Boltedfruit Archive

It’s dark and cold and tight. Pressure encases his limbs and he can hardly move.

Loki feels panic leech its way through his bones, making his skin tingle, his eyes wide and thoughts racing.

Somewhere he can hear a voice, distant. So distant.

He tries to remember what Thor had told him.

This wasn’t supposed to happen.

   “We should go to the snow,” Thor had said.

“Why?” Loki turned to regard his brother and gave him a look that told Thor exactly what he thought of the idea.

But Thor had smiled. “I can teach you how to snowboard, it will be fun!”

“So overeager. I didn’t like rafting, I didn’t like running.” Thor had come up behind him and kissed his neck. “You think this will be the one that gets me doing sports with you?”

“Yes. You don’t know what it’s like. It’s like…like…flying! You take off a ramp or a cliff edge and hang in the air and oh, Loki. Just imagine the wind rushing through your hair. Burning your cheeks. You’d be smiling, I know it.”

“Or I’d fall flat on my ass and break my leg.”

Thor shrugged. “I can patch you up and we’ll try again.”

“Ever the thoughtful one.” Thor grinned against his skin. “I thought you were caught up on surfing, what happened to that?” Loki turned and made a soft hum against Thor’s lips as he leaned forward for a kiss.

Thor rubbed his back and pressed his forehead to Loki’s. “You’ll adore it. I know you will.”

“Thor…”

“We could always catch a morning flight to Australia for surfing. Best waves in the world.”

Loki knew they were closer to a mountain range than any beach. “Fine. Fine, the snow it is.”

   Loki doesn’t know how long he’s been here. It’s freezing and his skin burns where it’s bare. A glove had been lost but he doesn’t know where. His beanie was lost and his goggles thrown about his neck. The flare he’d taken with him was gone too. His fingers ache and his limbs are cramping. He moves his body, assessing, trying to remember Thor’s words but he stops as soon as the pressure increases on his right thigh. The goddamn board is still locked to his feet and he can feel it shift only barely. Up and down. Up. Down.

Thor, he thinks. Loki doesn’t want to open his mouth. Doesn’t want to let himself cry. This, this is fear. This is all that could go wrong.

His forehead burns and somewhere along his arm it stings, different from the cold. He wants to reach up and check his face, check his body, but he can’t. And besides, he already knows he’s bleeding.

   “It’s blue,” Thor had informed him, too happy to be presenting Loki with his new gift.

“It’s neon. Thor, I could use it as a flare if I wanted.”

Thor lowered the board to his waist, easy and relaxed. But Loki could see where his knuckles gripped white. “Loki, don’t joke.”

Loki gave him a small smile in apology. He took the board from Thor’s hands and Thor gratefully let him. He kissed Loki’s forehead quickly.

After they’d paid for it and a couple pairs of gloves and, something Loki thought unneeded, a box of flares.

“These mountains are dangerous,” Thor had told him, none too gruffly. “I don’t want to lose you.”

   I’m lost, Thor. I’m lost.

The words repeat in his head for what Loki assumes are hours.

The tears pool at his eyes and he fights to remember Thor’s words. To concentrate on them.

   “What do we do in an avalanche, Loki?”

“Count to three and hold our breath, teacher,” Loki snarked at him.

Thor had pinched his cheek, hard. Loki glared.

“You take this seriously, brother.”

Loki had stood, straight-backed and focused and sight steadily held by Thor.

Thor’s stare was intense, almost to the point of causing the urge to fidget. But Loki only shook his head lightly. “What is there to do? You’d die. Simple.”

“You spit.”

“What?”

“Gravity.”

Loki’s eyes widened and Thor offered the tiniest of smiles, strained at the corners. He cupped Loki’s neck and squeezed his upper arm. “Then you dig.”

Loki nodded.

“We’ll be safe out there, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Thor knocked their foreheads together gently and they went to bed.

Thor held him, and it quieted Loki’s thoughts.

   That had been last night.

What he thinks was last night.

Loki gasps in a shaky breath and, for all that his tongue is dry, he tries. He licks at his mouth and tries to gather what little spittle he can and he bursts the moisture from his mouth, desperate. Desperate for anything.

He cries harder when it flecks against his lips and cheek because he can’t tell, he can’t, and he’s going to die here. Going to die because his asshole brother wanted to take him snowboarding in some godforsaken mountain range with a cheap entry fee because they hardly ever got business and they needed what they could get. Thor had been so adamant. So happy.

There had been a sound, a voice. Distant and repetitive. But now there is nothing.

He pictures Thor’s face. He hopes for a moment, short, unsatisfying.

Loki knows he will never see Thor’s face again and something in him breaks.

Loki screams, voice rattling until its hoarse and catching on some nameless hitch in his throat. He thrashes his limbs, trying to shift some of the pressure, trying to reveal the sky. But there’s nothing. If anything he feels closer to the core of the earth than he ever has been before. It feels like his grave.

He feels eons away from his brother.

That is when Loki feels his tears slip down his chin where he turns his head, catching, holding, and then they fall upwards.

“Gravity. Gravity, goddamn you,” he whispers.

   They were out in a field of endless white, a large incline a hundred yards ahead of them, breathtaking, though far from their concern.

Thor looked a professional, packed into gear up to the roots of his hair, tucked away in a beanie, behind goggles, and a close fitting hood. Loki felt like he could barely move himself, for all that they almost matched.

Thor had shimmied over to him and pulled down his goggles, smiling wide. “You look great!” he called over the wind.

Loki rolled his eyes but it went unseen. He pulled his own goggles down. “I bet I can snowboard down the hill.” Thor arched an eyebrow.

“Oh, really?”

“Watch me, brother.” Loki smirked, putting his goggles back in place. Thor slapped his arm and squeezed through the padded material. He watched with arms crossed.

   Loki remembers hitting something. A log. A stone.

Then a sound like thunder rippled through the snowy range and then Loki heard Thor yelling his name.

That had been it.

Loki had been stupid.

The last thing he saw was a rush of white, coming straight for him. Only him.

Thor was safe.

Thor is safe. Loki knows that. He has to.

He pushes above him, letting the tears fall. It feels like headbutting wet metal, the only real movement he’s allowed around his head. His hood had created a small little alcove in the fall.

Loki pushes until his arms feel like they might break, until he can’t feel them at all. He’s numb and freezing and his entire frame is locked into the work of turning. Just turning.

Something in the ice shifts and then his left elbow breaks upward. He feels snow give and he can move it, side to side. He almost laughs.

He keeps pressing.

Somewhere above him, behind him he knows, he thinks he hears the call of that voice. Someone he wants to be Thor. Someone he suspects is his own mind.

   Why not, he thinks.

He yells Thor’s name. Yells for help. Yells for anything.

And still, he keeps pressing and shifting and wiggling until he can pierce the snow above him with both elbows bent. He feels he has actual leverage now.

His stomach is rolling, hungry.

Loki has no idea how long he’s been down here.

   Loki feels like he’s vibrating, skin alive with an energy he’s never felt.

Panic, fear, the thought of Thor’s face.

Adrenaline. Pure adrenaline.

Another drawn out yell, eyes long dry, and he manages to twist his torso to the side. It feels like a valiant rush of air runs through him and he gasps, shaking and coughing. The board is still locked in place and he can hardly move his legs. Can barely feel them besides.

   He doesn’t know when it happens, but he falls asleep.

It feels like only a moment before Loki wakes again but his eyes are crusted shut with cold and ice. He cranes his neck and rubs his face furiously against the soft, damp shell of his hood, desperate to see.

Not my sight, not my eyes. Not like this, he thinks.

That voice, and it is a voice, Loki knows, is above and all around him again.

“Thor! Thor!” he shouts, voice rising to a scream, again and again.

He’s back to pushing, to twisting. He’s desperate, now, full and completely. He will not die here, he won’t.

“Thor,” he calls, over and over.

Loki digs at the snow packed around his middle, his thighs, shifting his legs until they burn with the effort. He won’t be able to sit up but he can switch enough of the snow around to turn his legs. Face the sky. Face fresh air. Then he can dig properly.

   It takes a long time. Too long.

Loki’s thoughts whirl, unbidden.

Wolves. He keeps thinking of wolves.

Movies, he thinks, cursing the media for the terrors he doesn’t need to think of right now.

Those things only matter if he makes it out.

   Maybe it’s the desperation, maybe it’s the not knowing if it’s night or day or if it’s been a day, a week…

Loki feels his hip pop, settles. Waits for it to pass. He shifts down so his bones are better settled, closer. He can’t feel his lower half aside from internal shifts of pressure and it’s both frightening and intimate. Learning how much the body can take before, before—

Loki tugs at his feet, the board shifting at least four inches back and forth, two up and down. Almost, almost.

He twists again, feels something in his knee pop and then. Oh.

Loki gasps, spit dotting his lips. His leg, his leg.

He screams and this time it is in agony.

   “And what would you do, in such a situation?” “What?” Thor had said.

Loki raised a finger to his cheek, rubbing the top edge of Thor’s beard.

“We had this conversation like ten minutes ago, Thor.”

“Oh,” he murmured. He nestled closer, lips thinning and eyes narrowing in consideration as he thought. “I would find which way was up, and then I would dig. Simple.”

“So simple,” Loki mocked. Thor nipped his chin, smiling and chuckling. Loki felt his lips quirk. “What if it wasn’t?”

“What do you mean?”

“What if it was bad? What if you couldn’t get out?”

Loki knew that Thor could hear the underbelly of his tone. He was serious.

“I would keep digging.”

“You can’t do that forever,” Loki whispered to him.

“Of course you can. I have you to see, don’t I?” Thor gave him a smile and Loki lay there, in awe over such confidence. “Even if I couldn’t tell which way was up, I’d keep going. I wouldn’t stop until I was dead.”

Loki cupped his hand firm over Thor’s jaw, fingers curling into his hair.

“Why?”

“Because you’re Loki. You’re my brother. You’re everything.”

   It’s his knee. His right knee.

In the shock of jolting the socket, Loki knows he’s managed to finally, finally wrench fully around so that he’s facing up.

His stomach hurts and his head has been throbbing for a long time. His throat is aching and his mouth is dry.

He thinks he pissed himself some hours past, but he can’t be certain. There had been a rush of warmth, and then the cold had come back, clinging.

“That fucking asshole,” Loki murmurs to himself in the dark. It’s not completely dark. It’s a sort of strange translucency. The snow is like a very, very dark mirror of the barest amount of light. He knows it’s from somewhere.

Please be close, please, he thinks again and again.

   Loki lies still for a long time. The pain radiates through his body in waves. It hurts, terribly, but not to where he can’t force his other leg to move in spite of it.

He lies still, eventually shimmying his arm up to the small hole his head is in. He picks at the ice above him.

Snow is strange in that it melts on your fingers almost as soon as you touch it, nearly too fast to see.

But it makes a deceptively powerful prison.

   He keeps picking until he slips away once more to dreams black and empty.

Then the dark is ripped apart by a bright red line of flame bursting from the earth and he’s shaken awake, heart beating too fast to catch his breath.

But then, Loki realizes— The earth is shaking.

Far above him he hears a resonating droning, something large, something dangerous, something encompassing. Loki lies, breath catching. He’s too late. The snow is shifting, burying him deeper, burying him alive. He’s going to die, he’s going to die alone and without Thor and—

And then it is like a large stone being lifted from his chest and he can breathe and the dark is lightening and oh, oh.

Loki hears voices. Shouting, surprised, and familiar voices.

He’s reaching upwards through the snow before he can stop himself.

   There is light. Too much light, too bright. He closes his eyes and groans when the snow is dug out from above him to reveal his face, his body, his leg.

There are people whooping and calling to each other, the drone of some machine in the background, and then there is one. One frantic voice, loud and deep and Loki knows it as well as he knows his own bones.

There is the crunch of snow underfoot and then snow is trickling in around him, spotting at his face and his hands, where he can register it. More crunching snow, a wave of it coming to rest by his side. And then a shaky series of guttural breaths, gasping for air.

Hands are at his face then, cradling his cheeks, his neck, his hair. Loki opens bleary eyes to see his brother there, alive, well. Savage, almost fearful relief plain on his face, tears streaming down his cheeks, but there all the same. Thor’s alive and hadn’t been caught in Loki’s mistake.

“Loki, I’m so sorry I should not have—I should have—”

Loki twists shaking fingers into Thor’s sleeve, gripping hard enough to ache. Thor leans down and kisses his cheeks, his forehead, his hair, his mouth. He wraps a strong arm around Loki’s back and crushes him to his chest. He feels warm, so wonderfully warm.

Loki squints up, sees they’re down deep. Maybe twenty feet.

“Gravity,” he murmurs against Thor’s lips. Thor sobs against his temple, his mouth, his neck. He hugs Loki tighter and he can’t breathe but Loki doesn’t care that he can’t.

Loki reaches a shaky arm to circle Thor’s shoulders weakly.

“I kept digging, brother.”