Imagine If You Assembled The Avengers: Volume 3

Aren't You Dead? (Loki x reader)

It was a gift given from a higher authority somewhere that your sense of direction had been scattered and your senses had been stripped away to nearly nothing. The sounds around you were heavy and muted, like a dense fog over a river on a cold morning. Your body was filling with a chill reminiscent of it, with an ache deep in your bones, and had you not known the terror around you first-hand, you might have tried to hide yourself away in the façade of your own imagination just to feel as if you may survive this.

"You must get up," came a voice from beyond the security your mind had been trying to create. "The escape vessels are about to disembark and you must be on one. (Y/N), I said, get up!"

Fires raged all around you, but your body remained cold. Maybe it was your heritage that spared you from the heat, being genetically half frost giant and all, or maybe it was the start of the end and you considered welcoming it. It would be so much easier than what you were about to open your stinging eyes to, to see the hell beyond the soot that coated them.

"W-where...where's Loki?" you managed to choke out, barely audible over the slaughter.

"He's with Thor, holding Thanos and the Order back so that we can escape, so do not dare make their efforts be done in vain."

"I cannot leave without him." It was expected that you would be one to argue at a time like this, when arguments were irrational and irrelevant, but if this would be the end of Asgard, the other half of your lineage, then you couldn't abandon any of it now. You could never abandon him.

"He insists-"

You pushed up on your elbows to try to position yourself to stand and face the man who dared to challenge you, but you could barely get that far much less entertain the idea that your legs would support you. The large pool of blood that you had found yourself lying in was your own, and it was the rapid loss that was confusing your thoughts now. "I don't care...what he insists..."

"Well, you also cannot move, so the choice is no longer yours," the man commanded, turning to someone nearby. "Lift her."

"No, put me down!" you tried, feeling as is if you were putting out effort despite the immobility of your limbs. "I have to stay behind! If he dies...then I must be with him! It is my right...I order you...I order...you..." you faded out, eyes rolling back in your head and your body succumbing to the traumas of battle and giving your friend a fleeting sense of relief that you were at least unable to argue any further.

Once he was secure in seeing you carried onto the escape ship to join the others, knowing that he could assure Loki that you were safe, Heimdall gave a final nod to the guard and watched the door close. The ship jettisoned and shot out into the blackness of space, towards any planet that would take them, the final remnants of a people who had already lost nearly everything. If Thor and Loki didn't survive this today, those people would need a leader, and it would have to be you.

Five Years After Endgame

Over five years had passed since that day, when a snap that had erased half of the universe was reversed by another that brought it all back, but one thing that it couldn't do was to return Loki to life so that he could join you once again. There was a part of you that had dreamt of this being just another one of his tricks, leaving you all to think him dead when he was simply off living another life; it wouldn't be completely unheard of. But in your heart, you knew that he stood at his brother's side in his final moments, and Loki had changed; the man you had watched walk into that fight was no longer one who could do that to you.

It was Thor who had brought the two of you together, finding you at the other end of the hammer as you fought viciously against him on Jotunheim. Even in those first moments of heated rage, he could sense something different about you, and there was no way that he could shake the feeling that you were not meant to be there.