brandingproblem | au shenanigans for icasm

Loki doesn't do this all the time. For one thing he, himself, barely sleeps in the first place and both parties being asleep is more or less necessary for it to work.

For another he's not trying to drive Clint mad. Not really. And Midgardians need their dreams. So. It's not an all the time event.

But sometimes. Tonight. Tonight Clint's dreams start out however his subconscious chooses except Loki is there. Present in an un-dreamlike way. A subversive sense of reality wedged into the otherwise unreal.

And so Clint has two options: he can continue the dream and deal with Loki in the time between it's end and Clint being entirely awake. You know. During such sensations as body paralysis. Or he can interrupt his own dream. Direct himself at Loki. See what happens.

Waking up, though? Not on the menu yet.

Here is an arrangement of facts:

Loki dies that night. Literally, in the waking world. He remembers dying, in the dream, and then he remembers the excruciating agony of resurrection into a body that held no life for a time. It only takes roughly twenty-four hours, but he has no real sense of that.

He's covered in wounds. Blood. The sheets, somehow, aren't. His throat hurts (unpleasantly), his ass hurts (in quite the opposite fashion), his hands have knife wounds through both palms. There are cuts and bruises and teeth marks all over. He feels sluggish and overwhelmed by the pain; his magic exists in fits in starts and he's too exhausted to sort out how to fix that, or any of it, so he doesn't.

Instead, he sleeps. For seven more days.

On the fifth day, the Barton children become aware something is amiss. Because Loki has missed an appointment with Lila to gossip about her dating life over sugary beverages. He doesn't answer the series of phonecalls that follow, or several text messages. When Cooper actually goes to the apartment on the next day, the door doesn't open, and the only response he receives from "Is anyone in there?" yelled toward the door is Glød's meow.

It's decided between the two of them that it is Lila who will inform their father that something is wrong, but they're still debating how exactly to go about doing that, when Loki wakes up and responds to text messages stating he'd "been asleep" and "wasn't feeling well", along with apologies for worrying them. When threatened with another visit he sent a photo (after he'd had a bath) as proof of life and told them that he couldn't have visitors or take a video call because he'd lost his voice.

But he was certain that he would get it back in a few days. They shouldn't worry overmuch. Everything would be fine.

So that is the context in which Clint gets a text from his daughter, followed by an address, and several unhappy smiley faces.

Loki was a door, before. They were always connected, but they could each open and close the door as they wanted, muffle the sound, stuff a towel underneath to block out the light.

It's a window, now. Can peer in, see one another more clearly, slide it open with not much effort. After Loki stepped deliberately into his dreams and back into his head. After Clint used that opportunity to kill, and the effects lingered into the waking world. Loki can speak in his mind directly if he wants. A thing he has not been happy with. They feel the confused twists of emotions in each other. Clint sometimes wishes he could break it, smash the glass, do something violent and harmful and severing. And he can't. Or, he could, but the damage done would be too awful to bear.

But he's also always thought of it as something that Loki does and Clint simply deals with. Loki is the one with magic, who bridged the gap deliberately, who went in with curiosity and overstayed his welcome and reaped the benefits and consequences both.

They rarely are asleep at the same time. So when Clint finds himself in a world of dreams, he simply assumes it is his own. Except that it doesn't feel quite right. He shouldn't know it's a dream, directly. He shouldn't feel so...whatever this is. He freezes. He waits. Perhaps to wake up.

There's a carnival of some kind going on here.

That's what originally drew Loki's attention to this place. Games of chance (more or less), fried foods, bright colors. Loud children and families. It's bright and colorful and much more along the lines of what Loki would be interested in seeing than the things that his father and brother are up to right now. Politicking and feats of amazing strength, etcetera, etcetera.

Loki ditched that scene almost as fast as he could. Was he interested in other realms? Definitely. But he wanted to know about the people, not the governments or the ones who had all the power. Eventually they would die off, or the people would replace them, and things would change. Boring in the extreme.

Ultimately, though, Loki finds himself wandering beyond the borders of the carnival towards some fields, following an odd but familiar sound. Odd because he knows what it is — the sound of an arrow being loosed and then striking a target, or at least various targets — but not how it's happening to be here. On Midgard. In the 1980s or whatever their calendar reads.

(One of the hardest parts of traveling between realms is that there is not any sort of unified calendar. Loki gets it but hates it simultaneously.)

The point is, Midgardians have broadly moved on from archery and arrows to metal projectiles, Loki knows to be true. So it's weird that anyone could do it in the first place, much less strike a target with as much frequency as Loki hears. So it's weird. A puzzle to be solved. Loki moves silently through sparse woods and fields of grain alike until he reaches the source of the sounds: a man, no, a boy closer to his own age equivalent, surrounded by targets made of various materials. Some bottles, some actual targets, some just... various and sundry objects, held aloft by heavy string or rope.

It's impressive, the amount of skill he (Loki is guessing at the pronouns) has in the first place. In an outmoded technology, at that. He doesn't miss a single shot he takes, in the ten, fifteen minutes Loki spends watching, and it's doubtful that any of the earlier shots were misses either.

Something happens as Loki watches him. Stares at the way his muscles move underneath his shirt, the form his body takes as he draws the bow. It's a buzzing in his head, a weight in his stomach. He wants to stand behind the other boy, to run his fingers across his shoulders as he pulls the bowline taut. Wants to gather some of the sweat at his brow on his fingertips and see how it tastes.

Now. Loki is neither sheltered nor a fool, despite his age; Thor has had an interest in various people of an assortment of genders, defined and otherwise by this point, much to Odin's amusement and Frigga's concern, but Loki has never felt interested enough in anyone to bother entertaining them, or the idea of their naked bodies in his presence. Before today.

The other boy has stopped shooting while Loki has puzzled this new feeling over, he realizes... because, of course, the other boy has to go and collect his arrows from their locations now that his quiver is empty before he can set them loose again, and Loki purposefully decides to step on a twig in order to make his presence known. "You're a good archer," he announces, raising his eyebrows. "I didn't know people bothered learning how, here, anymore." He gives a smile that he hopes indicates that he's not a dangerous threat (to this other person). "Hi. I'm Loki."

In dreams

after the dream

a different dream