Broken neck
Loki didn't know where he was, he didn't even know if he was. The last thing he remembered before waking up was Thanos holding him and crushing his neck. And after that, nothing. The unending void of death, that had taking him once and for all. Or so he thought.
He couldn't breathe properly, only a small sliver of air passing through his mangled airways. It was the bare minimum needed for him to stay awake, but not enough for him to have a clear mind. All he knew was pain. He couldn't move his head or his arms without his neck exploding in white hot pain, his eyes filling themselves with tears.
If he was dead why did it still hurt so much? If he wasn't, why? He seemed to be some sort of white room, no windows, no doors, no furniture. Maybe this was hell, the punishment for all that he'd done, for all his wrongdoings. Now he would have to spend eternity trapped between for white walls, with a broken neck, receiving almost no air and slowly losing his mind. Seemed like a fair punishment.
For so long, Loki wished he had stayed dead. Oblivion was much preferable to this unending agony. He thought of Thor, but knew he probably would never see him again. Even if he truly was alive, he was supposed to be dead, so nobody would look for him, nobody was going to come to rescue him. They'd figure his body got lost in space and hold a memorial, and move on. Someone may even be happy that he was finally dead for real.
Inside his white cell, he couldn't do much. Besides his neck, most of the rest of his body was still asleep, heavy, dead. It was getting better with time (unlike his neck, which was a constant source of agony) and at some point he even managed to put his back against one of the walls, get into a sitting position. It was... relatively better, having something to hold his head even if he still struggled.
Opening his eyes was a struggle, but so was keeping them closed, with that pain wakening him constantly, never letting him rest. Sometimes it was hard not choke in his own saliva, it was hard not to cry. He wanted to scream, but only pitiful whines came out. He hated his body, he hated his cell, he hated his cell. The white was eating up everything, everything he was, everything he had been, any and all hope he could have for the future.
He just wished for the pain to stop, but all hope seemed too far-fecthed, too impossible. He couldn't move, couldn't get out and no one else was going to get him out. He was doomed to an eternity of pain, solitude and sorrow. The fact that he probably deserved this didn ease his torment.
Thanos had taken away his voice, his body, his everything, and left him in hell to rot.
Loki wished he'd never been born, and cursed his neck a thousand million times. The pain was so overwhelming, never letting up, never letting him rest, only breaking him more and more as time passed.
Time passed slowly, painfully slowly... but it never ended.
The only sound in that cruel white cell was his sobbing.
He was in hell, forever.
And his neck hurt. It hurt oh so much.
----
People were happier as everyone who had died in the snap (plus Gamora) had been retrieved from the sould stone, undoing the effects of Thanos' terrible snapping his fingers. Of course, there had been some losses – all the Wakandan soldiers that died before the snap, all the civil victims from Thanos' and his lackeys... including Vision, Heimdall and Loki.
So now the Avengers' task was try to undo the damage Thanos had done as much as possible. Redo buildings, release prisoners, find any and every way in which they could help to try and get things working again, to move on from the trauma as best as possible. It wasn't an easy job, and it meant still being focused on all the horrors that had happened, not just in the world but to them as well, but that's what heroes are for, right?
Hulk and Bucky were looking into some facilities that Proxima Midnight and some of the other of piece of evidence they could use to construct better defense mechanisms against this kind of alien. Most of the places were fairly empty, they left some gadgets behind but nothing else, but one....
“PEOPLE INSIDE!” Hulk said, even if the place where they were seemed empty.
“There's no one here, big guy.”
“DOWN”
Hulk said, and smashed the floor. A younger Bucky would have been surprised, at least taken aback. But 100-year-old Bucky you had decided to go with the flow.
Under them there was some odd white place, filled with rooms with no windows, and in each of them there was someone... special. Someone that was supposed to be dead, someone that had in fact been dead, sometimes buried even... This was Thanos' room of last-resort secret weapons. People he had killed but brought back when things started going south, to use against the Avengers with some help from the mind stone... But he had no time to use them, and they had lain forgotten in those white rooms.
But because of the means he had used to bring them back none of them had died.
Heimdall was there, and so was the boy called Quicksilver, who were both very glad to see someone else, to be able to get out of that white hell.
Some of the other cells were empty, or had strange looking objects they would send back to Stark's. And in the last cell...
Someone was looking at them through red rimmed eyes, someone with dark eyes and a blackened violet neck and delicate features.
“LOKI!” Hulk roared.
Bucky tried to remember what he knew.
“Loki is bad, right? The reason the Av-”
“LOKI GOOD NOW! LOKI REVENGER LIKE HULK.”
“No problem. I was bad once upon a time too, I get it.”
Hulk took the still half dead looking Loki in his arms and outside of that cell, Loki managed to finally rest, sleep.
Thor was so excited, it took a lot of Avengers to stop him from enveloping his still-in-critical-condition brother in a bone crashing hug.
“What's that thing... in his neck?” He asked, once the euphoria passed.
Dr. Cho explained to him that his body had been too busy getting all his limbs and insides coming back from necrosis to fix his main injury, the neck, and the neck brace he was wearing was supposed to help speed the healing, minimize the pain and avoid him hurting himself any further. It was a horrid contraption, full of plastic and making Loki look like some sort of robot... but who cared, if this meant he had his brother back.
They also got him on some industrial-power painkillers and some IVs to replenish everything he had lost since that fateful in the Asgardian ship when they faced Thanos. And now he got to wake up in a universe without the Titan's poisonous influence, in a world that was being rebuilt – and he got to wake up as a hero that gave his life trying to do something good, who faced an enormous threat and made a right choice.
He got to wake up in a world where he had place among the heroes, and that wasn't in the verge of collapse anymore. A better world.
When Loki did wake up, there was no more white, and something was supporting his mangled neck.The pain was only a shadow of what it had been, a hum in the background instead of the constant scream it had been.
“Who...? How...?”
“You're free, brother. And you will be healed in no time, rest assured.”
Loki's eyes welled up, but this time it was tears of joy. He thought he was done for, he thought he would be left alone in hell forever, and now he was given a new chance to breathe, to see, to live.
An unknown soldier looking blue-eyed man looked at him fondly.
“You can breathe now, soldier. We are back here again, against all odds. Alive.”