Chapter Text
There had always been many strange things about Loki’s best friend. Some inconsistencies, oddnesses that could not just be explained away by him being a foreigner. Not when Loki was one himself.
Of course, he’d never really asked, never pried, and done his best to cover for them and teach Anthony the correct mannerisms instead.
And in return, Anthony had offered his unconditional friendship, companionship, affection.
He’d joined Loki’s school, even when it was more than obvious that there was actually no outside obligation forcing him to do so, not when he’d shown him his perfect SAT scores.
He’d participated in his pranks, came to his home, heard his woes, helped him get back at his bullies. He’d done all that and more, and become Loki’s most important anchor in his life.
His own very best friend.
Thor hated him, of course he did. Because Anthony did not care on whit what the oaf wanted. Because Loki was the only one allowed to call Anthony by his true name and not the moniker he donned at school. Because Anthony was always there to follow Loki’s plots and schemes, and bring about even more chaos about.
And, Loki admitted begrudgingly, because Anthony himself was strangely intimidating.
Not for Loki, of course, he’d never felt the slightest bit unsettled by the steady gold gaze, never disturbed by the way he always seemed to gaze a bit too deep into people’s souls or to know a bit too much about everything.
No, Loki had always found those quirks of Anthony’s personality somehow charming, incredibly natural. As though they were as certain as gravity, as reliable as the way the sun rose and set in the sky.
And Loki had started orbiting around that tiny slip of a boy with an outrageous and odd personality, with his jarring naivety and kindness, with his sometimes startling morbidity, and the way it contrasted with his otherwise sunny disposition, with his unearthly innocence.
Loki loved that boy with everything that he was, loved every quirk, every smile, every word from his lips.
There had been nothing that Anthony could do that ever made him uncomfortable. Not even that really curious conversation on Loki’s previous birthday where Anthony had asked him the permission to mess with his soul.
Loki had thought that Anthony was joking at the time, and even if he had not, he hadn’t quite understood what Anthony had meant.
After all, that was the first time anyone had asked him for the permission to ‘hold his soul’. If something were to ‘happen to him’.
Nothing had come from it besides a sunny and relieved smile, nothing beyond them going back to Loki’s room to read some more.
It had never happened.
Feeling his spirit phase through his body and take ahold of his flesh before it slipped from his discorporate grasp once more, Loki understood that. It was his mind’s way to make sense of what had just happened, the way Anthony had used to contact him once he’d already been too far gone to give consent.
Reaching through his mind directly, hooking onto a memory in order to mutate it for his own purpose, for one last desperate communication.
Ghostly fingers glowed green with newly awakened magic before phasing through his flesh had once more, and Loki willed the meld.
His hand tingled, the unpleasant crawling of blood flowing back to a numb limb.
He grit phantom teeth and bore through the feeling.
Anthony made no sense at all, except that he did.
Loki never expected that he would have to die in order to solve the mystery.
Die, and be brought back from the dead.
Anthony had just…
His fingers could curl, now, moving almost naturally. He could raise his arm, his flesh arm, and the move would be almost seamless.
He supposed that he would be able to behave naturally enough to be able to go back home. As though nothing happened. His family would be none the wiser.
They would never know that he had died.
That Tony had saved him.
The only traces were the pints of blood that had been washed off by the rain already and the strange pattern burnt into the asphalt.
His magic recognized it already, curling lovingly against the dark esoteric letters.
He could taste the desperation and horror in the air, those last hints of grief that lingered over the slumped form of his friend.
Loki wanted to soothe the furrow that laid between his brows, to protect him from the nightmares already plaguing him.
Somehow he knew that he would be the one starring into those nightmares, or rather his broken and bloody form would.
But he could not wake him yet. He was trembling with exhaustion, even through sleep, and his magic was barely a spark left from the golden sun it used to be.
That was a strange thing he would have to get used to, those snippets of knowledge that came to him at seemingly random. He somehow knew that it was his magic’s input, that they came from all that it had experienced of the world before awakening, that it had held those experiences for him overtime in order to eventually help him. He was … grateful, somehow, but mostly very confused.
It was too much, too fast, too shocking, and he knew if he took any time at all to consider what was happening around him, he would feel his mind slowly slip into hysteria.
He could not afford to do so. He was still healing, his heart beating much too slowly to appear normal, his soul phasing in and out of his flesh in an uncoordinated mess, Anthony unconscious by his side and covered in blood, it looked bad.
Necromancy was very much frowned upon, even more for unlicensed practitioners.
They needed to get away from there, away from prying eyes and the open, somewhere safe and secluded. Somewhere where no one would be able to gawk at the blood or the green glow of his eyes or the shallow breaths of his comatose friend.
Or the ghost silently looking at him from the side.
Jarvis, probably.
He could not get home like that.
He stood on shaky legs, hefting Anthony up, more through the force of his magic than any physical strength he could possibly hold in this state, and turned to the ghost.
“Where does Anthony usually stay?”
And Jarvis slowly showed him the way.
*
Ghost powers were widely overrated.
Loki had, at long last, managed to completely fuse back within his own body, and the mere thought was enough to make him giggle a bit madly again.
He’d called his mother to give the now common excuse of a sleepover with his friend, taken care that he would not be missed the next day, and found a change of clothes for himself and Anthony.
Though, doing the actual changing was proving more of a challenge.
His fingers were still clumsy, and now had the tendency to simply slip through whatever he was attempting to hold. And perhaps on any other occasion, having the ability to phase through walls would be an interesting one to explore, but at the moment the only thing it did was remind him of the cold, empty nothingness, the fingers of ice sinking into his flesh as his vision grew blurry, the pulsing heat of his wound and the gushing blood pouring from him, too fast, too hot.
And the more he panicked, the less control he had over his own flesh, his power rippling from him in a confused and terrified wave and shorting out lights and shattering glasses.
He could not breathe, but then did he even need to any longer?
His heart was still beating inside his chest, at least.
That had to mean something, did it not?
Slowly, Jarvis took hold of his hands, stilling their frustrated attempts at slipping buttons from his shirt, and he gently guided them through the rooms until he reached a bathroom. A few gestures had the sower starting, the gentle rush of water hitting the glass partition and running down the drain. The older ghost nodded, smiling, before leaving the bathroom, softly shutting the door behind him.
Loki stood there, somehow thrown by both the thoughtfulness and the tacit offer, watching the steam started filling the room and obscuring the glass as his mind kept racing.
But then, perhaps it would do him good to stop thinking for a moment.
He closed his eyes, feeling his shape discorporate with a thought, sensing his clothes fall to the ground in a puddle and the glass fade through his flesh as he walked into the shower stall.
The water droplets felt soothing as they passed through him, but somehow it was not enough.
His body became solid again, the shift almost seamless, as smooth as water, as easy as the barrier of his skin not reflecting the drops instead of letting them through.
He breathed out, relishing in the sensation of warmth pelting him, water running along his body and warming him to the bones.
He’d felt so very very cold in that alleyway.
Deathly coldness, he could now recognize.
He wondered how all this related to Anthony.
Was he like him? A corpse brought back to life? Or was he still human instead, just one with the power to raise the dead? Or even something different still.
But nothing that he could bring to mind truly fit with the description of who Anthony was.
But that would have to wait.
There was only so long he would be able to stall his mother’s questions, so long that he would be able to stay away before she started to worry, and he needed to be convincingly normal by then. Enough to be able to stand up to scrutiny, and pretend that everything was still normal.
That would never work.
Loki felt like a different person entirely. Like he’d been turned inside out, like some part of his innermost self had been wrenched apart.
He didn’t know who he was anymore. He certainly no longer felt like Loki, or rather the Loki who would climb fences and twirl amongst autumn leaves and leave a whoopee cushion on the teacher’s seats.
He felt so terribly lost.
Like nothing about who and what he was made sense any longer.
Was he even still human? Was he really alive, or was he rather some sort of undead?
The water ran cold around him, and Loki rushed to shut it off, phasing through the knobs a few times before finally managing to turn the tap.
He breathed out, frustrated that a ghost was better at handling physical interactions than he was, even though he at least still had a body.
Putting clothes back on was a hassle best left unspoken, and he ended up walking through the door instead of actually opening it, but he supposed it could have been worse.
Control was something he could understand almost instinctively. The way this strange power seemed to manifest made some sense to him, even as he fumbled through each task. He knew somehow what he should be doing, how it should be acting. What he was doing wrong.
It was just a matter of time before he would be able to actually master it. With some practice and experience, this ability would become a truly deadly trick. The ultimate cheat-code against reality. A way to bypass any lock, any vault, anything that would stop any normal human.
He wondered if he could make himself invisible too. Certainly, that would be an interesting ghost power to have as well.
His hand curled into a fist.
He was deflecting. The shock hadn’t quite settled in yet, and he was deflecting because otherwise he would have to confront the fact that he’d just died.
His breath caught, throat tight as he felt the shivers course through him the sight of cloying darkness, so very very cold, the nothingness that he was slowly dissolving into, the great echoes of so many voices melded into a single buzzing echo.
He could still hear it, if he strained his ears enough. He could still feel those phantoms brushing against him, chipping away at his essence, at his individuality. His personhood.
He remembered the absolute absence of will. He remembered being, being connected, being absolute, beyond the self and the world, simply being aware of everything in the universe, and his own place into it.
He’d known then, what Anthony was. He’d known with absolute certainty and reverence, he’d felt the complete adoration the universe had for that tiny slip of a boy, the parental affection they held for his best friend.
He could understand it.
But the knowledge was gone now, as were those foreign feelings, and the only thing left was a low currents of disgruntlement and blaring worry at the sight of his still slumbering form.
Loki had never seen Anthony sleep before. He’d never even seen him be tired.
He supposed this was a Death thing. Another one, at least.
But now, Anthony’s form was curled into the coverlet, his chest slowly moving in time with his breaths. Alive then, but nothing had managed to rouse him thus far, not Loki’s mad dash to the safehouse, not having been carried (and almost dropped) up the stairs, not when Loki had dropped him on the bed and removed his shoes and jacket.
It had been hours.
He was still not awake.
“Let him rest.”
Loki jumped, swirling to find the source of the voice.
Jarvis.
Loki deflated, relieved that it was someone they could trust.
“How long is he going to stay like that?”
And if there was a hint of hysteria in his voice, then he supposed he had been through enough that day to excuse it.
He wasn’t even surprised anymore that he could hear Jarvis talk. Of course he could talk with ghosts now.
And he’d turned into a half ghost and his best friend was in a coma.
Everything was just fine.
He was freaking out.
“Until he is recovered enough. It was no small feat, what he just accomplished.”
Anthony looked so small when he was asleep, so vulnerable. Exhaustion still clung to his features, and a worried frown painted his brow.
Loki wanted to soothe it away. He wanted to bundle the small boy in blankets until no ill or hurt could reach him.
Loki sighed, resolutely turning away. He could not afford to let his thoughts scatter. He couldn’t just let this fester inside him and blow up at an inopportune time.
Consciently, he knew that what Anthony had done for him was something of a boon, and yet there was still a rankled part of him, a knot of shock and horror that refused to be soothed. Something down to the very fabric of his heart that howled in distress.
He knew himself and his flaws well enough to know that if he did not take the time to settle it right there and then, he would throw all of those raw, unfiltered feelings at Anthony’s face. He would blame him and tear him apart, and hurlt hurtful words at his innocent face until he saw it crumple from pain and anguish, until guilt and grief turned his eyes dull and dead. And he would leave, disappear from his life to never be found again.
Such words could never truly be taken back.
Loki never even wanted them to pass his lips.
Already he could feel them crowd the back of his mind, poison his thoughts and grind his teeth.
He needed some fresh air.
He dashed from the room, not even bothering with the doors as he tried to get away, away from the thoughts roiling through his mind, the sheer uncertainty that made him feel like a stranger to himself, that made Anthony seem like a completely different person than the one who’d been the one closest to him for years.
He felt as though he was walking on the cracked ice that covered frozen lakes, slippery and too thin to hold him up, knowing that any wrong move would send him plummeting to his icy depth.
And Anthony was a blowtorch aimed at his feet.
It was not fair, he knew that.
But he’d never claimed to be, and Anthony had never asked him that either. He was a petty and spiteful teen, standoffish and arrogant. He thought himself better than everyone while being crippled with insecurities, he didn’t care one whit for people’s approval and yet craved it more than anything.
Or at least, that’s how he used to be.
Death somehow… threw things into perspective.
He did not know anymore if his thoughts were truly his own or if they’d been somehow colored by the shapeless and all-powerful entity that ruled over the Grim Domain, the Land of Mists. Already, he knew that the very knowledge of Its Name had been granted to him by his passing.
He hadn’t known it even existed before dying and coming back.
What else had changed? What else was new? What did it take in return? What was just gone?
He could not know. The mind wasn’t like a hard drive that one could just compare two different saved versions of. It was a lens through which one saw the world, and while wearing it, how could he know if what he saw was just the slightest bit grayer? Had the lens changed, or had he? And did that make any difference at all in the end?
What could he do?
What did it matter anyway, if his mind was just a bit warped, if his moral compass seemed just a bit skewed, if his father’s approval suddenly seemed strangely irrelevant?
What mattered was who he was. And he didn’t know that anymore. He couldn’t tell, couldn’t define himself in a way that made sense any longer.
Everything that used to matter seemed so trivial now.
He hated it.
He hated that the thought of who had stolen Jessica Simpson’s homework now seemed ridiculous, hated that seeing Thor rolling on the floor covered in itching powder…
Well, that was still rather funny.
But was that enough?
He stopped walking.
It was cold, the breeze biting at his currently corporal body.
He’d arrived outside, his feet somehow having taken him to the roof.
The sky was clear now that the rainstorm had ended, twilight coloring the horizon in golds and pinks, the clouds a bright orange on the pale background.
It was beautiful.
He could still see beauty.
What a striking, incongruous thought.
He didn’t know how to define himself any longer, felt aimless and unmoored since everything that used to matter to him now seemed bland and tasteless, but he still loved Anthony, he still found pleasure in tormenting his brother, and he could still see beauty.
It was a start.
He supposed it would have to be enough.
*
Sitting down on the ledge and leaning back on his elbows, Loki sighed and let himself take the time to just sit and watch. Just a moment to breathe. Just, a minute to be.
And perhaps that would be enough to let him recognize his own bones once more.
Perhaps he would open his eyes and feel like Loki and not this disjointed mess of reborn flesh.
He breathed out, deeply.
Let his lungs carry the air around them, surprisingly clean from car fumes.
There were herbal fragrances afting from the neighboring park, released by the rain.
He could hear people walking around still, calling people, angrily yelling, screaming children, distan sirens.
They were so very faint.
He could feel the call of the wind, leaves rustling, flapping wings and soft caws, the gentle pitter patter of a gentle drizzle starting again.
He just let the water pass through him.
It was peaceful.
An insistent caw at his side forced his eyes open, and he found himself surrounded by a sea of black birds.
A murder.
He’d always loved crows, what goth teen didn’t? But there was something about those birds that put him at ease. The way they were watching him perhaps, their calm and patience, or maybe the way they had come so very close, or their gentleness.
It seemed welcoming, as though they were here to greet the latest member of their crowd.
He smiled, both elated and soothed.
Perhaps he didn’t quite belong with humanity any longer, but he wasn’t really alone either. He had Anthony, he had the crows, and he didn’t think everything from his former life was entirely lost.
There was hope, time, possibilities ahead of him.
There were still many things he needed to get a handle on. His sense of self and his abilities were only two of those things.
He needed to figure out how he would reintegrate with his former life, needed to figure out what to do with the magic that was even now sparking at his fingertips, eager to be unleashed and turn the world to its image.
Needed to make sense of Anthony and how they would go from then on.
Not all of those needed to be all too difficult to decide. He already knew some of those answers. Most of them in fact. He only needed to make peace with them.
He needed to be there when his friend woke up.
*
Magic was easy. It made the world easy.
Sometimes, Loki wasn’t even aware he was using it. Anthony said that it was because he was so powerful, his magic could just simply rewrite reality instead of him needing to figure out how to bend it to his will.
Apparently, it was a rare gift. Loki found it incredibly convenient. It certainly made sneaking around easier, made hiding his lapses in control almost effortless.
Not that there were many of those anymore, he'd gotten used to possessing his own body incredibly quickly, though phrasing it that way still made him feel a bit jittery. But he would need some pretty advanced necromantic magic to anchor himself more permanently, to, essentially become alive again. It was possible, and his body was still alive, besides. But their solution had been a placeholder, or so Anthony had said.
He’d looked adorably embarrassed while talking about it, as though all that he’d done already wasn’t enough to have the greatest mages of the U.S. clamber to kiss his feet, had they ever decided to come clean.
Sometimes Anthony was truly ridiculous.
Keeping their mishap a secret wasn’t even a question. Loki’s death and subsequent resurrection would be enough to have the both of them in jail, or worse.
Keeping Loki’s magic hidden just came with the package. It wasn’t necessarily that he wanted to conceal it so much as the scrutiny that it would bring them. Mages were rare, somehow both revered and feared, and they were very very well known.
Loki could not afford to have so much spotlight on him, not with the way his magic actually came to be, not with the way his body still felt like an ill-fitting mecha instead of a part of himself.
Not when it seemed to echo so easily Anthony’s own calls, the way it seemed to surl lovingly over the sigils that called forth the voices of the dead, catching on spirits and manes, singing with glee when he crossed through graveyards.
And that was even without speaking of the way they would simply take him away to drop him in some all-mages exclusive boarding school and he would lose whatever freedom he had left, and Anthony with it.
No.
He laid low. There were barely half a year before they finished high school, and afterward they would have to go to college, and maybe find a way to make their own way in the world.
They would lay low in the meantime. Become perfectly normal students, almost well-behaved but not too much so as to not have people look too close, and they would plan.
They had the world ahead of them, all their life a blank canvas theirs for the taking.
There was only one thing Loki was certain of.
He wanted to spend the rest of his life with Anthony at his side.
*
Romance had a strange way of creeping upon you.
Shared glances that became lingering touches, soft smiles that turned from camaraderie to intimacy, from friendly to soft. Cuddles that lingered.
Adrenaline tingling through his veins at the thought of pushing just that bit further, of crossing that last line that they’d been dancing around.
It lasted for a while, that nebulous, in-between state. Closeness that made them feel so very safe, so delightfully alive.
Human.
This feeling, this tender trepidation, this coy hesitation, it was honey on the tongue and mischief in the eyes.
They’d been living together for years before this unnamed thing grew between them, and they were comfortable to let it grow further still, to leave it unspoken, to leave those touches unfinished for a while more, teasing each other with the mere possibilities, with hints of what-could-be.
When they finally kissed, it was a soft thing, the bare flutter of a moth’s wing, a feather-soft touch.
Hushed, like whispers in the night.
Powerful enough to light their hearts afire.
Somehow, nothing had ever felt more natural.
*
There was nothing more rude than vaporizing someone’s body.
When Loki finally finished rebuilding his flesh from the tiny ether beads it had been turned into, there were a few things he was certain of.
He was pissed, he was vengeful, and he was one week late for dinner.
And someone had attempted to vaporize his lover.
And whoever they were was going to die. Painfully.
He no longer cared who would be made aware of what exactly he was, if it ensured that no one would ever try to touch a single hair from his beloved’s head again.
It was a Loki on the warpath that slammed open the bar’s doors, it was a vengeful lich that prowled through the patrons until he found his brother’s band of merry imbeciles, and it was the Carrion Crow Reaper that listened to his drunken brother’s lament, with a vicious smile and predatory eyes.
“He mur-muer-morade.. He killed my brother! I’mma gunna.. I’m gunna kill him back. I am! Who’s wid me?”
Loki watched on, entertained enough to set his rage to the side long enough to make a dramatic entrance.
This promised to be good.
Volstagg thumped his meaty fist on the table, roaring his assent.
“You have my axe, Thor!”
“And my sword!”
“And my mace.”
The warrior three nodded to each other, pledging themselves to the quest and showing their support to their grieving friend.
How touching.
“And you have your brother.”
The mad scramble as they turned to him and recoiled in fright was terribly satisfying, especially as they turned white as though having turned to a ghost themselves.
The ridiculous stuttering was annoying, however.
“Yes, I am back. And yes, I want his guts too. Now, where’s my lover? If that moron dared to take advantage of the time I wasn’t there to try something, it’s not just his guts that I’ll take.”
And that was how Loki’s family became aware of his extracurricular activities as the country’s contract necromancer.
*
Life was… good.
They’d had their fills of playing with politician’s strings, of shadow games and power plays. It had been fun, for a while, to move their pieces across the board and just watch the chain reactions. Fun to allow the governments to call on them for special, highly confidential cases. Fun to be the only two qualified people in the entire world able to do what they did.
Thrilling and dangerous and exhilarating.
But after a while, they had started to seek something else.
There was little that could disturb one’s peace when they lived for aeons. After a couple centuries of traveling and exploring new things, Anthony and Loki had simply decided to… settle.
They had found a place remote enough that the whispers of the world’s struggles for power barely reached them, on the very edge of civilization yet not entirely cut from it.
A tiny town, large enough for a sham of anonymity, small enough to still be personable. A small community, kind neighbors, open-minded, welcoming.
A dying land, poisoned by some lingering waste or another, something that their combined powers could easily clean and revive.
Anthony had been able to let his Aulrune side come in play more often, to let the affinity with nature show. Loki had been able to laze around in graveyards.
The people had been thankful but discreet, their home isolated and quiet.
And then they had wanted more. Wanted to build something, to involve themselves, to, maybe, feel a little bit more human, a little less plant and crow.
The bakery had come as a surprise.
One of the town’s ghosts had been a chef, a renowned one who despaired over and over to have his knowledge die with him, his prized recipes never passed down onto his children.
It had seemed an easy feat to simply recreate the dish and present it to the family. A quick way to help the ghost pass on.
Actually cooking it had been more of a challenge than either had expected.
And it had been fun, a beautiful mess, chasing the accidentally revived turkey around the kitchen, Anthony grumpily shaking flour from his hair, onions toppling everywhere as they cried their hearts out while chopping them, quick kisses shared between laughs and playful jabs and asparagus stalks thrown at each other’s faces.
They’d loved it.
They had something to learn, to improve upon, to cooperate with.
They had a project, and an infinite number of tutors willing to pass on their age-old knowledge.
In the end they’d opened a bakery.
There were less risks of raised livestock wreaking havoc in the kitchen, and Loki had a terrible sweet tooth.
Jarvis helped with inventory, quietly enjoying their retirement as well, Anthony grew an orchard in their backyard, walking barefoot through the grass and feeling vines grow around him.
They made pies, and buns, and sweets, and they basked into their new beginning.
There were no more secrets, no more hiding. No more deaths.
Just, enjoying the very long life ahead of them, with the quiet certainty that, no matter what, they would have each other.