Archive of Our Own ^beta

The throne room, once so magnificent, feels cold and impersonal. Around the edges of his vision, Asgard's court shuffles in their finest clothing and nicest jewelry, like this is a night out on the town. Maybe it is, for them--what's more entertaining than a royal sentencing, after all? There's a country's worth of riches in this one room. Maybe a world's.

But he's seen bigger things at this point, seen things so breath-taking and awful that even Asgard's frankly ridiculous wealth pales in comparison. 

(What is a man who sits on gold when compared to a king who floats in the expanse of space with nothing but the blood beneath his fingernails needed to achieve everything he wants?)

(A damn fool, that's what.)

"Loki Odinson," the Allfather booms, dead silence falling as his staff hits the solid marble of the floor. "You have been called forth today to answer for your crimes, both on Midgard and against a fellow member of royalty. What have you to say for your actions?"

Loki Silver-tongue, Loki Lie-smith, God of Lies and Mischief. He has been called all of these things. He is all of these things. He can think of a thousand ways to drag out this trial, to make himself appear more innocent and sympathetic. Hell, he could even tell the truth--could announce to the rest of the Aesir that he was far from their biggest threat, that everything he did he did under duress from Thanos the Mad Titan. 

And yet. 

He looks at Odin, remembers the agony that burned through him as all he knew was ripped away, remembers letting go and falling and how the last thing he saw was Odin's face, impassive even in grief. An old, familiar mask slips into place, and all he does is give something between a smirk and a bow, keeping his voice steady as he responds. "It's Laufeyson, actually, or have you already forgotten that part of my heritage?"

The air in the room grows colder and tighter all at once, like for a heartbeat all of Asgard is holding its breath. Odin's face is dark and impassive on his throne of lies. 

Mother Frigga is nowhere to be seen, some distant part of him notes. 

"Speak clearly, my son. Do you challenge these accusations?"

Loki has to bite back a snarl, his teeth hard and sharp in his mouth. I am not your son , he wants to scream, I am nothing to you don't you see what you've done to me I am nothing --

"No," he says, perfectly calm. A facsimile of grief crosses the Allfather's face. Once upon a time, Loki might've believed that was genuine, but that part of him died somewhere between letting go of Gungnir and taking the scepter offered to him. 

"Then you take responsibility for these actions, Loki? You acknowledge the innocents you've killed, the war you've brought to civilian worlds, the damages you have wreaked across the nine realms?"

"I do," he says, smiling for the hell of it. Let the court stare at him. Let them look at him, smiling at accusations of slaughter. Let them see the blood in his teeth and know that one day he will come for them . 

"Then you leave me no other option. I sentence you, Loki Laufeyson, to live out the rest of your days in a shadowed realm. You shall have no company, and no comforts--there will be only you, and the knowledge of what you have done."

The crack of Gungnir hitting the floor reverberates through the room, and Loki shoves down his flinch viciously. There is no room for weakness in this golden palace; Odin taught him that long ago. 

The portal is opening slowly, inky darkness tinged with green, bubbles and wisps and shapes that aren't quite real anywhere else. It must look horrifying to everyone in the room, this vast unknown, the ultimate Asgardian punishment which hasn't been used in millennia. 

It is not unknown to Loki. He's known exactly what a shadowed dimension is since he was a boy; he knows just what kind of hell to expect. 

Part of him is waiting for some final declaration--be it of love or scorn--to pass through Odin's lips, but none comes. There is only the deafening silence of the room around him, the pulse of his own heart heavy in his ears, the brief flash as his brother's lightning rips the sky in two. 

Loki holds his chin up high, ever the crown prince, and steps into the darkness before the thunder hits.

***

The pain is about what he expected, Loki muses, but for a shadowed realm it's really quite bright. His eyes peel open, inexplicably gritty, and he finds himself staring at cracked tile beside his head while the sounds of a battle rage in the distance. There are sirens wailing from somewhere far below, and he is all alone. 

He pushes himself up onto aching forearms, feeling the air catch and burn in his ragged lungs. Hadn't his broken ribs just finished healing? What could possibly have happened in the 0.2 milliseconds since he stepped through the portal to break them again?

Loki's eyes wander upwards and around. It will make no difference, in a shadow realm, but his instincts will not allow him to stop assessing his surroundings even for a moment. 

(A moment, he remembers, Frigga's voice still calm and clear in his mind after all these years-- a moment is all it will take, my son, for everything to change-- )

(She'd been right. A moment was all it took. A moment and a brush against his skin and then he was left, blue and ruling with bile in his mouth.)

He has always prided himself on his mind, on his cleverness, on his ability to wriggle out of uncomfortable situations, but as he looks around, he wonders for the first time if he might truly have gone mad. 

For a shadow realm, it looks an awful lot like Stark Tower. 

He crawls into a half-way sitting position, props himself up against the stairs, and then just... stops. He's not really sure what he was working towards. If it's a hallucination, it's a damn good one, and if it's not, then... well, then there are a whole other host of questions, and picking a direction to blindly head toward won't do Loki any good anyways. 

So. He waits. He breathes through the agony and feels his bones slowly knitting themselves back together, the healing exquisitely painful. 

(Some part of him welcomes the pain, the same part that had relied on small, neat nicks of his dagger to tell fantasy from reality. With Thanos, they were all about the same thing; even the god of illusions had struggled to tell fact from fantasy unless there was pain clearing the fog from his head.)

They're almost done when he hears the footsteps. He could probably go--could get up and run--but where would he flee to? It's not like he knows what's happening. And besides, he trusts himself to talk his way out of anything that happens. 

( Yeah, part of him murmurs, because that ended so well with Thanos. )

( Shut up , he tells it.)

The people finally come into view, and Loki is torn between wanting to scream and laugh hysterically. Of course, of course , it's his brother and the Band of Buffoons, or whatever it is they call themselves. 

"I see you've finally finished breaking the city," he says, because Loki is many things but a master of self-control he is not. 

(They already sent him to hell, what more can they do?)

"Are you serious? Is he serious?" the man in the suit of armor demands, looking around as if one of his companions will have the answer. " You broke the city, Loki. We were literally cleaning up your mess."

" I wasn't the one hurling Chitauri into buildings--"

"Enough," Thor rumbles. He might've been imposing, a god fresh from battle, weapon pointed at Loki, if Loki himself hadn't grown up side by side with the oaf. 

Most people, Loki has found, are much less intimidating once you've tripped them into a fountain and turned them into a goldfish. 

"My brother will face trial on Asgard. For now, we must simply detain him."

Loki stops and stares at him. He remembers those words--they were exactly what Thor had said the last time he found Loki like this. Was this a memory, then? It couldn't be, because Stark hadn't said that last time--so a hallucination, maybe? But the odds of something being such an exact replica were so slim...

He puzzles over it in the quiet hours that follow, through the walk into Asgard, through the trial that sends waves of deja vu through him. For once, he has no clue what's happening, and that--that's enough to make him sweat. 

There's no talking your way out of a situation you don't even know you're in.

Everybody is staring at him, and he gets the sense that there was a question he was supposed to answer but missed. He shoots back a quip on little more than instinct and muscle memory, unwilling to acknowledge that he wasn't paying attention in his own sentencing, and stares with morbid curiosity at the portal that's opening in front of him. 

So... perhaps before had been a vivid premonition? It was rare, certainly, but not unheard of--plenty of Asgardians were Norns-blessed with seidr based on Sight, although Loki himself had never shown any potential. 

He shakes off any lingering confusion or hesitation and steps through the portal with his head held high . The inky black swallows him whole. 

***

He opens his eyes and it's bright. Sirens and explosions scream in the distance, brisk New York air sweeping across his face from the still-broken window, and his lungs are once again screaming. 

He's not quite sure what's happening, but something dark and ancient and slumbering in his gut says he needs to find a way out, and soon. 

He eyes the stairs--twice, now, that he's rested against those and waited for the end to come. He doesn't want there to be a third time, so he heads for the elevator instead. He gets all the way to the wall and stares at the cracked bit of glass where the down button should be, and for the first time, he remembers its destruction by shrapnel during his fight with the Hulk. 

He isn't quite sure where the Norns are, in terms of relative geography, but he assumes they are cozily at home in the deepest level of hell, so he looks down when he says "fuck you too". 

"Dude," says a voice behind him, wry with amusement, "were you seriously trying to escape with the elevator?" 

"Nice to see you too, Agent Barton," the god of lies grumbles. "I suppose this is the part where you're here to arrest me, escort me back to Asgard in chains, I'll get what's coming to me, yada yada?"

"Pretty much, yes," the Black Widow says. There's something cold in her face that makes Loki wonder if he'd picked the wrong henchman for his coup of SHIELD. 

"Wonderful," he says. He doesn't bother to hold back the sarcasm in his voice. 

When it's time, Loki walks into the portal without hesitation. 

***

By the fifth day, he's figured it out. 

It's a fucking time loop . 

***

"If it's all the same to you," Loki says on day eleven, "I'll have that drink now."

Unfortunately, he's not even joking. He'll take weak Midgardian mead if he can get his hands on it; he'd give anything to be drunk right now. Being in a time loop, he's determined, is worse than just about anything else in his life. Right now it's second only to the fall, but if he has to feel his ribs break and then re-heal one more time he's changing his mind. 

The Avoiders, or whichever cheesy name that blacksmith had used, only draw their weapons back further. 

Loki would sigh into his hands if they weren't busy being in the air and all. 

***

Every time, on the way back to Asgard, Thor tries to speak to him. He tries to ask Loki what happened, how he got the scepter, how he wound up on Earth, if he had truly meant the things he said during the battle. 

Every time, without fail, Loki ignores him.

Once, he had thrown himself off this bridge rather than face his father's disappointment or his brother's ego. If Thor was such a fool that he couldn't see how much it cost Loki to be dragged back in chains, caught and foiled, then he did not even deserve Loki's lies. 

(Or at least, this is what he tells himself. It does no good to acknowledge the lump in his throat, welling with homesickness, that wouldn't let him talk anyway.)

***

"I tire of your games, Loki. Speak the truth and nothing more," Odin booms, two weeks into this newfound hellscape.

Loki doesn't bother holding back his laugh. He'd like nothing more than to stop the games, as the Allfather so kindly put it, the issue is that he can't . For once, Loki has been out-magiced, and he has no goddamn idea how to fix any of it. 

He's still laughing when the shadows reach out and pull him in.

***

It takes another three weeks for him to swallow his pride. They're halfway across the bridge, heading into Asgard, and Thor is halfway through another of his inane questions when Loki speaks. 

"I would meet with Frigga, before the trial."

"Certainly, brother!" Thor says, sudden hope in his eyes. "Surely she will speak on your behalf to Father!"

Loki doesn't bother correcting him. Frigga would do no such thing--she's stayed far away from the trial on purpose. He knows. He'd given up and asked after a week where she was, and hadn't bothered to hide his anguish when Odin not so kindly informed him that Frigga had no interest in being near a son who had brought her nothing but pain and treason. 

Even now, the thought of facing her makes his stomach clench uncomfortably; still, she's the only one on Asgard who might be able to help him. 

When he's escorted to see her, she's sitting in in her gardens-- their gardens, that fountain she's perched on is one Loki himself helped enchant--staring distantly at the blue sky above her. 

"Hello, Allmother," he says, dipping into the closest thing to a formal bow that the chains will allow. "I've come to seek your counsel."

"You can drop the formalities, Loki," she murmurs. There is something quiet and unmistakably pained in her voice, and if he were anyone else, he might've given in to the urge to apologize. But he's not anyone else. He's Loki, the stolen child of the Frost Giants, and his pride is the only thing left of him so he clings to it like a dying man. 

"I've come to seek your counsel," he repeats, his words harder than before, "regarding time loops."

Frigga blinks, apparently too startled to reprimand him for his blatant disregard for her request. "Time loops? I haven't heard of one of those in a thousand years."

"Yes, well," Loki says, amused by the irony despite himself. He kind of wants to shake her and scream you're in one right now . 

(He knows himself well enough to acknowledge that if he wasn't the one reliving the same day over and over, he'd get a savage kind of joy out of the whole thing. If he wasn't so goddamn angry he might've applauded whoever cast this on him, but as it is, he's much more inclined to take a knife to their face.)

"I just need to know what you know about them," he manages after a moment. "What forms them, how they work, any way to break them--whatever you have, if you're willing."

"I'm afraid I can't help you much. I've only heard of one, and that was so long ago that most of the details have escaped me."

"Very well," he sighs. It had been worth a shot. Tomorrow, at least, she'll remember none of this, and his pride will be intact.

"Loki, why are you concerned with time loops? Do you know of one?" she asks, leaning forward. The concern is creasing her brow and Loki kind of wants to cry, because everything is convoluted and hard and he just wants out . 

(He wants to go back to when he could've come to Frigga without hesitation about this, to when they would've spent all afternoon weaving theories in this garden and she would've figured it all out, fixed it with a snap of her fingers and held him close afterward--)

(He wants to go home .)

"It does not matter, Allmother. Thank you for your time."

The trial. Odin's fury. Thor's grief. The crowd shuffles and murmurs, restless. A portal opens, and Loki throws himself in with the desperation of a dying man. 

***

Loki's ribs scream at him as he inhales, and he ignores them. Today, he doesn't even feel like picking a direction for a half-hearted attempt at escape. There's no point. Give it a few hours and he'll be right back in this spot again anyway, he might as well save himself the trouble and not move. 

He feels like closing his eyes, so he does. He just lays there and breathes, feeling the pain slide up and down his spine as his body works overtime to fix things that will be broken again in a matter of hours. The breeze ruffles across his face and somewhere, under the salt and smoke and screams, under the bitter haze that's settled over the city, there's a trace of something sweet. Loki thinks that he should've paid more attention when he had come to visit Thor. Midgard is primitive and in desperate need of leadership, but it's pretty, in its own way. He could see himself liking it here. 

(Thor thought his exile was something he endured, something that changed him.) 

(Loki thinks about what his brother went through, about what he endured, about the fall and the ship and everything that came after, and thinks Midgard sounds like a pleasant vacation.) 

(Only his brother would fall from grace straight into another group of people willing to do anything, overlook any flaw, for him.) 

When Thor's herd of idiots finds their way up, Loki is still just laying there, wondering what could've happened differently. 

"Loki--" his brother begins. 

"Suck my cock," Loki interrupts, his eyes still closed, "then throw yourself off the Bifrost."

There's a muffled snort, like someone--Stark, probably--doesn't want to acknowledge they found that funny. 

Loki considers calling him out about it, but decides not to. He's trapped in a time loop, his lungs are killing him, he'll have to endure another round of Thor's ridiculous questions, and even Frigga doesn't know anything that could help him. There's no point in any of it. 

***

"Brother, please. Why did you do this? What happened to you?" Thor pleads. Loki's eyes stay trained on the palace looming in front of them. He wonders, vaguely, where all the gold had come from. Not Asgard, surely, he doesn't even know of any gold mines, so which unsuspecting world had his ancestors the former kings stripped raw?

"Would you not offer me the comfort of the truth, just this once?"

Loki bites back the scream that wells up in his throat. "I was bored. It sounded like fun."

Thor is caught somewhere between relief and confusion. It's an expression Loki is far too familiar with on him. "I don't understand."

"Of course you don't, you've never been stuck in space with nothing to do," Loki says. It's not technically a lie, but he takes the same quiet joy from twisting words that he normally would. 

***

"Take me to the library," Loki commands, and they do. He doesn't know--doesn't care--whether it's because they're afraid of him, or because some member of the royal family has already decreed it okay, or because the guards still remember that no one has stripped him yet of his rights as crown prince, leftover from when Thor was exiled and the mess that followed. 

He makes a beeline for a shelf he had visited the day before as soon as they get inside, not bothering to pause for the homesickness that had caught him the first few times around. He'd been in the middle of a fascinating reflection on the relativity of time and how the astral plane could be used to bend it to one's will, if he could just figure out how to apply it--

He pulls out the book, looking for the page he had dog-eared yesterday, and almost screams when he remembers that he was the only one yesterday happened for. He'd have to do this the old-fashioned way, then, and experiment with some method of recording information that would exist outside the time loop. 

Perhaps if it had been some other day, some other version of himself, he might've screamed and cried and vented his frustrations until they tied him down, until his lips were sealed together and his lungs stripped of air. 

But it is today (again), and Loki is himself (still), so instead, he just sighs through his nose and sits in the nearest armchair. It will only take a moment to find his place, and time, after all, is the one resource he has in spades. 

***

"Help," Loki says, his voice completely flat, "I've fallen and I can't get up."

Mjolnir is on his chest, making his still-healing ribs scream in protest. If Thor knew that, he'd probably move it, find some other way to keep Loki in place, but Loki would die before admitting how much it hurts him. Has died, actually--there have been a few times in the past weeks when he's bitten down a scream of pain when the hammer hits his chest as shards of bone slide directly into his lungs, when he coughs up blood and falls into an entirely different kind of darkness while his brother and the others are off celebrating their victories. 

(The truth he will never admit out loud: in between closing his eyes and opening them to the light of the tower again, a quiet part of his mind had whispered finally .)

"Did you just," Stark begins, staring over at him with some sort of horror. He's standing in the kitchen, cradling what appears to be a gallon of coffee close to his chest as if to protect it from Loki's villainy. "No! No, no, no! You aren't allowed to make jokes that I would make! You're evil! Be silent and brooding!"

"Oh, I'm sorry, is my existence bothering you?" 

"Yes," Stark says, "there are actually few things right now that bother me as much as you do."

"Woe is me, I'm a billionaire and I have a supervillain on my couch--" 

Stark is gone before he can finish his mocking, but that's alright. Loki laughs through the pain into an empty room.

***

It takes him a year to work his way through the library. He's finished all the books pertaining to time and curses in the first three months, but it beats sitting in that golden cell, so he keeps going until he runs out of books to read, and then a while after that, until sitting in that beautiful room makes him want to scream rather than sleep.

Once, just once, he loses his patience. He flips a table, smashes the delicate, centuries-old stained glass, and sets fire to the better half of the lore section before they manage to restrain him. 

(He doesn't ask to go to the library anymore.)

***

"Why did you do it?" his brother asks, eyes wide and pleading. Loki has spent a millennia looking at those eyes; he's seen them glowing with joy or dark with rage, has seen the way the corners crinkle when they were children making mischief. Once upon a time, Loki had loved his big brother with fierce pride and stubborn loyalty, but--but that was a long time ago.

"I wanted the exclusive right to Midguardian donuts,” Loki says, just to see his brother’s face.

***

“Are you serious?” Stark demands as the rest of his team ambles out of the room. His voice has jumped an octave from the sheer horror and indignity of it. “I’m on babysitting duty ?”

“It’s not babysitting , Stark, it’s guarding a highly valuable prisoner of war and it’s a big responsibility that we’re trusting you with,” the one in bright blue spandex explains with a sigh. 

“Bullshit, Cap,” he cuts off angrily. “It’s babysitting and you know it.”

“Tony, we all have to make certain sacrifices in the name of--”

“I just died flying a nuke through a space wormhole! I have made the goddamn sacrifices !”

The Captain sighs heavily, using his forefinger and thumb to rub at the bridge of his nose. “Are we still on that?”

“Are we still--IT WAS TWENTY MINUTES AGO, YES WE’RE STILL ON THAT.”

And then, later, when it’s just Loki on the floor and Stark pouting on the couch:

“You know, in another life, I bet we could’ve been friends.”

“Oh, shut up.”

“What?” Loki asks, raising an eyebrow. “You really don’t think we have anything in common?”

“Nothing important,” Stark says, and there’s something harsh in his voice. “You had a loving family, every opportunity in the world, and people who grieved when you died. You chose to let them believe you were dead, try to invade a non-hostile planet, destroy the lives of countless agents, and kill a good man. We aren’t alike at all.”

“Loving,” Loki says, his lips pulling back into a sneer, “is not the term that comes to mind. And you’d be surprised at the lengths you find yourself going to after you spend long enough in the dark spaces of the galaxy.”

***

“Why did you do it?” Thor asks, shaking Loki by the shoulders. Loki’s not quite sure whether he’s more likely to get punched or bear-hugged, but he knows which one he’d prefer and how to make it happen. 

“Oh, brother,” he says, willing his eyes to go wide and watery, “you have to understand--I have children to think about now, I had to do it to save their lives!”

Thor, the idiot, looks absolutely gobsmacked. “Loki, why did you not mention this earlier?! Surely this will fix everything--we’ll find your children, pardon your actions, make things right --”

“You really will fall for anything , won’t you?”

Thor’s face falls comically quickly. The dislocated shoulder is totally worth it.

***

A year and a half into repeating the same day, Loki can officially announce, as current reigning expert on time loops, that the absolute worst part is the way that you can’t make inside jokes. It doesn’t matter if you grow and change, if your understandings and relationships with the people around you evolve--every few hours, the clock for them sets back to zero and they forget any progress you might have made. It’s why no matter how many times he goes to Frigga and tries to reconnect with her he’ll never be able to fix what was broken; why Thor looks at him with fresh betrayal each time he opens his eyes; why he’ll never be able to build that friendship that he thinks might actually be possible after a year and a half of stifled laughs between him and Stark, who gets put on “babysitting duty” about every third day. 

In the past year and a half, Loki has grown and changed and learned more about the universe. He’s had to learn more about himself, settle into his own mind, simply for the lack of anything to do for hours at a time every day--he is a different person now than he was during the invasion. He’s… well, he likes to think he’s better. He’s read more of Asgard’s library than even Odin, not that it would even stop the Allfather from speaking so condescendingly if he knew. 

And still, the frustration that catches like a scream against the back of his throat: he is the only one who will ever know. 

***

“Brother--” starts Thor.

“I swear to the Allfather if you ask me one more question I will jump off this bridge again ,” Loki vows in one long rushed breath. 

“But, Brother, I want to know why--”

Loki jumps.

***

The brisk New York breeze is coming through the window again when he opens his eyes. There’s the smoke billowing up from everywhere, the wail of sirens far below, but he wheezes a couple of times and scoots himself over to the side of the window and stares out at the skyscrapers dotting the horizon and the pure, endless blue stretching in every direction. Some days he tries to escape, but at this point--well. He’s tried just about everything there is to try, and some days he just wants to be tired and quietly grateful that at least he’s stuck on such a beautiful day. 

“Loki, you are under arrest for--what are you doing?” he hears Barton demand from behind him. 

“Watching the clouds,” Loki says. He means to be blithe and trite, to be the kind of lie that irritates just past the point of reason, but it occurs to him later as he’s sitting in his cell once more that it really wasn’t a lie at all.  

***

Once, just once, Loki had scooted over to that same ledge next to the wide, expansive sky, and let himself tumble over the edge. 

He suppresses a shudder just thinking about it, even now. That was by far the worst death. Better to just wait for the trial and the trails of inky darkness to come reaching out for him. 

***

Some days, when his chest is healed enough that he can still breathe and Stark hasn’t been left behind as a guard, Loki speaks to the man in the ceiling. His name is Jarvis and he claims that he is neither a trick of enchantment nor an actual creature, hiding above the light fixtures.

Loki isn’t quite sure what to make of him, this man-who-is-not-a-man, but then, he has some experience with defying categories, this lost prince, this misplaced child of Jotunheim. He takes in a shallow gasp of air, feeling the sting in his ribs burn with the rise of his chest, and does his best to remind himself of the baby birds Frigga had taught him to shelter in the garden, centuries ago. Their wings had been tiny, delicate things,  their heads no bigger than his thumb; even so, they had grown into fierce creatures that nipped at his fingers and learned to fly. 

He and Jarvis carry on long, meandering conversations, most of the time. There’s a tightness in the here-but-not-here voice, at first, but Stark trained politeness into him too well (likely in order to avoid having to be polite himself, Loki suspects) and so after a few hours of mindless chatter, there’s more mutual respect there than before. After all, Jarvis is a master of dry witticisms, and Loki--well. The people of Asgard called him Silvertongue long before he turned to dark and festering jealousy; it’s nice to not be the only one around with a sense of sarcasm. 

Sometimes Loki starts the conversation, sometimes Jarvis does. Sometimes neither of them speaks and the hours roll by in silence. But on the days when they do… it’s nice, having something close to a friend. 

***

It's the boredom more than anything else that does it. It's a good day; Stark's been watching him with more confusion than anger, his brother's hammer hasn't splintered his ribs any more than they already were, and Jarvis, the ever-present guardian of all things good, is willing to team up with Loki to make snide remarks about the various costumed team members that aren't there. Plus, somewhere far below, there's a hot dog vendor up and running again if the faint smell is anything to go by. All in all, a successful few hours of laying in place, babbling at nothing. Stark sits in the corner repairing his gauntlet, dumbfounded, while the conversation flows around him. 

"What would you do," Loki asks when there's a lull in the conversation. He says quietly, calmly, like one would tell a riddle. "If you were stuck someplace and couldn't get out?" 

(It's not a riddle, but only because he's not looking for an answer. Two years into this hellscape, Loki has more or less made his peace with it--not because he's given up but because he's run out of things to try.) 

"We are not helping you escape, Reindeer Games," Stark says, standing suddenly, as though he thinks that will make his point more clear somehow. 

"Well obviously," Loki responds, rolling his eyes. "I more meant a metaphysical somewhere, but thanks anyway, Tinman."

The sound Stark lets out can only be described as a squawk of outrage. 

"I think," Jarvis interrupts. (Loki loves Jarvis. If he ever becomes king Jarvis will be his head advisor and quite possibly spouse.) "that I would look for a loophole or a back door. I would try to find another angle."

Loki hums in agreement. "I've tried that, though."

"Have you exhausted every resource?" 

"Every one I can access."

"Hey, what about me?" Stark asks. He's watching Loki with a familiar expression, one that says I know interacting with you is a bad idea but I'm too intrigued to resist . Loki hadn't recognized it the first time, hadn't been able to read Stark quite so well. But the 200th time is another matter entirely. 

"What about you?" Loki asks, deliberately dismissive. Lack of interest is the best way to get Stark to engage. 

"Don't you want my opinion?"

"Hm," Loki says. "I suppose if you must share it."

Stark scowls at him, but Loki is still well within the range of safety. It's the same way he scowls at Ms. Potts and Col. Rhodes when they barge in every fourteenth loop or so. 

"If you're stuck somewhere and there's no exit, build your own."

Loki supposes he probably knows that one from experience. 

Still. It's an interesting proposition. The stigma against magical experimentation is strong in Asgard, so strong he'd barely given it a second thought. Magic is a powerful and finicky thing, and that's just when you're reciting words on a page--Loki has grown up on the horror stories of what magic without strictly defined edges can do, has lived through a couple himself so horrifying even he swore it off. But there are no counter-curses or wards or solutions to be found in what's already written in the libraries, and to be quite frank, he really doesn't have much left to lose at this point.

Build your own way out . 

An interesting proposition indeed. 

***

"Go fuck yourself," he gasps out, two weeks later. His whole body is wracked with pain and he's pretty sure that the red stuff splattered around the room is most of his internal organs. 

He's never trying this again. After the seventeenth straight day of horrific pain and slow, agonizing death by himself--no. He's done with experimental magic. It's time for another kind of approach. 

***

Banner tells him to center himself and take the time to figure out the best course of action. Colonel Rhodes tells him to go to, in his words, whoever the fuck’s in charge on that crazy planet of yours , and to ask for help. The Widow tells him to eliminate whoever is causing the threat. Steve Rogers tells him that he’ll get back to Loki but always forgets when the day restarts. Loki rarely encounters Fury again, but when he does ask, the other man’s answer (buried in taunts) is to gather enough intel that all he has to do is to put the pieces together. Selvig tells him that some problems don’t have one solution. Pepper tells him that everything has a fix and that he’s probably coming at it from the wrong angle.

Barton tells him to fuck off and stop asking stupid questions, Loki, I hope you never solve any of your problems. 

***

When none of those work, he decides it’s time to expand his perimeter.

***

Jane Foster slaps him across the face and calls the police when he finally summons up enough energy to teleport away, choosing travel over healing. It's nothing new, a technique he's tried before--he can get away, but the energy it costs him means he has five minutes, max, before he's dead. It uses everything he has left. 

He doesn't prefer to do it, but he can. He needs another perspective, and after hearing so much of his brother's rambles about the amazing Jane Foster, well. So he's a little curious. Sue him. 

When she's done with the screaming and violence and threats, she inches closer, curiosity etched into her irises. It takes her a minute to think over his question, to decide whether or not to even bother answering. 

"I'm a scientist," she tells him. "If there's a problem I want to solve, I try every option until only one true hypothesis can remain." 

***

"What do you need paper for?" the guard asks, skeptical. He was probably warned not to give Loki anything lest he find a way to magic himself out of prison, which--yeah, okay, fair, but right now it's causing him quite a headache. 

"I'd like to write a note for my mother," he says blandly. That is a lie that hurts, a little--it stings like a papercut because once when these same fucking hours were just repeating themselves, going over and over, he had said that and it was the truth. (Loki had been there the next day. The letter hadn’t.) The guard's face softens in sympathy, though, so it was the right call. 

Now. Onto the scientific method, as the mortals call it. 

***

By the time Loki is done making the charts and crossing out possibilities he's tried, there’s a sizable list scrawled in smaller and smaller text on the parchment. Most of the page is scratched out. Even without writing down every single option to test methodically, he’s tried most of the things he could dream up. His small list of options looks pretty dismal, but he figures that after years of living the same painful day over and over, he’s willing to die bloody a few times if it means finally breaking this loop. 

He glances down at the list again and grimaces. Really bloody. 

***

Throwing himself into the stream of energy from the Tesseract doesn’t work. Neither does trying to commune with Thanos again, or using up all his magical reserves and then some teleporting halfway across the universe. He tries bartering with the Collector, turning himself in to various prisons around the galaxy, and going for a very painful walk through Central Park, because why not? He gives hiding out in the spaces between worlds a shot and is disappointed with the results--as soon as he blinks, he’s back at the start of the day. 

Sakaar gives him hope, for a while. Teleporting takes a lot out of him, but for a dumpster planet, they have some pretty advanced medical tech. He goes to sleep there and wakes up with his ribs healed and tears of relief brimming in his eyes. If he needs to live on a trash planet for the rest of his life to avoid being caught in the time loop, he’ll gladly do it--but then he hears about the way time works on Sakaar. He tentatively holds out hope, but he’s not surprised when he opens his eyes one morning and his ribs are burning with pain. Enough time had passed in the outside world to reset the loop. 

Still, he goes to Sakaar a dozen times in a row after that. It’s reliving the same week over and over, but at least it’s a different week. At least these people don’t know of his crimes. At least he can have a few days where he isn’t in pain.

***

He still stays in the Tower, once in a while. If anyone were to ask he’d say it was because a planet of trash smells like, well, a planet of trash , and at least New York smells like hot dogs in addition to the ash and soot. In truth, though, he likes to go back to check in on Jarvis (and maybe Stark and his brother) every once and awhile. They aren’t friends, because you can’t be friends with someone who wakes up every morning not knowing they’re in a time loop, not knowing about all the conversations and laughs and knowing looks. Friendship isn’t a one-way street, and even Loki, with his lack of experience in that department, knows that. But he spent five years waking up in this room, talking to Jarvis and Stark and the others, and if you got enough Asgardian mead into him, he might admit that he misses them during the weeks on Sakaar. 

(No amount of mead would get him to admit that he wishes he could take them with him to Sakaar, to have them remember who he actually is for more than three hours at a time. Even with smoothed edges and cooling anger, Loki is still himself.)

***

It’s one of those days when it happens. It had been a good day--his ribs hurt minimally, Jarvis and Tony had both been willing to chat amiably, and it was the loop when both Pepper and Colonel Rhodes came into the Tower, which meant he had good company, at least. He had spent the better part of the afternoon loudly complaining about Asgardian politics and ideas regarding sexuality and gender and managed to get the others weighing in with gasps of shock and horror, mutters of needing to talk to Thor. The hot dog cart far below was especially busy on this version of today, so the room didn’t smell too badly like the aftermath of the battle. 

When his brother comes to get him, he’s in a good mood. Content, maybe, though that word isn’t exactly right. He feels like an ocean, calm and glassy after the storm.

“Brother,” Thor asks, eyes just as wide and pleading as they were the first day, “why did you do it?”

For Thor, this is the first day. But for Loki, it’s been--five years, maybe? He lost track around five years, and it’s hard to tell which way to count Sakaar’s time. 

It’s been half a decade of the same day, over and over. He’s tired. He’s running out of funny fake reasons to invade Midgard.

He tells the truth. 

***

The trial doesn’t go as usual. 

Actually, that’s an understatement. The trial goes extremely unusually . 

When Odin calls Loki to the front to answer for his crimes, Thor stands in front of him, arms spread wide, as if he can shelter Loki from Odin’s wrath with his biceps. 

“No, Father,” Thor says, and Loki does his best to look dignified as he chokes on nothing. “Loki committed many crimes, and he will answer for them, but you are the one who should be held accountable today. You stole him from his home, raised him to hate the people he came from, and did nothing beyond what was absolutely necessary to call him your son. Every crime he committed while he held the throne was in order to make you proud, because of the lies you told him. And as for his actions on Earth--Loki will need to take steps to compensate for what he did. It will be a long and slow process. But he acted under extreme duress from the Mad Titan, who was in possession of an Infinity Stone which allows for mind control. You, on the other hand, have no such excuses.”

And the throne room dissolves into chaos.

***

When the dust finally settles, Loki is escorted back to his cell to await further decision. His jaw still has not fully closed. His brother paces beside him, murmuring reassurances and promising to stay in the dungeons with him as long as Loki is trapped down there, and he wonders if he’s finally gone mad.

“Why?” he demands, his head still reeling from everything impossible that’s happened in the last hour.

Thor blinks. “Why what?”

“Why are you staying? Why are you doing any of this? What in the name of the fucking Norns is happening?! ” If his hands weren’t still in handcuffs, they’d be flailing somewhere over his head right about now. 

“Brother,” Thor begins, a strange smile resting on his face, “I understand that I have failed you in the past, but I assure you, I will make sure justice is served. I shall strive to be a better brother to you from now on. Father won’t be able to sway the court, not with Mother and I backing you.”

Oh. Oh . That look is--pity? Guilt? Whatever it is, it is unacceptable . 

Loki does his best to count back the last few minutes, juggling the mental math. The loop should be resetting any moment now, so it’s not like there’s anything to lose. Even if they decide he’s crazy, there won’t be enough time to put him in a cell. He’s been put in Asgardian straightjackets more than enough times to last him a lifetime, thank you very much, and just because the rest of the universe doesn’t remember doesn’t mean his fingers don’t still start twitching at the very idea of it. 

“Listen here, you fucking idiot,” Loki snarls, yanking the chains up as far as they go so he can shove a finger into Thor’s ridiculous chest. “You have not done this even once in the last five years , so don’t you dare start now. I don’t want your pity . I don’t need anything from you!” 

Lines appear on the oaf’s forehead as he scrunches his face up in confusion. “I… would have helped you, had I known you were alive, I assure you. And I do apologize for how I behaved when we were younger. I didn’t know any better. I know that doesn’t excuse it, but I really will try harder from now on.”

The very worst part is that he looks so sincere about it, the fool. 

“I--you--ugh!!” Loki sputters in disgust. This loop is undoubtedly a failure. It’s downright unnerving, in all honesty--like the universe itself is falling apart after so many resets, because what else could explain Thor trying to protect him?

He’s going to fuck off to Sakaar for at least the next five loops after this--that should give him enough time to drink all of the alcohol to forget all this. 

“Brother, please, what can I do to help you?” Thor pleads. Loki wishes they were still on the rainbow bridge; he’d chuck the idiot right off.

“Thor,” he says, making eye contact and speaking Very Seriously, “I am never, ever telling you the truth again. This was a hellscape of a mistake and you totally ruined the punchline I had planned for this loop.” 

Thor’s face falls, but only for a second. Damn. 

“I can see that my past actions have done more harm than I realized. But that only means I shall have to try even harder in the future! Tell me, brother, how can I help you? I could bring you blankets, or perhaps a hot drink while we wait? I think the kitchens still have some honeymilk!”

Loki opens his mouth to not-so-politely inform him that blankets and hot drinks aren’t going to fix a lifetime of neglect and lies, not to mention that he hasn’t liked honeymilk since he was a child, honestly --but someone else speaks before he gets the chance. 

“What do you mean,” Frigga’s voice sounds from the hallway behind them, “‘this loop’?”

Loki whirls around, ready to unleash his pent-up frustration on the first person who won’t just rebound from everything he says like a goddamn brick wall , but the sight of her face stops him short. She’s watching him with a carefully blank expression, but she’s pale and her eyes give her away. They’ve got that look they always get when she’s putting all the pieces together and coming up with a picture she doesn’t like. 

It’s a look Loki is intimately familiar with, if he’s being honest, which apparently he is today. It’s usually followed immediately by Loki, why did you , then fill in the blank here. Turn your brother into a salamander. Enchant all the bread in the kitchens to curse every time someone cuts a slice. Grow a patch of dandelions directly under your father’s throne. 

(And the darker things, too. Loki, why did you try to wipe a planet out of existence? Why did you invade Earth? )

( Why did you throw yourself off that bridge? )

Loki’s had the time loop conversation--or at least danced around it--with his mother one too many times already, and he doesn’t want to rehash it now, so instead of launching into the whole explanation again , he just sighs and rolls his eyes. “What’s the time?” 

It’s Thor who answers; Mother is busy pursing her lips and frowning at him. There’s less than a minute until the loop resets--he knows, because that was one of the experiments he ran when he was still trying to break out and not just to get through each time. (The whole court had stared at him in confusion as he hastily demanded to know the time while a portal to eternal damnation opened in front of him. It was actually rather embarrassing.) 

“Good,” he says, relief sweeping through him. “We’ll reset any second now.”

“Loki, are you in a time loop?” Frigga demands, striding forward and grabbing him by the elbow. Thor watches them curiously, his eyes flickering back and forth between them. 

“Doesn’t matter.” His eyes are locked on the watch perched on her wrist, carefully watching the seconds count down. “Five… four… three… two… one…” 

But nothing happens. 

Loki frowns. “Your watch isn’t wound right.” 

“Yes, it is,” Frigga insists. “You must’ve broken the loop somehow. Do you know how rare that is?” 

“Of course,” he rolls his eyes, “which is why I didn’t. Your timepiece is wrong. Or--hmm. Maybe this is some kind of side effect from spending so much time on Sakaar? No matter, it’ll reset any moment now. I must’ve mistimed it.”

He speaks with confidence--always speak with confidence, Jarvis had told him that once on a good loop--but there’s the beginnings of something wriggling below his collarbone. The first stirrings of doubt, perhaps. 

The Look   that Frigga gives him certainly isn’t helping. 

“Go upstairs and check on how things are going there. I’ll wait with your brother,” she says, smiling softly at Thor. It takes a few moments of persuading, but eventually, he retreats back up the stairs and toward the courtyard and the distant sounds of shouting. Frigga, still holding onto Loki’s arm, guides them toward one of the benches in the corridor and sits down with him before launching a barrage of questions that there’s no point in answering. 

Loki waits for the loop to reset. 

***

Any minute now, he tells himself, running nervous fingers over his sleeves. He just… he has to be patient. 

It’ll reset. 

***

The sun sets, then rises again. At some point during the night, he gave in and started answering his mother’s questions. It’s not like it matters. It’s not like anything fucking matters at all, not when they’ll all just forget again, not when he’ll open his eyes to smoky skies and pain any second now. 

He says as much through hysterical laughter and chooses to ignore the way quiet, unspilled tears well up in Frigga’s eyes. 

It’ll reset. He’s not going to be stuck here, in the wreckage of his honesty. He can’t afford to hope that somehow, this was all finally fixed.

It’ll reset. 

It will, it will, it will . 

***

Loki watches his second new sunrise in years from one of the balconies, a warm cup of honeymilk he’s not going to drink in his hands courtesy of Thor. The clouds have all turned dusty orange, and in the early light, Asgard looks… softer. People are waking up and starting their days, far below, but Loki is high enough up that he can’t really hear them. The palace is rose gold and muffled, the slightest breeze starting to blow through. 

It hasn’t reset. 

Loki takes a brief glance around, then a second, and okay, maybe a third time just to make sure. No one is there. This isn’t an illusion, as best as he can tell, and if anyone would know it should be him. 

And if he cries a little, well. There’s not a living soul that can prove it, and Loki is pretty good at lying if he does say so himself.

***

It takes a while for things to equalize. The court has to get all of their gossip and snide comments out of their systems before anything can really get going, which takes a while. Even when that’s done, it’s been millennia since they’ve had to hold a trial for royalty. It’s never been done for a sitting king, so all the bureaucrats are fluttering around like butterflies that have gotten into the mead, trying to work out new procedures on the fly. 

Loki has to testify, which is new and strange. He spends the whole time uncomfortably biting his tongue to keep himself from all the little quips and biting comments that would undo the momentum his mother and brother keep talking about, and he tells the truth, which is very odd, to say the least. Still, there’s a kind of dark satisfaction he gets out of it. Odin had always been so snide about Loki relying on schemes and trickery to get out of every situation--but he doesn’t have to lie even once during the Allfather’s trial. The truth is plenty damning. 

Loki still wakes up holding his breath, most mornings. He keeps his eyes squeezed shut as long as he dares to, trying not to risk breaking the spell of peace. He has to swallow back the choking fear that he’ll open them to smoky skies and blinding pain every morning, but he does it. And it’s so strange , his actions having consequences. The first few times people ask him stupid questions, he gives them flippant answers designed to shock that work a little too well before remembering that he’ll still have to see them tomorrow , which, sigh. 

Perhaps the strangest thing is his--family? Is that still the right word for them?

Well, his brother and his mother, anyway. It’s only been a handful of years from their perspective, but from his, it’s been almost a decade since either of them looked at him with anything other than disgust or hate. Now, Thor is suddenly hanging off of him like an over-eager puppy. Loki is constantly tripping over his attempts to “be nicer”--sometimes literally. 

(The other night, he tried to walk into his room only to find that an entire library worth of books had apparently been deposited in his room because the Crown Prince had asked some of the library staff to pick out a few titles for his brother and sent them into such a panic that they tried to bring “a little bit of everything”. He had to shove most of them into a pocket dimension between worlds before he could even reach his bed.)

So. Plenty of weird things to adjust to, and he’s totally blaming his itch to visit Earth on that. He absolutely does not miss Jarvis’ dry witticisms and watching Stark play fetch with his odd mechanical children. That would just be ridiculous. 

Or at least, that’s what he tells Thor when his brother asks why he wants to start accompanying him back to Earth on his rebuilding missions. And if it’s maybe, possibly, a little white lie? Well, Loki is the god of lies, after all. He’s just doing his job. 

***

“So. Time loops,” Stark says, squinting his eyes skeptically. “You really expect me to believe that?”

Loki rolls his eyes and squashes the fondness blooming in his chest. “You say the exact same thing every time we have this conversation.”

Stark squawks in outrage, pointing his greasy screwdriver in Loki’s direction. “But time loops don’t work ! Physics makes it impossible!!”

“And yet,” Loki replies dryly. 

“Hmph. Fine, prove it.”

“And how am I supposed to do that?”

“Well, Thor said that we sometimes talked in your loops,” Stark says, doubt lacing his voice. “Tell me something you wouldn’t know unless I told you.”

Loki smirks. Stark laid the trap himself, here, it would just be wrong not to take advantage. “Where should I start? Maybe Spring Break ‘85? Or that thing with Rhodey’s toaster? Or, hey, there’s that time when you were sick and Potts came over and saw you--”

“Okay, okay, shut up!” Stark shouts over him, looking slightly flushed. “How’d you know about the toaster thing, anyway? I always swore to take that to my grave.”

“Jarvis told me.”

“Jarvis!” the other man calls, a hint of a whine entering his voice. “What happened to our privacy protocols?”

A cool British voice answers from the ceiling. “I am not sure, since I have no memory of the events Mr. Laufeyson is describing. But I’m sure you’ll agree that you are not exactly the height of discretion, Sir, so I don’t really see the point of those protocols.”

Loki does his best to hold back his laughter, but the betrayed look on Stark’s face is too much. 

***

Earth doesn’t take kindly to him showing up again, and he can’t exactly blame them. It has only been a handful of months since he tried to take control of their planet, from their perspective, after all. But the “community service”, as Rhodey calls it, starts to help. Slowly but surely, people start treating him more like one of the other Avengers when they go in to clean up his messes. Plenty of people are still calling for his head, claiming that supervillains belong in prison or worse, not walking around as they please--but not everyone is, which is a start. 

It’s the actions of the other Avengers that surprise him the most. Some warm up quicker than others--Barton still leaves the room the instant he enters it and scowls at him on missions--but they’re a surprisingly forgiving bunch. He tries to sneer at them over it, calls them foolish for being so trusting, but he suspects they can see right through to the warmth he feels every time that they include him in the planning without hesitation, every time they leave out a plate for him at team dinners. His threats of murder and/or bodily harm hardly even justify a pause in conversation and gentle teasing anymore, which is a little disgraceful. 

Loki suspects it’s that lack of fear that leads one of them to finally ask. It’s Banner, and he earns a little extra respect from Loki for being the only one brave enough to point out the elephant in the room. He supposes the other man has plenty of practice talking to monsters. 

“So,” Banner says during a flight one day, watching Loki out of the corner of his eye. “You… seem pretty different. From before, I mean.”

“Yes, well,” Loki sniffs, doing his best to exude disdain for the question, “five years is plenty of time to get some perspective.”

“Five years, really?” Banner asks, leaning closer. Fantastic. Loki accidentally awakened the scientist in him. 

“What of it?”

“Well, how’d you break out, then? I would assume there must be some specific factor that broke the cycle, or else you’d still be in the loop right now. What changed?”

Loki gives a long-suffering sigh and looks skyward. The roof of the plane isn’t that interesting, but it still gives a good dramatic effect, which is important given that all other conversation on the quinjet has stopped and everyone is watching them. 

“I,” he pauses, grumbling the last part of the answer quietly, “told the truth.”

Loki still isn’t convinced that is right--why would telling the truth be the thing that breaks a time loop?--but it’s the best he and his mother have been able to figure out. It’s the only thing that had gone differently that they could piece together, and the moment he told the truth was the moment everything else had changed. Either they were missing something bigger, or the Norns had a seriously fucked-up sense of humor. 

Banner blinks. “Wait, but--five years of the same day? Wouldn’t that have been, like, almost two thousand tries?”

“Yes,” Loki grinds out, glaring daggers at him. 

“...It took you that many times to try telling the truth ?”

“Yes, and?”

“.......well, I mean--”

“I am literally the god of lies , so keep that in mind when you answer,” Loki snaps. 

“Dropping it,” Banner says, lifting his hands in the air in a placating gesture. 

It doesn’t stop the quiet snickers emanating from everyone on the plane now. Loki considers, for a moment, sabotaging the plane. He’d survive the crash. Probably. 

But if he did that, then he would miss Friday pizza nights he’d just be undoing months of work to get the humans to trust him. It wouldn’t make sense. Much more logical to sit in the laughter for the last few minutes of the flight and remind them all of his ability to kill any one of them at any time by wreaking havoc on this Hydra base. 

“Come on, idiot,” Stark says when they land, but there’s a warm fondness that takes all the bite out of the insult. “Let’s go fight some goons. You can take out all that aggression on them and not on my poor showerhead.”

Loki scoffs. “It was called a prank war , was it not? What did you expect? If you weren’t serious, you should’ve called it a prank scuffle or a prank diplomatic debate.”

Rogers, passing behind them, snorts in amusement despite himself. Stark turns his head to start barking rebuttals at the Captain’s retreating back, but his hand is still hovering in the open space between them. 

Some days, Loki is still half-convinced this is a fever dream sparked by some of Sakaar’s less than legal alcohols. He isn’t quite sure how he got here--part of Earth’s team of defenders, cracking jokes and sharing food with the very people he once fought against--and sometimes it feels like he’s still holding his breath, waiting for it all to vanish into nothingness. But even though he sometimes feels like an idiot, even though things aren’t where he’d been quietly hoping they’d be by now, he’s got a team and a family and each morning has a new sunrise that he’s never seen before. It’s strange and new and foreign, a little intoxicating and a little terrifying. He has no clue what he’s doing. If he messes up now, he doesn’t get to reset hours earlier--he never thought he’d miss the loops, but sometimes when he says something particularly stupid or finds himself in an especially embarrassing situation, he wishes fervently that he was back in them so he could have a redo. It’s so strange to be scared of living the way he’s lived for thousands of years as compared to just five years, but that was five years where death couldn’t touch him. Where Thanos couldn’t catch up. Where everything was temporary. 

Still. Things are… good. Not perfect, but then, Loki’s never expected to have a perfect day in his life. And they’re getting better every day. Tonight, when they get back, he’s already agreed to watch some stupid sci-fi series with Rhodes and Potts because Jarvis informed them he had never seen it before, the traitor. Loki suspects that it’ll be another night of staying up far too late for even his godly endurance, and even so, he’s strangely excited about it. Looking forward to things is not a new experience, exactly, but he’s out of practice. Still, it’s one he thinks he could learn again. 

Stark’s hand is still outstretched, even though the man himself is focused on mocking Rogers. 

Loki reaches up and, with the beginnings of a smile on his face, takes it.