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Chapter 25

Loki leaned eagerly into Dr. Strange's hands.

Tony was surprised at how disturbed that made Frigga.

"He knows I mean no harm to him," Dr. Strange said quickly. "I did him a service last time, one he won't be forgetting. Hmm. Yes, He's doing much better. Still nowhere near healed, and there's nothing I can help with this time."

He removed the hands and leaned back.

"Can you tell us anything about his enemies?" Odin asked.

"I'm sorry. He can remember more of the abuse now - that may be the breakthrough he had last night, in fact - but identifying information wasn't included." He shook his head. "Single leader, one with a suspected interest in Lady Death, but that's one in three sorcerous warlords, statistically speaking."

"How is he, really?" Frigga asked.

Tony realized Loki was paying very close attention to Dr. Strange.

"He's beginning to realize what he's lost, socially as well as functionally. He was afraid this might be a soft prison, but that's been corrected."

Odin nodded.

"He's terrified of taking risks, of making errors."

"After what happened the past few days, I'd believe that," Tony told him. "Did that incident hurt him?"

"He's sure you all have something nearing his best interest in mind now. He's considering taking deliberate risks." Dr. Strange sighed. "And he got a major rite-of-passage for innate sorcerers over with."

"What's the rite of passage?" Tony asked after Frigga and Odin shared a worried and grim look.

Odin began speaking, quite slowly and methodically. "The Lady Death is less an anthropomorphic psychological construct and more the guise a being outside our capacities to fully understand choses to wear over her natural form. She tends to favor sorcerers, for good or ill."

"Which makes it very likely for an innate sorcerer to have near-Death experiences where someone else would see nothing. Especially young sorcerers - she likes to introduce herself, as it were."

"Wait, he had an NDE because of us?"

"Mr. Stark, I am less surprised he had one and more surprised it was only his first. His opinion of her was healthy, and she resolved the issue that made him lose his appetite so dramatically."

"Which was?" Tony asked.

"Of an intensely private nature. It had something to do with Jotunheim and he did not want me to know anything more. And yes, he does know he is biologically Jotun. He's working through it, but there's no need to soften the fact of his ancestry when dealing with him now." Dr. Strange patted Loki's shoulder and overdid a smile. "You are doing just fine for now, Loki, and you should start to figure out speech again soon, or at least hearing it. Producing it will take much longer."

"Will it be like these breakthroughs have been?"

"Word by word, Mr. Stark, and not always in anticipated patterns. So give him all the speech you can on every topic you can." Dr. Strange firmed his hold on Loki's shoulder, but not enough to generate a complaint. "Producing will me worse. There was some sort of a block to make sure he didn't discuss his enemies - or at least that's all I can think of that would leave that set of injuries when removed. That will make it harder and there's a chance that won't heal so much as scar."

"So he may never speak," Odin said dully. He wrapped an arm around Frigga and held her close. She looked too distressed to react properly. Loki looked distinctly uneasy.

"May never speak well," Dr. Strange corrected. "He'll find ways to communicate so long as he has something to say and feels safe enough to try to express it. Right now, he feels reasonably secure expressing biological needs - although he won't act on them himself except in dire need. Which is still far better than he was doing."

"He tried to drink on his own when he was sick, but it came back up immediately," Tony reported. "And when he was going through the first breakthrough... he tried, intentionally, and couldn't. He... he just couldn't swallow it."

"And that would be psychological conditioning, Mr. Stark. Not a relic of the damage done to him. That just needs time, support, and a lack of pressure."

"So the best we can do for him is offer a stable safe environment with psychological stimulation, language enrichment, and opportunities to try making little choices for himself?"

Dr. Strange raised an eyebrow. "I thought your specialties were purely mechanical."

Tony rubbed the back of his head. "Pepper and Natasha may have just been handing me every potentially useful resource they could find for the past few weeks. And Bruce has been trying to teach me everything he knows about abuse psychology."

"I thought his expertise is chemical."

"... this is more in the experiential realm," Tony hinted without any more detail than that. And that only because there was a bit of a legal paper trail involved, toward the end of Bruce's childhood, and because Bruce had told him he could hint about it to the Asgardians if he felt the need. It was less than an open records search could turn up if you knew the name of Bruce's father.

And it had taken weeks and weeks of idle chit-chat in the lab for Tony to find out what he did know.

Odin nodded gravely. "He is in hands that know what they are doing, then."

"I'm not sure I would say that after what happened just before you came..." Tony hedged.

"You asked us what resolution would be least distressing for him," Frigga reminded him. If you did not care, you would have delayed us as well you could, cleaned him up, and acted as if nothing happened. He is non-communicative right now, and therefore greatly vulnerable."

Dr. Strange let go of Loki's shoulder and gave him a gentle pat on the back. "All in all, he's doing quite well for all he's been through in the past few years." He seemed to consider something for a moment. "And I consider it a very good thing you sent him here. Some of what the Asgardian sorceress supreme has been saying..."

"Is there still danger?" Odin asked.

"I would not call it danger, but... well, it's less what she's been telling me and more the solid stream of biased statements and anti-Jotun slurs she's been using to tell it."

Frigga closed her eyes.

"That's a problem."

Dr. Strange nodded. "I hadn't realized her views until Loki came here, but it made some other things in the past make sense. And it's an interrealm difficulty."

"How so, I thought the sorcerers supreme kept to their own worlds."

"There are historical chains of who is responsible for what should a world lose its sorcerer without a trained replacement handy. Jotunheim hasn't had one since before you took to the throne, Lord Odin, and Asgard is considered responsible for training the next one. There are no candidates I've heard tell of, there is no active search for a latent candidate, and with her views I have no doubt she is not doing her duty otherwise."

"No wonder..." Frigga breathed. "One of her top Asgardian potential students - she's been chasing after her for years, even though her primary interest is not innate sorcery at all - has been completely ignored of late. She defied her family, and I've been keeping an eye out for her." She sighed. "Well, at least now she can have some idea why that career door is closed."

"And she hasn't done anything actionable," Odin said dully.

"Not anything I've heard of, not within what I know of Asgardian law. If Lady Death hasn't acted, there's nothing that can be done from the sorcery side. And unfortunately from my side, I can't do anything against her personally because Midgard is in the same client relationship with Asgard as Jotunheim is. I'm automatically her junior in more than age and experience if I bring anything before the rest of the sorcerers supreme." He sighed heavily. "I don't like it when I can't do anything, but that's what the political side of the situation seems to have gotten to. At least she's content with neglect of her out-of-home-realm responsibilities. I'll keep doing whatever I can for Loki. If we could just figure out who did this to him..."

Frigga brightened somewhat. "That could help him?"

"No. But no one does what they did to him without experience. That means there are others and someone needs stopping."

Everyone was a bit sullen when the Asgardians, Tony, and Dr. Strange came out of the room.

By agreement, they'd had an audio and video feed this time, courtesy of JARVIS. That way, they could all react without Loki reacting to them.

Pepper was off doing 'CEO things', as Tony called them, but the rest of them were there. Steve already found his mind running through what in the world they could try to do to help Loki now.

"I have one more question," Dr. Strange told Odin. "I don't know if it will matter or not, but it may."

"Ask, then."

"Where did you find Loki when you adopted him? Not which family he came from, not how many days old he was, just where?"

"The inside of the Jotun temple, on something I thought was an altar. Why?"

"Because that's exactly what I was hoping to hear. He was abandoned with intent that he would die, but they consecrated him to Lady Death's safe-keeping first. Ritual abandonment of a wanted child who was not going to survive no matter what anyone did - or so his birth family would have thought."

That brought back too many memories of his own childhood as a weak runt who had never had a hope of defending himself. Of one - or three - too many childhood diseases that practically killed him.

And, well, that meant that even though Loki was a large man - he and Thor had probably been in constant competition for who would be taller all through their growth spurts, if Jotun and Asgardian development were anything like human - compared to what the rest of his species looked like, he really was a worse runt than Steve had been. With all the brain development genetic coding of someone significantly larger.

That just made him feel more protective than he already had been.

If we could just talk to you, even just to let you know you've got natural allies in us, people who understand some of what you've gone through...

But that was clearly not going to happen. Not soon, anyway.

"That means she's more likely to take this personally than she might be otherwise, and that Loki does have some amount of favor with her.

"Um, 'consecrated to Death'? Isn't that a potential, well, problem?" Tony asked.

"Everything dies eventually," Bruce replied softly.

Dr. Strange nodded. "Everything physical does. And that which tries to avoid that for too long tends to go insane. It has something to do with total amount of experienced time, so far as I understand it. The limit is still well beyond even the standard lifespan of an Asgardian, though. Anyway, the intent would have been for her to take him on whenever his condition degraded enough to kill him, and not have him linger until there was no other possible outcome. That is one form her favor can take. For sorcerers supreme, it takes the form of her leaving us alone until something other than normal effects of age for our species kill us - mostly physical damage from a battle. Loki survived his infancy, so her favor would now more likely be weighted to his survival rather than his death. And whether he has her favor or not - and I believe he does - she will consider such a gross offense against his being as an offense against something that belongs to her." He gave a grim grin. "And considering what has been known to happen to people who obstructed sorcerers supreme acting on her direct instructions, that is not a good thing for Loki's enemies."

Loki wondered what the strange man had told his mother and father that morning.

He wondered all morning, straight through lunchtime, and was still wondering when his father gave him a few extra hugs and quite obviously took his leave.

And his mother didn't.

His father chuckled a little at his reaction to having what was happening not match what they had explained would happen, and then... it took a while, but he finally understood that his mother was going to stay a few more days, but that Thor was definitely coming back once Odin reclaimed his throne.

And that was more than all right with Loki.