NOTE - A very Happy Holidays to all my readers and reviewers! I can't tell you what wonderful gifts your feedback messages are - it's such a huge help as I write my stories. Thank you all so much!
4 Message
When placed over a flame, lithium compounds give off a striking crimson color.
Her first thought was to run to Loki and demand an explanation for his supposed death, but Natasha had learned to weigh all consequences before acting. If Loki discovered she knew Thor had no idea his brother was alive, what would that strange demigod's reaction be? He was unpredictable at the best of times, and in an asylum, facing his former enemy who discovered something very private... the result could be catastrophic.
Obviously the entire situation on Asgard was a secret. Loki told her he was the current ruler of all nine realms, and Natasha knew when power and thrones were involved secrets became valuable commodities. Her life could be held ransom to his ambitions and mysterious desires if she fled to him with her latest bit of information.
And there was something else holding her back. Of all the Avengers, Thor had the least complicated psyche. He was simple, strong, and utterly sane. The others were all damaged in some way – even Steve Rogers bore the same biomechanics as her, the Black Widow. He had been transmuted to a new century, like lead turning to gold, without the benefit of watching time pass; the Captain awoke to news of dead friends, new tech, and a complete shift of moral understanding. Clint and Tony both had childhood issues. Bruce had cut himself off from the world of relationships. Only Thor seemed completely 'normal' - if such a thing existed in her world at all.
Therefore if Thor looked at her with pity as though he thought she were seeing things when she mentioned his brother, was there a chance she had dreamed up the presence of Loki within the hospital?
Lithium was a safe drug according to all she had read, but the injections they received in the facility were enhanced. She felt it with every keen detecting sense in her body. It was just possible she was experiencing hallucinations and had dreamed up the interactions between her and Loki; that thought made her bones melt with fear.
Natasha paced in her room. She returned there as a last refuge after the session with Dr. Holmes in order to try and make some sense of what had just occurred. It was simple, she told herself – she was wrong or Thor was wrong. Either choice, given their current setting, was bad.
Her conclusion was to keep quiet and wait.
The attendant poked his head in her room and held up a small purple stick between his thumb and one thick forefinger. "What is that?" Natasha asked, in the middle of mentally listing contingencies and back-up plans.
"Crayon." He shrugged. "Take it or leave it – it's all I could get for you. If it had a point you could stick it in a vein or under your skin. There would be blood. Probably a lot of blood. One dude used a pen in his neck and bled out on the mattress."
She held out her hand and thanked him. The crayon was stubby, the paper surrounding it long gone. Still, it was invaluable – now she could write messages, draw out diagrams, get some real work done.
"Why did that servant come inside your room?" Wearing a dark scowl, Loki burst through the door as soon as the attendant left.
Smoothly she pushed the crayon under her pillow while she pretended to stretch. "You have your plans – I have mine."
"Why did you not come outside to the round place after your appointment with the doctor - the one with the ugly mustache and few wits? I wanted to talk to you."
"And I wanted a little privacy as well as some time to think."
He shook his head. "No. That leaves me with no one for conversation. I cannot stand there and chat with the television man."
Natasha felt her face register amusement. "No, I don't suppose you can."
"So you do have feelings!" Loki dimpled in one of his ready grins, and he stepped forward abruptly to brush her hair back from her face. "I always thought of you as cold and without emotion."
A number of sarcastic retorts came to mind – Why, because I never attacked New York? Because I didn't pluck out a living man's eyeball? Because I failed to stab my brother in the gut?
However, she didn't want to antagonize him - at least, not yet. Plus she wanted to make certain Loki was real. He certainly seemed real – any hallucinations she experienced in the past came with sickness, chills or fever, and a feeling of tilting away from the true world. Who is right? she wondered again. Me or Thor?
"Hold out your arm," she ordered.
Strangely, he did as she asked without hesitation. Natasha hopped off the bed and felt his skin, bared with the short sleeves of the hospital gown and cool to her touch, softer than she had expected with corded muscles sliding underneath the smooth flesh. There was no questioning the reality of Loki, looming over her and smiling down from his dark height. She found herself wondering exactly what had happened in Asgard between the brothers.
"What are you doing?" Loki asked in a quiet voice.
She dropped her hands from his bicep, stepped back. "Just wanted to see something. You can go now."
Loki shook his head. "No, I do not want to. Your room smells nicer than any other place in this hospital."
"I took the time to scrub it – actually, now that I think of it, have you won any privileges from Rebecca yet? Can you use her to get me some soap?"
His hairline moved as though he were thinking it over. "Yes, but you will owe me two things if I procure it for you. One for the information and one for the soap."
"Okay." Natasha inclined her head in acknowledgement. "How did you arrive here? Did you wake up inside, or were you somehow overpowered and brought in …"
He laughed at that. "Nothing can overpower me. No, I came here as you did – in my sleep and with no memory of how it came to be."
"Right." She frowned. "And since you're still here, I'd imagine your magic doesn't work inside the facility for some reason."
"Of course not, or I would be gone. Or," he dropped his voice and sidled closer, "perhaps I do not want to leave just yet. Maybe I am enjoying my time."
"Better than the throne of Asgard? I find that hard to believe, especially after I saw you in action trying to win my realm and rule over it as yours." Natasha drummed her fingers against her thigh and peered up at the single tiny window in her room, set too far up on the wall to view. "Do you think you could lift me up to look out?"
Instantly he bounded onto her bed, beckoned with one palm and, when she climbed up beside him, spread his long fingers on her thighs to hoist her up so she could peer out of the smeared pane - dusty and speckled in the corners with insects. There was nothing to be seen outside except more forest, stretching out in every possible direction for miles. Snow was coming - the sky head a looming, threatening aspect that made Natasha wish she could be among the trees to smell the crisp air.
"Okay, I'm coming back down." Natasha jumped off the mattress and thrust her feet back into her flip-flops. "Well, that was useless."
"I enjoyed it." Loki's grin spread like untamed water after a hurricane.
Studiously she ignored that comment. "What time is it? I really don't want to be caught in here with you - Rebecca would order me three injections the instant she found out."
"Perhaps, but I would have had my fun."
"But tomorrow you'd have no one to talk to, since I'd be drooling on the sofa like Maria Hill." Natasha cursed as soon as she spoke – she hadn't meant to give that away.
"Do you know her?" Loki's eyes glinted. "Of course – she is the female who fired at me on the Helicarrier transport device. I suppose she looked so different here I missed it… But you still owe me two debts. That was a mistake on your part, not a gift."
"Semantics," Natasha muttered.
He shook his head. "No, this changes nothing. However, I take your point. I want to talk to you, not a living corpse. And on that thought, we have at least ten minutes by my calculations before I must go and pleasure the nurse." He sat on her mattress and patted it. "Come and sit next to me. I do not bite."
Natasha ignored him and crossed her arms. "No one can overpower you, according to what you just said. So in your opinion, how did you arrive? I should think your being here would shorten the list of suspects considerably."
"This may come as a shock," Loki said with a wink, "but there are many who would like to get hold of me for vengeance."
"Shocker, riiiight." She stared at him for a moment, unblinking, before adding, "And do all of those enemies know you sit on the throne?"
A shade swam across his vision, and the Black Widow allowed herself a mental pat on the back. In that one moment she had the entire situation in the realm of Asgard figured out: nobody knew he was the current ruler. Loki had used some sort of magic to fake his death and subsequent resurrection to usurp the position of All-Father. And she was the only one in the Nine Realms who knew it, other than the god sitting on her bed with a sulky look on his face.
"It is time for me to go and meet my girlfriend," Loki announced coldly. He pushed away from the mattress, crossed the room with two strides, and left without a backwards glance at her.
Natasha counted to fifty before going to the bathroom and closing the door. There she jiggled her shoulders and butt in a victory dance, chanting under her breath: I'm a bad-ass, a big bad-ass, the biggest baddest motherfucker of them all.
The back issue of Time had enough usable space in the margins and back cover to allow for a write-up of her ideas in a code she had devised years ago. She also included a preliminary sketch of the grounds and hospital building. On the ever-present subscription card she added a to-do list. Priority number one was making things as easy as possible for Thor when he came for Maria. As soon as she finished her self-assigned homework she stashed everything in a loose tile in the ceiling of the bathroom.
After removing her flip-flops she padded barefoot to Maria's room. Naturally it was vacant, since the inhabitant sat motionless on the duct-taped couch at that very moment.
Inside the dreary, stinking chamber Natasha searched for cameras, found two, and shifted them so they portrayed a continuous feed of stained wall and a spider web in one far corner. There were no personal items, but she bagged some of Hill's extra panties to send with her.
The Time magazine was stapled together – proof that those running the hospital were rookies. Natasha had already removed one staple and stashed it in her hospital gown; she bent it carefully and inserted it into the lock of Maria's door so it would appear to close during lockdown but could be opened from the outside with a mere shove. Thor's strength would take care of it easily, and there would be much less noise as a result.
Finally she returned to the dayroom, her first few tasks for the day complete. The kid sang Marceline's song in front of the TV. Loki's chair was empty. Carl yawned in one corner; she waved at him and gave him a bright smile.
Maria sat on the couch with her knees up, listing sideways. Natasha cautiously approached her and put one arm along the back of the sofa. Again she counted, this time to five hundred. When no one in the dayroom moved beyond the attendant rubbing his eyes and shaking his head with exhaustion, she slipped the bag with underwear into Maria's hand. "Hold onto this when you go to bed," she whispered. "Can you remember?"
Hill raised her head and looked blearily into the Black Widow's face. "Organs," she said in a voice husky from disuse. "Stairways to nowhere. Black market. Rooms with no doors. Bodies are commodities. Gas chamber. Bones."
"Okay," Natasha soothed her. "It's okay. I'm on it." She rubbed Maria's back, hoping Hill wouldn't go into freak out mode. At the same time she dropped a folded square with a few words written in purple crayon into the waistband of the woman's pants and prayed no one would find it at lights' out before Thor returned for the rescue op.