Work Text:
He met her on the day the world ended. On the day his world ended. The day that stars shattered, bones were broken, light was lost, and warmth was no more. The day he slowly lost his ability to feel warmth, to feel cold, to feel his body. After he finally had no eyes to see, and no tongue to speak, and no mind to perceive.
He met her on the day he fell.
He fell out of the world, out of time, out of light and love and reality, out of perception itself. He fell. He stopped. He ceased to be anything. He ceased to know anything. There ceased to be anything. The world was nothing. Nothing was the world. There was no thing, no time, no space. There was nothing.
Then came the impact.
The world came rushing back to him all at once. He had a body to feel, bones to break, blood to flow. He was a thing, living. He was a thing, thinking. He was a thing, perceiving. He was. He had not been, but now again, he was. He existed. He was alive, born, new.
He was broken.
The blood that flowed in him, once frozen and congealed, now flowed free. Free from his skin, from his lips, his nose, his mouth. Escaping him, where once it was all too trapped. The bones that had once been all to solid, all too rigid, all to restrictive when his body wanted to crumble and fold around him, were broken. Shattered. Everything he was, everywhere he was, had shattered. There should have been pain, sight, sound, but he could hardly comprehend these things.
He could hardly comprehend. He had but a body, not a mind. No sense to see or know or understand, hardly to perceive. At first.
The senses were slow to return to him. Or perhaps all too fast. What was time, when you were once not a thing? What was time, once you'd ceased to be? What was time, when there was no thing to measure it against?
Nothing. It was not a thing. He was not a thing. There was not a thing. No things, but there was space. Because he existed, there had to be space. A space, for him to be within.
So perhaps he had a mind, but he could not control it. He could not guide it. He could not watch the things that free flowed within its matrix, nor could he truly understand the print they presented to him in. He had a mind, whatever that meant to him.
And then he could see.
She was the first thing he could see. She was the first locus for his mind. She was a thing. She existed. She was a point of life. She was a mass of blood and bones and motion and color. She was recognition. She was.
And that was when he had senses fully, again. That was when he had a mind, again. That was when he had thoughts, again. That was when he had sound, and self, and sight. He had perception and understanding and knowledge.
Loki had himself again.
And Loki laughed. That was how he rediscovered sound. It poured from his lips, it blasted out all around him. It echoed and rippled and choked him. It was both inside his mind and outside his body. It was something he produced. He could create things. He was a being that existed, that could create. He was matter. He mattered. He could make himself matter, because he could change.
He could change himself from nothing, to something. He could change himself from a quiet thing, to a thing of sound. From a sightless thing, to a thing of sight. From a thoughtless thing, to a thing with thoughts. He could change from a creature that produced nothing, to one that produced something.
And he laughed because of it. He laughed because of many things. Many thoughts all working in concert together. The matrix of his mind was an interwoven spell of associations and knowledge, of bridges and tunnels, of relation and correlation and causation. He had been triggered into activation. He knew, once more. He was. And he laughed.
He must have been an unsightly thing. He was broken and bloody and cackling like a mad thing. He was choking on his blood, on his tongue, on his thoughts. He was suffocating and breathing. He was, without a doubt in his newly constructed mind, mad.
He was mad because he had ceased to be and now was again. He was mad because he'd fallen through space, been absorbed, and taken, and spit out again. He was mad because she was beautiful and alive and living. He was mad because she was a monster. Because he remembered that he was a monster. He was mad because she was blue, and beautiful, and he absolutely, without doubt or contrast or contradiction, loved her.
She scowled at him as he laughed uncontrollably. As his broken body heaved and convulsed and choked. Her eyes were entirely derisive and he could, for whatever reason, read her perfectly. She hated his weakness. His broken body, broken mind, was an affront to her own strength. She hated his joy, what she perceived as joy. The unrestrained, unrestricted way that he laughed. It was an affront to her reserve, even though he could so easily read her emotions on her face.
She was affronted, insulted, angry, because she didn't understand. She didn't understand him. She couldn't. Why would he laugh, in his state? How could he live, in his state? How could he be a thing that fell so far outside her realm of understanding? Weak, yet joyful. Broken, and yet...
She couldn't understand him.
She hadn't lost all senses. She hadn't fallen. She had not been broken, as he had. She had not been unmade and stitched back together by the fabric of space itself. She had not been lost and found in as much rapid succession as he had, over such long centuries as he had.
She didn't know how easy it was to fall in love, when you were mad.
That was fine, though. He didn't want her to know. He didn't want anything but for time and space to remain as it was for a moment longer. Because he knew that his moment could not be eternal. That if one other thing existed, if he existed, then other things existed as well.
They would not all be blue, he was sure. They would not all be beautiful, he was certain. They would not all be monsters, he hoped. They would not all be her, he lamented. But they would be.
But for just a moment longer, he would remain in this mad moment. Cackling because a monster made him fall in love and regain his senses. Because a monster had made him hate himself and love her. Cackling, because pain and misery and beauty were entangling inside the same space and his body did not now what else to do. Laughing, because he was supposed to die and instead he lived again.
Fate was cruel mistress. Loki would pay for his laughter. Loki would pay for his love.
But Loki was used to that by now.
He was not used to love.