Chapter 62
Avengers Tower
August 2011
“Hold still,” the doctor snapped.
Loki resisted the urge to bare his teeth and tear away. He remembered another place and another time, another invasion of body and mind like this, when Thanos pinned him down and tortured him, bleeding him dry again and again over days to test the limits of Loki’s healing, to weaken his seidr until his mind was left bare and unprotected. Every muscle in Loki’s body was rock-hard with tension and it took all of his self-control to not jerk away from the needle again.
Dark red-purple blood trickled sluggishly from his veins.
“Has your core body temperature always been so low?” Dr. Banner asked absently, flicking through pages of data. “SHIELD records show Thor ran noticeably hotter than most humans, but you seem to do the opposite.”
“There is a wider variation on Asgard than here, I presume,” Loki said coldly. “I wouldn’t pretend to be an expert in human physiology.”
“Mmmm.” Banner seemed lost in the computer and the papers in the binder, unconcerned with Loki’s hostility. Loki glared at the blood slowly filling a small plastic bag and imagined clenching his fists and smashing the entire lab to bits.
The door slammed open and Jane Foster charged through. She obtained the general attitude and bearing of a battering ram when in pursuit of scientific advancement, much like Thor in battle, her brain entirely focused on her work and turned off from such paltry things as fear and risk. It was amusing.
“These readings are incredible,” she said. “You’re actually slightly altering the Higgs-Boson fields to manipulate matter. I didn’t even know that was possible. Can you teleport? This seems to suggest that quantum tunneling could be controlled on a much larger scale by your abilities, in which case I don’t understand how you haven’t set off a disruption in Higgs-Boson fields. Bruce, remember that conference, the hypothesis that Higgs-Boson could collapse? Quantum tunneling for instantaneous transport could reverse the Big Bang, collapse the universe in seconds back to nothing. If you can bring things with you when you teleport, then I need to send a sensor with you, gather more data–”
“Jane,” Banner interrupted. “Perhaps not at this precise moment? I’ve only just gotten him still enough to take a sample.”
Foster blinked, nodded. “Yeah, I’d love some,” she said.
Banner rolled his eyes and went back to monitoring his blood draw.
Loki rubbed his temple with his free hand.
When the plastic bag was full, Banner carefully slid the needle out of Loki’s arm and pressed a small amount of white absorbent material against the break in the skin. “Keep pressure there,” he advised.
Loki used a spark of seidr to heal the wound.
“Are we done here?” he asked coldly. He saw no point in pretending to be happy about this. They all knew how he’d resisted letting them have his blood. My blood. They had no right–
Loki clenched his teeth. They did have a right. A non-invasive procedure, for scientific purposes, as part of a bargain, taken from someone who had single-handedly killed hundreds of Midgardians… he had to admit that it was a valid point. A small price to pay.
But he would not, could not, allow them to discover the differences between himself and Thor.
“We’re done,” Banner confirmed.
“How long will it take before the results are returned?” Loki asked indifferently.
Banner shrugged. “I have a lot of other things going on, and it’s difficult for our technology to analyze Asgardian tissue, based on what we’ve done with Thor’s… A week or two, maybe more.”
“Mmm,” Loki said noncommittally. “Dr. Foster, I trust your initial results will be adequate for some study?”
“Yes,” she said without looking up from her desk. Her workspace was even more of a disaster than Darcy’s. “Yeah, this is… This is great.”
“I’ll be going, then,” Loki said.
Neither of them answered.
He shook his head and strode out of the lab.
Two weeks. He had two weeks to find a way to tamper with the data. He couldn’t destroy the sample; they would notice, of course. He would have to alter the data somehow to make it resemble Thor’s, after the tests were finished but before Banner had a chance to analyze the results.
It would not be easy, and the stakes were high.
Loki smiled thinly. He certainly appreciated the challenge.