#look guys idc if i can't have the characterization of a ms birbs

[dadsbongos]

gentle lover

(1)gentle lover (2)burn me to the ground Movie/Game/Show: Loki Dynamic: Loki Laufeyson/Reader Warnings: spoilers for infinity war/1st episode of loki ig, fem pronouns Summary: Loki almost wishes he could've experienced the life he's watching of you and him together. ~~~

There’s something about looking upon the gentle face of a lover and coming to the realization that you’d do anything for them. It isn’t as though you never knew - the knowledge was already there, it just took a few seconds for the thought to become cemented as truth. Loki sees this in himself as he stands before the TVA projection of his life.

He’s paused at a moment on an unnameable planet. He sees himself standing on a balcony in what he assumes to be a late-night, but instead of staring up at the stars, he’s looking upon a woman beside him. She’s looking at him as well. They share the glance with smiles - and that’s what alarms Loki most. The smile he sees is one he hasn’t felt in years. It’s small but it’s more genuine than the leather he was wearing moments ago. It’s a smile he hasn’t felt since before he knew about Laufey. Since before his mother…

He knows that woman. One of Thor’s Midgardian friends. The one assigned to watch and guard him in New York.

He doesn’t know why she’s there with him. He doesn’t know why she looks so content to be on another planet with him. He doesn’t know why he looks so at peace at her mere presence. He doesn’t know why it makes him miss a reality he’s never even known to exist.

He almost wants to be there, just to know what it is about that woman that brings him so much tranquility at that moment.

She’s just another bug, their difference in lifespans is proof enough of that. But Loki knows that look, as much as he hates to admit to his own conscience, he knows that feeling smeared across his own face. It’s caring. Tender. A softness he’s never felt for others is now on full display to a Midgardian.

Loki clenches his jaw and resumes the projection.

He watches the two slide their hands together on a railing, interlocking their fingers.

The Loki onscreen’s eyes flicker between hers and their joined hands. It isn’t even him that speaks first, it’s her.

“When this whole thing is over and Sakaar is ruined and Thor has the throne, where will you go?”

Silence is passed between them, Loki brushes his thumb over her knuckles, tilting his head to the side briefly in thought, “Where will you want me?”

She chuckles and shakes her head, “You wouldn’t want to go to Earth. Unless you’d like the Avengers up your ass.”

They giggle together, ignoring the very real reason why the Avengers would be so onto him in the first place. Loki blinks at the woman, scooting closer to her, “I wouldn’t be fond of that… but for you, my dear, I’d tear the universe apart.”

He kisses her knuckles and she merely jokes back, “That sounds like exactly why they wouldn’t want you. Sorry to say they’re not fond of universe-tearing.”

“I’m charming and romantic and this is how I’m repaid?”

“However,” she stresses with a broad grin, “I can’t say that’s not excellent bargaining to keep you on a leash.”

Loki’s brows furrow and he nearly pulls back, “Like a dog?”

“Well, now,” she bites her lip in thought and looks away at the dystopian city below, but Loki still looks at her.

He looks at her as though she’d sewn the very realms together. As though she’d hung all the moons and suns and stars and planted every sweet flower and harvested every fruit. He looks at her like she’s the beginning of his world - and he knows that it also means that, if she asked right then and there, he’d help her destroy the world too. He looks at her as though she’s the only true love he’s ever known. And for all this Loki, watching himself and this woman be entwined, knows - she probably is. He can feel it through the very projection he’s watching, and so he plays another scene with her in it.

“For a woman who could undoubtedly tear people apart, you master the role of a noblewoman, love.”

“Well, that’s a relief.”

Her response is dripping in lighthearted sarcasm and it manages a laugh from the Loki onscreen as he lays back in a shared bed.

“I am somewhat on the espionage scene, it’d be a little embarrassing if I couldn’t even pull off a little role like this.”

“Even so, I admire you for it.”

“At this point, it’d be rarer to find something you don’t admire me for,” she lightly huffs, a smile tipping at her lips as she finishes tying up her dress, “Not that I’m complaining. It's a huge ego boost.”

“There certainly is much to admire about you,” Loki shows his palms as if to display a sort of surrender.

Before more can be said, the projection is paused once again. Loki closes his eyes and lets his head down in the silence - almost expecting that voice to creep through his mind again. He can hear her now, in his head. He knows that out there, in those other variations of him on the sacred timeline that haven’t yet become Variants, they can probably hear her too. In a more realistic sense, of course. Because if they’re determined to fall in love, there must be one of her fated for every one of them. And he almost pities the fact.

He plays the projection in bits and pieces.

“My mother…”

“Loki, stop, you don’t have to.”

“I wish to, dear.”

“Loki…”

“My mother, I truly feel that she would’ve adored you.”

He takes in their love story as it comes and he struggles down what feels too intimate for even him to watch.

“Do you ever worry about the day when you wake up and I don’t?”

“Yes, of course, I do.”

“What will you do?”

“I prefer to not think on that.”

“You think about everything.”

“Some things… are better left unplanned for. At least for now, when that isn’t a valid worry in my mind.”

He almost wishes he hadn’t touched that tesseract. Just to live a life where he gets to see first-hand how this human woman manages to creep under the walls he so carefully spent years crafting.

“I love you.”

“Poor choice, really.”

“Loki. Seriously. I love you.”

“I love you, too, dear.”

It’s bizarre to see himself love. It’s bizarre to watch as he cares for a being he once would’ve had no qualms ruling over. It’s bizarre to know that this is what could’ve been the happiest times of his life if he hadn’t picked up the tesseract.

“Did you ever imagine yourself here?”

“On a spaceship with a bunch of Asgardians and the gladiators from Sakaar? No, never.”

“I meant with me.”

“I know, I was just messing with you. And… no. To be honest. I thought maybe I’d have to watch you as a guard or something. With the whole trying-to-take-over thing, but never that I’d be your girlfriend.”

“Eh.”

“‘Eh’? The hell does ‘eh’ mean? I am!”

“It sounds so… juvenile. Girlfriend - boyfriend.”

“What? Wife sounds better?”

“In honesty? Yes, it does. I’d much rather call you my wife than my girlfriend.”

“You can’t joke about that! I’ll get my hopes up.”

“Who said anything about joking, dear?”

And as he comes to the end, as he watches himself be lifted by the titan he’s come to fear more than anything, he hears her. Her mourning. Her screaming. Her pleading. Her gut-wrenching cries.

He watches her and Thor crawl to his body and sprawl themselves over it in heaps of hiccupped tears and choked sorrows.

“You were supposed to out-live me… Loki, please. You’ve come back before, Loki, please, come back again. Come back again… I can’t - I can’t live this life without you, Loki… please… please come back again…” she sounds as though her heart itself has been ripped from her chest and torn in two before her very eyes, “You were supposed to out-live me… Loki...”

He looks away from the screen. Decides that now is too much. He can’t watch her lose what she saw as the world. Loki barely knows her and yet he knows himself enough to know if he watches her grief then he’ll want to mend it.

Looking upon her and seeing how deeply and irrevocably she’d cared for him, knowing of his past and forgiving his ways and loving him anyway, he knows he’d want to end her cries. It’s that feeling of realization that makes him feel ridiculous for wanting to do so much for a Midgardian he hasn’t fallen in love with yet.

Yet?

Yet.

It’s a feeling of realization that he’d do anything for that lover of his, when he gets to love her. If he gets to love her.

And it’s that ‘if’ that makes him understand why Mobius was so interested in making him watch his own life. His own future. It makes him realize what he wants but can’t have. His brother, his love, his happiness - it gives him something to want. Lying just out of reach.

So long as he’s compliant with the TVA, he assumes. Otherwise, he’d have to tear the universe in half to even see that Midgardian woman once again.