Brotherhood - Loki & Thor ♡

58. lights out

There was an outage in the Avengers Compound. Just an electrical error, really, no one thought it was a big deal at all... until it became a pretty big deal.

///

"Any luck?" Clint asked the moment Tony emerged from the basement after having had gone down to check the transformer, to see if he could bring the power back and so no one would have to spend the rest of the night in utter darkness, considering it happened to be nighttime.
(Tony was in his lab, in the midst of his working when the lights went out with no warning, like someone suddenly surprised him with a bag covering his head)

"Sorry, bud. Looks like we're going to have to spend the rest of the night in the dark. I called our technician dude. Apparently the soonest he can be here is tomorrow." Tony shrugged. He hoped his friends could see him shrug, with how dark it was.

Though they definitely heard him, and he sure heard them groan and complain, their voices overlapping — and Tony thought, a bit amused, 'who would've thought the Avengers were, in fact, a bunch of whiners'

Though if there were to be anyone who wasn't saying anything at all, it was Loki. He stood silently next to his brother.

A whole night in the dark, Loki tried not to let the thought get to him. Of course, he could spend a whole night in darkness. He wasn't a child.

He used to be scared of the dark when he was little, where he would always sneak into Thor's room at night for comfort. The fear went away as he reached adolescence, in which he and Thor never spoke anything about it, like their childhood lives were nothing but a dream. They barely spoke anything to each other in their lives of late, even after Loki's redemption, after Thanos, after they both found their new home at the Avengers Compound with the rest of the team.
(And Loki could lie to himself, but he wondered, once or twice, what went wrong. Why they weren't able to speak so easily with each other like when they were children anymore. When, exactly, did they start growing apart? Things were never the same after his falling from the Bifrost. He supposed, even if the thoughts hurt, they weren't brothers anymore)

"You okay?"

Loki flinched slightly as Thor's voice snapped him out of his trance. "I'm fine," said the younger brother. He was grateful the absence of light helped conceal the paleness on his face.

Loki could spend an entire night in the dark, he could. He... had to.

The last time he spent time in utter darkness was in the Sanctuary, after his falling into the abyss, into Thanos's grasp. It wasn't exactly a pleasant memory.

~~~

Loki excused himself to his room. And sure, he slept with his light off, but it was never... this dark. There used to be lights shining through his windows from Bucky's garden, from the yard in which Tony normally made sure it wasn't completely dark, for security purpose. There were always little lights that kept the atmosphere in the room from blackness. All of that gone with the power outage.

Do you remember what happened in the dark, Laufeyson?

No. Loki shook his head, ridding himself off the voices creeping in the back of his mind. What happened.... happened. It was in the past. It was over. He survived it.

He made his way to the bed and lied down on the soft mattress.

Except it wasn't soft. Coldness piercing through his skin the second his back touched the hard metallic table. Dozens of shadowy, masked figures creeping through the dark, circling him. Their claw-like hands reaching down towards his body, trying to rip him open like how they did in the Sanctuary.