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It’s maddening. Lights hum overhead with no warmth. Boxes display numbers and words and lines that glow with different colors and no meaning. Everything is cold and dead and strange around him. His chest feels like it can’t expand fully, the walls seemingly closing in like a trap.
“Hey.”
There. That voice is a safe harbor for Loki’s internal maelstrom. A gentle hand anchors him when it rests on the back of his own. Slowly, like sailing against the tide, Loki feels his lungs fill and that constricting fear ease. He drags his eyes from the meaningless paper afore him to the man sitting at his left.
Mobius. His hair is shorter, his face less sun-kissed, and his garb, like Loki’s own, is drab and bizarre and Loki hates it. But those same kind eyes he’s grown to love search his own and the familiarity supersedes any other discomfort.
“You doing okay?” Mobius asks and Loki has no idea how to respond.
He doesn’t know what it means to do “okay”. He’s unfamiliar with the word. But with the way Mobius studies him and rubs his thumb tenderly over Loki’s knuckles, he gathers Mobius is inquiring after his wellbeing. And his being is certainly not well.
Loki shakes his head when words fail. This isn’t where he’s supposed to be. Where they are supposed to be. He doesn’t know how he knows that but he does and his breathing comes shakily when he can’t speak. His vision turns watery and he wants to lean into Mobius when his other hand lands on Loki’s shoulder.
“Loki?”
Loki sniffs and a few tears slip free as Mobius lightly jostles him.
“Loki?” The sight of Mobius with his hair shorn and the lights with no warmth and everything dead and cold blurs and fades as Mobius’ arms wrap around his shoulders.
“Loki, wake up,” Mobius tells him. “It’s a dream. It’s a bad dream.”
Loki’s lashes are damp when he blinks his eyes open and his breath shudders in his chest as he awakens. In Mobius’ arms. In Mobius’ bed in his quarters on his ship with the sounds of the sea and life around them and Mobius is kissing his hair and murmuring soft reassurances to calm him.
And he clings to his captain until the tears stop and the dream fades away like foam on the sand.
“It was horrid,” the pirate finally whispers. “Your hair was short.”
Mobius chuckles. “Yeah? Sounds better than the dream I was having. You were a priest.”
Loki wrenches his head up, aghast, tears and coldness forgotten. “A man of god? Me?! Never.”
“Dreams can be strange like that.” Molbius catches his chin and guides their faces closer. “You did make quite an alluring priest though. You were very tempting in your preacher’s robes.”
As their lips meet and Loki lets Mobius roll him onto his back, the pirate decides to “borrow” a cassock at their next port.
Some dreams could be reality after all.