bookmawkish

“Hung on a windy tree nine long nights Wounded with a spear, dedicated to Odin, myself to myself.”    -       Havamal The element of surprise is as genuine as the element of lithium, and has pretty much the same potential for explosive consequences. On the periodic table it’d be over there on the left with all the other reactive alkali metals: potassium, rubidium, cesium, francium, surprise! Surprise, however, unlike its elemental compatriots, occurs freely and naturally all over the place, especially where humans are in evidence. [If he wanted us dead -] [we’d be dead] Which really only leaves one logical conc

Running. It’s something Loki’s good at. With hindsight, you’ll come to see Loki differently: when the PTSD subsides, when the wounds heal, when normality is restored (come on, as if it ever IS) or at least when you finally have time just to sit down and chill in a chair, read some stuff. When you can read about him without it binding your brain up in knots for hours. The old stories have him the best, unsurprisingly. They’re less clear on his familial relationships (and Odin‘s), but then there probably wasn’t any DNA testing back then and the method of deciding whose dad/brother was whose would have involve

This is it.   This is when it should happen.   If stories are the lifeblood and heartbeat of the universe, then this should be your indrawn breath, your chance to run with that living rhythm and show the world what it didn’t know it had been waiting for until now.   Lots of modern stories love this beat. The underdog story. The person of small power, small means, who grows - either through natural time or through adversity -  into something greater. Whom, under enormous pressure, proves not to crack like glass but to transform instead into diamond. The one who spends the whole story looking like a mouse, but in the moment, the one momen

Birds. You’d had a bird once, when you were small. It had been a lunatic budgerigar, one of the lime green ones with mad round eyes and a frenetic way of moving that had made you tired just looking at it. It had been your mother’s pet, really. To you it had been a living, chirruping, irritating, shitting-everywhere ornament. You’d read in a book that birds were supposed to be the descendents of dinosaurs on earth: the last bastion of the giants who had once ruled this world as their own.   The budgie had been called Gerald. There had been nothing about Gerald that had suggested his ancestors had once stomped roaring over Aus

You’ve seen all this in movies.   Usually (and not particularly comfortingly) they’re the kind of movies where scientific people in labs get extraordinary readouts on screens mere moments before the earth explodes/the aliens invade/the zombies attack.   Rarely has huge activity on a usually mediocre scientific readout been a positive sign, in movies. The one-eyed man is the only one who doesn’t seem to be overly worried about the surge of activity in his science corral.   Well, him…and, if you’re being completely honest about it, you. Which is a surprise, but not an entirely unpleasant one. Loki’s hand has

The sudden lack of pain and Loki’s silence in the link is almost more upsetting than the noise and agony had been.   You remember that Loki said he would tell them about what had happened to you both. For the first few minutes when the physical pain subsides and the noise of Loki’s body in pain dies away to an oddly disturbing, mindless hum in the link, you are relieved. Maybe this is what’s happened. Maybe he’s told them everything, they’ve believed him, and now they’re letting him alone.   Then the anxiety sets in.   You’ve always been an anxious person, more frightened of the thought of pain than p

The overhead neon strip lights are blinding. You feel physically sick. Looking back on it with the benefit of hindsight, you feel you had been massively slow in understanding what the real problem was, who the real villains were.   The sickness turns in your gut like poison, working up into your throat and mouth with an acrid tang of bile, working down into your leg muscles and rendering them all shakes and shudders and Loki -   - Loki is gone, but not gone.   It’s everything of the worst you could have imagined, and more. It’s everything he could have possibly suggested, and more. The fact that he was right about it, about every

Of course, he’s crazy.   You don’t know how you managed to forget that. You’d seen it back in Stark Tower, and you’re seeing it again now: because really, can you outrun a thunderstorm on foot? This has the feeling of a old chase, long played out, and you’re just along for the ride. You’d read once that the definition of madness was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.   So Loki’s crazy. No doubt about that.   Loki makes a snarling half-laugh as he picks up on your thought through the link, and gets a firmer grip on your hand. You’re running through what is

The feel of Thor in Loki’s head is complicated, in far more than a Facebook relationship status sort of way. Thunder growls in the sky, an unmistakable warning: I’m coming. I don’t stop for anything. Take cover. Loki’s emotions writhe and contort like a nest of snakes set aflame. Your own stomach feels as if it’s full of bile, but as you’ve got nothing left to be sick with, you stumble along at his side with no more than a faint, bubbling nausea. Thor. The name has got into his mind and is running around restlessly, and he seems unable to put a stop on it. It circles your own train of thought and derails

You suppose that you’ve always believed in magic. Oh, not in that little-girl, pink-unicorn sort of way, but you’ve always had that feeling that at the very furthermost edge of things-that-make-sense there’s that other, more intangible mass of things-that-don’t. Things that can’t be explained by scientists in a ten-second commercial. Things that can’t be measured. Even now you’re grown up you still occasionally feel that frisson of wonder, of joy, when you encounter something that isn’t quite in the ordinary way of things. Something that lifts you out of the mundane.   Music does that to you eve

:bulletyellow: Mischief’s Child :bulletyellow: Loki heard it, first in a whisper and then in a loud cry of anguish. Oh yes, he most definitely heard the call. But due to the fact it had started as nothing more than a hum on the wind, he ignored it. Believing the sound to have been a moment’s fancy, something his imagination had concocted for the lack of something more amusing.   But then several days later when the hum had turned into a nerve-wracking echo, the God had no choice but to give it his attention.   With keen blue-green eyes he scanned the realms, using his ultimate knowledge in magical arts to track the noise. It took

:bulletgreen: Loki-x-Reader: Hypnotizer :bulletgreen: It was late and the nightclub you had entered was jam-packed. Everywhere you looked there were people dancing to the explosive beat that pulsed from the large speakers, and drunken souls making fools of themselves. Normally, you weren't comfortable in places such as this, but tonight you had made an exception. Because tonight you had every reason to party. From your place at the bar you could see everything that the club had to offer. From its flashing lights, to its excellent sound-system and wide variety of beverages, it was pure heaven. Well, to any hardcore clubber at least. You sig