Brotherhood - Loki & Thor ♡

39. weeping ashes

"No thoughts, no prayers,
can bring back what's no longer there,"

________________

After Thanos broke his neck, Loki's only company was himself. For some reason he couldn't reach Valhalla and reunite with his mother, unable to crossover and move on.

For some reason Heimdall could. Loki couldn't.

(That reason being Loki still had unfinished business, things on his mind. He couldn't move on. Not when Thor was still mourning his name and when he, himself, still couldn't say goodbye to his brother)

The lost God was alone for five years, then he got some new friends.

///

It was dark and cold. Loki remembered the moment of his death, the second his soul left his body. He remembered watching Thor cradling the lifeless corpse, remembered yelling at his brother to escape and save himself as everything around them came crashing down, as Statesman came cashing down. Still no matter how loud Loki screamed, Thor couldn't hear him. His voice no longer be heard.

Then it was just him. Alone in the void. Ha! Loki wasn't sure whether he should laugh, cry or howl. After falling - no, not falling, after letting go - Loki thought he had spent enough time in the void for the eternity. He wouldn't spend a single more minute here, consumed in the dark, not even as a ghost.

So he reached out. Not knowing how. Not knowing where. But he knew to whom. Thor's face cleared in his mind; his mismatched eyes, his trimmed beard, the scars that indicated his years of wars and battles. The centuries they shared; the laughter, the fighting, the tears, those times Thor tended to Loki's wounds even though Loki had tried to push him away, all of these; clear in Loki's memories.

The ghost reached out, and here his brother was.

Thor wasn't looking happy, far from it. He looked beaten, shredded to the bone. Something about that made Loki's cold, dead heart ache (how was that even possible?)

"Thor," Loki carefully lowered himself down next to his brother. Thor didn't turn his head nor did he acknowledge the younger brother's existence. And Loki didn't at all hold it against Thor for Loki knew Thor wasn't ignoring him. Thor simply couldn't see him. They were in different worlds now.

"What's wrong with him?"

Loki lifted his gaze up to the blondie, with short undercut hair, who was clearly talking about Thor as though Thor wasn't sitting isolated in the room with them. She was... new. Or at least Loki didn't know who she was; she wasn't one of the Avengers trying to stop him when he, under Thanos' control, attacked New York years ago.

"He's angry," oh, Loki thought, so the raccoon can talk. Apparently there were a lot of unfamiliar faces in the Avengers; Loki hadn't been keeping up. "With himself," the raccoon continued, "he had the chance to kill Thanos, but didn't go for the head."

Right. Loki knew that look; Thor was blaming himself. His gaze returned to his brother; he looked suddenly much much older, like he carried so much, too much.

"Stop blaming yourself," he said even though he knew Thor couldn't hear him. "It wasn't your fault. I brought the Tesseract. I -" Loki stopped, pressing his lips into a thin line, knowing there was no use for a ghost to start an argument with a living. Old habits die hard. He sighed, gingerly placing a hand on Thor's shoulder. Thor couldn't feel the touch, the most Thor could feel was something on his skin. Just that.