[AO3 Crosspost] At the end of the end of the world

[terresdebrume]

✗ TECHNICAL DETAILS

FANDOM: Marvel’s MCU
SERIES: -
RATING: General Audiences
WORDCOUNT: 1 585
PAIRING(S): Pre-Loki/Sygin
CHARACTER(S): Loki, Sygin
GENRE: Alternate Universe, Post Apocalypse
TRIGGER WARNING(S): Dying character
SUMMARY: It is, thankfully, the end of Loki’s struggles.


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The first words he hears when he wakes up are “thank god” and he wants to scream with how wrong they sound. The ground under him is hard and cold as gold, dusty and empty, but the sky above is black and white with the barest hint of pink here or there, and it makes his stomach lurch. Thank god… But which one, and for what?
He grunts.

“You probably shouldn’t move too much,” someone says, but there are hands at his back to support him and he manages to sit up, though not without pain.

For some reason, his whole body feels sore, and too light, but hard to move all the same, as if restrained. He tries to call upon his magic as he lurches forward, and half a dozen voices start screaming together, wild and raw like children spotting the bogeyman, until one of them turns to pain. Someone pushes him back upright and the screams vanish, replaced with whiny complaints and desperately wet voices crying about something called a Baba.
In his veins, the magic burns, tired and strained, and it feels so ridiculously out of place he can’t help but snort and let the knife cutting through his tunic do their job, uncovering skin that is abnormally scared and bruised, split in several places to reveals a few drops of blood floating toward the sky in lazy lines of red.

Behind him, someone screams, calls him a murderer, and he thinks thank the Norns you’re here to tell me. His head swims and he falls backward, his head hitting the ground loudly enough to make him feel like his skull is going to split.
Above him, a silvery blonde cloud floats against the dark background of the night, but the screaming has vanished and nobody notices him.
Thank Odin for small mercies, he thinks before he sinks into unconsciousness.

When he opens his eyes again, the silvery blonde cloud is still there, but when he squints it sharpens into the shape of a woman with rose-pink cheeks and forget-me-not blue eyes, a smile budding at the corner of her lips like a flower waiting to bloom. She makes the heat surrounding them more bearable and he finds himself smiling despite himself, heart leaping when she answers in kind.

“You look like a Vanir,” he says, voice raw from thirst -or heat, or pain.
“Actually my name is Sigyn, and I used to be a doctor, but thanks anyway.”

He doesn’t quite remember what a doctor is, though he suspects he used to know at some point. He still smiles, because he doesn’t quite trust his voice just yet, and her smile widens, making him want to trace the tiny gap between her front teeth. He realizes his head is propped up on her knees and struggles to a sitting position -nobody screams this time.
He spots a metal box filled with some red liquid next to his right hand, and he can’t resist bringing it up to his nose to inhale the sweet scent of it.

“It’s tomato soup,” Sigyn says. “I don’t think you have any where you’re from. Wherever that is.”

It’s only then he realizes his hand is blue.
Not so long ago, it would have made him panic, he knows, but at present he can’t muster more than distant interest for it and he thinks thanks for that. Wordlessly, he lets Sigyn spoon-feed him tomato soup… She apologizes for having to serve it cold but it feels scorching to his tongue and he welcomes the pain of it with a masochistic kind of relief. He doesn’t know if he wants to know where that came from.

“Where are we?” He asks after they’re done, and Sigyn’s smile turns bitter.
“In the middle of Earth,” she says. “What’s left of it anyway.”

That makes him tick hard enough that he takes the time to look around him.
They’re standing on a yellowed rock big enough to host a small house and a strip of garden around t, provided you’re not too demanding. As it is, the stone is barren, nothing visible save three persons surrounding a hole in the ground, the fourth one climbing out of it with a grunt and a bag on his back. Their clothes are torn, their faces gaunt, haunted, and they keep their eyes resolutely fixed on the stone.

Beyond them, he can only see the darkness of space and the blinding white spots of stars.

“The screaming man,” he says with a frown, “when I woke earlier…”
“Whatever you did keeps the air in and the illusion of gravity present,” Sigyn explains, “but it doesn’t prevent anyone from going overboard. Half his body went over the top when you tipped us, and since there’s no pressure to keep us together out there…”

He nods, unwilling to make this any more graphic than it needs to be. A shield then, protecting that patch of rock from the destruction of an entire planet -he doesn’t know what caused it, and he really doesn’t want to anyway. It’s not like it would save them if he did. Whatever destroyed the planet, his magic bound itself to that piece of rock to transform it into a functioning ecosystem… Or semi-functioning, at least, as he doubts there are any crops to be raised here. If he tries to access his magic, he’ll kill them all, himself included, and so long as he doesn’t… He’s a mortal, nothing more.

“We’re going to die,” he realizes, eyes widening.
“Eventually,” Sigyn says.

She sounds like one of those platitude you tell elderly men to reassure them at the threshold of death, and he wants to shake her and scream, to explain how magic is going to leave him if he can’t use it, how it means the shield will disappear, how they’ll find themselves without protection one day and explode before they can even realize what’s happening… But then he realizes, what does it matter? They’re lost. Every moment that passes makes him a little more human and when he fully is… The end.

Thank Odin I won’t have to live this life very long.

He gives himself a year and a half, two at the most. Weirdly enough, the idea makes him feel calmer than he remembers feeling ever since his brother was cast out.

“You’re Loki, aren’t you?” Sigyn asks after a while, “The alien named like a god.”
“And you’re a mortal named like a goddess,” Loki says with a shrug -he remembers reading her name in one of the legends of Midgard, long ago.

Maybe he was he one who put her there, so he could pretend he wouldn’t always be so lonely as he truly was.
Sigyn nods with a good-natured smile and they sit together in silence for a long time, until one of the other mortals brings another box of soup, orange this time. Sigyn dubs it pumpkin soup, and they take turns sipping from it. Loki cuts his lips on the sharp edge, the taste of it strangely pleasing on his to tongue -one more proof he is alive.

He looks at Sigyn and the dainty way she holds their improvised cup, and he smiles.

{ooo}

It’s difficult for him to figure out if the heat feels so bad because it is, or because of his nature. It’s not like he has anywhere to hide from it now, reduced to a mere mortal -a mutant, Sigyn said. What does it matter? He’ll be dead in the blink of an eye anyway.

“How long have we been on that rock?”

It is the fourth time Loki woke up. He assumes they go to sleep about every twelve or thirteen hours, roughly the duration of a normal day on Midgard and Asgard both, but he has no idea how long he was unconscious.
Beside him, Sigyn shrugs:

“Maybe a week,” she says. A pause and then: “Who do you think will jump first, the mother or the son?”

The men and women with them are a family. According to Sigyn, they were in the middle of a family reunion when Loki fell in their backyard and saved them all. “What were you doing in their backyard?” Loki asked when she finished her story, and Sigyn shrugged and said: “I was avoiding my ex. When things got really rough he decided he wanted a goodbye shag, whether I was willing or not. I ran, and when everything exploded he was on the other side. I kind of owe you.”

“The father will jump first,” Loki says. “It’s always the quiet ones.”

Sigyn nods and Loki thinks, distantly, that a mortal should probably not feel so detached as she does about the last of her kind jumping to their death in an undetermined part of the universe -they spotted Jupiter at some point, but given that Earth has disappeared Loki is willing to bet the other planets have shifted positions too, and he doubts seeing one or the other is any indication of geographical position.
Still, he can’t truthfully say that he minds Sigyn’s calm. It’s stupid but he hasn’t felt so settled since… well, ever, actually. He’s never been so sure as to who or what he is as he has been since he woke up on that rock. He is Loki. He is the one holding their world in his palms. He is dying. There is, thankfully, nothing else to know about him.

Finally.