Lost in the Woods

Chapter 6

"I love you."

Those were the three words that Loki clung to in his isolation. For eighteen months he was faced with black walls, relentless cold and suffocating silence. In the long dark of his imprisonment the demigod found himself holding on to every small, happy memory that he could recall. It was too hard to be angry when there was no one there to see it. It was too hard to feign hurt or act damaged when in reality he ached for the warmth of friendship and love.

For the first week of his confinement Loki was difficult. He annoyed the guards incessantly, tapping on the metal door and whispering frightful things to them through the only slat. He quickly grew bored of this though and insanity took over again.

For a month he railed against his confinement, screaming bloody murder until his voice gave out. He flung himself against the metal walls of his box and more than once woke up from his unconscious state to see the vaguely concerned face of his nurse looking down at him. Once awake though, the trickster was immediately locked back in his cell.

This awful cycle of screaming and self harm continued until he ran out of anger. One morning he woke up feeling nothing but unbearable hurt.

This was when he started crying.

Loki prided himself for being unbreakable. However, the hostile silence pressing in around him eventually became too much for his fragile mind to take and the liesmith crumbled into a hysterical mess. Tears tracked down his face for he knew not how long. He was so lonely it ached and the only way he knew how to express that feeling and find some amount relief was to weep.

Once, during his state of sadness, he could have sworn he heard Thor's voice. The demigod sounded pained, perhaps even concerned, but all too soon the hallucination ended and Loki tried to go back to his silent vigil. From then on though, he was plagued by voices in his head, whispering things. Sometimes they took on the tone of his family, his previous friends. Other times they were the plaintive cries of his victims. Regardless, the hushed murmuring in his ears only increased his distress. Their words revolved around the horrible things he had done and Loki found his tears dripping faster down his face, fuel by guilt.

Then, after what he assumed was a few months, Loki ran out of tears as well.

Like his anger, the hurt and loneliness in him dissipated. Only this time he was left with nothing. His time in solitary then became a bleak, drawn out interval of stillness and quiet. No sound was issued in his box, save for the occasional scrape of a food tray as it slid through the slat under the door. Loki found himself becoming one with the silence. He already felt like an empty husk, so it was easy to fill that shell with a sense of abandonment. However, instead of igniting hurt or anger at the thought of being forgotten, he found peace in the notion. He willed himself to believe that if he were forgotten, no one could hate him. If he were forgotten, no one would confront him about his crimes. It became easier still to even pretend that nothing had ever happened, that perhaps he wasn't even born.

Such drastic thinking worried him. From a private corner of his mind Loki watched his sanity unravel further with a sinking sense of despair.

If they ever drag me out of here, he mused to himself, they will think they fished out the wrong convict. I don't think I would even recognise myself in this state.

The order never came for his execution, and so Loki went on, almost paralysed with sinister calm, believing that this was all his future held. Though it distressed him somewhat to know that he could never reach his full potential; never show the universe just how great he could be, he pushed that aside and made peace with his confinement.