Disclaimer: as you hopefully know, these characters are Marvel property. In other news, back again with another Loki fic, yet again set just after the Avengers. This one is m-rated for both violence and also romantic content, the latter of which is a new experiment for my writing. If you are not into such things then the best advice would be not to read, but I do plan to place warnings on the chapters with erotic content as well.
"...What happened to your crazy brother?" Iron Man asked as Thor helped him out of his personal crater. He had just fallen what felt like several miles after blowing up the alien portal in the sky; his feet were not quite operating in concert with his brain.
"Hulk smashed him," Dr. Banner answered.
Thor looked at him askance, then shrugged. "He's probably fine."
The worry was clear in his voice, however, and it was Captain America who said, "But we should probably check."
The team trudged wearily through the shattered streets of New York back to the Avengers Tower, utterly relieved when the elevator proved to be still fully functional to take them up to the penthouse. They found Loki exactly where Hulk had left him, lying on his back in a Loki-shaped indentation in the floor. A bruise blossomed over one side of his face, adorned with a smear of blood. His eyes were closed, and his posture seemed a little odd, with his right arm half-flexed, and the left arm wedged straight next to his body and both legs fully extended. He was clearly breathing, though a little irregularly. It was unclear whether his unconsciousness was an act or the genuine result of his injuries. As none of the exhausted Avengers was terribly eager to get too close to their fallen enemy, Dr. Banner picked up Loki's bent scepter and poked him with it in the belly. This evoked no response, so he poked him again, harder. Loki's straight arm twisted unnaturally against his side, his toes pointing briefly downwards as he coughed but failed to awaken.
"Oh, golly," Captain America said, as Thor dropped his hammer and swooped down to Loki's side. He pried open Loki's eyes to find them dilated and staring.
"Brain injury," Hawkeye said unnecessarily, lowering his own weapon.
"Oh..." Banner said, edging back, eyes shifting from Loki to Thor and back again. "Shit, Thor. I don't know what to say."
Thor ignored them, his hands passing slowly over his brother's skull, gently probing his scalp through his hair. After a moment of this he paused, nodding. He started searching Loki's armor, finally extracting a long, thin knife. He wound his fingers through Loki's hair and unevenly chopped half of it off, exposing an irregular section of pale skin several inches across over his right temple and behind the ear. Without hesitation, he sliced a neat curve through the exposed area of scalp, electricity skittering along his fingers and the knife blade to cauterize the tissue as he cut. He set the tip of the knife slanted against the side of Loki's head, reached behind him for Mjolnir, and struck down hard on the pommel an instant later. The Avengers collectively yelped in surprise and alarm as a piece of Loki's skull split free with a wet crunch. Loki's limbs twisted spasmodically again.
"What the hell are you doing, Thor? You can't just stab people in the head! That's not how brain surgery works!" Tony shouted at him.
A brief smile flickered across Thor's face then as he used the end of the knife to gently clean the wound he had just made; huge blood clots were rolling out of it. "Actually, this rather is how brain surgery works, at least in an emergency. There is a collection of blood overlying the surface of the brain and causing pressure on the brainstem. If I did nothing, he would surely die. But, if I relieve the pressure... he may yet live. He is resilient." He grimaced as fresh blood started flowing freely from the wound in spurts, not just clots. He closed his eyes for an instant, summoning a flickering light to the tips of his fingers in order to inspect the wound. He gingerly laid the tip of the knife against some unseen target inside Loki's head. With one bright flash and the mixed smell of ozone and burning hair, the bleeding stopped. "Extremely resilient," Thor continued calmly. "By all accounts he should have been dead last year, you know... I don't want him to die again. Certainly not like this." He sat back on his heels, looking around at his dust-colored surroundings. "Man of Iron, do you have any clean bandages by chance?"
"Uh, probably. Let me check. Jarvis?" Tony wandered out of the room.
"That's definitely going to get infected," Natasha said, peering down at the Asgardians.
"I know. I will need to take him directly home as soon as possible, once he is stable. If he improves," Thor said. "Transport will be risky regardless."
Natasha sniffed judgmentally and knelt down to help, gathering Loki's remaining long hair into a braided twist so as to avoid worse contamination of the wound. Tony returned a couple minutes later with an armful of clean gauze, rubbing alcohol, and a bottle of distilled water from one of his labs. Natasha greeted him with another judgmental sniff, but accepted his offerings. She and Thor wiped down the skin with rubbing alcohol before rinsing the wound thoroughly with distilled water. It was the best they could do, and little enough to stave off infection. Then Thor carefully nudged the fragment of bone and still-attached skin back into place. Natasha helped him to loosely wrap Loki's head in several layers of white gauze.
When they were finished, Loki looked pretty much the same as when they had entered, minus some hair and plus a new bandage.
"Now what?" Tony asked with a yawn. "Shawarma time?"
Thor raised his eyebrows. "You go ahead. I will stay here. I don't want to leave him alone."
"I'll just order take-out."
"You know, we could take him to a hospital," Steve suggested. Hawkeye burst out laughing. "...Nevermind. Probably not a good idea if you want to take him back to Asgard."
"If he doesn't improve somewhat within the next couple hours, then there's no point. The injury he has already sustained would most likely be permanent." Thor said dryly.
By the time the Avengers had finished gorging themselves on shawarma, Thor actually had reason to be encouraged. Loki no longer assumed any bizarre postures when poked and prodded, and his eyes were no longer dilated. It was almost past sunset, with half the Avengers having fallen asleep on the nearest couch, when Thor's cajoling finally roused Loki, though. His eyelids fluttered groggily open with no indication of awareness until Thor pinched him, hard, in the side of the neck.
"Ow..." he mumbled. His eyes focused slowly on Thor before closing again.
Thor shook him again, one hand stabilizing his fragile head. "Loki, look at me. Can you hear me?"
"Yes." The slurred response somehow still sound annoyed. His eyes opened again. He looked first at Thor, then past him, then started moving his head to look around the room, brow slightly furrowed in puzzlement.
"No! Don't move," Thor commanded.
Loki stopped instantly. "Why?"
"You're hurt..."
"...You're right. Everything hurts. Where...? This isn't... home..."
"No. We're on Midgard." Loki blinked in confusion. "What do you remember?"
Loki clearly struggled with that question for several seconds before answering, "I don't know."
He started trying to sit up, and Thor had to hold him down. "No! Don't move, remember? You're hurt! Like Alwe was!"
"Alwe?" He stopped trying to sit up, but Thor still restrained him with both hands.
"...You remember Alwe, don't you?"
"'Course... We drink with him every... every..." His eyes closed before he managed to finish the thought.
"Who is Alwe?" Captain America asked softly. Thor looked up at him, sitting quietly on the floor opposite Thor.
Thor sighed. "He was a friend of ours, same age, schooled by the same tutors. Actually Loki's friend more than mine. He died seven hundred years ago as you count it. Hit in the head in the training yards. Initially he was fine, and no one thought anything of it. He sat out the next few bouts, and was dead when Loki went to check on him later. Our master healer Lady Eir had all of us, including Loki, learn how to recognize the injury and decompress the skull after the incident. That's the only reason I knew how to treat this. And now Loki doesn't even recall that Alwe is gone..."
"Well, I'd say it's still fairly good from being nearly dead to speaking in less than twelve hours. I think it's safe to say he'll live barring some major complication in the next day or so. So... when do you want to leave? I already spoke to Fury, and he's not happy, but he's willing to surrender the Tesseract and Loki so you can get back to Asgard, assuming your lot is willing to interrogate him properly, give him a trial and all that. Once he's better."
Thor smiled sadly. "Asgardian justice... will not be lacking. I only hope he recovers enough we are able to find some answers."
"As you said, he's resilient," Tony grumbled from the couch. "I'm sure he'll be fine."
Their conversation was interrupted when Loki suddenly turned his head to the side, a green luminescence springing up around him as he arched back rigidly and a ghastly cry escaped him. The humans sprang to their feet in surprise, drawing weapons. Thor on the other hand swore, drew a crackling shield of power about himself, and clapped both hands to Loki's head. "Get out!" He cried. Then Loki's body started to convulse, magical power bursting out of him in time with his shuddering limbs. All the windows shattered at once, and all the electric lights flicked off to be replaced by roiling illusions. There was no direction to the magic, some manifesting as light and sound, some paralyzing and incoherent psychic blows, some cracking and burning through the ceiling and floor. The Avengers fled the penthouse as the seizure continued, and Thor simply did his best to shield his brother's body from the fires flickering into life around them and from the falling debris. He could do nothing to protect him from his own magic, though, and so closed his eyes against the gashes and burns appearing on Loki's body, half of them healing over into scars as quickly as they formed. Fortunately, the magical outburst diminished rapidly, with only flickering light and dark and temperature distortions persisting after the first minute. Still his body shuddered, and Thor held him as still as he could.
"Is it over?" came the distant question, Hawkeye's voice, Thor thought. Just then the floor gave way beneath them, and the brothers fell through to the hallway below. Thor twisted himself around Loki to cushion the landing, praying to the Norns the head wound didn't start bleeding again with the impact.
"Thor!?" Came a distant shout.
"I'm fine. The floor broke. We're in a hallway now. Empty. There's a window at the end, but I can't see anything else. And Loki's still seizing. Get me the strongest sedative you can find... And an executioner's sword if you can."
"An execu-"
"Just do it!" Thor shouted. All light in the hall was now dimming unnaturally, the floor becoming a darkness so deep it seemed he and Loki rested in a pool of ink. So dark Loki's skin appeared a dingey gray-blue rather than its usual pallor. The air grew colder and colder, each of the still-burning fires winking out one by one. Thor could make out ice crystals forming from the new smears of blood covering Loki's nose and mouth. He must have bitten his tongue. Thor carefully allowed Loki's head to turn further to the side and wiped away a frozen chunk. Loki's movements were subsiding at last, but he was still rigid, still unresponding, still clearly not in control of the magic that drew all light and heat from their surroundings.
Distantly, he heard the pounding of someone running. Then Captain America jumped down the hole in the ceiling, holding a plastic device tipped with a needle. "I'm told this can just go in the muscle, not IV," he said through chattering teeth, his voice distorted to a lower tone than was normal. His hands held steady while he found an exposed muscle through Loki's shredded armor, even as he shivered. A minute later, the seizure finally ended, with Loki once more lying as if dead in the center of the chaos. Normal light from the remaining undamaged electric lights, the twilit windows, and the new holes in the roof beat back the unnatural darkness. Thor heard a warm breeze blowing in from the shattered windows in the penthouse above, though the air remained chill below. Iron Man flew in on the breeze as well, pausing to hover over the gaping hole in the floor to stare down at them.
"I assume you won't be needing this after all?" He proffered a huge, flat-bladed strip of antique metal. Thor was mildly surprised; it was a genuine executioner's sword. He shook his head warily. "Mind telling me why you asked for it before I take it back to the museum? The staff were kinda mad."
Thor raised his eyebrows and gestured to the debris surrounding them. "We are fortunate. If the sedative hadn't worked and he kept seizing, he could have brought down the building, or worse. I needed a sure way to stop it."
"You were going to kill him?" Captain America asked quietly.
"To be fair, looks like he was going to kill himself and all of us otherwise," the Black Widow said, peering down over the edge of the hole. "That's some nasty slices he's got now. Hold on, Thor, I'm coming down." She disappeared for a minute, apparently gathering all the scattered medical supplies left in the penthouse parlor, before dropping neatly down into the hall by Loki's feet. Unfortunately, most of the bandages that hadn't caught fire were filled with dust and grit, but Hawkeye and Dr. Banner retrieved some fresh ones while Thor and Natasha cleaned Loki up again.
"It's worse than it looks," Thor told her as they removed Loki's ruined armor and cut away a portion of his clothing. "There was plenty of healing magic mixed in with everything else. So long as his brain and heart have suffered no further damage, I doubt any of these injuries will prove very serious." Indeed, while almost every inch of him was smeared with blood and dust, most of the actual open wounds had healed over into puffy pink scars over the course of the seizure. His earlier scalp incision had sealed. Even the deeper wounds that hadn't closed were not actually bleeding. The exceptions were his lacerated tongue and a deep leg wound, because it transected the quadriceps and underlying bone, and the convulsion had pulled the fracture completely out of alignment. Thor grimaced as they examined it. "That will have to be rebroken at some point. But not now." He rinsed the area liberally before packing it with gauze and winding a tight bandage around the leg.
"You need to get him out of here," Hawkeye said as he tossed an armful of blankets for Thor to catch. Iron Man was behind him, holding the Tesseract in some new container that he was still fiddling with.
"Not to be rude, but yeah," Tony said. "That sedative the Cap used is a doozy, but it doesn't last long."
"I hear you," Thor said as he wrapped Loki in a sheet as carefully as he could, Natasha helping with his legs while Steve supported his head. "We should get him outside though. I don't want to damage the building any more than we already have."
"Sounds good to me, and I think I have just the thing you need. Here Bruce, you carry the rock. I'll meet you outside."
Thor knelt in the center of a small city green with Loki while Clint and Natasha scared off the few pedestrians that had ventured back outside in the meager light of the streetlamps. Tony zoomed down to meet them moments later, holding a neck brace for Loki. "Always good to recycle these things," he commented, strapping it into place.
"That's better," the Captain agreed as he finished securing a sheet like an enormous sling holding Loki against Thor. Dr. Banner settled the steel-framed box containing the Tesseract near Thor's left hand.
"What about this?" Clint called, holding up Loki's scepter.
"Keep it," Thor said. "I can't risk carrying any more volatile magical objects than I already am."
"Good point," Iron Man said. The humans stepped back, studying the Norse Gods one last time. "Welp, happy journey, I guess."
"Good luck," Captain America said.
"I'll need it," Thor said grimly. "And I hope to see you all again under better circumstances..." With that, he reached for the Tesseract and vanished in a shower of brilliant blue light.
Author's note: The arguably more likely outcome of being slammed into a stone floor by the Hulk, even for Loki. By way of explanation of what was supposed to be going on medically: he had a skull fracture causing an epidural hematoma squishing the brain around. The weird arm flexion and extension are things that can actually happen, called "decorticate" and "decerebrate" posturing (look it up). Once Thor relieved the pressure from the blood, the brain was able to move back to its original position, but there's still a lot of damage which caused the seizure. And magic seizures obviously have got to be more exciting than regular ones, so yeah.
Should be getting somewhat regular updates for awhile at least. A lot of this fic is already drafted, but I am working on more than one story right now.
