Title: A Villain State of Mind
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Fantastic racism, angst.
Timeframe: Set post-Avengers.
In the end Charles called for a break, for the evening was wearing on and even if Loki could go many days without food without feeling it, he couldn't. Loki had lapsed into silence following Charles' little speech to the monitors, and try as he might Charles could not get him to respond again. His thoughts ran in wild self-devouring loops and coils, resentment and fear and aching love all tangled hopelessly together. Family - not family - chains of duty, chains of obligation - just another stolen relic - can never turn my back on - why not, why not, did they not turn their backs on me?
Family, unsurprisingly, was not an easy topic for Loki to think on, and Charles couldn't guess which of a half-dozen responses he'd eventually come back with.
The response that Loki did eventually come back with, however, surprised even Charles. He'd ignored the food brought to him in order to stare steadily at Charles the entire time. "You are wrong, you know," he said at last, breaking the silence.
Charles swallowed the last bite of his food, and pushed it aside in order to focus back on Loki. "Wrong about what?" he said.
"Blood and kinship." Loki tilted his head to one side, his brilliant green eyes searching Charles' face. Searching for a reaction, Charles knew, seeing how far he'd have to push to get one. "It is no more than human sentiment, after all; it means less than nothing among monsters. I slew him, Laufey, he who sired me, and I have never regretted it. I would have done more, if I could; I wanted to do more." Kingslayer, kinslayer. There is nothing worse in all the Nine Realms than what I've become. You who value love and kinship so highly, do you despise me yet?
That thought and memory went down and down, to the very core of Loki's despair. Charles hesitated for a moment, sensing a window of opportunity - of shocked openness - but not sure which line of thought to pursue. It was clear even to one without Charles' insight that Loki's contentious relationship with his adopted family was probably responsible for a great deal of his current mental confusion - he'd never even known his biological kin, except as enemies at the far end of a sword-point. Two families and both of them so very, very broken, painted in lurid shades of anger and hate. But only one with love.
In the end he decided that the question of Loki's tumultuous strife with his adopted family could wait. They were a part and parcel of his problems, the frustrated rage that seethed endlessly beneath his skin, but - there were things even more important than that. There could be no repairing of bridges upon such an unstable foundation; there could be no mending until Loki himself had mended, until he excised this poisonous self-hatred and became a whole person once more.
So he grasped the thought and followed it down, letting his awareness dip further into the seething currents of that alien mind. The memories bubbled close to the surface now, easy to see and reach and touch: a varicolored bridge, a dome of golden light. Power humming beneath his hands, the bullroar of force as the bifrost bridge opened, cleaving a path to another realm.
Jotunheim. The name rang with grim portent, conjuring images of cold blue dark and howling snow and wind. Jagged black stone, crumbling towers. Loathing thick on every corner. Hulking dark shadows, fiery red eyes promising pain and violence and death. Snow. Wind. Ice. Blood. Jotunheim, abode of monsters.
And then a crack of light split the sky as his hands slammed the casket of ancient winters power source onto the pedestal, wove the conduits between two very different forms of magic that power might flow and flow and never stop. Iced lightning crackled outwards from the point of contact, twisting and twining like the branches of Yggdrasil the great tree made visible.
He glimpsed, down that open pathway, the destruction he had wrought - a roar of thunder that did not fade but grew into a deafening cacophony, ground that trembled and shook and ripped apart like rotten cloth as the power slammed into the realm that could not turn its face away from Asgard. Stone melting, ground cracking, a seething wave of dust and debris hurling outwards and he was thrilled because his plan was working, exalted in his moment of triumph as an entire world writhed in agony beneath his feet -
Charles' head rocked backwards as his eyes flew open. He took a deep breath, still half-expecting to smell the fierce ozone overflow of the open bridge.
Loki was watching him, his expression closed and his eyes stone-cold. As hard and dark and frozen as the crumbling edifice on the dying world. Now? he thought. Now that you know, will you hate me at last?
"You tried to destroy them," Charles said, his voice numb with the impossible scale of it. "All of them."
"I need not defend myself," Loki snapped, a lie obvious even to one without Charles' powers; his voice and posture vibrated with sullen defensiveness. "Our realms were at war. They breached the defenses of Asgard, sought to strike down the king while he slept." Even if I baited him to it, what of it? It was still his choice, he chose treachery and he reaped the consequences.
"I sought to end the war, quickly and decisively and with as little risk to my own people as possible," Loki went on. "Do not tell me you mortals would not seek the same. You would, you did, your clever metal man sent an attack back through the portal that destroyed every living thing that it touched. I admire your ruthlessness, it was no less than deserved; but do not pretend to me that you do not know what it is to kill your enemies."
Charles noted that Loki seemed to be missing some rather key facts as to how the battle of New York ended, but this did not seem like the time to fill him in. He shook his head. "Killing soldiers is one thing," he said. "Wiping out an entirepeople is another. They didn't all choose to be part of your war."
You cannot destroy an entire race, Loki! A voice rang faintly across the memory, high and clear as a bell. And his own response, both then and now: why not? "Why not?" Loki asked aloud, voice chill and brittle. Thor never did answer me; even he couldn't come up with one good reason why I should spare them. Can you?
"You don't regret it," Charles said, fascinated despite his sickness at the concept. "You tried to commit genocide and you don't even feel guilty about it."
Loki inhaled sharply through his nose, and he raised his hands to place them carefully palm-down on the table as he leaned forward. "And why should I?" he said softly, dangerously. "Do you mortals feel guilty when you put down a rampaging beast? Do you regret inoculating your people with a cure against a deadly disease, even if doing so means that the disease will die out forever? Frost giants are no better, they are a plague upon the realms. They know how to do nothing but kill and destroy, and spill out over the worlds they invade like a virus, devouring all in their path and remaking it in their own image. It is not genocide, Professor, it is pest control."
Loki flicked his gaze up towards the camera lenses overhead, a was a twisted pale smile on his face. "Can you imagine an entire realm of Lokis, Director?" he addressed the silent watcher, and although his voice was soft it carried across the distance perfectly. "A planet populated entirely by villains, consumed with hatred for those who are better than themselves, who murder and destroy without a second thought? They have tried before, you know, long Midgardian ages past. They would try again if they could. If I had disposed of them it would have been a service to you all. Really, you ought to be giving me a medal." He rocked back in his chair, a faint expression of bleak satisfaction on his face. "If you had ever come face to face with a Jotun, I assure you that you would not feel such tender remorse on their behalf."
"I've met one," Charles corrected him. "And he doesn't seem so bad as all that."
"Yes, and I've been such a stellar ambassador of my race," Loki snapped, clearly agitated by the reminder. "I destroyed and I killed, just like giants always do. What else could one expect from a traitor cuckoo such as myself? I always, I always knew -" He cut himself off, biting his words into silence with bled-white force, but Charles followed the thought without effort. I always knew I was different, wrong in some way, and at last I finally know why. Trickster. Coward. Liar. Never wanted, never good enough for anyone. I fought for them with the only weapons I had, with feint and deception and guile, because nothing I could do would ever be good enough but to save the whole kingdom, make them safe forever. Because if I could kill all the monsters then maybe the monster inside me would die too.
"You are not a monster, Loki," Charles said. And it was true. Loki was a mess inside, it was true, and his hands were heavy with blood - but he had known blood before, and everything about Loki's rage and pain and madness were familiar, all too familiar. There was nothing in Loki's mind and heart that he had not seen before in humans and mutants both - nothing fundamentally unworthy, nothing beyond redemption.
Loki laughed, an ugly cut-off sound. "Oh, but I am," he said. He swept one hand across his chest, a mockery of a bow. "This skin is a lie, you know, a pretty disguise that lets me walk in secret among civilized folk. I have been lying to the world before I even knew how to speak, because that is what I am. If you saw what lies beneath this glamour, you would recoil in horror." And why not? Why not? I did.
"Try me," Charles challenged him.
Silence hovered in the cell between them, breathless and daring. Loki's face had gone blank with shock, and his mind flitted chaotically between one thought and the next, unable to settle on one reaction. He did not know whether to laugh uproariously or rage in offense at Charles' presumption, to spurn his pity or to strike him down or - there, hovering behind everything else, stifled and drowned but never quite extinguished. Hope.
"Do not say I didn't warn you," Loki replied, and although his voice was icy it barely concealed a tremble. He inhaled deeply and pushed back in his chair as though trying to regain some distance between them. His eyes flicked to Charles and then away, shifting in and out of focus. "I will - need some ice."
"Ice?" Charles' eyebrows lifted. Loki's thoughts were a seething mire, shifting rapidly between yearning and aggression and fear. A part of Loki wanted very, very badly to be seen and accepted; despite all his pushing, Charles hadn't expected the other man to call him on his bluff just yet. Not, of course, that he was bluffing. Given some of the students Charles had cared for over the years - many of them now lifelong friends - he very much doubted that there was any appearance Loki could put on that would shock him.
"Yes, you blithering dunce, they're called frost giants for a reason," Loki snapped, and his nervousness drove him to lash out, loading his speech with insults like he hadn't done for days. "Do you think this is something I habitually do for fun? I will require cold to trigger the transformation, if you can pull yourselves together enough to find your asses with both hands upon this ramshackle ruin of a floating castle."
Without taking his gaze from Loki - although those green eyes avoided meeting his own, fixing instead on the lenses of the cameras in a staring contest with someone he couldn't even see - Charles raised the headset he hadn't bothered wearing in hours and spoke into it. "Bring us some ice, please," he said into it. His own authority over Loki was equal to the director of SHIELD's, just like Fury had promised - if he asked for ice, he would get ice.
Neither of them spoke in the minutes it took for the strange request to be filled; the door opened and a nervous black-clad agent scurried in with a container. She left it on Charles' side of the table, avoiding Loki's half of the room as much as possible, and withdrew as quickly as she'd come in.
Charles unstopped the plastic container, and a burst of dry white steam curled up from it - dry ice, really? Had that really been easier to come by on this military base than the simpler kind? He slid it across the metal tabletop towards Loki. "Is there anything you need me to do?" he asked.
"I need you to cease your incessant prattling for a moment," Loki snapped. Every line of his body was tense and sharp, and his hands trembled slightly as he reached for the container. Hesitated, then plunged his hand within.
Charles felt no echoing shock of pain at the motion, though direct contact with dry ice would have burned a normal human. Loki pulled his hand back and opened both palms together upwards, wreathing his downcast face in the rising, bubbling steam as the ice sublimated in the warm room. But it did its work, drawing the heat from its surroundings as it expired, and Charles felt as well as saw the cold spread over Loki's hands and creep up his arms.
He hadn't actually known what to expect. He had looked briefly through Loki's mind and memories of the ill-fated journeys to dark Jotunheim, but the memory of the giants themselves was shrouded, occluded. Loki's mental picture of frost giants was as much emotion as it was fact, a distorted mass of dread and danger and dark loathing. Of Loki's own true form he had seen no images at all, no glimpses of his reflection in a mirror - Loki had, it seemed, studiously avoided mirrors while in his other form. He caught only a memory of seeing his own hands, deformed and discolored, and the shock and grief and betrayal that had raced through him with realization of the truth.
And so Charles thought he was ready for any Halloween-grade horrors, thought he had braced himself to let only calm and nonjudgmental acceptance show on his features. He hadn't expected the burst of cerulean color that washed up Loki's hands and arms, crept under his coarse prison clothes to envelop his whole body. He hadn't expected the faintly raised markings that traced delicate lines and whorls over Loki's skin, as exquisite as frost on a window. He hadn't prepared for eyes the color of vermillion, glancing up to check his reaction with a mixture of hostility and ill-concealed hope.
He hadn't expected to see his own childhood staring back at him from across the table.
"Oh," Charles said in a small voice.
Skin the color of a summer sky in the evening, patterns etched across the arms and chest and face. It could have been Raven sitting in the chair across from him, transported across the years and miles back to his side. Even the expression - half sarcastic, half yearning - was painfully familiar. How could two such different people, from such vastly different circumstances, bear such similar scars?
He'd stared too long; he'd let his self-control slip, let himself be knocked off-balance. Loki was already closing up again, pulling away from vulnerability, his outward expression going cold and blank even as shame and pain and bitter disappointment rose like a hot tide within him. "Once again, the heroes of Midgard show their true colors of hypocrisy," he said icily. He hates it, he hates the sight, anyone would, he's no different from the others at all. "How easy it is to give proud speeches and boasts, and how difficult to actually live by such fine, empty words -"
"No," Charles interrupted him, and his voice had gone choked and breathless. "That's - that's not what I meant. Not at all."
He raised one shaking hand to rub his numbed and tingling face, and felt cool wetness sweep over his cheeks and the back of his hand as the pressure moved the tears to fall. He hadn't even realized he'd been crying until that moment. Nor had Loki, apparently, for those red eyes widened in alarm. He weeps, why does he weep? Loki's thoughts ran in a panic. He was never afraid before, not for a moment! Surely this appearance cannot be as terrible as that?
It was, Charles thought in a distant way, the first time since he'd begun his captivity that Loki had stopped to actually think about what someone other than himself was feeling. It was a milestone, if only Charles had been in more of a state to appreciate it. "It's just that you remind me a great deal of someone I used to know," Charles managed to say, once he had his voice somewhat more under control. "Someone who was… very, very dear to me."
Loki hesitated, wavering on the brink between open vulnerability and defensive hospitality. Those startling eyes narrowed in a suspicious glare; it was very effective, in this form. "You knew a frost giant?" he said incredulously.
Charles shook his head. "No," he said. "She was a mutant, like me, but her appearance was very much like yours. She was - she was my sister."
Loki's head jerked back slightly, as though the word stung. "You had better come up with more believable lies, mortal," he growled.
"I have never lied to you, Loki," Charles said, and for a moment he regretted that although he could read the thoughts of others, Loki could not do the same to him. How could he teach trust? The best he could do was give him the truth, whole and unvarnished, and let Loki accept it if he could.
Another moment of agonized hesitation, and then Loki swallowed painfully. "How - did this come about?" he asked. Accepting, at least for now, the truth of Charles' words.
"We weren't related by blood," Charles said. "We met when we were both children; she'd been turned out by her family and had nowhere else to go. It was… it was the first time I had ever met another mutant, someone like me, and I asked her to stay, to live with me in my home. My mother did not pay very close attention to minor details like the exact number of children she had at any given time, you see." After all these years there was no pain in that admission, only a dry acceptance. He'd found other families since then.
"She was... a shapeshifter, not unlike yourself. Most of the time she took care to look like a human, only letting her true skin show when it was safe, when we were somewhere alone and apart from everyone else. I encouraged her to hide, to keep her disguise on all the time. I didn't realize at the time just how much it chafed her, never allowed to be herself. I acted as if I was ashamed… no," Charles gave a painful, hoarse little laugh. Honesty, after all this time. "I was ashamed of her true appearance. I did not see why she should want to look so strange and out of place, when she could choose instead to be normal." Even when Raven's blue skin was as familiar to him as his own, he'd still been annoyed by it, on edge by the sense of danger it lent to be in the company of someone so obviously out of place. His own sister, and he couldn't even bear to be seen with her. He closed his eyes, letting the last of the tears fall, tears of old regret years and years gone.
"What became of her?" Loki asked softly, and Charles opened his eyes again. Loki's gaze was trained steadily on his face, his attention hanging on Charles' story. "Did she die?"
"No." Charles gave another hoarse, pained chuckle. "Thank God, no. She still lives. But do you remember the man I told you about earlier, the leader of the mutant faction other than mine?"
Loki nodded.
Charles took a deep breath. "There was a time when we were allies," he said, "when we worked together and fought together. He befriended her, she became attached to him… he was the first one to encourage her to wear her real skin around him, you see. He told her that her true self was beautiful, that she should not have to hide. When… when we quarreled, when Erik left to forge his own way for mutants in the world, she left with him. She believed in his vision of the future more than she did in mine - because his was of a world where she could walk freely and unafraid.
"I haven't seen her since that day." Not except for in pictures and security camera footage, gathered from the wreckage of a scene when Mystique had blown through like a hurricane. She would not even use her name, the name of the childhood they had shared; she'd thrown it away. "We're enemies, now; if we ever did meet again, we would have to fight one another."
"I am sorry," Loki's voice was quiet, and he looked momentarily at a loss for what else to say. How long had it been since he'd last been moved to comfort another living being? "For your loss. I'm sorry."
"I have always regretted…" It was hard to go on, to force the words out over the constriction squeezing his chest and choking his throat, but Charles pushed on. "Even if we are enemies now I have always wished that I could see her again, just to tell her that I was wrong. That she is beautiful, no matter what she looks like… and that she should be proud to be who and what she is, that she should never have to hide or be ashamed."
He raised his eyes back to meet Loki's, trying to convey all of his earnest sincerity and wish-to-help in his expression. "I very much think," he said hoarsely, "that your own family has the same regrets about you."
No. The denial was firm and unshakeable, not allowing the faintest trace of doubt. No, they don't, they never would. It was not the same; the gap between Aesir and Jotunn was centuries-wide and filled with blood. Impassable, impossible.But I wish - I would have wanted - if someone had to find me that day in the temple, if they couldn't just let me die in the snow - if I was fated to go on living, to be found and stolen and raised in another realm far from my own - I wish that it hadn't been Odin. If only instead it had been - if only it could have been - I wish it could have been you.
~to be continued...