Desreal: love, from a survivor. --

One time, a guy on the other side told us we were dead already.
---

He’d been dreaming again.

Shh, it’s alright.

Voices, voices, voices, angry, aroused, fearful, angsty, pained, hateful, laughing, crying…

It’s alright, just a dream…

But it wasn’t.

It was voices, a thousand million voices, earth and dirt and animals and thoughts and primal rage and…

Listen to me, not to them! Wake up!

But this one?

This one was familiar.

(literally…)

Safe.

Loki woke.

There were thorns embedded in his flesh, breaking through his skin with bits of bone-white.

That’s how bad it was.

What am I doing here?

You were wandering… you left… you’re a somnambulist, who knew.

He laughed. It was shaky and shocked but he did -- because it was rich, wasn’t it, that the colt with the green-black eyes would also be a somnambulist, of all things, and the laughter tapered out to a whimper and then to a small, fearful cry, because he was just a colt, after all, just a boy, and the wolf besides him licked the wounds clean -- wounds, because the earth isn’t kind and lovable and motherly, at least not to Loki, not when the thorns rip around him like the messiah’s supposed crown, but not only on him, but in him, through him.

Fvck messiahs.

He didn’t notice Isadore until the thorns had -- seemingly -- shifted into beladonna, forget-me-nots, all things beautiful and painful, retracted into his bloodstream as if nothing had ever happened, leaving only blood

(seers can't heal themselves)

behind. Huddled in a wasteland of his own making, just bare cracked-dry earth surrounded by snow and he didn’t even know how he got there in the first place.

“You don’t belong,” he echoes faintly, “chhaya…”

We don’t.

Not the colt with all the world’s thoughts and the crown of thorns in a travesty of old goatherder's tales, not the wolf-pup curled against his knee and growling softly at the stranger, half-heartedly, not the Viper Princess who should’ve had all the rights of a nu-ku-lar family and a mother and a father laughing around her, drawing her in, making her safe.

A sign of the times, wasn’t it.

Well, Loki had parents to spare; all three

(four?)

of them.

When he’s finally up, all impossible angles and gruff hair, trembling legs and ecliptic eyes more fit for a war survivor than a small child, but then, maybe he is both, his nose bumps against her shoulder -- he is a lot smaller than she, being younger, premature, fragile as the network of moss and plantlife growing in, out, through him.

“Venez,” he muttered against her pulse, which he instinctively knew; earth wasn’t just metal and stillness, not at all, but also life and death and survival. “Venez avec moi, chiya.”

---
Fvck those grown ups. Fvck them all.
We don't need them ever again.