Chapter 32 - Let it Go
Wanda's behavior had only become more erratic since they had found the little castle hidden in the park and turned it into their base, thought Pietro.
It had been easy enough for her to suggest to everyone there that they should leave before the storm came through. She hadn't even needed to do anything to them directly, when she made the lights flicker on and off, the person behind the counter had gotten nervous and decided to close up. Then all they had to do was hide in one of the stairwells when they went around to usher everyone out before locking up.
He watched her pace back and forth. Then she stopped, tilting her head, listening. "Someone's here."
"No one else is here," objected Pietro. "You're just letting your nerves get to you."
"No, someone is here. I can feel them—they have powers that are similar to mine, and they're strong—"
"No one has powers like you. We are the only ones who survived what HYDRA did to us."
"Loki has powers."
"Small ones," Pietro allowed. "He can turn from a boy to a girl, and I've seen him make little illusions to amuse himself, but he can't—"
"He is a god, is he not? I doubt we have seen all he is capable of."
"Maybe; but if it is Loki, he won't hurt us."
"He will if Stark tells him to."
"I don't think he wants to hurt us either. If they are here, they have come to take us back to the tower." Pietro pulled his jacket tighter around himself. "If it is them, I think we should go with them. It's freezing."
"The cold doesn't bother me," Wanda muttered, but she seemed to have become fixated on the door behind him.
Pietro heard footsteps. He turned to look, and Loki was standing in the doorway. He smiled at Wanda. It wasn't exactly a nice smile, but it was nothing dangerous. Likely, he was annoyed with them for slipping out of the tower when he had been left in charge of them. "I don't suppose you'd like to come home now, do you?"
A red light limned Wanda's outstretched hands. "Go away."
Pietro stepped between her and Loki. "Wanda, stop. He isn't threatening us."
"No. Stark must have sent him here."
"He didn't," said Loki. "In fact, I think Tony's pretty upset with me right now. He wanted to talk to you himself, but I couldn't let him do that when you can barely control your own powers. The first rule of magic is that you have to be able to control your emotions, Wanda. My mother always impressed that upon me, from the time I began learning."
Wanda lifted her chin defiantly. "I can control my emotions."
"Can you? You don't seem in control to me."
"I agree." Pietro kept himself positioned in between them in case something happened. "You haven't been thinking clearly since they brought up the scepter."
"Scepter?" Loki's voice changed to something uncertain and tense. "What do you two know about it?"
Pietro couldn't see the harm in telling him, so he ignored the look Wanda gave him and turned towards Loki. "Before we came here, we had escaped from a HYDRA facility. They were the ones who gave us our powers."
"And they used the scepter to do it." Loki's breathing became more rapid, and his eyes seemed unfocused. Pietro wondered if he was going to be physically ill. "Why didn't you tell anyone before now?"
"It is not so easy to trust them." Pietro wanted to say more, but he wasn't sure how to explain it in a way that Loki, who seemed to trust everyone in the tower implicitly, would understand.
"It's difficult for me to trust anyone anymore either, but you can trust Tony and the others. I've wronged them far more than either of you, and they've done nothing but try to help me."
"What do you mean?"
For all his talk about controlling emotions, Loki seemed to be getting agitated. "I mean that I'm the one who brought that stupid scepter here in the first place. You know about the Chitauri invasion, don't you? Don't you realize that I'm the one who led it?"
He felt frozen by the words Loki had spoken, more so than he had felt because of the cold. He had known about the Battle of New York. Everyone on Earth knew about it. But he hadn't realized that either the scepter or Loki—his Loki—had been involved in it.
Wanda stepped around him. "You brought it here?"
Loki blanched. "I didn't want to. I'm sorry, it was all a mistake."
Wanda wasn't hearing him, Pietro realized. Her face had contorted into an expression of pure hatred, and once again she had lifted her hands, limned in red light. Loki had taken notice as well, and held his own hands up defensively, limned in green.
They were two nuclear missiles trained upon one another, but Pietro wasn't fool enough to think that mutually ensured destruction would prevent them from launching themselves at one another. A moment before it happened, he stepped in between them again.
He was hit in the front by Wanda's magic and in the back by Loki's, and for a moment, it felt like he had been struck by lightning and set on fire at the same time. As his vision started to fade, he dropped to his knees.
In the background, he could hear Wanda call out his name. Loki said something under his breath that rhymed with "duck me." It might have been the first time Pietro had heard him swear. If his mouth hadn't been flooded with blood, he might have laughed.
"I'm going to get Tony," he heard Loki say.
At least he wasn't cold anymore. For a moment, his eyes opened a fraction of an inch, and though his vision was blurred, he could see two figures hovering over him. One was a terrified looking Wanda, and the other was a woman with dark hair. She reminded him of Loki; she even wore his favorite shade of green, but she wasn't Loki. For one thing, she wore a lot more eye makeup than he did.
(/-)/ ｡.*:・'ﾟ(＋_＋).*:ﾟ･'ﾟﾟ:。'･ﾟ\(｀-´\)
Betty had found Robby a heather gray t-shirt that fit even if it was on the snug side. Pants had been more of a problem, but a pair of flannel pajama bottoms—in purple, which had always been Bruce's color—had done the trick, even if they were a little short. Robby had insisted on dressing himself, but he hadn't been shy about changing in front of her. She had looked away anyway; it was nothing she hadn't seen before, but it seemed wrong to look when he had mentally regressed to the age of six.
Bruce had always gone by his middle name; he hadn't liked being called "Robert," though she had never known why. Had he ever gone by "Robby," even as a child?
At least he made a fairly low-key six-year-old. Betty had very little idea what to do with a child; she had been an only child herself, and had never had any inclination to offer her services as a babysitter when she'd been in high school, as some of her friends did. She had been too focused on preparing herself for college, and since her family had been well off, she had never needed extra money.
As an adult she had only occasionally considered that she might want to have a child in the future, and that had been mostly when she had been dating Bruce or Leonard—they both seemed like they would make good fathers, and if they had told her they wanted children, she likely would have agreed, provided that they didn't expect her to become a stay-at-home mom. Though if either of them had had wanted to be a stay-at-home dad, she would have supported it.
But Bruce had never expressed an interest in having children, and Leonard had only mentioned it once, on their first date—which had felt more like an interrogation than a date. They had met through an online dating website, and the man had come prepared with a list of questions for her, written on index cards. When he had asked if she had wanted children, she had told him she didn't know. It must have been an acceptable answer, because he had then proceeded to the next question. (Their second date, which she had gone on only because it felt preferable to sitting around wondering what Bruce was doing, had gone better, and eventually, she had decided that Leonard's little quirk of being entirely too organized was actually kind of cute.)
Betty only closed her eyes for a moment to rest them, but when she opened them, she realized that Bruce—no, Robby—had disappeared. "Robby?" she called out. The door to the room was still closed, and she hadn't heard it open. The door to the bathroom was open, so she poked her head inside it and looked around, but it only took a moment to determine that there was no one inside, since the shower was enclosed in glass and didn't have a closet.
Her room (which felt a lot like a dorm room or a prison cell, when you got down to it) had no closet either. The only reason storage hadn't been more of an issue was that she didn't have much other than clothes, toiletries, and the research materials she kept in her lab. There was only one place left to look. She got down on her knees and peered under the bed. "What 'cha doing down here?" she asked Robby, trying her best to affect all the non-threatening cheerfulness of a kindergarten teacher.
He shrugged in response.
"Okay, well—if you need to hide under the bed, that's okay. Just let me know if you need anything. I'll be right here."
Betty sat down at the desk next to her bed and put her head down on her arms. Then something wrapped itself around her leg. She nearly screamed, but stopped herself. She looked down at Robby. "Need something?"
"I'm hungry."
At least that would be easy to handle. "I can go get you something to eat, but I need you to stay here. Just don't leave the room, okay? I'll be right back."
Robby nodded and Betty smiled at him, lightly ruffling her fingers through his hair.
(;;ᵔ ᵕ ᵔ)(ಡ_ಡ)
Tony struggled against the magical bonds Loki had cast on him, but it was no use; Loki had been right, he had no defense against magic. He couldn't cut the bands with a blast from the gauntlet he was still wearing; trying had only resulted in the blast ricocheting off the walls. He had ducked just in time, only narrowly avoiding death by accidental self-Lasik surgery.
When he got his hands on that kid, he was going to—well, he didn't really know what he was going to do. He had meant it when he'd told Loki he would never hit him, but now he couldn't help wondering if the kid might be overdue for a spanking if he thought it was okay to ignore everything Tony said and run headfirst, alone, into a situation he thought dangerous. While he appreciated that Loki wanted to protect him, that wasn't his job; it was supposed to be the other way around.
Tony had asked the kid to trust him, and it hurt that he couldn't do that. Although come to think of it, maybe he had set a bad example by constantly putting himself in danger and ignoring the pleas of everyone around him to be more careful—yeah, when he thought about it, this situation was probably his own fault. Still, if Loki got himself killed again, he knew he would do whatever it took to make sure it didn't happen a third time. Maybe that made him a hypocrite, but it didn't matter. He was beginning to suspect that being a responsible parent meant he'd have to be a hypocrite sometimes.
The green threads that had been holding Tony in place dissipated. Not expecting it, he fell to his knees. A second later, Loki came running down the stairs. He kept repeating the same thing over and over. "Tony, I'm sorry. I'm sorry! I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm—"
Tony brushed the concrete dust from the knees of his pants as he stood. "Okay, I get it, you're sorry. You're not as sorry as you're going to be, though."
"You don't understand! I think I've killed him—I'm sorry, Tony, I should have listened to you."
It was only then that Tony realized how shaken he looked. "Wait, what did you just—"
"Pietro! He got in the middle, the stupid boy. If he'd just stayed back, Wanda's magic and mine might have neutralized each other, but instead I'm afraid it's neutralized him instead—"
As concerned as he was for Loki, Tony pushed past him and ran up the stairs. At the top of them, he found Wanda kneeling next to her brother, tears rolling down from her eyes as blood bubbled up from his mouth.
He pulled his phone out of his pocket. "J, send an ambulance."
"Right away, Sir."
"Help him!" Wanda shrieked up at him.
Tony could just kick himself; If only he hadn't made fun of Cap for being an oversized boy scout when he had suggested everyone on the team take a class and get certified in first aid, he might have had a better idea of what to do now. "We're getting him help, Wands, I promise. Just don't try to move him, okay?" He knew that much; you weren't supposed to move someone when they were badly injured, in case they had a spinal injury. Otherwise, he would have told JARVIS to send the suit and carried Pietro to the hospital himself.
('､\_ヽ)＿ヽ(`o´；\)
Betty knew what Bruce liked, but she wasn't sure if Robby shared his tastes, so she had brought back as many different things as she could carry from the refrigerator in the break room. As it turned out, he wasn't a picky eater at all.
She wondered if she should tell him to slow down, but then she reminded herself that not only did he have an adult sized stomach, that stomach probably hadn't had much in it in the last forty-eight hours or more. When Bruce was distressed—which he must have been in order to turn himself over to her father willingly—he had always had a tendency not to take care of himself.
She couldn't help smiling as she watched him lick the pudding off the foil top of a pudding cup. It wasn't funny, she reminded herself. Something had gone very wrong with Bruce, although she wasn't quite certain what, or whether or not it had been her fault.
She tried desperately to work out if it was possible for the "Eat Me" to do this. All it was supposed to do was trigger Bruce's transformation, but maybe triggering the transformation that way had been so traumatic for Bruce that it had made him forget the last thirty-eight years of this life.
When Robby had finished eating, Betty decided that she should find something to keep him occupied, so she had given him her tablet. He seemed to be fascinated with it, and though he didn't seem familiar with the interface at first, he had quickly figured it out for himself. She had thought he might want to use it to play a game or watch something on YouTube, but maybe she shouldn't have been surprised when the first thing he figured out how to do was open an advanced biology text. Consequently, it was one that she and Bruce had co-written about a year before the ill-fated Gamma experiment.
Bruce was a genius, after all. "Do you understand that?" she asked Robby.
He nodded and looked up at her. "I should. We wrote this together, didn't we?"
"Bruce?" Betty sighed in relief. "How long have you been—well, you?"
"What do you mean?" Bruce looked down at himself. "Betty, how did I get here, and what am I wearing?"
Betty sat next to him on the bed, and laid her head on his shoulder. "The short version of it is that first you were Hulk, and then you were a little boy named Robby. And you're wearing my pajamas, because I didn't have anything else for you to wear."
"I was who?"
"Robby. He told me he was this many." Betty held up six fingers.
"Oh my God—Betty, if that's a joke, it isn't funny."
"I'm not joking."
Bruce put the tablet aside and buried his head in his hands. "I'm so sorry."
"Don't be sorry. He was sweet. You make an adorable six-year-old."
Bruce groaned. "This is so embarrassing."
"You don't need to be embarrassed." She put a hand on his knee. "Whatever's going on with you, Bruce, it isn't your fault."
"I thought Karla was lying when she told me I had another alter."
"Alter? Is that what that was—you really have multiple personality disorder?"
"They call it 'Dissociative Identity Disorder' now, but yeah, I think so. Hulk is an alter, but now it looks like there might be others."
"That's so weird—I mean, it's not weird, that's not what I meant. I just never saw any signs of it when we were together. You were always you. I mean, there was the role-play—"
"Role-play?"
Betty's lip quirked up and she wiggled her eyebrows at him. "You know; when you pretended your name was David—"
"Betty, if that's a joke, it isn't funny."
"I'm not joking. You really don't remember? David was, you know, kind of rugged and just so sexy—"
"Rugged—me?"
"Mm-hmm, in those tight denim jeans and that flannel shirt with the wide collar. Kind of like a sexy lumberjack."
"I don't think I've worn denim and flannel together since college, when the nineties grunge look was in."
Betty shook her head. "You definitely had more of a seventies retro vibe going on." Bruce had to be joking. He had to remember. "Oh, come on! You used to pick me up in your arms and carry me to the bed—"
"Sorry, but I definitely don't remember that." Bruce looked around at the mess spread over Betty's bed, left over from the snacks he had eaten. "Did I eat all this?"
Betty and Bruce stared at one another. Bruce opened his mouth, like he wanted to ask something else, but a knock at the door interrupted him. Betty got up, motioning for Bruce to stay back from the door until she found out who it was.
⁖⁎❄∘⁖⍋⍋⁎❄∘⁖⁎ 🚑 ==
After Tony had left him to tend to Pietro, Loki had found it insufferably hot inside the castle. Feeling a little numb, he had wandered out into the snow. He hated snow, but at that moment, he hated himself more. Not only was he likely responsible for Pietro's death, now he suspected he had been responsible for a good deal more of his and Wanda's suffering.
And then there was the fact that no matter what he had said before, Tony was definitely going to send him back to Asgard now, and Loki wouldn't blame him. If he had ever turned his magic on Odin the way he had turned it on Tony, it wouldn't have mattered the reason, the All-Father would have struck him dead, or at the very least, made good on his previous threats to imprison him in a tree for the rest of time.
He now stood at the edge of the pond the castle overlooked. Loki crouched down and stuck his hand into the snow, then watched the skin of his wrist take on a light blue tint. He sneered at his own reflection in the pond. He couldn't stand the sight of his own face right now, and the face he was seeing wasn't even his true face—it was the face of an Asgardian or Midgardian, and he wasn't either one of those things.
A monster ought to look like a monster. Loki closed his eyes and concentrated on calling forth the appearance he felt he most deserved in that moment.
When he opened his eyes, a pair of blood red eyes stared back at him from the surface of the water. He bared his teeth; was it just his imagination, or did they look sharper? It was difficult to tell in the imperfect mirror of the pond. He found himself fascinated with the tattoo-like scars on his face. More adorned his arms. Did they cover his entire body? He had never had the opportunity to examine himself before. Normally, he wouldn't consider undressing in public, but there was no one around to see him.
Besides, as many times as he had dressed up one of Thor's goats as a jest, he had always found it somewhat presumptuous of animals to wear clothes. He stripped off his jacket and his sweater, and dropped them into the snow beside him.
He ran a finger over a ridge that went from the top of his shoulder to just below his left collar bone. Were Jotunn born this way, or did they carve these markings into their young as soon as their mothers birthed them? So little was known about them as a species, other than the fact that they were hideous brutes who cared little for the lives of others. I'm no exception, thought Loki; his other self-had been wrong about him.
The noise of an approaching ambulance's siren —it would be much too late, he thought—roused him from his self-loathing, and he realized that it wouldn't do to be spotted in this form by the mortal first responders Tony had summoned. He tried to call forth his female humanoid form, which was the one he normally wore in public to avoid being recognized as the war criminal who had once terrorized the city.
Loki's chest swelled obediently at his command; his waist narrowed and his hips widened. But try as she might, she couldn't make her skin shift back to a color that mortals would accept as normal, or hide the scars that adorned it. Loki swore under her breath. She hadn't had difficulty shape shifting in months. Why was this happening now?
She decided she had better hide herself until the paramedics had taken Pietro away. Poor Pietro, who was most likely dead already. Perhaps she shouldn't have been so dismissive of her feelings for him. That anyone would love someone like her had to be nothing short of a miracle, but had she appreciated it? No; but perhaps that was to be expected of a monster.
Monsters don't feel love—after all, how likely was it that Laufey had felt anything at all when he had abandoned his own child to the elements?
＼＿ﾍ(•̃͡•̃͡
Author's Note:
Yes, this chapter is a bit of an homage to Frozen—because obviously, I have no self-control whatever as a writer, and I HAD TO.
By the way, if anyone's wondering, Karla's past is based on the comics, but I took a lot of liberties with it. Also in the comics, Bruce really does have DID, which he developed as a result of his abusive childhood (he saw his Father kill his mother, like in the 2003 Ang Lee pre-MCU film); but as far as I know, all of his alters are different versions of Hulk.