Chapter 5
Loki’s eyes snapped open in total darkness, and his lungs, without his willing it, heaved in an enormous breath of air.
He exhaled the air on one long groan, as sensation – and pain – returned to his body.
Never in all his centuries of spirit-walking had he come so close to dissolution, nor been so violently snapped back into his material form, and the agony of it held him locked and panting for a long time.
Finally the worst of the pain began to fade, and Loki had to turn his mind to what he would do now. Likely it would be several days until he could safely send forth his spirit again, or even longer; he really had no way of knowing. In the meantime, he had no methods of gathering information except for his mundane senses, and those would tell him nothing as long as he stayed here in his bolt-hole.
He rolled laboriously onto his side and groped around for the water bottle that he always kept full and near his body. On Sanctuary, the Other had found it amusing to provide Loki with only dry, spicy, or salty foods (already a challenge for his Jotun biology) and then deny him water for days, weeks, and finally months. Ever since then, Loki had found that though he had no appetite to speak of, he would panic if he didn’t have an assured source of water. The building in which he kept his usually-uninhabited body had running water, as well as this delightful cold-closet in which he now lay recovering.
The building had been a “restaurant” he knew, and the cold-closet was designed to keep Midgardian foodstuffs at a temperature that would inhibit spoilage, approximately the same temperature as a root cellar in winter. It was lovely, and spacious enough not to feel like the – well, it was spacious enough.
Finding the water bottle, he brought it to his mouth and chugged greedily at the chilled water, while pushing his stiff limbs out to soak up the coldness of the tile floor.
After a while he began to feel marginally better, the overwhelming dread from his run-in with Odin began to fade, and his thoughts began to clear.
He thought and thought, and argued with himself, but any way he looked at it, he needed to know what was going on, and the only way to know that would be to venture forth in his physical body. He found he had a great distaste for staying in his body, now that he had been spending so much time away from it, but it simply couldn’t be helped. He would have to go, embodied (and therefore vulnerable to capture, deprivation, and pain), into the lion’s den.
For there was nowhere else to go, was there? He needed great heroes, and the greatest heroes of this realm were all gathered together in Avengers Tower.
In truth, he had known all along that it would come to this, ever since his ignominious defeat at the Battle of New York.
He had had plans and counterplans buzzing wildly through his head the whole time that the scepter had been in his possession, but it had been impossible to tell which thoughts were his own and which were imposed from without. Sometimes he thought he was plotting against Thanos, and sometimes he worshipped and adored Thanos and would do anything to bring his goals to fruition. At other times his very attempts at sabotage seemed to please and serve the Titan, and at yet other times his best and most loyal service incurred only punishment and rage from his master. It was difficult to think of those days; he felt as if his brain had been hacked to pieces and then thrown back, willy-nilly, into his skull.
The beating he had received from the Green Berserker had broken some subtle cord, and then being kept away – well away – from the scepter had kept it broken. Ever since then, Loki had been slowly, painfully trying to put himself back together.
He had had enough sense of self-preservation, even then, in his badly confused and dissociated state, to know that he never wanted to see that bedamned scepter ever again. He had maintained a docile and harmless demeanor after his defeat, and had kept his ears wide open. The Avengers had been remarkably lax with him, as soon as they had him in magic-blocking shackles, and amazingly had even informed him of their plans.
At first they had contemplated sending Loki and the Tesseract to Asgard, with Thor to guard them, and keeping the scepter on Midgard, “to study.” Loki had not disliked this plan, and had stayed demure, hoping for it to be implemented quickly. He would be as safe as he could be (so, not especially) on Asgard, which was under the direct protection of Odin, while Thor (and Frigga) would be there too, which might provide him some protection from Odin. Only one of the stones coveted by Thanos would be in the same realm as Loki, and it would be the most useful one for keeping himself away from Thanos, if Loki should ever manage to find an opportunity to steal it. Yes, altogether, he had liked the first plan.
But then, at the last minute, Huginn and Muninn had appeared on the roof of Avengers Tower with a scroll from the All-Father, in which he offered to let Midgard keep Thor in exchange for both artifacts and the prisoner.
Loki had liked this second plan not at all. This would put him in one realm with two of Thanos’s desired stones, Odin, and no Thor. That was a much less safe position than the first, and the first had been none too safe as it was.
He had also been unpleasantly reminded, by the appearance of the two ravens, that Odin, in his youth, had been a great world-walker, and didn’t actually need the Bifrost in order to reach between the nine realms of Yggdrasil. Perhaps that reminder had been an unspoken part of Odin’s message, for the Midgardians had seemed as unpleasantly surprised as Loki. They gave in to Odin’s “request” with a great deal of talking amongst themselves, but no actual resistance.
And so Loki had found himself standing, the next day, on the highest point of the Tower, shackled to two silver cases, one holding the Tesseract, and the other the hated scepter. One black raven perched on each case, both keeping their suspicious eyes on Loki.
It was very fortunate for Loki that the magic-blocking shackles were only made out of untempered adamantium. While too strong for him to break without his magic, it was yet soft enough for him to scratch, with diligence and a tiny boot-nail of uru (kept for precisely such occasions). He had spent the entire night in his cell silently working, in near-perfect stillness, to disfigure a few relevant sigils on the inner surfaces, and so, when the cases, the artifacts, the chains, and the ravens were all sucked away to another realm, Loki and his shackles and his muzzle were left standing on Avengers Tower.
He had shaken off the now-useless bits of metal, grinned maniacally at the gathered Avengers and SHIELD agents, and used the last of his strength to whisk himself away from there.
He had only been able to carry himself three blocks north, and then he had had to crouch behind a large waste receptacle for several hours, because he was too weak to cast a glamour over himself or his clothing, and even idiot Midgardians would be bound to recognize the person who had just invaded their city. So he had sat, sick to his stomach from the smell of rotting food, and frantically scratching the circles and symbols that would temporarily hide him from Heimdall, until night had fallen over the city.
It was then that he had found this bolt-hole with the excellent cold-closet and infinite water source, and he had moved in and counted himself lucky.
But now his time of relative freedom and comfort was over. After two years of close proximity, it appeared that the scepter had finally conquered even the mighty All-Father, and if his condition was anything like what Loki’s had been, no one was safe, be they never so well hidden. Alone, Loki could do nothing, and if he did nothing, Odin would fall deeper and deeper under the Mad Titan’s thrall until he eventually became one of Thanos’s “children,” and that would be a fearsome thing indeed.
Another possibility, no whit better in Loki’s opinion, was that Odin’s natural greed for power would win out over his artificially imposed loyalty to Thanos, in which case Odin would keep the one stone which he already had, and begin to seek out the others on his own account. If he found all of them (Loki had reason to believe that the total number was six), he would be the most powerful being in the universe. Seeing how he had used such power as he already had, Loki had no desire to know what Odin would do with infinitely more.
The only (remote) possibility of nipping the situation in the bud would be for Loki to lay out everything he knew before the Avengers and hope that they believed him and could be induced to do something about it. And that they were strong enough to do something about it. It was a miserably slight chance, and it was the only one he could see.
Handing himself over to the Avengers and SHIELD would no doubt lead to imprisonment and torture, but the torture dealt out by mortals would be no more than an annoyance compared to what the Other had meted out (and would mete out again, if Loki was still here when Thanos arrived), and imprisonment by mortals was, by its very nature, temporary.
Loki groaned some more as he heaved himself to his feet. Everything was numb and weak from his long torpor, and his head swam alarmingly as he leaned against one cold wall. Once the worst of the dizziness had past, Loki put on every article of Midgardian clothing that he had, refilled his water bottle and, clutching it to his chest, made his slow way out of the empty building and down to the corner of the block, where the buses stopped.
He waited for twenty minutes, occasionally taking a carefully rationed sip of water, and avoiding eye contact with the rare passing mortal. It was late afternoon, coming on to evening, and the dim golden light hurt his eyes after so long in the dark. He pulled up the hood of his soft garment and tilted his face towards the ground, both to shade his eyes and to hide his distinctive face and hair.
His thoughts were one part screaming panic, one part dull resignation, and one part anxious curiosity. Several times before the bus arrived, he almost turned around and went back to his comfortable cold-closet. He had to tell himself that comfortable did not mean safe, and he was going now to the safest (though likely uncomfortablest) place in the realm.
As much as the Avengers would surely mistreat him, Loki felt reasonably confident that Thor would not allow them to kill him. And even if the mortals did find a way to kill him, Thanos and his children would do infinitely worse, if they managed to come to these realms.
The bus finally hissed to a stop in front of him, and Loki obtained admission with his beeping-card, an inheritance from one of the criminals that used to meet in his restaurant. He had turned them all into seagulls when he discovered the nature of their criminal enterprise, and then he had taken two weeks out of his busy schedule (of lying on a cold floor in the dark) to seek out their web of accomplices and do the same to them. Though none would ever know of it, and the name of Loki would always be reviled on Midgard, it gave him some sense of …something… to know that hundreds, possibly thousands, of Midgardian children and young women would be spared a life of horror and degradation.
The card did its duty of eliciting a beep, and Loki moved to sit wearily in the very back seat of the long conveyance.
He was so preoccupied with his worries and plans, that he missed his stop, and the next one, and only caught his mistake when he was six blocks away from his intended destination. He got out and held tightly to a sign pole until the world stopped swaying around him.
Looking up (as soon as looking up didn’t make him want to vomit) he saw the unmistakable, immense, form of Avengers Tower looming over him, and he set out on tottering legs towards it. The closer he got, the harder it became to breathe, but, as he really couldn’t think of any better plan, he kept moving.