Disclaimer: Don't own Doctor Who or Thor
Chapter 2 – These Days
When Loki awoke, he couldn't remember having fallen asleep. Up to this point, he had believed it impossible to fall asleep in the Void, to escape the endless nothingness – even by falling unconscious. He was sure that he had been awake the entire time since he had fallen from the Bifrost; granted, he couldn't remember every moment that had passed – however many moments there in fact had been since that awful, horrible day – but he was sure that he had been conscious of every single one as they happened.
The perpetual state of half-awareness that he had been in since he had let go of Gungnir had brought back a vague memory, one of a prison – the perfect prison – from which one could not escape, not even by dying…
"Doctor! I think he's waking up!"
The voice – that of a maiden – was harsh against his ears, so sensitive after having spent so long in the deafening silence.
As his awareness gradually returned, his senses began to detect other things: the warmth of the air around him, when before, there had been no air to have any kind of temperature at all; that he was lying on something soft that supported his weight, rather than nothing through which he could only fall; that, for the first time since this nightmare began, he could actually move – he didn't have the oppressive blankness of the Void pressing in on him from all sides, suffocating him and locking all of his limbs in place, leaving him completely immobile and with no hope of escape.
His brow furrowed slightly as he was drawn from his slumber, and the sounds around him – a shuffling of feet and a shuffling of clothes: the sounds of life – cleared around him, becoming less and less muffled with each second that passed.
Then the voice – the maiden's voice – was speaking again, this time to him.
"Loki? Can you hear me?"
Yes, I can hear you, but who are you?
Loki dragged his eyes open, only for them to be assaulted with yellow.
He was aware that the room he was in was white, that bright, colourless nothingness draining all emotions from the walls, leaving them blank canvases for the thoughts and feelings of those who stood within them. But the colour above him was a bright yellow, the same yellow that the sun shone at midday on Asgard-
No. Don't think of Asgard. For thoughts of that place – all wrapped up in gold to hide the filth that lay within – threatened to send him into a dark place, one darker even than the Void…
His vision was still too blurry to work out what the yellow was. He blinked furiously, trying to clear it, but nothing seemed to work properly. The edges became more defined, but everything else was still too slightly out of focus for him to properly distinguish.
He still wasn't entirely able to make out certain details, when suddenly, something touched him.
It wasn't a harsh touch: it was gentle and tentative, but it was unexpected and he didn't want it, so he shoved the hand away from his face and scrambled into a sitting position, holding his sheet up to his chest as he tried to sit as far away from the yellow maiden as he could get on the bed on which he had woken up.
The sudden movement brought the clarity back to his vision, and he could see the maiden's face crease in confusion and hurt.
"Loki, it's me."
Loki shook his head at her, wanting nothing more than to get away from here – from her – but here was safe, here was not the Void, and how could he ever leave somewhere that was not the Void ever again?
"I don't know who you are," Loki told the maiden, and it was only half a lie. He didn't know her, but he recognised her; somewhere in the jumble of memories that was his confused mind, he remembered seeing her: a picture of her.
But he didn't know who she was.
The maiden rose from the stool on which she had been sitting, beside his bed.
"Loki, it's me: Rose. We met, remember? When you were in-"
"Rose."
An authoritative tone cut across Rose's speech mid-sentence. They both turned towards the door, off to Loki's right and behind Rose, to see a man with close-cropped hair and a leather jacket standing in the doorway, his arms folded over his chest and a dark, warning look on his face.
"Doctor, what's going on?" Rose asked, as the Doctor crossed the room to stand beside her. "Why doesn't he remember me? What's wrong with him?"
What's wrong with me? Loki asked bitterly in his head. I am a Frost Giant, a Jotun, a monster; the monster parents tell their children about at night…
The Doctor reached up to the wall above Loki's head, and suddenly there was a beeping from behind the trickster.
Loki jumped at the noise, twisting around on the bed and looking up to see a screen mounted on the wall, still clutching the sheet to his chest. The Doctor pressed at points on the screen, and each time he made contact with it, a beep sounded from it and the features on the screen changed. The screen was covered with strange, swirling symbols that Loki wondered was the Doctor's native language – the language of Gallifrey.
"He can remember," the Doctor answered simply, "he just can't remember what hasn't happened yet."
The Time Lord pressed the screen twice more, with a distinct air of finality. The screen went blank and he turned back to Rose, who still looked perplexed.
"What do you mean, it hasn't happened yet?" she asked.
"It hasn't happened yet. It has for us, but not for him. We keep meeting out of order."
"But he recognised you."
An awkward silence descended over the two of them, and Loki could practically see the cogs turning in the Time Lord's head. There was only one way that Loki would know the Doctor in this form and not Rose, and that was if he met the Doctor in this form without Rose – but the Doctor hadn't met Loki in this form without Rose, so there must have be a future – his future – where he travelled in this form without Rose.
And the thought of that seemed to send shivers down the Time Lord's spine.
Yet that wasn't the part that intrigued Loki the most. Rose had said that he had recognised the Doctor – but when?
He strained his memory to see beyond the nothingness, to reach beyond his time spent floating in the Void, until…
Until he remembered falling asleep. He remembered being dragged into the TARDIS and set upright; he remembered seeing the face that stood beside him now, and he remembered collapsing, falling away into a more complete, a more beautiful and comforting nothingness than he had remembered experiencing for a long, long time.
And he also remembered a strange beat beneath his palms, just before he had slipped away from reality: a beat with a familiar feel, but an unfamiliar rhythm.
A heartbeat: doubled.
"You have two hearts," Loki gasped, finding his voice breathy and weak. How long had it been since he had spoken?
The comment cut across the silence between the Doctor and Rose, as they both turned to the trickster in the bed.
"Yes," the Doctor nodded briefly, but there was another puzzle in play in his head, the pieces being manoeuvred into position behind his stormy blue eyes. "And you were falling through space."
Those eyes seemed so familiar, the bright blue boring into his soft, green irises. Loki could almost recall having seen their twin pair, somewhere, but the memory was being pushed down into the depths of his mind even as it fought to reach the surface. The only thing that emerged it was the feeling that it produced: the shadow that covered his life up until that awful moment when he was lost, and all the dread that came with being so unable to step out into the light, no matter what he did, no matter how hard he tried…
Loki shied away from the Doctor's gaze, shrinking further into himself as he fixed his gaze on the sheet covering his legs.
Pathetic, a voice that sounded suspiciously like Odin hissed in his head. Is that any way for a king to behave?
I never wanted to be a king! he shouted back, but the sense of inferiority only grew until he was torn from his introspection by the maiden's – Rose's – voice.
"Loki?" The name came as a question, tentative and as though she was walking on eggshells around him. "Loki, what happened to you?"
If he had the strength, he would have laughed – or at least chuckled. So much had happened to him in the last few days since Thor's failed coronation.
The coronation that he had ruined.
But surely he had been right to do that – Thor wasn't ready, and the warrior with the deep green eyes had made that all too clear to him. Granted, things had got out of hand, but things had only really started to go wrong for him – Loki – when he had found out the truth.
It was only then that he had lost himself, and he hadn't even been afforded the time to recover when Odin had the selfishness to fall asleep and force his adopted son into the one position that he was completely unequipped to hold. Loki had never wanted to rule, and – as a consequence – he simply didn't know how to do it. The pressure weighed heavily on his already fractured mind, until it had broken completely and he had turned on his own race.
So, what had happened to him? If Rose wanted to know, then she would have her answer.
"Jötunheim," he murmured, his voice barely louder than a whisper. He didn't turn to the maiden whom he was addressing as he spoke; instead, he kept his gaze firmly fixed on the sheet covering him.
"What about it?" Rose asked softly, keeping her distance. Loki was grateful that she didn't try to touch him again.
Glossing over the fact that Rose seemed to know what Jötunheim was – after all, it had been made perfectly clear that she would met the trickster at some point in his future – he sighed, closing his eyes briefly as the thought of what he had attempted to do returned to him with a vengeance, accompanied with all of the guilt that such an action deserved.
"I tried to destroy it," he admitted.
A sober silence followed the confession, and – now that it was out in the open – Loki found himself wondering why he was bearing his heart and soul to someone he had only just met. Regardless of whether or not she knew him in his own personal future, Rose was still – to him – a complete stranger, and generally he did not make a point of confessing the heinous crimes that he had committed to complete strangers.
Then again, Rose was a companion of the Doctor's, and – at the moment – the Doctor was probably the one person in the entire universe who really knew him, and so if he couldn't trust the Doctor's companion, then he couldn't really trust anyone.
"Your home planet?" Rose asked, her voice laced with disbelief and wariness: a combination that only revealed her fear.
Well, why shouldn't she be scared?
Loki turned to her quickly at her words, not for the tone, but for the comment: she knew. She knew his true heritage and the horror of his actions.
Yet she was still there – she wasn't running away, like everyone should from Frost Giants. If anything, she merely seemed sympathetic.
Loki risked a glance over at the Doctor, to try and gauge his reaction: it was not something that the trickster could bear to look upon for too long.
Those eyes – which he now realised were so much like Thor's that it sent daggers of guilt and longing plunging through the core of Loki's very soul – had clouded over, like the Asgardian sky when his brother's (no, not his brother) anger was inspired.
It suddenly dawned on Loki that the Doctor had never told him what had happened to his home planet – what had happened to Gallifrey. Surely it hadn't been destroyed? And certainly not by the Doctor's hand?
Yet Rose gave the Doctor a sidelong glance, almost as if she was checking that the Doctor was okay in such treacherous conversational territory, and it dawned on Loki just why, all those years ago, the Doctor had looked so sad at the mention of Gallifrey.
Loki's sympathy, however, was short-lived, and his newfound anger must have been evident in his expression, for the next moment, the Doctor was sending Rose out.
"You've got to be kidding me," Rose scoffed, glaring up at the Doctor.
"I need to speak with Loki alone."
"Why, cause this is a touchy subject? It was a touchy subject last time, but I was allowed-"
"He hasn't met you yet!" the Doctor snapped, a desperate edge to his tone as he begged Rose to understand. "Last time was in Loki's future, he was different. People change. Believe me, if you'd met me a couple of hundred years ago, our relationship would be completely different."
A silence followed the Doctor's words – long, drawn-out and agonising – before Rose finally agreed to move away. She headed for the door on the wall opposite the foot of Loki's bed, and disappeared into whatever lay beyond. The Doctor watched her go, only turning away from the door when it had swung shut. Even then, he couldn't quite seem to be able to meet the trickster's eyes.
"Loki-" be began, but Loki cut him off.
"You knew?" he asked, lacing his voice with as much spite as he possibly could.
The Doctor sighed. "I've always known."
Loki had been getting used to this intense feeling of betrayal ever since he, Thor, Sif and the Warriors Three had been on Jötunheim after the botched coronation, and his skin had first developed that awful blue tinge.
It was at that moment that he had realised that everyone he had ever cared about had been lying to him. Well, maybe not Thor – he probably hadn't known, or he wouldn't have spent their entire lives speaking of how he longed to see all of the Frost Giants dead at his feet.
Yet none of that meant that it hurt no less now than it had when he had forced Odin to tell him the whole story in the weapons vault. For some reason – and he hadn't exactly known why – he had sort of had the feeling that the Doctor would never lie to him.
"Why didn't you tell me?" he whispered, his entire body beginning to shake with exhaustion, both emotional and physical; however long he had been unconscious after the Doctor had recovered him from the Void clearly hadn't been long enough for him to recover from that time spent in nothingness.
The Doctor pursed his lips before speaking. "The first two times I met you, you already knew. Then I met you a third time, and you didn't. Then the fourth time, you did. But I never found out when you found out. Whenever I see you, I have to work under the assumption that you don't know yet, otherwise your timeline will be damaged."
"What's wrong with a damaged timeline?"
The Doctor let out a humourless breath of laughter and ran his hand over his short-cropped hair. "You don't want to know."
Suddenly, a loud bell rang throughout the room, and the Doctor snapped his head up to face the ceiling.
"What was that?" Loki asked, a sense of trepidation growing at the Doctor's obvious wariness.
The Doctor offered him no answer, nor did he get time to, for the door to the infirmary burst open almost immediately after the sound rang, and Rose – who had probably been waiting just outside the door for the last few minutes – rushed over to the Doctor's side.
"What's going on?" she breathed, though no sooner had the words left her lips than they were joined by another: a man whom Loki recognised from the older Doctor's photos, wearing a simple pair of black trousers and a white t-shirt over his muscular frame.
"Are we in danger, Doc?" the man queried of the Time Lord, and – for a third time – the Doctor didn't get to answer, for the man who had spoken with a similar accent to that of Jane Foster all of a sudden seemed to notice the figure in the bed, and his previous expression of concern, alertness and determination was replaced with one of the most beautiful smiles that Loki had ever seen.
"Why, hello there," the man grinned, pushing himself between the Doctor and Rose and extending a hand towards the trickster. "Captain Jack Harkness; I don't believe we've met."
"Now's not the time, Jack," the Doctor warned, as a small smile broke out on Rose's face, and Loki shook the offered hand rather nervously.
"So later, then?" Jack asked, in a tone of voice that put Loki in mind of Amy, though it was certainly more effective in its endeavours. The question was accompanied with a wink that somehow sent shivers down the trickster's spine.
"No," the Doctor growled, dragging Jack away from the bed and towards the door. He paused slightly to look back over at Loki. "You coming?"
Loki blinked, slightly surprised that he was being invited on… whatever this was, and nodded, throwing the sheet off of him and twisting so that he could get out of the bed.
As he followed the Doctor, he fell into step with Rose, who had stayed behind to wait for him.
"Don't worry about Jack," she assured him, "he does that to everyone."
