Fill: Strange Bedfellows 14/?
anonymous
July 17 2013, 06:15:44 UTC
((I blame all of you for my present relapse into a horrible, horrible writing addiction.))
On the ninth day, Loki almost acted like himself.
Victor's bar for this was now very low. By that he meant that the god showed some hint of personality, the faintest, faintest traces of dignity in his posture, of shrewdness in his air. He seemed, maybe, to have the occasional thought instead of a blank slate behind his eyes, to have acquired some sense of identity that did not consist wholly of doing anything possible to avoid pain.
Several times, he looked at Dr. Doom. Actually looked at him.
Doom was wearing his armor all the time now - had been wearing it even to bed, for in light of recent events he was not completely convinced that the trickster or someone else would not attack him in his sleep.
He almost regretted wearing that armor, almost regretted covering his face, when Loki looked at him.
The trickster god had never pitied him; had openly sneered at his scars when they were partners, and that was what had allowed their relationship to work. Loki did not pity Victor von Doom, did not see him as a lesser creature in need or deserving of comfort. The god saw Victor in the same way he saw himself: as a man or animal, wholly and shamelessly geared toward dominance.
The way the trickster god looked at him now - the faint sheen behind the look, anyway, for Loki's gaze was nowhere near as intense as it had once been - but the expression in his eyes when they managed to focus on Doom's faceplate was something entirely new, and intriguing.
He was thoughtful. He was thinking about Doom. Analyzing him. And not - this was one of few times Victor could say this about a subject of Loki's thought - for the sole purpose of eventually tearing him apart.
There was no gratitude - that would have been unbearably un-Loki-like, an unbearably blatant sign of how horrifically the trickster god had been changed by suffering. But there was a notable lack of resentment.
Loki was, maybe, thinking. And in those thoughts he did not resent Dr. Doom.
And Dr. Doom was, maybe, the only living creature he did not resent, and that for some reason made Victor proud.
He tried not to think too hard about why that might have been.
Re: Fill: Strange Bedfellows 15/?
anonymous
July 17 2013, 06:40:27 UTC
On the tenth day, Victor realized he had almost completely forgotten his original objective.
Watching the wraith of the trickster god blossom had become something of a botany project. Doom was somewhat impressed with his own work; in a week and a half, a mostly-dead and utterly shattered jotun had begun to resemble a living thing.
The minions' clothes no longer bothered Doom, for Loki had resumed the ghost of his former self-possession which seemed almost to reclaim the outfit. His indifference was no longer a sign vacancy, but of the innate pride that Loki had always possessed.
The god still refused to show explicit interest in anything; the trickster reacted Victor's war map, which he had left tantalizingly exposed, like a very determined recovering addict reacts to the sight of a syringe.
He averted his eyes. Glanced sidelong at it, frequently, as long as he was forced to be in its presence. Stood up and left, came back minutes later, refused to direct his full attention to the thing, and yet…
The way Loki treated the map spawned a sudden, horrible idea.
What if the trickster god was not a threat, but a spy?
What if whomever had so thoroughly tortured Loki had deposited him here to gain Victor's trust?
What if they were every bit as capable of retrieving their jotun victim as Victor had often feared, and simply chose not to because he had not yet collected the information that they sought?
It had long since become apparent that the chaos god would do anything to avoid the manner of horrors he'd known under his former captors' hands. To threaten him with pain or bribe him with freedom in exchange for spying on his former ally would be the easiest thing in the universe.
And that would explain Loki's stubborn reticence to reveal his torturers' name.
So Victor found himself, for the first time in a long while, at an impasse.
The slowly, slowly brightening jotun was sitting on the couch in Doom's library while he worked, not really doing anything - he never really did - but looking vaguely at the intricate arabesque pattern of the carpet with a smile that spoke of the faintest, faintest return of an appreciation for beauty.
How would he disprove the spy theory? His best efforts had failed to locate the people who had tormented Loki, who could now so easily control him. The trickster god would say nothing, hiding behind a denial of reality, or threatening to retreat into an entirely nonverbal shell, when questioned directly.
He could not tell where Loki came from, could not tell what was going on behind the god's eyes. And he had already shown him, in his naive assumption of the trickster's brokenness, far, far more of his own plans than he ever should have.
It seemed logical that Loki would have to go. Be expelled from the castle, at least; but even that was a taste of illogical kindness. No, the logical thing to do would be to kill him.
And he remembered, suddenly, the god's suicide attempt, and wondered suddenly if he had botched it on purpose; then realized, with a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach, that this was the most logical explanation for all of the events surrounding Loki's appearance.
Damn the trickster. He had conned Victor von Doom for a week and a half.
And it was testament to the effectiveness of the con that Doom could not instantly bring himself to raise his voice to Loki. He could not even bring himself to contemplate, in seriousness, violence against the creature that was currently doing such a good impression of an idiot child while eavesdropping on Doom's war plans.
He wondered if Loki had noticed a change in his demeanor; wondered if Loki had already figured out his deduction, and was now planning the next step.
There was one thing, anyway, that would be very difficult for even the trickster to fake.
So Doom, gentle despite himself, cautiously approached his former ally and began to gently coax him back in the general direction of the laboratory.
Re: Fill: Strange Bedfellows 16/?
anonymous
July 17 2013, 06:56:02 UTC
It was difficult to disbelieve the way Loki whitened and stiffened when he saw the equipment, the way he pressed his back against the laboratory's cold metal wall to get away from it.
And it was all the more difficult to do, now that this creature reminded him of Loki, now that it was not just some green-eyed pathetic alien but a man with a shadow of his former partner's dignity and self-respect.
But then, 'difficult to disbelieve' had always been Loki's calling card. How many gods and men had he conned? And how much easier a mark was Victor?
"It won't hurt," Victor soothed, and that was true. But he was half-afraid it would send this Loki-like creature into a panic attack, or at least a sufficiently powerful impression thereof to wreck the very equipment he needed.
That gave Doom an idea. He cornered the trickster, very, very carefully (thank the gods for his armor), and despite the sweat on his brow, Loki seemed to want the closeness enough that he did not try to slip away.
Or maybe he just thought it was pointless.
Or maybe it was all an act, damn it all, and he had some as-yet-incalculable trick up his sleeve.
"Please," Victor tried to put an edge of emotion into his voice to be convincing, did entirely too good a job at it and ended up sounding like he wanted to cry. "Please don't resist. If you do, I'll have to hurt you."
The god stopped sweating, straightened, deadened; it was the same resignation Victor had seen in his bedchamber. Loki was sure that he was living the bad dream again, that his belief in the reality of his surroundings was about to be punished.
Or, he was pretending, and he was ready to fling Victor across the laboratory.
And then Victor was touching the trickster's face for the second time in a week, metal fingers but the most delicate of touches, and Loki turned away from it with a soft sound as though the cold had burned him.
"I don't want to hurt you." Doom was still over-selling mercy. "So please do as I say."
And Loki's mouth contorted, and Victor knew because he had seen this before what was about to happen.
The remnant of the trickster god sank to the floor, curled into a ball against the laboratory wall, and began to sob desperately like a frightened small child.
'There goes a week and a half of progress,' thought half of Victor, bitterly, watching nearly-resembling-Loki disintegrate into not-Loki-at-all.
His other half thought: 'Damn the deceitful bastard, how long does he think that he can keep this up?'
Re: Fill: Strange Bedfellows 16/?futakuchi_onnaJuly 17 2013, 14:20:08 UTC
(You know, I really, really can't bring myself to be sorry for that relapse. XD)
Haha, paranoid Doom is glorious. And he has a point, Loki is not to be trusted normally. Even though it's not the problem this time, how's he to know that for sure? Loki is untrustworthy, fickle, annoying and a thousand other things, but he still wants that all back. That's great.^^
"Please," Victor tried to put an edge of emotion into his voice to be convincing, did entirely too good a job at it and ended up sounding like he wanted to cry.
That made me laugh way more than it maybe should, these new chapters are awesome. <3
Re: Fill: Strange Bedfellows 17/?
anonymous
July 17 2013, 23:20:06 UTC
"Come on."
Doom bent and wrapped his arms around the trickster god, hoisted him into the air. Loki was shockingly light - as light as a child, it seemed, and instead of struggling he clung.
And wept. Shamelessly. Burrowed his head into Doom's armor shoulder, pleas for mercy unspoken except in the way his ribcage heaved.
It was not an act. It was not an act. It was, at least in part, genuine. Loki was terrified.
"Let me do this," Doom tried a different tack, "and maybe we will find out what's hurting you, and how to stop it."
That got the trickster's attention. He started to support his own weight a little, drew back his head to look up at Doom with the same ever-so-faint maybe-Loki surprise he'd had in Victor's bedroom.
And his eyes wandered toward the machine with something like lust.
This was good. This was fantastic. If Doom could get Loki under the fMRI he might be able to figure out whether the trickster was conning him.
And Loki, were he in his right mind, would probably know that. Which meant that if he let Doom scan him…
Then he probably wasn't lying. About anything.
The trickster god was climbing onto the table voluntarily, allowing Doom to guide his head inside…
And if this is brutal honesty, Victor thinks his heart might break.
The jotun's brain structure is remarkably human; the great similarity of all the humanoid races is something Dr. Doom has always wanted to look more into, but it's been a bit difficult with his two choice species for comparison existing beyond the Rainbow Bridge. Some evidence points to a common descent for jotun, Aesir and man, or suggests that one may be ancestor to the others…
In any event, Loki's brain structure looks…horrifying.
The ventricles, the empty spaces within the brain, are enlarged. Unless Loki started out with brain damage, he has sustained it in the course of his ordeal. It's a wasting of grey matter, or an active destruction of the cells that make the god who he is - or perhaps, who he was.
Do jotun brains regenerate? Human brains don't, or at least not very well after puberty. Victor finds himself hoping…
Loki's amygdala and hippocampus, symmetrical structures dealing with negative emotions and with memory, seem enlarged. That's odd. There's no way to tell what a normal jotun baseline is, but perhaps…
Perhaps the torturous bastards decided to ensure that Loki would remember the pain given him, even when the rest of his brain was gone.
The subtle wasting of the higher thought centers, the swollen regions governing fear, made Victor want to stroke the god's pale forehead again, to ensure him, even if it was a lie, that everything was alright.
Re: Fill: Strange Bedfellows 18/?
anonymous
July 17 2013, 23:21:37 UTC
Now comes the interesting part.
"Loki," Doom's voice is low and urgent, and broadcast to the trickster god where his head is encased inside the machine, "I need you to tell me who did this to you."
For several seconds, no sound comes from within the chamber. Loki must be hesitating - deciding whether to risk belief in Doom, whether to risk the nightmare that might ensue.
"Thanos," he says at last, in a broken, hollow voice.
And the fMRI reads true; Loki's brain is aflame with fear, but there is no sign of deception.
'Thanos.' Well that's an ominous name if Doom's ever heard one. And he almost laughs at that. 'Dr. Doom' thinks that a name is ominous. But still...
It's only one syllable off the Greek for Death, and he wonders if there's a reason for that. If the names of Thor and Loki survived as gods in the lore of one human culture, could another such immortal have been remembered...
And gotten its claws into Loki?
"Who is Thanos?"
"A god," Loki answers, without hesitation and almost with reverence. "Justice."
There is no sign of falsehood here, and praising his torturer almost seems to mitigate Loki's fear. But other brain regions are active now, as he speaks of Thanos.
Shame. Guilt. And a strange sort of exultation.
Thanos had made the trickster believe that he deserved everything that was done to him.
He didn't want to suffer, that much was clear but he believed that he deserved to recieve what he most feared.
Doom stepped away from his consoles, from the displays that showed him the state of Loki's mind.
Re: Fill: Strange Bedfellows 19/?
anonymous
July 17 2013, 23:22:49 UTC
In the night Doom decided that, pride and safety be damned, he would hold Loki.
To see his former ally reduced to a shell had been bad enough; to know what he knew now, that hallucinations had been used in his torture, that the Loki he knew was still alive but so, so distant, that who or whatever occupied his skull in the meantime believed that it deserved every agony the universe could produce.
He could at least offer what was left of Loki the physical affection that he craved.
This time Doom approached Loki's bed, in the dead of night. Intuition told him that the trickster would wake easily, and he did. By the time Doom's heavy key had turned in the bedroom lock and the door swung open, what was left of the trickster was wide-eyed and staring at him.
And there was the faintest, just the faintest hint of Loki in the intelligence behind those eyes.
The god neither fights nor retreats from Doom's approach - armored, yes, it was silly, but practical. Loki shifts slightly to make room for Dr. Doom on the edge of the bed.
"Why?" He asks, in that quiet, rasping voice.
Why? Why was Dr. Doom taking such great care to help him?
"Because I think that whoever harmed you means to threaten me."
"No." Loki says this, not as a denial but as a simple statement of fact.
"You don't think so?"
Loki's head shakes from side to side. "Know it. Doesn't care." And then he freezes, and his eyes go wide with horror, and the shadow of Doom's former co-strategist flees from this form.
Loki goes dead and vacant again.
And Doom wonders, wonders what caused this. Does Loki still hallucinate? Does he still enter Thanos' world in his dreams? He seems to be mending remarkably, all things considered.
But his retreats from reality remain...
This time Doom remains beside the vacant Loki, nestles the trickster's body against his own in hopes that a little warmth will convince him he does not need to stay away.
Re: Fill: Strange Bedfellows 20/?
anonymous
July 17 2013, 23:24:01 UTC
Doom is disgusted with his brief lack of judgement in the morning.
He knows the move was rational enough, but something - maybe the sight of Loki's body curled up against him, when the body's rightful owner would never curl, much less at Victor von Doom's side - makes him bitterly regret his choice to sleep beside the trickster.
He begins to move, to shift away, and Loki wakens -
And looks up at his metal-clad bedfellow with not entirely un-Loki-like confusion.
There's too much helplessness there and not enough pride - too much of the wide-eyed child and not nearly enough prince of Asgard. But this expression, confusion not overlaid with fear, is a start.
Loki starts to rise, tenses, stops, and sinks down against Victor again, watching him. Von Doom would have to forcibly remove the trickster, now, if he wanted to rise.
And the expression on the god's face is...ever so slightly familiar.
Loki is watching Victor von Doom again, and thinking about him.
"Liar," he rasps, finally.
Von Doom blinks.
"Liar. If you feared a threat, you would have killed me."
Victor pushes Loki off of him, pushes himself upright. "Kill you before I knew what I was supposed to be afraid of? That would be stupid of me." "What about now?"
Victor regards him sharply for a moment. "I don't know enough about Thanos, yet."
"You know he's too powerful for you."
"I only suspect that," Victor admits, and realizes with a sensation of pure thrill that he is again talking tactics with his former ally.
Underneath everything that has been done to him, the real Loki is awake.
...and is now wrapping himself around von Doom's waist, peacefully but firmly making sure the Doctor doesn't leave him alone in bed.
Well. They'll work on the newly acquired psychological issues later.
Re: Fill: Strange Bedfellows 20/?futakuchi_onnaJuly 18 2013, 05:36:43 UTC
Awesome!
The details are great by the way. (And even though Loki's brain is damaged as it is, that he made progress already gives me hope you let him recover in the end. The story is great already, no matter whether he does recover or not, its just my own preference. But I'm not the OP and it's your story, so don't mind me.)
Ha, liar indeed. Doom can't even hide the pesky sentiment to a brain-damaged Loki. XD Also cuddling is always delicious to read.^^
On the ninth day, Loki almost acted like himself.
Victor's bar for this was now very low. By that he meant that the god showed some hint of personality, the faintest, faintest traces of dignity in his posture, of shrewdness in his air. He seemed, maybe, to have the occasional thought instead of a blank slate behind his eyes, to have acquired some sense of identity that did not consist wholly of doing anything possible to avoid pain.
Several times, he looked at Dr. Doom. Actually looked at him.
Doom was wearing his armor all the time now - had been wearing it even to bed, for in light of recent events he was not completely convinced that the trickster or someone else would not attack him in his sleep.
He almost regretted wearing that armor, almost regretted covering his face, when Loki looked at him.
The trickster god had never pitied him; had openly sneered at his scars when they were partners, and that was what had allowed their relationship to work. Loki did not pity Victor von Doom, did not see him as a lesser creature in need or deserving of comfort. The god saw Victor in the same way he saw himself: as a man or animal, wholly and shamelessly geared toward dominance.
The way the trickster god looked at him now - the faint sheen behind the look, anyway, for Loki's gaze was nowhere near as intense as it had once been - but the expression in his eyes when they managed to focus on Doom's faceplate was something entirely new, and intriguing.
He was thoughtful. He was thinking about Doom. Analyzing him. And not - this was one of few times Victor could say this about a subject of Loki's thought - for the sole purpose of eventually tearing him apart.
There was no gratitude - that would have been unbearably un-Loki-like, an unbearably blatant sign of how horrifically the trickster god had been changed by suffering. But there was a notable lack of resentment.
Loki was, maybe, thinking. And in those thoughts he did not resent Dr. Doom.
And Dr. Doom was, maybe, the only living creature he did not resent, and that for some reason made Victor proud.
He tried not to think too hard about why that might have been.
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Watching the wraith of the trickster god blossom had become something of a botany project. Doom was somewhat impressed with his own work; in a week and a half, a mostly-dead and utterly shattered jotun had begun to resemble a living thing.
The minions' clothes no longer bothered Doom, for Loki had resumed the ghost of his former self-possession which seemed almost to reclaim the outfit. His indifference was no longer a sign vacancy, but of the innate pride that Loki had always possessed.
The god still refused to show explicit interest in anything; the trickster reacted Victor's war map, which he had left tantalizingly exposed, like a very determined recovering addict reacts to the sight of a syringe.
He averted his eyes. Glanced sidelong at it, frequently, as long as he was forced to be in its presence. Stood up and left, came back minutes later, refused to direct his full attention to the thing, and yet…
The way Loki treated the map spawned a sudden, horrible idea.
What if the trickster god was not a threat, but a spy?
What if whomever had so thoroughly tortured Loki had deposited him here to gain Victor's trust?
What if they were every bit as capable of retrieving their jotun victim as Victor had often feared, and simply chose not to because he had not yet collected the information that they sought?
It had long since become apparent that the chaos god would do anything to avoid the manner of horrors he'd known under his former captors' hands. To threaten him with pain or bribe him with freedom in exchange for spying on his former ally would be the easiest thing in the universe.
And that would explain Loki's stubborn reticence to reveal his torturers' name.
So Victor found himself, for the first time in a long while, at an impasse.
The slowly, slowly brightening jotun was sitting on the couch in Doom's library while he worked, not really doing anything - he never really did - but looking vaguely at the intricate arabesque pattern of the carpet with a smile that spoke of the faintest, faintest return of an appreciation for beauty.
How would he disprove the spy theory? His best efforts had failed to locate the people who had tormented Loki, who could now so easily control him. The trickster god would say nothing, hiding behind a denial of reality, or threatening to retreat into an entirely nonverbal shell, when questioned directly.
He could not tell where Loki came from, could not tell what was going on behind the god's eyes. And he had already shown him, in his naive assumption of the trickster's brokenness, far, far more of his own plans than he ever should have.
It seemed logical that Loki would have to go. Be expelled from the castle, at least; but even that was a taste of illogical kindness. No, the logical thing to do would be to kill him.
And he remembered, suddenly, the god's suicide attempt, and wondered suddenly if he had botched it on purpose; then realized, with a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach, that this was the most logical explanation for all of the events surrounding Loki's appearance.
Damn the trickster. He had conned Victor von Doom for a week and a half.
And it was testament to the effectiveness of the con that Doom could not instantly bring himself to raise his voice to Loki. He could not even bring himself to contemplate, in seriousness, violence against the creature that was currently doing such a good impression of an idiot child while eavesdropping on Doom's war plans.
He wondered if Loki had noticed a change in his demeanor; wondered if Loki had already figured out his deduction, and was now planning the next step.
There was one thing, anyway, that would be very difficult for even the trickster to fake.
So Doom, gentle despite himself, cautiously approached his former ally and began to gently coax him back in the general direction of the laboratory.
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And it was all the more difficult to do, now that this creature reminded him of Loki, now that it was not just some green-eyed pathetic alien but a man with a shadow of his former partner's dignity and self-respect.
But then, 'difficult to disbelieve' had always been Loki's calling card. How many gods and men had he conned? And how much easier a mark was Victor?
"It won't hurt," Victor soothed, and that was true. But he was half-afraid it would send this Loki-like creature into a panic attack, or at least a sufficiently powerful impression thereof to wreck the very equipment he needed.
That gave Doom an idea. He cornered the trickster, very, very carefully (thank the gods for his armor), and despite the sweat on his brow, Loki seemed to want the closeness enough that he did not try to slip away.
Or maybe he just thought it was pointless.
Or maybe it was all an act, damn it all, and he had some as-yet-incalculable trick up his sleeve.
"Please," Victor tried to put an edge of emotion into his voice to be convincing, did entirely too good a job at it and ended up sounding like he wanted to cry. "Please don't resist. If you do, I'll have to hurt you."
The god stopped sweating, straightened, deadened; it was the same resignation Victor had seen in his bedchamber. Loki was sure that he was living the bad dream again, that his belief in the reality of his surroundings was about to be punished.
Or, he was pretending, and he was ready to fling Victor across the laboratory.
And then Victor was touching the trickster's face for the second time in a week, metal fingers but the most delicate of touches, and Loki turned away from it with a soft sound as though the cold had burned him.
"I don't want to hurt you." Doom was still over-selling mercy. "So please do as I say."
And Loki's mouth contorted, and Victor knew because he had seen this before what was about to happen.
The remnant of the trickster god sank to the floor, curled into a ball against the laboratory wall, and began to sob desperately like a frightened small child.
'There goes a week and a half of progress,' thought half of Victor, bitterly, watching nearly-resembling-Loki disintegrate into not-Loki-at-all.
His other half thought: 'Damn the deceitful bastard, how long does he think that he can keep this up?'
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Haha, paranoid Doom is glorious. And he has a point, Loki is not to be trusted normally. Even though it's not the problem this time, how's he to know that for sure?
Loki is untrustworthy, fickle, annoying and a thousand other things, but he still wants that all back. That's great.^^
"Please," Victor tried to put an edge of emotion into his voice to be convincing, did entirely too good a job at it and ended up sounding like he wanted to cry.
That made me laugh way more than it maybe should, these new chapters are awesome. <3
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Doom bent and wrapped his arms around the trickster god, hoisted him into the air. Loki was shockingly light - as light as a child, it seemed, and instead of struggling he clung.
And wept. Shamelessly. Burrowed his head into Doom's armor shoulder, pleas for mercy unspoken except in the way his ribcage heaved.
It was not an act. It was not an act. It was, at least in part, genuine. Loki was terrified.
"Let me do this," Doom tried a different tack, "and maybe we will find out what's hurting you, and how to stop it."
That got the trickster's attention. He started to support his own weight a little, drew back his head to look up at Doom with the same ever-so-faint maybe-Loki surprise he'd had in Victor's bedroom.
And his eyes wandered toward the machine with something like lust.
This was good. This was fantastic. If Doom could get Loki under the fMRI he might be able to figure out whether the trickster was conning him.
And Loki, were he in his right mind, would probably know that. Which meant that if he let Doom scan him…
Then he probably wasn't lying. About anything.
The trickster god was climbing onto the table voluntarily, allowing Doom to guide his head inside…
And if this is brutal honesty, Victor thinks his heart might break.
The jotun's brain structure is remarkably human; the great similarity of all the humanoid races is something Dr. Doom has always wanted to look more into, but it's been a bit difficult with his two choice species for comparison existing beyond the Rainbow Bridge. Some evidence points to a common descent for jotun, Aesir and man, or suggests that one may be ancestor to the others…
In any event, Loki's brain structure looks…horrifying.
The ventricles, the empty spaces within the brain, are enlarged. Unless Loki started out with brain damage, he has sustained it in the course of his ordeal. It's a wasting of grey matter, or an active destruction of the cells that make the god who he is - or perhaps, who he was.
Do jotun brains regenerate? Human brains don't, or at least not very well after puberty. Victor finds himself hoping…
Loki's amygdala and hippocampus, symmetrical structures dealing with negative emotions and with memory, seem enlarged. That's odd. There's no way to tell what a normal jotun baseline is, but perhaps…
Perhaps the torturous bastards decided to ensure that Loki would remember the pain given him, even when the rest of his brain was gone.
The subtle wasting of the higher thought centers, the swollen regions governing fear, made Victor want to stroke the god's pale forehead again, to ensure him, even if it was a lie, that everything was alright.
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"Loki," Doom's voice is low and urgent, and broadcast to the trickster god where his head is encased inside the machine, "I need you to tell me who did this to you."
For several seconds, no sound comes from within the chamber. Loki must be hesitating - deciding whether to risk belief in Doom, whether to risk the nightmare that might ensue.
"Thanos," he says at last, in a broken, hollow voice.
And the fMRI reads true; Loki's brain is aflame with fear, but there is no sign of deception.
'Thanos.' Well that's an ominous name if Doom's ever heard one. And he almost laughs at that. 'Dr. Doom' thinks that a name is ominous. But still...
It's only one syllable off the Greek for Death, and he wonders if there's a reason for that. If the names of Thor and Loki survived as gods in the lore of one human culture, could another such immortal have been remembered...
And gotten its claws into Loki?
"Who is Thanos?"
"A god," Loki answers, without hesitation and almost with reverence. "Justice."
There is no sign of falsehood here, and praising his torturer almost seems to mitigate Loki's fear. But other brain regions are active now, as he speaks of Thanos.
Shame. Guilt. And a strange sort of exultation.
Thanos had made the trickster believe that he deserved everything that was done to him.
He didn't want to suffer, that much was clear but he believed that he deserved to recieve what he most feared.
Doom stepped away from his consoles, from the displays that showed him the state of Loki's mind.
"That," he said softly, "is enough for today."
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To see his former ally reduced to a shell had been bad enough; to know what he knew now, that hallucinations had been used in his torture, that the Loki he knew was still alive but so, so distant, that who or whatever occupied his skull in the meantime believed that it deserved every agony the universe could produce.
He could at least offer what was left of Loki the physical affection that he craved.
This time Doom approached Loki's bed, in the dead of night. Intuition told him that the trickster would wake easily, and he did. By the time Doom's heavy key had turned in the bedroom lock and the door swung open, what was left of the trickster was wide-eyed and staring at him.
And there was the faintest, just the faintest hint of Loki in the intelligence behind those eyes.
The god neither fights nor retreats from Doom's approach - armored, yes, it was silly, but practical.
Loki shifts slightly to make room for Dr. Doom on the edge of the bed.
"Why?" He asks, in that quiet, rasping voice.
Why? Why was Dr. Doom taking such great care to help him?
"Because I think that whoever harmed you means to threaten me."
"No." Loki says this, not as a denial but as a simple statement of fact.
"You don't think so?"
Loki's head shakes from side to side. "Know it. Doesn't care." And then he freezes, and his eyes go wide with horror, and the shadow of Doom's former co-strategist flees from this form.
Loki goes dead and vacant again.
And Doom wonders, wonders what caused this. Does Loki still hallucinate? Does he still enter Thanos' world in his dreams? He seems to be mending remarkably, all things considered.
But his retreats from reality remain...
This time Doom remains beside the vacant Loki, nestles the trickster's body against his own in hopes that a little warmth will convince him he does not need to stay away.
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He knows the move was rational enough, but something - maybe the sight of Loki's body curled up against him, when the body's rightful owner would never curl, much less at Victor von Doom's side - makes him bitterly regret his choice to sleep beside the trickster.
He begins to move, to shift away, and Loki wakens -
And looks up at his metal-clad bedfellow with not entirely un-Loki-like confusion.
There's too much helplessness there and not enough pride - too much of the wide-eyed child and not nearly enough prince of Asgard. But this expression, confusion not overlaid with fear, is a start.
Loki starts to rise, tenses, stops, and sinks down against Victor again, watching him. Von Doom would have to forcibly remove the trickster, now, if he wanted to rise.
And the expression on the god's face is...ever so slightly familiar.
Loki is watching Victor von Doom again, and thinking about him.
"Liar," he rasps, finally.
Von Doom blinks.
"Liar. If you feared a threat, you would have killed me."
Victor pushes Loki off of him, pushes himself upright. "Kill you before I knew what I was supposed to be afraid of? That would be stupid of me."
"What about now?"
Victor regards him sharply for a moment. "I don't know enough about Thanos, yet."
"You know he's too powerful for you."
"I only suspect that," Victor admits, and realizes with a sensation of pure thrill that he is again talking tactics with his former ally.
Underneath everything that has been done to him, the real Loki is awake.
...and is now wrapping himself around von Doom's waist, peacefully but firmly making sure the Doctor doesn't leave him alone in bed.
Well. They'll work on the newly acquired psychological issues later.
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The details are great by the way. (And even though Loki's brain is damaged as it is, that he made progress already gives me hope you let him recover in the end. The story is great already, no matter whether he does recover or not, its just my own preference. But I'm not the OP and it's your story, so don't mind me.)
Ha, liar indeed. Doom can't even hide the pesky sentiment to a brain-damaged Loki. XD
Also cuddling is always delicious to read.^^
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