Distorted & Disordered
Chapter 19
**Trigger Warning**: Suicide attempt aftermath, suicide methods & feels
Dad? Dad, I'm sorry. You don't care but I need help. The words floated through Odin's skull as he grabbed his keys and bolted out the office doors of his workplace in a blurred flurry of movement.
I took some pills. I tried to kill myself. I'm sorry.
He vaguely recalled his office co-workers calling out to him, something about how he couldn't leave and how he'd left everything at his desk, out in the open, without a seeming care in the world.
His son needed him.
His son was hurting.
He couldn't positively grapple with the weight that had been casted upon his shoulders.
He was the father here. It was his-always his-responsibility to provide for and care for his sons.
Oh, how he had failed Loki.
How he had failed Frigga and failed Thor.
He whimpered alone in his car as he drove fast through yellow lights and didn't completely stop at red octagonal signs.
What had he done? How could he have failed so much as a father?
Was it not enough that he had failed Jimmie?
Was it not enough for him to have lost his own brother to suicide? A suicide so deeply painful that the family had pushed away the revelation at all costs? Pushed Jimmie away so far it was only but a dream that he had ever even existed to begin with?
To be a suicide survivor was unlike any pain and grief imaginable. It cut so deep into the soul that it left mere fragments behind.
How could he have been so blind?
How did he not see the signs?
They had to have been blaringly bright, just as Jimmie's were.
You tell yourself after that no one could have known. But why couldn't you have?
Why couldn't part of the blame land on you?
Why was there never a true, definitive answer?
Something to say yes, this is why they died?
Why was it just a tangled web of uncertainties?
He wanted to ask why his son did not come to him for help sooner, sooner than his end now? But Odin knew why.
He was so cruel to the boy.
Even Thor had said as much.
And he knew it in his soul that despite her efforts not to, that Frigga would blame him.
….Just as his mother had blamed him for Jimmie's untimely death. They no longer spoke to each other since Jimmie passed. Their relationship was estranged.
Even Frigga didn't know the real reason why.
Odin just didn't have the heart to tell her.
His father hadn't been the same after Jimmie passed, ultimately taking his own life too after a terminal cancer diagnosis.
Suicide ran in the family and Odin shook himself for not realizing sooner how much pain his youngest was in.
There must have been something he could have done; something to have prevented this.
Something he could do now to help.
When Odin stepped past the boundary separating his home from the external world, he blindly rushed into the house.
He searched through the living room rapidly, an eye casting once quickly across the room then again more carefully.
Loki was not here.
Had his son left?
Had he run into traffic? Had he slit his wrists? Had he-had he-?
Odin marched up the stairs loudly but the house was eerily silent save for his labored, panicked breathing.
Where was Thor?
Odin felt the panic swarm his central nervous system maybe more than it should have.
He passed by Loki's room, messier than usual-how long had this gone unnoticed for the elder man?-and Thor's but no one was there.
When he passed the bathroom a second time, he felt an icy hurt plunge through his system.
As he reached for the handle, he stepped unevenly on the carpet, gazing down to find handwritten folded pieces of paper.
Loki is here, he thought, only just realizing this is where the music he had faintly heard down a floor was coming from.
He held his breath as the door shifted backwards.
…What he found made his heart still for a beat and a half.
"Oh, my son," Odin whispered to himself, falling upon his knees as the tears came streaming down his cheeks.
Loki was so pale, his skin white and his lips tinged with grey and blue.
Loki reminded him so much of Jimmie then.
Jimmie with his lips chapped, his blue eyes lifeless and the blood that spattered the tile floor and trailed along the gunshot wound in his body.
He detached for a moment, he was sure of it.
Because one minute he was crying in shock and another he was on speaker phone to an ambulance he should have called sooner-should've, should've, should've-checking Loki's limp body for a pulse.
There was one, he felt or maybe he lied to himself about feeling, but it was faint and slow.
He took his son into his arms, unnerved by the thinness of his form, his elbows sharp and jabbing into Odin's thighs.
Odin held him and cried, looking around to find the source of the problem. He saw, through his tears, scattered white pills and a pamphlet on the tile detailing bold lettering with a single number:
1800 273 8255
Odin thought more than spoke, but he shushed Loki quietly, patting his long black hair with an open palm as he prayed to a god high above to keep his son here.
"Don't go, Loki. Don't go."
How would he tell Frigga?
Who would tell Thor?
Loki was everything to Thor, he always had been?
How would the father of two live with himself when he became a father of one?
"We need you here, my son. I want you here." He shut his eyes as the wordless music swarmed over his soul.
"Come back, Loki, come back…. My son, why do you hurt so?"
He heard the long wail of a siren off in the distance.
He wanted to tell Loki how much he meant to him, how much this world required him, how painful his absence would be on this entire province, whether they knew it or not.
Every life lost to that of suicide was a loss greater to humanity than was ever truly realized.
"My son, my son," Odin whined, rocking them back and forth just as he had done to him as a young babe.
"I know I haven't been there, my son. I have not given you the love you deserve. Come back to me now and things will be different. Don't say hello to Uncle Jimmie so soon. Please, do not."
The EMT's soon crowded the room quicker than Odin would have guessed. They placed an oxygen mask over Loki's face, asking Odin questions that he could not begin to answer. They started an IV and took the bottle of medication from the countertop by the sink and placed it neatly into a plastic biohazard bag.
They asked him if he wanted a ride to the hospital with them, but he said no because someone had to notify Thor and Odin couldn't begin to guess where his firstborn was.
They just didn't talk the same anymore.
Not even one of them.
But Odin knew the real reason was because he didn't want to continue to feel so helpless watching Loki die all by himself.
At least with Frigga or Thor he could console them to take his mind off his coming loss, and even Odin could recognize how selfish that made him.
Misery loved company; Odin required company.
So when he saw the ambulance off and he trudged back up the stairs, he collected Loki's notes and called Thor to tell him the predicament.
From there they could wait at the hospital, together.
Odin just prayed Thor wouldn't blame him nearly as much as Odin already did.
It was still only early afternoon when Thor felt his phone vibrate in his pocket.
He ignored it, placing his hands to the side of Jane Foster's face, kissing her long and slow.
When they parted for air, their foreheads leaning onto each other, she asked breathlessly, "Shouldn't you be answering that?"
Thor chuckled nervously, letting out a wisp of air.
"It's probably nothing." He reasoned, to himself or to Jane he wasn't sure.
"You still might want to check," she answered, placing a strand of fraying hair behind her ear.
Thor, hesitant and infinitely reluctant, rifled through his pocket and clicked through his phone.
"That's strange," Thor mused quietly, trying to understand the peculiarity of this new found situation.
"What?" Jane asked, curious and ready, it seemed, to solve a problem.
"I have a text from Loki and three missed calls from my father." Thor frowned in thought, suddenly deathly afraid.
"What does that mean?" Jane whispered quietly, resting a warm hand on Thor's shoulder.
"I don't know," Thor replied, unlocking his phone then dialing back his father.
The line rang only once before Odin answered.
"Thor?" His voice cracked, pained and strained.
Thor immediately felt there was bad news. His face fell and his blue eyes narrowed with his expression readable to Jane as she squeezed his shoulder in an effort to comfort him. Thor suddenly wished he was alone to be the only one to witness the expression of his emotions, because this was new territory and he was so used to being the person to comfort another, not the one receiving it.
"Father?" Thor breathed, the unknown suddenly striking his face.
"It's Loki." Odin cried out.
Thor's world slowed to a halt. It was as if his time machine had stopped working in the midst of flight, as if he were submerged in zero gravity, as if rain droplets had frozen in time and space. He felt limitless and pulled apart all at the same time. He wanted to say something, to say anything, but his lips were frozen with frost like the red berries on a bush in winter and he couldn't get his voice out of his skull to answer his father.
"Loki hurt himself. He's on his way to the hospital. I need you to meet me there, Thor. Thor? Can you hear me?" Father spoke with emotion clogged in his throat.
Thor felt…unreal.
This wasn't happening. This wasn't happening. How could it be happening?
"Loki did what?" He croaked through his pain.
There was silence for a minute and Thor suddenly thought maybe this was all just a sick prank thought up by his brother or that the line had dropped or anything other than an emotional tsunami had taken place.
"Your brother tried to kill himself. He wrote-just meet me at the hospital. I'm heading there now."
Tears Thor didn't know he ever had hidden behind his eyes sprang to them now as if he were a personified sprinkler.
His phone dropped dully to the sofa's green cushions as the words played over and over again in his mind.
Your brother tried to kill himself. Your brother tried to kill himself. Loki tried to kill himself.
Flashes of memories sprang into his line of vision: Loki was yelling for him to wake up, Loki was calm and happy after a darkness so deep Thor had been guiltily afraid of him, Loki was hugging him; telling the elder sibling how much he loved him, Loki was doing terribly in his classes, Loki giving away his art materials to that one kid with the shaggy blonde hair, Loki crying after speaking with Ms. Pirelli after class, Loki bargaining and begging Thor not to discuss these matters-these suddenly real and valid concerns-with their parents.
Loki.
Loki.
He'd been crying out for help for months and no one had noticed. No one had realized until it was maybe too late.
More importantly-the most important thing was that-Thor had not noticed.
Thor knew he was still just a kid but he couldn't help but feel partially responsible. He was Loki's big brother; Loki's partner standing by the sidelines cheering him on in this arena they called life.
If Thor hadn't realized, if Thor hadn't noticed, if Thor hadn't guessed that this was the fatal trajectory of Loki's life-then what kind of brother was he ever really? How could he dare to call himself Loki's sibling if Thor had never even known this was as bad as things had gotten?
All the meals Loki had been skipping, all the times Thor had wanted to reach out to him but thought better of it-all of it was weighing heavily upon his shoulders now as if he had tried to lift the weight of a dying star.
How could he not have known?
He should have realized. He should have known. He should have been enough to stop it.
He should have been enough of a good reason to get Loki to stay alive.
And he felt immeasurably crushed that he wasn't. If Thor wasn't enough of a reason to keep on living, then how could he ever be of enough purpose to help keep Loki alive thereafter?
Ultimately, what could Thor do-if anything at all-to help keep Loki alive?
Because maybe, and Thor grew breathless at this, maybe Thor wasn't enough. Maybe Loki needed more of an anchor than Thor's life preserver could provide.
Or, maybe Thor couldn't save Loki at all.
Maybe…maybe Loki had to learn now how to save himself. Thor blindly shook and trembled and cried and mourned because deep down, past his hope and his love for his brother, he feared that Loki did not possess the willingness to try.
And that-that scared him more than anything.
"Thor?" Jane asked again for the seventh time that minute. Her boyfriend had collapsed into the shoulder of her pink blouse with the peonies on it and hadn't stopped crying since the phone had slipped from his hand and landed on the cushions nesting between them.
"Thor? Is there anything I can do?" Jane guessed that he wasn't in the best of emotional places right now so she figured he couldn't quite comprehend full sentences. Still, she muttered about her physics lab partner Darcy who looked up to her and how her baby Shih Tzu at home named Darla would chew on her new sneakers, the pair Jane still hadn't broke into because her current ones were still fine (and she'd tried to tell her mother that but the woman hadn't listened).
"So I told her not to yell at Darla like that because the poor thing would pee on the carpet out of fear, and it's not like my Mom is some foul gremlin of a creature but she persists on yelling at Darla as if I've never even said anything." Jane prattled on as if Thor collapsing into tears was a normal, everyday occurrence.
A few seniors at the household shot her dirty looks and she couldn't stop herself from flipping them off behind Thor's blonde head because fuck them, that's why!
She noticed, a few seconds too late, that Thor had stopped bawling as much and tried to unsuccessfully clean his nasal passages from all the snot and dribble and gook that had otherwise been dreadfully unleashed.
"J-Jane?" He asked tentatively, avoiding her gaze as she groped for a tissue that some other nerd was trying to discreetly hand to her.
"Yes?" She asked in return, presenting to her boyfriend a clean, white majestic piece of Kleenex.
"Can you t-take me to Southbridge?"
Southbridge: the town's nearest hospital.
She began to ask why but shut her teeth with an audible crush.
"Okay, let's go." She swung her legs free from the entanglement they had rested in on the couch and grasping Thor's hand, she led him out to her car (stealing a box of tissues and making a twenty-eight point turn out of the crowded driveway).
They rode mostly in silence, Jane having the radio on low and being mostly in tune with the complexities of driving. She would steal a couple glances over to Thor from the corner of her brown eyes but his eyes were either glued to his phone or closed to blot out the tears that continued to leak out.
Jane combed through her brain for the right thing to say, opening and closing her mouth several times before simply settling on, "I hope things go okay." She wanted to say more, wanted to follow-up with a question or two or eight, but she made her glossed lips into a frown and stuck with that.
Moments later she added, "I'm here if you need me."
Unruly tears appeared in Thor's vision.
"Th-That's what I would tell my brother." He clamped his open palms over his face in shame. "But he never needed me until it was too late. And-and where was I? I was with you," he growled, shoving a hand out to Jane but not daring to touch her. He sobbed to himself with pain and guilt.
"I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry!" He hiccupped and swung his head until it reverberated with the back of his seat. "I was supposed to be there for him! I was supposed to protect him? But how do I save him from himself?"
Jane's eyes clouded with her own tears.
What she said next, solemnly and with no glee, she said because she cared for Thor, she cared for his loved ones and she cared because she liked him-but she cared not that he would always like her but rather he'd appreciate her point of view even when it was hard…especially when it was hard.
"You can't, Thor." She glanced at him hard when she came across another red light. She held strong emotion in her eyes, a pain she had learned long ago.
"You can't always save somebody from themselves. Only they can. It has to be them…It can only come from them." Her chocolate eyes stared through the desperation of his blue, even longer after the irate guy behind them honked his horn when the light had changed to green and Jane held Thor's gaze anyways-because he needed her to, because it mattered.
"That doesn't mean you don't do everything you can because you do. You do everything you can. You support and you love and you care." She paused, emotions tightening her voice. "But you accept that you can't do everything. You accept that it's ultimately his decision at the end of the day-whether that's to live or to die. And it's not easy-it will never be easy. But you accept it's not your choice, it's his. And that's not to say you don't give him help or resources or care-because you do. You do it with every fiber of your being. You also just learn how to let go because there are going to be times when you can't hold on-whether it's because they don't want you to or they no longer can.
"You don't give up hope though; because so many people live despite the challenges. So many people need you to believe in them as they learn to believe in themselves.
"So be there for him, because he needs you to be there for him. Help to teach him that he can be there for himself, too. And things will get better. Because they do get better. They do improve. They may not get easier yet you will get stronger. Loki's going to be so strong one day. He'll be, in some ways, even stronger than you. So have faith for that Loki, for that person, because he's in there waiting for you and it's your job not to save him but to help him learn how and why he needs to save himself."
Jane had already pulled into a parking space when her (she hoped) inspirational speech had come to a close. She killed the engine and the music disappeared and she pulled the keys from the ignition in a clatter of metal hitting metal from all the keychains she had on it.
Thor was staring a hole into her winter coat as if he had bright lasers in his sockets.
"Thank you, Jane. I-I don't know if I'll remember all that but-"
"I'll remind you," Jane supplied with a quirk of her lips.
"-You'll remind me," Thor repeated, suddenly leaning forwards and bringing her into a tight embrace.
"Let's get inside before our noses fall off," she giggled and for the second time that day, Thor both agreed and felt such awe in his girlfriend, an awe that brought such warmth across his chest that he only wanted another chance to share this same joy with his brother.
With hope, he felt that he'd be blessed with this chance as they held hands and walked inside of Southbridge.
"Sixteen year old male brought in by ambulance after an apparent overdose on Oxycodone." The brown-haired EMT announced as they wheeled the high schooler on the stretcher into the next available room.
"Do we know the dose?" someone asked from the corner but they were overshadowed as the emergency room doctor shuffled into the room with a penlight checking the reactivity of the patient's pupils (there wasn't any, as an expected symptom of the overdose).
"Vitals?" The doctor asked, petite and short as she gazed over at the EMT's for quick clarification.
"Heartrate's stuttering at forty-five, BP is low too. We don't know how much was ingested; poor kid," the male EMT stated, a frown settling on his thin lips. "We started an IV at the scene. Been pushing fluids since."
"Then let's get him situated, shall we? Help me move him to the bed and get some naloxone in case his breathing gives out. Let's check the airway and get him on some monitors. Let's go, people!" The doctor moved into position with ease and the other healthcare workers followed suit.
"How long's he been unconscious for?" It was the voice from the back that piped up again, nervous and fidgeting slightly as they took in the scene.
"Father wasn't very talkative. Since he found him though." The man responded, hazel eyes flicking over to the entity.
The heart monitors played their feed onto the machines by Loki's left and the signs weren't great.
"Okay, change of plans, let's push for that naloxone now, this kid needs a boost up!" The doctor ordered as the medicine was pushed into Loki without a second thought.
Loki's slowed breathing put them on edge as they waited a moment for the medicine to kick in.
"How much does this kid weigh?" The doctor asked as an afterthought, lips pursed as she gazed over his slim form, having been freed from his sheltered and looming clothing.
"Not sure, maybe a hundred?" The female EMT mentioned over her shoulder as she began to follow her co-worker back out the doors.
"Has anyone notified the family?" She asked next, a clinical eye wavering between the monitors and Loki's form.
Before anyone could properly respond she shook her head.
"Too many of these kids come in here on the daily. Let's wait 'til he's more stabilized before contacting the family. Anyone have the bottle?" Someone rifled for the bag the emergency responders had left by Loki's bedside. "Not his prescription, then. Let's get ready with another naloxone; we may be doing this for a while yet." She said glumly, stretching her arms briefly over her head. She always had a habit of holding tension in her neck.
"Someone make sure psych is paged once he's stabilized. He's probably heading for a few days in the ICU." She sighed, thinking to herself that this shift was really probably gonna suck ass.
But the clock ticked on and more patients needed to be seen and as she left the teenager to follow after the dozen others that had OD'ed or got pencils shoved in their ears or nail guns stuck to their fingers, she hoped to herself, that he'd make it out okay.
She hoped, for his sake, that he'd be one of the lucky ones.
A/N:
Aww, man! I know I've been doing super well on accuracy points thus far in this story and I'm reaaaaally hoping this final scene is okay for how things might otherwise play out in reality. I tried! To be fair, I've never firsthand experienced medical complications from attempts myself, and every other time I've been hospitalized I was always in the psych section without going through medical. So, if it's spotty at best that's probably why!
However, I hope that you enjoyed this chapter! I've already started working on the next one and so be prepared for all the feels yet to come and everything else that's about to come underway!
Did you guys like Jane's speech? I actually really kinda love her more for it, ahaha. It's good to have a little bit more light in the story from a fresher perspective. I'm sure there's a whole backstory somewhere in my head for why Jane knew to say what she did.
Also, I plan to have some stigmatizing and less than kind experiences to come from various new and different characters as the story continues to pan out. But soon the Avengers will be here, yay! I've made up some hospital names now too which is extra nice. Also, Jimmie was actually a name I thought up recently for a character of a drawing I did, funnily enough! The rest came naturally from the Muse. One does not wish to argue with the Muse. XD
Any who, thank you so much for reading! Please send me a review if you have the chance to! I'd love to read them and they help give me more inspiration and ideas for the future chapters and plot. :]
Until next time, peeps!
Handwritten: 4/14, 4/15, 4/18, 4/19/19
Typed: 4/20/19
Edited: 4/20; 4/21/19