have it.”
“You said that you did. I have it, you said, and I sensed the truth of it, the presence of its power. And now it is gone.”
Loki managed a shrug, a faint smile. “I have no memory of saying any such thing.” Beginning, maybe, to understand. Blurry fragments, a few of them, swirling past and then vanishing. He’d come here - presumably with a purpose. Alone, it seemed. Thor -
He must be still alive. There was only one reason Loki would have given himself up like this. One person he would do it for.
Thanos was silent. “Ebony Maw,” he said, his eyes still fixed on Loki. “If you would.”
Loki held still though his stomach clenched, twisting. I hope you’ve run, Thor, he thought. I hope you’ve run far, far away. Well on your way to Midgard.
Don’t do anything stupid.
He flinched when Ebony Maw’s fingers pressed to his temples, but did not close his eyes. The fear drained out of him and he abruptly wanted to laugh.
Ebony Maw shoved into his thoughts with brutal force and Loki heard himself scream, felt him rifling through Loki’s mind, picking apart his memories, digging through every corner of his brain and prying him apart. His head was exploding, brain leaking out of his ears, he could taste blood in the back of his throat-
Maw’s fingers pulled away and Loki crumpled to his knees, panting. “He doesn’t know where it is,” he said, voice flat.
“Are you certain?” There was a hint of a threat in Thanos’s voice, but Maw’s voice was steady.
“Yes,” he said. “I can see the places where he’s cut the memories away.”
Loki smiled down at the floor and forced out a rough laugh. “So you see,” he rasped, “you can do anything you like to me. It will not matter. I cannot tell you what you want to know. You may as well kill me now.”
Silence. At length, Thanos said, “I do not believe that.”
Loki felt his smile fade.
“I do not,” Thanos said, “believe that you, Loki, would remove any part of your mind without the means to get it back. And I trust that my children can convince you to do so.”
“Wishful thinking, my lord,” Loki said, though his breath caught. No. He was certain. He would not have…would not have taken that risk.
Unless he had had just enough hubris to believe that he could survive this. Enough cowardice to fear to make it final.
“I have time,” Thanos said. “And when I catch him…perhaps your brother will be more cooperative.”
When I catch him. So he hadn’t, yet. Run, Thor. Quickly. “Do you really think that I would tell him anything?” Loki asked, trying to sound mocking instead of terrified.
“I suppose we’ll just have to see. For you…take him,” he ordered. “I trust that at least one of you will be able to persuade our wayward servant to recall what he has done with our property.”
The fear was returning. It’s just pain, he told himself. Meaningless. You’ve borne pain before. You can bear it again.
Corvus Glaive began. He hammed metal bolts through Loki’s wrists and into the wall where his feet could barely touch the floor and let him hang, flaying the skin from his chest a strip at a time, asking with every piece peeled away: do you remember? Do you remember yet? Tell us where you’ve hidden the Tesseract and maybe we will let you die.
He blacked out when Glaive’s knife hit one of his nipples and came back around to him grinding something coarse into raw flesh. It burned and he screamed, thrashing, but movement only pulled at the metal in his wrists, sending agony down the nerves of his arms. Consciousness fuzzed out again.
Glaive gripped his jaw, fingers slick with Loki’s blood. “Tell me where you hid the Tesseract,” he said. “You are a coward. You would leave yourself a way out. So take it.”
A wet laugh bubbled out of Loki’s throat. “You don’t know me as well as you think,” he said, and spat in his face.
Glaive did not like that at all.
When Loki could think again he was sobbing soundlessly, unable to draw a breath without pain. Glaive dragged a nail across his flayed cheek and Loki whimpered, trying weakly to pull away.
“I will end this,” he said. “All you need to do, whelp, is remember.”
“I can’t,” Loki said, his next sob half a laugh. “Believe me or not, but I - have no idea where the Tesseract is.”
Glaive exhaled in clear frustration, pulling away. “Perhaps with some time to consider,” he said coldly, and turned and walked out of his cell. Loki could no longer even smell his own blood, though he knew he was covered in it, his feet slipping in a puddle of it, every twitch reopening the scabbing wounds in his wrists.
Someone, he thought weakly. Someone help me, but no, no, it was imperative that no one try. Eventually his body would give out. And until then, all he had to do was say nothing, which would be easy when there was nothing to say.
Loki started laughing again, weak, wrenching noises. For once, it might be that his reputation as a liar came in handy. They’d never believe he was telling the truth, and the more time they wasted on him…
Right now, the best thing he could do for the universe was suffer.
He slipped in and out of consciousness. Not sleep, more like a semi-conscious doze when he was too exhausted by pain and loss of blood to keep his eyes open.
“Loki,” said Thor’s voice, cutting into foggy, indistinct dreams, and he prised his eyelids open to see him standing there, one of his hands hovering against Loki’s face. He turned his scabbed cheek into his palm and saw him flinch.
“Already?” He said blurrily. Thor’s smile was strained.
“I wasn’t going to leave you here. I came as soon as I could.”
“Of course you did,” Loki said.
Thor reached up and eased the bolts out of his wrists one at a time. Loki hiccuped with pain, but Thor caught him, the warmth of his body so solid, so real. The pain of his armor on raw flesh hardly even mattered. “We need to get out of here quickly. Do you have an escape plan?”
“No,” Loki said. “I don’t. I’m not leaving.”
He felt Thor’s snort. “Of course you are. With me. You always have an escape plan.”
“I don’t have the Tesseract,” Loki said.
“What?” Thor sounded confused. “What are you talking about?”
“I don’t have it,” Loki repeated. He smiled, faintly. “Nice try, Ebony Maw.”
Thor’s eyebrows pulled together. “Loki,” he said, slow and careful, speaking to a madman. “It’s me. Your brother.”
“You got the smell wrong,” Loki said.
Thor made an exasperated noise. “What do you mean, the smell? I’ve been in space for weeks. Of course I smell different. Loki, we need to go. If you have any plan to get out of here-”
Loki rested his head on Thor’s shoulder. “I am almost tempted to see how long you could keep this up,” he mumbled. “But I’m getting bored.”
Thor vanished. Loki’s wrists were still nailed to the wall above his head. Ebony Maw stood in front of him, eyes narrowed.
“Was it really the smell?” He said, sounding curious. Loki laughed hoarsely.
“It was a lot of things,” he said. “I know Thor. Better than anyone else, myself possibly included. No imitation could be perfect.”
“Hmm.” Ebony Maw studied him with cool indifference, different from Glaive’s savagery. “It is unfortunate, what you did to yourself. The…gross mutilation of your own mind.”
Loki bared his teeth. “I wasn’t trying for pretty,” he said. He suspected Maw was dulling his pain - or, more accurately, his ability to feel it. “It just needed to be good enough to thwart your monstrous father.”
Maw looked annoyed. “Let us try a different tack,” he said, and reached out-
–he was sitting on the ship soaring away from Thor, Thor and the others, flying toward his own nightmare looming on the horizon. He fumbled at the controls, transmitted the words Tesseract in hand. He felt it pulling on him and turned, looking to where he’d set the cube down, humming and pulsing with light.
No, Loki thought wildly. You can’t take it to him. What are you thinking?
Bargain. Trade it for your life. No, for Thor’s life. No, for the sake of the universe.
Who do you think you are? A hero?
He didn’t have a chance. Thanos would not bargain. Thanos would take.
He needed to get rid of it. Hide the Tesseract somewhere Thanos would never find it. Somewhere secret, somewhere safe-
Something - hiccuped. A little skip in his thoughts.
The Tesseract. He didn’t have much time. He’d-
That little skip, again. A hitch. His vision fractured and with one eye he could see the inside of his ship, the glow of the Tesseract; with the other he could see Ebony Maw, teeth bared. “There,” he said. “There it is-” Loki felt him push, pressure building behind his eyes.
Something gave. He felt it, like a joint popping out of place, and screamed. Ebony Maw yanked away with a hiss, but the pain didn’t fade, the deep feeling of something wrong.
“Clever,” Maw hissed. “Very clever. You were more thorough than I expected.”
“Was I,” Loki slurred, panting.
“But you are still weak,” he said. “We will have what we want from you. Sooner or later.”
“Needs to be sooner, doesn’t it?” Loki said. His head lolled weakly on his neck. “Or I won’t…be the only one in pain.”
Ebony Maw lashed out. His command of pain was precise, and this time it was pure, a psychic knife flensing his nerves, no physical damage necessary-
It couldn’t last long, or risk burning out his consciousness and leaving a gibbering wreck. It felt like an eternity. He’d hit the mark, then. Their time wasn’t unlimited. Loki lifted his head and let it fall weakly back against the wall, staring up at the bolts holding his arms in place.
“We broke you once,” Ebony Maw said. “We can do it again.”
“You have that the wrong way around,” Loki said. His breathing felt strained. “You broke me once. There’s nothing left to break.”
He stepped back toward Loki, long fingers pressing to his temple. “There is always something left to break.”
Ebony Maw tried four or five times. He used Frigga, used Odin, used old memories of torture that grew progressively less and less subtle. When he left in frustration, Loki’s nose was streaming blood and something felt broken in his mind, like a bowstring stretched too far too many times until it snapped.
It doesn’t matter, he reminded himself, against the fear that some permanent damage was being done that could not be undone. There is no after. Nothing they do to you matters.
Ebony Maw yanked the bolts out of his wrists and let Loki fall to the floor. He managed to catch himself on his knees so he could roll to his back. The skin on his chest had partially grown back, but he wasn’t going to cause himself unnecessary pain.
As soon as he thought it Loki started laughing. Weakly, and it hurt, but once he started it couldn’t stop. He barely registered when it turned to weeping.
He reached back for his last memory. If you were here, I might even give you a hug.
I’m here.
It hurt and was a comfort in equal measure.
Proxima Midnight yanked his head back by his hair and said, I will enjoy this. Traitor. This is your just punishment.
She cracked his ribs away from his spine, opening his back so he could feel air on his faltering lungs. Every time he drifted she yanked him back, demanding that he tell them where, where, where every time he ran out of breath to scream.
He begged. He screamed. Finally, he laughed.
“I don’t know,” he told her. “I have no idea. You may as well - let me die-”
“No,” she said, snarled. “You do know. And you will tell me.” She grabbed hold of his ribs, pulling them further apart.
Loki hiccuped. He’d thrown up once for the pain, bile and nothing else, but now he couldn’t even summon the strength for that.
“Do you think this is the worst I can do?” Proxima Midnight asked. “I can wind a spool with your intestines in front of you. I can shove Glaive’s spear unspeakable places and leave you impaled on it for hours. I can hold you clinging in agony to the edge of life, make Glaive’s pain and Ebony’s tricks look like nothing. Whatever you’ve done - undo it. Say what you’ve done with Father’s property and I will set you free.”
“I,” Loki said weakly. “Not we. Do your siblings know that you would see them trampled underfoot? I wonder what they would think if I told them?”
She reached into his back and grabbed his lungs with her bare hands. Loki’s consciousness fled, finally so deep that she could not bring it back.
Corvus Glaive was dragging him over the floor. Literally dragging him, and dumped him shortly after Loki became aware of him moving. His back was still pulsing with pain, though apparently his ribs were back in place.
He stayed where he was, unmoving. There seemed little point in trying to rise.
“Open your eyes,” Thanos said, and it was a command Loki couldn’t resist. He forced them open and his staggering heart stopped.
Thor was on his knees, covered in blood. One of his arms was visibly broken. His eyepatch was gone and he barely looked conscious.
“It’s not real,” Loki whispered hoarsely. “He isn’t here. This is one of Ebony Maw’s tricks.”
Proxima Midnight placed a knife to his throat. Thor’s unfocused eyes found Loki, and filled with horror.
“Loki,” he said hoarsely. “I tried. I tried-”
Loki squeezed his eyes closed. “I know Thor,” he insisted. “He wouldn’t abandon his duty. Not now. This is a tired game. You should - you should know better than to think I would fall for it.”
(Some secret part of him thought what if, what if this time it is real-)
“Tell me the location of the Tesseract,” Thanos said, “and I will spare him. The one person left in this universe that you love. Would you watch him die?”
Loki sought out the pain in his back, the ugly ruined places in his mind where he’d hacked away his own memory. Anchors to reality. This was not reality.
“Do not tell him,” Thor said. “Say nothing. I am one man, Loki, don’t throw everything away, you know he lies-”
He sounded like Thor. Almost. There was a flaw - or was he imagining it? “He’s not here,” Loki said. “And even if - even if he was, I don’t know.”
“Open your eyes,” Thanos commanded again. Loki saw a line of blood at Thor’s throat; he swallowed and more dribbled down.
“You’re right,” Thor said suddenly. “I’m not - really here. This is a trick. Don’t fall for it.”
An illusion would never say it was an illusion. Unless that is the intent.
The knife bit deeper. “This is your last chance, whelp,” Proxima Midnight said. “Unless you want to see the color of your brother’s spine.”
Loki’s breathing staggered. “I can’t - I can’t. There is nothing to remember. There is no point to this charade.”
Thanos stood. “Daughter,” he said.
The knife jammed into Thor’s neck, cut through skin and muscle and sinew like butter. Blood sprayed, the light went out of Thor’s eyes, and Loki screamed because even if it wasn’t real (it isn’t real, it can’t, it can’t be) he knew that sight would be burned on his eyelids forever, there every time he closed his eyes.
“No,” Loki moaned, “no.” No one was holding him and he wasn’t thinking when he crawled to Thor, his body facedown on the floor in a spreading pool of blood. He was still warm. When Loki rolled him to his back, he felt heavy.
Ebony Maw’s illusions always felt real.
(Blood, slick and hot on his hands. Thor’s lone eye staring blankly upward. He rocked forward, then back.)
“With the complete Gauntlet,” Thanos said. “I could bring him back. Pluck him from whatever space and time you wish. Tell me where the Tesseract is and when the time is right I will return your brother to you.”
Loki shook his head, still staring at Thor’s face, reaching out to close his eye, pulling away. Shook his head and kept shaking his head until it spun and he could barely breathe. His nose was full of the smell of blood and he caught himself clawing for it, reaching, desperately seeking out that amputated memory-
“Give it to me, Loki,” Thanos said.
“I can’t,” Loki said. Hot tears were streaming down his face, like blood. He laid down next to Thor, head on his shoulder, and wished as hard as he could to die. “I can’t. Those memories - are gone. For good. Please-”
He didn’t know what he was begging for. But Ebony Maw was right. There was always more to break.
It isn’t real, he kept telling himself. Any moment now, it will end. Any moment.
Silence stretched out. Thor’s body was still warm. Loki knew his hair was getting soaked with his blood. It didn’t matter. None of this was real.
“Kill a thousand facsimiles of Thor,” Loki said. “I will give you nothing. I cannot give you anything else.”
“They will have to be facsimiles,” Thanos said. “I can only kill the real one once.”
Loki’s heart staggered to a halt. He pushed himself up and looked at Thor, the ruin of his throat, the foggy emptiness of his eye.
The world just - stopped. He stopped. Everything-
stopped.
He reached inward, frantic, desperate.
I’m here-
Gone.
I thought the world of you-
Gone.
I’ll tell father what you did-
All of it. All of it, he took it and cut it away, ripped it out at the roots like so many weeds, every memory he could reach, every glance and laugh, the anger, the sorrow, the joy, the love. Thor, he thought, Thor, until the word was meaningless, dwindling-
Never doubt that I love you.
He was lying on the floor next to a body. His head was resting on its shoulder. His thoughts stuttered, skipped, echoing the beat of his heart.
Loki (that was his name, wasn’t it? Though it meant nothing, or he could not attach meaning to it) pushed himself up to look at the man next to him. His throat had been cut. Loki felt weak, woozy, confused.
He looked at the corpse and wondered what he might have done to deserve his fate.
Grieving for Loki should have gotten easier. Thor thought it never would.
He fought through it, though. Fought his way to Midgard, to protect his people, to warn them of the coming threat. He did his best not to think of the fact that somehow Loki had found a way to give them time; managed to lure Thanos away. And the price he would pay for that choice. Trust me, he’d said, the last words before he was gone, again, and if at first Thor thought it was to run-
It was. Just not away from danger, but toward it.
That’s what heroes do.
But Thor had his duties. Thor was a king now, and had others to protect.
And yet, when they came face to face with the first of Thanos’s children, he looked at Thor and said we have something of yours. I don’t suppose you’d want it back?
So when they had an opening, he took Val, and Heimdall, and snuck onto Thanos’s ship.
It was no easy task to find Loki in the vast, labyrinthine hallways. When they did, Thor thought at first he was dead, and had just been left to rot. Hanging from the wall, bars of metal driven through his arms and another through his middle so either he could pull himself up by his arms or rest his weight on the bar driven through him. The air stank of rotten blood and Thor felt sick, almost swaying.
“He’s still alive,” Heimdall said, voice grim.
Thor broke his way in almost before he’d finished speaking. “Watch the hallway,” he said to them both, and crossed swiftly to Loki, trying to figure out the best way to free him without letting him bleed to death. He touched the side of Loki’s neck, clammy and cold, and found his weak pulse with his thumb, needing the reassurance.
Loki stirred, barely, his eyes opening. He raised his head slowly, blinking at Thor.
“Loki,” he said softly, not bothering to even try for a smile. “It’s me.” He caught Loki’s head when it started to droop, holding him gently. “It’s me,” he said again.
Loki looked at him blankly. His tongue crept out to lick cracked lips.
“I’m sorry,” he said, voice rough and barely audible. “Should I know you?”