seidrade:

Do you ever just think about

The first time Loki has a evening to himself in Avengers Tower and watches a Midgardian film like Synecdoche, NY or Call Me By Your Name or anything that’s intensely moving and quietly, emotionally devastating

And he’s never experienced anything quite like it before, because he’s used to theatre and the symphony— the sense of grandeur that comes with the stage and the Asgardian sense of drama, and how public and larger than life the spectacle of it is. And he finds all that to be incredibly moving in its way, just as he finds books to be incredibly moving, his escape has always been in books, but somehow

Watching a film where the emotions are quiet and intimate and you can see the nuance in the actors’ faces and bodies, in the space between them, and the score is just subtle and dramatic enough in turns to play up their yearning or their sadness and inner turmoil — and he’s watching it alone, or maybe Steve or Thor is in the room, but it feels like he’s being drawn into this world and it’s unlike anything he knows how to process

Anyway picture Loki clutching his hands into fists and weeping quietly to himself, trying not to let it show how affected he is by this beautiful thing; how he can’t quite understand how these short-lived mortals have captured something inside of him that he didn’t even realize was there to ensnare, but it’s pulling all these dormant feelings from deep inside of him and he’s overwhelmed by it but can’t quite let himself fully give into it

And the feeling follows him for days, weeks after the film, he can’t stop thinking about it, he craves more of this even though he fears it. And then Thor or Tony or Steve or Natasha start ‘accidentally’ leaving Netflix popped up on the communal TV with Forrest Gump queued up, or a careless DVD of Steel Magnolias is left on a coffee table (despite the fact that Tony can’t stand having them around, so outmoded) and nobody mentions it aloud but they start planning their evenings so that once a week there’s a perfect opportunity for Loki to watch a film alone and just cry to himself out of happiness or sadness or something else entirely

And then eventually Thor joins him for one, and then Steve pops in, and by the time Nat shows up with popcorn and Kleenex, all the boys are red-eyed and teary and when Brokeback Mountain ends, they cue up Dead Poet’s Society at her suggestion

And Loki will still never openly acknowledge it, or thank them for it, but something changes in him after that— he feels lighter, somehow— and he thinks it might be for the better