Holly Potter and the Midlife Crisis (Hp x Mcu) by Enigmaris

Chapter 16: God Mischief, Magic, and Angst

Summary:

Loki has been falling for a long, long time. He didn't even know what to do with himself once he managed to land.

Notes:

Ya'll. This update is like...over 9k words can you believe? Normally I'd cut a chapter that long in half but because I've kept you waiting for so long on a Cliff hanger I just gave you the full thing.

Loki's fall began long before that day on the Bifrost. It began, on a sunny hill outside the city of Asgard, mourning in Odin's arms. His mind had been overwrought with grief and denial, weak from pointless magical exertion. Pointless because it had failed.  From that moment, the moment in which he knew he'd failed, and that Ralston and the other humans were gone, from that very second on Loki had started to fall. He fell into denial there on that hill, begging Odin for it not to be true.

After that first day, he began to fall into despair. He spent the first century falling in Asgard. He just wandered the halls of the palace like a specter. Each thing he saw reminded him of all that he lost and all that he never got the chance to have. His favorite Aesir food tasted like dust because he remembered sneaking some to earth to share with his friend. The other food tasted worse because he'd never gotten the chance to see Ralston's face when he tried it. Every waking moment was filled with painful memories or torturous regret.

Eventually that falling transformed from pure pain to something tainted with rage and regret. Thor and Frigga, the two people in Asgard who had done their best to slow Loki's fall were the first to witness this new sort of fall. The kind where he blamed everyone for what had happened, but most of all himself. Why hadn't Frigga foreseen this tragedy and warned him? What good were seers for? Why hadn't Thor pulled his head out of his ass and helped? Isn't that what warriors were meant to do? Protect the people weaker than them?

Why hadn't Loki been better? Why hadn't he spoken to Odin and asked for help earlier? Why hadn't he stayed on earth and fought to the very end? Why hadn't he come up with a plan? Why hadn't he foreseen how fast the muggles would act? Why hadn't he protected Ralston better?

Why? Why? Why? WHY? WHY?

Was he truly so useless? So pointless a god that he couldn't even save his people? Those wonderful magical mortals that had needed him and why hadn't he been enough for them? He cursed himself in the night and his sleep was wracked with nightmares of the torture, the burnings that his people had gone through, unable to defend themselves. In the day he spit venom at anyone who neared him, forcing them to feel the same level of poisonous grief and guilt that he did.

The questions haunted him, burned his very soul with a scorching flame. But no answers ever came and in their absence a bitter resentment took root in his heart. The farther he fell the stronger that bitterness grew. Every year they moved closer to Thor's coronation the hatred for Odin, for Thor, for every damn god in the pantheon grew.

Loki tried to forget his plans, the half-formed ones that would haunt him in his dreams like phantoms. Plans of creating a new hidden realm on earth, one where magic users could be free. One where he could live with Ralston and his wife, and their children. Where he could forget about Asgard and just be Loki, brother of Ralston. He dreamed of a house, a home that he knew had been real at one point but was no more, where a bedroom was always set aside for him. Where he was wanted. Sometimes, on particularly cruel nights, he dreamed of two golden apples that he'd stolen from Indunn's Garden when no one was looking and hidden in Ralston's house, for Ralston and his wife. A fantastic vision of what would never be. An eternity with his two great friends, made gods by his stolen gift.

Those plans weren't real, just the feverish wantings of a falling man.

As the years passed Loki fell out of despair and fully into rage. The cruel whispers of the court and Thor's growing pride stung worse than they ever had before. Loki now knew what it was to be loved and valued, he also knew what it was to lose such a thing. Without Ralston and with the torment of his death, Loki was too vulnerable to Asgard's scorn. That scorn watered the seed of resentment in his chest until he fell further and further all the way into treason.