Out of Chaos

Summary: They think they've finally found the one behind a string of murders. Only a psychiatrist utilising experimental technology can hope to uncover the truth behind these killings, until she learns that her prisoner isn't quite the man she thinks he is and that the psyche hides more than she can ever imagine of the world around her. Set before Thor (the first movie), but incorporates events from all three movies (Thor, The Avengers and Thor: The Dark World) in no order. AU.
Rating: T/M (for brutal violence and possible sexual situations)
Author's notes: Inspired by a prompt found here, but the story has taken a life of its own and a different direction as I wrote it. As with all my stories, every one is an experiment in style and form. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Characterisation here however, is stretched to the point of believability but I hope I'll do all our favourite characters justice by the time this ends.
Disclaimer: No copyright infringement intended.

Prologue

The woman falls forward with a dull thud into the coarse sand. Her body is cleaved through the middle and brutally disembowelled, divided messily in half as though executed by the bluntest of blades and the shakiest of hands. A distance away, a head crowned in scarlet flame lolls to a stop by the jagged edge of an escarpment.

A flash of white teeth is the only sign of exhausted satisfaction from the man who stands over the body that shudders its last sigh.

Loki Odinson staggers towards the outcropping of rocks as the muted winter sun creeps across the horizon and tightens his hold on the twin daggers in his hand. Blood drips liberally from them, marring the yellow and brown plains with the odd spots of red and black.

There's an incessant buzz in his ear that rises to a booming crescendo, fracturing the stillness of the dawn with an ear-piercing shriek that scatters the critters of the night in several directions.

He hates that noise. It spins around him like a dream, unmooring the last shred of reason that his mind clings onto and strands him in the tumultuous ocean of doubt and broken memories.

The sudden pain in his ear causes his grip on the dagger to loosen. Like the body, it falls to the ground, its sharp edge vertically hitting the mud like a whisper through pursed lips as its owner claps a bloody hand over his ear in a futile bid to stop the noise.

His hand comes away tingling with sticky warmth. He looks and sees that the tips of his fingers stained with blood. His own. In the dim light, how easy it would be to imagine that it's not the heated red of his people, but the treacherous black of a distant enemy.

Maybe it's touch that brings dawning awareness of the throbbing bruises that his body carries. It drives him momentarily to his knees as the thick trunk of a fallen tree provides meagre support for a lacerated back.

Pain is of no relevance. Only the purpose is. One that is fated to last.

Where is the rest for the weary, who are miles away from home? But there is no home, is there? Or at least, the second son of Odin doesn't allow himself to even entertain the fuzzy notions of home. Notions of gilded halls and laughter and marvellous vistas, shredded into bits on the shore of a consciousness that still clings desperately to life.

He takes a brief sniff of the decaying air. It's slightly resinous, mossy, with an underlying stench that he's learned to pick up after spending time in their all too fragrant company. The scent of fear and loathing is found in every panting breath that intangibly heats up the cold, dusky gusts of wind that whistle through the ailing branches of the ancient, dying forest.

A massive shadow obscures the rising sun and Loki is up on his feet in an instant. He whirls around without hesitation and slams the last dagger in his hand unerringly in his assailant's heart. Like the woman before her, this one crumples with a shriek that dies as a hoarse cry in her throat. He follows her down and drops to his knees, keeping his grip on the dagger steady, then drags the knife through bone, muscle and sinew.

As an obedient servant to a ruthless master, the blade does its work efficiently as it did on his last victim. Twisting, shredding, cutting on a smooth path rendered crooked only by the occasional tremble that runs through his body.

She's dead. He's made sure of it.

But the dead can come back to life and those who live as humans show too much steel. It is a lesson he'd had to learn the hard way.

He never makes the same mistake twice. The dagger glints again when he raises his arm.

The last and the hardest cut is reserved for the woman's throat. A head capped with short, spiky dark hair sails through the air in an arc of splattering blood as it joins its neighbour in the next second.

Blessed silence follows the dull thud of the bouncing head, punctuated only by the harsh cawing of an ever-watchful crow hidden in the trees. Loki straightens and sheaths his daggers in the folds of his clothes.

They disappear into a pocket dimension, winking out of existence with a thought.

Then he heads west, away from the brightening sky, eager to shield himself in the waning darkness that the new dawn has already cast away as a forgotten memory.

They are coming for him, just as he is coming for them.

Twenty-three and counting.

And he will slice their throats dry. He will destroy every single one of them when he finds them until they are naught but grains of sand in the desert and soil on the damp forest ground. The vow that he makes to himself falters like a sharp slap to the face when he strains to call together the healing warmth of depleted magic from a core that had been hollowed out and emptied not too long ago.

Lost in his musings, Loki is surprised when his feet bring him to the edge of a fast-flowing stream. He washes his injuries in it, allowing the frigid swirls to calm his body. He briefly entertains the idea of sustenance only to shake it off when the long rays of the sun begin to touch the gentle banks of the stream. There's sufficient game in the forest to feed a warrior tribe comfortably, but as tempting as it is, the cover of darkness is preferable for hunting. Yet the encroaching brightness of the morning will hinder this thankless task.

His body is calling for rest, the cuts, aches and bruises staying unhealed as long as he gives himself to this mission that he has vowed to complete. But hadn't he gone without sustenance and recuperation in the ceaseless campaigns that had been launched against the enemies over the millennia?

After every skirmish, the only reminders that he would have had of these encounters would have been the scars that his skin cannot seem to relinquish. Many of them had been marks of honour, of initiation. Loki hadn't given them too much thought before; instead, he'd borne them with a measure of pride and hastily-cast illusions as disguise if the occasion had called for it.

It's not in his makeup to entertain the possibility of defeat. Shorn of the magical core that is knitted tight into the marrow of his bones, there's nothing he has left on his person but his wits and his weapons. And without the comforting buffer that his magic provides, there is nothing to stop the rising tide of a deeper, intangible horror that has seared a burgeoning – and revolting – consciousness his own family had thoughtlessly sought to repress.

So the nightmares come. Flashes of an incoherent story that bleed into reality, the detritus of an unwanted life that floats on an endless sea. Laughter that turns into monstrous howls and the merriment of feasting that morphs into chains and torture. It's all blue frost and icy on this wretched plane of existence and he cannot escape it, even when the sun is warm and inviting and shining brightly on his face as he stands on the shimmering rainbow bridge of the Realm Eternal.

When Loki jerks awake with a shuddering breath, he's more than thankful that his only companions are trees and the dissipating mist. He stumbles towards the stream, kneels in the soil and shoves his hands into the cold water that ripples around his fingers. The water hits his parched throat a second later and a laboured sigh escapes him.

He stays kneeling in that position until he thinks he can stand without falling.

The last time he tried this, he hadn't woken up for a week.

In the last hour that he spent drifting in and out of awareness, the smallest curl of magic had unfurled itself in his gut. Now it reacts instantaneously to other sources of magic so far-flung in this barren realm called Midgard, sending a fine buzz along the surface of his skin that's a heady breath of fresh air blowing over a suffocating soul. The shadow of a tired smile faintly stretches the corner of his mouth. How tempting it would be to allow his magic and its propensity to heal simply take its course within his body. To do so however, would be to waste precious time and resources that he simply does not have.

Instead, he uses that brief, returning flow of power as a pathfinder.

Indiscernible shapes and whirring silhouettes coalesce into a fixed point of resonance, like ripples in a pond stilling long enough to reveal the water's true depth and its buried secrets.

It tells him what he needs to know. His next kill. Where he must go.

Arresting its kinetic flow midway, Loki tears open a minute pathway of travel and teleports away from the forest, depleting himself fully once again.

oOo

The short walk uphill along a path striated by the yellow lamps lining the street takes him only a minute. A small building stands at its crest, a derelict old thing that isn't fit to house any living being.

It rings a discordant note even in the recesses of his own muddled memories. Is Midgard so changed? Had there been any truth then, to the grandiose stories of Midgardian battles and wars that had been told to him in his childhood? Battles that had even whetted the appetite of those who lived in the Realm Eternal?

A few seconds pass as he tries to sift the past from the present, straining to remember. Clarity filters sluggishly through when he takes a downward look at the soft and flimsy material that adorns his body. It isn't the black and green leather garb that he favours, but a poor imitation of what one can construe to be mortal garments.

This isn't the Midgard of old, drawn in the large, gilded books of the library he has spent too much time in. There are metropolises so bright now that they mar the night sky, a thousand mutually incomprehensible languages and dialects that they'd made his head spin. Where anonymity was prized and simultaneously denied in the frantic mix of activity, anxiety and sheer speed. No, this is the Midgard that has strayed from the old gods, whose inhabitants are too quick to label the inexplicable as the irrational.

Loki takes a sharp glance around and steps forward to the apartment's entrance. The front door opens without any effort when he twists its handle. The faded blue carpet of the interior is torn in places, leading to a staircase that goes up and up.

He takes the winding stairs carefully, pausing only to look at the tiny, dirty window that seemed to have been constructed as an afterthought. Outside, the world turns in oblivion. He watches a group of giggling girls hurry past, their thick coats pulled tight over their flushed cheeks, then turns his eyes to an old man who hobbles along the street. The sounds they make fade into the distance. Further yet, a woman leisurely with her partner, tightly clutching his arm as though she fears losing him to the slightest smile from another.

All of them hold the potential of being so much more than what their exteriors really reveal – a challenge that anonymity always presents.

Not too long ago, Loki would have said that he relished challenges in all its forms.

The long corridor upstairs is lined with dark brown wooden doors. The décor doesn't look any different from those in his previous kills. A copy of a copy…of a copy. The interiors are dull, uninspired with highly restrictive views of the exterior. Or perhaps it is the nature of Midgardian living spaces in this age.

Loki stops. Something is amiss. Like the stars blotted out from the endless expanse sky, like the mighty rushing great river whose flow is reversed.

There's life within these walls. Stinking life. A particular abomination that he has to extinguish, that he needs to wipe out from the face of all the realms.

The fourth door from the end of the corridor is ajar, a wedge of daylight shining through its gap. To him, it's a subtle invitation, a planned trap. That same screeching noise that had been present in the forest now assaults his ears.

The static shadows morph in an instant. A dark shape materialises from the corner where wallpaper peels off in rings.

He whips to face it straight on.

But the air is curiously emptied of tangible things, and dense with unspoken threat.

Instead, he hears a small, fragile voice from the dark corner where he thought the shadow once was. "Who's there?"

The voice is neither masculine nor feminine, but a gnarly thing that hints of age and incapacitation.

Loki's fists clench involuntarily when he catches a glimpse of the speaker. In his feverish haze, it looks as though the elderly crippled bears an uncanny resemblance to Odin Borson stripped of his Asgardian powers. With greying hair and beard, an elderly man shakes and trembles in a wheelchair with an eye that has already been misted over by a thin white film.

A helpless being who has shrugged off his coat of majesty. Or rather, evil in the disguise of a helpless being.

Loki doesn't deign to answer. Talk is wasted on the undeserving.

The spent magic in his core trembles as it tries to rebuild itself, then fades mutely into frustrating dormancy – a pattern that is painfully routine by now. The kills, followed by the hollowing out of his energy reserves that he'd once arrogantly thought limitless, regenerating enough only to be depleted after each teleportation when he seeks a new target to hunt. Rinse and repeat. An unending cycle...until his mission is complete. At this rate, he'd be at it for the next few millennia and counting.

"Who's there?"

The voice repeats the question, turning beseeching, needy. A potent weapon calculated to arouse pity and sympathy, designed to stumble a murderous nature.

Fighting to keep mounting uncertainty and the pressing blackness of panic at bay, Loki pulls his daggers into his hands and shifts his focus to the deep-seated intuition that had brought him to this very place, this very time. His breaths turn ragged, uneven. But the sudden flash of heat and pain in his abdomen, honed so finely along the rim of his consciousness that it's hard to tell whether it's imagined or real, throws his usual assured gait into disarray.

The briefest shadow of movement stirs him into action.

Propelled by sharp, jagged edge of memory, the blade flashes as he swings it downwards, leaving a dark stain to congeal on the peeling walls. As he had done with his other kills, muscle and sinew are ripped through until flesh, skin and bone form an unrecognisable mess on the wooden floor. The body falls limply out of the wheelchair and the head follows, rolling to a stop when it hits the corner of the room.

The ceiling spins as Loki falls to his knees, a hand going automatically to his left side where he feels the warmth of his own blood staining his ruined shirt. The trickle of blood is turning into a red river that runs down the length of his torso. Briefly, he stares at his own bloodied hand in confusion, wondering how he'd come by that injury.

He realises that he doesn't quite know. Without the intuitive sense that his magic had always given him, he's just another blind man on the street.

Then the adrenaline wears off, replaced by the searing burn that creeps in where the injured spot is.

When had this happened?

The surroundings are becoming a grey haze of indistinct shadows, a product of blurring vision and increasing mental incoherence. His legs move of their own accord as his lungs gulp in the heavy, muggy air of a fog that's rolling in.

He had been a hairsbreadth of stepping into Valhalla's glorious hall before but has never walked into it. He'd welcome it now.

Maybe this might be his third time lucky.

Eventually, the pain drives him into the street and beyond. It's a hundred metres down the road when he sees the first signs of urban decay that encircles the city centre, and another hundred when the crowds start to gather. They point, first, with some curiosity, and then in surprise and then in panic.

He sways on his feet and fights to keep himself upright, every muscle screaming in protest.

The world rotates, affixed to a horizontal plane comprised of blurry shapes that look like flailing human limbs. All around, Loki sees the a swarm of faces that look down on-

Look down?

It's then that he realises he has fallen onto the hard, concrete ground, his hand still clutching his bleeding side. There are voices now, a labyrinthine maze of sounds and frequencies that he cannot pull apart and separate in his addled mind.

But all he can think of is the remaining number of kills he needs to make. There're more of them to hunt…yet there's nowhere to go. What is laid before him? A string of dead ends and a plethora of clues that lead everywhere and nowhere.

He could go on for weeks, months and maybe even years and not find what he wants.

Exhaustion, weighed down by these gloomy predictions, saps away his last bit of strength. As formidable as his will is, it's no match for leaden limbs and a head in which truths and falsehoods freely tangle and turn reality into distorted lines.

The last thought before the darkness claims him is that his mission is as good as gone.