Tony was hauling a sizeable box of dry ice and the container with the liquid nitrogen back into his office, wondering what kind of brain aneurysm caused him to not consider just bringing Loki to his workshop instead.
Maybe it wasn't that bad of a call though. The god was extremely agitated by the very idea of what they were asking him to do, and Tony didn't need a reminder of the scenes from the lab this morning – Loki acting all surprised they weren't going to torture him for sport – and the more neutral grounds might make at least a sliver of difference.
Tony himself was no stranger to captivity, coercion and torture, but whatever Loki had been through, it seemed to be far beyond the level that could be fixed with Tony's usual methods: one good meal, a shag, a solid night of sleep, and a few drinks to drown the memories, rinse and repeat until things are more or less fine. No, Bruce was right, it was long months – years maybe, because the timeline Thor presented them with was flimsy as hell – of continuous torment, deprivation and methodical conditioning and that wasn't something one just brushed off, no matter how strong of a mind they possessed. Loki needed actual, professional help, someone who would know how to work around that kind of trauma. But they needed to fix his body first, so someone else could start fixing his mind.
Loki was pacing the office when Tony returned. That, at least, was good, to see him up and moving after what they've witnessed over the last couple of days, even though there was undeniable anxiety to it.
Tony dropped the huge styrofoam box on the table and placed the vacuum bottle next to it, much more gently, then pried the lid off. The pellets immediately started sublimating on contact with the moisture in the air.
"Okay, what now?" he prompted.
Loki sighed, came over to stand over the ice box and eyed the steam rising from the container with a contemplative expression. He rolled his sleeves up then stopped, with his hands hovering just above the surface. He took in a long breath and gritted his teeth.
"Are you sure this is safe?" Bruce asked him. It wouldn't be, for a human. Sticking one's appendages into the container without protective, insulated gloves would result in serious frostbite, in seconds. But that was the whole point, wasn't it?
Loki nodded, but still hesitated.
"Are you sure you want to do this?" Bruce rephrased the question.
Loki set his shoulders, pulled the sleeves further up and closed his eyes. "No," he said, then shoved his hands into the container, up to his elbows.
Tony suppressed a shudder.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then the color of the skin on Loki's hands slowly started to shift, from pale pink to neutral gray and then into a shade of steel blue. The color crept up, overtaking his arms and throat, and spilling over his face.
Tony had seen videos documenting Banner's transformation into the Hulk. That change was disruptive, sudden and violent, and he expected to witness something similar here too. What he got instead was just a gradual shift. A subtle state change, like frost slowly overtaking a calm surface of a lake, not an explosion.
Besides some raised lines now framing Loki's forehead, chin and cheekbones, the change was purely cosmetic. Tony had no issue recognizing the god's features, even under the new color palette.
Loki's eyes snapped open. Those too had undergone a change, the whites of his eyeballs were now deep orange and the irises – blood red, shining like two well-polished rubies inside his skull.
"That's a nice touch," Tony decided with a smirk. He was so glad he got to witness it. "But I was expecting more screaming and tearing. You know, something more dramatic."
He circled the table and sat back down in his vacated chair.
Loki slowly pulled his hands out of the box and his eyes dashed around, from Tony to Bruce, whose face bore an expression of the same utter fascination Tony was experiencing, to Romanoff, who was grinning like a child waiting in line for a rollercoaster. His brows furrowed and he looked down on his fingers, then whipped around and studied his reflection in the glass dividing the room from the hallway.
"Something didn't work as it should?" Bruce asked.
Loki turned back to them and his gaze wandered around, sliding over the people gathered in the room once again. The expression on his face couldn't be described as anything but the ultimate confusion.
"It did," he said quietly. His voice sounded exactly the same too.
"Then what's the problem?"
Loki blinked, let out a sigh and collapsed down into one of the empty chairs.
Bruce sprung up the same moment Tony did and he was at Loki's side in a blink of an eye. Loki jerked away when Bruce's hand reached for his arm. "Don't touch me," he snarled and Bruce pulled his hand back immediately.
"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to…"
Loki swallowed hard then pulled the sleeves back down. "No, I… The Jötunn's touch will freeze your flesh. It can cause irreparable damage to a mortal."
Bruce frowned, then pulled a thermometer out of his lab coat's pocket and aimed it at Loki's forehead. "Your current body temperature is at nine degrees Celsius. That's extremely low for any warm-blooded species we know – to the point it renders the naming scheme obsolete – but hardly dangerous, even for a human." He reached out and pressed his knuckles to the back of Loki's palm. "See?"
Loki's eyes dashed up to Bruce's face. It was a bit harder to read his emotions now, but even with that, the mixture of incredulity, relief and pure, raw despair was evident in his expression.
"It's completely fine," Bruce assured again and pulled his hand away. "How are you feeling?"
Loki bit his lip and his expression turned thoughtful. "Hot," he decided after a few seconds.
"Anything other than that?" Bruce inquired, while Tony pulled up the app and adjusted the air conditioning in the room to as low as it would go.
"No. I feel… fine."
"You think you can hold on to the form for a while longer?"
"Yes," Loki said, and there was both dejection and appalment in his tone. "How long?"
"As long as you can keep it? We should rerun the scans and do another energy transfer to test how it behaves now. You think you can manage that?"
Loki stared at his hands for a moment. His nails were dark, almost black and there were more lines like the ones on his face on his hands too. "Yes," he said finally.
"Great! So, shall we?"
Loki pushed himself into the corner of the elevator, as far as humanly possible from the rest of them and glued his gaze to the floor, avoiding his own reflection in the mirrors lining the walls like a plague.
Tony couldn't help but wonder what exactly triggered that reaction.
He had a guess or two, all stemming from that fleeting "monster" comment. It couldn't be more obvious that it was what Loki saw himself as because of his looks, even if Tony could hardly begin to fathom a reason. Because, sure, now Loki looked more like Tony – and the majority of pop culture, for that matter – imagined an alien should look like, but he could hardly find anything inherently monstrous about the image. Was there something Loki wasn't telling them about the form, something that would become immediately apparent to someone who knew what they were looking at?
Or was it rather some Asgardian cultural thing? Their civilization was supposed to be ancient and developed beyond anything the human race could possibly imagine, but that development seemed to be lacking in the social areas, seeing how they still did the whole absolute ruler thingy and used barbaric corporal punishments.
Or maybe it was that Frost Giants war thing still? It was ancient history for humans, but it might not be so for people with millennia-long life spans. Was Asgard still hooked up on the skirmishes they had with Loki's home planet in the past and that bled into some sort of space racism against blue people?
Whatever it was, it looked like it was another issue to add to the already sizeable list of things Loki needed therapy for.
The lab looked different now, seen through Loki's Jötnar eyes, too bright and too hot and too open, with nowhere to hide from the ever-present reflective surfaces. There was little for him to be done, so he just sat in the spot he was told to occupy, focused his gaze on the floor, gritted his teeth and pushed through.
The procedure was almost the same, minus the drip. The incision in his vein closed up upon his change and Bruce had to remove the now useless port from his forearm.
"No big deal, I wouldn't risk giving you the contrast before running more tests anyway," Bruce said, then urged him onto the machine, for the third time this day and, at this point, none of the initial reservations Loki had about the procedure remained, now replaced with heat of shame. How it must've had looked to the humans to see him react as he had done?
The scanner routine was next and Loki dreaded it for a wholly different reason now. He had never seen how the rest of his body looked like in his Jötnar form and now he had to experience it for the first time along with his hosts.
"We can wait a few minutes if you need a break," said Tony, seeing his hesitation and apparently misinterpreting it as tiredness.
"No," Loki said and pulled off his shirt over his head in one decisive move, then tossed it aside. The scar-like, disgustingly prominent and mercilessly telling heritage marks ran up from his hands, wrapped around his upper arms and continued to his chest, and then down, onto his abdomen, just to disappear behind the waistband of his trousers.
He looked around. Romanoff was still watching him closely with the same open curiosity as before, but neither Stark nor Bruce seemed to pay attention, each focused on their task.
Bruce came closer to replace the contact pads and Loki flinched, instinctively. But, just like before, the human touched his skin without any adverse effects. How was that even possible? Every child in Asgard had been taught that the Jötnar touch is dangerous; a sinister and deadly tactic the beasts would use against the innocents.
Could that part be a lie too?
No, he had seen it in action, on Thor's companions and on himself alike, during that doomed trip to Jötunheimr. Was it something that only worked there? Or maybe it was an offensive trait, part of the Jötnar innate ice magic, something that one had to use deliberately? Could he make use of it like that too? Was it instinctual or something one needed to learn first? Would it work even with his magic diminished?
Stark waved his hand at him, bringing his attention back to reality. The man had already exposed the reactor in his chest. If they were going to do that more often, Loki should really tell Stark it could be done with clothes still on.
He didn't take much energy this time. Just some, for the test to work, even though he already suspected what the results would be.
"Okay, I think we've got everything," Bruce said, peeling off the pads off Loki's back, while Loki worked on those on his face and chest.
"Here," Stark said, tossing Loki's shirt back to him. "Unless you want to keep it off."
Loki blinked at him, surprised. It would be highly unacceptable to walk around half-undressed, like a primitive brute. But this was what they were perceiving him as now, wasn't it? Not a treat, maybe, but an uncultured beast…
"You know, because of the temperature thing?" Stark added, "There's only as low as the thermostat could go."
The hot air, in fact, did feel marginally more comfortable without a layer of cloth sticking to his skin.
"It's just us here and no one is going mind," Stark added, then turned to Romanoff, "Right?"
"Right," she agreed and grinned again from her spot on the workbench. The bright, seemingly honest smile looked out of place on her usually controlled and serious face and Loki couldn't figure out what real emotions were hidden behind it, which served to unnerve him even more.
"Maybe later," he said and pulled his shirt back on. He realized it offered absolutely no protection from anything, but he still hated the idea of leaving himself so exposed.
Stark rolled his eyes.
"The results shouldn't take as long to render this time, now that we have a working model," said Bruce, still tapping away at his keyboard, purposefully removing himself from the discussion. "You can either return upstairs or wait here until we wrap this up."
"I'd rather wait here," Loki said.
"Sure," Bruce said and returned to his machine. Stark was already busy with his portable computer.
"I'll get us some coffee then," Romanoff said, jumping off the workbench. "Any requests?"
"Double espresso for me," said Stark without looking up, "and top it off with regular black."
"Bruce?"
"No, thanks, I need to keep my blood pressure under control."
She turned to him. "How about you, space boy?"
It crossed his mind to refuse, but he bit his tongue, taught by the previous experience. And there was an inkling of curiosity there, too. He never tasted anything in this form. Would there be any difference? "Yes, please."
"Any special orders?"
He pursed his lips, unsure what to answer.
She laughed. "I'll make it a surprise then," she chirped, then added, "Don't worry, I'll go easy on you." She patted his shoulder with her hand in passing and walked down the hallway.
Loki stood there, stunned. No Æsir would even think of casually touching him like that in this form.
"Hey, you're all right?" Stark asked, peering up at him above the top edge of his monitor with suspicion in his gaze.
"Yes, Stark. Everything is fine."