Silence of the Chaos

Power.
Madness.
Chaos.

Go wherever I might, these three things are like seeds waiting to be nurtured, to be brought back to life. Time and again, these maligned elements are planted- sometimes knowingly, other times, just thrown into the wind without a care in the world- and soddened with reasons carrying self-preservation wrapped nicely in the silk of what is the right thing to do.
And the similar is happening now as I look down at the Chitauri kneeling in front of me, gasping for air, trying to break my purpose-filled hands locked around its throat.
It makes one last attempt to tear my flesh with its rusty metal weaponry before I summon my knives to be coloured in its blood as its body writhes momentarily before the light in those repulsive eyes vanishes.
Pathetic.
That is what all of them are- pathetic. Dull creatures holding the sharp cold metals high in front of their faces, the monsters howling into the transparent sky as they charge towards us. Not even a single one of these minions have any perception of the painful death that awaits them. Though the more I ponder upon it, the more I am sure that these vile brainless monsters have not felt pain ever since they were recruited to take over Midgard.

Defiling the last Chitauri of its internal organs, I turn towards the exhausted scowls of the unordinary beings who have accompanied me to wipe the last traces of the mad Titan’s sway from all the Nine Realms.
Anger, fun, frustration and disgust, though the last of them could be, what I have been corrected on time and again by the humans, more tastefully defined as ‘yucky’.
I have to admit I never thought I would be seeing myself working with this sad, degenerate lot. Yet, here we are. Desperate times call for aid from such wild characters. No wonder that brother mine gets along so well with all of them.

“Forty-Six! I killed forty-six of these stupid punks! Nice! A little gross but nice.”
Korg is elated at some unclear predefined count that he has been keeping. Clearly, the rest of the lot is as blank as I.
“What are you, hundred?” Brunnhilde takes out her sword from inside the corpse of a Chitauri lying beneath her feet.
“What does he mean fourt-”
“It’s his equivalent of your sixty-nine.”
“…oh. Okay. Is that it? Is that the last of them?”
Your breathless words fill the air around us while the scarring breeze tangles your already mess of hair around your face. I stop for a fleeting moment to do nothing but admit to myself the noticeable allure of death that has so vividly touched your skin and walked by as the solar star grazes the seabeds of the dark oceans inside your eyes. How could someone so imperfect as a human shine with such passion when it was smeared by the insides of a mindless monstrosity that it just killed?
“Yes, it’s the last of them. I don’t sense anyone else on this planet or any other in this solar system,” the fiercest one, Nebula, is quick to answer, bringing me back to the present, away from my meandering thoughts towards you. She is the least bothersome of the lot. Fueled with the objective at hand, she talks less and works more, efficiently even. I have never seen someone so mechanical yet so driven by emotion. Had she been by Thanos’ side, I doubt we would have ever made it out alive in any possible timeline.  It would be a shame on anyone’s part to underestimate this one.
“That’s good,” you say as you try to get up and away from the cadaver that surrounds you, “that’s g-uggh.”
My reflexes take over as I bring my hands forward beneath your arms to prevent you from falling into the gooey remains. No one wants the ride back home to be muddied with the filthy odour of the dead. That is what I tell myself as the breeze teases my sense of smell with your sweat and artificial Midgardian fragrance. You are close. Closer than you are supposed to be. And as if that was not enough, you put your arms over my shoulder to stabilise your legs, looking at me with gratitude and apology.
“Y/N, you are wounded! Come on let’s patch that quickly, shall we?” Korg announces as he takes your weight from my arms and picks you up, leaving a morbid emptiness in my hands.
I push away my thoughts but not before Brunnhilde looks at me with a hint of playful curiosity.
“Is something wrong, Valkyrie?” I throw my words at her.
“Just wondering how all the locked up torrents would turn out had we not been mishandled by your excuse of a father.”
She smiles her most noxious smile as she cleans her sword by sliding it through the fingers of a corpse nearby.
“You can hide your hurt Laki, but this,” she gets up and sways her sword between me and Korg’s figure disappearing inside the spaceship with you and Nebula, “this is new for you. Not so easy to hide behind the edgy goth facade that you continue wearing.”
I cannot help but mock a laugh.
“You are worse than my brother, Brunnhilde. I am not a mission or a project you and my brother try to keep working on. Y-”
“I’m not your brother. Stop comparing me to that infuriatingly bright piece of sunshine, okay? That one needs to calm down for two seconds in his life.”
Brunnhilde’s words are a positive surprise to my ears but quite an obvious truth they state. She walks back to the ship with me, matching the patient pace.
“Listen Laki, you are no one’s project. You are just a messed up kid with daddy issues.”
I turn to her with such animosity in my gaze that she cannot help but raise her hands in the air as if she was stating the obvious. Well, she was.
“I’m just saying don’t let an old man’s  blindness to his son- pun intended- ruin your chance at something new.”
“New?” I scoff, “New what, Brunnhilde? Everything around us was built on chaos. Everything dies in it. There is no new. It is a painful loop of history repeating itself until we are fortunate enough to die and escape the formidable.”
I do not hear any backfire from her and have to turn in her direction to see if she was even listening.
“Now where have I heard that before?”
The question was more for her than for me. Who would be wise and idle enough to speak the truths that I speak, without having suffered a hundred times as I have?
“Ponder in your quarters, Val. We still have work to do,” I announce as I leave her with her thoughts to step inside the ship, move past the dull corridor and enter the meeting room.
There you are. Again. Your frame perched up on the table, your legs already devoid of your armour, revealing the worked up sweat as nothing but your lounging shorts capped them above the wound. I watch you steal a glance at me from under your lashes, quickly reverting your eyes to your cut that Korg smears with a concoction made for you by Dr Banner and Dr Strange. Must be nice to have two of Midgard’s most brilliant minds device things according to your needs.
I move towards the food station to quench my bothersome thirst initiated by the desert we had just left.
“It’s fine Korg. Don’t bandage it. I’ll heal it when I get the time.” Your words come out coarse and unrefined. Clearly, the arid planet has worked it’s way through your skin as your once lively, saturated lips are now cracked and on the verge of bleeding.
Humans.
Your bodies cannot handle the changes as well as most of us. And still, you’re here, fighting by the side of an assassin-cum-half cyborg, a cluster of rocks, a former warrior of Asgard and an unstable frost giant. You are so far from home that if something were to happen to you here, no one would know for the next few years.
“If it means I can slow down or minimize even a fraction of chaos then I’m coming with you,” you had so prudently declared to Brunnhilde when she was recruiting hands for me to wipe out what all was left of Thanos after his defeat. But you had done far more than just slow them down. Your powers had healed the Asgardian when she was cut open, restoring her to full strength, your knowledge and ability to be patient while learning how Nebula’s mechanics worked had saved her a great deal of trouble more than once. You might have not appeared to be a warrior- you still were not, in my eyes- but you were a far more valuable asset than any of your Midgardian friends gave you credit for.
“Here,” I tossed a bottle of water your way, “before you die of dehydration. Would be quite an insult for someone who survived a month in space fighting off leviathans.”
A snicker comes out of your throat. “Thanks,” you send the words floating my way before consuming the liquid within two quick breaths.
Your eyes travel to Korg, who is keeping away the medical supplies and moving his arm up and down as a painful grunt escapes him.
“What’s wrong?” You get off the table, wobbling a little, visible only to the one who observes you, forgetting about your own injury as you move towards the blue pile of rocks.
“Looks like I pulled a pebble somewhere when I carried you. You are not as light as I estimated.”
Amusement fills up to my brows as Korg’s uncalculated words leave his rocky mouth, only realising his mistake too late.
“I’m so sorry, Korg,” you apologise, just like I expect, your fingers tracing your matted hair behind your ears.
“Oh, I uhh…I did not mean it that way.” Doesn’t matter my friend. The shot has already been fired.
“I-It’s all right,” you assure the dense rock as your tone gathers a certain edge while your legs keep shifting the weight between them.
The door to the control room opens, breaking the awkward silence surrounding the two of you.
“I have set the course for our next target. We’ll reach there in a week’s time,” Nebula declares as she picks up a ripe golden strawberry and bites into the blue flesh.
“Perfect.” That’s all you say before you saunter off to the lower level, to the living quarters, still trying to cloak the pain it is causing you to move your wounded leg. A fine actor, you are.
__________
If I have been as observant as I give myself credit for, you are supposed to be in the shower bay ridding yourself of the muck you gathered by your still sloppy fighting form before you go off to find your humanly-needed rest. As always, turns out I am right.
The sturdy mauve crystals- much to my distaste- carefully but cleverly dividing the shower blocks reflect the lights everywhere in here. The sound of water cascading down on to the brown tiles in the blocks echoes throughout. Brunnhilde comes out of the shower in her naked form, smiling at me through the mirror, justly unashamed, proud even, as she leaves trails of water droplets up to the sink beside me.
“You are going to scare someone off like that someday,” I state, locking my eyes with her through the mirror. Her response is a cackle, which I am sure has made you jump out of your thoughts as your previously still figure standing under the shower- which had not been turned on yet- finally makes a sound, the kimoyo beads on your wrist colliding involuntarily with the crystal walls surrounding you as you reach for the knobs to let out the strong gust of water.
“That’s the plan, my frosty raven.”
“As for you,” she goes on, brushing the wetness off her hair, intentionally getting it all over my jacket that I just took off, “I feel your head still hasn’t taken my words. You should be enjoying a steamy shower by now. Not alone.”
“My head doesn’t bother with undesirable garbage,” I disclose while revealing myself of my breastplate, feeling my skin breathe in the humidity surrounding us. I can clearly see her eyes linger on my form through the steam-covered mirror. “Like what you see?” I smirk.
“Pity what I see.” Her brow jumps up, mocking me. “Your loathing is far more ripped than your muscles, Laki. Believe me when I say that you should be putting the better of the two to good use.”
She wraps herself in her grey robe and with one last glare of judgement, walks out.
The hot blast of water over my skin burns it in the most satiating manner. The coldness of my body readily lets the heat penetrate through as my aching limbs feel themselves dilate the acid cramping them up. It is only after every last bit of chaos has been wiped away by the heat that I realise your presence a thin violaceous wall away from me, resting your palm over the obscures of the crystal right where my fist is, it being the only thing near to explicit compared to your blur figure standing there. It only takes a shift of coloured shadows to know you comprehend the same thought as your palm moves away into the same blur.
I stand there, turned in your direction, wondering what you might think of me at this moment; and then wonder some more as to why it matters what you might think before your voice catches me off guard.
“Here,” you announce just as something flies from above in my direction, barely missing my head, my hands catching it before it can hit the floor. The tube says 'oil and damage control with lasting strawberry fragrance’.
“For your hair.”
The lilac around your figure changes a shade as you wrap yourself in your black robe and step out of the shower, leaving me to weigh the options of risking my hair to be touched by this 'shampoo’.
__________
I deliver a lazy knock on your door before opening it. It is evident from your disposition you don’t hear me come in as your robed figure rests on the ledge, your fingers playing with the edge of your teacup while your eyes look out into the darkness of space. Your wound is on full display, still not taken care of.
“You haven’t healed yourself yet.”
My voice breaks you out of a trance with a jolt, making the contents of your cup spill over your robe.
“I didn’t mean to…allow me,” my hands move on their own, causing the drink spilt over you to disappear.
“Thank you,” you respond with a smile that just reaches your eyes before disappearing into a muddiness of emotions as you steal your gaze away from mine, making me wonder if you can read the threads of doubt in my mind about you giving a damn about yourself while you float through space.
“It’s one of the harms of being a healer,” you put the words together mildly as you clear your bed of the pictorial novels you seem quite fond of, making way for me to sit, “we forget that we have the ability to heal ourselves by our very own hands. Often, it’s the pain that makes us forget the latent powers inside us.”
I look at you, frozen in the unmitigated wonderment of the extent of knowledge that your words carry which I am positive even you do not know of. Pain does make us forget that we are more than we seem to be.
“Then all you have to do is allow someone else to help.”
If my conscience had a physical form, it would mock me at the words that had just left my mouth all the while laughing at the irony.
You look at me with hesitation before slowly setting yourself on the edge of the bed. I drag the cushioned chair out from under the table in the corner beside your bed and place it in front of you before planting myself in it.
The wound is from the custom daggers the Chitauri used for close-range combat that had their hilts marked with poison- that travelled to the edges the more they sat in a Chitauri’s hand during a stand-off- which could kill a bilgesnipe and injure a God if the dagger ever went fully inside an organ. They only took them out when they were going for a kill even if it meant sacrificing themselves in turn. The fact that you had made a predator come to its last resort was making me question my judgment of your skills now. What had you done to invite such wrath? Was it the underlying power Strange and the Black Widow had warned me about? Or was it your wrath that I had the honour of seeing once when we had been abducted by the space pirates?
The edges of your cut, marked with the healing concoction, had already done the work of neutralizing the effects of the poison but sadly the magical chemical cocktail was not an antidote to the pain that lingered in the neurons for the next five hours from the poison. I must say I am surprised at your composure as you sit in front of me, clad in nothing but two layers of black, your orbs glittering with an innocent curiosity for what I am about to do. How can you sit there, with such calm while your insides feel pricks of needles every five seconds in a new part of your body? The thoughts in my mind only drive me further to ask myself if you had suffered to such an extent before. I even ask myself if you were numb to pain before recalling the time you had nearly crushed Korg when he thought it was a good idea to punch you in the face regardless of you asking him not to aim for it during the training affair.
“May I?” I ask for permission to go ahead, my fingers hovering over and around your exposed thigh carrying the wound. You adjust yourself a little, your heavy eyes locked on to mine before you give your approval.
I feel you flinch just a bit as my fingers land on your naked skin with a purpose while my own flesh feels a questionable vibration on coming in contact with your warmth. My fingers graze over the hairs on your thigh, feeling the tiny tingles under them being left by the provoking miniature strands, till they find what they are looking for. We both do not seem to realise that we are holding our breaths as we follow the movement of my hands getting to work, one keeping itself under your hefty supple thighs to hold them in place while the other spreads itself over the wound, nesting over the perfect skin torn apart without a thought. Familiar glowing warmth starts to emanate with a green hue from my palms and a slight gasp escapes from your blood-gushed lips, forcing me to look up to catch the green lighting up your amazed ocean beds again.
“It’s sorcery.” I find myself correcting any doubts you have in your mind that would be considering me similar to your kind in some way.
You exhale and smile, to my surprise. “It…looks beautiful. It feels beautiful.”
I smile in acknowledgement. You really are innocent. Either that or you simply appreciate this complexity unfolding before your eyes; you had been earth’s most powerful sorcerer’s apprentice once, after all.
Within seconds, the torn skin is repaired and your thigh is marked with one thin line- a light remnant of the wound that was there.
Your tiny fingers come down to graze over the smooth line, unintentionally touching my cold ones, sending an unravelling spark through my fingers. Is that how healers are supposed to work? Unintentional waves of a warm ocean washing through you, starting from wherever you touched them or wherever they touched you? Warm oceans are wonderful, I must admit; curing, even; but I cannot dive into one without considering what destruction would I be inviting in, leaving everything in my vicinity marred, or have me marred with things I would rather not have been investing myself in, though the former seems more likely to happen in reality.
What are you thinking Loki? Did you really think about a human just now? Of all the life forms existing in this vast cosmic ocean, you were thinking of someone with such a frail existence? You were thinking of love and heartache for someone whose species kills and exploits each other every day for fun; someone whose time of life is not close to even half of yours. What has gotten into you, Loki?
Is it because of your powers? It had to be. This warmth is turning into a heated suffocated thought now.
“Thank you, Loki.”
Your heavy whisper breaks me from the accelerating dark hues of my speculation.
You say my name with a smile. It should be a crime by death where you come from to even show a hint of positive understanding towards my name. Yet, here you are, saying it with a texture of relief in your voice as your eyes search for something in mine.
I slowly let go of your skin from my grasp, the hairs doing the dance under my fingers in reverse.
“This could’ve been a deadly wound if not for the ointments and healing. You’re either getting careless or you have a death wish,” I theorise.
The smile on your lips fades, the slight tilt in your head vanishing as you straighten yourself.

“It wasn’t m-” you stop mid-sentence, a sigh eroding the tensed expressions on your face, “I’ll take care next time.”
“What is it?” I demand it out of you.
You do not look at me, your brows turning with concern as your hand tucks away your hair, now a clean mess drying. Gathering enough breath in your lungs, your eyes come back.
“Korg’s left side was open and a Chitauri had sneaked from behind him, aiming for his vitals. I was holding off two of them and in order to prevent the third one from killing him, I threw myself in its path, pushing him away from Korg in the heat of the moment and at the same time let go of the other two, making them hit their friend with the dagger instead. But I clearly didn’t notice the wound that son of a bitch marked me with before going down.”
Something tells me you must have been busy breaking some Chitauri skulls at the moment to even notice until the rush faded, love.
“Were you even in a condition to think?” I try to tone down my sarcasm as much as I can but it slips, the natural flowing stream that it is.
But you do not notice. Your eyes looking at the void lit up by burning gases outside.
“In that chaos and uninterrupted madness? God, I hope not.”
Your voice is nearly a whisper and still, it seems apt to call it a melancholic melody.
“I’d rather not think about the consequences of an individual’s lust for power in the name of 'balance’. It’s all the same. History repeating itself. Peace and chaos running throughout the vessels of this world taking turns. We, you and I, caught up in the transition period, wondering when we will be the lucky ones to take our last breath.”
Brunnhilde’s words fill my mind.
It was you.
“But,” you smile with sadness in your eyes, turning towards mine, “it still makes you think in your fleeting moments if you will ever find a few moments of love or happiness not restricted or restrained by the chains of the chaos unfolding around you.”
Everything around us pauses, frozen inside this moment. I sit there, wondering why I feel the need to let your words sink into my core. I even make the bold mistake of stealing a glance at your lips, parted with a question even you do not know, inviting my presence.
Brunnhilde’s vinyl breaking into a song somewhere down the corridors breaks us out of this ludicrous trance.
“Get some rest,” I insist, “We have a lot to prepare ourselves for, starting tomorrow.”
I get up and you mirror my movement, walking towards the door.
“Hey, Loki, is everything all right?” you ask before I am out of your door, making me turn in a bit of a confused contemplation.
“Yes, why?”
“Oh, no it’s just that you’ve never come to check up on me before, not that I’m complaining,” you shrug and give me a hint of a smile. For a moment I think I see your cheeks turn their colour.
All of this catches me off guard. I don’t even grasp the movement of my legs shifting the weight while trying to maintain my gaze on you.
“Everything is fine,” is all I let out before walking away towards my quarters in an uninvited and infuriating daze.