"Here?" Oh, oh, Loki could laugh, if he weren't so weary of all of it.
"Among you. Assuming first and foremost that you would have me; yes. I could. I could play at being one of you, perhaps, for a time. Stay. Live inconspicuously. A human life, friends, lovers perhaps; I could watch you all grow old and die, watch the brats you leave behind live out their own tiny lives while I go on." As he has, already has. Even that isn't new.
"I could surround myself with the meaninglessness of my own longevity, yes, while you live. Every last one of you, living new things, fresh things, things I've seen a thousand times before, a million; I could muster some false enthusiasm but I could never share it. Millions of you could pass me by, young, bright, burning, while I carry on withering away, valueless, unable to relate, entirely alone. I would have to be alone. I don't know that I can love you as individuals anymore, but that isn't a risk I would fain take." Certainly not lightly. Certainly not unless it should seem that the benefits would outweigh the costs -- and they never do.
"Without Asgard I am less than nothing. Three thousand years I spent among them, thinking myself one of them. I don't know anything else." He was never so much as able to want something else. There was no alternative, not when his true parentage was hidden and the culture with which he would have been raised, should have been raised, denied him. And now? Now when he looks away from that long and complex history towards solitude, self-definition, he is frightened. There's nothing. There's nothing at all. Everything he's ever been has been defined relative to others, to concepts and to individuals which are uniquely and undeniably Asgardian. To cut that lifeline quite simply isn't that easy.
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"Among you. Assuming first and foremost that you would have me; yes. I could. I could play at being one of you, perhaps, for a time. Stay. Live inconspicuously. A human life, friends, lovers perhaps; I could watch you all grow old and die, watch the brats you leave behind live out their own tiny lives while I go on." As he has, already has. Even that isn't new.
"I could surround myself with the meaninglessness of my own longevity, yes, while you live. Every last one of you, living new things, fresh things, things I've seen a thousand times before, a million; I could muster some false enthusiasm but I could never share it. Millions of you could pass me by, young, bright, burning, while I carry on withering away, valueless, unable to relate, entirely alone. I would have to be alone. I don't know that I can love you as individuals anymore, but that isn't a risk I would fain take." Certainly not lightly. Certainly not unless it should seem that the benefits would outweigh the costs -- and they never do.
"Without Asgard I am less than nothing. Three thousand years I spent among them, thinking myself one of them. I don't know anything else." He was never so much as able to want something else. There was no alternative, not when his true parentage was hidden and the culture with which he would have been raised, should have been raised, denied him. And now? Now when he looks away from that long and complex history towards solitude, self-definition, he is frightened. There's nothing. There's nothing at all. Everything he's ever been has been defined relative to others, to concepts and to individuals which are uniquely and undeniably Asgardian. To cut that lifeline quite simply isn't that easy.