A/N:
"Wrecked" is a SEQUEL to the story "Damaged", which can be found by clicking on my profile, or going to fanfiction DOT net/s/7076434/1/Damaged .
"Damaged" should be read first. It is the story of how Loki, after his fall into the vortex, recovered the use of his body and mind with the help of a human girl named Rachel. It was written before The Avengers came out, but fits neatly between Thor and The Avengers.
"Wrecked" was written and published before the release of Thor: The Dark World. It will almost certainly turn out to be incompatible with that movie, so consider this a deviating timeline after The Avengers.
In the year since Loki left her, Rachel had considered using the coin many times. Silly impulses, for the most part. They came when she was off her guard. Like when she woke in the middle of the night and stretched out a casual arm, expecting it to fall across Loki's cool, narrow ribcage, only to find herself alone in bed.
Or when practicing for work, watching her short fingers twinkle along the piano keys. She'd smile at the memory of Loki's long, rake-thin body perched beside her on the bench, boyish fascination glowing from his sculpted features, and consider calling him back for one more session.
Or when she walked alone at night and caught a glimpse of someone, any old most-likely-harmless person, closer than two blocks away. She'd remember the attack she'd suffered in her apartment, and her blood would scream in her ears: Use it! They can't hurt you if he's here!
But Loki was a god. A real one. And he'd promised the coin would only work once. So Rachel had treasured it, saved it for a true time of need, an emergency only magic could solve. It was a genie's lamp with two wishes used up, and its final use had to be a good one.
The time came.
Rachel's brother Rob lay on a hospital bed, surrounded by a nurses and a crash cart, quietly dying.
He'd been unconscious for a month, ever since Loki's attack on Manhattan, actually. One of the Leviathan monsters had tried to make a sharp turn near the apartment Rachel and her brother shared, and it had grazed the building. A piece of rebar, pulled down with immense force by the weight of a refrigerator-sized chunk of concrete, had sliced through Rob's waist from behind like a scythe, severing his spine, all his lower back muscles, and his intestines.
Still, Rachel had waited, because for a time, the surgeons had been hopeful. Her brother wouldn't walk again, but he would likely survive, since he'd gotten through the critical first forty-eight hours.
But infection set in.
Staring at the thin ring of scar tissue around her pinky finger, the digit that had regrown from a stump in two weeks, thanks to Loki's interference, Rachel decided it was time to use her wish. She'd get one more medical miracle.
One more glimpse of that ghostly skin, those ancient green eyes.
She pricked her thumb and rubbed the coin with her blood, front and back.
Turned it in her hand three times.
Said the magic word: "Loki."
And nothing happened.
Nothing at all.
The hallway grew cold as she waited, an hour, two, Rob was cresting, his heartbeat reappearing again and again, there was still time…
But Loki had told one more lie.
He never came.
And Rachel's brother died.
Should it have been a surprise that Loki had failed to keep his promise? There was no pretending, now, that Rachel didn't know exactly what he was. The Loki. God of Mischief, God of Lies, mass murderering psychopath.
Maybe he was dead. Executed for his crimes.
She'd seen the cell phone footage – everybody had – of Loki in chains and muzzle, heartbreaking gaze fixed on his enormous blonde brother, just before they'd burst into the sky in a snap of rainbow light.
Rachel doubted it, though. She'd gotten herself good and educated on Norse mythology, and knew that the Aesir court denizens forgave Loki's mischief as regularly as they passed the salt.
The rejection stung; the disappointment left her mouth dry and sour-tasting.
It was like two deaths instead of one.
Still, Rachel didn't miss work that night. Missing performances, no matter how good the excuse, was career suicide on Broadway. Especially in the orchestra pit, where a pianist was as easy to replace as a violin string. Plus, work was a welcome distraction.
The show was My Fair Lady, and it pushed three hours. Three hours in the pit, staring at the black-and-white notes, the black-and-white keys.
Rachel made it two and a half hours, then grief and exhaustion set in. There was a warping, swirling sensation, and all the white turned green. The black pooled into a set of small, bottomless pupils set in emerald eyes. There was a muffled scream. A ripping pain in her shoulders.
The fit passed, and Rachel found herself being pulled to her feet by the cellist. She'd fainted in the middle of "Get Me to the Church on Time," which was, thank god, a loud and busy enough song that it could handle a dropped piano part.
Her alternate made it to the bench before "Without You," and she was sent home, shaking and nauseated, crying quietly.
On the subway, it happened again.
Green everywhere. Eyes. That scream, a desperate, crunching, back-of-the-throat sound, the sound a movie chainsaw victim might make if her mouth were covered in duct tape. Again, there was the ripping sensation in Rachel's shoulders, and this time it spread to the back of her head.
Instinctively, Rachel wrenched forward, away from the pain, and she regained consciousness on her feet in the middle of the subway car. At least she'd waked in time for her stop.
At night, the sensation came three more times. Worse each time – the screams more gut-churning, the pain more acute, as if she were being flayed, and the eyes burning further into her.
Pleading, manic, tear-filled eyes.
Each time the wave of sensation came, she tensed and fought, yanked herself from the hallucination, and came back to reality panting and sweating.
It could have been a side effect of the accumulated trauma of the last month, the last year. A reaction to the awful minutes on the phone with her parents, telling them about Rob, the loss of hope.
But she knew it wasn't.
This was magic. She knew its scent now. Magic gone wrong. The useless coin still sat in her pajama pocket, warm to the touch, and she considered throwing it out the window.
Instead, she went to sleep with it clutched in her fist.
Asleep and dreaming, she was unprepared for the next wave of pain. It swamped her, confused her, and her swimming brain seemed to spin. Instead of staring into those desperate eyes, she seemed to be staring out of them; she saw herself, as if in a mirror.
Had she always looked like this? So thin and small and frightened, so lost?
The pain wracked her; she lurched forward, towards her own image, and her image reached towards her, as frantic for relief as she was.
She felt a rush like warm wind, and a pop, like she'd stepped through a barrier, thin as a soap bubble.
Then she was whole again.
The pain had passed; she was standing up, and staring out of her own eyes.
But the green eyes hadn't vanished. They stayed in front of her, wide, red-veined, swollen with insanity.
Loki's eyes.
She was with him.
Too late. Too late for Rob, for her wish, but here was Loki, pressed against her, face to face, belly to belly, toe to toe, and her hands were on his cheeks.
Their foreheads touched. Loki's skin, though cool, was soaked in sweat, and as Rachel pulled back, he slumped forward, exhausted.
Rachel took in her surroundings. Gasped.
The scale of the place nearly sent her to her knees.
She stood on the center of a polished obsidian dais which appeared to be a mile wide. Pillars the size of the Statue of Liberty towered on either side of her. Chains stretched from them – one to each of Loki's wrists, pulling his arms wide, exposing his bare chest. A third chain extended from the ceiling, hundreds of feet above them, attached to a metal collar around his neck.
They were underground, in a cavern large enough to hold Manhattan and all its skyscrapers. Indeed, it seemed to be filled with mountains. Rachel and Loki were at the top of the tallest one, in the middle of the cavern, and other mountains, slightly lower, surrounded them. Each had a flattened top and two pillars. Rachel couldn't see far enough to be sure, but she would have bet that between each set of pillars stood a prisoner like Loki.
The pillars were torches; wide red flames at the top of each one lit the enclosed space, and their smoke mostly hid the distant stone sky.
Rachel took all this in quickly, then her focus was back on the man in front of her. The god, the Aesir, the prisoner.
He was a ruin. A shadow of the man he'd been when she knew him; in far worse shape than he'd been in even on the day they met. Then, he'd been bruised, sore, hollowed out with sorrow, confused by his fall, but whole.
The man in front of her was in shreds. Was nearly dead. Would be better off dead.
His prone position exposed the gauntness of his chest. She'd known him to be thin; now he was near starvation.
He still wore the muzzle from when he'd been carted off Earth in Thor's custody; was it possible it hadn't been removed this whole time?
That he'd been tortured was beyond question; how, Rachel couldn't guess. Long red welts that looked like dripping paint rolled off his shoulders; his back was bent towards her, and she could see the damage to his upper back was much worse. It looked like someone had thrown a bucket of acid on him. The raw wounds extended up over his neck, onto his head. Fully half his hair, the back half, was gone, burned off, and the remainder hung long, limp, and greasy.
Every few inches, his skin was marked with pairs of swollen puncture wounds. Vampire bites, except instead of blood, each hole dripped with an opaque yellow ooze. The wounds stood up like bee stings. There had to be three dozen of them, and those were just what Rachel could see on his exposed upper half.
Loki's face, also marked by the vampire bites, and covered in sweat and smoke, had clean tear tracks in inch-wide vertical stripes, like war paint. His eyes themselves were worse than they'd seemed in the dreams. Bloodshot, wild, mad.
Rachel stared, looking for a hint of recognition, and couldn't tell what she found. The eyes rolled; she could see the whites, or what had once been the whites, all the way around.
Blood dripped from Loki's manacled wrists; the skin below the manacles was stretched, and above them, piled and raw.
He'd practically pulled his own hands off.
All this took time to process. Rachel could hardly believe the sight. Believe that a man, no matter what he'd done, could be abandoned in this cavern, in this condition. He couldn't even stand. The three chains were all that held him upright, biting his skin and pulling his neck at a painful angle.
She wouldn't have wished this on the worst human criminal. Not on Hitler or Stalin or Osama Bin Laden. Imprisonment, yes, execution, she could understand. But protracted torture, abandonment in hell, especially for someone as delicate and sensitive as Loki – no, it was too much to believe.
She had to touch him, but hardly knew where to start. Her instinct was to graze the back of her hand over his cheek, but at the contact, he flinched and reared like a horse touched by a hot coal. The sound, that awful crunch, came from the back of his throat.
Then, cautiously, just to find out what she was dealing with – and letting him watch her move her fingers towards him, a centimeter at a time – she gave the lightest possible brush of her fingertips to one set of puncture wounds.
Loki's stomach muscles worked in and out. Tears squeezed themselves from his eyes, and Rachel knew if he could open his mouth, he would be gasping.
She started to raise her fingers up, to get a better look at the liquid on them, but her fingertips almost immediately began to sting, then burn – burn like the time she'd accidentally gotten a chili pepper flake in her eye. She hissed and blew on them, and when that didn't help, frantically wiped the liquid on her nightshirt. Her fingertips were left burning, and she sucked on them, then blew, and found it barely helped at all.
God. It was some kind of acid. And it was inside him, swelling beneath his skin, burning him all over. God, no, please.
"We're going to get you down," she heard herself say, though she couldn't think how. He was far stronger than she; if he couldn't break the chains, what could she do? "Baby, don't cry, don't cry, I'm here. I'm going to help you. I won't let them hurt you any more, you hear me? It's me, it's Rachel, do you remember? I helped you before. You're going to be okay. Shhh, don't fight, let me… let me think."
The muzzle first. Perhaps if he could talk, he could tell her what to do. Anything, she'd do anything he said. She'd jump off this mountaintop if it would relieve his pain. What he'd done to her city, to her people, to her own brother, was a distant memory, if that. All she could see was this moment, his agony, his need for her help.
Trying not to touch Loki's skin, she went to work on the muzzle. There was a catch in the back, and she pried at it, wiping tears off the inside of her elbow at the sound of his muffled screams. She was forced to get a good look at the burned back of his head. The skin appeared to be melting; she felt that with one hard wipe, she could slough it away, baring the skull.
There was a simple double-button system, like the release on the handle of a baby carrier. She had to squeeze with all her strength, and Loki howled in his throat; Rachel's knees wobbled, and she feared she might faint again. But at last there was a hiss of moving pneumatics; a back panel of the muzzle bisected itself, and then the whole catch lobstered away, folding towards Loki's ears until only the front part, covering the mouth, remained.
It had sat on his face a long time, and was embedded in the skin. Pulling it away was hard work, and cost both of them more tears, but at last, the metal peeled free, leaving an angry, deep impression in the soft skin around Loki's mouth.
His mouth.
Which, beneath the muzzle, was sewn shut.
Sewn with a thick leather thong, crudely, in wide-spaced stitches that had been pulled too tight. Each stitch hole had stretched open over time into a hollow oval, so it looked like Loki's teeth were on the outside. Through the holes, Rachel could see his irritated gums.
He was mutilated. Permanently disfigured.
Rachel's heart stopped.
"Baby," she said again, and now she was really sobbing, right in time with him. Their chests hitched together; his head fell forward, and she couldn't tell if it was from exhaustion or shame. His hair mixed itself in hers.
There was no tool to cut the thong with. It was knotted heavily at each end, and there was nothing to do but go to try to untie the knots. To hurt Loki more with her touch, to pull at the already ghastly wounds.
Her small fingers went to work, and at each motion, Loki shuddered in pain, though Rachel imagined he was trying to cooperate. After each flinch, he let his head fall back to her waiting hands. Once, she kissed his forehead, and he didn't fight it.
"Who did this to you?" she whispered as the first knot came free. "Who?"
"I did."
The voice was loud, obnoxiously so, and male. It rang with nobility, and had a hint of an English accent.
Rachel turned and found herself staring at a tall, blonde, heavily armored man. His red cape caught a rising thermal and billowed dramatically behind him as he stomped towards her. If she hadn't been sick with pity and fury, the sight of him, nearly two feet taller than her and handsome as a god, would have impressed her.
In his right hand there was an enormous, square-headed hammer.
Rachel would have known him anywhere, even if she hadn't seen the videos.
Thor.