anything you want, it can be done; how did you go bad? did you go bad?
Imprisonment has a way of making one lose track of the passage of time, the passage of everything outside the bounds of one's cell. Slowly the world outside fades, until it's nothing but a concept, nothing but memories, nothing but an idea in the mind of a madman in a box, a madman whose world consists now of nothing more than this. Everything else goes as the freedom to experience it goes. One becomes a brain in a body in a box, and that is all that there is.
For Loki the horror in it is strangely mitigated by the calm. The lack of pressure. The lack of need to be, to define himself, to prove what he is to anyone. As time passes it seems increasingly to him that he is the only one left who matters, and he knows who and what he is. There's no horror in it if there's nothing else he should be. There's no guilt despite the long hours he spends in self-reflection. It is, somehow, peaceful.
Someday still he will be free, and still he yearns for it. This place's simplicities are balanced by out-there's complexities, and the latter provide far more stimulation than the former. It matters. It does matter. It might well drive him madder yet but he craves it all the same, the way a man freezing to death out in the snow will take off his clothes to escape the heat only he can feel, unknowingly, dazedly hastening his own death. Thus, except that Loki does it in some way knowingly.
He was made for that, after all. It's why he exists. What he's meant to be. Not merely self-destructive, but destructive overall, chaotic, burning worlds to ash so new things can rise from them; thus is his fate, he thinks at times. There's certainly plenty of evidence for it. He's seen. Infinitely many Lokis spanning infinitely many worlds and universes and ways of being and every last one of them doomed to be hated for acting out what he is inevitably made to be.
Other times he thinks that's all bollocks. Thinks it a convenient excuse by which he reconciles conflicting drives. Maybe both are in some way true.
Or maybe they're not. Maybe things can be turned on their head, for a time. He's not foolish enough to think any change permanent but that doesn't stop the curiosity from blooming in that hollow in his chest where so many other things should be when the word reaches him. No wonder emotions fill him up, no wonder he can hardly stand it. There's nothing else in the way. Nothing.
There's laughter too, when they tell him. Tell him where he's to go and what he's to do, as though they can make him, as though their disapproval means anything anymore when it's all he's ever had. As though the Allfather can simply frown him into behaving and the stormclouds on his brother's brow have the power to frighten him anymore. They've got it all wrong. Utterly backwards. Smiles are so much more terrifying now.
But he kowtows. He toes the line they lay out before him. He is contrition and regret. And so on it goes.
It's raining when they arrive on Earth, cuffs around his wrists and hands clamped tight around his biceps, a gesture more than anything. He could slip his skin and slip timespace and go anywhere he liked and they know it, they must know it, thus the set of his brother's jaw, but all he does is turn his face up to it and close his eyes while they drag him stumbling along, off to another cell and isolation again. But it's alright. He can still taste petrichor. Plant oils and other old things long hidden in the dirt rising up. Like Loki will rise up, either to the occasion, or in other, more sinister ways.
Today, today he thinks he'll play, today he thinks he'll hand over Victor von Doom, but tomorrow -- oh, that's lovely, the concept of tomorrow -- who knows?