You've Got Sucker's Luck


Chapter 6


Fit for a king, Loki sarcastically observed as he surveyed his new living quarters. They were as austere as his interrogation cell, but with the addition of a bed, night table, washroom, and desk and accompanying chair. It almost made him feel nostalgic for the glass cage.

"You realize I have no intention to remain here longer than is absolutely necessary," he had told Fury earlier that afternoon as they were transferring him onto the Helicarrier.

"The feeling is mutual," Fury replied. "But there are higher powers I have to answer to, and as far as they're concerned, you're staying on as our consultant. Which means you get treated just like every other one of our guests."

"Higher powers?" Loki echoed. "I've never taken you for a religious man, Director."

"I'm not," Fury answered curtly. "I'm referring to our auditors. Enjoy your stay."

And with that, the Director had departed, escaping into a closed-door meeting and leaving Loki in the dubiously-capable hands of a lackey. Seething, Loki permitted himself to be led down numerous empty corridors until he was deposited at the door of the chambers in which he now stood.

After dispensing with the twitchy-faced minion, Loki commenced with a few housekeeping chores, casting spells to soundproof the walls, and deploying an enchantment that would prevent the door from opening at anyone's bidding but his own. He took the time to poke at the bed (too hard), and investigate the closet (the complementary SHIELD-issued apparel was an amusing touch), and in the process discovered several electronic monitoring devices (pathetic), which he disabled.

He was just settling in to master the computer tablet Fury had given him when he received word from Thor by way of Heimdall; the "negotiations" had ended with the ambassador spectacularly passing out over dessert. Thor and Jane Foster would be staying the night in Asgard, with plans to return the following morning. Loki informed the gatekeeper that he no longer required the use of Gungnir, and shifted his attention back to the black-screened device called iPad.

No technology had ever eluded him. Interpreting the Idunn's apple logo on the back of the device as an omen of future success, he reached out and tapped the screen, mimicking the motion he'd seen Coulson perform.

Nothing.

Loki tapped the surface once more, harder this time, but with the same result.

What was wrong with the contraption?

Frowning, he picked it up and perused its edges, lips curving into a satisfied smile when he spied a small rectangular button on the side. He gave it a quick press, laid the tablet back on his lap, and waited.

Still nothing.

He depressed the button once more, then several times in succession, and waited again. This time the screen lit up, but no images appeared on its surface.

A knock at the door spared his pride from further wounding. He motioned to the door with his hand, which opened of its own accord to reveal Brynn standing in the entryway and wearing a startled expression. She was eyeing the door, as if waiting to see what else it might do.

"Can I come in?" she asked finally.

"You may," Loki assented without glancing up. The tablet was now frowning at him, literally.

She stepped inside, closing the door behind her as Loki prodded the screen a few more times.

"Lucky you," Brynn remarked, walking over to where he was seated at the desk. "I'm not allowed to have any electronics." She peered over Loki's shoulder to see what had him so stymied and let out a laugh. "How the hell did you manage to get it to show you a Sad Mac logo?"

Loki had no idea what she meant by this question and settled on scowling at her in reply. Snickering, she took the device in hand and restarted it, then handed the iPad back to him; a white apple glowed back at him from the screen.

"Just swipe your finger over the line thing at the bottom," she said when the home screen loaded.

"I have been doing that," Loki lied through his teeth, "but as I just told you it will not work – oh."

Brynn had reached forward and unlocked the device for him. Her name and photograph immediately appeared on the screen.

"Wh — hey, that's my file!" she squeaked.

Before Loki could stop her, Brynn snatched the tablet out of his hands and hurled it across the room. It spun in a neat arc and smashed into the opposite wall, coming to land on top of the bed.

Loki glared at her, outraged. "Was that necessary?" he demanded.

Brynn's eyes flashed. "Yeah," she shot back. "You want to know something about me, you ask me. You don't get to cheat by looking it up in a database."

"I suppose that's fair," he grudgingly admitted.

She walked over to pick up the tablet, which now bore a shattered LCD screen.

"So…how is this whole thing going to work, anyway?"

Loki lifted an eyebrow, presuming that her question was not in reference to the iPad, which most definitely no longer worked. "To what are you referring?"

She tossed the tablet into the trash bin by the desk and then invited herself to a seat on the bed.

"Geez," she muttered, bouncing once or twice, "Your mattress is as crummy as mine." She looked back up at him and explained, "Whatever it is Director Fury said you're going to do to help me remember the accident."

Loki turned the desk chair around to face Brynn and sat back in his seat, pausing a moment to see if she resumed her fidgeting. She did – her fingers tapped restlessly against the bedclothes and one foot bounced.

"I intend to use a combination of hypnosis and telepathy," he answered.

Brynn gave him a look of unfettered disbelief.

"Riiiight," she said, drawing the word out, "And I'll bet you can shoot lasers out of your eyes, too."

"Only my ears, I'm afraid," he deadpanned.

This made her smile. She glanced at the floor, then back up at him again. "Did they tell you what happened? With the accident?" Her voice had taken on a slightly higher pitch.

"Nothing of note," Loki replied, absently tracing one finger in circles on the table. "Hence the Director providing me with your dossier. Or rather, what remains of it." He gave the trashcan a deliberate look.

She made a face and leaned back on the bed, making herself at home.

"Oh, don't worry," she assured him, "SHIELD will give you another one. I've been begging them for a tablet but they won't cave. I can't blame 'em though. Not having internet access drives me nuts, but I'm so doped up half the time that I don't even care."

Loki frowned, not following.

"How do you mean?"

Brynn sat forward again, this time to play with the lamp on the bedside table.

"Medications," she answered, flicking the light on. "Anti-seizure, anti-anxiety, anti-depressant – you name it, they've prescribed it. Jackasses draw the line at medical marijuana."

"Is that why you nearly killed yourself earlier today?" he asked curiously. "Because you are drugged?"

Brynn let out a half-snorted laugh and switched the lamp back off.

"You actually bought that performance?" she scoffed. "Fury was a second away from stopping me. You just beat him to it. Thanks, by the way."

"You seem rather certain of this fact," Loki observed, unable to keep the skepticism out of his voice.

She was raiding the nightstand drawer now and grinning at the Gideon Bible that she found within.

"Everyone has a tell."

Once again he did not understand what she meant. This was getting to be a bad habit.

"A tell?"

Brynn put the Bible away and pulled both legs up to sit cross-legged on the bed. Loki refrained from ordering her to get her still-shod feet off of the furniture and waited for her to speak.

"I grew up in Las Vegas," she explained. "My dad was head of security at the Bellagio. One of the perks was getting living space in the casino. I used to watch the card tables from up in the security wing. I got really good at reading people. Counting cards, bluffing, passing off counterfeit chips, things like that – I could spot it a mile away. Better than some of the dealers, even, which pissed off the pit bosses like you wouldn't believe."

"And what is Director Fury's…tell?" he queried.

A trace of that pit viper smile returned to her lips.

"Figure it out yourself. The hydrocloric acid was just a game of chicken and he knew it."

"But why play such a game in the first place?" Loki wanted to know. "The risk to you was real, regardless of your actual intent."

Brynn's face darkened into a scowl.

"I don't like bullies."

"Yet you continue to cooperate with SHIELD, even now," he pointed out.

"They saved my life," she said matter-of-factly. "I owe them." She paused, giving him a sidelong glance, and then asked, "So…what have they told you about me?"

"Fury mentioned an accident," Loki said, keeping his tone neutral.

Brynn's expression grew sober and she looked down at her lap, hair falling forward to conceal her face.

"Yeah," she said softly. A loose thread on the bed covering caught her attention and she began to toy with it. "Hit my head on the A-frame of the car, spent some time in a coma. And when I woke up, I had six senses instead of five, and bunch of doctors calling me a liar."

Finally, Loki thought; now perhaps he would get some more concrete answers regarding this woman's nature.

"Tell me," he encouraged.

She looked up at him through her lashes, unconvinced of his willingness to suspend his disbelief.

"Telekinesis?" he suggested with a teasing smile when she didn't respond. "Or perhaps laser beams firing out of your eyes?"

His levity had the desired effect and some of the tension left her face, but she continued to worry the thread on the bedclothes. At this rate she would have it unraveled by nightfall.

"No," she admitted. "That would at least be interesting. This – it's just weird."

She took a deep breath, as if steeling herself, and began to speak.

"I see auras. Constantly. Like I'm dropping acid, except all the time. When I look at Fury, he looks…normal," she explained. "But when I look at you, or other people, everything's – sharper. Like there's a colored filter over you. It goes away when I've spent some time with a person, but something about you guys, it just feels different. And there's no pattern to it at all. Some people have it, some people don't. And when you did that stuff this morning – spilling that guy's coffee, making the cups fall – all of the green coming off of you got brighter, both times."

Brynn abandoned the thread and raised her head to face him, drawing her knees up to her chest as she debated how to continue her story.

"That's why they didn't let me leave the psych ward after I came out of the coma," she said finally. "They kept saying I was hallucinating when I told them what I was seeing, but SHIELD brought me in and ran their tests, and it's not psychosis. They don't know what it is. They just throw around words like genotype and phenotype and chit – chitawney…?"

Her voice trailed off; the word was evading her, and she squeezed her eyes shut in frustration.

"Damn it!" she muttered. "What'd they call it? Chi – chi-something."

"Chitauri," he automatically supplied, realizing too late that he was not supposed to speak of such topics with her.

"Yeah," she said wearily. "That. I'm probably not supposed to know about it anyway, whatever 'that' is. Like I said, they keep me in the dark most of the time."

The puzzle pieces were growing a bit clearer now, and the fragments fell further into alignment as he watched Brynn continue to unravel the the blanket. Her accident had left her with the ability to see through illusions and sense magic, even very faint traces of it that lay dormant in others. Per order of Odin's father during the Jotun invasion of Midgard, which failed when he and the Valkyrie came to humanity's rescue, Aesir-mortal couplings were expressly forbidden, but they had taken place nevertheless. More than a few of those liaisons had yielded offspring. Generations later, the ability to perform magic would have died out, but it was possible traces of its presence would remain.

Is that what SHIELD was pursuing? Using the scepter in conjunction with Brynn to seek out individuals in possession of dormant magic?

"The coffee shop," he said suddenly. "How did I appear to you?"

"Like you do now," Brynn shrugged, "I don't know what person Agent Hill and the others were seeing, but I know it wasn't who I saw - like you are now, I mean. And…you tasted green."

She mumbled this last part, so quietly that Loki had to strain to hear her. Tasted green?

His confusion must have been evident when Brynn looked over at him, because she tried to hide her embarrassment with a grin and said, "Yeah, I know – I'm a freak."

Loki was not fooled by her false confidence. He had employed self-deprecating humour and bravado for more years than he could count, and done so with a far more practiced hand than the mortal who sat squirming before him now.

"Is this a habit?" he demanded, unable to stand her fidgeting any longer. He looked her up and down to indicate what he meant. "Or do I make you nervous?"

Brynn instantly froze in place.

"No," she answered. "Just jittery. It's the medicines. What they've got me on right now makes me really twitchy."

Loki huffed in response; lack of natural carriage and bearing appeared to be yet another inherent human frailty.

"I have been charged with helping you remember what took place during and after your accident," he said finally. "Accomplishing this will not be easy for you. I am aware you lost both your husband and unborn child."

Brynn stiffened at the mention of her family, but her eyes remained dry.

"This will require an extraordinary amount of faith on your part," he warned. "Faith in me. Faith that I will not hurt you, or abuse the privilege of penetrating the boundaries of your conscious thoughts."

Now her eyes welled up.

"And my unconscious thoughts?" Her voice was a choked rasp and she hung her head down. "Do those stay private?"

"Ultimately, those are the ones for which we search," Loki acknowledged, "but I will make every attempt to exercise discretion."

A tear rolled down Brynn's cheek and splashed onto the blanket, but when she raised her head, Loki saw that the raw vulnerability in her face had already faded into scorn.

"Discretion?" She let out a watery half-laugh. "Don't even bother. SHIELD wants to see everything. Use me like an energy-sensing metal detector, or patent my brain cells. Some stupid shit like that."

Her words struck a chord with Loki, and he felt a sudden surge of empathy for her plight.

"Then know this, Brynn Nolan," he said, leaning towards her. "I have no affiliation with SHIELD. I am cooperating with them because I am bound by an agreement, but that agreement has nothing to do with Director Fury, or Agent Coulson, or any other member of their organization."

Brynn pressed her palms to her eyes and took a shaky breath, trying to compose herself.

"How does it work?" she finally asked, hands still covering her eyes.

"Are you familiar with the mechanics of hypnosis?" he inquired.

She dropped her hands from her face and looked at him.

"Yeah," she sighed. "You send someone into a state of deep relaxation."

Loki nodded.

"Correct. I shall be employing a similar method. From there, we will explore your unconscious mind together, starting with simple memories and then…continuing on to other recollections."

Brynn flinched and glanced away.

"Explain what you meant by things tasting green," he requested, sensing that it was time for a change in topic. It was a transparent tactic, but his interest was genuine.

"I don't know how to," she muttered. "I mean – I don't remember the word for it."

Loki hesitated, and then extended his right hand out to her, palm up.

"Try to show me," he suggested.

She gave him an odd look. "Huh?"

"Show me with your mind," Loki explained. "Touch helps facilitate the process."

Brynn's gaze shifted to his still-upturned hand and back then to his face. He immediately misinterpreted her reluctance for revulsion, and went to draw his hand back but then heard her mutter, "Oh, what the hell."

Her fingers slipped into his a moment later and she looked at him expectantly.

Loki swallowed, concealing his surprise.

"Close your eyes."

She did as he asked, but a dubious frown still puckered her brow.

"Are you sure –"

"Quiet," he ordered.

Slitted eyes glowered at him, and then closed again.

Keeping his voice low, his cadence of speech slow and steady, Loki began to repeat the words taught to him almost a millennium ago. As he guided Brynn into that tenuous state of relaxation that hovers between awareness and sleep, the worry gradually eased from her face, and when her hand went slack in his grasp, he reached out for her subconscious with his magic.

Think of what you saw in the coffee shop, he instructed her.

Brynn's confusion about how to go about following this request was palpable, but she made a clumsy attempt to try nevertheless. Colours began to swirl in his mind's eye, melding together to recreate the coffee shop from earlier that morning.

The image was from her perspective, its edges mellifluous and hazy, but he could see well enough. He spotted himself seated at his table and scowling at the brute at the cash register. His form in the memory was haloed in a shimmer of green, Loki noticed. A few other patrons carried similar auras, but theirs were of different colours and muted in their intensity.

He plunged deeper, imbuing his psyche with Brynn's, testing the waters to see how far she would permit him to wander in her thoughts. He encountered no resistance, and senses other than sight began to reach him.

"Then next time just do us all a favour and stay home with your goddamn NesCafe."

The aura around the memory-Loki brightened to a shimmering emerald, and as he watched the idiot spill coffee down his front, the taste of wintergreen washed over Loki's tongue. The sensation was so unexpected that his eyes flew open, breaking his concentration and severing the telepathic connection.

As his head gradually cleared, he could see Brynn staring back at him, her cheeks flushed and lips parted. It was an admittedly pleasant sight, but what struck him was not her face but what he read in her eyes.

Trust.

"That was really weird," she breathed.

She was waiting for him to reply but he was still trapped by her guileless eyes and the mislaid faith he saw in their depths. He had told her this process would require her to trust him, but making such a statement in theory and witnessing it in the flesh were two different matters completely. When had anyone last gazed upon him with such blind confidence? Oh, Thor, probably…but not for a very long time…

He forced himself to set those traitorous thoughts aside and extracted his hand from Brynn's.

"Yours is an unusual gift," he observed. "Do you experience the same with all of the colours?"

She shook her head.

"Yes. Taste the rainbow," she said, trying to smile, but Loki did not understand the reference.

He watched fidget for a few moments and then spoke. "What has SHIELD told you about the auras?"

Brynn was examining the blanket on the bed, looking for more stray threads. "That it's some kind of electrical energy field."

Fools.

"What you are sensing has nothing to do electrical energy," Loki told her flatly. "You are sensing magic."

She looked at him for a second or two and then started laughing, convinced that this was all some kind of a joke. Then she saw Loki had not cracked even a hint of a smile, and her mirth faded.

Her eyes widened. "Seriously?"

"Very."

Brynn dropped the blanket and her head fell into her hands. "Jesus Christ," he heard her mutter.

Uncertain why she was invoking the name of the Christian god, Loki continued, "How else did you think I was able to read your mind just now?"

"I don't know!" Brynn shrilly exclaimed. "I thought it was some kind of alien superpower! Not fucking Harry Potter!"

Loki closed his eyes and scrounged together every remaining ounce of patience he possessed, which at that moment was just shy of nothing.

"I would prefer for this information to stay between ourselves for the present," he said when he opened his eyes again.

Brynn had started inspecting the blanket again. "I'd prefer that too," she replied, "although it's not like everyone on here doesn't already think I'm a lunatic."

"We will start tomorrow, if it pleases you." This was feigned politeness on his part; he did not care whether it pleased her or not, and his eyes flashed when she replied in the negative.

"I can't. I have therapy tomorrow," she explained. "Dr. Ives bitches if I miss appointments, and I'm usually a mess afterwards."

Loki scowled.

"We will start tomorrow," he repeated.

Brynn rolled her eyes and stood up to leave. She didn't seem turned off by his sudden shift in temper, which only goaded him further.

"Whatever," she said. "My room is two floors up. Come by if you feel like having a mood swing."

She was almost to the door when Loki turned in his seat and said, "Ms. Nolan..." She glanced back at him. Hesitant, Loki forced the question out: "What is my…tell?"

A slow smile game over her face.

"You're a closed book to me," she answered, shifting from one foot to the other. "And you have no idea how nice that is. Ignorance really is bliss."

Loki frowned.

"Everyone around here lies to my face, all the time," she said simply. "They just don't tell me what they're lying about. At least with you I can pretend like someone's actually telling me the truth." She paused, then said, "See you."

Loki inclined his head in farewell and turned away from the door as it shut, absently flexing the fingers of his right hand. They were still warm from where she had clasped them.