Warnings: This is where the "medical experimentation" tag comes in-this chapter is basically all medical torture. This also takes place immediately after what I firmly believe was a suicide attempt at the end of Thor, so the "suicidal thoughts" tag is relevant here too. Let me know if I should add warnings for anything else specific.


Loki falls.

He falls and falls and he struggles to believe that anything existed before this, that he has not always been falling (and perhaps that would be better; then he would not have these faces and voices in his head, know your place, make your father proud, no Loki no Loki no Loki).

Falls are supposed to end. This one was meant to end with his death. And yet it goes on and on, in utter darkness that scours out his mind and shreds away his body. Only when he has forgotten what it is to feel anything else, when he has nearly forgotten his own name or his consciousness apart from the void, does he feel the fall begin to change. There are lights, tiny pinpricks in the black, stars, he has a body again but it is frozen and useless and so cold, colder than he knew was possible, and the numb horror of nothingness gives way to new fear as he realizes he is now falling toward something.

He is going to land. He does not know what he will do if he survives.

The dark gives way to blinding light, the cold to searing heat. He cannot see, cannot hear, cannot move, cannot breathe—

He lands.

Loki feels himself shatter, and for long moments he is sure he is broken in pieces, scattered across whatever realm is unlucky enough to have caught him. Eventually he manages to open one eye, to feel anything about his surroundings other than the pain consuming him. Everything is bright, far too bright, and his eye blurs with tears until he can blink hard enough to see anything.

He is lying on his front, face twisted to the side, something gritty scraping at his exposed skin, and he seems to be at the bottom of a wide pit. The edges look like sunbaked sand and dusty rocks, but nearer to hand the surface looks hard and shiny, like a layer of ice the color of the soil around it. For a moment he stares, vaguely puzzled, and then the clues come together: he is lying in the bottom of his own impact crater, and the shiny stuff is glass made of molten sand created by the heat of his landing.

Next he tries to move, and his vision goes white with agony, and then everything goes away for a little while. When the brightness of the sun drags him back to awareness, he is gasping painfully, a feeling in his chest as if his ribs are snapping with every breath. Knobs of rock and glass are digging into him, pressing against torn skin and broken bones, but he cannot shift to ease the pressure.

Through process of elimination, he discovers he can move his left arm a little and tip his head down slightly, enough to bring some of his body into his field of vision. He sees that his sleeve is in tatters, most of the cloth burned away by the heat of reentry. In some places the leather is seared to his skin, and the metal he can see is melted and distorted. It, too, seems to have melded itself to his flesh.

And the skin itself—

He is confused at first, when he manages to focus. It is not the smooth paleness he is used to, nor the red of burned flesh; but it is not the shade of his monstrous form either. Instead it is deep purple and blotchy, the black fingernails cracked and uneven, and he realizes: this is what burnt Jotun looks like.

For a while he stares at his hand, the broken fingers and cracking skin, and he cannot understand why he is still alive. He is not supposed to be alive. He was meant to die when he let go of Gungnir; the void should have swallowed him up for good, or he should have found an end when he was broken upon the surface of this realm. He wants to be dead, he wants to be done, and instead he is more trapped than ever with the howling emptiness of his heart and the wreck of his body.

Surely the Norns laughed when he was born (if they even watch the births of monsters); surely they are laughing again now, to see how spectacularly he has failed at everything he attempts, up to and including ending his own miserable existence. Perhaps he can turn his face against the sand so he will suffocate—but no, something in his neck seems to be stuck, and even that slight movement is beyond him.

So he waits, because he can do nothing else, and hopes that soon he will die of thirst. Surely frost giants succumb more quickly to heat and dehydration than the Aesir do. Surely he will not simply lie here until Ragnarok.

If he heals enough to drag himself out of the crater, he has no idea what he will do next.

As it turns out, he has no need to worry about that. He doesn't know how long he lies there, tormented by growing thirst and burned still further by the sun, before he hears vehicles approaching. The sun is still high and he still cannot move, so it cannot have been terribly long, and his first reaction is one of sick fear. He is broken, he cannot move, and if he is found like this—

The sound becomes more distinct, tires crunching over gravel and the growl of mechanical engines, accompanied by the tang of something acrid and unpleasant, and he realizes: Midgard. He has fallen to Midgard, of all the useless places, and he has no idea what the humans will try to do with him.

He reaches for his magic and it flickers weakly as he touches it, like a guttering candle flame. He will get no help from that direction. Again he tries with all his remaining strength to move and only succeeds in twitching his fingers, and cold terror washes over him as he fully understands that he is helpless, the humans can do anything they want and he can do nothing to stop them. He cannot even speak.

The vehicle sounds stop, quickly replaced by voices and many footsteps. Loki flexes his hand again, tries to dredge up even a spark of magic, tries to roll to his side so he can at least see what is happening, and he cannot.

The voices are closer now and they are all a jumble, as if the fall has even damaged his grasp of the Allspeak and its gift of language. A few words and phrases come clearly through the haze, "it's alive," "we're clear," "go ahead" and then something sharp jabs Loki's side. He chokes, struggling to breathe past the surge of fresh agony. He wants to react, wants to fight, and he cannot move.

There are hands, then, prodding at him, rolling him onto his back, strapping him down against something hard and flat. Bones grind against each other with every movement, and Loki can only gasp emptily past the heaviness in his lungs and long for oblivion.

He is lifted and borne out of the crater, and the sun blinds him; and then he is inside one of the vehicles, staring up at a metal ceiling. Doors slam shut. Nearby a voice says, "Tell Pierce we've got it secured," and then everything jerks into motion, and at long last he slips from agonized consciousness into darkness.


When he wakes, he is still flat on his back, still staring up at blindingly bright lights, but now the lights are artificial and the surface under him is cold metal. It is cold all along the length of his body, in fact, and he realizes that the remnants of his armor—at least, what could be easily removed—have been peeled away. Thick metal cuffs hold him to the table at his wrists, ankles, and neck, and he still cannot move enough to test them, but he thinks…these humans will underestimate his healing and his strength and then, perhaps, he can free himself.

His captors never allow him a chance to try. Long before he is able to do much more than twitch in his bonds, even before his skin has returned to the pale Aesir tone he has always recognized as his, they return, and they begin their tests.

It doesn't hurt, at first. They measure him, weigh him, inspect all the visible parts of his body. He tries to speak then, but the rasping croak he manages is barely audible, and they ignore him.

When they have examined everything they can, however, the work really begins. First they cut away the pieces of leather and metal that are fused to his flesh, leaving him naked and bleeding under their bright lights and impersonal gazes. He is conscious for part of that process and grateful when his mind goes away again.

He wakes when they begin to cut into him. At first he tries not to scream—they are only humans, they deserve nothing from him—but the knives and needles and probing fingers do not stop, and eventually he cannot prevent the thin moan that seems to be the only noise he is capable of making. They ignore that too.

Very quickly, everything begins to blur together. Sometimes he is lucky enough to be unconscious; more often, he is not, and his ever-present companions are glaring light, cold metal, and pain. Sometimes he is left alone for long stretches of time that he assumes must be night, or at least gaps between shifts; sometimes humans come, usually two or three, sometimes more. The ones he can see all wear masks over their mouths, thin gloves on their hands, caps covering their hair, identical robes covering their clothes, goggles over their eyes; they are all effectively faceless, with almost nothing to distinguish them from each other.

He heals, slowly. They seem fascinated by the process, and at first they do little to impede it. They continuously drain off a little of his blood, and another needle in his arm seems to be supplying him with nutrients of some kind. Other wires lead from sensors attached to his head and chest. They cut open his leg, parting skin and fat and muscle so they can see the shattered bone, and they put some sort of cover on the wound that keeps the tissues pried apart and the bone visible. Otherwise, at first, they let him heal, burned flesh gradually flaking off and returning to its normal color, bones knitting, bruises fading, and he thinks he was right, they are complacent and soon he will be able to escape.

But they don't want him healed; they only want him far enough away from the edge of death to be useful. The more his body pieces itself back together, the more he can feel human drugs polluting his blood, keeping him groggy, dampening his still-damaged magic. He tries to free himself anyway, straining at the cuff on one wrist until it starts to give, and then he learns how they intend to keep him bound when they are not watching him: a bolt of lightning slams through the metal and into his body, crackling through his nerves and jerking his spine off the table in a hard arch. When it finally releases him, he is left dazed and panting, his muscles twitching outside his control and aftershocks of pain still sparking through his nerves. He tries again, some time later, and again the lightning rips through him, on and on until he is barely conscious.

It is after this, too, that they begin to experiment in earnest.

When they found him, he was in a mangled version of his Jotunn form, perhaps from shock or from the endless cold of the void, and it is to this state that the humans want to return him. They spray his limbs with some kind of intensely cold, foggy gas that somehow does not damage the table, his flesh changes in self-defense, and in this way they are able to carry out tests on both of his forms (sometimes at the same time).

He learns that Jotun blood is darker than Aesir, red so deep it is almost purple, and thicker. He did not know this before. He had no reason to know.

They cut into his body to remove bits of him, with needles and knives and delicate instruments he doesn't recognize. They burn him and freeze him, break his fingers to watch them mend, seal a mask over his nose and mouth to determine how long he can survive without air (longer in his Jotunn form, it turns out, but even then his lungs burn and his body instinctively panics as he gasps for breath). They test his skin with substances that burn like acid and others that cause a spreading numbness; they pump other gases through the mask, ones that burn his throat and lungs or make him dizzy and sick or (rarely and wonderfully) send him plummeting into unconsciousness. They pump still more substances into his veins. Some are poisons that turn his entire body into howling, writhing agony; others simply leave him sick and shaky. When he is given something that feels as if a giant fist is squeezing his guts and trying to rip them out, and he feels choking bile start to rise in his throat, he learns the table can be rotated on its longest axis to face downward, presumably not only so he can vomit.

They take one of his teeth from his Aesir form and another from his Jotun form. For this he must be heavily drugged and even more thoroughly restrained, with metal clamps holding his head in place and his jaw open. Then they approach his mouth with their tools, and they carve and drill and pull, and shrieking pain radiates through his skull. (Later, when he has the ability and the courage to check the empty sockets with his tongue, he feels hard little nubs under bloody flesh and realizes they have left him the roots of his teeth—so they should grow back, eventually, but until then the tissue inside is unprotected, and his entire face throbs with every heartbeat.)

They are not deliberately cruel, for the most part. Sometimes they seem to want his pain as part of their tests, but most of the time the pain seems incidental to their purposes. They simply do not care enough to prevent it; they only care that he is unmoving and usually conscious. It is utterly impersonal curiosity, and that is far more terrifying than being held captive by beings hoping to extract from him any knowledge about Asgard. He cannot give them anything, promise them anything, persuade or plead or intimidate, because they are only interested in what his body can reveal to them. They are not interested in anything he can tell them, and they are only irritated when he can no longer keep his screams locked in his throat. These they smother by cutting off his air again, or giving him drugs that put his body entirely beyond his control without dulling the pain.

They talk to each other, sometimes, and the words swirl around him in a haze. They seem excited about whatever information they are pulling from his quivering flesh, and more than once he hears the phrase "winter soldier," which both does and does not seem to refer to him. He has no idea what it means.

It takes only a few periods of unconsciousness to lose nearly all sense of time, but he thinks he has languished here for nearly a month—certainly more than a week—when they wheel in a new machine and position it behind his head where he cannot see. It is humming already, at a pitch just barely below that of ordinary hearing, and Loki's empty stomach clenches in fresh apprehension. Something about this machine is wrong, more than anything they've done to him yet.

Again, clamps are placed to keep his head still, and he is made to bite down on something rubbery that keeps his teeth separated almost like a horse's bit. Then cold metal presses against his temples and the inaudible humming begins to vibrate through his skull like the first pricklings of a vicious headache, and he hears one of his captors say, "That's where we're starting? Isn't this half again as much as they used on Rogers?"

"Rogers was still human," another voice says impatiently. "Why did you think we were running all those tests? I've been doing nothing but calibrating this thing for the past three days."

If they say anything else, Loki doesn't hear it, because someone flips a switch and the humming changes to a shriek that feels like a spike through his brain. Very distantly he is aware of his body convulsing, of something like electricity tearing through him again, but it is nothing next to the cacophony in his head. It is like the void all over again but inside him, chewing holes in all his senses and thoughts and memories all the way down to the hard wounded little core of him, and he can do nothing against this onslaught because it is everywhere at once. It is agony, violation, absolute wrongness, and it wants to make him a void too, eating away at everything that is Loki until only a broken shell remains.

He doesn't try to run from it, to flee more deeply into himself than he has ever done before, but frantic instinct overrides any semblance of choice or rational thought. His mind can no more welcome this invasion than his body would a knife to the gut.

He doesn't know what happens after that, if he manages to hide or the emptiness devours him; but he goes away somewhere he doesn't have to feel anything, and he doesn't care about anything else.

(Somewhere, near his impossibly distant body, a voice might be saying, "Okay, we got it, shut it down," but wherever Loki has gone, this does not seem to matter either.)


He wakes with a jolt and no idea of how much time has passed. The new machine is gone, the room is dimmer than usual, and when he raises his head to look around, he sees no one. It is probably nighttime again then, but—something feels different. Perhaps he has been unconscious a great deal longer than normal. He feels more nearly whole than he has at any point since he fell from the Bifrost, and he doesn't know what to make of that, or why his captors would decide to let him recover any more than he did after his arrival.

His seidr feels burned down to nearly nothing, as if he used up whatever was left to protect himself, and so he cannot use it to heal himself or even to cast a helpful illusion. But physically he is stronger, he is sure of that, and he can sense nothing newly wrong in his mind. Whatever they tried to do, it does not seem to have worked.

He realizes, belatedly and abruptly, that he is not lying on the metal table anymore. Instead they have moved him to a low cot—a bed, unbelievably comfortable compared to the way he has spent the past days or weeks, and he can feel restraints on his wrists but nowhere else. Not even metal—leather, perhaps. Padded.

Whatever they tried to do, it did not work—but they clearly seem to believe it did.

Loki sits up slowly and his body protests at the movement, but the simple fact that he can move is enough of a novelty to push aside the lingering ache in his bones. He is clothed, too, in a simple robe much like that worn by the scientists who cut him apart. This might all be a trap, and yet he does not care. It is the best chance they've given him to escape, one way or another.

He wrenches off the restraints and scrambles to the low counter nearby. A tray of perfectly clean instruments gleams in the dimness, and Loki's breath tightens in his chest at the sight of them. He knows intimately what each one feels like, the sharp ones like needles, the pliers, the tweezers, the drill, the knives, and he cannot

He seizes a scalpel in fingers that only shake a little and wonders if it would be best to simply drive the blade into his throat right here. He could be done then at last, finish what he attempted on the Bifrost, rid the Realms of one more monster—put himself forever beyond the reach of his captors' knives and needles, his false family's rejection and hatred—

And then he realizes he has already delayed too long. The shrill alarm is faint and distant but his hearing is still keen, and of course they must have been alerted when he freed himself from the bed. There is no time to ensure the deed is done properly. It will have to be the other kind of escape first, then.

Clutching the scalpel, Loki forces open the room's only door and peers out into a long, nearly featureless corridor. Gray floor, gray ceiling, gray walls, a few metal doors, no windows or anything else to give him a sense of direction, so he simply turns left and limps down the hallway as quickly as he can.

He doesn't get very far. He is stronger, but he is not healed; his limbs tremble with weakness and disuse, his lungs ache, and when he stumbles and flings one hand against the wall for balance, he feels something inside him give way. He gags, spits blood onto the floor, staggers on a few more paces—hears the alarm again, many pounding footsteps, and then he comes to another corridor perpendicular to this one and the soldiers are nearly on him.

The scalpel is all wrong for throwing and he only has the one weapon. He shoves off the wall and lunges across the mouth of the new hallway, momentum and a spike of frantic adrenaline giving him the strength to run.

Something smashes into his shoulder, his back, his arm, and he crashes to the floor, limbs tangling, body spasming out of his control. It's the lightning again, from a distance this time, but it's less and if he can just get up

Another bolt of it, dead center on his spine, shouts he can barely hear over the ringing in his ears, and then hands, yanking at his arms, aftershocks shaking him apart so his body refuses to obey. He strikes out wildly with the scalpel and hits empty air, and then his arms are wrenched up and back, his face pressed to the floor, and something stabs into his spine and pours a torrent of electricity into his body. Everything overloads.


Pain drags him back toward consciousness. He fights it, because he wants to be dead, he had his chance and he wasted it, again, the Norns will not even let him die, and if self-loathing could kill he thinks he would finally be out of their reach.

But he is alive, and this time the pain is sharp and intense, radiating outward from his wrists and ankles. His arms are pulled out at an angle, too, straining his shoulders. When he manages to turn his head enough to look, he understands why: this table has jointed extensions for his arms, so they can lie parallel or perpendicular to his body or any degree in between, perhaps for easier access. And he is pinned to these metal arms by a bar through each wrist.

He stares for a moment, uncomprehending, and then tugs on his arm. Agony erupts in his bones, and for long moments he can only lie still, choking on it. When he can think again, he realizes his ankles must be pinned the same way.

A few of the scientists are here again, outside his line of sight, but he catches bits of their conversation: "…try again?", "a higher level would kill it," "yeah, of course Pierce is pissed, he thought he was getting another winter soldier," "just want it alive." Loki understands, gradually, that he has gone from a potential field asset to a mere specimen. They will not kill him—they will keep him like this indefinitely.

He hears, "Okay, let's open it up," and this he doesn't understand, until a blade slices down his sternum, down his ribcage, all the way to his navel, cutting neatly through skin and muscle, and then they peel his chest open.

That day, Loki learns for the first time that all their experimentation could have been worse from the beginning. Before, they had to take care not to damage him permanently, because they had plans for him that required him whole, sound of body if not of mind, and now they are acting under no such restrictions. They no longer need him functioning or technically ambulatory; they only need him alive so they can continue their work. That usually means conscious, too, as the most reliable way of ensuring that he is not plunging into shock, so once again he is awake when they cut him apart.

And this is what they do, over and over again, for far too many days to count. They delve deep into his core to examine his organs, forcing the shift between forms again to see how his insides change. They cut out more pieces of him, from everywhere they can reach. They make him breathe more poisonous gases, and rather than simply observing his responses as they did before, they take samples of lung tissue to study directly. Some organs they remove entirely, whatever they decide he can spare; others they damage in various ways to observe the regenerative process. He thinks they do this with every distinct organ at least once, often more than once to determine what methods and substances will slow his healing. They force poisons down his throat and slice open his stomach to see the results for themselves. They prod at his heart with their jolts of electricity, making it twitch out of control or stop altogether and then shocking it back into a normal rhythm.

His skeleton is just as interesting as his softer tissues. Before they confined themselves to small, relatively unimportant bones like fingers. Now they pull apart the major joints at knee, elbow, shoulder; now they use their machines to break his ribs and legs and arms, by crushing or cutting or snapping or twisting. Sometimes they apply substances directly to the bone first, acid or fire or ice. They cut off fingers, sometimes reattaching them immediately, sometimes much later.

He remembers thinking, early on, that eventually he will grow desensitized to this, that his nerves will give up or his brain will simply stop interpreting the sensation of pain, but it never happens—he never becomes used to the feeling of blades slicing through his flesh, of metal clamps cracking his bones, of tiny buzzing saws and whirring drills eating into him, of hands probing through his insides. Every fresh wound is agony, every moment he lives is as unbearable as the last; every waking after a period of blessed unconsciousness is new despair. Sometimes, when he can speak, he begs answers of the universe—why didn't Odin leave him to die on Jotunheim, why did Frigga allow him into her home, why didn't Thor kill him on the Bifrost, why damn you all didn't someone snuff out his worthless life before he could hurt and destroy and find himself reduced to flesh

But there is never any reply.