Heatstroke
It was so hot, it was hard to think.
Loki had never liked the hot. While the rest of Asgardians basked in it, and loved to take every ray, to get a healthy golden tan, Loki had shied away from the and the heat of summers. He didn't feel invigorated after being in the sun, he didn't enjoy it. The heat made his head hurt, and if he was too long in the sun he got sick. The other Asgardians had laughed at him, called him odd, different.
It made sense now, why he was so bad at heat, and yet had such high tolerance for the cold so many others despised. It was the cold that invigorated him, that made him feel stronger, revitalised. And the heat... the heat just sucked the life out of him, made him dizzy and weak, his whole being burned when it was a sweet embrace for others. Because how do you kill a frost giant? Well, with fire, obviously.
Fire would have been a mercy compared what he was being sunject to. Being slow roasted in the sun, like a sad blue chicken. Oh, his head hurt so much he couldn't even come up with an elegant analogy. That was how bad it was.
Some anti Avengers group had caught him and decided to chain him to the roof of skyscraper, in the middle of July. He had been there for hours, unable to free himself after being dosed with some sort of paryltic, just getting hotter and hotter under the sun. It was about two.thirty, and he still had a lot of hours of sun. And it was just so hot...His head was starting to not work properly.
Sometimes he forgot where he was, or the fact that he couldn't leave. He would try to tug at his chains, wondering why the hell am I here when it's so sunny? A couple of times he tried to call for his mom, because he was feeling a bit wrong. Must be the heat. He had closed his eyes a long time ago to prevent more damag, but he lept opening them, forgetting where he was. He felt nauseated, but there was to throw up. It was puzzling and continuously horrifying situation, and it seemed to have no end. The heat was unrelenting, and his limbs were dying a slow painful death.
Yes, to make it more horrible, those guys had changed him into a tank top and some shorts, so that there was more white skin to burn in the sun. It was terrible, but at least he wasn't wearing all his layers of black leather – those bad guys had helped him without noticing. If he'd been wearing his usual getup he'd been dead from hyperthermia a long time ago. Or maybe the meant to do it: like this, his agony was longer.
He'd stopped sweating a long time ago, and skin looked red in the sun. That was probably bad. A normal Loki would have freaking out and thinking of any and every possible way in which he could get out of this awful situation, but too-long-in-the-sun Loki was too light-headed for such complicated thoughts. All he knew was that he wanted his brother, and some ice cream, and maybe a nice dip in a cold pool.
He felt so light-headed, so out of it... He was breathing rapidly, not realising what was going on. Not realising that if he didn't get out of sun in the next minutes the damage done by it may be too much too reverse. May be it was for the best, Loki thought as he closed his eyes. At least, that way, he wouldn't be so hot anymore.
**
This was bad, so so bad.
Some of the other Avengers had asked Rhodey to retrieve Loki, as he'd been taken (like some others) by an Anti Avengers group. Get him in that adress, untie him from wherever he was and try to fix whatever tortures they had prepared for the guy. If he was honest, Rhodey expected to find Loki surrounded by the bodies of those who had tried to hurt him, with a malevolent smile on his face. That was how he usually pictured Loki: malevolent, scheming, vicious.
The other seemed to have forgiven him for his past, and some of them were even very friendly with the guy, but Rhodey always pictured him like the first time he came to Earth, grandiloquent, imposing, evil. What if this was just a long con? There was something shifty about that guy, and they had plenty of shifty. No need to add more.
What he found was nothing like what he'd pictured.
Loki was chained to the roof of a skycraper, and seemed to having been left there somee time ago, as he looked red and terrible. Shit, didn't Tony say that Loki was actually from some ice planet? He started undoing the chains, before anything else. Seeing chained up people hurt his heart.
“Who... who is...?” Loki tried to say, the effects of the paralytic having disappeared, but those of the heat stroke fully hitting him.
“This is Rhodes, Loki, Sam and the others sent me here for you.”
Loki moaned. There was something important he needed to say, but he lacked the strength to say, so many words. No, he couldn't give up just yet.
“There is... tracker... in my... in my... neck. If I move.... they come. Drones and attack teams... too many.”
“But if we take the tracker out and leave it here it will seem that you haven't moved. Thanks for telling me, Loki, I know I'd rather not get swarmed by enemies while the nearest backup is half an hour away.”
So, first things first, he located the scar from where they had put in the tracker (and god, was his skin burning up, this was so not good) and took it out using some his suit's features, trying to be as gentle as possible. Loki was on the verge of unconsciousness, and Rhodey knew that heat stroke could lead to coma. No, thank you.
After he did so, he assessed the situation. His skin looked fairly bad, his heartbeat was too fast, his breathing shallow. This was a code red situation and so he asked for assistance.
“Heimdall, get me home.”
But Rhodey wasn't Heimdall. (He whished he was Heimdall, that man tall and handsome, had a great voice and could see the whole universe.) He added confusion to list of things wrong with Loki. It was a fairly bad heatstroke, bad enough that they couldn't wait for the others in the others in the sun.
Rhodey had been deployed in places where heatstroke was a very constant and present threat, and he knew how to deal with it. They needed ice, some fan, and preferably some showers to bring Loki's temperature down, so he took Loki in his arms and flew him into one of the offices of the skyscraper. The a/c was good, but not good enough.
“Oh my god, Avengers!” A lady in one of the cubicles exclaimed “What have you done to poor Loki? He's my daughter's favourite.”
Rhodey smiled despite the situation.
“It was some bad guys. Now, ma'am, do you know if there are any showers in this building? It's an emergency.”
Another woman from a nearby cubicle took her head and answered.
“There's a gym three floors down, I figure they'll have showers. Oh gods, poor Loki indeed, he looked like a tomato, the poor soul. My foavourite's the Captain though, please tell him Maura says hi. I mean, that man is dreamy.”
Rhodey left the ladies to their gossip and flew to the gym, breaking in without any second thought. Loki hadn't opened his eyes in too long. Thankfully, the showers were easy to find, and the gym goers left them some space. The super new war machine suit disappeared (well, that wasn't the word, but Rhodey couldn't care to remember. Retracted? Compacted?) and so he was able to open the shower and put maneuver Loki under it. Soft and slow water at first, more afterwards.
The redness would take a while receded completely, but skin wasn't burning so much. Good.
Loki sluggishly opened his eyes again, awakened by the blessed feeling of cool water on him.
“Loki? Can you recognise me?”
Please don't let there be any brain damage, please!
“I do, Colonel Rhodes. Thank you for taking me out of the heat. I really hate it.”
Emergency neutralised.
It was three days later that Rhodey and Loki were playing some computer games on Stark tower (he had misjudged the guy, I mean the guy told him about the tracker even when he was half dead from heatstroke so that he wouldn't be caught unawares in an attack, and remembered his rank, which was something a lot of more official Avengers didn't) when they saw a couple of familiar faces in video chat.
“Hello! We were redirected here by...someone. It's Sylvia and Maura from Dreegar incorporated, you flew in some days ago.” The ladies from the cubicles from the other day. “We just called to check in how Loki was doing?”
“I am much improved, thank you for your concern.”
“Well, that's good to hear, dear. You keep yourself cool, have a popsicle if you need to.”
Loki couldn't help smiling.
“And could you say hello to my daughter? She's a great a fan of yours, and she was very worried when I told her that you flew in all sunburnt and passed out. To the camera, we're recording this, aren't we, Maura? Her name is Kaylynn.”
“Hello, then, Kaylynn, Loki here. As you can see I am totally recovered, and very touched for your concern. I thank you for your support and wish you the very best in any endavours. And again thank you for your aprreciation, you have no idea of how much that means to me.” And a smile.
“Oh goodness, that was perfect!”
“She's going to freak OUT!”
Sometimes, being an Avenger was terrible. People paralysed you and left of on the merciless sun, burning like a sad blue chicken. But other times...
Other times it was the best thing in the world.