Overdose
“Loki, you've got to see this.”
Val said, coming in without knocking, as she usually did. (In one or two occasions she even had to bring down the door, but there was something she really had to share, and Loki had a tendency to lock himself).
In this occasion, Loki couldn't see anything because he was thrown on the floor of his room, in a limbo between consciousness and oblivion, blue foam coming out out in uneven painful sounding gurgles, half his face stained from a profuse nosebleed. His limbs were twitching softly, slowly, as if they were too tired for a proper twitch. As if he was giving up already.
“Ah, shit.”
Val found some hyperthrexyn laying on the floor, and wondered how the hell had Loki managed to find any in this shitty forgotten planet. But if there someone that could find a deep space drug while away from any supplier, that was Loki. He was... well, magic. Although he didn't look it right then, slowly chocking on his own vomit and foamy saliva, eyes looking at nowhere closing and opening uncoordinated.
“Why do you do this to yourself?” Val said under her breath, before going to the floor to try and help him.
She moved his head to the side, cleared his airways and looked for some first aid supplies. Someone else would have surprised, horrified, panicked. If it had been Thor who found then everyone else in the building would have heard his pleas for help, noticed the thunder in the sky. The mortals would probably have been fairly scared, probably, specially any of the younger ones.
But she had seen too much in her lifetime, she knew that Loki... Well, he was unstable, to say the least. It was only a matter of time before something like this happened, as he especially had a penchant for getting himself killed. On purpose more than not, she suspected. So no, finding him OD'd wasn't that big a surprise for her.
So she cleaned his face, softly and slowly, and carried him to the bed. Loki tried to fight her, probably not aware of who she was, or what she was doing. As she prepared and milk and salt solution that was supposed to help detox, she could hear him letting out some sad noises, something between a sob and a moan. He probably was feeling like crap, but not aware enough to control his reaction to it.
Val wanted to be angry, to tell him that he deserved it for being so careless or so stupidly self-loathing. Wanted to hope that this would teach him a lesson, that he bought this pain and should be eating it. But... she was just saddened. She thought that things were better now, and that Loki had left his self harming ways in the past.
Giving the milk was hell. He couldn't very well swallow, and tried to fight her, so most of it ended up in his clothes and in the bed (and she had to clean him again, and goddamnit she was Valkyrie, not a cleaner), but he seemed to relax a bit afterwards, the twitching stopped and he fell asleep.
She waited by his side until he woke up, cancelling everything she was supposed to do. Maybe some other time she would have called Thor and let him deal with this... But not this time. Not after she had found him half dead. This time he was going to hear her.
When Loki opened his eyes many hours later the world was fuzzy and blurry and there was a familiar face with a sour expression looking at him.
“What.. happened?” His mouth was dry, his stomach was unsettled and his head seemed to want to kill him.
“You had so much hyperthrexyn you nearly died, that's what happened.”
“Did I?” He said, innocently, while painstakingly sitting up on his bed. (How did he get there?) “Oops.”
“I’m supposed to believe this was an accident?”
“It would be easier for everyone involved if you did.” Loki said, but knew that ship had sailed. “Maybe I didn't know which were my limits?”
Val raised an eyebrow.
“For years people came into Sakaar and were melted, or thrown in to the fight, and I watched them. You came in and knew exactly which buttons to touch to make the Grandmaster make you his favourite in days. So you're smart enough for that but you don't know your way around a simple drug? No, that's not it. It was on purpose”
Loki avoided her gaze, looked down on his bed.
“Why?”
Loki said something that was too low to hear.
“Come again?” Val asked, in a tone that left no room for disagreement.
“It's stupid.”
“I know it's stupid, it had to be, but I still want to hear it.”
Loki sighed, looked up to the ceiling.
“Nobody likes me here... nobody needs me. I just wanted to forget about everything, you know, forget myself.”
Val's expression screamed “Really?” without the need of any words. But she would have to tread carefully.
“First of all, people like you. That Spider kid likes you, the red witch respects you, Nebula loves to spend time with you. And Thor needs you, you'll the only thing he has left. And me too, in a way. So that's stupid. And there are other better ways to forget yourself and you know it.”
“Like you and your drinks?”
“I do drink a lot, but I don't outdo myself and you know it.”
There was a tense silence, and Loki wanted the world to swallow him.
“I understand, okay, I understand that sometimes you don't even need a reason to want to drink yourself to death, or put yourself in the line of fire. Sometimes you just want to go, stop feeling, stop having to handle all the... bullshit this life has. But you need to find another way, something safer... or some control mechanisms to you know, stop you from doing something stupid like this.”
“Sometimes I want to be stupid. Sometimes I want to hurt myself.”
“Well, you don't. Even if you want to, okay? You come to me, you go to Nebula, you stab some inanimate object. You go to the mortal called Luis that always know how to lift your spirits. But you have to stop this.”
Loki's eyes were bright as Val kept speaking. Someone else would tell her that this was too much, and to let him recover before continuing. But she had no intention of stopping.
“You, me, Thor, we've lost too much already. I lost all my sisters, you lost your identity, and we all lost our planet. Now, the only home I have left is you two. Don't take that away from me. From your brother. From yourself.”
Loki was crying, but still smiled.
“Who knew you had a heart?”
“If you tell anyone about this conversation I'll cut you into little pieces. If you are thinking any of this.... shit, picture my face say NO, and just don't, ok? Find another way.”
Loki nodded, smiled at her.
And so she left, leaving him to rest and maybe make some decisions about his self care. A better one, or else.
“Don't let me down, Lackey.”
“I'm not planning to.”
For that moment, it was good enough.