Burned
“Shuri? Are you in the lab? We've got an incoming.”
T'Challa's voice came in her lab, above the music.
“An icoming what, brother? Missile? Puppy? What exactly is incoming?”
“Another broken man for you to fix.”
And this one was extra broken, as she saw when they came into the lab: her brother, the injured man, and the broken one's brother. She was going to need a lot of time to fix everything, it was clear. The man was tall, but folded on himself, moaning slightly, half of him covered in red-black burns, softly moaning and weakly spitting up blood.
“How is he even still awake?”
Her brother's voice spoke clearly next to her, although she hadn't seen him coming.
“This is a more complicated broken white man than usual, Shuri. He comes from another planet, he is... well, something similar to a god.”
“Are you kidding me right now?”
T'Challa shook his head.
“So some of your readings and data might not make sense for a human, because he isn't exactly human. Hence why regular hospitals wouldn't work and we needed your specific unparalleled magic touch.”
“Flatterer. Anything else I should know about?”
The brother's grave voice came from the entrance.
“Loki is from a frozen planet. He's specially sensitive to heat and intense light.”
“Shuri, this is Thor, King of Asgard.”
“Well, you sure are some premium white man, aren't you?”
T'Challa looked mortified, but Thor just smiled.
“I was hoping that you could fix my brother... he had a run in with some flame throwing waving maniacs and he's not been able to heal himself as usual. And he's in a lot of pain and...”
Loki tried to say something in the lines of “I can speak for myself” but all that came out was an strangled moan and some more blood. So maybe he couldn't speak for himself.
“Poor man. I am gonna to give you bath of the most soothing cream known to existence, you'll see. Uhmmmmm....”
Her brother took the hint. It was years and years of knowing each other.
“Yeah, sorry, Thor, but Shuri generally works better alone. Maybe we could ask Okoye about locating the people who did this to him?”
Thor just nodded, solemn, and Shuri could see all the anger and the power that were only barely being controlled. This was a powerful out of this world creature, a king, and a god, and an Avenger, and she was responsible for fixing up his little brother. Yikes.
“Well, handsome, let's see what we have here.”
What she had there was something she hadn't seen before, vitals, organs and elements she had never seen in her life, right before her eyes. An honest to god being from another planet, right before her. But before she could satisfy all of her scientific curiosity with this man, first she had to look after his wounds, fix him as she was supposed to.
The burns covered most of the left side of his: his left cheek and the left of his neck, nearly all of his left arm (there maybe would be reconstruction work needed in that arm) and a good part of his lower abdomen. She was doing some scans and looking for the most suitable meds when she realised something.... There was some sort of defense mechanism that was draining nearly half of his energy, slowing down everything.
What if she gave him even more sedatives so that he'd let go of that too? Maybe she shouldn't have (this was a prince from a land of gods, not exactly an inconspicuous guinea pig for her experiments) but she did, and the result was something she would never have expected.
“This guy is blue!”
Dark blue skin stretched all over that really tall guy, with weird lines on it. It was hypnotic, it was... beautiful and very outer space-y. Between her advanced tech and his enhanced healing (the guy was beating all sorts of records for regeneration and speed of healing, even if some of it would probably scar, specially in the arm and stomach) he was awake again in only three hours.
Awake and freaking out, looking not at this strange lab or at how quickly his wounds seemed to be disappearing (knitting themselves in a speed visible to the naked eye!) but at his own hands, at his own self.
“What did you do?” He asked in a strangled voice to Shuri, and his eyes were red, and he was hyperventilating.
“You were wasting all your energy just to look white, I had to turn it off to help your burns!”
“Bring it back! Bring it back!!”
He was looking more and more panicked, and Shuri was at a loss of what to do.
And then there was the sound of thunder and the brother came back, and blue boy tripped and fell to the floor and just tried to hide himself.
“What is going on?” Shuri asked Thor, afraid that she had unleashed some curse or something equally horrible. Afraid that she had hurt the guy while trying to help him.
“Loki is.... not used to his real skin. It's a shock for him, you see.”
“I was just trying to help him!”
Thor smiled, calmed her.
“It's not your fault that he's reacted like this, it's... a lengthy tale.”
“Well sum it up and tell me, because your brother is my patient and I pride myself on repairing them, not breaking them further so I'm going to need to fix him too.”
Thor sighed.
“Basically, Asgardians were told that Loki's kind, the Jotun were monsters that should be killed. And Loki thought he was Asgardian because Father never told him that he was really jotun. Realising it... well, it broke Loki a bit, as you said, and also realising that he'd never been told because his father thought that the truth was too horrible.”
“That's messed up.”
“Yes... I thought he was handling things better after his time as King... but...it would seem that he was only hiding himself, as usual. Loki?”
But Loki was hiding behind a model of a building, in a corner of his own making and refused to get out until he was able to go back to his usual self.
“Why? Why is it so important that you're white again? Your father was clearly a horrible person, no offense, and the people that matter from your family who matter don't care, right, Thunder?”
“Of course.”
“That's your brother and king saying it doesn't matter.”
Loki refused to look at her, not with those red eyes.
“You don't understand. The Ice Giants were monsters, savages.”
“Yeah, that sounds like one side of the story to me. We've been called savages too, by our enemies. They simply had to look beyond to see how much more we were... Probably, like you did with your Ice giant people.”
Loki closed his eyes and rested his head on the glass him. He had made a fool of himself in front of this Midgardian princess, seemed weak and childish and... It wasn't like he could pretend he wasn't Jotun now, he could only try and minimise the impact. Be better in other areas that weren't his outer appearance.
When he opened his eyes, there was a hand in front of him. He took it and got up, tried to compose himself, even if he had a hard time not jumping every time he saw his blue skin.
“I apologise for this, Princess Shuri.” (How had he gotten her name?) “I am not normally so...”
“It's okay, handsome. You're allowed to freak out after having half your body burned and then healed. But you shouldn't want to go back to white so much, I mean, I understand why, but really, this blue is so much more cooler. Pun absolutely intended.”
“Kind of you to say.”
“And...well... I did some readings on your blue skin and got some amazing data of the properties of this one and your temperature regulating system.”
Loki half smiled through his burned up face.
“A scholar princess? Just my kind of royal heir. Do tell me more about your findings.”
Shuri clapped in excitement.
“It's amazing, YOU'RE AMAZING, what you can do...”
Thor smiled in the background. Maybe something good had come out of all of this.