Come to Pass
Chapter 4: The Discussion
Trigger Warning: Mentions of suicidality
"How bad is it?" Tony was asking from the corner of the kitchen table, his arms spread out on the wood, taking up as much space there as possible. "Can you see this?" he was immediately following up with, fingers slapping into the farthest reach of air towards his right.
A bitter laugh landed from out of the demigod's mouth.
"No." A normally impassive face instead reflected nausea and pain.
"Why would your father do this to you?" Steve was asking tentatively and Tony huffed back, "You clearly don't have any daddy issues."
The trickster's lips twitched for a second before he was uttering softly, "I do not know."
"Why is there a war happening on your planet?" Tony asked instead without missing a beat but found that Loki was already looking towards his left, cloudy eyes as blank as before, the sunlight falling upon his face, probably too pale than it should have been.
He hummed softly.
"I do not… wish to hold this conversation." He stammered, betrayal lingering in his eyes with the way they crinkled at the corners and the deep-set frown that was lasered into his cheekbones.
"We have to, Loki," Steve said as calmly and carefully as possible.
Loki let out a small whimper, "Maybe you do, but I don't."
"You have to eat something," Tony remarked instead, pushing a bowl of oatmeal towards their most unexpected (and unwanted) new house guest.
"No," Loki challenged, lips pursed tightly together. "I don't."
"You have to eat in order to live." Tony said lightly and Loki sputtered instantaneously.
"Maybe I don't want to live."
The silence that fell was suffocating.
"I don't choose this life." Emotions swirled in Loki's expression; a pain there so deep that Tony felt himself lose his breath. "I'd never choose this."
Tony let out the shakiest breath he could manage, like he was breathing through a broken straw.
"Great," he told Steve, gesturing to the god, "now we've got ourselves a suicidal demigod on our hands. Awesome." He laughed awkwardly, his own chest suddenly feeling so tight it was hard to imagine breathing easier again in the future. "Did they ever prepare you for this training?" He skid his palms down the sides of his face. "'Cause I don't remember ever being ready for this conversation."
Tony fingered the spoon in the brown bowl in front of Loki and tried instead, "You really do need to eat though."
"I don't want to." Loki said stiffly instead.
A frown set in on Steve's features.
"Loki, it's been forty-eight hours since you've been here."
"So?"
"You haven't eaten anything in that time," Tony replied, adding onto Steve's tone, trying to mirror the super soldier in any way that he could because for the moment it was still dawning on him that Loki couldn't see their faces and couldn't read their body language so he couldn't fully know or appreciate the fact that they had absolutely no idea what they were dealing with, in for or how inexperienced they were in dealing with this new predicament.
"I'm not hungry," Loki murmured.
It was a lie, and they seemed to know it.
"Look, Reindeer Games," Tony bit his lip and sighed. "There's no easy way to say this but you're still a war criminal by the standards of the United States and there are protocols and rules and regulations that we have to abide by as citizens of that world you tried to take over. Someone besides us has to know that you're here and that we're technically hiding a criminal. It's not great, it's not easy, but you're here and there may be a war coming after us so we need your explanation of the information that you have. It's not like we can ask Gary down the street, because Gary doesn't know jack shit."
Tony broke the silence by cracking his knuckles and continuing, "We're sorry about your… situation. If we had the time to be careful about not hurting your feelings and getting you back on whatever track you need to be on, we'd be doing that, but the literal state of the world is at stake here and we have to move this along. It… it's not fair, but it's what we have to do. It's already been two days. You have to give us some leeway."
Tony looked at him, studied him really, with so much exasperation and confusion.
How were they going to get through to him? How were they going to manage this new situation that was so confusing and so complex and so multi-faceted, and absolutely something no one had ever properly prepared them for? Something no one could have ever imagined preparing them for?
It'd been a year since New York and wasn't the world supposed to be easier since facing an alien army and being reminded that you're not the only ones out there in the universe?
It felt suddenly like everything was at stake and that was so overwhelmingly terrifying that Loki's lack of expression and lack of response was probably even more frustrating and horrifying than Tony ever wanted to admit.
Still, the thin god's eyes were downcast now and his face was so expressionless it made Tony's skin crawl.
He blinked slowly, timidly almost, before he was responding, eventually, slowed down as if he were a broken computer.
"No."
"What the fuck," Tony hissed, throwing his hands into the air. "I just—I can't… Cap?" He shot a frustrated and helpless look towards his teammate. "Can I have a word with you?"
Steve nodded grimly and stood up, following Tony to the edge of the kitchen where he listened to Tony's franticly descriptive whispers, part of his attention still focused on Loki warily.
"—I just don't have any fucking idea how we're going to get information out of him. If, if it's this hard right now, can you imagine what improvement or lack of information SHIELD would get out of him?" Tony bit his lip and groaned. "I really don't think this is at my pay rate. I, I have no fucking clue what to do right now. What's the rule here? What's the protocol? Cap? Cap. Rogers!"
Steve jerked his head, looking to Tony for the first time in hours.
"I…." he muttered softly and let out a long breath. "I don't know, Tony. I don't think any kind of training could have prepared us for this scenario." He pondered to himself thoughtfully for a moment.
"We just have to give it more time."
"Time? Time. We don't have that kind of time, Rogers." Tony grumbled effortlessly. "If there's another guy out there who was really behind New York, if this is the last mission, the mission, then we don't have time to sit around and wait. We have to get as much information out of Loki so we can properly set in place preventative measures. Who knows what kind of war or army we can even muster together to face the next threat?" Tony eyed Steve carefully, almost in distrust. "You saw how we were at New York. …If there's someone else behind Loki that's anything more than that, and it sounds like there is, then we're completely fucked. You have to realize that, right, Cap?"
Steve gazed back at Tony, mulling over the inventor's words.
"We need more time." He repeated instead, and there was a pensive sadness in his eyes that made their blue shine dully. "He needs to eat something. We handle that first, then we work on information. Then we call in our reinforcements and we get who we need to get involved. We have to do this carefully, Tony. One wrong move and… and the fate of the universe could be at stake here."
Terror sliced through Tony, his eyes watering immediately.
"We'll lose."
"Then we'll face that together." A flicker of determination returned to Steve's eyes.
"Half the team is around the world." Tony uttered wisely, pointing briefly to the demigod at the table. "He's not gonna be a happy reason for us to be back."
"Then we'll face that together, too." Steve's head nodded minutely. "You ready?" His blue eyes faced Loki and the situation at hand again.
Tony observed the worry, the doubt, and the smallest inkling of newfound hesitance within his own body. If this was the mission, if this was the big one, he just hoped and prayed that they'd be enough to manage it. He wasn't so sure, though, as he looked back at the demigod, and he wasn't so sure of Steve's plans—what if they couldn't get Loki to talk in any reasonable amount of time? —but he decided, reluctantly, that he had to keep his head down for now and just muddle through it as best as he could.
Because, if he were being honest with himself, Tony didn't have any clue how to capture his emotions in the present moment. Did he listen to Steve blindly because they were supposed to be a team or did he go for a higher up that he still didn't even fully trust? It felt like there were no good solutions for this situation and he had a nagging suspicion that it would be the wrong move to get SHIELD involved, at least so soon. Tony bit his lip and felt like the situation was already crawling all over his skin like bugs and he hated that with a passion.
He had never been one to mess with his intuition, and he watched it almost out of bodily now, but he settled on the fact that a couple more days couldn't hurt. With that decided, he clenched his teeth together tightly, nodded and plowed straight ahead, "Together."
{*!*!*}
His mood felt as bleak as his level of sight: absent, locked away, vanished, no more. It took everything in the remaining shreds of his soul not to be crying every few seconds. It was only through the sense that he didn't want to appear any weaker than he already was amongst the company of his enemies that kept his tattered mind loosely held together.
He couldn't stop himself from thinking, over and over and over again, the words Odin had spoke to him before he'd…he'd…
The thought was too much. He could feel the tears come to his eyes just thinking about it.
And it's all he thought about. It's all he could think about.
Why would Odin do this to him?
Why would the Allfather think this was the right course of action?
What had Loki truly done in his life, in his existence, in his birth to ever deem this as a necessary and just punishment? Was he being tortured, again, all over again, for just existing because he shouldn't have? He shouldn't have survived and he shouldn't have lived and now his price to pay was the fact that he was abandoned in a strange land (a land he had attempted and failed to rule), gone without sight, facing a war that would eventually find him after a being who had already wrought so much damage and pain onto him when he'd been briefly in his company?
Was this how his life always had to play out to be?
What would eating a snack or sleeping a blink do for him?
Maybe if he just… eliminated himself from the question, there wouldn't be anything else to be done. To be managed. He could just take himself out of the equation and everything else would go back to normal. He wouldn't have to sit in this fear and this aching pain and this… pervasive hopelessness that nothing was ever going to be okay again. How could it?
If he couldn't see?
If he couldn't see a way out of this, then how was there ever going to be a way out?
But the tears came again then, with that thought, so he buried it down tight, compact, like he were digging a grave like the Midgardians did, burying their prey.
Some things weren't meant to be discovered.
Sometimes those things included Loki.
He sniffled, poking himself in the eye accidentally when he went to swipe his sleeve over his nose.
Was this ever going to be normal for him? Was he ever going to be able to… live like this?
He felt a tear fall from his eye. He felt the way the warmth traveled down his cool skin. He felt the loneliness ache and expand inside his chest and he just… he just craved that comfort that Thor could bring, that childish need within himself to be loved and cared for and told that everything was going to be okay. No matter how much he didn't believe in that, no matter how much he would gripe on the lecture that sentiment meant anything at all, no matter how much he would laugh and pretend like he didn't believe it, didn't hear it, didn't want it—he needed it, now more than ever, he needed it.
He needed to be told it was going to be okay.
Because maybe one day, if not today, if not within the expanse of his lack of vision, in his lack of seeing a better day ahead, maybe it could be achieved, maybe it could be found. Didn't having that hope, having that essence that existed in some small square space of the universe that everything would be okay again, and everything would come to an end, that there would be peace and blissfulness, if not happiness than an okay-ness, with the way life was dealt, didn't that mean everything? And if that meaning didn't exist, if he was alone in the universe meant to suffer until his dying days, what else was out there to truly live for?
Loki grunted softly.
It always came back to that, didn't it?
A life worth living.
But cast into shadows for all his life, cast into the nothingness and the blankness and the darkness, did Loki truly believe things would get better?
Could he afford to? Now of all times?
Because maybe having hope wasn't the worst part. Maybe having hope and then losing it again was the worst part. And that inevitability, that inevitability that pain would always return even among the brightest joy, maybe that discolored his vision, maybe that made him weak, maybe that made him bitter.
But in the faint recesses of his mind, he still wandered, he still wondered, maybe it could be different. And it was within the space between hearing shuffling feet and a soft clinking sound that he heard from the corner of his imagination, a happy Thor urging him to try: to try to live, to try to hope, to try to try.
"Loki?"
It was almost like he was right there. Red cape and all.
Loki felt the ease of comfort, even if Thor wasn't really there. For now, he felt comfort. He grasped it tightly, not knowing when he'd ever feel it again.
"Can you try to eat just one spoonful?" It was the Captain and Loki felt something break and come back together inside of his soul.
He licked his lips.
He thought.
Maybe to get to tomorrow he had to act today.
"Okay." He paused.
There was a sense of dread here, for a moment. A sense of wonder if he'd actually be cut out for dealing with this newfound life. A wonder if he was ready enough or strong enough to ever manage it.
But he set his jaw straight, and he swallowed back his fear as a look of perseverance creased his brows.
"Where's the utensil?"
A/N: Hi hi! So, I know I'm kinda rushing out this chapter but I didn't really come up with a long or any real outline for this and after filming the process of editing and re-writing some of it today, I decided I DO want to get it up, if only for the fact that it's for me to wave and say hi and then say that I'm working on future story updates.
So, yeah. I got inspired to write for this story again earlier this week when I was watching a Dry Bar comedian on Youtube that briefly mentioned a blind friend. I wound up reading the entire story up to this point and then vent writing this chapter.
As of "today", I filmed myself editing it and re-phrasing parts of it and then edited that as a separate video, taking a break and then finishing writing and editing the full piece for now. So, if you watch the video I made, the writing there will look a little different in parts to how it actually is here. But, I'm hoping that those improvements and grammar fixes matter!
Any who, thanks so much for reading!
I'm hoping and planning to write and update these stories within the next two months: D&D, ALU, CeC, S, TAaBBT (this is in the works). ALU and CeC are in the process of me re-reading.
But yeah, I also wrote this chapter in the heat of the fact that I have stalled in re-watching the MCU movies which also means I'm trying to stay spoiler-free and in the dark about the current Loki series, soooo that sucks. Definitely missing out on a lot but I'm too stubborn at the same time. I guess I'll just continue to be out of the loop for a bit longer.
Any ways, yeah, feel free to reacquaint yourself with this story and I'll see you all I hope very soon. All the best, xxx
Written: 6.22, 6.25.2021
Edited: 6.25.2021