Title: A Villain State of Mind
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Angst, brainwashing.
Timeframe: Set post-Avengers.

At length the tears ran their course and Loki sat quietly, spent like the sky after a storm. He felt drained and exhausted, and he hurt deep inside, as though a long-infected wound had been lanced and washed clean. He knew Fury was still watching, somewhere out there - knew that eyes were trained on him at all times - but he could not bring himself to care what they thought. What any of these petty little mortals thought, save perhaps Charles Xavier.

You are not a monster. You are not evil. You are not. You are not.

Had those words come from anyone else, Loki would have scorned them as cheap and hollow, meaningless platitudes born out of ignorance. But Charles had vision that ran deep; he had seen into Loki right to his very core, past all the lies and masks and veils. He'd seen all of Loki's twisted jealousy and hate, had seen the memories of Loki's worst moments. He knew everything, and yet still he would say - still he would say that there was still hope for him.

That went beyond idealism or ignorance. That could only be madness - or, perhaps madder yet, an impossible truth.

As much as he wanted to believe those words, to let himself think that someone, anyone, might think he was a person worth being - at the same time he pushed them away with equal tenacity. It had felt too right, believing he was a monster. There were too many things in his life that had never made sense until that revelation, until everything clicked home at last. Why he'd always been different, why he'd always been outside. Why everything he'd tried to do had gone so wrong, because the villain was meant to fail; if he was a monster, at least there was a reason for it. Why slights and hurts he'd given to others had been punished so severely, and yet slights and hurts offered to him had been brushed off as though they didn't matter, because what matter was an offense given to a monster?

"If I am not... not a monster..." Loki said aloud, and his voice felt strained and heavy just getting out the words. "If I am not, then why..." There were so many whys it was hard to even pick one; they tumbled through his mind like streaking meteors, until at last he was able to catch on one. The dwarven smiths, Brokk and Eitri, how they had looked at him with such loathing.

"Why did they..." He gestured towards his mouth, helpless and frustrated; even now, he couldn't say it. The dwarves had done their work too well, masterfully buried all testimony of their acts. Even years later, with all his mastery of magic, he could not force the words past his sealed-shut lips. "Why did no one care?"

Fortunately, he didn't need to. Charles could reach into his head, hear the words he could never speak; Charles had seen those terrible memories that had swallowed him on the first day the spæmaðr had come to his cell. The mortal looked at him now with sympathy - not pity, he did not need pity, he would not take it - and a certain hard-edged interest. "You were never able to tell anyone about it?" Loki shook his head. "Why not?"

He could not speak of the act itself, of the pain and the fire and the blood and the silver needle; but he could speak in generalities. He let out a dry laugh. "Dwarven spellcasting is excessively literal," he said. When the dwarves had sewn his lips, they had bound him never to speak of what had passed between them, and not even the greatest of mages could lift a geas laid upon himself. Others in Asgard could have, perhaps; but since he'd never been able to speak of it, he could not ask for their aid. Even if they would have granted it.

"I was turned out of the fastness of Nidvallir and left to make my own way home, horseless and barefoot in the rocks and snow." He could still talk around the edges of it, it seemed. "It took me weeks to get home, and by the time I staggered into the great hall the wounds - most of them - had already healed."

"Did no one call upon the dwarves themselves for an explanation of their mistreatment of you?" Charles wanted to know, a low note of anger in his voice.

Loki laughed again, the sound as bitter as wormwood. "They said that I had given them insult, and been silenced for it," he said. "They may have left out some of the details. But the official story was enough for the court, who took great merriment in the idea of Loki Lie-smith made mute."

"You were barely more than a child at the time," Charles said, low and sad.

Loki blinked; that was not what he'd expected Xavier to say. Then his chin lifted in automatic pride. "I had seen battle, and killed my first enemies. I was a man in the eyes of Asgard." Except he hadn't been, had he? No true man would dabble in sorcery, nor wrap himself in deception. To the royal court he had only been a half-a-man, ergi, less even than a woman - he'd been burdened with the expectations of a warrior, but never granted the prestige of one, nor the protection.

"You never even tried to get around the geas," Charles remarked. "You were clever enough to find a way, if you'd tried. Why didn't you?"

He frowned. "I was a son of Odin, a prince of the realm." And in the end, it turned out he'd never been that either. "It would not have been seemly for me to whine like a child, nor to blub about hurts already healed." Even if anyone would have been inclined to listen. Try as he might, Loki couldn't think of anyone back then who would have cared to hear the true story; his mother's indifference, his father's distance, his brother's boastfulness. None of them would have cared, none of them ever listened. His vision seemed to close down, helpless rage dimming the world about him to a narrow tunnel.

"I am listening, Loki," Charles reminded him.

It helped, a little. The darkness drew back.

"The hammer did come to Thor eventually, of course," Loki said, his voice a hundred years distant, half in the present and half in the past. "How he loved that accursed thing! - how he carried it with him from room to room within the palace, far out of reach of any foe that might call for it. And every time I laid eyes on it, every time he brandished or tossed it in some boastful feat, I would remember." He would remember the needles and the coals, pain in his hands and agony in his mouth and silence, silence. "And my thoughts would fill with bitterness and hate, and I could never, ever explain to anyone why.

"Not that most people thought they needed to look far afield for an explanation. They thought me jealous of Thor, of his prowess in battle, of his magnificent gifts. I suppose I was that, as well. Over time, it came to be that he didn't even need to have that accursed hammer anywhere in sight - just seeing him, just walking into a room, would be enough."

Loki uttered a chuckle. "Do you know, on the day I sent the Destroyer, he tried to offer me an apology? If that is what it can be called. For whatever wrongs I have done you, I am sorry. As though an offering of rote words could mean anything when he had no idea what he was even sorry for, when he even then could not comprehend that he could have done anything wrong. I, of course, could not tell him, and he never was any use at figuring things out without my help. He still has no idea how I came to hate him so, and I suppose by now he never will."

"Is it really Thor that you hate?" Charles asked. "The man himself, or just the associations around him?"

Loki frowned. It was hard to separate them in his mind. "I don't know. I don't think it matters, now. We are sworn enemies, howsoever we came to be so, and he can never recant. His pride, his honor would never allow it." And neither would mine, Loki thought.

"That's it, then?" Charles said, and he sounded sorrowful. "No chance, no hope of forgiveness, not ever?"

Loki felt a stab of resentment, that once again someone took Thor's part over his - until he remembered Charles' story of the mutant girl Raven, once his sister, now his sworn enemy too. The spaemadr could not help but dream of reconciliation, however impossible it would be for others. Nevertheless, Loki couldn't help but relent a little. "Perhaps someday," he said. Yes, someday when the stars fall from the sky, and the throne of Asgard crumbles from age, and our bones are all but dust in the winds - then perhaps Thor and I could be reconciled.

A silence fell between them, for a time.

"Would you like me to remove the block on your mind?" Charles offered.

"Can you?" Loki asked, startled. "I - would not expect you had much skill with dwarven spell-crafting."

"I do not," Charles admitted. "Nor with most kinds of magic in general. But however the binding was administered, I can now see its lingering effects in your mind. I believe I could loosen it, if you would allow me to try."

For a moment Loki hesitated, waffling between hopefulness and suspicion. What good would it do him to be released from the geas of silence now, after so many years, long past the point where he had anyone who would care about the truth? There was no explaining things to Thor, nor to his parents, not after all that had befallen them. That bridge was thoroughly shattered, and could never be rebuilt.

And yet - even if he never spoke of it to anyone for the rest of his long life, it would make a difference just knowing that he could. More than the physical pain and humiliation, it burned at him not to have command of himself, to be constrained by an outside force within his own mind. To be released from that, even in such a small and belated way, was an opportunity not lightly passed up.

"All right," Loki allowed. "What do I need to do?"

Charles pulled his chair up to the small metal table at which they had spent so many hours, so many words. He gestured to the chair opposite. "Sit," he said. "I will need to be able to touch you."

Loki sat on the edge of the chair, holding himself tense and stiff as though in anticipation of a blow; but Charles only raised his hands and rested two fingers lightly on either side of his temples. A tingling hum filled the air between them, and the spæmaðr closed his eyes. Loki did not, watching the other man carefully.

The positioning was awkward - Loki was taller than Charles, even sitting down, and the barrier of the table between them made the way the smaller man was forced to stretch upwards stiff and painful. "Stop - wait," Loki said, and leaned back far enough to break the contact.

Charles opened his eyes, and quirked a curious eyebrow at Loki. "Did that hurt?" he asked. "Uncomfortable?"

Even now, after knowing Charles Xavier for over a week and sharing more of his inner self with him than anyone else in centuries, it still flooded Loki with a strange feeling in his chest to realize that Charles actually cared whether he was in discomfort or pain. Perhaps it was time that he should return the favor of that regard. "Not for me," he said, and pushed himself out of the chair.

He walked around the small metal table, and slid smoothly to one knee in front of Charles' strange wheeled device. It felt a little dissonant to be looking up into his face for a change, but Loki could not bring himself to feel shame - he had knelt before far worse men than Charles Xavier. If he could kneel before Skadi, before Geirrod, before the Other, before -

(Who? When?)

(He'd forgotten.)

- even before Odin All-father, then he could certainly kneel to this man before him, mortal or no.

"This should be more convenient, I think," Loki said, affecting a casual tone. Charles smiled at him, and raised his hands to lightly touch Loki's head once more.

"Thank you," Charles added, as though in an afterthought, but the sincerity in his voice was perfectly real.

Loki frowned; he didn't think the change in position had been that big of a deal. "For what?"

"For the honor of your trust," Charles said softly, and Loki felt his face flame. Now, he did close his eyes.

The spæmaðr's touch upon his mind was tingling and cool - not painful or uncomfortable after all, but probing and invasive in a way that made Loki uneasy. It was an effort to hold himself open under that scrutiny, but Loki set himself to endure.

Brief nonsensical impressions flitted past him too quickly to stop and analyze, sudden surges of colors at the corner of his eye or tastes filling his mouth that could not really be there. When the first ghostly images began to form behind his eyelids, at first Loki disregarded them the same way - until he realized they were not fanciful imagination, but memory.

Memories rushed past him like the outgoing tide, the subsidence of water that preceded the tidal bore. Falling through the void, the boundless no-place outside of space and time. Fighting against unseeable currents to try to regain solid land, reaching for the promise of light and air. Coming at last to the shattered stone archipelago where the Chitauri built and tunneled their hives, and crashing like a meteor upon the ground.

They had taken him, and taken him for a spy, at first, and had not believed his protestations of innocence (how ludicrous it was, that the one time he should be telling the truth, he would not be believed, even by those who had no reason to know him.) They pressed him for answers more to their liking, and he had none to give.

Then the pain began, and how the Silvertongue had danced then! weaving a tapestry of artful deceptions and tiny slivers of truth, of persuasion and guile and sly flattery. What fools they were, what arrogant fools, to believe that their unimaginative brutality could force out truth in the place of lies. How naive, to imagine he would be any more honest only because he was pained. Loki ducked and weaved through their interrogations as though dancing upon hot iron, exhilarated and desperate, and at last - at last - won over some grudging semblance of trust. Convinced them, at last, that he could be of some use to them.

The Other had taken him to their cold and desolate city under the twisting sky, paved with the bones of so many dead the architecture did not even bother to display their skulls in prominent triumph - a dead enemy was not even worth the notice, here. Just another building material. And in that citadel, seated upon a rust-black throne, he saw -

He saw -

"Relax, Loki," Charles' voice broke in from an endless distance, soothing and steady. "I'm not trying to hurt you."

"Then why does it hurt!" he cried out, like a child's outburst. It was all mixing together in his mind, the black sky and the white bones and the bright blue starburst and the cold, and the cold, ice blood snow Frost giant monster monster monster deathdeathdeath, bone white skin and dark hair and eyes like stars, the edges ripped and torn and the picture overlain with the translucent red spray of blood -

He'd forgotten who sent him here, the name and the face and even the existence of the one who had raised him to be his dark champion and placed power in his hand and planted blue fire in his mind. He'd forgotten why had he come to Earth at all, he had forgotten it, he had forgotten, all his careful plans and strategies and contingencies, could remember nothing at all of the reasoning behind the invasion of Earth except that this was important and he could not fail.

But in the end, he had failed.

"Who sent you here, Loki?" Charles pressed him, his voice echoing in Loki's mind as though they stood in a hollow cave. "Who was it that sealed you to silence?"

The answer was there, just out of reach, but there was a barrier past which he couldn't see. He could feel it creaking ominously, bent under all the pressure of his locked memories - and Charles Xavier, forcing them remorselessly to the light.

For a moment Loki did not know which will break first; the geas, or him.

There was a face. Coming towards him through the distance, rising up through a blank white (blue starfire sunburst blinding) fog towards him. Looming huge and implacable, like a mountain given to walk. Skin the color of drying blood, and eyes like dead stars -

Is not the wake of my passing crimson with the blood of allies and enemies alike?

He's in love with Death, he's in love with Death, he'll kill everyone everyone everyone -

You exist only to serve. Your life will be a paving-stone beneath my feet on my way to destiny - and so, for now, you will live.

"Just a precaution," that granite-grating voice said to him, chilling him down with dread (and the tiniest thrill of defiance, the knowledge kept secretly encysted in his heart, that in the end Loki would do what he thought best.) "To ensure that you remain focused on my task, and do not find yourself in the position of... reconsidering your loyalties."

"My lord," his own voice, dripping with honeyed sincerity, "I would not dream of betraying you."

"Indeed," and the face loomed before him now, one hand clenched in a fist around the bright teardrop gem held within, sputtering with blue fire, "you will not dream of it."

A bright spark leapt from his hand to Loki's head, and he seized and fell with his limbs twitching and clawing at nothing as the blue sunfire wrapped in a band around his head and burrowed inwards, burning like nettles, twisting his thoughts and devouring his memories until he forgot.

Forgot who. Forgot why.

And he'd stumbled out of the Tesseract-bright portal half-blind and half-sick, and he had everything he'd wanted, he was free and home and held power in his hands again, and yet all he could remember was the sick certainty that this new freedom was nothing more than an insidious lie.

Even now, he could remember the face but he could not remember the name, could not speak it, aloud or even in his thoughts. Trapped inside his own skin, he could not fight and could not flee and could not speak -

Your silver tongue is in need of tempering, Liesmith.

The dwarves had wanted him silenced, and taken steps with their bright needles and coarse thread to make it so. But they were not the only ones who had done so, were they?

Silver tongue turn to lead?

All who had known him -

Know your place!

All his life -

SILENCE!

Wished for nothing more than his silence -

I am listening, Loki.

He tore at the barrier, and it gave way with a suddenness that startled him. And on the far side, at last, he found his voice. "I am Loki," he cried, in a voice that shook from the rafters. "And neither man nor God shall silence me!"

Abruptly the heat in the room was doused as though plunged into water; a wave of biting cold snapped out from him and expanded in a ring. All the glass panels in the windows shattered, despite how heavily they were reinforced, as the deathly cold touched the overheated surface. Metal warped and buckled, plastic cracked and curled - but at the center of it, Loki and Xavier sat untouched.

He could hear shouting, at the corner of his attention, the panicked footsteps and babbling voices that were the Director's useless guards. He ignored them as beneath him, instead slowly raising his eyes to meet Charles'.

"His name is Thanos," Loki grated harshly. A slow, viscous liquid dripped from his nose, from the corners of his eyes, seeping from his ears into his hairline, but he ignored it. "He is coming, and when he comes to this world, death comes with him."

~tbc...

Author's Note: This story is going to have to go on hiatus for a brief time - I'm being pulled into a contest in the TRC fandom, and will need to concentrate on that for the next few weeks. A Villain State of Mind should be back in a month or so - I haven't abandoned it, and I know where the next few chapters are going.