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Loki stood frozen (ha) staring at the plinth on which his doom rested.
He didn’t want to know. (He needed to know.) All he had to do was reach out and take it and he’d be certain of what he already knew. If only he could make his hands lift to do it.
“Loki,” said a low voice behind him, sounding as though it was about to break, “don’t.”
He jumped, whirling, magic coming to his hands. “Who are you,” he snarled, immediately on the offensive. “You should not be in here,” though his voice died halfway through, staring. The man in front of him looked as battered as though he’d come directly from a battle. He held himself with the exhaustion of the same. His eyes were mismatched, one brown and one blue, hair shorn. He held an axe in one hand, and even at this distance Loki could feel the power thrumming through it.
Could he have taken a step back, he would have. He lashed out instead, magic to bind and restrain.
He offered no resistance, the axe dropping heavily to the floor. His eyes - and Loki could see now that one of them, the brown one, was false - stared at Loki with a strange, overwhelming, intensity.
Loki’s spine crawled. “Who are you,” he asked first, and then shook himself and said, “I’m calling the Einherjar,” although then he would have to explain his presence here.
“And what will you tell them about why you are here,” the man said, uncannily echoing Loki’s thoughts so that for a moment he thought they’d been plucked from his mind - but his defenses were all still intact. He swallowed hard but tried to keep his face impassive.
“How did you get in,” he asked again.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“I’d say it matters a great deal.”
“Loki-” There was something pleading in the man’s voice, something strangely almost-familiar, but Loki was quite certain he’d never seen this man before in his life. He would remember. Surely.
“Be silent,” Loki snapped. His eyes strayed back toward the Casket. Now it was going to have to wait, and who knew when he would have another moment. The need to know burned in him. Maybe he should just do it, damn this stranger’s witnessing, he could always kill him after.
“I know why you’re here,” he said, and Loki’s gaze cut sharply back to him.
“What?”
“I know why you’re here,” he repeated, but there was no accusation in it, just a strange unhappiness. He nodded toward the Casket. Loki’s body coiled tight.
“I am not going to steal it.” A moment later he felt absurd, and added, “not that I need to excuse myself to you, who trespasses here.”
“I didn’t say that you were,” the man said. “You are…you’re seeking proof. Right?”
Panic fluttered in Loki’s chest and he tensed still further. “Proof of what?” He snapped. “What do you think you know, stranger-”
“Walk away,” he interrupted. “Please, Loki. Walk away from this. Go…go speak to - your mother.”
Loki clenched his fist so the bindings tightened. The stranger still didn’t fight. “Who are you,” Loki demanded, voice vibrating. “To think you know - to think you can tell me what to do–”
He hesitated. “I am trying to help you.”
“And I am to believe that?” Loki demanded. His voice sounded humiliatingly shrill. “When you will not even give me your name?”
The man looked down, and closed his eyes. “You already know it,” he said, after a long pause. “Even if you don’t know me. And that you don’t…”
He trailed off. Loki stared at him, trying to look past the battered exterior, to imagine what he might look like were he less grimy.
The eyes. Eye.
Loki’s stomach dropped even as his heart lurched into his throat. His eyes flicked over him again, cataloguing details. “Thor?” He said, barely a whisper. The bonds slithered loose.
Something in the stranger’s - in Thor’s - face cracked, and the expression was all wrong, grief and pain and weariness like his brother bore a weight beyond imagining, and this was not - could not - be his brother, so lately banished.
No Mjolnir. Was this what happened to him? He was exiled, and did not return - but no, the power that was his birthright was still there.
“Loki,” Thor said, his voice raw, and took a step forward only to stop himself. Loki took a half step of his own, but everything in him screamed wrong, this is wrong, and he couldn’t make himself go further even as part of him ached.
“You…you’re from the future,” he said, numbly. “You came here–”
“I don’t know how much time I have,” Thor interrupted. “Loki, I–”
“What happened,” Loki asked hoarsely. “What - you look–”
Wounded. Deep within, in his soul.
“Too much,” Thor said, after a moment, and then let out a ragged sound, covering the distance between them in two strides and seizing Loki before he could move, dragging him into a hug that was almost too tight, fierce and desperate and Loki was afraid. “You are my brother,” he said, voice on the edge of breaking. “Always. And I love you. Never doubt - never doubt that.”
His own words. Loki took a breath in, shakily. “Thor,” he said weakly, but he didn’t know what he meant to say.
“I did not do this enough,” Thor said. He smelled like smoke and ash. Loki could feel himself trembling.
Am I dead, he couldn’t ask. In our future, am I dead?
“Please,” he said. “Promise me. Promise me you won’t take this on alone. Go to mother. Go to me.”
Loki shook his head, but Thor held him tighter. “Promise me. This - this secret our parents kept changes nothing.”
Loki heard himself make a wild, strange, laugh, and tried to push Thor away. “So it’s true,” he said. “That I am - then they are not our parents but yours - changes nothing? It changes everything.”
“No,” Thor said, all the certainty in it, all the surety that Loki had never been able to find. “Nothing. Not about you. Not about us.”
A sound shamefully like a sob caught in Loki’s throat and he found himself pressing his forehead into Thor’s chest. Not his Thor, this one. But yes, his Thor. Always. Never doubt. All he knew how to do was doubt.
“We still have a chance,” Thor said. “To do things differently. To do things better. I beg you, Loki. Promise me.”
There was such an ache in his voice. Such pain. And for all Loki’s anger, for all his fear and horror and hurt, Loki thought he never wanted to hear Thor sound like that. Never wanted Thor to suffer as he was. Never wanted to feel anything like the desperation with which Thor clung to him now.
He closed his eyes. “I promise,” he said, voice weak and small, and he felt Thor exhale and slump.
“Let it be enough,” he said. “Please, let it be enough.”
He pulled back, mismatched eyes staring into Loki’s. He clasped Loki’s neck in a gesture as familiar as his own heartbeat and kissed Loki’s forehead.
“Loki,” he said, and between one blink and the next was gone.
Tears spilled out of Loki’s eyes and he let out a wet sob, and then another. He sank down on the stairs and pressed his face into his hands, and wept until he was empty.
Promise me you won’t take this on alone. Smoke, and ash, and all consuming grief.
We still have a chance.
He pressed his hands to his eyes and scrubbed his cheeks. He needed to see Thor. To know that he was - hale, and strong, and if not himself not the man made of sorrow who’d held him with such fierce need.
And maybe - maybe he could bring himself to say more. To sit down and try to tell him what had happened. What he knew.
Let it be enough to keep whatever terrible future he’d just glimpsed from coming to pass.