Chapter 12: All of my faces, none are my own

Loki woke at the sound of movement to his right, but he didn't open his eyes. First, he took stock of his current environment. The breathing tube was still in, and he could feel it beginning to irritate his throat, but supressed the reflex to cough and struggle to breathe on his own. The rustling at his side had been paper. Someone was sitting at his bedside, reading a book. So, not Thor then. Loki thought to himself. Charles was still mostly absent. There were no other sounds or impressions coming from the rest of the lab; his guard was here alone. They weren't upset or tense, merely patient. Not Agent Barton or Dr. Banner... Loki could always sense the inhuman aggression underlying the scientist's presence. You're either that Captain or the Spider. He opened his eyes and allowed himself to react to the unpleasant plastic tubing lodged in his throat.

Agent Romanoff closed the book that she'd been reading and set it aside, moving forward to help him remove the apparatus. "You need to relax and blow out a big breath. Now," she instructed and removed the breathing tube.

Loki coughed a little once it was out, but quickly recovered. When he looked up again, Natasha was holding out a glass of ice water for him to take.

"Tha..." Loki didn't quite manage to get the first word out before he choked on it.

"Don't try to talk, just suck on the ice," Natasha instructed, reclaiming her seat. "It helps."

Loki followed her advice, looking around for a way to tell what time it was, or a clue to where the other occupants of the tower had gone. He nearly pulled a muscle tensing as completely and rapidly as he did at JARVIS' unexpected intervention.

"The time is currently five minutes past midnight, Mr. Odinson. You have been unconscious for exactly four hours and twenty seven seconds, and Sir has requested that I inform him of any changes to your condition or requests that you make in his absence," the AI informed him helpfully.

Natasha was scrutinizing Loki with a critical eye. She noticed the stiffness in his posture and trailed her eyes down from his slightly hunched over position to his hands wound together and tucked under his ribs.

"JARVIS, mute," she commanded, leaving her chair once again to stand in front of Loki. "Which is it? JARVIS or Stark?"

Loki didn't answer, keeping his expression neutral, but the Agent had noticed the way that he'd relaxed in response to JARVIS' retreat. After a few more seconds of their quiet standoff, Loki tipped another piece of ice into his mouth and made himself more comfortable against his pillows.

"Your eyes are green," Natasha observed and Loki mimed a slow clap in silent reply. It did not deter her in the least. "They were blue when I met you."

If Loki's throat hadn't been hurting so much, he probably would've teased her about the absolute certainty in her tone. Oh, why not. "You remembered." It would have sounded more appropriately snide if he didn't currently sound like his trachea had been run through a loom.

"I memorize my targets," Natasha informed him, making it sound almost irrelevant. Loki could feel a certain flash of something vicious underlying the statement, but it was gone before he could interpret it. "The blue eyes, was that him?"

Loki arched his eyebrows at her assumption. Why does seemingly everyone in the Nine intuitively equate power with masculinity? Not for the first time, Loki found his mind wandering back to Sif and the argument that had ruined their friendship. He forcefully snapped his attention back to Agent Romanoff.

"If you want to convince us of your innocence. You're going to have to try and cooperate," she pointed out.

"You assume that he's a man."

"Am I wrong?" Natasha replied, not taking her eyes off of Loki's.

Loki didn't answer.

"You're obfuscating," Natasha determined.

"Hardly," Loki denied. He flicked his gaze over her face, calculating how much he should tell her. There was no point in hiding what had been done to him, since Thor had already crossed that line. Now Loki's focus was mainly damage control, excepting his own personal interests.

After his pause for thought began to drag on a bit too long, Agent Romanoff reached out to touch his shoulder. Instead of simply drawing him out of his thoughts as she'd intended, this caused him to jerk violently away from her. Both his hands closed into fists, ready for a fight.

After a tense beat in which the Agent was half convinced that he was about to strike her, Loki calmed.

"I wasn't his puppet," Loki explained as if the confrontation between them had never occurred at all. "More his... I may have been under his influence, but you must know that you would not have survived had I truly intended to destroy you." Loki relaxed again as the old, familiar guise fell back into place, mocking and proud. It didn't quite feel right to him anymore. That was a concern for later.

"It was an invasion. I was under the impression that you were trying to conquer us," Natasha said, leaning against his bed's railing with her hands placed so that they were just inches away from his leg. Her hypothesis was confirmed almost instantly when his gaze zeroed in on the invading appendages with unusual intensity and the muscles in his thigh twitched.

"I was directed to invade your realm," Loki responded carefully, aware of what might be done to him if he was perceived to be a threat. He still didn't remove his gaze from his interrogator's hands until she withdrew them to a safe distance. He caught her eye, continuing, "But his wish was not to subjugate your kind. The aim was annihilation." Loki made sure to keep his expression open while he held her gaze. The humans here needed to understand the truth in his words, even if he had disingenuously shed the word 'mutual' from his explanation.

Natasha paused, absorbing the full weight of his statement. "Do you know why he would choose to target Earth?"

Loki laughed darkly and took a sip of his water in order to prevent another coughing fit. "Yes. Naturally, he loved to discuss his reasoning with me over afternoon tea," he replied sarcastically.

Natasha watched Loki with an unimpressed look, waiting for him to fill the silence.

"I know that he lusts for the pain and suffering of those under his power. I felt it," Loki recalled with a grimace. "He wanted me to feel it. He exalts in death." Loki squeezed his eyes shut at one of the many memories that he wished he could shed: The slimy wetness across his cheek as his captor crouched over him. The sickly sweet sent of his breath invading Loki's senses while his torturer's slick tongue tasted the blood dripping down the side of his face. Loki shook off the vile sensations and noticed Natasha scrutinizing him again with her arms folded over her chest.

"Barton told you about my history," she noted, coming to some conclusion that Loki was too weary to ponder over.

"Did he?" Loki responded, affecting an air of indifference. "I don't recall." He rearranged his blankets and lay down to rest. Natasha was staring at him through narrowed eyes and he couldn't make himself close his eyes with her standing over him. Loki glared at her. "What?" He snapped.

"You told me that he did."

"Have you not heard? I am the Liesmith. You're an assassin; I expect that at times you kill people. Now leave me be."

"You mentioned details."

"I must have guessed," Loki dismissed. Unfortunately that only seemed to encourage her.

"Either you're playing another angle..." Natasha stoicly observed him. "Or you can't remember."

Loki felt knots forming in his stomach. She was right, but he assured himself that it was nothing. "I must not have deemed it to be memorable."

"You said that you weren't his host," Natasha considered.

Loki's lips thinned at the unintentional association that she'd just made between Thanos and Charles. It was utterly wrong. "Well then, perhaps I am a liar."

"You can't remember everything you did."

"I am no one's puppet!" Loki shouted, grabbing one of the metal rails of his bed and giving it a nasty tug.

"Can you be sure that he didn't try?" Natasha pursued, not intimidated by his aggression.

Loki blanched. He'd had blackouts during his time on Earth, moments when time seemed to skip. One second he was descending a staircase, the next he was walking away from a bloodied victim towards a crowd of panicked civilians. It was his doing. Loki told himself that he simply didn't want to know and had therefore blocked out those memories. Thanos lacked the telepathic discipline and skill necessary to possess an Asgardian Sorcerer. The tesseract's influence left a noticeable trace behind for days afterward; Loki knew that he would have noticed evidence of such an all-encompassing hold. Then how...

"Interesting," Natasha concluded and turned to exit Loki's improvised enclosure, but she paused at the curtain to look back at him. "We can stop him together."

"There is no 'we', Human," Loki countered.

Agent Romanoff raised an eyebrow at his less than convincing dismissal before walking away and out of the lab. Loki found the action to be strange. He was a prisoner, and a dangerous one at that, yet he had just been left alone, unrestrained. JARVIS might still be watching, but in a practical sense, Loki was unsupervised. It's a test. They're doubtlessly waiting to see what I'll do. If I try anything, they will dismiss my claims and be done with me. With that thought in mind, Loki lay back down in the bed and waited. He didn't even bother to feign sleep. It was deception that his keepers were expecting now, afterall, and Loki rarely did what others expected.

"What's he doing?" Clint said, frowning at the transparent glass of the computer interface, that he, Thor, Tony and Steve were all congregated around.

Peter and Bruce had gone to bed hours ago, as had Tony, but the he had hurried to rejoin his restless comrades at JARVIS' notification.

The inventor looked up at the screen. "He appears to be eating ice and staring at the ceiling," he answered redundantly, returning his attention to the Starkpad in his hands.

"He's waiting for something," the assassin decided distrustfully.

"Yeah. Or maybe anything, judging by the unparalleled excitement that we're subjecting him to," Tony said drily, scrolling through the data that JARVIS was relaying to him.

"Agent Romanoff, you want to weigh in on this?" Steve prompted, as the woman stepped out of the elevator to rejoin them.

Natasha paused to note Tony's presence and to study the feed from Loki's enclosure before taking her seat between Steve and Thor. "Loki knows that we're watching. He's smart enough to expect us to test him," she noted.

"And what are your impressions from the interrogation?" Clint asked, shifting his attention from the sedentary Trickster to his own confidant.

"He shows signs of post traumatic stress. I can infer from previous observations that he has probably undergone extensive physical and psychological torture..." the Agent paused to consider Thor, then continued. "Possibly more. It's probable that he was at least conditioned by the enemy into following certain behavioral patterns, if not brainwashed outright."

"I do not understand your Midgardian terms," Thor told her warily. "But I suspect that you may be withholding some of your thoughts on this matter."

"I have suspicions about his treatment, but nothing that I can confirm."

"I would prefer to hear them."

"No, Thor. You wouldn't," Natasha countered bluntly. When he opened his mouth to argue, she admitted, "I don't particularly want to confirm them myself."

"You believe him?" Clint asked, sounding defensive.

"I believe that there may be some truth to the claim that Loki didn't attack Earth of his own free will. That doesn't mean that I trust him," Natasha clarified.

"Tasha?" Tony prompted, setting aside his Starkpad.

"He doesn't seem to be lying," Natasha appraised, "but he is definitely hiding something."

"When I confronted him within his mind, he cautioned me that he was being watched. He feared that his captor's reach extended even into his thoughts," Thor considered. "If he believes that such knowledge would bring us further into peril, he could be withholding it."

"As warm and fuzzy as that idea might feel," Clint quipped. "Loki has tricked you before, he could just be preying on your desire for reconciliation."

"That thought has not eluded me, Agent Barton," Thor returned stiffly. "It has taken much to convince me of his honor."

"I could give a rat's ass about his honor! Give me one reason why we should believe a single word that comes out of that monster's mouth."

"He risked his life to save you?"

"The fuck! Tony?!" Clint exclaimed, turning an accusing glare on his friend.

"Sorry. Not picking sides here," Tony relented.

"Then shut up."

"Okay." Tony mimed zipping his mouth shut.

"The Man of Iron only spoke the truth," Thor argued.

"I'm not involved," Tony stated, waving the argument away.

"At least he still remembers the selfless act that landed my brother here with us," Thor continued, ignoring the genuis' frantic waving. "He has been the most unbiased of all of us in this matter, and you would do well to mind his words."

"Nuh uh," Tony disagreed, as the arguing pair turned on him. He looked imploringly at Steve and Natasha.

"Gentlemen," Steve prompted, drawing their focus away again. "Tony's not involved."

"What are you, the babysitter?" Clint reproached.

Thor looked particularly disturbed by the new concept. "Is such a ritual common in your realm?"

"What?" Clint asked nonplussed.

"It's a misnomer. Infant abuse is a felony here," Natasha clarified impassively while she observed Tony's hasty escape in her peripheral vision. "It's a colloquial term for a child-minder."

"How strange," Thor considered.

"Can we focus, please?" Clint snapped. "That son of a bitch-"

"Our mother was no dog!" Thor objected in a warning tone. Steve winced in sympathy.

Clint blinked and shook his head. "Bad choice of words. I meant..." He stopped short when the Cap shook his head in warning. "That isn't important. What is, is that Loki is still a threat to all of us. If he wants us to believe him, he needs to give us proof. Tangible proof. Otherwise, I say we give him nothing. He's a prisoner in transit, that's it."

"Did Lady Frost's words not move you to doubt?" Thor tried. "If the Son of Stark shows such faith in her abilities. Why should we not do so as well?"

"Considering intel is one thing. This is ridiculous,"Clint replied, then caught sight of movement on the monitor. "What? What the hell does he think he's doing?"

Tony descended into the lab and wandered into Loki's enclosure.

"Stark," the alien acknowledged.

"Odinson," Tony replied, mimicking his tone.

Loki's lips thinned. "That is not my name."

"What is it?" Tony inquired.

Loki opened his mouth to reply, but faltered, puzzling over the question. "I am only Loki," he decided after a while, displeased by his own conclusion.

"Just the one name, huh? Like Cher?"

"I haven't the faintest clue what you're on about."

"She's a pop singer with a really deep voice, kinda kitsch now, I guess. But it's a thing," Tony thought aloud, trailing off into a random tangent.

"Did my brother send you here to annoy me to death?"

"Aren't you always saying that he isn't your brother?"

"If this is a trial to test my patience, I will gladly fail it," Loki warned.

"Really, Gray's Anatomy? Somehow I feel like I could take you," Tony joked, smiling without a trace of fear when Loki grabbed the front of his Led Zepplin T-shirt and yanked him close.

"Do not test me, Human."

Upstairs, the other Avengers tensed. Clint and Thor were both preparing to charge in for the rescue.

Tony's smile widened. "How's the tea on Asgard?"

Loki's grip faltered, "What?" he questioned, oblivious of the Avengers upstairs echoing his reaction.

"Huh. Going to play dumb?" Tony asked, "That's okay, this human's got more. You see I'm a robotics designer. I make smart machines for a living, so to me, behavioral anomalies are kind of a big thing."

Loki looked away at the work table a few feet to his right, on the other side of the privacy curtain.

"According to Thor, you haven't spent a whole lot of time on this planet, at least, not during this era," Tony continued. He reached up to take hold of Loki's wrist, drawing the jötun's intent gaze back to his face. "You've spent even less time interacting with us lowly mortals than he has. Which is why it's weird that it's you, not Thor, who is speaking perfect English."

"Has my brother not told you of the Alltongue?" Loki hedged. He hadn't even realized that he had been speaking English until that very moment. Thank you so very much for that, Charles.

"I'm betting that's what fooled him."

"And yet you are certain of it."

"I've been keeping an eye on Thor. The 'Alltongue' doesn't do idioms."

Loki blinked at Tony, considering his point, then realized that he'd just proved it."Damn." He let Tony go but the inventor didn't move away.

"So, you're more than fluent in contemporary American English," Tony paused a beat to acknowledge Loki's displeasure. "If accented. Care to explain?"

"I'm clever."

"Nah," Tony dismissed with a wave, earning a half-hearted glare from the Trickster. "That's not it. You visit other, more relevant planets all the time, and I doubt that you speak all those languages this well. Earth wouldn't be your first choice."

Loki swallowed and began running through the different answers and conceivable consequences in his mind. He was beyond embarrassed by his slip, which was really Charles' fault as far as he was concerned. That only made it worse, but as he didn't have the time to indulge in pointless self-pity, he pushed it aside.

"You know you have to give me an answer, " Tony pushed impatiently. "I will annoy you until you answer. I tend to do that when I'm curious."

"An inconceivable prospect," Loki quipped distractedly. "The others are watching us. As, I assume, is Heimdall."

"Who doll?" Tony queried.

"Charming."

"Okay, yes, you're being watched. What does it matter? We're on the same side this time, right?" Tony pointed out. Loki chuckled at the man's naiveté.

"Come now, Stark. I thought you were meant to be clever," he mocked. "There are no 'good guys' as your kind so quaintly put it. It is true, I harbor no real malice towards your realm, but that fact alone does not make us allies," Loki turned his head to look right into the hidden camera. "Trust is earned, Thor. I will share none of my secrets with you."

Upstairs, everyone jumped out of their seats when the feed unexpectedly cut out in perfect tandem with Loki's gesture. He had smirked at them-or at least the camera- and drawn a symbol in the air, right before the screen went black.

"Shit! What the hell was that?" Clint exclaimed, heading towards the elevator with Natasha and the Cap following close behind him.

"I have seen him use that sigil before," Thor assured the others. "It is merely a harmless shield, utterly benign."

"Yeah. Sure, unless a killer uses it to trap you in a room with them," the Cap noted as they entered the elevator, then noticed Thor's hurt expression. "Sorry. I shouldn't have said that."

"Whoa!" Tony said, reaching towards the flickering, not quite invisible barrier with opaque alien symbols running across it like computer code.

"Please don't do that. Responses to touch will drain the energy source."

"Energy source? What? If you haven't noticed, Bruce and Natasha had to strip you before treating you- which I regret missing out on."

Loki raised an eyebrow at him. "Bordering on creepy, Mr. Stark."

"Admittedly not my best material, but beauty like yours tends to distract me."

"Better."

Tony grinned at him. "Hey, call me Tony." Loki's eyebrows arched in sarcastic challenge, and the billionaire playboy cleared his throat. "So that shield... If you had any gadgets on you... Well, unless- This isn't coming from that necklace?"

Loki nodded his head but didn't elaborate. He wanted to see what Tony could figure out on his own. He was also feeling somewhat violated by the idea of virtual strangers stripping his unconscious body, not that it was a huge surprise.

"Your magic is exponentially advanced technology - maybe not like ours, but it's technology - which means that it has to follow some of the same laws of physics and function..." Tony thought to himself aloud.

The others rushed into the lab and Tony waved them off, beginning to pace while he studied the barrier. Clint tried to shout something to him, but all they perceived were his movements.

"Ah, sound-proof too, I see," Tony noted, turning away from the shield to scrutinize its creator.

"This one is."

"Not the necklace then. An implant maybe?" Tony considered, tilting Loki's chin up with the tip of his index finger so that he could check the Trickster's eyes.

Loki opened his mouth to answer but Tony shut it with another nudge under his chin. Loki surprised their anxious audience on the other side by humoring him, with all the same body language and expression of a parent handling a curious child. Clint and Natasha both looked incredulously at Thor who was the only one not shocked by this display of patience. He simply shrugged.

"No. An implant would show up on the MRI-" Tony pulled out of his thoughts, briefly, in response to Loki's questioning look. "Magnetic Resonance Imaging, it's how we see what's happening inside of you."

"Ah," Loki acknowledged, and Tony leaned back, trailing his gaze over Loki's arms and shoulders.

"Unless it was seamlessly incorporated. It would have to be organic..." Tony mimicked Loki's hand signal from earlier with a slight frown. "It's in your arm- This arm," he announced, grabbing Loki's right forearm between both hands. He jiggled Loki's hand, squinting thoughtfully, then amended. "Wrist!"

"Not bad," Loki praised, retrieving his wrist from the excited engineer's grip with the same gentle grace that he'd displayed before.

Tony eyed him determinedly. "I'm not done yet. It's a force-field generator, but to fit into your wrist it would have to be small, too small to generate the necessary amount of energy. It certainly couldn't sustain an extended charge, magic or not. Where's the battery?" The inventor speculated, already smiling at his own brilliance. The smile vanished when Loki winced in pain and leaned into his arms. Clint had body slammed the barrier.

"You're the battery," Tony finished without a hint of the enthusiasm that he'd felt seconds before. He looked out through the more violently flickering shield and shouted "Hey! Quit- Right, they can't hear me." Tony turned back to Loki "You can't keep this up. If I know my friends, they aren't going to stop until they reach us."

"I know."

"Uh... Aren't you going to take it down?"

"N- ngh! No," Loki responded, flinching at another sudden drain of his body's metabolic energy.

"You realize that that makes no sense," Tony told him, lowering to his knees so that they could continue talking face to face despite the way Loki had hunched in on himself.

"Perhaps not to you."

"Then help me catch up. I'm clever, remember?" Tony tried, sneaking a backward glance at the others. Thor seemed to have gotten into an argument with Clint while the Cap tried to reason with the both of them. Natasha however, was now too busy watching Loki and Tony's exchange to participate.

"I am proving a point," Loki stated.

"That you're suicidal?" Tony guessed. "Because we already kind of sensed that."

"Not to you."

Tony studied him for a beat then sighed, and rubbed a hand over his face. He suddenly looked a decade older. "You'd rather self-destruct than be controlled?" It was hardly a real question, more confirming what Tony already knew.

Loki's fevered eyes snapped to his.

"They really did a number on you, didn't they?" Tony observed, sounding surprisingly sympathetic.

"Which ones?" Loki replied breathlessly. It wouldn't be long until his reserves were depleted again.

"You need to let down the shield."

Loki didn't respond.

"No one's going to take your choice away from you," Tony assured him, but that clearly wasn't good enough "Not as long as I have anything to say about it," he added, locking gazes with Loki. They stayed like that for a long couple of seconds. Then Loki closed his eyes and released the barrier with a sigh. He collapsed unconscious into Tony's arms before the others had even stepped through. "Crap! Guys, help? He's heavy. I'm gonna drop him! I'm gonna- Oh. Thanks, Spangles."

"Care to explain, Tony?" The Cap requested, repositioning the unconscious god on his bedding with enviable ease.

"I think we sort of scared him," Tony explained, getting a mixture of accusing and incredulous looks from his friends.

"We scared him," Clint deadpanned.

"He's afraid of being used again. I don't think the whole covert observation idea came off very well. It just made him feel like a lab rat."

"We can't just trust him," Clint defended.

"Trust is earned," Thor said softly, recalling Loki's last words before he erected the shield. "I am afraid that I may have done the opposite over our past decades together. Even if I did not intend it."

Much later that morning, Loki jolted awake. A seemingly endless span of different versions of his battle with Thor that night over the Bifrost bridge had played through his head, each ending in that terrible Void. It was a torture that he had been put through over and over during his time there. He hastily aborted his scream, remembering in the nick of time that he was outside that eternal emptiness. Here someone might hear his scream. Loki glanced up at the rapidly beeping heart monitor by his bed and hastily ripped off all the sensors stuck to his chest and face. He winced as he pulled out the IV needle, but it had to be done. Loki was overcome by an overpowering desire to get out of the lab, and up higher. He burst out through the cracked door of the lab and climbed up and out until he found himself on the very edge of the tower roof, looking down at the dilapidated city below. Two more of those menacing metal behemoths were moving through the streets, but now they looked like large insects, out of his reach. Loki plopped down and dangled his bare feet over the edge.

He couldn't remember what had really happened on the Bifrost bridge anymore. He hadn't been able to differentiate between his true memories and the nightmares, the taunting delusions that the emptiness had brought upon him ever since his death. He'd told himself that he didn't want to know, so it didn't matter.

"I need to stop," Loki murmured. "Something must be true. If even my own mind deceives me... I must know myself. If nothing else..." He squeezed his eyes shut. "What did I do?" He focused as hard as he could, trying to drag the truth out of the jumble of illusions through sheer force of will. The pounding in his head didn't matter, nor the weakness in his muscles. He wasn't going to back out now. Suddenly, there it was. The Bifrost vibrating its chamber while it wreaked havoc on Jötunheim, Thor's obstinate refusal to fight him until Loki finally pushed him to lose his temper and attack, Mjölnir's weight on his chest, and then...

"I could have done it, Father!" his past self implored, desperate for understanding, to earn a father's acceptance. "For you! For all of us!"

"No, Loki." There would be no acceptance. This man was not his father.

Thor began to plead as he realised what Loki was about to do, but it was all for nothing. The past Loki let go of Odin's spear and fell into the Void to endure an eternity of horror before he died.

Loki fell to one side, catching himself on his aching elbows while he stared at the drop just inches away from claiming him. It probably wouldn't kill him but it would maim him, and he thought he might deserve it. He was feeling simultaneously sickened by his own actions and relieved by the scrap of his hidden past that he had managed to reclaim. There was a metallic slam as someone burst out onto the roof behind him. Sounds like Thor, Loki noted internally, dabbing at the trail of wetness dripping over his lips and chin. He'd given himself a nose bleed.

"Brother!" Thor exclaimed, rushing over to him and grabbing him by the shoulders.

Loki lurched forward and vomited over the side of the ledge.

"What have you done to yourself?" Thor lamented, taking care to keep Loki anchored to him.

Someone else jogged out to join them. "Oh, you got him," Steve's voice confirmed.

"I remembered," Loki answered his brother's question, and threw up again.

"What have you remembered?"

"What I've done." Loki bonelessly flopped into Thor's side, too disgusted with himself and dizzy from his mental struggle to bother with personal pride.

"It was not-" Thor began to console him.

"Don't. I know what I am whether or not you will admit it," Loki stated firmly, making it clear that there was no point in arguing.

Thor looked crestfallen, so Loki batted his face in a pitiful excuse for a slap.

"Stop that, Brother."

"On the bright side, I don't feel like I'm going to throw up anymore."

Thor looked unconvinced.

"Don't pout, Brother."

Thor stared glumly down at him until he registered the change and his face lit up in delight. "You called me brother!"

"Took you a minute," Loki teased, closing his eyes to avoid the sting of the poisoned wind. Thor grabbed him in a tight hug. He is far too easy...

He loves you. That's a good thing, Charles responded, making Loki smile.

What I did was inexcusable.

So do better.

Loki swallowed thickly and hid his face in Thor's flannel-wrapped shoulder. I won't run anymore.

A/N: Ok, I know this one's a little unusual, and it took a lot longer to write than it probably should have, but I needed to get done with this whumpy little mini-storyarc. We'll be getting furthur into the grander storylines soon if I have my way, and I think/hope you'll all appreciate that as much as I do. Loki is a badass, and not an innocent. He's just been dealt phenomenally shitty hand. It'll be fun to see how Charles and Erik deal now that they're being dragged along for the ride. Anyway, before I babble on too much, thanks for reading. Special thanks to icanhearthedrums and Janieceal for their reviews. Feedback is welcome.