#he's clearly emotionally imbalanced so why not recruit him instead?

[worstloki]

Concept: Because of going through Ebony Maw's torture repeatedly, Loki has cracks on his skin, all of them spiralling out of where Maw dug his needles in. His body is pretty much covered in cracks, from his cheeks down to his legs. He covers them all with a glamour.

“Brother, you’re becoming predictable.”

Thor crouches down next to Loki who is twitching on the ground, held in place, immobile, by the obedience disk he had attached to the back of his shoulder, just in case the need to manage him had arose. And, it has.

“I trust you, you betray me, round and round—” Thor’s smile drops, and he watches in horror as the blood vessels visible across only half of Loki’s face start to fade from a heated purple into blue, snaking over its entirety, like sharp folds of marquina marble.

Loki’s eyes widen slightly, and his mouth opens in an attempt to speak, though he doesn’t manage any sound except a quickly cut-off choke. He continues convulsing, and Thor averts his gaze over to Loki’s hands, palms partially gloved, only to find the same shades of blue bleeding through, like cracks in his skin; glistening cracks with a silvery outline that doesn’t manage to conceal what those exact blues mean to Loki. Or what they mean to Thor.

Those, as much as Thor wills to think it so, despite the colour, are not the natural markings of Jotun. He has fought Jotnar, and for all he’d been told of Loki being a frost giant he had been under the impression that even small for one, he at least looked as they did.  

The fissures run, outlines in silvery blue, to the tips of his fingers, Thor notes, and they are denser and coalesce through the centres of the palms and the areas directly under the cheekbones, from whence they spiral out.

They also slip under his sleeves and neckline, and Thor refuses to assume anything further than he can see; he refuses to imagine the rest of his brother’s skin divided in a mosaic of pales and blues, a harried patchwork of scars messily painted on, to imagine it a signifier of suffering passed, but also as a reminder infused into his very being. That Loki had been— that he is broken. Thor refuses.

But he has lived a millennia and a half through battles —albeit most on smaller scales than inter-realm warfare— but he immediately knows.

He can recognize torture. 

And he can recognize magic.

And Thor refuses to think what combination of physical and psychological stress could do this to Loki of all people. Loki. The Loki he’d known his whole life to be the most stable, persevering and reserved person in mind. The same who would joke and run his mouth and cause mischief but also the brother he trusted to always be at his side. The Loki he’d pitch to be an unbreakable companion, both in mind and heart, whose mastery of seiðr and knives, however unconventional, were indicative of his strength, his control, his pride. 

And now Thor doesn’t even know why or for how long Loki has concealed this fractured form from him— he doesn’t know if Loki would have ever told him freely. Or if this too would’ve been another family secret carefully constructed to keep him in the dark, to mark him as untrustworthy to know. Another silent battle, locked away.

“You’ll always be a liar, Loki,” Thor concludes, disappointed, knowing what he has said to be true, for who else but a coward would hide something like this? Something Thor may have at a time been able to have helped with, but now has no information nor empathy to spare, not for him.

Thor stands, turning his back to the alarm in Loki’s eyes, the slight shake of his head as if trying to refute the truth Thor can see with his own eyes.

He’s too hurt and angry at another of Loki’s deceptions to care about anything right now. He wants to go to Asgard and salvage what he can of the people he knows, who he trusts wouldn’t conceal themselves behind falsities, especially those of being alright when so much is wrong. 

Thor holds down on the remote in his hand, releasing the obedience disk’s hold on Loki, so that he may recast whatever illusion he no doubt wants to shield himself with, and he walks away, towards the ship.

Thor regrets not waiting till he was further away to relieve him of the pain when Loki’s ragged breathing breaks into voice behind him, and what he’d seen of Loki’s hands flash through his mind’s eye: cracks across his slender fingers and soft palms, cobalt streaks spreading around his wrist, which no doubt grow stronger rather than fainter further up the arm, likely another focal point for the corruption marks at the shoulder, the largest swirls emerging through the base of his sternum pierced through to covet both his back and chest in slivered crevices giving the illusion of shattered glass, another centrepoint a hairs-width above his hips on each side, rifts of blue emerging from the space between the lower thigh and knee in both directions, cracks curling around his feet from the roof of the ankle like vines. And, of course, the jagged cuts of blue he’d seen across his face. 

At the same time he also sees his brother as he’s known him for centuries, whatever he’d show of his entire body always unmarked, the same facial structure, the same bony wrists and hair and softness— but now he doubts how much of that, if any of it, was real. 

Thor closes his eyes hard to hold back the welling tears, as if anything Loki says can be a half-decent attempt to justify— as if any reason could ever be worth forgiveness for dismissively concealing something like this, which has impacted all of him enough for his own magic to taint his body in such a way of defense, to have pieced together whatever parts of him it could, and decide to hold him together so desperately under the distress he so evidently faced alone.

Loki speaks, barely loud enough to make it to Thor’s ears over the sound of the dimming alarms as he walks, almost as if Loki’s words are first and foremost for himself, as if he is the one who needs the comfort of them, and Thor a mere spectator.

“My skin was already a lie; I just added a few words of my own to it.”

Thor’s heart shutters and he feels his resolve crumbling. He ignores the pain in his chest and keeps walking away. 

#i liked the concept 👉👈 #and may have added some lore too #so basically #loki ends up with thanos and the bois #and he's super durable so Maw has plenty of fun with the needles and everything #but #after Loki gets out of his depressed defying-not-having-a-purpose funk his magic (which was already stressed by his emotional roller-coaster #decides that psychological issues of internalized racism but also refusing to die means that instead of the torture killing him #or instead of healing like a normal person #he ends up healing with cracks that are all jotun-y #he heals over all the injuries maw left him with #of course Mr Ebony could just keep cutting him #but... this guy has magic... and he's strong and durable... and his attitude just flipped #he's clearly emotionally imbalanced so why not recruit him instead? #he's proven he can make good of a bad situation and the mind stone loves strong emotions #so just hook him up there #meanwhile loki's stuck with a reminder that it's not just his hand that's blue or another skin #now his aesir one shows his jotun side too #he's just got to live with that now #so he covers it up and deprioritizes it #because that's how we cope #so anyway that's the lore #and yes thor cares about loki but it's more in relation to what changes to loki mean to himself #you can decide if loki still decides to show up to save asgard or if thor's repressed anger at loki made him win the hela vs thor fight #ficlet