Hello, everybody! Anything you recognize is unlikely to be mine.
Warning: This story will be dark. Like, bottom of a cave and your light goes out dark. I will try to warn for specific chapters as they emerge. This will end up addressing some extremely tough subjects that people (particularly of the aristocracy) have had to deal with. I do not endorse any of this content. I will welcome reasonable discussion on anything. Be nice.
Warnings for chapter one: medical trauma, characters being horrible to each other.
With some reference to a prompt on Ao3 by Zaniida:
Physical Intimacy: sensual but nonsexual, or grooming, or medical care, or just physical touch
Emotional Intimacy: shared emotion, or one character comforting another
Experiential Intimacy: letting down your hair together, or going through the same experience that few others would understand
Secret Sharing: things that you wouldn't want people in general to know about you
Vulnerability/Acceptance: accepting help, exposing some weak point, sleeping or letting yourself get drugged in the other's presence, sharing artistic endeavors
X
All at once, the battle ceased.
Chitauri after Chitauri collapsed to the ground, twitching a few times before becoming truly and obviously dead. One of the dragons, for Thor could never think of them as anything else whatever the Midgardians called them, crashed into a cluster of abandoned cars leaving nothing but rubble and dust in its wake.
"Thank God."
The Captain's relieved voice brought Thor back to his immediate surroundings. "They must have had some sort of chip controlling them, that even kept them alive. Whoever trained them or whatever, they weren't taking chances on them doing something unauthorized."
Thor wasn't listening. He'd already jumped ahead to the more immediate concern. Banner's scream-and-pray approach had revived Metal Man, leaving the hawk and the spider as the only ones still missing. And of course...
The thought hit Thor like Sleipnir's hoof to his chest. "What- did they do that to Loki?"
An odd mix of emotions crashed into Thor like a bilgesnipe. If they had, Loki was probably already dead. But it would mean that he hadn't been too far gone.
It horrified him to realize he didn't know which would be worse, losing his brother to death or to madness.
X
Loki lay still on the ground, taking a shallow, ragged breath every now and then. Thor appeared out of nowhere, saying something that to his jarred and damaged brain was nothing but so much meaningless noise.
Somewhere deep inside him, a problem made itself known in the form of hot numbness.
X
"Loki?"
Thor's demolished brother flicked his eyes in the general direction of the sound, but there was no focus to them.
"It's going to be fine. We'll get you back home, get you fixed up. Just don't cause any more problems."
"That'll be the day."
The Hawk's voice sent a thrill of alarm through Thor. Loki was alive and fixable at the moment, but the drawn arrow pointed directly at his face threatened to change that with a single twitch of mortal fingers. Thor stepped between the two, struggling to contain the upcoming storm.
"Loki is my responsibility. I and Asgard will handle him. He is no longer a threat."
In fairness, that shouldn't have been particularly reassuring to any of the mortals, and inded it wasn't. Hawkeye's weapon remained aimed. Resigning himself, Thor pulled out the gag his mother had made, enchanted to counter Loki's magic.
"I'm going to put this on. It'll stop him casting any more spells, then we'll get him back to Asgard and figure out what to do next."
As soon as the metal fastened over Loki's mouth, he shuddered and went limp. Thor made to pick him up, then noticed the shine of a fading glamour spell. Scars and injuries, some of them disturbingly half-healed, made themselves apparent. Most disturbing was the swelling under his battered shirt. Thor lifted it up to look, revealing a spectacular bruise, or was that Loki's Jotun skin putting in an ill-timed appearance?
One touch revealed pulsing heat under Loki's skin, and sent him squirming around trying to get away from what looked to be horrific pain. Thor felt sick to his stomach. "I'm sorry, brother. We'll fix it."
"There's an infirmary a few floors down."
Metal Man's voice shocked Thor for the split second it took to realize the remaining Avengers had gathered around him and his brother. Gingerly, he took Loki and followed them into the elevator, ignoring the various questions from the two of them during the brief -descent? ascent? he never could tell with those things- to the infirmary floor. A flurry of activity rushed around them, and soon enough Loki lay on a rolling bed with a de-angered Banner running something over his stomach.
"Something's hemorrhaging inside, can't see it behind all of the blood. I'll have to go in and fix it. Is that okay?" He looked between the barely-conscious Loki and the confused and concerned Thor, who just nodded.
"Do whatever it takes. I can't lose him."
That, of all things, seemed to calm Loki. Natasha helped Thor to restrain Loki's limbs while Banner cut off his shirt and began working. Loki struggled for a horrific moment, every sound muffled and punished by the gag Thor knew none but Odin could remove, before he passed out. Small mercies.
"Banner? What ails my brother?"
"There's some organ I can't recognize, full of blood. Maybe I can get into that, figure out where it's coming from."
At a touch of Banner's scalpel, blood spurted out and Thor ducked away to vomit. Nothing came up, and he bothered to wonder when last he'd eaten. After a moment, the sound of a machine made him look at what was left of Loki. Banner was using some sort of tube to suck the blood out, all the while raising questions about Loki's anatomy. Thor couldn't answer. In retrospect, he should have brushed up on Jotun biology before coming here. Come to think of it, he wasn't all that well-versed in his own.
A weird gurgling noise and exclamations from the Avengers drew his attention back to the mess that was his brother. Metal Man made some vulgar comment involving the Chitauri and some "demon chestburster", quickly hushed with a "language" from someone else. Banner laid the strange entity in a metal bowl Stark offered before returning to Loki, removing something else, and beginning to stitch. The Widow had placed some sort of tube in Loki's arm; maybe that was helping him. Thor was certainly of no use. He didn't help in the healing rooms other than giving them new patients on which to practice.
"Loki?"
Loki gave no indication of having heard, but Thor noticed tears on his cheeks. "Hey, it's going to be fine. We'll get you back to Asgard, get you fixed up properly, figure out what's going on. Okay? Brother?"
Banner held up his hands as if to say, I'm finished, and Thor nodded at him.
"Thank you."
Any explanation of what just happened was interrupted by the small creature freshly extracted from Loki announcing its displeasure with inarticulate shrieks. Thor had to fight the urge to just smash it with Mjolnir, only because there was a lot of expensive equipment and he'd been on the receiving end of that sort of lecture before.
"What's up with this thing, anyway?" Stark honestly sounded confused. But what was there to question? The Chitauri had put one of their spawn inside Loki and it had tried to claw its way out and kill him. Another debt to the Avengers that they had managed to save him. Already Loki's breathing had eased and he seemed to sleep. Thor ran his fingers through Loki's messy curls. What did they do to you, brother?
Then he realized everyone was waiting on him to give some sort of an answer on the... being.
"Whatever. Maybe SHIELD can figure out what to do with it."
X
Logistics reared their ugly head, and it fell to Thor to drag a barely-conscious Loki into an elevator and down to the outside. The contraption Thor had been given to transport the two of them home required open sky, so he made for the nearest park. Except...
In fairness, the mortals weren't all that interested in letting a massive source of power leave their planet in the hands of two beings who were also massively powerful and not exactly trustworthy. Thor had to draw on a few different arguments, then the whole question fell to pieces in an instant.
What exactly happened to the Tesseract, Thor couldn't be sure, but out of nowhere, it was floating away across the floor while Stark had some sort of medical incident. Thor zapped him with Mjolnir and all seemed well, except that Loki and the cube had vanished into thin air.
Much later, the Avengers would explain that Loki had snatched the case off the floor, opened it, grabbed the cube, and simply disappeared in a cloud of green-black haze. At the time, Thor could only know that his brother was once again gone.
X
A lunch of shawarma later, the alarm brought them back to Stark Tower. Evidently, Loki had been found in one of the labs near the top of the tower. That surprised Thor. He'd have thought Loki would end up somewhere on the opposite side of Midgard if not on an entirely different planet. Truth be told, he wouldn't have even blamed him for that.
Thor, the rest of the Avengers tagging after him, burst through the door to a scene of carnage. Three Shield agents lay dead on the floor, the victim of stab wounds and in one case, a snapped neck. One living person had managed to flee, evidently the source of the alarm.
Loki sat curled up in the corner, arms wrapped around himself. Whatever shock and anger Thor had one his face apparently sufficed for him to take one look and bolt out the door at top speed. Thor let out a furious shout and gave chase, out the door, down a hallway, up an emergency staircase, which set off a piercing alarm and flashing lights, and out onto the roof.
Now it was Thor's turn to take one look and panic. Loki had backed himself onto the edge of the roof, gasping for air beneath that stupid gag. One step backward, or passing out, and he would plunge to his death with no magic to save him. Even now, after everything Loki had done, Thor couldn't see anything other than his brother, in mortal danger.
"Stay back," he hissed to the other Avengers, then slowly approached Loki. "Brother, let me help you. Come with me. We'll get Mother to take a look at you, figure out what's going on. I can't-"
Loki flicked his eyes over the dropoff, and Thor felt like he'd been punched in the stomach.
"No. Not again. Loki, please. I can't watch you die again."
Thor would have paid dearly for Loki to be able to speak. As it was, he had to take a wild guess at what was going through his brother's head. Then again, it hadn't been much better back at the Bifrost when Loki had the freedom to say whatever he liked.
"Brother."
Finally, Loki stepped forward from the edge, towards Thor. Before he could change his mind, Thor grabbed his hand and pulled him even farther away.
"Come on. Let's go home."
X
Back in the park where they'd originally intended to depart, Thor spent a few minutes in silence, then turned to the others.
"Change of plans. My parents want to speak with all of you. I guess they have questions."
The tone left no room for arguments or even questions. Taking one last look at the planet they called home, the rest of the Avengers prepared to leave it behind for Asgard.
On the balance, that wasn't even the weirdest thing that had happened in the past hour.