Loki's exhausted. It's nearly seven o'clock and he's stuck doing overtime because someone didn't show up.
He was serving orders, taking orders, and bussing tables. Bucky's in the corner, sitting with his boyfriend Steve. They're on a date. They keep staring at him. He ignores it.
Eight thirty-seven and customers were starting to clear out. Evening customers were pouring in. Tired truck drivers, exhausted bikers. They all welcomed the restaurant as a sanctuary for their starving bodies. Bucky and Steve still stared. He still ignored.
At nine, his ten minute break rolled around and he sat far in the corner, munching on fries and left over pastries from the previous day. He was going to text Bucky. Ask him why he kept staring when his phone chimed and a text came in.
It's from an unknown number. There's a long list of instructions and then a few more texts with links. His eyebrows furrow and he reads through the instructions, stuffing his cheeks full of fries.
He feels staring, Bucky and Steve still, he rolls his eyes and holds up one hand, flipping them off. Bucky was his friend. A good friend and Steve was his good friend's boyfriend but that didn't mean he wanted them to look at him like that.
The dark web had never interested Loki. He'd heard enough about it to want to stay away. He turns off his phone and finishes up his food before returning to work.
Bucky and Steve leave at a quarter past nine, leaving a big fat tip for him. At ten thirty, Loki's shift is over. He clocks out, says goodbye to the other employees, and pops in to say goodbye to his boss, Brunnhilde.
Bucky is already there when he gets to their flat. “I'm gonna shower,” Loki tells him, tossing a peace sign which Bucky returns with a smile. He heads to his bedroom and gathers up some clothes.
While he showers, scrubbing hours of dirt from his body, he thinks about the texts. Briefly, he wonders exactly what the dark web is like. He'd heard about the drugs, weapons, and other shit; but then there was the murder, the torture, the abuse — the kind of thing normal people would feel queasy at. Loki was normal.
But he's curious. It couldn't hurt to check it out, he thinks to himself.
When Loki gets out of the shower, he goes to his bedroom, boots up his laptop and flops on his bed, crossing his legs Indian style.
His wet curls cling to his shirt and face but he doesn't mind. Bucky says going to bed like that is 'fucking barbaric'. The thought makes Loki giggle as he pulls up the text and follows each instruction to a 't'.
After a few minutes, he's on. It's underwhelming and almost anticlimactic, he finds, visiting the first few links. Mostly bullshit and random sites. The last link though leads to a forum.
A black screen with red chat boxes. People are talking, new boxes of text popping up constantly. He skims through until someone posts a link with the comment, 'This'll be a good one! He never disappoints!'.
That piques his curiosity so he finds himself on the site the link lead to. He had to buy Bitcoins only to spend them just to get in. Loki is glad Bucky's boyfriend happens to be rich and ever so generous — as in, Loki stole his credit card information the last time he was over.
Once he's paid, the screen goes black and timer appears, counting down the second until something is supposed to begin.
He waits for the countdown to end.
00:00:04
00:00:03
00:00:02
00:00:01
00:00:00
The stream begins and he is met with a man in a mask with his blonde hair pulled up into a neat bun. Tied up next to him is a woman with matted hair and dirty and bruised skin. Loki recognizes her from the local store's wall of 'Missing Persons'. She's crying, but no sound leaves her cracked and bloody lips.
The man is reading the chat. Loki glances. The other viewers comments disturb him. They tell the man they want to see how much she'll scream if he rips her breasts off one by one. Another how they want to hear her gurgles as he fucks her throat. Some just want him to beat her senseless. Loki feels sick.
He tries to leave but he finds that he can't. He's paid the price to get in and he can't get out until it's over.
Loki panics a little, terrified of what this man was going to do. He didn't want to see an innocent woman die. While he panics, he's stuck watching the man doing what he's being paid to do. In the corner, a fire blazes, heating up; crackling in a way that under normal circumstances, Loki would love. He rips chunks of her hair out, makes her scream as he smashes her ankles with a mallet, turning the bone inside into shards sharp enough to start digging into her skin from the inside. And then he's going to the corner, pulling a piece of metal from the fire that's so hot, it's burning bright orange and white.
Loki freezes, hands going up to grab at his own breasts in horror as he approaches the woman. She screams, louder and louder, trying desperately to get away. He's bound her too tightly. There's nothing she can do.
Loki chokes up, breath hitching as bile rises in his throat and goes back down leaving behind an acid film that clings to the back of his throat and burns. He flinches. He's never heard a person scream as loud as the woman as the man thrusts the white hot metal to one breast and presses in before he rips his hand back.
The bile starts to rise up again and Loki lets out a little scream as he registers that her breast came off with metal. The man shakes the metal and the lump of fat falls to the ground with a wet squelch that sounds far too loud in Loki's ears.
The woman screams and screams, thick red blood dripping down her stomach. What's left of his lunch comes up and spews onto his bed and crossed legs as he sees what looks to be a hole where her breast once was.
His had begun to race faster and faster but his lungs couldn't keep up, seizing and tensing, hurting as he struggled to pull in air. He couldn't breathe. Tears welled in his eyes and spilled over, his hands shaking and struggling to wipe them away to clear his bleary vision.
A knock on his door and another scream from the stream as the man ripped her other breast off broke him from his panicked state.
“You okay in there?” His roommate, Bucky, called.
He choked up, struggling find his words before he managed to force his brain to cooperate and say, “Just watching a horror movie! I'm okay!”
“Don't die in there. I'm going out to get pizza, be back soon.” Bucky tapped on his door again and then his footsteps retreated.
Loki let out a straggled breath of relief and sniffled, burying his face into his shaking hands.
“Look at that. Poor Loki is terrified.” A rumbly, low voice comes through his speakers. It's full of amusement with an undertone of cruelty.
Loki freezes upon hearing his name, slowly lowering his hands from his face. His wide blue eyes stare at the screen. The masked man is right there, standing in front of the camera. The comments, he finds, seemed to have turned their attention from the poor woman to him over ten minutes ago. These.. these sickos had been watching him.
They were mocking him; saying he looked gorgeous when he cried, wondering what he'd look like in that woman's position. This only freaked him out further.
“Oh god, oh god, oh god—” He sobs, fumbling to grab the pack of stickers from his nightstand, cringing as still wet puke slid down his bare thighs.
With fumbling hands, he pulled off a Carebear sticker and pressed it over his laptop's camera. And then he stuck some more. He heard the man laughing.
“He's hiding. Oh, but Loki, I agree. You do look gorgeous like that. I wonder..” The man trails off, pulling a knife from his pocket and approaching the woman.
Loki, now feeling better, but only by a little, that they could no longer see him, watches, terrified of what the man would do to her next.
The blade plunged into the woman's throat, drawing another scream that died off into a disgusting gurgle. When he pulls the knife back, her gurgling makes blood spurt from the hole and splash into her shoulder, the man's pants, and the floor.
He slaps her, like he was upset she got blood on his pants, Loki's almost laughs through his tears wondering what the man had expected to happen.
The masked man starts to undo his belt, letting his pants and boxers to fall to the ground. And Loki pales because oh god, he's big and then pales further because he realizes, the man doesn't intend to fuck her throat in the way a normal person would.
The woman isn't moving. Loki thinks she's dead. The man doesn't notice or just doesn't care as his cock slides into the hole he'd made, stuffing it with every bit of his thick length. His hands grab her head roughly and he begins thrusting his hips rough and fast. More blood spurts out and Loki watches in some morbid combination of horror, arousal, and disgust.
The man's cock was covered in blood but he continued, heady moans leaving his throat, moans that sound like pure melted dark chocolate to Loki.
He feels empathy, pity for the woman. He feels terrible for her family who had been looking for her for months now. He feels terrified imagining all she'd been through in the months since this man took her to play with her for these people to see.
Loki feels disgusted with himself for sitting here, watching her suffer; for finding the sight of this man — no, murderer — fucking into her throat like a fleshlight arousing. It was enough to make him want to scream.
The masked man let out a low groan and the wet squelches slowed down. Loki watched with teary eyes as he pulled his cock out, covered in bodily fluids. Pouring from the woman's throat was blood and cum turning pink from mixing with the viscous red fluid. Loki pressed the back of his hand to his mouth, feeling faint and he leaned over the edge of his bed, vomiting what was left in his stomach that he hadn't puked out earlier.
For a moment, he continued leaning over his bed, sobbing. “Loki. I know you're still watching.”
Loki froze.
“I'm home!” He heard Bucky yell.
The masked man chuckled.
“I'll be seeing you soon.”
The screen went black as the stream ended and all that was left was a new countdown.
48:00:00