Fic: Such A Cunning Disguise (Natasha/Loki, R)
Title: Such A Cunning Disguise
Rating: R
Pairing(s): Natasha/Loki
Summary: This time, she has the upper hand.
Content Notes: Non-con, interrogation scenes, drugging, emotional manipulation, Jötun!Loki
Word Count: 3455
Author's Notes: I used elements of Natasha's comics backstory as a basis for her characterization, but I fully admit that I twisted things around a little for my own nefarious purposes. Title taken from the Nick Cave song "Let Love In".
The Black Widow has had many names, many faces. Natashenka Romanova, young and naive (but not innocent, never innocent); Natalya Romanova, rendered deadly and undying by experimental injections and Soviet brainwashing, baptized under gunfire and soaked in red; Laura Morrison, Sofia Amoretti, Natalie Rushman - the list goes on. She is adept at switching her identities, peeling off faces and replacing them with new masks, and now, Natasha Romanoff is not who she needs to be.
She opens the door, and Natalya enters the room.
Her prey sits in the center, bound by Stark Industries-designed cuffs on his wrists and ankles, the metal crawling with runes, a wedding of magic and technology unprecedented in human history. He watches her with lidded eyes, a lazy smirk tilting his lips. Smug, even chained, even trapped in this well-lit room with its muted colors, buried three hundred feet under the surface of the Earth.
"As interrogation rooms go, this is quite a letdown," Loki says, gesturing to the walls with both hands. The chains sway with his movement, loose enough to permit him small gestures. "You didn't even attempt to hide your recording devices."
"Sorry to disappoint you," she says. Her posture is relaxed, hands clasped behind her back, standing with a grace acquired with years of ballet training and martial arts.
"I believe I'll make it," he responds dryly, and leans back in his chair. "What can I do for you, Agent Romanoff?"
Black Widow smiles at him, all teeth.
"You can start by telling me the location of the seventh Infinity Gem," she says. As she expects, he throws his head back and laughs.
"Do you really think I'm going to tell you? You, of all people?"
"I outsmarted you once before," she says.
He sneers.
"Agent Romanoff. Natasha. Dear Natasha, you cannot possibly still believe that? I allowed you to guess my intentions with your pet monster because it benefited me, I allowed you to think you had broken me because it made you underestimate me. Because it pleased me to do so. If that one incident is why your Director Fury has sent you, I'm afraid it was for naught."
She glances down and bites her lip, making a show of thinking things over. Looks up, a little sheepish, and shrugs.
"You called my bluff," she says. "I guess I'll have to resort to other measures."
Going back to the door, she lets the locking mechanism scan her retina and verify her voice print, then opens the door to allow a guard to bring in a chair and a small cart, upon which a capped hypodermic needle and a tourniquet sits. Loki watches with interest, and his smirk twitches into a full-on grin as she wheels the cart closer.
"Really?" he says. "You're going to drug me? Of course you are. What a predictable creature you've turned out to be."
"Doesn't all that sarcasm start to grate after a while?" she asks. "Arm, please."
"No, it does not. Have I annoyed you already?"
To her surprise, he extends his arm and lets her swab the crook of his elbow. She ties the tourniquet around his biceps and wonders at his confidence. The dose is ten times the amount she would use on a human, though of course there's no way he could know that. Still, is he truly so certain he'll remain unaffected?
Well, so be it. He'll break that much more quickly.
"This is a formula designed by a doctor friend of mine," she says as she depresses the plunger, injecting the amber liquid into his body. "Not Dr. Banner. A different man, someone I met before I worked for S.H.I.E.L.D."
"Did he drip some red in your ledger?"
"You could say that." Natasha pulls the extra chair closer, though not close enough for him to touch. "He's not a very nice man. Brilliant, but cruel. I think you'd like him."
"I'm sure I would, if he weren't mortal."
Loki swallows, blinks several times in quick succession. She watches the flutter of his throat, noting the flush creeping over his unblemished skin. Ever since Hawkeye lowered his bow and extended his hand to her, she's been doing her best to be good, but she can't deny she'll enjoy this a little.
"I wonder if you'll rip out your throat," she says conversationally. Loki whips his head to look at her, eyes wide. The toxin took effect quickly: his pupils are uneven, one dilated until just a rim of green shows around the edge, the other shrunk to a needle's point. "I've seen men do that on this drug. I hope not; it would be a shame to ruin such a good complexion."
Loki stares at her, and says in a raspy voice, "Despite what others might say, vanity is not one of my many flaws."
"Liar," she says, and he makes a small noise. Sweat beads on his forehead, at the hollow of his throat, along the lines of his clavicle. Idly, she imagines what it would taste like, then wonders which of her selves that thought had come from.
"Where is the seventh Infinity Gem?"
He twitches, turns his head to glare at her, and spits something in his native tongue that could be nothing but a vicious curse. One better than mewling quim, hopefully.
She has to congratulate him on his self-control. He's trembling, on the verge of spastic, vision distorted, but still aware, still coherent. It's impressive.
"I'll give you one more chance before I lose my patience," she says. "Where is the Infinity Gem?"
"You dare insult a god!" he bursts out. "You pathetic cunt, you will break under my hands, I promise you, I will rape you in front of your precious archer, I'll force him to rape you, and then I'll throw your whining, bleeding body to the ogres - "
"Not really original, Loki." Fear can make even the most creative people lose their wits. Looks like it works on gods, too. "I have to say I'm disappointed. I guess your reputation isn't really up to snuff."
He squints at her, and a smile cracks open his face.
"Nor is yours. You've turned - " His eyes flicker behind her, darting from vision to vision that only he can see. " - turned soft since you allied with the mighty and the righteous. The infamous Black Widow's lost her sting."
Bastard. I'll show you a sting.
"Guess it's time for another dose," she says, covering up her anger with a cheerful smile, and takes another hypodermic from the cart. He flinches violently, and leans away as far as he can as she approaches.
"Don't - get away from me," he says, his voice higher than normal. She smiles and takes him by the shoulder, fingers digging deep into the muscle.
"I'm the Black Widow," she purrs. "There's no running from me."
It doesn't really matter where the fear toxin goes in, so she stabs him in the neck. He screeches and flails, the second dose hitting him hard and fast, ripping the syringe from his skin and flicking droplets of blood across Natasha's face. She wipes them off on her sleeve.
Loki is hyperventilating now, trying to thrash his way out of his bonds, but the cuffs are enchanted and the chair is firmly secured. He's not going anywhere.
"All your efforts are in vain," she says, dropping her voice low and velvety. "You can't escape. You're trapped." She walks the perimeter of the room, scratching her nails across the wall. It sounds like the skittering of scorpions across the cement floor, the creak of ice just before it breaks (a lost child clawing at a locked door in a dark room).
"No," he whispers, and convulses, shuddering like he's trying to shake something from his shoulders. "No, no, get off me, get them off me get them off me - "
Natasha looks at the way he twists, like he's fighting his way from a tangled net, remembering a certain myth or two, and goes off a hunch. Leaning in close, she hisses in his ear.
Screaming inarticulately, Loki curls in on himself, and Natasha exhales by his temple. Her breath ghosts over his ear, and he pushes his head against his knees, wrapping his arms around himself as far as they'll go.
"Here there are serpents," she hisses, drawing out the sibilants, and chokes back a laugh at the absurdity of the words. Here there be dragons, a foreign place on a map. Welcome to her life. "Snakes, slithering things, dripping venom, just waiting for you to bare a soft spot, something delicate and…tender - "
"My eyes," Loki moans, "my eyes, don't, it hurts - "
"You're caught in my web, just waiting for the serpent's gullet, and no spell, no lies, no golden brother with his invincible hammer will save you now."
Loki flings his head back and shrieks, back arching, then twists to glare at her. The feverish hate in his eyes is astonishing, and Natasha very nearly takes a step back. Instead, she crosses to stand in front of him, and says,
"Tell me, Laufeyson, what do you fear?"
"DON'T CALL ME THAT!"
To her shock, the color of his skin flickers and changes before her eyes, grim blue creeping across his hands, turning one half of his face into a scarred, alien visage with glowing red eyes. She hadn't known he was capable of this - he shouldn't be capable of this, not with Stark's chains around his wrists, spelled to bind the wearer's magic. Fear claws at Natasha's throat, her eyes prickling with frightened tears; this time, she does take a step back, then another for good measure.
Then she remembers who she is, and the Black Widow blinks her tears away, shakes her head, and coldly assesses the situation. He's too far gone for questioning, so she'll have to let him sweat it out until the tail end, when he'll be coherent again yet still drugged enough to answer truthfully.
Well, that's not quite true. She has another option.
He called me soft, Natasha thinks. I've never been soft.
Still, she hesitates, thinking of what her new team would say, but Clint's dead eyes flick across her vision, like a subliminal picture inserted in an old film reel, and that's enough to change her mind.
"Starve a cold, feed a fever," she murmurs. "And Loki, you're burning up, aren't you?"
Crouching a careful distance away from him, Natasha slides open the bottom drawer of the cart. She tugs on thin, super-insulated gloves, and glances up at him from her position, balanced on the balls of her feet. He's lost control of his Asgardian illusion, eyes blazing red in blue sockets, frost lining his lashes. He's been crying. Natasha smiles and lets him see it, a cruel little grin.
"Look at yourself, Loki," she says, lacing her voice with as much poison and disdain as she could muster. "You sicken me."
She stands and begins to pace around him in a circle, slowly, sizing him up. His breath whistles through his teeth.
"You're a monster, Loki. You're nithing. Thor's carcass is worth more than you. You know what he told me?"
Is she having any effect? He's hunched in on himself still, head buried in his hands, a shield against her words. That's no good; she wants him raw and screaming like a fresh and oozing wound.
"He told me," she continues, moving behind him, and feels around for the box feeding out the chains on the back of the chair. "That no matter how low on the scale humanity falls - and we fall low, believe me - "
She wrenches the lever and pulls his chains taut, restraining him tightly against the arms and legs of the chair.
" - we still rank higher in his estimation than you. You're sub-human, Loki. Even the giants didn't want you. You're worse than the scum of the Nine Realms. Worthless. Cheap."
She leans close again, and he turns away. Tears roll down his cheeks, but they don't freeze.
"After all, we don't fuck horses," she whispers, a parting shot, and he ducks his head and giggles, a reedy sound full of despair.
"I didn't," he says. "I didn't want to…"
She digs her hand in his hair and pulls his head up sharply, wishing she had some sort of collar or head brace so she wouldn't have to keep making him look at her like this.
"Where is the seventh Infinity Gem?"
"I don't know," he gasps, and she shakes him hard. A manic little grin spreads across his face. She asks him again, and jerks his head back until he's looking at the ceiling, his throat bared, his skin criss-crossed with Jötun scars.
"Not telling," he gurgles. Useless. She shakes him again, spits in his face for good measure, but he simply lies there with eyes half-closed.
Stepping back, Natasha puts her hands on her hips and reevaluates her strategy. He's reached the peak of the high and now he's coming down, which means she has to work quickly.
And why hasn't he come up with a lie, yet? Are the drugs working that well, or does he have a plan?
There's no way she can know without further investigation. For lack of anything else to do, Natasha stands in front of him and asks, "What are you, Loki? Be honest, now."
It's a rhetorical question, and she doesn't expect a true answer, but she gets one anyway.
"Monster," he murmurs. And that sparks something inside her, an idea snug beneath kindling bursting into flame. Loki's spent his entire life facing cruelty, whether real or imagined; what she has said and done may hurt, but it is nothing new. She needs to try something else.
She touches the column of his neck with her gloved hand, and he stiffens. Cold radiates through the fabric, but it doesn't shatter or freeze - and if it does, S.H.I.E.L.D. medical can deal with a case of frostbite.
"Oh, Loki," she says, and cups his cheek tenderly. If possible, he goes even stiller than before. "You're not a monster.
"You're beautiful."
His mouth falls open, but he says nothing. She estimates that he's in the stage where time and space begin to bleed; he might not even know where he is anymore. Playing with that, she continues:
"I've always thought you were beautiful. My dark prince, shining like the moon. And now…"
She trails her hand across his chest, strokes his throat where his pulse flutters, traces the raised lines of his face, brushes her thumb across his parted lips. He leans into her touch, and disgust coils in her stomach, not for him, but for herself. She loathes using sex to get her mark in the first place, and this - this is just cruel. With his blue skin and his obvious yearning for any kind of touch, he's suddenly become pitiful. Vulnerable. Not at all like the monster who tried to destroy her world and enslaved her partner.
Do not let personal feelings get in the way of carrying out your assignment, Natalya's trainer says, sixty years in the past. Do what needs to be done.
Natasha sinks to her knees in front of him and places her hands on his thighs. He gazes down at her, dazed, brow furrowed. This sudden turn from violence to kindness has given him whiplash, and the vestiges of the drug in his system has left him pliant. She presses a kiss to his leather-clad thigh, and nuzzles against it. Loki whimpers and strains against his bonds.
She hopes Thor never has to see this footage. Any of it.
"You're like starlight on frost," she says. "You're exquisite, Loki."
She presses the heel of her palm lightly against him, and he sighs and cants his hips forward as much as he can. He's already hard, which isn't unexpected - the fear toxin arouses all parts of the brain, after all - and she wonders how long it's been since last someone touched him. If he's had a first time to count from to begin with.
Unlacing his trousers, she untucks him and begins to stroke him, slowly, telling him all the marvelous things she'd like to do to him, telling him where she wants him to touch her, telling him how gorgeous he is, how unique, like a priceless work of art.
Voice dropping to a whisper, she tells him she loves him, and he makes a choked noise in the back of his throat and goes rigid. His come splatters on her glove and up her arm; it soaks through her sleeve and burns her skin. Natasha bites down on a scream, and asks gently,
"Where is the seventh Infinity Gem, my love?"
"With Nemesis. Nemesis has it," he says languidly, head lolling, eyelids twitching as the last of the drug pitches him into unconsciousness, and she stands abruptly, wanting nothing more than to escape this cursed place. She hates this kind of work.
"Thank you, Loki," she says, knowing he can't hear her and wouldn't care anyway, and gets the fuck out of there.
The elevator ride up is shorter than she remembered, and Nick Fury meets her at the top. He'd been watching the whole thing, of course; this prisoner in particular requires as many eyes on him as possible.
"Agent," he says in greeting. "Think he was lying?"
"No, he was telling the truth," she says. "I'm sure of it."
Fury looks hard at her for a long moment, and she keeps her expression neutral. He isn't an idiot, he knows her history and her methods, and he is just mercenary enough to approve of using the fear toxin in interrogations. He, of all people, will understand why she did what she did.
After a moment, he nods.
"Good work, Romanoff," he says.
"Thank you, sir," she replies. As soon as she's dismissed, she walks with careful, methodical steps to the nearest bathroom, where she vomits until her stomach's empty. Resting her forehead on the porcelain seat, she regulates her breathing, and forces herself to confront what she's just done. Rape, essentially. It may have been for the mission; it may have been Loki, who out of all the people she's ever known deserves to be tortured; but it was still rape, and she can't believe she did it. No, that's not true. She doesn't want to believe.
"It's over," she whispers. "You can't change the past. Accept it and move on."
This is a rule of Natasha's life, and sometimes it kills her that it's one she must follow. But she has no choice if she wants to survive.
Natasha flushes the toilet and stands. At the sink, she splashes her face with water and runs her fingers through her hair; the woman in the mirror is composed, confident, her gaze distant, her body still. She looks sleek, competent, deadly. She is all of these things.
Of all the people she's been, she hates Natalya the most.
. . .
"He's going to kill me," she says to Clint, two nights later. "No, worse."
They're curled up together on the couch in his suite; neither of them are used to having a permanent home, much less an entire floor of Avengers Tower, and they often find themselves seeking each other out for company.
Clint's the only one to whom she's told the details. He's the only one who could possibly understand.
"Probably," he agrees. His eyes are shadowed, like they always are whenever Loki comes up. "He's damn well going to try."
"I won't let him," she says. Her voice isn't nearly as certain as she'd like, so she tries again. "I won't let him catch me."
There, that's better.
"He won't even come close," Clint promises. "Not with me backing you up. And the others," he adds, an afterthought. Neither of them are used to working as a part of a team, either.
They lapse into silence for a long while, both of them trapped in their thoughts.
"He was so pathetic, Clint," she says finally. It's difficult to get the words out, to admit sympathy for the enemy, going against all of her training, but she has to tell someone. "He hides it well, but he was already broken when I went in there."
She shakes her head, and repeats, "He was absolutely pathetic."
"Well, forgive me if I don't feel sorry for him." Clint's voice is bitter; she can't blame him one bit. She tucks her head against his shoulder.
"I do," she says, and leaves the words suspended in the aether, ambiguous and undefined; it's a familiar place to be.
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Rating: R
Pairing(s): Natasha/Loki
Summary: This time, she has the upper hand.
Content Notes: Non-con, interrogation scenes, drugging, emotional manipulation, Jötun!Loki
Word Count: 3455
Author's Notes: I used elements of Natasha's comics backstory as a basis for her characterization, but I fully admit that I twisted things around a little for my own nefarious purposes. Title taken from the Nick Cave song "Let Love In".
The Black Widow has had many names, many faces. Natashenka Romanova, young and naive (but not innocent, never innocent); Natalya Romanova, rendered deadly and undying by experimental injections and Soviet brainwashing, baptized under gunfire and soaked in red; Laura Morrison, Sofia Amoretti, Natalie Rushman - the list goes on. She is adept at switching her identities, peeling off faces and replacing them with new masks, and now, Natasha Romanoff is not who she needs to be.
She opens the door, and Natalya enters the room.
Her prey sits in the center, bound by Stark Industries-designed cuffs on his wrists and ankles, the metal crawling with runes, a wedding of magic and technology unprecedented in human history. He watches her with lidded eyes, a lazy smirk tilting his lips. Smug, even chained, even trapped in this well-lit room with its muted colors, buried three hundred feet under the surface of the Earth.
"As interrogation rooms go, this is quite a letdown," Loki says, gesturing to the walls with both hands. The chains sway with his movement, loose enough to permit him small gestures. "You didn't even attempt to hide your recording devices."
"Sorry to disappoint you," she says. Her posture is relaxed, hands clasped behind her back, standing with a grace acquired with years of ballet training and martial arts.
"I believe I'll make it," he responds dryly, and leans back in his chair. "What can I do for you, Agent Romanoff?"
Black Widow smiles at him, all teeth.
"You can start by telling me the location of the seventh Infinity Gem," she says. As she expects, he throws his head back and laughs.
"Do you really think I'm going to tell you? You, of all people?"
"I outsmarted you once before," she says.
He sneers.
"Agent Romanoff. Natasha. Dear Natasha, you cannot possibly still believe that? I allowed you to guess my intentions with your pet monster because it benefited me, I allowed you to think you had broken me because it made you underestimate me. Because it pleased me to do so. If that one incident is why your Director Fury has sent you, I'm afraid it was for naught."
She glances down and bites her lip, making a show of thinking things over. Looks up, a little sheepish, and shrugs.
"You called my bluff," she says. "I guess I'll have to resort to other measures."
Going back to the door, she lets the locking mechanism scan her retina and verify her voice print, then opens the door to allow a guard to bring in a chair and a small cart, upon which a capped hypodermic needle and a tourniquet sits. Loki watches with interest, and his smirk twitches into a full-on grin as she wheels the cart closer.
"Really?" he says. "You're going to drug me? Of course you are. What a predictable creature you've turned out to be."
"Doesn't all that sarcasm start to grate after a while?" she asks. "Arm, please."
"No, it does not. Have I annoyed you already?"
To her surprise, he extends his arm and lets her swab the crook of his elbow. She ties the tourniquet around his biceps and wonders at his confidence. The dose is ten times the amount she would use on a human, though of course there's no way he could know that. Still, is he truly so certain he'll remain unaffected?
Well, so be it. He'll break that much more quickly.
"This is a formula designed by a doctor friend of mine," she says as she depresses the plunger, injecting the amber liquid into his body. "Not Dr. Banner. A different man, someone I met before I worked for S.H.I.E.L.D."
"Did he drip some red in your ledger?"
"You could say that." Natasha pulls the extra chair closer, though not close enough for him to touch. "He's not a very nice man. Brilliant, but cruel. I think you'd like him."
"I'm sure I would, if he weren't mortal."
Loki swallows, blinks several times in quick succession. She watches the flutter of his throat, noting the flush creeping over his unblemished skin. Ever since Hawkeye lowered his bow and extended his hand to her, she's been doing her best to be good, but she can't deny she'll enjoy this a little.
"I wonder if you'll rip out your throat," she says conversationally. Loki whips his head to look at her, eyes wide. The toxin took effect quickly: his pupils are uneven, one dilated until just a rim of green shows around the edge, the other shrunk to a needle's point. "I've seen men do that on this drug. I hope not; it would be a shame to ruin such a good complexion."
Loki stares at her, and says in a raspy voice, "Despite what others might say, vanity is not one of my many flaws."
"Liar," she says, and he makes a small noise. Sweat beads on his forehead, at the hollow of his throat, along the lines of his clavicle. Idly, she imagines what it would taste like, then wonders which of her selves that thought had come from.
"Where is the seventh Infinity Gem?"
He twitches, turns his head to glare at her, and spits something in his native tongue that could be nothing but a vicious curse. One better than mewling quim, hopefully.
She has to congratulate him on his self-control. He's trembling, on the verge of spastic, vision distorted, but still aware, still coherent. It's impressive.
"I'll give you one more chance before I lose my patience," she says. "Where is the Infinity Gem?"
"You dare insult a god!" he bursts out. "You pathetic cunt, you will break under my hands, I promise you, I will rape you in front of your precious archer, I'll force him to rape you, and then I'll throw your whining, bleeding body to the ogres - "
"Not really original, Loki." Fear can make even the most creative people lose their wits. Looks like it works on gods, too. "I have to say I'm disappointed. I guess your reputation isn't really up to snuff."
He squints at her, and a smile cracks open his face.
"Nor is yours. You've turned - " His eyes flicker behind her, darting from vision to vision that only he can see. " - turned soft since you allied with the mighty and the righteous. The infamous Black Widow's lost her sting."
Bastard. I'll show you a sting.
"Guess it's time for another dose," she says, covering up her anger with a cheerful smile, and takes another hypodermic from the cart. He flinches violently, and leans away as far as he can as she approaches.
"Don't - get away from me," he says, his voice higher than normal. She smiles and takes him by the shoulder, fingers digging deep into the muscle.
"I'm the Black Widow," she purrs. "There's no running from me."
It doesn't really matter where the fear toxin goes in, so she stabs him in the neck. He screeches and flails, the second dose hitting him hard and fast, ripping the syringe from his skin and flicking droplets of blood across Natasha's face. She wipes them off on her sleeve.
Loki is hyperventilating now, trying to thrash his way out of his bonds, but the cuffs are enchanted and the chair is firmly secured. He's not going anywhere.
"All your efforts are in vain," she says, dropping her voice low and velvety. "You can't escape. You're trapped." She walks the perimeter of the room, scratching her nails across the wall. It sounds like the skittering of scorpions across the cement floor, the creak of ice just before it breaks (a lost child clawing at a locked door in a dark room).
"No," he whispers, and convulses, shuddering like he's trying to shake something from his shoulders. "No, no, get off me, get them off me get them off me - "
Natasha looks at the way he twists, like he's fighting his way from a tangled net, remembering a certain myth or two, and goes off a hunch. Leaning in close, she hisses in his ear.
Screaming inarticulately, Loki curls in on himself, and Natasha exhales by his temple. Her breath ghosts over his ear, and he pushes his head against his knees, wrapping his arms around himself as far as they'll go.
"Here there are serpents," she hisses, drawing out the sibilants, and chokes back a laugh at the absurdity of the words. Here there be dragons, a foreign place on a map. Welcome to her life. "Snakes, slithering things, dripping venom, just waiting for you to bare a soft spot, something delicate and…tender - "
"My eyes," Loki moans, "my eyes, don't, it hurts - "
"You're caught in my web, just waiting for the serpent's gullet, and no spell, no lies, no golden brother with his invincible hammer will save you now."
Loki flings his head back and shrieks, back arching, then twists to glare at her. The feverish hate in his eyes is astonishing, and Natasha very nearly takes a step back. Instead, she crosses to stand in front of him, and says,
"Tell me, Laufeyson, what do you fear?"
"DON'T CALL ME THAT!"
To her shock, the color of his skin flickers and changes before her eyes, grim blue creeping across his hands, turning one half of his face into a scarred, alien visage with glowing red eyes. She hadn't known he was capable of this - he shouldn't be capable of this, not with Stark's chains around his wrists, spelled to bind the wearer's magic. Fear claws at Natasha's throat, her eyes prickling with frightened tears; this time, she does take a step back, then another for good measure.
Then she remembers who she is, and the Black Widow blinks her tears away, shakes her head, and coldly assesses the situation. He's too far gone for questioning, so she'll have to let him sweat it out until the tail end, when he'll be coherent again yet still drugged enough to answer truthfully.
Well, that's not quite true. She has another option.
He called me soft, Natasha thinks. I've never been soft.
Still, she hesitates, thinking of what her new team would say, but Clint's dead eyes flick across her vision, like a subliminal picture inserted in an old film reel, and that's enough to change her mind.
"Starve a cold, feed a fever," she murmurs. "And Loki, you're burning up, aren't you?"
Crouching a careful distance away from him, Natasha slides open the bottom drawer of the cart. She tugs on thin, super-insulated gloves, and glances up at him from her position, balanced on the balls of her feet. He's lost control of his Asgardian illusion, eyes blazing red in blue sockets, frost lining his lashes. He's been crying. Natasha smiles and lets him see it, a cruel little grin.
"Look at yourself, Loki," she says, lacing her voice with as much poison and disdain as she could muster. "You sicken me."
She stands and begins to pace around him in a circle, slowly, sizing him up. His breath whistles through his teeth.
"You're a monster, Loki. You're nithing. Thor's carcass is worth more than you. You know what he told me?"
Is she having any effect? He's hunched in on himself still, head buried in his hands, a shield against her words. That's no good; she wants him raw and screaming like a fresh and oozing wound.
"He told me," she continues, moving behind him, and feels around for the box feeding out the chains on the back of the chair. "That no matter how low on the scale humanity falls - and we fall low, believe me - "
She wrenches the lever and pulls his chains taut, restraining him tightly against the arms and legs of the chair.
" - we still rank higher in his estimation than you. You're sub-human, Loki. Even the giants didn't want you. You're worse than the scum of the Nine Realms. Worthless. Cheap."
She leans close again, and he turns away. Tears roll down his cheeks, but they don't freeze.
"After all, we don't fuck horses," she whispers, a parting shot, and he ducks his head and giggles, a reedy sound full of despair.
"I didn't," he says. "I didn't want to…"
She digs her hand in his hair and pulls his head up sharply, wishing she had some sort of collar or head brace so she wouldn't have to keep making him look at her like this.
"Where is the seventh Infinity Gem?"
"I don't know," he gasps, and she shakes him hard. A manic little grin spreads across his face. She asks him again, and jerks his head back until he's looking at the ceiling, his throat bared, his skin criss-crossed with Jötun scars.
"Not telling," he gurgles. Useless. She shakes him again, spits in his face for good measure, but he simply lies there with eyes half-closed.
Stepping back, Natasha puts her hands on her hips and reevaluates her strategy. He's reached the peak of the high and now he's coming down, which means she has to work quickly.
And why hasn't he come up with a lie, yet? Are the drugs working that well, or does he have a plan?
There's no way she can know without further investigation. For lack of anything else to do, Natasha stands in front of him and asks, "What are you, Loki? Be honest, now."
It's a rhetorical question, and she doesn't expect a true answer, but she gets one anyway.
"Monster," he murmurs. And that sparks something inside her, an idea snug beneath kindling bursting into flame. Loki's spent his entire life facing cruelty, whether real or imagined; what she has said and done may hurt, but it is nothing new. She needs to try something else.
She touches the column of his neck with her gloved hand, and he stiffens. Cold radiates through the fabric, but it doesn't shatter or freeze - and if it does, S.H.I.E.L.D. medical can deal with a case of frostbite.
"Oh, Loki," she says, and cups his cheek tenderly. If possible, he goes even stiller than before. "You're not a monster.
"You're beautiful."
His mouth falls open, but he says nothing. She estimates that he's in the stage where time and space begin to bleed; he might not even know where he is anymore. Playing with that, she continues:
"I've always thought you were beautiful. My dark prince, shining like the moon. And now…"
She trails her hand across his chest, strokes his throat where his pulse flutters, traces the raised lines of his face, brushes her thumb across his parted lips. He leans into her touch, and disgust coils in her stomach, not for him, but for herself. She loathes using sex to get her mark in the first place, and this - this is just cruel. With his blue skin and his obvious yearning for any kind of touch, he's suddenly become pitiful. Vulnerable. Not at all like the monster who tried to destroy her world and enslaved her partner.
Do not let personal feelings get in the way of carrying out your assignment, Natalya's trainer says, sixty years in the past. Do what needs to be done.
Natasha sinks to her knees in front of him and places her hands on his thighs. He gazes down at her, dazed, brow furrowed. This sudden turn from violence to kindness has given him whiplash, and the vestiges of the drug in his system has left him pliant. She presses a kiss to his leather-clad thigh, and nuzzles against it. Loki whimpers and strains against his bonds.
She hopes Thor never has to see this footage. Any of it.
"You're like starlight on frost," she says. "You're exquisite, Loki."
She presses the heel of her palm lightly against him, and he sighs and cants his hips forward as much as he can. He's already hard, which isn't unexpected - the fear toxin arouses all parts of the brain, after all - and she wonders how long it's been since last someone touched him. If he's had a first time to count from to begin with.
Unlacing his trousers, she untucks him and begins to stroke him, slowly, telling him all the marvelous things she'd like to do to him, telling him where she wants him to touch her, telling him how gorgeous he is, how unique, like a priceless work of art.
Voice dropping to a whisper, she tells him she loves him, and he makes a choked noise in the back of his throat and goes rigid. His come splatters on her glove and up her arm; it soaks through her sleeve and burns her skin. Natasha bites down on a scream, and asks gently,
"Where is the seventh Infinity Gem, my love?"
"With Nemesis. Nemesis has it," he says languidly, head lolling, eyelids twitching as the last of the drug pitches him into unconsciousness, and she stands abruptly, wanting nothing more than to escape this cursed place. She hates this kind of work.
"Thank you, Loki," she says, knowing he can't hear her and wouldn't care anyway, and gets the fuck out of there.
The elevator ride up is shorter than she remembered, and Nick Fury meets her at the top. He'd been watching the whole thing, of course; this prisoner in particular requires as many eyes on him as possible.
"Agent," he says in greeting. "Think he was lying?"
"No, he was telling the truth," she says. "I'm sure of it."
Fury looks hard at her for a long moment, and she keeps her expression neutral. He isn't an idiot, he knows her history and her methods, and he is just mercenary enough to approve of using the fear toxin in interrogations. He, of all people, will understand why she did what she did.
After a moment, he nods.
"Good work, Romanoff," he says.
"Thank you, sir," she replies. As soon as she's dismissed, she walks with careful, methodical steps to the nearest bathroom, where she vomits until her stomach's empty. Resting her forehead on the porcelain seat, she regulates her breathing, and forces herself to confront what she's just done. Rape, essentially. It may have been for the mission; it may have been Loki, who out of all the people she's ever known deserves to be tortured; but it was still rape, and she can't believe she did it. No, that's not true. She doesn't want to believe.
"It's over," she whispers. "You can't change the past. Accept it and move on."
This is a rule of Natasha's life, and sometimes it kills her that it's one she must follow. But she has no choice if she wants to survive.
Natasha flushes the toilet and stands. At the sink, she splashes her face with water and runs her fingers through her hair; the woman in the mirror is composed, confident, her gaze distant, her body still. She looks sleek, competent, deadly. She is all of these things.
Of all the people she's been, she hates Natalya the most.
. . .
"He's going to kill me," she says to Clint, two nights later. "No, worse."
They're curled up together on the couch in his suite; neither of them are used to having a permanent home, much less an entire floor of Avengers Tower, and they often find themselves seeking each other out for company.
Clint's the only one to whom she's told the details. He's the only one who could possibly understand.
"Probably," he agrees. His eyes are shadowed, like they always are whenever Loki comes up. "He's damn well going to try."
"I won't let him," she says. Her voice isn't nearly as certain as she'd like, so she tries again. "I won't let him catch me."
There, that's better.
"He won't even come close," Clint promises. "Not with me backing you up. And the others," he adds, an afterthought. Neither of them are used to working as a part of a team, either.
They lapse into silence for a long while, both of them trapped in their thoughts.
"He was so pathetic, Clint," she says finally. It's difficult to get the words out, to admit sympathy for the enemy, going against all of her training, but she has to tell someone. "He hides it well, but he was already broken when I went in there."
She shakes her head, and repeats, "He was absolutely pathetic."
"Well, forgive me if I don't feel sorry for him." Clint's voice is bitter; she can't blame him one bit. She tucks her head against his shoulder.
"I do," she says, and leaves the words suspended in the aether, ambiguous and undefined; it's a familiar place to be.
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