The sudden lack of pain and Loki's silence in the link is almost more upsetting than the noise and agony had been.
You remember that Loki said he would tell them about what had happened to you both. For the first few minutes when the physical pain subsides and the noise of Loki's body in pain dies away to an oddly disturbing, mindless hum in the link, you are relieved. Maybe this is what's happened. Maybe he's told them everything, they've believed him, and now they're letting him alone.
Then the anxiety sets in.
You've always been an anxious person, more frightened of the thought of pain than pain itself. Now the silence is filling with your dread.
You try to console yourself with facts. He's not unconscious and he's not dead. From the experience you've had so far, it seems that when you black out, he blacks out, so it would make sense that if Loki had been rendered unconscious, you wouldn't be awake to worry about it. Equally, [daudr] makes you quite sure that if Loki had been killed, you've have far bigger problems that sitting in a puddle of your own vomit in a sterile beige room with a camera on you.
Or maybe not. Maybe being dead would be an end to all problems.
Would you go to heaven? Unlikely, as you're not sure you believe in it anymore. And also, while your mom was always more religious than you, you're fairly sure that her Lord God would probably be less than forgiving to someone who's been effectively sharing their soul with a pagan deity.
Maybe you'd end up in Asgard, sharing eternity with an angry, disappointed Loki.
Or maybe there'd just be…nothing. Like this. A blank room. No sense of other people being nearby, but a sense of being observed and silently judged, nonetheless.
For the briefest of moments you entertain the possibility that you're already dead, and this is the afterlife. The idea doesn't frighten you as much as it should. Instead, you feel only a shrugging sort of resignation. This is an alien feeling for you. You've spent your whole life buried in what-ifs and fears without ever managing to feel properly resigned to your fate.
You're never going to be a celebrity. You're never going to be rich. It's too late for that, and you weren't born into the right scene or given the right advantages. Your life is going to consist of only the same things that nearly everyone else's life consists of. Here's how your obituary will read: Born. Schooled. Employed. Died. That's all. You made no impact on the global stage and that's the way of things for almost every human being on the planet.
It would be depressing if you weren't already in that odd state of mind that allows you to be objective.
And also if you hadn't remembered at that point that you aren't actually dead yet, you're in (presumably) an extremely high security holding cell with the eyes of some incredibly important people on you, and an alien god has you leashed up to the mind of his wayward younger son like some kind of adopted puppy dog.
That's probably enough to make anyone a celebrity, if you think about it.
Gosh.
Born. Schooled. Employed. Attached to god. Died.
Now that's something.
And at that moment there's a golden sensation/sound along the link, like someone plucking a harp string attached to your central nervous system, and you can feel Loki again. He feels like [Hel] hell. All the hairs on your body stand on end in response, and you realise that part of what you're feeling is relief.
A door that you could barely even separate from the magnolia wall opens, slowly and silently, in front of you. Two anonymous figures in soft grey come in. They're wearing helmets and some body armour, a bit like a more sophisticated and elegant type of riot gear, and they have specialist guns that look bigger and more wicked than any gun you've ever seen, and you've seen your Uncle Clifton's gun locker in his basement.
One of them holds his gun on you and you freeze in place. The other comes over to you and tautens some kind of plastic strip like you get on packaging around your wrists. He is professional and relatively gentle, and you say nothing, even when he steps in your vomit. Let him. Worse things have happened to you today, let someone else have a turn.
[Come to me]
Loki. His voice feels rough and unfinished somehow, but his intent is clear. He wants you. He needs you. Somehow you know that wherever he is, there are people doing worse than holding a gun on him, and your being there with him will alleviate his situation in some way.
Your guards usher you out of the room. The one with the soiled boots keeps a hand firmly on your shoulder, his colleague walks behind with the gun. You can feel the threat of that gun as if it were physically prodding you in the back.
There is nothing to see outside of the room. The corridor you walk down is lit and just as magnolia as the room had been. Except it all looks…unfinished. There's that sensation again. As if SHIELD are in the middle of decorating and have left the chipboard undone.
Loki murmurs something at the back of your mind. Yes. They've deliberately covered up anything that you could identify about this corridor before bringing you along it. Behind these hastily raised magnolia covers, there are things of interest.
It's clear from Loki's murmured comment that this is exactly the sort of thing he would have done. A sensible precaution. No. Wait.
[ I have done]
What's he done? What -
The guard at your shoulder swipes a card through a reader at the side of another door. The door opens with a hiss, like an airlock.
And inside is Loki, on the floor, being stood over by a man who looks as irritated as it's possible for any man to look with one eye covered up.
Loki looks as if he's been through a very precise, scientific threshing machine. His armour is gone. Instead he's wearing something anonymous and black that reminds you a bit of form-fitted thermal underwear, covering his body from neck to ankle, leaving only his pale feet, face and hands uncovered. There's a sensation of rage and violation from him on your tongue, and its metallic awfulness makes you feel sick all over again. His eyes look green and glassy in the bright light, and there are dark exhausted circles ringing them.
He feels like dissonance, like badly formed syncopation, like a Sondheim refrain. His rhythm is all off. He feels wrong.
Behind the one-eyed man there is a little sealed booth, and in the booth a group of people in white coats. They are so stereotypically scientific it's almost funny, and Loki's pale lips twist up a tiny amount at one corner as he senses your amusement. The whitecoats are all dividing their time equally between staring at you and staring at innumerable little screens that are cycling readouts of stuff. It's like something out of Star Trek.
[Come to me]
Loki is sitting on the floor, his arms circling his knees, the sense of him still jangling along your nerves like a modern arrhythmic composition. His inner voice is flat. The gun behind you gestures you forward, as the one-eyed man tilts his head in a confirming gesture.
[You'll have to kneel]
He sounds odd. You only realise afterwards this is because he's sounding very slightly apologetic and that emotion doesn't fit. Almost in a dream, you walk forward, get down on your knees, and kneel before Loki. He reaches out a big, pale hand and touches your forearm. An impersonal place to touch, which somehow feels much more personal than it should have. Every muscle in your body seems to relax.
And all the little screens in the booth go crazy.