Disclaimer: I own no part of the Marvel movie universe.

Chapter 30

There didn't seem to be anything wrong at first. Loki was staring intently at the screen, first examining the main menu and then the request page, which was linked to the only non-pictgram on the main menu.

Tony had done that very intentionally, hoping Loki would be curious enough to check it out first. He was glad it had worked. The sooner they could let Loki start processing that requests for food were allowed, the better.

For them and most definitely for him.

Only it was quickly apparent that was not going to be so easy.

Loki stiffened a little, and a little figuring of angles showed Tony he was vaguely staring at the icons he had hoped would provide a spot of hope.

And then he was trembling, and Frigga was moving to her son's aid...

And that was when Loki hugged himself desperately, shrugged her off with enough force to knock her off balance, and started making keening distressed noises in the back of his throat. Tony hadn't heard that sound before.

But someone else had.

Natasha ran in from the hallway, clearly ready for a fight. She gave a short curse in Russian. "What happened?"

"I think he's having a flashback."

"You think he's having a flashback?"she said incredulously.

Tony resisted the urge to roll his eyes.

Frigga had gotten over the shock of what had happened and was kneeling in front of her son, speaking in low reassuring tones that he was going to be all right.

Tony's own nightmares about the dark said otherwise. For whatever had triggered this to have triggered it, whatever was up with Loki had to be something that was not going to be easily solved.

Loki was starting to calm down a little. Just a little. But it was enough to be sure he was aware of the world again.

And then, well...

Tony had managed to skip past a great number of otherwise required literature classes in his short and fast academic career. But even he had been exposed to the old term 'shame-faced' and there really was no other way of describing Loki's expression.

He thought a great many curses.

Natasha said a few.

Frigga simply said "Oh my little Loki" as if the issue at hand were a skinned knee and gathered her adopted son into her arms.

And that was when Loki started weeping in eerie and totally unnatural silence.

To make Tony's day just that much more interesting, footsteps thundered in the hall and a moment later Steve ran in followed closely by Thor.

Steve looked like he was about ready to rip whatever had caused Loki to make the sounds into little tiny shreds. Which did not help Tony with his ever more fragile attempts at denying the blatantly obvious.

Thor was disturbed, ready to defend his brother with the mighty war-hammer firmly held in one hand and the other in a fist, but he seemed a bit perplexed. "What has happened?" Thor demanded.

"Something about the tablet triggered Loki."

"You mean he had another breakthrough, and it distressed him."

"No, Thor, as in a trauma disorder," Steve bit out. "Asgard's got warriors, right?"

"Many warriors of great strength'" he said with no little pride.

"Ever have any of them come home without mentally leaving the dangers of the battlefield behind?" Natasha asked him. "Still treat any noise behind them as if an enemy were sneaking up behind them?"

"A few. A few of those nothing can help." Thor's voice was sad, and then he turned fearful. "You think Loki is this way?"

"After what he's been put through, it'd take a miracle for him to have skipped having at least one trigger," Steve told him. "No shame to it, of course..."

"Of course there's no shame to it," Thor thundered out.

Loki cringed.

"Thor, he doesn't understand half of what we say..." Tony told him in an unnaturally upbeat voice.

"As I was about to tell you, I've got a few myself. So if you've got questions later on you can ask me," Steve ground out.

Natasha was looking at the little cobbled-together tablet. "Tony, you put food and drink request icons on here?"

"Yeah. I wanted him to know they were things he could chose to ask for."

"When Dr. Strange said he was punished for eating and drinking without permission but couldn't get how out of Loki?"

That time, Tony couldn't hold in the cursing.

Frigga told him, "It was only a matter of time before someone made a mistake taking care of him. Better it not be family."

We nearly killed him not a week ago, Tony thought.

Natasha handed him the little device. "Get coding, Tony. If nothing else gray them out. Remove them outright if you can."

He'd nearly gotten through with the editing when Frigga gently pushed away from Loki at last. "I must go," she said with some regret. "Otherwise, the realm..."

"Better your children have a home to return to, and a ready hearth with you waiting, than to have you here sharing in their exile," Thor told her.

Loki took it amazingly well, given everything. Frigga's departure appeared to be something he could understand, and there was something more adult about him now.

Natasha followed her out of the room, talking so softly Tony couldn't make it out.

And that left the four men alone.

"Do we have any better idea how he was punished?" Thor asked.

"More guesses," Steve told him. "Can't really know anything until he starts talking."

Thor tried to hug his brother. Loki submitted to it but looked miserable, as if he thought Thor might take the touch away at any time.

"What guesses?" Thor asked with pained resignation.

"Thor, what do Asgardians think about warriors captured by the enemy and mistreated in their custody?"

"Shame for having been captured. Unless there was no way to fight being taken, as is true of Loki."

"And this mistreatment?"

Thor looked away. "It depends."

"On what?" Steve outright growled.

Tony and Loki shared a mutual 'Get Me Out Of Here' glance.

"Thor, Steve, you're scaring him. I'm going to go take him down to the lab with me, get him calmed down and distracted, okay? And you two can handle the family education bit where Loki won't have to know his brother's initial reaction? Since he won't be able to tell the difference between anger at his enemies and anger at him?"

That snapped both of them out of whatever mental space they'd worked themselves into for long enough that Tony could retrieve Loki from Thor and gently guide him out of the room with an arm firmly embracing his shoulders.

Tony got them to the little crash bedroom he kept around the labs for the times Pepper found him sleeping hunched over on a table. Two chairs, one small bed, a table that could have been rejected by a thrift store is had seen so much abuse over the years.

He steered Loki toward the bed and sat down with him.

Bruce came in a moment later. "What happened?"

"I was a fool and accidentally triggered memories of whatever they did to him to keep him from eating on his own. And well, Natasha and Steve both came running when they heard him, so..."

Bruce swore, but his heart rate only went high enough for the monitor to beep a few times before falling silent again.

Loki looked miserable.

Bruce sat down in one of the chairs and reached out to hold one of Loki's hands. "We aren't angry with you, Loki. We're angry at the people who did this to you, whatever happened and however it happened. They are horrible people and a number of us would like to do horrible things to them for what they have done to and through you."

Loki must have understood a good bit of that - he really was recognizing more words every day even if it was probably only momentarily and from context - because he looked up wild-eyed and shook his head.

"And why don't you want us to avenge what they've done?" Tony asked.

Loki looked at him quizzically.

"Why not?" Bruce simplified.

Tony didn't understand quite all of the response, since Loki didn't gesture much yet and he certainly hadn't addressed the topic before, but the concepts of 'big', 'strong', and 'powerful enough to hurt you' were certainly involved.

"Bigger than Hulk?" Bruce asked in a growl.

Loki thought for a moment, then nodded very intently.

Silence.

"Well, that's one more thing we can tell Dr. Strange," Tony quipped.

Loki nearly fainted.

It took him more than a little while to recover properly.

Between the latest shock and what he'd already gone through that day, Loki wished they'd just leave him alone.

They knew. And his mother knew, not that she'd judge him for it but...

And by now, Thor knew, because Steve clearly knew. And there was no telling what Thor or his friends in that other life he used to have would think about it.

Which was disconcerting, because they clearly weren't his friends in this new life but it still mattered what any of them would think about the fact an enemy had managed to...

He closed his eyes and shook his head in distress, trying to shake the thoughts out of his mind.

It didn't work.

There was something hard being pressed into his hands, and he opened his eyes to find Tony handing over the device again.

He didn't want to look. Even knowing the source of his unease around eating - especially knowing the source of the unease - he did not want to see those little images again.

And that, he suspected, was the most useful aspect of the thing so far as his communication went.

If he could just look there, there was the promise that Tony had given him a way to say when he really needed access to a toilet. And an apology for what had happened when Odin and Frigga had arrived. If.

He focused on it, telling himself he could look without touching. That main page had been trouble-free, hadn't it? So long as that was all he saw, it would be safe. Useless to him, but safe.

As if anything would be safe once the detail about him he'd let slip got loose.

You've met Death, and it wasn't bad, he reminded himself. The end is not what you need to fear.

And it wasn't what he was fearing. The way to the end was more than frightening enough anyway.

He finally processed what he was looking at and started with a whimper of fear he couldn't hold in.

Tony'd already set the device to the page of requests. Only...

Only there were blank spaces, black where there should have been an image of food and an image of water.

Blank, the promise that the space was still available, that maybe someday that option might come back, that it was maybe just that Loki wasn't ready to have the option to ask for those things quite yet.

He relaxed and smiled uncontrollably. They had 'listened' to him...

"Better?" Tony asked.

Loki nodded.

This time, Tony went through the entire set of available communications with him - requests, places, people, items, basic concepts like 'yes', 'no', 'please repeat', even 'name this'. For people and places, there was even a setting for being led to where that person or place was, which Loki knew required some amount of technology working in the background in the building but he just couldn't remember what exactly, complete with a large arrow even he could figure out.

And once that was done, they did leave him alone and just let him lie down and doze while they discussed some project they were working on. Here and there, he could make out a technical word or five, but oh it was good to hear those again...

Then they ate, just the three of them, and Tony didn't seem to mind 'helping' with that.

Afterward, Bruce said something and Tony slapped his head. A few minutes later he was modifying the device again. With a little work, most of the buttons now talked. And not just talked, but Tony even made sure Loki could understand the messages and could know what he was saying and oh the way he did it!

It was very late when Thor wandered into the bedroom he and his brother shared that night.

Dinner had been an individual affair thanks to the disruptions of the day. He hadn't seen Loki since shortly after their mother had left them.

Loki had already gotten mostly together for bed - Thor realized Tony must have helped him through the bits he still needed permission for - and was lying on top of his sheets, facing away from the door.

"Brother?" Thor asked softly.

If Loki had managed to fall asleep, Thor had no intention of waking him.

Only Loki did in fact stir uneasily.

Thor walked over. "Brother, this matters not. Between us, I mean. I saw you, remember, in the moments before this happened to you. Their control was too deep for you to have fought any abuse they dealt to you."

His head was still swimming through what Steve had told him. He managed to remember the bit about avoiding unwarned physical contact when he walked over to the bed, though.

Better to not deal with it if Loki didn't want to right now, he reasoned with himself. Loki had always been a private man, and this... This only made respecting that more important.

"Loki, don't you want to see what I brought you from home?" He hadn't bothered unpacking that while their mother was still with them.

He sat up then, staring at Thor quizzically and worriedly. And with a touch of possible actual exhaustion that left Thor wondering just what Tony had him doing all evening.

The books interested him, mostly vaguely. The plush animal from his quarters was another matter. Caution, the hint of eventual offense...

"I thought you might have need of it, as time passed. I swear, I did not know..."

Loki still seemed uneasy about it, as if he didn't seem to know what to make of it being there on Midgard.

Thor was nearly asleep himself, hours later, when Loki snuck over to lie on top of the covers beside him after a particularly unquiet half hour.

Thor tried to invite him under the covers, but when the answer was a cold hand to the back of the neck he had his answer - Loki was sleeping colder now and neither of them would be comfortable if he accepted the offer.

To the darkness between worlds with his advice and caution, Thor thought as he broke Steve's rules, stuck an arm out from under the sheets, and pulled his brother close by with no real warning. Not without guilt, given the price Steve must have paid to learn what he knew given that he'd disturbingly lapsed into first person a few times in his ire without noticing, but it didn't seem to apply to this.

The answer was Loki pressing even closer plus the realization that he had brought the toy with him.

A flash of indignity, and then the remembrance that such things were meant to help the young learn emotional self-regulation, something Loki was still working on.

His brother was just trusting that he wouldn't be judged by Thor for using it. And, given everything, that meant something.

His brother was his brother. Now, I'd he could just figure out who that was in a manner that could last more than three days...

Loki woke once or twice and woke Thor with him thanks to the feel of cold tears on his arm if nothing else, but on the whole he slept through the rest of the night.