HP/Avengers - Redemption Songs 02 - Harry/Loki
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Whoo, chapter two. And it didn’t take that long, and it’s also a longer chapter. I think the next one will be fairly short, but the one after that will probably be gigantic, so it will take longer to get around to finishing! Patience is a virtue? Thanks for all of the feedback, and everyone who read the story and enjoyed it.
“Redemption Songs”
Disclaimer: Harry Potter is property of JK Rowling, Bloomsbury, Warner Bros, et all. Avengers, Thor, Loki, etc belong to Marvel, Stan Lee, et co. I make no money from this and own nothing, don’t sue.
Summary: [HP/Loki] Loki escapes from Asgard during his punishment, and finds himself back in New York City where people still remember his face. Well, except for one man, who doesn’t know of him or the Avengers and has a strange habit of trying to save people who are beyond redemption. Like Loki, Harry has known pain and suffering, and was Mother once. And like Harry, Loki now has someone who wants to save him.
Warnings: Slash. HP/Loki. Post-Avengers. Violence. Language. Torture. Typos. Creepiness. Eventual happy ending. AU Harry Potter ending. Past LV/HP. Mpreg. Past rape. Lots of Loki feels. Angst.
Rating: NC-17. (There should be a higher rating, just for my Loki feels)
A/N: Title is the name of a Bob Marley song: it’s good, youtube it. Also. I might have broken Loki (with all his creys and my feels and his hurts), so he’s bottoming for this fic…
XXX
“Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery; none but ourselves can free our minds.” - Bob Marley.
“…love has within it a redemptive power. And there is a power there that eventually transforms individuals.” - Martin Luther King, Jr.
“However, since He took the most horrific death to redeem us, He showed us in fact that suffering and pain have great power.” - E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly.
Words: 5,523
Chapter 2
June 21st 2013. Asgard.
He should have expected it really, should have seen it coming a long time ago. His defeat had been unexpected, Thor’s arrival on Midgard unwelcome, but even with those two unplanned for factors Loki had never truly considered the possibility of Thanos ever actually punishing him. Odin would punish him, surely, though Frigga and Thor would defend Loki from the more barbaric of Asgardian tortures. The humans would surely have seen him punished, humiliated and brought low (so much lower than he had already been brought by the so called Avengers), and so Loki had simply chosen to let Thor take him back to Asgard. He could have escaped from Stark’s tower, he could have disappeared to another city anywhere on earth, but then Thanos would have been able to reach him and SHIELD might have eventually tracked him down. But on Asgard, his only real threat lay in the form of his not-father.
Loki should have known that he could never (had never) escape that lightly from a mess of his own creation. When he had cut off Sif’s hair, he had thought he would not be punished, because he had been trying to make her see how vain Thor was, how bad a match for her he was. And then when he had won her hair back from the dwarves and escaped their deal, he had never expected Thor to help them punish him, to sew his mouth shut, to pin him to the floor and hold him there while Loki screamed and struggled and begged to be defended. But Thor had, just like he had told the Midgardians of how Loki was terrified of being silenced permanently; like Sif had failed to see any of his good intentions and allowed the dwarves’ punishment to go ahead without protest, though she had later asked for his forgiveness for doing such. Loki had always thought himself too smart to get caught in his own trap, snared by his own schemes. Yet, he always seemed to find himself humiliated and hurt, though he never saw it coming in time.
But he should have.
He should have.
Thanos had promised him pain unlike anything Loki had ever experienced before. The promises of longing for something as sweet as death, the words dripped in his ear like venom every time Loki attempted to meditate, had kept him awake for nights on end while he was upon Midgard. To think that Thanos would not make good on his word was foolish and Loki cursed himself for being so naive, so arrogant as to believe he had slipped the Eldar’s grasp.
The Tesseract had controlled each of the humans Loki had enslaved, had bound them to Thanos’ will. Just like it had infected Loki’s mind, mingled with his hurt and his fear and his anger, and driven him to lengths he had never gone to before, pushed upon him Thanos’ desire to dominate all life form and fanned the flames of jealousy that already existed within Loki’s heart. But beneath every part of his actions that were his, the Tesseract forced thoughts that were Thanos’. Though he had left calmly with Thor, thinking himself safe while upon Asgard, Loki should have known that the Tesseract would exert its master’s will even here.
His guards were once men who had trained under his watch, fought for Asgard at his command. They had been friends and comrades once, though embarrassed as they had been when Loki had let the Jotnar slip into Asgard on their watch during Thor’s coronation, each had been as dedicated to Loki their King as they had previously been to Odin before. But now, with the Tesseract held in the weapons vault above their heads, Loki’s guards had turned from old friends to prison guards, and then as Thanos sank further and further into their minds, to torturers and rapists. They were the ones who made Loki scream and beg and cry in his every waking moment, and in his dreams Thanos and the Other were there, whispering into his ear, words of comfort and praise, congratulating him on being such good entertainment, on being a great fuck though pity they weren’t close by to try him for themselves. They consoled him, promised him an end soon, and then Thanos’ hand would strike across his face and Loki would snap awake with a cry, on his knees once more as another of his tormentors forced their way inside of his body with a grunt.
This was the punishment that Thor had refused to let Odin subject his brother to. These were the actions Frigga was so determinately against happening to her son. To be broken in the dungeons of Asgard, in any way deemed necessary (or enjoyable for the tormentors), was a punishment inflicted upon the worst of the worst, traitors, and what was Loki now if not a traitor to the throne of Asgard? To the brother he had killed and the father he had usurped? Frigga and Thor had argued for a lessor punishment: isolation. Two years of isolation, to think over his deeds and mistakes and to be ready to repent before the All Father and his family once the two years were over. He was to have no visitors, no word from those who still professed to love him, but he was not to be harmed in anyway. And yet, Odin’s first sentence, the one his wife had refused to stand behind, had been the one to come to pass. Thanos’ will controlled the guards, Thanos’ desire for vengeance and pain, but Odin must have known, Heimdallr must have seen.
It was his punishment, Loki thought on the rare nights where he was left in peace or at the least used once only then left alone to crumble. Heimdallr must have seen, of course he must, because Loki was using none of his powers now to block himself from Heimdallr’s sight like he had done before. Heimdallr did not tell other peoples’ secrets, unless they threatened Asgard, and what was Loki’s suffering in the scheme of things? Was he not supposed to have been bound to a rock until Ragnarök anyway? Could this be it, he sometimes wondered, and Heimdallr did not tell for fear that Loki’s release would unleash the force of the prophecy upon the gods; Fenrir would break free of his shackles to devour the All Father, and Jörmungandr would rise from the ocean of Midgard to swallow it whole, and Hela would welcome all of the Æsir into Helheimr until it was time for their world to spin again, anew. Heimdallr must fear the twilight of the Gods, or he must still be angry at Loki for freezing him upon the Bifrost years ago, decades ago in the scheme of things, and Loki did not think Heimdallr to be as petty as he himself was.
Had his mother or Thor not once asked how Loki was getting on? They that would love him, or so they said, had they never thought to check? Or perhaps they did, and Heimdallr had lied, told them that Loki was enjoying his creature comforts, the dirt and dank and stench of the dungeons, and the taste of semen upon his tongue, the slick feel of it in his arse, the thought that there was so much of it inside him that it had made its way, like salmon swimming backwards, into his stomach, sitting there like lead and making him queasy. But Loki was enjoying it, had Heimdallr said? Loki lived for the attention, he had said once before, so maybe Heimdallr thought this was another of Loki’s games, an attempt to seek pity and early freedom maybe.
But Loki hated it. Hated every one of the men that touched him, who would take liberties with his body, and every one of those he once knew who had followed Odin’s orders and not once come to see him. And he hated that he knew deep inside of his heart, when it was still feebly beating, that Heimdallr had seen, and Odin would have been the first to question him (before Frigga, before Thor, or Sif who was almost still his friend, and Sigyn though she had been tricked into marriage with him was still the mother of his child and cared a little for him). Loki knew Odin would have sworn Heimdallr to secrecy, and Heimdallr, who had sworn allegiance to his King would keep Loki’s torment a secret unto the grave.
And Loki… Loki was left, abandoned, in Hel.
The guards had first bound Loki’s magic, with cuffs of steel around his wrists and the silver muzzle Stark had created across his face. Odin had replaced the first set of handcuffs with another, a stronger pair, though both had to be present for the magic to properly be suppressed. One guard, one day, after growing weary of Loki whimpering his cries behind the contraption of metal and silver, wanting to know how loud Loki Silvertongue could be, had wrenched the muzzle from his face with the strength of an Æsir; all of the dungeon heard Loki’s screams that night, every cry and grunt and breathless pant, as he struggled to stay on his knees and not end up with his face mashed against the floor, with his arms bound behind his back, and no way to catch himself. The guard in charge had entered his cell the following morning, found the broken muzzle, and had Loki whipped in punishment for trying to escape. Thanos had seen inside of his head, seen and experienced all of Loki’s fears, and it was Thanos’ voice that came from the guard’s mouth as he ordered two others to sew Loki’s lips shut. And though Loki had screamed and struggled and cried for mercy, two men had pinned him down, while Thanos’ host sewed up his mouth, fingers and thread bloody and Loki’s face streaked with tears.
They took out the stitches when they were in the mood to hear him scream. When it was time to eat, meals left at the top of the stairs leading down to the dungeons and later collected so that no one but those under Thanos’ control were ever in the dungeons, they stitched him closed again. Always eating in front of him, taunting Loki with food he could not have no matter how much his stomach rumbled for it.
They came to him another day, almost eight months after his failed attempt to overthrow the earth. They carried with them a potion, one that Loki and Frigga used to make together. It was one that allowed those who were infertile to conceive. Frigga, who blessed unions with prosperity and children and happiness, and Loki, who was magic, who did magic and made magic: together they had created this potion, years ago, when Loki was still learning the art. Only Frigga could have made it now, though whether she knew it was for her son, Loki didn’t want to think about.
Instead, he turned his face away, pressed his lips tightly together, even after the thread had been cut away, and tried desperately to avoid drinking the potion. The leader forced it down his throat eventually, and then forced his cock inside of him; his seed and stain, making Loki feel as dirty on the inside as he was on the out. Thanos knew all of his fears; he had seen inside his head, his memories. And though Loki loved Sleipnir as he did his other children, innocently and without fault, whole heartedly, Loki hated how he had been conceived: Svadilfari hunting him down through the trees and undergrowth, his legs burning with exhaustion, but fear pushing him on, always on because being caught was not a viable alternative. Until he was caught. And mounted. And forced. Loki had hid away for nine months, unable to change from mare to man, and when the child had come, his eight-legged foal, it took Loki three days to work up the courage to touch Sleipnir and remember how he had come to be.
Again, a pregnancy had been forced upon him, Thanos’ seed this time (though it was an Asgardian’s body that did the deed, Loki had no doubt that somehow Thanos had managed to impregnate him himself). Another lash upon Loki’s back for his failure.
For three months, he changed and grew. Pain blossomed in his stomach, unnatural things happening within him, (because the potion had never been given to a male before, and Loki had been female when Svadilfari took him), as the child grew within him. Thanos whispered to him in his dreams, hands to Loki’s stomach that was barely beginning to swell at three months gone; he told Loki how pleased he was, how well Loki would do as his brood mare, and Loki got sick on Thanos’ feet at the very thought.
The guards were careful not to touch his stomach, content to let this be another punishment in lieu of their usual beatings, though the rapes did not stop. Bile rose in Loki’s throat every time hands brushed his belly, fingers soft and cautious, pressing here and there as he was rutted into viciously from behind.
Loki choked once, on his back beneath two of them, mouth sewn shut once again so there was nowhere for the vomit to go but back down. As he coughed and heaved and sputtered, clenching in pain and fear around the cocks within him, one torturer came and the other thinking Loki was trying to buck them off punched him hard in the stomach. No one spoke of Loki’s miscarriage, though the one who punched him never visited his cell again. Loki felt guilt, eating him up from the inside, at the relief he felt as Thanos’ child bled from him (it was not his child, like Sleipnir had not been his child until the foal was right there in front of him, sweet and innocent and relying on him for protection). But that Loki was happy at the loss only proved he was a monster, truly abominable, as Thanos regularly pointed out now, for whom but a monster would blame an innocent child for their parents’ sins?
A month had passed since then, fourteen months since his imprisonment, and though at first Loki had held out hope for a rescue he had long given up such foolish dreams. He was battered and bruised and broken, used in every possible way until there was nothing left of him to be taken, no small part of him left untarnished or dirtied. He was all gone, used up, nothing but a vast empty sucking hollow, a void of darkness where even his previous anger and hatred no longer tread. It was all about pain now.
Loki had screamed a lot for Thanos, for Thor, for anyone who might have the power to end this, until his voice was hoarse and his tongue flecked with blood from his throat and all he could do was rasp until he was given water or his lips were sealed again. Loki screamed sometimes to Hela, his legitimate child with his ex-wife Sigyn, who ruled the land of the dead, and he begged Hela to take him to her bosom, to free him from this pain in the only way she would be able. Hela had whispered back to him once, in his dreams, with her pale hands on his gaunt face, and her mismatched eyes holding his own green desperate gaze.
“It is not your time yet,” she told him softly, before repeating the words Death had once whispered to another green eyed man. The right time was yet to come, she told him, he only had to preserver a little longer, to bear with the loss and rise above it, she breathed in his ear, breath like silk and smelling of honey and Loki had leant into her embrace, clutching his daughter to him as he shook with tears.
At Hela’s side, a tiny child looked up at Loki, with wide green eyes and a mop of messy black hair. Potter’s child would have been almost three months old, but here, in death, he was almost a year: six months in the womb and five outside of it, and he looked so very much like Loki as a child that the God flinched at the sight of him.
“Is that?” He asked, unable to voice the words that caught in his throat and took his breath away in fear.
“No. This is the child of another. He was mourned.” Hela ran a gentle hand through the child’s hair, a soft smile on her grey-ish pale face. “It is not your time yet,” she repeated, before pressing both hands firmly against Loki’s flat stomach, “but soon, father, soon.”
“Never!” Loki hissed, his eyes narrowed as he jerked away from his daughter’s touch. “Never again,” he promised, as Hela sent him back to waking.
She whispered then, into the dreams of her mother, of Sigyn who was half Æsir and half Fae of Alfheimr. Sigyn who had so hated how Hela looked because she blamed herself and her unknown father’s genes for how unnatural her child had turned out to appear. Sigyn, who loved Hela regardless and mostly just hated herself and her shortcomings and Loki for getting her pregnant on the only night they had ever had sex during their sham of a marriage. But Sigyn pulled Hela into her arms when she appeared, smiling sadly at the mismatched eyes and the waxen grey face and the hair on the right which was black and on the left a bone white as if the life had been sucked out of it.
“Hello, mother,” Hela whispered, Loki’s dead child clutched against her chest. The child, genderless and still, was tiny though it was three months old in death and should have been bigger than the palm of her hand. But that was what malnourishment did, Hela supposed. “This is my sister, or,” she paused to glanced down at the unfortunate creature in her hands, “she would have been.”
Sigyn’s eyebrows rose up into her hairline, and she gasped down at the child who looked to be fully human or Æsir. “How?” She tried to think of anyone who had spoken of Loki in the last year, anyone who might have been pregnant by him, unless he had assumed the form of Lady Loki and allowed himself to be taken. The child appeared to be three months old, but time moved differently on Helheimr, Sigyn knew. Loki would often visit their child and be gone for a few days, though he would return and tell stories and stories that amounted to years’ worth of adventures and experiences. “How old?”
“Father was three months gone when she died.”
The cogs turned in Sigyn’s mind, and she gasped as she came to the only conclusion she could. “He has taken up with one of the guards?” It was unsurprising that Loki had managed to seduce someone, probably the one in charge, in order to better his living standards for the duration of the punishment. But he would not have given up a child willingly, not unless he had not known something was wrong, or he had asked for a healer and had been refused, or unless…
“Was he-” Sigyn bit her bottom lip. She glanced away from the child and her child and over towards the bed that Hela had been conceived in, the one Loki and she had shared just once. He had sat beside her on that bed the day she found out about her pregnancy and begged her with tears in his eyes to let him keep the child, even if she did not want it, he did, desperately, and he nor the child would ever bother her again if she granted him that one boon. And she had laid her head in his lap, six months pregnant; as he reached down to stroke her bump while he told her all about Sleipnir and how Loki had hated being pregnant, swapping stories of nausea and dizziness and tiredness. He had confessed his fear, blinding terror, that raged within him as Sleipnir grew, the horrific pain as he gave birth alone in a clearing, trying to keep those horrible tortured animal noises from leaving his throat in case someone heard him, and confessed how he loved his children, all of them, the one Sigyn carried and the ones Odin had cast out for being monsters and the one he had borne, though Loki had hated Sleipnir while he bore him. He had confessed, softly, his face pressed to his arm to muffle the horrible words, that if he had lost Sleipnir before his birth Loki would have been glad, because he hadn’t loved his son yet, hadn’t known him, and so would not have missed him or the reminder of his rape.
“Yes.” Hela said simply, hands cradling the unwanted child to her chest. The girl let out a cry, her first noise since appearing in Helheimr, and once the noise had stopped, Hela and the child were both gone. Sigyn found herself sitting up alone in her bed, her nightdress soaked with sweat while she clutched shaking hands over her fast beating heart.
Loki had long let go of the foolish belief that someone might care enough to save him. He had long stopped hoping for comfort or reprieve or safety. Redemption was beyond his grasp. Rescue was never coming. There was only pain left. Though he told himself he was ok with that, that he had accepted this for it was all he would ever have, all he deserved, his heart still jumped into his throat with anticipation as the door swung open, and instead of guards, a woman in her nightdress stood shaking in the threshold. Sigyn had a cloak around her shoulders, its hood pulled down to hide her face, but Loki could see the way her eyes darted around frantically. She gasped as she got a good look at him, naked and feeble, shaking all over and covered in blood and grime and waste. Seed ran down the backs of his thighs, and had dried around his ear and chin, and the blood was fresh upon his lips as they had been sewn shut again that night after the guards had taken their fill of his throat.
“Oh Loki!” Sigyn gasped. She rushed towards him, careful though to leave the door open and not risk locking herself inside as well. Loki looked at her, really looked, and he could see the pain etched upon her every feature, the sadness and pity and anger. She did not fake her reaction to seeing him, and she had not come to hurt him. And for a moment, until she pulled out a dagger, Loki hoped.
“Hold still!” She chastised him, as he kicked out at her. He scrambled back on his arse, hands behind his back clawing at the ground to pull himself away from the knife. “I’m trying to help. Hold still!” The blade was at his mouth, but it wasn’t cutting through the thread. It was like the last time, Loki thought despondently, when the dwarves had stitched his lips together, and only dwarf weapons could cut him free.
“The sceptre,” he tried to tell her, but his lips moved less than a centimetre apart from one another and no recognizable sound escaped them. If Thanos had been the one to bind him, then surely the sceptre that Thanos had gifted him with would free his mouth? But he could not tell Sigyn this, not until his mouth was unbound, so he silently allowed her to turn him over so she could jiggle the tip of the knife in the lock of one handcuff. It popped free after a moment, though it felt like hours to Loki, who lay tense beneath his ex-wife, ears open to any and all sounds that might spell trouble for them.
“Thank you,” he signed to her, having learnt to do so the first time he had been unable to speak. It was before he had married her, but during their marriage, though there was no love, a friendship had formed, and she had asked him to teach her so that they would have their own secret language (because no one other than Sif or Frigga had bothered to learn it when Loki did). “You should go, before they come back.” He signed again. Sigyn passed him the knife, and Loki fiddled with the second cuff. He offered her a nod of thanks and one of goodbye as she slipped back out of the cell and to her bedroom.
Sigyn barricaded herself inside, in her tower room beside Loki’s old room, a hallway away from the King and Queen, but she trembled, wide awake all night in fear that her part would be uncovered and she punished like Loki had been punished. She did not allow herself to relax until the alarm was sounded, and Frigga knocked upon her door to inform her that Loki Laufeyson had escaped from Asgard. Sigyn did not sleep for two days, tense and agitated whenever anyone bad mouthed her ex-husband, worried and terrified whenever Loki’s guards stood too close to her in any room.
But the morning after Loki’s disappearance, each of them collapsed in a flash of blue light, and when they woke from their healing sleeps, not one of them could remember a thing about the past year and two months. Their eyes were no longer blue, and Thanos no longer had a purpose upon Asgard, because the only one with the power to teleport between worlds was no longer on the world that housed the Infinity Gauntlet, and so Thanos set his slaves free. But his hooks stayed latched within Loki’s mind, and Thanos followed him back to earth, to where he landed, naked and unable to stand, armed with only a knife at the foot of the rebuilt Stark Tower.
Loki still had one cuff on his wrist, and it was making his magic unpredictable and slow. His injuries, his hunger and exhaustion were not helping either, and each attempt to perform his art was lacklustre and shoddy and Loki cringed, because if anyone had seen him they would have called him a fraud. He looked like a petty con artist, attempting to trick people out of their coin with smoke shows and flashing lights, but it was all he could manage and it was enough to conjure himself a pair of trousers, though the shirt he had created turned to brightly coloured dust as it settled on his skin.
Loki had the knife against his left wrist now, twisting and turning, trying to catch the latch and free his other hand. He stood his back a mess of scars and fresh lashes, scabbed over or bleeding sluggishly, and his chest just as dotted with wounds. His stomach was free of scars, having three straight months of being left alone to allow his innate magic a chance at healing. But his legs trembled, blood and semen streaking across his skin beneath the leather he had conjured, and he kept his arse against the wall because every time someone looked at him he clenched up in fear. His mouth was sewn up, sticky with come and lips covered with dried blood and that strange thick thread that Sigyn had not been able to cut. One eye was bruised so much that it was almost like Loki was wearing an eye patch, dark against the paleness of the rest of his skin, and his cheekbones had sunk in from starvation and his eyes squinted in the light that had been denied to him for so long.
People passed. They watched and they stared and they pointed, and all the while Loki tried to free himself of the last handcuff, tried to release his magic so that he had some small chance of defending himself if Thanos caught up to him. Eventually, unfortunately, one man that had been standing in that very spot over a year ago, as the Chitauri rained death and destruction down upon his head and the rubble that had buried his wife, spoke.
“That’s Loki!” He whispered, pointing at the fallen God. His voice was harsh, even in its softness because there was so much emotion behind it, and he was too afraid to speak louder in case it startled the God into leaving. “THAT’S LOKI!” He screamed at last, when after a moment no one moved to help him apprehend the criminal who had killed his wife. He had watched Loki fly passed a year ago, as he tried to dig his wife out from under the fallen stone and cement, and the God had laughed, horned-helmeted head thrown back, as Iron Man chased him across the sky.
People surged forward at that. No one thought to question, or check, or eye Loki a little longer to make sure. Mob mentality took over, and they swamped him. Three or four of them got in a good hit, a punch to the face, or a kick in the groin, or a briefcase into the stomach, before Loki managed to teleport away. It was wonky, and uncontrolled, and wrong, and he landed in a pile in an alley, trying to breathe through his nose accompanied by some horrible gasping sounds that couldn’t escape from his mouth though they tried. Loki hunched down, seated on the floor, with his knees pulled up to his chest and his arms wrapped tightly around them.
He wasn’t sure how long he sat there for, shaking and too afraid to stand up and face more people who would harm him. Loki tried not to cry, because he had done more than enough of that over the last year already. He was free now. Stranded on Midgard, at the mercy of those who hated him, but he could move, once the cuff was off he could go to England or Asia or Canada (because didn’t the Canadians hate Americas, so shouldn’t they thank him for his failed attack on Manhattan?). He would find somewhere to start again, glamour his face once he had magic enough to waste on that, and he would blend in. Loki would heal, and survive and prepare. If Thanos came after him again, Loki swore to himself he’d be ready this time; he would not be taken by surprise again, never again. Hurt and humiliation and suffering had moulded Loki into what he was, into who he was; it was something that had always been with him, a part of him, intended to break him, though it never had. And it would not this time either, Loki told himself, even as he gave in to his desire to cry.
“Are you ok?” A voice called, soft and warm and safe sounding, from the mouth of the alley. When the human who was asking was within reach, walking cautiously forward, hands held out in front of himself, offering themselves to Loki for his comfort, Loki did not flinch away as he had from Sigyn and those humans before. Instead, he looked at the green eyed, dark haired man before him, and Loki threw himself into his arms. The strangers hands held him gently, afraid to touch him in case they caused pain, but they were a warm presence just above the skin of his back, rather than on it, and Loki couldn’t decide whether to press back against the hands or press forward against the body before him, the hard chest and the hard swell of his stomach and… what?
Loki drew back sharply, glancing up and down over the stranger, between his obviously masculine features, and then to his very pregnant belly. He wanted to question him, to ask how this stranger could bear it, carrying someone else’s thing inside of him, unwanted and unwelcome, but Loki could not speak, so he stared instead.
Harry laughed softly, used to that sort of reaction, because the potion Snape had created wasn’t even two years old yet, and not widely known. “I’ll tell you mine, if you tell me yours,” Harry offered with a one-shouldered shrug. There was a half-smile on his lips, the feel of Loki’s half bound magic swirling wildly around them, on his skin and in his hair, like it was a part of him too and was trying to find its way home. Loki glanced up from Harry’s stomach, eyes fixing on the same green eyes as the child Hela had brought to visit him once had. Loki swallowed, and Harry’s green eyes slid down to the stitched upon his mouth, pale pink lips swollen and bruised and bloody, and Harry’s face tightened in anger.
“What the fuck?”
And didn’t that just sum everything up perfectly, Loki thought, holding back a snort of laughter.
XXX
Thanks again guys. Let me know what you thought?
Ok. Take them. Take them all. All of my feels and all of my creys, take them away! Because Loki is sick of them, and they are KILLING me. Sobbing uncontrollably… Needs to go back on tumblr and find happy frostiron feels now.
Words: 5,895
Chapter 3
NEXT CHAPTER HERE
Whoo, chapter two. And it didn’t take that long, and it’s also a longer chapter. I think the next one will be fairly short, but the one after that will probably be gigantic, so it will take longer to get around to finishing! Patience is a virtue? Thanks for all of the feedback, and everyone who read the story and enjoyed it.
“Redemption Songs”
Disclaimer: Harry Potter is property of JK Rowling, Bloomsbury, Warner Bros, et all. Avengers, Thor, Loki, etc belong to Marvel, Stan Lee, et co. I make no money from this and own nothing, don’t sue.
Summary: [HP/Loki] Loki escapes from Asgard during his punishment, and finds himself back in New York City where people still remember his face. Well, except for one man, who doesn’t know of him or the Avengers and has a strange habit of trying to save people who are beyond redemption. Like Loki, Harry has known pain and suffering, and was Mother once. And like Harry, Loki now has someone who wants to save him.
Warnings: Slash. HP/Loki. Post-Avengers. Violence. Language. Torture. Typos. Creepiness. Eventual happy ending. AU Harry Potter ending. Past LV/HP. Mpreg. Past rape. Lots of Loki feels. Angst.
Rating: NC-17. (There should be a higher rating, just for my Loki feels)
A/N: Title is the name of a Bob Marley song: it’s good, youtube it. Also. I might have broken Loki (with all his creys and my feels and his hurts), so he’s bottoming for this fic…
XXX
“Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery; none but ourselves can free our minds.” - Bob Marley.
“…love has within it a redemptive power. And there is a power there that eventually transforms individuals.” - Martin Luther King, Jr.
“However, since He took the most horrific death to redeem us, He showed us in fact that suffering and pain have great power.” - E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly.
Words: 5,523
Chapter 2
June 21st 2013. Asgard.
He should have expected it really, should have seen it coming a long time ago. His defeat had been unexpected, Thor’s arrival on Midgard unwelcome, but even with those two unplanned for factors Loki had never truly considered the possibility of Thanos ever actually punishing him. Odin would punish him, surely, though Frigga and Thor would defend Loki from the more barbaric of Asgardian tortures. The humans would surely have seen him punished, humiliated and brought low (so much lower than he had already been brought by the so called Avengers), and so Loki had simply chosen to let Thor take him back to Asgard. He could have escaped from Stark’s tower, he could have disappeared to another city anywhere on earth, but then Thanos would have been able to reach him and SHIELD might have eventually tracked him down. But on Asgard, his only real threat lay in the form of his not-father.
Loki should have known that he could never (had never) escape that lightly from a mess of his own creation. When he had cut off Sif’s hair, he had thought he would not be punished, because he had been trying to make her see how vain Thor was, how bad a match for her he was. And then when he had won her hair back from the dwarves and escaped their deal, he had never expected Thor to help them punish him, to sew his mouth shut, to pin him to the floor and hold him there while Loki screamed and struggled and begged to be defended. But Thor had, just like he had told the Midgardians of how Loki was terrified of being silenced permanently; like Sif had failed to see any of his good intentions and allowed the dwarves’ punishment to go ahead without protest, though she had later asked for his forgiveness for doing such. Loki had always thought himself too smart to get caught in his own trap, snared by his own schemes. Yet, he always seemed to find himself humiliated and hurt, though he never saw it coming in time.
But he should have.
He should have.
Thanos had promised him pain unlike anything Loki had ever experienced before. The promises of longing for something as sweet as death, the words dripped in his ear like venom every time Loki attempted to meditate, had kept him awake for nights on end while he was upon Midgard. To think that Thanos would not make good on his word was foolish and Loki cursed himself for being so naive, so arrogant as to believe he had slipped the Eldar’s grasp.
The Tesseract had controlled each of the humans Loki had enslaved, had bound them to Thanos’ will. Just like it had infected Loki’s mind, mingled with his hurt and his fear and his anger, and driven him to lengths he had never gone to before, pushed upon him Thanos’ desire to dominate all life form and fanned the flames of jealousy that already existed within Loki’s heart. But beneath every part of his actions that were his, the Tesseract forced thoughts that were Thanos’. Though he had left calmly with Thor, thinking himself safe while upon Asgard, Loki should have known that the Tesseract would exert its master’s will even here.
His guards were once men who had trained under his watch, fought for Asgard at his command. They had been friends and comrades once, though embarrassed as they had been when Loki had let the Jotnar slip into Asgard on their watch during Thor’s coronation, each had been as dedicated to Loki their King as they had previously been to Odin before. But now, with the Tesseract held in the weapons vault above their heads, Loki’s guards had turned from old friends to prison guards, and then as Thanos sank further and further into their minds, to torturers and rapists. They were the ones who made Loki scream and beg and cry in his every waking moment, and in his dreams Thanos and the Other were there, whispering into his ear, words of comfort and praise, congratulating him on being such good entertainment, on being a great fuck though pity they weren’t close by to try him for themselves. They consoled him, promised him an end soon, and then Thanos’ hand would strike across his face and Loki would snap awake with a cry, on his knees once more as another of his tormentors forced their way inside of his body with a grunt.
This was the punishment that Thor had refused to let Odin subject his brother to. These were the actions Frigga was so determinately against happening to her son. To be broken in the dungeons of Asgard, in any way deemed necessary (or enjoyable for the tormentors), was a punishment inflicted upon the worst of the worst, traitors, and what was Loki now if not a traitor to the throne of Asgard? To the brother he had killed and the father he had usurped? Frigga and Thor had argued for a lessor punishment: isolation. Two years of isolation, to think over his deeds and mistakes and to be ready to repent before the All Father and his family once the two years were over. He was to have no visitors, no word from those who still professed to love him, but he was not to be harmed in anyway. And yet, Odin’s first sentence, the one his wife had refused to stand behind, had been the one to come to pass. Thanos’ will controlled the guards, Thanos’ desire for vengeance and pain, but Odin must have known, Heimdallr must have seen.
It was his punishment, Loki thought on the rare nights where he was left in peace or at the least used once only then left alone to crumble. Heimdallr must have seen, of course he must, because Loki was using none of his powers now to block himself from Heimdallr’s sight like he had done before. Heimdallr did not tell other peoples’ secrets, unless they threatened Asgard, and what was Loki’s suffering in the scheme of things? Was he not supposed to have been bound to a rock until Ragnarök anyway? Could this be it, he sometimes wondered, and Heimdallr did not tell for fear that Loki’s release would unleash the force of the prophecy upon the gods; Fenrir would break free of his shackles to devour the All Father, and Jörmungandr would rise from the ocean of Midgard to swallow it whole, and Hela would welcome all of the Æsir into Helheimr until it was time for their world to spin again, anew. Heimdallr must fear the twilight of the Gods, or he must still be angry at Loki for freezing him upon the Bifrost years ago, decades ago in the scheme of things, and Loki did not think Heimdallr to be as petty as he himself was.
Had his mother or Thor not once asked how Loki was getting on? They that would love him, or so they said, had they never thought to check? Or perhaps they did, and Heimdallr had lied, told them that Loki was enjoying his creature comforts, the dirt and dank and stench of the dungeons, and the taste of semen upon his tongue, the slick feel of it in his arse, the thought that there was so much of it inside him that it had made its way, like salmon swimming backwards, into his stomach, sitting there like lead and making him queasy. But Loki was enjoying it, had Heimdallr said? Loki lived for the attention, he had said once before, so maybe Heimdallr thought this was another of Loki’s games, an attempt to seek pity and early freedom maybe.
But Loki hated it. Hated every one of the men that touched him, who would take liberties with his body, and every one of those he once knew who had followed Odin’s orders and not once come to see him. And he hated that he knew deep inside of his heart, when it was still feebly beating, that Heimdallr had seen, and Odin would have been the first to question him (before Frigga, before Thor, or Sif who was almost still his friend, and Sigyn though she had been tricked into marriage with him was still the mother of his child and cared a little for him). Loki knew Odin would have sworn Heimdallr to secrecy, and Heimdallr, who had sworn allegiance to his King would keep Loki’s torment a secret unto the grave.
And Loki… Loki was left, abandoned, in Hel.
The guards had first bound Loki’s magic, with cuffs of steel around his wrists and the silver muzzle Stark had created across his face. Odin had replaced the first set of handcuffs with another, a stronger pair, though both had to be present for the magic to properly be suppressed. One guard, one day, after growing weary of Loki whimpering his cries behind the contraption of metal and silver, wanting to know how loud Loki Silvertongue could be, had wrenched the muzzle from his face with the strength of an Æsir; all of the dungeon heard Loki’s screams that night, every cry and grunt and breathless pant, as he struggled to stay on his knees and not end up with his face mashed against the floor, with his arms bound behind his back, and no way to catch himself. The guard in charge had entered his cell the following morning, found the broken muzzle, and had Loki whipped in punishment for trying to escape. Thanos had seen inside of his head, seen and experienced all of Loki’s fears, and it was Thanos’ voice that came from the guard’s mouth as he ordered two others to sew Loki’s lips shut. And though Loki had screamed and struggled and cried for mercy, two men had pinned him down, while Thanos’ host sewed up his mouth, fingers and thread bloody and Loki’s face streaked with tears.
They took out the stitches when they were in the mood to hear him scream. When it was time to eat, meals left at the top of the stairs leading down to the dungeons and later collected so that no one but those under Thanos’ control were ever in the dungeons, they stitched him closed again. Always eating in front of him, taunting Loki with food he could not have no matter how much his stomach rumbled for it.
They came to him another day, almost eight months after his failed attempt to overthrow the earth. They carried with them a potion, one that Loki and Frigga used to make together. It was one that allowed those who were infertile to conceive. Frigga, who blessed unions with prosperity and children and happiness, and Loki, who was magic, who did magic and made magic: together they had created this potion, years ago, when Loki was still learning the art. Only Frigga could have made it now, though whether she knew it was for her son, Loki didn’t want to think about.
Instead, he turned his face away, pressed his lips tightly together, even after the thread had been cut away, and tried desperately to avoid drinking the potion. The leader forced it down his throat eventually, and then forced his cock inside of him; his seed and stain, making Loki feel as dirty on the inside as he was on the out. Thanos knew all of his fears; he had seen inside his head, his memories. And though Loki loved Sleipnir as he did his other children, innocently and without fault, whole heartedly, Loki hated how he had been conceived: Svadilfari hunting him down through the trees and undergrowth, his legs burning with exhaustion, but fear pushing him on, always on because being caught was not a viable alternative. Until he was caught. And mounted. And forced. Loki had hid away for nine months, unable to change from mare to man, and when the child had come, his eight-legged foal, it took Loki three days to work up the courage to touch Sleipnir and remember how he had come to be.
Again, a pregnancy had been forced upon him, Thanos’ seed this time (though it was an Asgardian’s body that did the deed, Loki had no doubt that somehow Thanos had managed to impregnate him himself). Another lash upon Loki’s back for his failure.
For three months, he changed and grew. Pain blossomed in his stomach, unnatural things happening within him, (because the potion had never been given to a male before, and Loki had been female when Svadilfari took him), as the child grew within him. Thanos whispered to him in his dreams, hands to Loki’s stomach that was barely beginning to swell at three months gone; he told Loki how pleased he was, how well Loki would do as his brood mare, and Loki got sick on Thanos’ feet at the very thought.
The guards were careful not to touch his stomach, content to let this be another punishment in lieu of their usual beatings, though the rapes did not stop. Bile rose in Loki’s throat every time hands brushed his belly, fingers soft and cautious, pressing here and there as he was rutted into viciously from behind.
Loki choked once, on his back beneath two of them, mouth sewn shut once again so there was nowhere for the vomit to go but back down. As he coughed and heaved and sputtered, clenching in pain and fear around the cocks within him, one torturer came and the other thinking Loki was trying to buck them off punched him hard in the stomach. No one spoke of Loki’s miscarriage, though the one who punched him never visited his cell again. Loki felt guilt, eating him up from the inside, at the relief he felt as Thanos’ child bled from him (it was not his child, like Sleipnir had not been his child until the foal was right there in front of him, sweet and innocent and relying on him for protection). But that Loki was happy at the loss only proved he was a monster, truly abominable, as Thanos regularly pointed out now, for whom but a monster would blame an innocent child for their parents’ sins?
A month had passed since then, fourteen months since his imprisonment, and though at first Loki had held out hope for a rescue he had long given up such foolish dreams. He was battered and bruised and broken, used in every possible way until there was nothing left of him to be taken, no small part of him left untarnished or dirtied. He was all gone, used up, nothing but a vast empty sucking hollow, a void of darkness where even his previous anger and hatred no longer tread. It was all about pain now.
Loki had screamed a lot for Thanos, for Thor, for anyone who might have the power to end this, until his voice was hoarse and his tongue flecked with blood from his throat and all he could do was rasp until he was given water or his lips were sealed again. Loki screamed sometimes to Hela, his legitimate child with his ex-wife Sigyn, who ruled the land of the dead, and he begged Hela to take him to her bosom, to free him from this pain in the only way she would be able. Hela had whispered back to him once, in his dreams, with her pale hands on his gaunt face, and her mismatched eyes holding his own green desperate gaze.
“It is not your time yet,” she told him softly, before repeating the words Death had once whispered to another green eyed man. The right time was yet to come, she told him, he only had to preserver a little longer, to bear with the loss and rise above it, she breathed in his ear, breath like silk and smelling of honey and Loki had leant into her embrace, clutching his daughter to him as he shook with tears.
At Hela’s side, a tiny child looked up at Loki, with wide green eyes and a mop of messy black hair. Potter’s child would have been almost three months old, but here, in death, he was almost a year: six months in the womb and five outside of it, and he looked so very much like Loki as a child that the God flinched at the sight of him.
“Is that?” He asked, unable to voice the words that caught in his throat and took his breath away in fear.
“No. This is the child of another. He was mourned.” Hela ran a gentle hand through the child’s hair, a soft smile on her grey-ish pale face. “It is not your time yet,” she repeated, before pressing both hands firmly against Loki’s flat stomach, “but soon, father, soon.”
“Never!” Loki hissed, his eyes narrowed as he jerked away from his daughter’s touch. “Never again,” he promised, as Hela sent him back to waking.
She whispered then, into the dreams of her mother, of Sigyn who was half Æsir and half Fae of Alfheimr. Sigyn who had so hated how Hela looked because she blamed herself and her unknown father’s genes for how unnatural her child had turned out to appear. Sigyn, who loved Hela regardless and mostly just hated herself and her shortcomings and Loki for getting her pregnant on the only night they had ever had sex during their sham of a marriage. But Sigyn pulled Hela into her arms when she appeared, smiling sadly at the mismatched eyes and the waxen grey face and the hair on the right which was black and on the left a bone white as if the life had been sucked out of it.
“Hello, mother,” Hela whispered, Loki’s dead child clutched against her chest. The child, genderless and still, was tiny though it was three months old in death and should have been bigger than the palm of her hand. But that was what malnourishment did, Hela supposed. “This is my sister, or,” she paused to glanced down at the unfortunate creature in her hands, “she would have been.”
Sigyn’s eyebrows rose up into her hairline, and she gasped down at the child who looked to be fully human or Æsir. “How?” She tried to think of anyone who had spoken of Loki in the last year, anyone who might have been pregnant by him, unless he had assumed the form of Lady Loki and allowed himself to be taken. The child appeared to be three months old, but time moved differently on Helheimr, Sigyn knew. Loki would often visit their child and be gone for a few days, though he would return and tell stories and stories that amounted to years’ worth of adventures and experiences. “How old?”
“Father was three months gone when she died.”
The cogs turned in Sigyn’s mind, and she gasped as she came to the only conclusion she could. “He has taken up with one of the guards?” It was unsurprising that Loki had managed to seduce someone, probably the one in charge, in order to better his living standards for the duration of the punishment. But he would not have given up a child willingly, not unless he had not known something was wrong, or he had asked for a healer and had been refused, or unless…
“Was he-” Sigyn bit her bottom lip. She glanced away from the child and her child and over towards the bed that Hela had been conceived in, the one Loki and she had shared just once. He had sat beside her on that bed the day she found out about her pregnancy and begged her with tears in his eyes to let him keep the child, even if she did not want it, he did, desperately, and he nor the child would ever bother her again if she granted him that one boon. And she had laid her head in his lap, six months pregnant; as he reached down to stroke her bump while he told her all about Sleipnir and how Loki had hated being pregnant, swapping stories of nausea and dizziness and tiredness. He had confessed his fear, blinding terror, that raged within him as Sleipnir grew, the horrific pain as he gave birth alone in a clearing, trying to keep those horrible tortured animal noises from leaving his throat in case someone heard him, and confessed how he loved his children, all of them, the one Sigyn carried and the ones Odin had cast out for being monsters and the one he had borne, though Loki had hated Sleipnir while he bore him. He had confessed, softly, his face pressed to his arm to muffle the horrible words, that if he had lost Sleipnir before his birth Loki would have been glad, because he hadn’t loved his son yet, hadn’t known him, and so would not have missed him or the reminder of his rape.
“Yes.” Hela said simply, hands cradling the unwanted child to her chest. The girl let out a cry, her first noise since appearing in Helheimr, and once the noise had stopped, Hela and the child were both gone. Sigyn found herself sitting up alone in her bed, her nightdress soaked with sweat while she clutched shaking hands over her fast beating heart.
Loki had long let go of the foolish belief that someone might care enough to save him. He had long stopped hoping for comfort or reprieve or safety. Redemption was beyond his grasp. Rescue was never coming. There was only pain left. Though he told himself he was ok with that, that he had accepted this for it was all he would ever have, all he deserved, his heart still jumped into his throat with anticipation as the door swung open, and instead of guards, a woman in her nightdress stood shaking in the threshold. Sigyn had a cloak around her shoulders, its hood pulled down to hide her face, but Loki could see the way her eyes darted around frantically. She gasped as she got a good look at him, naked and feeble, shaking all over and covered in blood and grime and waste. Seed ran down the backs of his thighs, and had dried around his ear and chin, and the blood was fresh upon his lips as they had been sewn shut again that night after the guards had taken their fill of his throat.
“Oh Loki!” Sigyn gasped. She rushed towards him, careful though to leave the door open and not risk locking herself inside as well. Loki looked at her, really looked, and he could see the pain etched upon her every feature, the sadness and pity and anger. She did not fake her reaction to seeing him, and she had not come to hurt him. And for a moment, until she pulled out a dagger, Loki hoped.
“Hold still!” She chastised him, as he kicked out at her. He scrambled back on his arse, hands behind his back clawing at the ground to pull himself away from the knife. “I’m trying to help. Hold still!” The blade was at his mouth, but it wasn’t cutting through the thread. It was like the last time, Loki thought despondently, when the dwarves had stitched his lips together, and only dwarf weapons could cut him free.
“The sceptre,” he tried to tell her, but his lips moved less than a centimetre apart from one another and no recognizable sound escaped them. If Thanos had been the one to bind him, then surely the sceptre that Thanos had gifted him with would free his mouth? But he could not tell Sigyn this, not until his mouth was unbound, so he silently allowed her to turn him over so she could jiggle the tip of the knife in the lock of one handcuff. It popped free after a moment, though it felt like hours to Loki, who lay tense beneath his ex-wife, ears open to any and all sounds that might spell trouble for them.
“Thank you,” he signed to her, having learnt to do so the first time he had been unable to speak. It was before he had married her, but during their marriage, though there was no love, a friendship had formed, and she had asked him to teach her so that they would have their own secret language (because no one other than Sif or Frigga had bothered to learn it when Loki did). “You should go, before they come back.” He signed again. Sigyn passed him the knife, and Loki fiddled with the second cuff. He offered her a nod of thanks and one of goodbye as she slipped back out of the cell and to her bedroom.
Sigyn barricaded herself inside, in her tower room beside Loki’s old room, a hallway away from the King and Queen, but she trembled, wide awake all night in fear that her part would be uncovered and she punished like Loki had been punished. She did not allow herself to relax until the alarm was sounded, and Frigga knocked upon her door to inform her that Loki Laufeyson had escaped from Asgard. Sigyn did not sleep for two days, tense and agitated whenever anyone bad mouthed her ex-husband, worried and terrified whenever Loki’s guards stood too close to her in any room.
But the morning after Loki’s disappearance, each of them collapsed in a flash of blue light, and when they woke from their healing sleeps, not one of them could remember a thing about the past year and two months. Their eyes were no longer blue, and Thanos no longer had a purpose upon Asgard, because the only one with the power to teleport between worlds was no longer on the world that housed the Infinity Gauntlet, and so Thanos set his slaves free. But his hooks stayed latched within Loki’s mind, and Thanos followed him back to earth, to where he landed, naked and unable to stand, armed with only a knife at the foot of the rebuilt Stark Tower.
Loki still had one cuff on his wrist, and it was making his magic unpredictable and slow. His injuries, his hunger and exhaustion were not helping either, and each attempt to perform his art was lacklustre and shoddy and Loki cringed, because if anyone had seen him they would have called him a fraud. He looked like a petty con artist, attempting to trick people out of their coin with smoke shows and flashing lights, but it was all he could manage and it was enough to conjure himself a pair of trousers, though the shirt he had created turned to brightly coloured dust as it settled on his skin.
Loki had the knife against his left wrist now, twisting and turning, trying to catch the latch and free his other hand. He stood his back a mess of scars and fresh lashes, scabbed over or bleeding sluggishly, and his chest just as dotted with wounds. His stomach was free of scars, having three straight months of being left alone to allow his innate magic a chance at healing. But his legs trembled, blood and semen streaking across his skin beneath the leather he had conjured, and he kept his arse against the wall because every time someone looked at him he clenched up in fear. His mouth was sewn up, sticky with come and lips covered with dried blood and that strange thick thread that Sigyn had not been able to cut. One eye was bruised so much that it was almost like Loki was wearing an eye patch, dark against the paleness of the rest of his skin, and his cheekbones had sunk in from starvation and his eyes squinted in the light that had been denied to him for so long.
People passed. They watched and they stared and they pointed, and all the while Loki tried to free himself of the last handcuff, tried to release his magic so that he had some small chance of defending himself if Thanos caught up to him. Eventually, unfortunately, one man that had been standing in that very spot over a year ago, as the Chitauri rained death and destruction down upon his head and the rubble that had buried his wife, spoke.
“That’s Loki!” He whispered, pointing at the fallen God. His voice was harsh, even in its softness because there was so much emotion behind it, and he was too afraid to speak louder in case it startled the God into leaving. “THAT’S LOKI!” He screamed at last, when after a moment no one moved to help him apprehend the criminal who had killed his wife. He had watched Loki fly passed a year ago, as he tried to dig his wife out from under the fallen stone and cement, and the God had laughed, horned-helmeted head thrown back, as Iron Man chased him across the sky.
People surged forward at that. No one thought to question, or check, or eye Loki a little longer to make sure. Mob mentality took over, and they swamped him. Three or four of them got in a good hit, a punch to the face, or a kick in the groin, or a briefcase into the stomach, before Loki managed to teleport away. It was wonky, and uncontrolled, and wrong, and he landed in a pile in an alley, trying to breathe through his nose accompanied by some horrible gasping sounds that couldn’t escape from his mouth though they tried. Loki hunched down, seated on the floor, with his knees pulled up to his chest and his arms wrapped tightly around them.
He wasn’t sure how long he sat there for, shaking and too afraid to stand up and face more people who would harm him. Loki tried not to cry, because he had done more than enough of that over the last year already. He was free now. Stranded on Midgard, at the mercy of those who hated him, but he could move, once the cuff was off he could go to England or Asia or Canada (because didn’t the Canadians hate Americas, so shouldn’t they thank him for his failed attack on Manhattan?). He would find somewhere to start again, glamour his face once he had magic enough to waste on that, and he would blend in. Loki would heal, and survive and prepare. If Thanos came after him again, Loki swore to himself he’d be ready this time; he would not be taken by surprise again, never again. Hurt and humiliation and suffering had moulded Loki into what he was, into who he was; it was something that had always been with him, a part of him, intended to break him, though it never had. And it would not this time either, Loki told himself, even as he gave in to his desire to cry.
“Are you ok?” A voice called, soft and warm and safe sounding, from the mouth of the alley. When the human who was asking was within reach, walking cautiously forward, hands held out in front of himself, offering themselves to Loki for his comfort, Loki did not flinch away as he had from Sigyn and those humans before. Instead, he looked at the green eyed, dark haired man before him, and Loki threw himself into his arms. The strangers hands held him gently, afraid to touch him in case they caused pain, but they were a warm presence just above the skin of his back, rather than on it, and Loki couldn’t decide whether to press back against the hands or press forward against the body before him, the hard chest and the hard swell of his stomach and… what?
Loki drew back sharply, glancing up and down over the stranger, between his obviously masculine features, and then to his very pregnant belly. He wanted to question him, to ask how this stranger could bear it, carrying someone else’s thing inside of him, unwanted and unwelcome, but Loki could not speak, so he stared instead.
Harry laughed softly, used to that sort of reaction, because the potion Snape had created wasn’t even two years old yet, and not widely known. “I’ll tell you mine, if you tell me yours,” Harry offered with a one-shouldered shrug. There was a half-smile on his lips, the feel of Loki’s half bound magic swirling wildly around them, on his skin and in his hair, like it was a part of him too and was trying to find its way home. Loki glanced up from Harry’s stomach, eyes fixing on the same green eyes as the child Hela had brought to visit him once had. Loki swallowed, and Harry’s green eyes slid down to the stitched upon his mouth, pale pink lips swollen and bruised and bloody, and Harry’s face tightened in anger.
“What the fuck?”
And didn’t that just sum everything up perfectly, Loki thought, holding back a snort of laughter.
XXX
Thanks again guys. Let me know what you thought?
Ok. Take them. Take them all. All of my feels and all of my creys, take them away! Because Loki is sick of them, and they are KILLING me. Sobbing uncontrollably… Needs to go back on tumblr and find happy frostiron feels now.
Words: 5,895
Chapter 3
NEXT CHAPTER HERE