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News reaches Asgard of Thor’s missing brother nearly a year after he vanishes from his heavily-guarded room deep within the palace walls. The guards had been found slumped against the door, their throats quickly and neatly cut, and black with frostbite.
“Jotunheim.” Thor had spat, pacing in his brother’s empty room for hours after, examining every inch of the room he knew so well. One of Loki’s beloved spell books had lain open on his bed, the corner of one page turned innocuously down; a half-eaten apple rested next to it, the flesh brown and the skin gently wrinkled.
Even as he approaches Jotunheim in the newly restored Bifrost Thor shivers at the icy, biting cold streaking like daggers past his unprotected face.
“Loki!” He booms as soon as his feet make contact with Jotunheim’s icy ground. His shout echoes off every cliff face nearby; a Frost Giant comes running, sneering and with a maniacal glint in his eye. Thor dispatches him calmly, with one blow of his hammer, then makes his way into the heart of the frozen city.
His very stomach freezes within him as he nears the imposing slabs of ice that make up what remains of Laufey’s palace. They have strung Loki up, high on the walls, bound him in some form of magic to prevent him from sheltering his Asgardian flesh with a Frost Giant cloak. Chains of ice run from great hooks protruding out from the battlements, snaking down and around his brother’s gaunt body, turning the skin black where it meets his vulnerable flesh.
Panic surging like bile in his throat, Thor skins Mjolnir by the leather thong on its handle, rocketing up into the air. He lands on a ledge just below his brother’s naked feet; Thor realises with a lurch that this must have been put here for a reason; it only takes a quick glance of Loki’s body to notice the deep stab wound in his brother’s sides, or the shallow laceration made by whips.
Loki’s head hangs forwards, face obscured by matted black hair; twisted and gnarled on one side where it’s thick with blood. Thor shatters his brother’s ice shackles with two neat blows of his hammer; Loki falls forwards into Thor’s waiting arms, still and lifeless, his eyes near-welded shut with frozen tears.
As Thor flies them back to the Bifrost, Loki so silent and light in his arms, he has half a mind to call down every bit of lighting he can and destroy all of this miserable, wretched planet who dared to touch his brother. But as the howls of fury begin to echo from the city, as the Frost Giants notice their precious captive has been taken, Thor allows himself just this one small victory, even as it feels increasingly hollow with every minute Loki does not stir.
The Bifrost whirls around them; Thor holds his brother close and allows the tears to fall thick and fast down his cheeks.