A/N: Thank you xbecbebex, JPElles, KillerCupcakes, the obsessed shipper, CharmedSkye92, wrennfrug, TinderboxParadox, d1mplz3 and Skittles8705 for your reviews, and everyone reading this for your patience. You're all awesome!
As you may expect, given where they're going, there will be a whole lot of OCs to introduce in this chapter. You don't need to remember everyone's names and personal info long term, don't worry. When the visit arc is over, it'll be pretty obvious who's who when they turn up again.
Everyone
He felt drunk - and not the good kind. His brain sloshed sickeningly around in his head as his body was moved by impulses he couldn't quite control. His limbs felt like unwieldy lumps of cement whenever he tried to move them himself, yet when they decided to move on their own, they were as fast and agile as he expected.
He sat cross-legged, observing the controlled doctors as they busied themselves following orders he'd only half-understood as they left his own lips. But then another layer of sickening drowsiness overtook him - his mind pulled from him, spinning through space in moments, and then he was standing, ghost-like, before the throne.
The Titan wasn't facing him, but his presence suffused the space, suffocating Loki even though his physical body was lightyears away.
The Other spoke, and he answered, hardly hearing himself. The words probably even sounded natural to him. He only knew that they were questioning him, and that he was defending himself. He wondered dizzily why they would bother going through such a charade. Perhaps, he supposed, to remind him that they owned him.
"You think you know pain?" The Other crooned, lightly running his filthy fingers across Loki's jawbone. His whole body convulsed in horror, memories of absolute agony running through him. "We will make you long for something sweet as pain…"
He came too with a ragged gasp, clawing at the hands gripping his shoulders and realizing embarrassingly late that they were Darcy's. She let him go, but remained within reach, looking worriedly down at him, hands hovering like she wanted to touch him again. Her glasses were off - he must've woken her up rather suddenly. Dazed, he rolled into a sitting position, legs hanging off the side of the bed, wondering if he'd been screaming or just tossing and turning.
"You good?" she breathed, backing off a bit so he'd have room to move. He tried to reply in the affirmative, but phantom pains were still shooting through his whole body, and he couldn't stop trembling. To his humiliation, his murmured "yeah" came out as a broken sob. He swallowed, once, twice, cleared his throat. It ached a little - perhaps he had screamed after all.
"You wanna talk about it?" Darcy asked quietly, sitting down on the end of the bed. He shook his head emphatically.
"No," he growled, then cleared his throat again. "But," he added, hating himself for his weakness, but fearing what his own mind would do if left to its own devices, "talk about something else, if you would." He glanced up at her briefly, then back down at his hands, his hair - which had been getting rather shaggy - forming a curtain between them.
Darcy scooted back so that she could sit against the wall, folding her legs to the side.
"When I was at school in Chicago," she began, "I had this awesome idea to take French. I was supposed to do a spoken language, I was bored of Spanish from high school, so I thought I'd shake it up a little. Anyhow, HUGE mistake, because the professor was this gigantic ass-wipe. Constantly embarrassing students, insanely high standards, and he was always late - about 13 minutes late, to be specific."
"So never quite enough for you all to be able to leave," Loki surmised when she paused for breath. She nodded.
"Never once a full 15 minutes, no. He'd come to campus, stick his stuff in his office, then go outside and smoke. Now, we had a rule against smoking on campus - you were supposed to get in your car and drive away before lighting up. But some of the professors had found this little blind alcove where nobody would catch them, and we all knew that was where he was.
"So one day, me and V decided to screw with him. While he was on a rant about the class's test scores, I stood up and yelled back, making a scene, while V stole his cigarettes and replaced them with some that we'd altered. We put those popper things in - but not at the end, where he'd notice them right away. We rolled 'em up in the middle, so he'd get part of the way through before they exploded.
"So after class, he goes out and has another smoke. We'd hidden this walkie talkie near the alcove, so that we could play a recording through it; V is amazing at computer stuff, so he made it sound like a little computer voice even though it was only me. I hid in a classroom where I could peek through the window, and when he got to the middle of the cigarette, I shined a laser-pointer right at the cigarette. It looked like a laser-beam actually shot the cigarette out of his hand, and then V started up the recording, about how smoking was prohibited on campus…" she broke off to snicker. "Yeah, he bolted so fast he probably qualified for some kind of race. Was never late again - I think we scared him off of smoking entirely."
Loki leaned against the wall, trying to imagine the professor's terror, the little explosion, Darcy crouching in a classroom and trying her damndest not to laugh too hard lest her hand shake. His breathing was beginning to even out, but the horror still sat heavily in his stomach.
"Then there was the time that me and all my brothers dressed up as Christmas Trees so we could 'come alive' and chase people down the hall," she continued, leaning in so that her shoulder pressed lightly against his. His heart slowed as she described different people's reactions, finished that story, then began to describe their twist on the 'classic sticky note prank.' He'd be thoroughly enjoying these stories if he was in his right mind, but tonight he clung to them like a person hanging off a precipice clings to a rope.
-0-
Darcy had been a little concerned about airport security, but Fury was good for his word; he'd said Loki was okay to fly, and it seemed that they meant it. They disembarked at O'Hare airport in Chicago without incident, and got on the familiar train into the heart of the city.
She'd noticed that lately Loki seemed to be having more nightmares; she'd always been an extremely light sleeper, so him moaning or mumbling in his sleep never failed to wake her. Last night though, it had sounded like he was sobbing in pain. She usually didn't just barge in on him - after all, she'd probably throttle him if he'd brought up the nightmares that she was sure he'd noticed her have - but he was so loud that she thought maybe he was awake; maybe he was physically hurt.
He'd panicked when she touched him, trying to brush her hands off and cringing away from her in abject terror before he got his wits about him and woke up properly. At his request, she'd monologued about whatever she could think of until he'd fallen asleep sitting up, but he'd still looked haunted and paler than usual in the morning.
They got off of the train at their station, familiar smells and sights enveloping Darcy with the comforting feeling of home.
"That one's ours, with the porch swing," she announced, pointing at the house as they approached. "The one next to it is Uncle Allen's—he's our landlord, slash on-call actual adult," she laughed.
"You're late!" someone shouted in a booming voice, and both pedestrians looked up to the second story window, out of which a young man was leaning with a mock-stern look on his face.
"A wizard is never late," Darcy shot back, a huge grin spreading across her face. "Nor is she early. She arrives precisely when she means to!"
The man grinned widely as well, hopping up onto the windowsill and from there onto the porch roof, then the railing, then the ground, in simple, efficient moves that would have made Sif proud.
"Luke, meet Zach," Darcy said as she hugged the tall brunette man, who reached behind her to shake Loki's hand jovially.
"We thought you were never coming!" another voice intruded from the front door; the man it belonged to was shorter than the first. "I almost panicked and ate your share of the empanadas!"
"Don't you dare, you sunnovabitch!" Darcy exclaimed, running past Zach at full tilt and bolting into the house. Zach snickered, gesturing for Loki to follow him inside as well.
As his eyes adjusted to the slightly dimmer lights, he picked out familiar faces from the pictures Darcy had shown him. The one who'd threatened to eat Darcy's food was Milo, Zach's boyfriend. The one guarding the loaded table like a sentry was Angel Ramirez, but everyone called him Junior—from the conversation, Loki picked up that the food had been a gift from his grandmother to welcome Darcy and V back home for the holidays.
V himself—the tallest of the group and the only one besides Darcy and Loki who was still wearing a coat—offered a hand and his name, which Loki took, after setting his bags near where Darcy had plopped hers near the entrance. For some reason, Darcy's brief confession that they'd once been lovers sat strangely in his stomach as he shook the Russian man's hand. He found himself evaluating him—his chiseled jawline covered in intentional stubble and dark, heavy eyebrows made for smoldering looks—and almost, dare he say it, trying to measure up to him.
Shaking that errant thought out of his head—where had it come from anyway? What did he care who his best friend used to sleep with?—he completed the handshake without breaking any of the attractive man's bones and introduced himself pleasantly as Luke Randle.
Jose—the mastermind behind the carnivorous Christmas Tree prank, if he recalled correctly—made himself known, and then properly introduced Darcy to his new girlfriend, Tessa. Jose had graduated with his bachelor's degree two years previously, but was staying on to complete his PhD. Darcy playfully warned Loki not to ask him about his thesis if he didn't want to listen to a five-hour monologue on a narrow topic no one else cared about.
"Yeah, she's got the patience of Buddha," commented CJ, an economics major who'd joined the family shortly before Darcy had transferred away.
"I promise he sometimes talks about other things," Tessa responded with a laugh, which was shared by everyone in the room.
Kinsey, a tattoo artist who'd never actually attended college according to Darcy's description, chose that moment to descend the stairs, hair damp and smelling of shower gel, and fling herself into Darcy's waiting arms.
"Finally!" she grumbled, "I thought you'd never get home." Without pausing or letting go of Darcy she looked over her sister's shoulder and reached back to shake Loki's hand. "You must be the hot foreign roommate she was telling us about."
"Oh, she said I was hot?" Loki laughed, "this is news."
"Well she also thought that capullo Jeff was hot at some point so I wouldn't exactly trust her judgement," Junior responded dryly. Darcy casually gave him the finger.
"Okay, so maybe I inferred you were hot—but you did make Scumbag-Jeff's life suck, so you're okay in my book," Kinsey responded brightly, finally releasing Darcy. "Speaking of taste in men, you finally get to meet Mitch tonight when he gets off work!" she exclaimed excitedly, and from there the conversation dissolved into discussions of everyone's romantic lives in the last couple of years, and what to have for dinner once the empanadas ran out.
As day wore into night, Mitch arrived home to be introduced, as well as their last housemate Bobby, whose deep bass voice and long mane of dreadlocks made him look like a younger, hotter version of Heimdall. The last to arrive was Uncle Allen himself, to have a beer and invite the visiting trio to move their stuff next door.
"No chance you're all going to fit in here overnight; the place'd burst at the seams," he laughed. "You guys'll have to double up, but I got a spare bedroom and a pull-out couch."
To Loki's quickly repressed disgust, this sleeping arrangement meant that he had to share the spare bedroom with V himself, while Darcy got the pull-out couch in Allen's office. As he tucked himself into one of the twin beds, he reminded himself for the umpteenth time that night that there was absolutely no reason for him to dislike Valery Pavlov. He and Darcy had parted on amicable terms, so he didn't deserve to be placed in the Mop-Haired-Maggot's category.
And there was no other reason for him to dislike the man, no other reason at all. Not one.
He almost believed himself by the time he drifted off. Denial was one powerful thing.
-0-
"He is ready."
The dull spike of loathing Loki felt at the voice barely even registered through the all-consuming waves of pain. He felt himself moving—or was he being moved—and something heavy was placed into his hands. Heavy with weight, and heavy with power, and heavy with sadness, but that didn't make a bit of sense, and he couldn't think straight enough to correct it.
-0-
"Sir, please put down the spear."
Slowly, dreamlike, he glanced at his hand - eyes taking in the source of the weight which rested there. It felt sad. Why did it feel sad? He felt nothing as he shot a blast of power at the puny mortal who dared give him an order.
-0-
"Look to your elder, people," Loki said, but his voice shook as he took aim. Though not a physical blow, the man's words had shaken him, made him return to himself for a moment. It was such a little thing, but it felt like the man was staring straight through him, locking eyes with Thanos himself as he refused to bend his knee. All too soon the feeling passed, and the relief that he might have had when Captain America dropped from the sky and saved the man's life was entirely lost on his magically-drugged brain.
-0-
When lightning cracked all around the plane, panic and hope warred within him; he feared what his not-brother might do to him for this great of a transgression, but still somewhere deep down hoped to be truly caught, and stopped—even killed, so long as he was safe from the retribution he would suffer should he fail.
But fear won out, and must have showed on his face. Though he said aloud that he wasn't overly fond of that which followed lightning, in truth the terrible realization had unfolded within him that Thor's interference was a signing of his brother's death warrant… But if he tried to save him…
When he was pulled from the machine, the shudder of fear that wracked his whole body had nothing to do with the strong arms encircling him.
Loki awoke suddenly and silently, grateful that he hadn't cried out in a stranger's home. Rubbing a hand across his face in resignation, he rolled onto his side. It was only going to get worse from here, he knew. Ever since he'd showed Darcy his true form—ever since he'd acknowledged that the blue skin and red eyes were his true form—the memories had been returning thick and fast. Before, it was as if he'd convinced himself that everything that had happened to him was actually happening to someone else; another entity, hostile and blue and inhabiting his body. In this manner, he'd sealed away the frightening, painful memories, and gotten on with his life.
But now that he could admit to himself that that had been him…
"Everything all right over there?" V whispered, and Loki's eyes snapped to his deep brown ones. The other man was looking over at him in sleepy concern, his phone lying face down on his blanketed chest—he'd already been awake then; Loki's senses needed retraining if he hadn't noticed.
"Fine," he responded quietly. "I always have odd dreams when I drink beer before going to bed."
"Hm," V hummed, clearly unconvinced. "Don't tell me if you don't want to," he allowed. "It's your business. But I've seen enough people trying to crush their demons alone to know what it looks like in the eyes."
"You're quite clever, I suppose," Loki murmured dryly, rolling over the other way to settle back in for hopefully a dream-free night.
"What can I say," he replied with a little laugh. "Spend enough time around Darcy Lewis and she starts to rub off on you.
I used to think it was like magic, you know?" he added, and Loki glanced over his shoulder to make eye-contact with him again. "How she always knew when someone was having a hard time; how the most broken people would flock to her. But she told me her secret recently."
"And what's that?" Loki asked, both surprised and not surprised that adopting broken people was in fact a habit with his friend.
"It's that really, everyone's a little broken," V explained with a shrug. "You just start by accepting that, and eventually, people are honest with you. And eventually, they start to heal."
"Honesty was never my forte," Loki admitted with the ghost of a laugh.
"Well, she's a good person to start with, if you ask me," V told him, before rolling over himself so that his back was to the god.
'Well I already knew that,' Loki thought as he drifted off, with equal parts smugness and resentment.
A/N: So, it's been a while. I've seen Endgame and I AM EMOTIONALLY COMPROMISED. Also, my last birthday was November 12th, 2018. *Glares red-eyed at the universe, while clutching Marvel paraphernalia.* Thanks, bitch, thanks. Great fricken present. *Composes self.*
Last year I quit my horrid job (sad to leave my coworkers, elated beyond words to get out from under the thumb of the stereotypical rich douchebag who owned the place). I made Loki proud with what I left behind; I expect they'll be finding my pranks for years to come. (Well, I had to be a bit conservative, because I wouldn't put it past this asshole to sue me for damage to company property if he could, but still, I did well.)
Got a new job at a High School, working with kids in a tech program - all day every day I'm surrounded by nerds of all varieties, and let me tell you, it is wonderful!