motion of the other

Loki has let go.

Loki is falling.

There are moments of light and activity, but only moments, flashes of such sudden violence that he is falling just as before but blinded. Stars going by comes on him in a rare moment of lucidity, I have fallen through a star, and then a raw and bloody laugh that fizzles out like a pinched candle before it’s even gotten out of his mouth, it’s whipped away from him on a solar wind. I may as well get used to this.

Loki

falls.

He holds it strangle-tight in his mind his whole last minutes – will he die? – the sick skew of prismic color from the rainbow bridge’s shattered edge, the way the two of them looked from below. The Allfather’s face. He wants to hold on to it, to burn it into his memory and let it warm him in the dark, but he can’t

He’s contorted like a man in a nightmare, head flung back and body arched broken. And then blackness, real dark, black as the womb and wet and too thin, pulling at his clothes and his hair and his flesh like hands. It isn’t rough, it’s like slipping on the top step before you collide with the ground. It nurses him, tranquil and oily, certainly quiet; he could fall forever this way, before the sights begin.

He sees such things –

and with a harsh jolt to his body they are gone, like a door shut in his face. The only thing worse than what he sees is what his mind fills up the gaps with. His thoughts swell to a roar, his eyes are open and he sees nothing but himself. Feels nothing but every embrace all at once, every perfunctory touch they never gave him, hears nothing but ‘brother’ in his ears until he can’t help but scream again and he can’t stop.

Loki has hit the ground, but he is still falling.

*