Loki x Reader: Into the MCU

Chapter 50: Decompress

Notes: Ok, so this is my first chapter under 10,000 words in a long while. We were getting ready for vacation all week, and were traveling all day Saturday, hence why I couldn't finish to post on time. We're in South Carolina for the week, so I won't have an update next weekend. This will be it until the following week. I wanted to leave you with a longer one to make up for that, but it didn't work out that way. We're close to 10,000 words, but just shy so sorry for the shortness. Oh, I also can't wait til Thor on Friday! Hope y'all see it and everyone enjoys! And Happy Fourth to all fellow Americans!

You fell to the back of the group, smiling or passing a word or two with one of the Warriors Three. They were used to battles, seeming as merry as they usually were. But you? You felt...drained. Yet peaceful. Also, you still felt like you wanted to cry. Tears of joy and blessed release from the pressure you'd never realized was always weighing on you, hiding in the back of your mind all these months. You'd acted like you'd always win, treating things as a cool movie. But that was a distraction from even thinking that losing was possible. Had you allowed yourself to entertain the thought, you could have done things right. It wasn't until it was all over that you realized how much your subconscious had always feared the idea of losing. If anything that's probably why you pushed a happy face forward all the time. To cover your deepest fear.

Now you could breathe. And it felt so good. You'd just lived through two of the biggest battles in Avenger movie history, and all in the span of a day. To say you were struggling to wrap your mind around it was an understatement. You didn't know what you were supposed to be, how you were supposed to feel. Merry like the Warriors Three? Act like it was nothing? If lying to yourself for the last months had taught you anything, it was that you couldn't keep pretending things were ok if they weren't. And right now, though ecstatic over your victory, you didn't know how to cope. You just knew things didn't feel like sunshine and rainbows on the inside.

It isn't until the quiet hits that the horror of the day finally starts catching up with you. On the beautiful peace of Asgard, walking along the bridge with nothing but the sound of waves to fill your head, your adrenaline dissipated...meaning it couldn't keep your mind and body focused anymore. You felt weak. You tried hiding it, but your body was shaking a little. And mentally it hurt trying to admit what had happened.

I saw Thanos. Not just saw, got thrown into a tree and backhanded by Thanos! And I fought fucking aliens. Space dogs. Saw Maw, Obsidian. Fought Proxima Midnight. Held the mind stone. Died. I died! That was death. Was there an afterlife and I don't remember it? Or were we just snapped back from when we left so we never got there? Oh God, I died.

That was the hardest to tell yourself, the hardest to contemplate. Life, death, reality, time, these kinds of things were creepy enough if one really got lost in thought about them. Try having to come to terms with watching yourself turn to dust and then just being there again like nothing had happened. Of experiencing the loss of friends, only to get them back right away. Of having the fear and, essentially, trauma of dying only to have to continue your day like nothing had occurred! Of having to just go right into another giant battle, after miraculously surviving one you never thought you'd see.

Your head was hurting, and you tried not thinking of any of it. Tried just saying "oh well" and shrugging it off like you'd managed to do with everything else. But doing that with everything else had led to what had happened. It had been a mistake. Was it a mistake to not let yourself freak out? Did you need a good freak out session? You'd already had a break down like ten minutes before. But that had been over the overwhelming emotions you could release having finally won. Now you were having a crisis about the crazy shit you'd witnessed.

Am I a baby if I let myself freak out? Who would I even freak out to? No one wants to hear your whining. And every hero here didn't go cry to someone after their first battle. I made it through the Knowhere and Sakaar battles without a problem, why can't I do it now?