Catch Me If I Fall (PJO/Avengers Crossover)

46

Loki sat up abruptly, a hand over his heart, trying to slow his breathing. He got up, sweat beading his forehead, and opened the window near his bed, letting the cool, Asgardian, night air wash over him. He wasn't there anymore, he reminded himself, they couldn't hurt him. Not while he was here, on Asgard. Not when they thought he was dead.

There wasn't a lot on his mind other than the haunting memories from his time spent with Thanos, so he did the one thing that could help him out; he wrote.

He'd found writing was one of the few things that brought him pure happiness these days, he found he could write a sonnet, an anecdote or a play about anything. It was how he dealt with things now. Loki had discovered this one day when he was particularly bored in a meeting, posing as Odin. He had taken a scrap piece of paper, inattentive to what his council had to say, and wrote a poem about his mother, whom he hadn't exactly talked about at all since she died.

He had found it to be almost exactly like talking about it, and, upon writing poems about other things, like his parentage, his internal struggles, even his time with Thanos, he had decided to begin carrying a notebook with him everywhere he went. It provided him with the closure he wouldn't have been able to get otherwise. Now he sat down with it, a pen in hand, and wrote about the one thing he had refused to think about since his faked death two years prior.

His eyes are unparalleled by nothing I've ever seen before;
Ocean green, like the coruscating gleam of amazonite;
Burning with an inferno of intensity, blazing into me and my soul's very core;
And they are as radiant as the sun's blinding light.

On the rare occurrence I think of him, I am suffocated by regret;
For I know nothing I can do can bring him back to me;
If I could go back to the night we had met;
Would I have done things differently?

At the end of the day, there is only one thing I know;
If he asked me, I would follow him, wherever he may go.

Loki stared at what he at written, unsure how he was meant to feel.

For once, writing had not helped. If anything, it had made things worse. Would he have done things differently? And, if that was the case, what would he have done? Would he have waited less time to confess his love? Would he still have let go of the sceptre that night? And, if he had, when would he give into Thanos' torture? Would he withstand it for longer or lesser time? And what about the Svartalfheim situation? If he had warned Percy he would fake his death in advance, would that change anything?

Loki closed his eyes, putting his head in his hands. He didn't know what he wanted, he didn't know what he needed, but it definitely wasn't this.

*

"Two minutes. Stay close." Steve's voice came through the comms into Percy, Clint and Natasha's earpieces. The three of them were on the quinjet, whereas Steve was outside, on his way to Dr Helen Cho's lab in Seoul, South Korea. Natasha and Percy glanced at each other seriously.

There was a few minutes of silence until Steve and Dr Chos's voices invaded Percy's ears.

"Dr Cho!" Steve sounded panicked, and Percy figured she was probably injured.

"He's uploading himself into the body," Helen's voice was breathless and weak.

"Where?"

"The real power is inside the Cradle. The gem, its power is uncontainable; you can't just blow it up. You have to get the Cradle to Stark."

"First I have to get it."

"Go."

"Did you guys copy that?" Steve asked.