Chapter Text
Despite all the weirdness that’s been happening in the last couple of days, the news catches them by surprise.
It’s been a strange week, that’s undeniably true.
Thor was sighted on Earth but didn’t even come to say hello. There was some sort of huge alien creature terrorizing people in Wembley Park, somehow still avoiding capture. An alien spaceship crashed in the middle of a campus in Greenwich, multiple seismic stations registered tremors where no seismic activity was ever registered before, there were gravitational anomalies, and entire buildings disappearing, to reappear a few feet away from their original position a day later. And that all on top of multiple missing aircrafts, vessels, people, and livestock no one could come up with any explanation for so far.
And, while a single event like that wouldn’t exactly shock an experienced agent of SHIELD, it all happening all at once, wherever one bothered to look around the globe, with seemingly no rule or logic, was enough to get even Natasha slightly concerned.
So, when, in the middle of dinner – in Stark’s penthouse, which still serves as a temporary HQ of the Avengers Initiative – all their phones ping new messages at once, nobody is too keen on finding out what it could be, this time. Because odds are it’s only going to go downhill from where they are.
Stark caves in first, his curiosity taking the best of him once more despite his obviously sour mood – they still have no working theory about what is going on or why – and retrieves his phone from his pocket. His eyebrows ride up.
“What is it?” Clint asks. His gaze is trained on his plate as he is unenthusiastically kicking a meatball around it with a fork.
“Loki’s back.”
The atmosphere in the room changes immediately.
“Fuck,” Clint utters, drops his fork, and hurriedly fishes his phone out of his pocket.
Natasha does the same.
The message is from Fury and it’s as cursory as it could possibly be, given the subject.
Loki landed back on Earth two hours ago. I’ve got the situation under control but I do ask you to remain on standby in case your assistance is required, it says.
“Fuck,” Clint mutters again. “I should’ve known this bastard had something to do with it.”
“Can we find anything more about it?” Bruce asks, looking at Natasha.
“Should we?” she says, not hoping for much. Yes, she would rather take Nick’s declarations at face value and leave his current super-secret team to worry about it, but the connection between the general weirdness going on and Loki is already apparent and the chance the others would be willing to leave it like that is non-existent. Especially Stark, who is already all bristled up with the lack of answers and who does a bad job hiding the panicked twitching of his fingers. The reason for that is also not a mystery to Natasha. As much as he’s trying to keep it from them, he still looks shaken each time someone even mentions the Battle of New York. She wouldn’t be surprised at all if he got diagnosed with PTSD, if he ever admitted he needed help and went to see a therapist.
“Hmm,” Stark hums and scratches his chin. As per usual these days, he’s been working late and hauled his ass out of bed only in time to join them for lunch, skipping shaving. Possibly showering as well. “Jarvis? Anything in SHIELD’s files?”
“I’ve allowed myself to start looking the moment the message was delivered, Sir. So far, the database hasn’t been officially updated. But I believe I found a surveillance recording from a third-party source that matches the area of recent SHIELD activity.”
“Put it on,” Stark says and waves his hand at the TV. The screen blinks to life.
The footage is of the low resolution, grainy kind and it’s impossible to see the details. It shows what looks like a slice of a parking lot at the backside of some sort of establishment – a restaurant joint or a shop perhaps, judging by the fenced-in backyard visible in the corner of the frame, filled with crates and trash bags. For a couple of seconds nothing happens.
Then the camera shakes and something crashes into the pavement, with so much force that it cracks the concrete around the point of impact and sends loose trash and pieces of cardboard flying away with the resulting shockwave.
Then Natasha understands why Jarvis found it relevant, because the object moves, unfurling its limbs and revealing a roughly human-shaped form, even though there’s no way any human would survive such a fall.
Clint grunts something that sounds much like a curse.
Loki doesn’t get up. Doesn’t even try to get up, from the look of things, just grovels away from the hole slowly, leaving a dark smudge on the concrete behind. It’s impossible to tell for sure from the recording, but it looks suspiciously like blood to Natasha. There seems to be quite a lot of it, which only confirms it cannot be just some human, because no one can lose so much blood so quickly and still be conscious, lest moving.
Then there’s a movement in the corner of the frame and another person shows up, running. They approach the hole in the pavement and fall into a crouch, reaching out. A wave of green light bursts out, followed by another, much stronger shockwave. The feed turns to static and the recording ends.
“The feed cuts off after that,” Jarvis informs. “I also found accounts of power outages that were reported to the grid operator that match the time and location where this was taken. It appears that the resulting surge took out most electronic devices in two blocks area.”
“The fucker can fire EMPs now?” Clint grumbles.
“To be fair, it looked more like some sort of self-defense mechanism,” Stark muses.
“Any casualties?” Steve asks.
“Nothing that could be linked directly to this event at this moment,” Jarvis says. “There’s one injury though. Kyle Jennings, aged seventeen, has been brought to a local hospital roughly fifteen minutes after the recording was made, but his injuries aren’t classified as life-threatening: a broken arm and a suspected concussion.”
“That could be life-threatening,” Bruce observes.
There’s a moment of silence as they all stare at the TV, now showing only static.
“It looks like the second coming of the wannabe benevolent ruler of the human race was a lot less graceful than the first one,” Stark comments in the end.
“It wasn’t that graceful to begin with,” Clint grunts.
“Huh?” Stark mumbles, looking at Clint. “I thought you didn’t remember anything.”
“I never said that.”
Natasha is pretty sure Clint has said exactly that, each time anyone was foolish enough to ask him anything about his time under the influence of Loki’s scepter. Stark probably realizes that too, because he doesn’t push. There are some common courtesies they all follow, no matter what, and that extends to not discussing one’s traumatic experiences in front of the group.
The unspoken question still hangs in the air for a moment.
“That’s not the point,” Natasha says. She knows what it is that Clint isn’t telling them – she had seen the recordings from the Pegasus facility and read the transcripts of Clint’s testimonies, because it was a part of her job to know – and it doesn’t change anything about their current situation. “Either way, it looks like the situation is under control for now. We shouldn’t fuck with things that aren’t broken.”
Stark breathes out an unhappy huff.
“What, would you prefer another attack?”
“No, but–“ he starts and cuts himself off, then sighs. “Yeah, you’re right. Count your blessings and so on. So, if that’s settled, I guess I’ll go back to my work.” He gets up, brushes the breadcrumbs off his t-shirt, gives them an awkward handwave and leaves the room.
“I’m going to go… I have, uhm, stuff to do,” Bruce says.
Steve makes an excuse as well, leaving only Clint and Natasha sitting at the dinner table.
“They are totally going to fuck with it,” Clint observes.
“Yep.”
---
When the jet takes off from the rooftop ten minutes later Natasha feels only a small pang of regret. Yes, she and Clint are still employees of a governmental agency and going against orders could mean risking being court-marshaled, but so is Steve Rogers and Stark and Banner didn’t bat an eye when they included him.
Then again, nobody of a sound mind would be brave enough to drag Captain fucking America for doing what he decided was right. She and Clint on the other hand…
Yeah, it was probably a good call. Besides, she knows Fury well enough to realize how it’s all going to end. The Avengers are not much more than Fury’s tools, his soldiers, and it all goes smoothly as long as Fury is making all the important calls, and he is as aware of that as she is. Stark and the others dropping in uninvited will end up with Fury’s proverbial foot on their butts and as a massive waste of time.
---
Stark and the others aren’t back by midnight, so she retreats to her rooms. Well, the guest suite, technically speaking, the one Stark doesn’t care enough to kick her out of. Natasha isn’t going to say it out loud, but she kind of got used to living – or almost living, as she is still renting her Hoboken flat as a backup – in a skyscraper in the middle of Manhattan. She isn’t looking forward to the move.
The new Avengers Compound is mostly complete and the first date of the move was set for mid-August. It’s been postponed, then postponed again, because saving the world got in the way, but it has to happen. Stark claims they are moving because the Tower was never meant to house the Initiative and isn’t suitable for it, but he’s lying. She saw the plans he submitted to the Department of Buildings, and – if that wasn’t enough – she saw enough of the Tower itself to realize it was never meant to be just Stark’s home and office.
Still, she realizes why he changed his mind, too. As long as they are doing what they are doing, they will be a target. And staying in the middle of one of the most densely populated cities on Earth means risking collateral damage unnecessarily, a lesson they all learned the hard way a year and a half ago.
That’s why Stark considered the new compound a priority. Still, the timeline he managed to push was quite astonishing. It took SHIELD – with all the government funding and high-priority contracts – three years to finish the Long Island facility. Stark managed a similar feat in just a year and some, from purchasing the land to the core elements of the compound being finished. There are still plans for extensive, future additions, but, as it stands, the new base is ready for operations, more or less, and the new date – two weeks from now, at the end of September – is meant to be the final one.
It's a logical step and she would have no arguments to argue against it, but she is still going to miss the view.
---
A phone call wakes her a bit past two am.
It’s Stark, and she is fully alert even before she answers.
“What’s going on?”
“Hi,” says Stark, in that overly cheerful manner he often uses to mask stress or joke about matters that shouldn’t be joked about.
She groans. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, currently. And I'm doing all I can to ensure it stays that way.”
“But?”
“I’m gonna ask you to meet me at the compound.”
“What for?”
“That’s a long story. I’ll tell you when we meet. Could you be there in…” There’s a pause. “An hour or so?”
“Sure, if you have a time machine in your basement that you didn’t share with the class.”
Stark scoffs. “I don’t. But I do have a spare jet. There’s no time to get a clearance to fly over downtown, so it cannot pick you up, but if you can get to Teterboro–“
“Fine,” She grumbles and rubs her eyes.
“Great! See ya!” Stark chirps and hangs up.
Natasha mutters a curse and goes to wake Clint. Whatever it is that Stark has gotten them into, she is most likely going to need some support.
---
“They fucked it up, didn’t they?” is the only thing Clint says before he jumps out of his bed and hobbles behind her, pulling his pants on.
---
The jet is, in fact, waiting on the tarmac when they arrive – just half an hour later, as she borrowed one of Stark’s cars, and sped all the way – and somehow gets a takeoff priority, possibly because it doesn't need a runway, just a stretch of open space in front of the hangar, so it’s just another five minutes before they are flying.
The pilots are Stark’s employees, so they don’t even bat an eye once she tells them to drop them off at the compound instead of the airport a few miles away. The facility is meant to have its own airfield but it isn’t operational yet, so they do a precision spot landing on the lawn in front of the main entrance.
It’s clear they are the first to arrive. The main building is dark, not even the emergency lights are on, and the door is locked shut and doesn’t even budge when Natasha yanks the handle.
Clint pulls out his phone and frowns. “No service.”
That doesn’t shock Natasha that much. She went through Stark’s plans a couple of times, looking for potential holes in security and is ready to admit Stark (and his engineering department who did most of the dirty work) went out of his way to ensure the facility would be as infiltration-proof as possible. That means installing a whole range of signal scramblers on the premises and having a repeater running that would provide an uninterrupted signal only to those with proper clearances. The scramblers are already running, but the secure network isn’t set up yet.
“What now?” Clint asks.
“I guess we wait,” she says with a shrug and goes to sit on the stairs.
Clint sighs and joins her. He is mindful of his right leg as he’s sitting down. It’s not a big display – just the way he props himself up with his arms and how he keeps the limb straight – but it’s enough to tell her it’s still bothering him and to rouse a pang of regrets. He might not have been hurt if she’d been there.
But she wasn’t, because in this new reality they found themselves in she cannot always be there at his side.
The reality in which they are goddamned heroes whose mission is to save the world.
It’s been a year and a half since New York, since they officially became a team, and it should be enough time to get used to that thought, and yet it still sometimes hits her how surreal it all is. How she used to be a spy and yet her face shows up on the magazine covers now. How her name isn’t a strictly kept secret but public knowledge.
How she is called an American hero by some.
If someone told her, all those years ago, when she was but a frightened girl stuck in the clutches of the Red Room that this was what her life would become she would have laughed. Or perhaps she’d cry, knowing how impossible that sounded, that all the future her masters had in stock for her was just blood and pain and servitude.
Besides, she isn’t even American, not truly, the papers that got her the citizen status were fabricated by Fury’s team when she first joined SHIELD.
“Are you sure Tony didn’t say anything else?” Clint asks, tapping his fingers against his knee.
“Yes, Clint, I’m sure,” she says, in an overtly patient tone and Clint pulls a face.
“If it’s one of his pranks, I swear I’ll–“ Clint cuts himself off and crooks his neck to look at the sky.
She can hear it too – the unmistakable sound of Iron Man’s thrusters – and soon she can see it too, the smudge of light, crossing the dark firmament above them, getting closer and closer.
Stark lands right in front of them, powers the boosters down and opens his helmet.
“Daddy’s home,” he says with a grin and throws his hands to the sides, as if he just finished some complicated gymnastics routine. “Missed me?”
“Mhm,” Natasha hums, unimpressed, and drags herself up to her feet. “How about we start with you explaining to us why exactly we’re here at this ungodly hour?”
“Well, speaking of which…”
“I fucking knew it,” Clint mutters and shakes his head. “What did the fucker do?”
“Very little, surprisingly,” Stark says and approaches the control panel by the door, then puts in a code. The lights in the atrium come to life and the door slides aside with a hiss of pneumatic servos being released.
“Meaning?” she asks and follows Stark inside.
“He was unconscious when we got there,” Stark says. He aims his steps at the reception desk, his armor unfurling around him as he walks. Natasha has seen the process dozens of times already, but it looks just as mesmerizing each time, the machine’s fluid movement more reminiscent of something alive than a creation of one’s hands. And brain. Mostly brain, possibly.
“SHIELD agents put him down without your help?” Clint asks, raising an eyebrow.
Stark claps into a seat by the reception desk, powers on the computer, and types in something before answering. “Not exactly. Fury’s new boys found Loki in that parking lot we’ve seen on the recording, flaked out. All they had to do was scrap him off the asphalt and put him in a cell.”
“So why did you–“
“System reboot complete,” sounds from the speakers, in Jarvis’ voice.
“Hey, welcome back, Jay.”
“Good to be back, Sir. I’ll sync my database with the hub in the Tower now, if you don’t mind.”
“Knock yourself out,” Stark says and waves benevolently at one of the cameras.
“I’m afraid I’m not capable of doing that, Sir, but I’ll proceed with the update as advised,” Jarvis chirps and tunes out.
“Stark?” Clint insists.
“What is it?”
“Why are we here?”
Stark holds Clint’s angry gaze. “Yeah, well, about that…”
“Just squeeze it out already,” Natasha urges.
“Loki is being transported here as we speak. Bruce and Cap are on convoy duty. They should be here in…” He looks at his wrist, realizes he has no wristwatch on, then at the clock on the wall. “In something like six hours?”
There’s a moment of silence.
“Why?” Natasha asks, because it’s as good of a question as any and all she can think of right now.
“The compound is more secure than the Tower,” Stark explains quickly, “Plus if something happens we are not risking any collateral damage again, and–“
“I get that, Stark. I’m more interested in why is looking after Loki our duty now, after Fury explicitly told us that he had it under control and you confirmed that containing him wasn’t an issue.”
Stark’s shoulders slump and he leans forward with a sigh. He props his elbows on the desk and presses his fingers to his temples. “It turns out that whoever it was that Loki pissed off this time, they were a lot less forgiving than we were. His injuries are…” Stark pauses and rubs his eyelids. “Fuck, he has a hole in his chest the size of my fist. His spine is completely severed and his lungs no longer exist for all intents and purposes.”
That does give Natasha a minute pause, because, fuck indeed. Then again, it’s Loki, and his and Thor’s freaky alien bodies, and she has no idea what that means. If anything, it further proves he’s an annoying, unkillable bastard. “And?”
“There’s nothing the conventional medicine can do for him and we have the Cradle here and…”
“We do?” Clint asks and Stark shoots him a nasty glare.
“Yeah. I paid like a hundred and fifty mil for the machine, another two hundred in a promissory grant for future development, and signed all sorts of NDAs before I could even start inquiring about it. Dr. Cho’s lawyers have no mercy.”
“It’s experimental tech,” Natasha points out. “Nobody knows for sure if it doesn’t have any nasty side effects for humans, and more so for aliens.”
Stark nods. “True. But it’s better than nothing.”
“How so?” Clint says.
“What do you mean, how so?” Stark snaps, straightening up and training his eyes on Clint. “He’d die.”
“So?” Clint bites back with a shrug. “If you expected me to cry about it, think again.”
“First of all, he is still Thor’s brother. Thor, who is still our teammate and, the last time I checked, irredeemably attached to his lil bro. Are you going to be the one to stand in front of him and tell him that, ‘hey, we found your brother and we could’ve helped him but decided to just let him die’?”
Clint’s lips pull into a thin line.
“And what’s the other reason?” Natasha asks.
“Huh?”
“You said ‘first of all’, I’m assuming there’s at least one more?”
Stark takes a deep breath and shakes his head. “Pierce’s people were already there when we arrived and the way they talked about… What they would do with Loki’s body once he was dead and possibly before that, and I just couldn't… I couldn’t leave him there. With them. So I…”
“You told Fury we can fix him.”
Stark nods. “And that we can keep him contained until Thor returns to pick him up. I might have blackmailed him with withdrawing all the funding I provide for the Initiative, too. Just a little bit.”
“Great,” Clint utters with no enthusiasm whatsoever. He props his arms on his hips and looks around. “Where are the personnel quarters?”
“Down that hall,” Stark points out.
“Are we already decided who takes which?”
Stark shakes his head.
“I’m calling the one closest to the kitchen,” Clint says and starts walking.
“Where are you going?” Natasha asks.
“I need a shower. Are the bathrooms working?”
“Yeah,” Stark says.
“Finally, some good news,” Clint murmurs and wanders off.
Stark sits back in the chair he’s occupying and tilts his head back, taking deep, deliberate breaths and staring at the ceiling.
“Admit it,” Natasha says.
“Admit what?”
“You felt bad for him.”
Stark works his jaw without answering for a while. “Yeah.”
Natasha chuckles.
“You’d feel bad if you’ve seen him too.”
“I highly doubt that. Haven’t you heard? They schooled all higher emotions out of me in the Red Room.”
He tilts his head and looks at her. “Have they?”
She smiles. “Sometimes I wish they did.”
Stark breathes out a laugh.
“So, what do we need to do?”
“The rest can wait, but we have to set up the security protocols in the medbay and run a parameter check before they arrive. Fury’s and Pierce’s people are coming along and will most likely want to check whether I was full of shit when I said this place is secure enough to hold a hostile alien.”
“Is it?”
“I have no idea.”
“Well, let’s make sure we get it as good as we can then.”
---
She expected a plane, but it’s just an unmarked van. Not even a fancy one or anything, just a Ford Transit in a non-descript tan color with a ladder rack on the roof, a car that one would just slide their eyes past without really noticing. Which is exactly the point of those. Still, those were used when setting up covert ops, not when transporting detainees who could escape state-of-the-art cages constructed to hold supernatural creatures.
Stark talks to the driver via the intercom and tells them to go to a ramp at the back. Natasha has no time to ask for the purpose of that, even though it’s far from being readily apparent, and just runs across the compound to meet the convoy at the dock.
Then it does become obvious.
There are four agents in the car, none of whom Natasha recognizes, which can mean multiple things – one driving, and three more in the hold, along with Steve. Bruce is sitting in the front, most likely because there’s simply no more space left in the back, most of the hold being taken by a weird combination of a hospital bed and a cage. It has wheels and railings, just like a bed used to transport patients would have, but also a see-through enclosure, fixed above the figure trapped underneath.
Natasha leans closer to steal a peek.
Loki does in fact appear to be unconscious. Which is probably for the best, since something tells her he wouldn’t take kindly to all the apparatuses hooked up to his body, or the thick straps crossing his neck, chest and hips, or the manacles attaching his limbs to the railings. Not the usual, leather and cloth ones either; they are made of metal and look solid enough that Natasha suspects it would be easier to break the bed – by itself appearing quite sturdy – than those.
There is a line of monitors attached to the side of the enclosure, but Natasha recognizes only a heartrate monitor among the displayed data, the rest remaining a mystery to her.
Satisfied with the results of the inspection, she leads the ensemble to the medbay, while Stark takes two of the agents for a tour.
“How are you holding up?” she asks, matching footsteps to Bruce, who’s helping Steve and the two agents to push the bed along the corridor. It does look like it weighs a ton, without much exaggeration, but she suspects the grim expressions on Bruce’s and Steve’s faces have little to do with it.
“I’ve been worse,” Bruce says with a thin smile. He looks at her just for a second, before his eyes flick back to Loki. She cannot fully decode the look on his face. There’s wariness in it, and it’s warranted, but also something else. “Just tired.”
“You can go catch a couple of winks now. Stark says most quarters are ready.”
“Not now.”
“We’ve got this. Stark has his armor at the ready and Clint is standing by, waiting for a call in case Loki tries something stupid.”
“No, it’s not about that,” Bruce says with a head shake. “Fury insisted we do the transport by land, because Pierce wouldn’t agree to authorize a flight, and it cost us so much time already… We need to put him in the Cradle right away.”
She narrows her eyes and watches Loki through the glass – or plexiglass, or whatever kind of reinforced material it is – for a while, fighting the uneasy feeling in her stomach that the sight evokes. Even as he is – knocked out and stripped of his fancy armor – he scares her. But, the longer she looks and the more details she registers, the more that fear chips away. He does look injured. The loose, grey scrubs some brave soul changed him into mostly hide the bandages swaddling his chest, but what they do reveal doesn’t look too hot – the bruises and cuts on his neckline and upper arms (that look a lot less impressively muscular than she’d have imagined), the sickly paleness of his skin, the deep shadows under his eyes.
“Are we sure he isn’t faking it?” she asks.
Bruce just looks at her for a couple of seconds, then shakes his head. “I’ve examined him myself after I looked over the tests Fury’s doctors ran. If it’s some trick, it’s a goddamn good one. That thing here,” he points at one of the monitors, “is a brain activity scanner. There’s some aberration but it’s still well within parameters for someone in a coma.”
She nods, accepting the answer. “What’s the prognosis?”
“I don’t know. Nobody knows. The wound in his chest alone would kill a human instantaneously. It goes right though–“
“I’ve heard the gist already. Spare me the details, if you’re so kind.”
“If we can get the Cradle to work, and that’s a big if, since it’s been configured to human DNA and there’s no time to do a full sequencing and recalibrate it again, we can fix the damaged tissue. But the spinal cord?”
“A lost cause?”
“Would be, for a human. But I have reasons to suspect the Asgardian anatomy can regenerate it, to some degree at least.”
“How so?”
“The scans show signs of intramembranous osteogenesis in multiple bones, including his lower vertebra.”
“I love when you talk all science to me, Bruce, you know I do, but–“
“His spine was broken before, and it looks like it’s quite recent.”
She sighs. “How recent?”
“No idea,” he says, but his expression reveals something else.
“You don’t think the big guy did this, do you?”
Bruce sets his jaw and doesn’t answer.
“Natasha,” Steve says. He’s been quiet until now, but she’d be foolish to assume he didn’t listen to what was said. “Don’t you think it’s not the best time?”
She shrugs. It’s as good a time as any by her book, Bruce should know that what he did – what Hulk did and what they all helped with – was necessary. Then again, it is easier said than done. Even trained agents, spies and soldiers with years of experience aren't always able to stay on top of their emotional responses, and Bruce is a civilian. He never trained for this. Stark, who chose this life for himself, still can't cope with some of the things he has done or had done to him, and Bruce didn't have even that small privilege of choice.
“Yeah, sorry,” she mutters, and doesn’t ask any more questions until they reach the medbay.
---
“Good luck,” one of the agents says, just as they wheel the bed slash cage contraption into the infirmary. He hands Bruce a keyring with what looks like – and most likely is – a bunch of restraint keys.
“Hey, where are you going?” Natasha calls.
“Back to the car, then back to HQ,” the man says. “Our orders were to deliver him to you. Since it’s done, we are heading back. He’s your problem now.”
Natasha doesn’t bother to argue, just files the information for later, in case she needed to use it against Fury.
Bruce and Steve start removing the cage right away. The proper protocol would be to secure the room first, but in light of what Bruce told her, it doesn’t seem necessary.
Stark shows up five minutes later. Clint is with him, but he stays outside of the room, observing from behind the pane of glass that divides the suite from the hallway. At least that’s what Stark tells them. When she turns to wave at Clint, she sees nothing but her reflection. There’s a shielding layer covering the glass and with the room brightly lit and the hallway darkened it makes the window act like a one-way mirror. She’d assume that was the desired outcome, if it wasn’t exactly the same with testing chambers in Stark’s workshop. She couldn’t guess the reason, so she asked Stark about it, a while ago, and he told her all about radiation shielding, in many more details that she actually wanted to know.
There’s a thud as Stark sets the crate he brought with himself on a workbench. He flips the lid open.
Natasha peeks inside. “What are those?”
Stark picks up one of the bands and brushes a magnetic key against the side. It clicks and opens, splitting into two halves connected by a hidden hinge. “Some toys from SHIELD’s R&D playground, I’ve been told,” he says. He snaps it shut around his wrist and wiggles his hand. “I had no time to pick those babies apart, but Fury claims they’ve been designed to block magical abilities. From the couple of scans I just did, it looks like they emit delta waves and a faint electromagnetic field when inactive and have an array of sensors that sense… something. Nothing harmful, as long as the power source doesn’t get activated.”
“And then what?” asks Steve.
“Dunno. Perhaps it just boosts the suppression field. But it’s capable of delivering quite a nasty shock, too. Also, does this.” He picks up another manacle and brings it closer to the one on his wrist, then fiddles with the key again. A magnetized cable extends from one band and clips to the other, creating a pair of handcuffs.
Steve frowns.
“Oh, don’t give me that look, Steve-O,” Stark says and brushes the key against the bracelet again. It opens with just a slight delay. He slides it off and shows off his hand. Unsurprisingly, there is no mark left on his skin – the shackle is polished to a smooth finish, as one would expect with any restraint meant for a long-term use. “See? Totally harmless, and I’m really not in the mood for Maleficient waking up with a fresh desire to kill us all and all the means to do it.”
Steve nods, curtly.
Stark picks the rest of the setup from the crate and approaches the bed.
“You want to do it now?” Bruce asks.
“This is the best opportunity we might ever have,” Stark counters. “The Cradle has an option to manually mark any external object that cannot be removed. For implants, pacemakers and such, so they won’t cause any issues with the process.”
Bruce sighs and nods.
Stark turns to her.
“No complaints here,” she says.
“Yeah, I figured,” Stark mutters and returns to the task.
The atmosphere in the room is quiet and tense, the silence interrupted only by the hushed commands the men whisper to one another as they are removing the rest of the restraints – to replace them with Fury’s shackles and collar – cutting away the clothes and the bandages, and moving Loki into the Cradle. Even Stark is uncharacteristically non-quippy and gentle, even though they probably would be hard-pressed for methods to make it any worse at this point.
The wound in Loki’s chest is indeed a nasty sight, and she quickly realizes Stark wasn’t talking shit when he said it was the size of his fist. If anything, he underplayed it. The doctors attempted to stitch it, but there wasn’t enough skin for it to be closed fully, and even after their efforts what’s left is a ten inches long gash spanning from below Loki’s sternum almost to his throat. And the sight becomes even more horrifying once the men turn him over to get rid of the rest of the bandages and she notices a matching wound on his back.
She might not be a medical expert, but, no matter how hard she strains, she cannot comprehend how one could survive that. Alien healing factors or not, there are many important parts in that area of one’s body.
And yet, they’ve all seen him move. Which means he was still conscious when he hit the ground. That he felt every. Single. Thing.
That’s about how far she can go without making herself sick, so she pushes the whole train of thought away.
She stays alert all through the process, ready to… she doesn’t even know what. She has her gun, but not her shock bracelets – she just grabbed her pistol when she was leaving the Tower, which might have been a mistake. Still, even the bracelets wouldn’t be of any use against the Loki who attacked them in New York. Would him being in the state he’s in make it any different in case things went sideways and he woke up?
Possibly, but she would rather not find that out empirically.
Luckily, he doesn’t, so she allows herself a small breath of relief when the lid of the Cradle closes finally.
Bruce taps on the control panel for a while, with Stark hovering above his shoulder and offering pointers.
“It’s all set and ready to go,” he announces in the end. “It would be best if we left the room.”
“How so? What if something happened? Wouldn’t it be better for us to stay close?”
“Nah,” Stark says. “The process is fully automatic from now on, and there’s nothing else we can do but wait for it to run its cycle. Since the room is Hulk-proof – sorry, Bruce – we’ll have more time to react if we wait outside.”
That settles it and they leave the room, joining Clint in the hallway.
“How long will it take?” Steve asks.
“Not sure,” Bruce says. “It estimates at least two hours for a full diagnostic scan and an hour for synthesizing the required artificial tissue. So, three hours minimum till we see some effects?”
“I don’t know about you, but I’m gonna use this time to check out my new bedroom,” Stark announces and turns on his heel to leave. “Possibly the bathroom as well. Jarvis will wake me up if I’m needed.”
“Clint?” Natasha asks.
His eyes are still fixed on Loki, his expression hard, his hands clenched into fists. “I’m staying,” he grumbles. “I’m not risking getting caught unprepared again.”
“Steve?”
“I’m good. I don’t need as much sleep as before.”
“I’m staying too,” Bruce says, before she even asks.
“You shouldn’t. We may need you… Or the big guy, if Loki wakes. And I really don’t want to find out how a cranky Hulk is like.”
Bruce breathes out a humorless laugh. “Yeah, you’re probably right.” He doesn’t move from his spot though.
“We’ve got this.”
“Yes, I know, it’s just…”
“Go. Get some sleep and eat something. You’re not going to be of much use like this.”
That seems to do the trick, for Bruce sighs, nods and heads to the exit. “Just call me if you notice anything out of ordinary!” he calls from the doorway.
“We will,” Natasha promises, even though she isn’t sure what could be categorized as “out of ordinary” in the current situation.
Bruce disappears in the doorway and she turns back to the glass. They stay like that, all staring and silent, for a few moments.
“He looks so…” Steve starts and pauses, rubbing his chin.
“Dead,” Clint offers.
“Innocent. Like that Disney princess… Snow White.”
Natasha crooks her neck and looks up at him. “You’re full of surprises, Cap,” she says. “I had no idea you caught up to pop culture.”
“I didn’t,” he chuckles. “But we did have movies in the thirties. We took Bucky’s niece to see it in cinemas once. I think I ended up liking it more than she did.”
“Right,” she says, and looks away. Making Steve talk about his childhood – or his childhood friend – was never a good idea. “I’d go for a different comparison if I had to. The Lenin mausoleum sort of different comparison.”
Clint chuckles. “That’s more like it. Two fucks with illusions of grandeur.”
“Hey, we do not disrespect Comrade Vladimir Ilyich in this house!”
Steve’s look is one of those that would drop her dead if they could kill.
“I’m joking.”
“I know you are,” Steve says, and his expression mellows out. “I know it’s ancient history for you and that you find it appropriate, but for me it’s…”
“Too soon?”
Steve nods.
“Now I wonder how you’re even able to be with Tony in one room,” Clint muses. “He cannot go five minutes without dropping some inappropriate joke. Like that one from yesterday, about–“
“It’s different. Tony is… Tony is very much like his father in that regard. And Howard would often use humor to mask his true feelings. He’d joke to make the people around him feel at ease. He’d joke when he was scared or stressed or under pressure.”
“You definitely shouldn’t tell Tony that,” Clint laughs.
Steve smiles and turns back to the glass, so Natasha does the same. And the longer she looks at Loki, lying there, completely still, in his glass coffin, his dark hair spilling around his pale, calm face, the more she can see where Steve was coming from. Which only leads her to another question.
Who is the evil queen in this particular tale?
---
It’s three hours and five minutes later when Stark comes back. In the meantime, they found some folding chairs in what could possibly be a conference room nearby and dragged them to the hallway to have something to sit on. Stark takes one of the extras they brought and joins them in their mostly-silent vigil.
Bruce reappears perhaps ten minutes later.
Then they wait.
They don’t have to wait for long. The preparation time might have been significant, but the Cradle’s effects, once it starts working its magic, are almost instantaneous. Bruce taps into the feed and zooms the camera on the bed so they could all see better, and they all huddle around him, peering at his tablet. The edges of the wound – at least they look clean, as if it was made with some wickedly sharp blade rather than with a blunt object or projectile – shrink and come together, new skin forming where there was none, until all that’s left is a thin, pink line of a fresh scar.
“I thought it was not supposed to leave any marks,” Stark observes, scratching his chin.
“The damage must’ve been too extensive,” Bruce says, but he doesn’t sound too confident about it.
It’s a guess as good as any to Natasha and even with that, it’s impressive, to see the wound go from that awful, gaping hole to just this, in a span of minutes.
“Perhaps it will–“
There’s a sharp, wheezing sound and it takes Natasha a second to realize what it is – the sound of the first breath being picked up and amplified by the sensitive microphones aimed at the Cradle.
On the feed, Loki’s chest rises again, but the sound gets drowned by another noise – a screech of an alarm. It wails once, then twice, then shuts off.
“Jay, what was that?!” Stark barks.
“My sensors picked up the Cradle turning off. You set up alarms for that, Sir.”
“Hell yeah, I did. Do we know why?”
“Unable to determine at this moment, Sir. I’m running a full diagnostics as we speak.”
“Huh,” Bruce exclaims. His screen is now showing some sort of numeric data and quickly changing lines of text. “It looks like it deactivated itself because it sensed a change in the subject’s anatomy and it determined it was unable to progress without a recalibration.”
Stark frowns. “Do we know what that means?”
Bruce bites his lower lip and taps on his tablet again, switching to another display, which shows – to Natasha’s best knowledge – life signs’ indicators. “That’s… fascinating,” Bruce says numbly, and scrolls down. “See that? That’s blood oxygen level. It was close to zero before, because, well, his pulmonary system was completely destroyed.”
“It’s at thirty-six,” Stark says, as if they all couldn’t see it. “Thirty-seven.”
For a moment, they watch the numbers go up. The oximeter, then the pulse and the blood pressure.
“It fixed him enough for his healing to kick in,” Natasha says, because that sounds like the most believable explanation.
“That’s my guess, yeah,” Bruce says and pinches the bridge of his nose.
“Should we try to turn it back on now?” Stark asks and gets up to walk to the glass and look inside. “Damn.”
She gets up as well to see what he means and understands instantly. Inside the container, Loki is no longer lying still. His eyes are open and his hands are twitching at his side. He takes in the enclosure and raises his head to look down, at himself. He moves his hand up and traces his fingers along the scar on his chest, and frowns. And the frown only deepens when he notices the shackle on his wrist. He turns his arm around, then brushes the fingers of his other hand against the metal, but doesn’t go for any direct attempt to remove it before moving on to trace his digits around the collar.
Again, he doesn’t as much as try to pry his fingernails underneath it, just lets out a breath, drops his hands back down, and goes for another take of his surroundings, at first just observing, then dragging his fingers along the lid’s seams. In the end, he presses his palms to the glass above his head and pushes.
Natasha prepares herself mentally to spring into action the moment he gets out.
Loki doesn’t. She cannot tell if it’s because he is still weakened by the injury, isn’t using all his strength or if the Cradle is built solidly enough to withstand the attempt, but the lid doesn’t even budge. All they get is another sigh from Loki as he gives up on further tries, drops his hands down, rolls to his side, curls into a fetal position, and closes his eyes. Then he stops moving altogether.
Then they hear the first sound he makes since waking up. It’s a sob, and there’s no mistaking it for anything else.
“He’s faking it, isn’t he?” Clint says.
Natasha bites her tongue before she says “yes” because, while it makes a hell lot of sense why Loki would put up a show like that, she isn’t sure she’s ready to give his self-control this much credit.
“Hmm,” Stark hums under his breath and scratches his nose. “If I’m being honest, this is not what I expected.”
Steve mumbles something in confirmation. It isn’t hard to guess what they were expecting instead of this, because it’s most likely close to what Natasha was anticipating – verbal sparring at the very least, like on the Helicarrier, or a string of insults, an escape attempt, or a violent outburst.
Not this.
Loki’s shoulders shake, he wraps his arms around himself and presses his face closer to the plastic lining of the Cradle.
“We should give him some clothes at least,” Bruce says, his tone uncertain.
“Yeah,” Stark agrees, with just as much conviction.
Nobody moves, they are all just staring numbly, until another suppressed sob reaches their ears.
“Okay,” Stark says and sets his shoulders. “I’m gonna go put the armor on now. Then we can deal with this.”
“Where are we going to put him?” Natasha asks. “Is the detention level ready?”
“Yeah, mostly,” Stark says.
“He should stay here,” Bruce objects. “For observation. We need to make sure there are no adverse–“
“You can watch him in a cell just as well,” Stark counters. “The lowest level is the most secure, with just one exit and a full range of sensors, so we would not only know when he’s trying something fancy with his bullshit powers, but also wouldn’t have to watch him twenty-four-seven, since Jay can do it. Here, the cameras cover only some areas because of privacy and someone would have to stay on watch duty.”
“I’ve got better things to do,” Clint mutters.
“Yeah, same,” says Stark.
Bruce shakes his head in disbelief.
Stark turns to him. “Bruce, I love you like a brother I never had and I know you’re a doctor and you’ve sworn to do no harm and whatever else goes into the Hippocratic Oath, but this is Loki. You know, the guy who tried to murder Thor multiple times, us at least once, released an alien swarm over Manhattan, and went on a rampage against his own people back home? We can’t be too careful here, and prevention is better than cure, right?”
“Yes, Tony, I get that, it’s just…” Bruce pushes his glasses up and pinches the bridge of his nose. “You’re right. We can’t afford to risk it.”
“That’s the spirit,” Stark says, walks a couple of steps towards the exit at the end of the hallway, and stops. “The armory is operational too, if you want to prepare.”
---
Natasha isn’t convinced that anything she could pick up at the armory could be of any help if it came into a fight, but still goes with Clint to check it out, while Steve wanders off to retrieve his shield. Bruce stays in the hallway.
When they meet back in the medbay a while later, she has changed into a combat suit – apparently, Stark made sure to stock the armory with spares, for all of them – and found a replacement for her bracelets, which was, according to Jarvis’ words, some prototype Stark had worked on for her, but hadn’t gotten around to present her with yet. At first, the notion weirded her out – people usually didn’t do things like that for other people – but she quickly let it go. It was Stark, after all, and not just anybody, and he could sometimes do the weirdest shit, for even weirder reasons, and there was no point in thinking too much about it. She just made a mental note to thank him once this blew over.
Bruce gives her – the suit and the weapons – a side eye, but doesn’t comment. They’ve been running together for long enough for Bruce to accept what they are doing and realize sometimes violence is the answer. More so, she has a feeling that he always knew that. Always knew that Hulk can be an asset just as much as he can be a liability, and that sometimes aiming all that pent-up rage in the right direction is better than doing nothing at all.
And she trusts him enough to know that he’ll make the right call today as well.
---
“Okay, guys and gals, let’s do this!” Stark exclaims, entering the room. He has his armor on, but the helmet is folded, and he isn’t hovering as he tends to do, just walking like a regular person. He stops next to Bruce. “Any change?”
“No,” Bruce says.
Loki hasn’t moved even an inch, he also has been silent for a good while. Natasha started to suspect he might have fallen asleep or lost consciousness, but Bruce said the readouts indicated he was still awake. Unless, of course, sleep wasn’t the same for Asgardians as it was for humans, which they had no way of knowing.
“Ready?”
“Yeah,” Natasha says, pulling out her weapon. She aims it at the floor, for now. Clint reaches for the bow strapped to his back, reconsiders, and retrieves the tranquilizer gun from its holster, the one he’d picked in the armory and loaded with the strongest sedative darts that were in stock. She offers him a nod of approval and he sticks out his tongue.
“Cap?”
“I’m ready,” Steve says and tightens the strap of his shield.
Bruce shrugs and picks the bundle of cloth from his chair. Natasha didn’t notice it before, but she doesn’t ask. It must be something to wear for Loki and Bruce probably retrieved it from somewhere in the infirmary while they were gone.
“Stay behind me,” Stark says and goes to the door. There’s a slight delay, a mechanical whirr, and the glass pane slides aside, opening the way.
That gets Loki’s attention. His eyelids fly open and his gaze locks on Stark, his eyes widening with surprise. Or shock, or possibly even fear, Natasha cannot tell. Then the god pulls himself up into an awkward sitting position – he has to keep his head down, because the inside of the Cradle doesn’t have enough clearance – and pushes his back to the glass and his legs close to his chest, as if he tried to take as little space as possible in the already pretty cramped box.
It's a strange display for sure, and the contrast between this and how Loki acted on Helicarrier – sticking to his “the ground beneath my feet is not worthy of bearing my weight” act even when locked in a cage – doesn’t fail to register in Natasha’s mind.
“I’ll let you out,” Stark says, “if you promise to behave.”
Loki looks up, glowering at Stark from behind a curtain of hair, tangled and clumped into dirty strands. He blinks, works his jaw and clears his throat, but doesn’t say a word.
“I won’t open it until you say it.”
Loki just stares.
“Come on, it’s not that hard,” Stark coaxes. “I wanna hear it. ‘I will behave if you let me out of the box’. That’s all I ask for.”
“Tony–“ Bruce starts, but Stark interrupts him with a raise of his hand.
Loki’s eyes dash to Bruce, then to Steve, and Natasha, and Clint, and finally back to Stark, and his apparent confusion only seems to deepen.
“I’m waiting,” Stark urges and impatiently taps his armored fingers against the side of the control panel.
“I will behave if you let me out of the box,” Loki says, and it’s little more than a whisper, breathy and shaky.
It’s still more than Natasha expected, considering his lungs were a mangled mess just a moment ago. Stark apparently agrees with the sentiment, because he doesn’t tell Loki to repeat, just taps at the control panel.
The lid of the Cradle moves aside with a pneumatic hiss. Loki straightens up, but doesn’t move any further than that, and his gaze, parked firmly on Stark now, is wary and lost.
“Get up,” Stark says.
Loki tears his eyes away from Stark, slowly swings his legs over the side of the machine’s bed, and lowers his feet to the ground. Then he stays like this, panting slightly, with his toes on the floor and his hands gripping the edge of the mattress.
“Step away from the box,” Stark orders.
Loki grits his teeth, sucks in a breath, and pushes himself up. His legs are shaky, but he manages to stay upright as he shuffles away from the Cradle.
“There,” Stark points to the center of the floor, in front of them.
Natasha doesn’t mean to stare, but it’s hard not to, when there’s absolutely nothing left to imagination like this. And there are observations that are just begging to be made.
The first thing that strikes her is how thin Loki is, way below the threshold of it being healthy, with the ridges of ribs, hipbones and sternum poking out through the skin. Unlike his paleness – which could easily be explained by losing more blood than a body should reasonably contain – this cannot be just an effect of the recent injury.
Then she notices the scars. They aren’t as prominent as the fresh one on his chest, but the way they are concentrated around his belly, groin and thighs and how… methodical they seem still makes her stomach roil. This is not an effect of some random injury. No, someone made those, carved the lines into Loki's flesh…
She looks at Bruce, hoping he’d have some explanation – he has examined Loki before, so maybe he has some idea where those came from – but he just avoids her gaze. He crumples the clothes in his hands nervously, then takes a step forward, towards Loki, and hands him the bundle.
“Here you go.”
Loki looks at him with a frown and doesn’t reach to take it.
“Some clothes, for you to wear,” Bruce explains sheepishly.
Loki looks down at himself, then at the clothes in Bruce’s hands, then back down at himself, and his frown only deepens, as if he just realized he’s naked.
“Loki, just take the clothes,” Stark says, sternly. He’s quickly losing his patience.
Loki’s gaze snaps to him, his eyes narrowing. “Is that… Is that my name?”
“What?!” Stark blurts out.
“The name you called me. Is it mine?”
There’s a moment of very awkward silence. Loki’s gaze travels from Stark to Bruce.
“Don’t you remember?” Natasha asks. She is relatively sure this is a ploy – and one of the oldest in the books, too – but to call it out too early would mean never learning where Loki was trying to get with it.
Loki just sets his jaw and shakes his head. Then he finally takes the bundle of fabric, presses it close to his chest, and looks at Stark for further instructions.
“Put them on,” Stark says and the irritation he’s trying to hold back still can be heard in his tone.
For a second, Natasha suspects Loki is going to drag them through explaining how wearing clothes works, but no, he slowly unfolds the shirt, examines it – it’s as simple of an outfit as possible, just like the scrubs he was wearing before, but in white, not gray – and starts pulling it on over his head. Then he puts on the pants and even figures out how to tie the string to keep them on without explanation.
Clint shifts his weight from one foot to the other and huffs in annoyance. He most likely has the same suspicions as Natasha, they both have seen thugs trying to use convenient memory loss to get out of trouble a couple of times too many to believe the show Loki is putting on.
Bruce, apparently, doesn’t share the sentiment, or he’s just more cautious about it.
“Loki, what is the last thing you remember?”
Loki bites his lower lip and narrows his eyes, in a perfect facsimile of consideration. “I… I’m not sure. I remember falling and then… There was someone there, I think. And after that… Just this.” He makes a broad gesture with his hands.
“Do you know who we are?” Bruce presses on.
He gets another headshake.
“We are the good guys,” Stark interjects, before Bruce can get another query in, “and you’re a bad guy. That’s all you need to know. I’m really not in the mood to play twenty-one questions.”
Loki visually deflates at the words, dropping his gaze to the floor and hanging his head. “I see.”
“Great. Now, put your hands behind your back.”
The frown is back and Loki looks at Stark with an unspoken question.
“I’m not gonna tell you twice,” Stark warns and takes a step forward.
Loki apparently decides it’s better to play along – after all, it’s a game of his own design – and does as he was told, but doesn’t quite hold back a shocked exclamation as Stark presses the button on the remote and the handcuffs connect with a click. Then the manacles on his ankles activate as well and his feet are pulled together, knocking him out of balance. He falls to his knees.
Bruce, who’s still the closest, catches him and holds his arm before he smashes face-first into the floor.
“I’m sorry,” Loki says, and damn, he makes it sound so genuine that even Natasha finds it hard to ignore the pangs of compassion. Hard, but not impossible.
“Hmm,” Stark hums and walks closer to have a look, then readjusts something on the remote and the cable extends, now leaving Loki with about a foot of give. It should be enough for a slow walk, but not enough to run or fight with any sort of efficiency, making it a decent compromise.
Loki seems to realize it would be futile to argue, so he doesn’t, just rocks himself back up to his feet.
“Let’s go,” Stark says, and gestures at Loki to move. The god doesn’t react immediately, so Stark adds, “Either you walk on your own, or I manhandle you. Your choice.”
Loki’s choice is to walk, so they do.
The detention center is at the other end of the compound and five levels below the floor they start from, so it’s a long journey, considering how slow Loki’s tempo is. Stark urges him to hurry up a couple of times, but it’s half-hearted at best, and doesn’t help much, so Stark gives it up. Loki might be fucking with them right now, but the injury was real, and so was the coma, and the fact that he’s able to walk around at all is rather astonishing. The fetters aren’t helping either.
They don’t seem to be making it that much worse though, for Loki adjusts his pace to the restraint easily enough and doesn’t trip even once.
Stark is walking at the front and chooses a route that takes them nowhere close to the common area or the sleeping quarters, keeping mostly to the service corridors and maintenance passages, but there’s a point when they have to walk through a sky bridge between two wings.
Loki suddenly stops and glues his eyes to the slice of landscape beyond the glass. Most windows in the facility have the protective shields down, since it wasn’t in use until this morning, but the bridge doesn’t have those, being a lightweight construction. Natasha quickly assesses the risk, decides there’s none – it’s just a stretch of muddy ground that will be turned into a lawn when the work on the compound is finished, and a line of trees in the distance, no landmarks that could tell Loki where he is – and allows Loki a moment do his thing, whatever it is.
Stark doesn’t have the same patience though, so he grabs Loki’s arm and pushes him on.
Loki lets out a sigh and drops his gaze back to the floor.
He does steal one last look at the outside world before the gate on the other end opens and they walk into another dark hallway.
The elevator is quite spacious, but with a guy in a bulky combat exosuit – and with the fact that everyone naturally gravitates to the side of the compartment that Loki is not occupying – it feels cramped and stifling within seconds. Natasha is thankful there are just a couple of floors to cover, not like in tower, where it could take one fifteen minutes to get from the penthouse to the street level. Unless, of course, that someone is using Stark’s super-duper-private code to his super-duper-private express elevator that they obtained in not at all dodgy manner.
While the main levels of the facility all share the design of all Stark’s estates – high, spacious rooms with modern furnishings – the underground floors have very little in common with that. The corridor the elevator opens to is utilitarian and nondescript, with concrete floors, whitewashed walls, and trails of pipes and ducts running under the low ceiling.
Stark yanks Loki’s arm again to get him to move and Loki doesn’t quite manage to hold back a hiss this time. Stark grunts out a curse, but does let go of him.
The corridor twists and turns and Natasha starts to wonder whether the level was designed like that on purpose, to create an inescapable maze meant to trap anyone who couldn’t find their way out, or whether it was just an effect of the layout of the upper levels and the structural pillars and beams and supports that had to be there to bear the weight of the floors above their heads. Knowing Stark, it could be either.
Loki’s tempo slows down even more and Natasha cannot tell if it’s because he’s growing tired – there are beads of sweat on his forehead and his breathing is a little quickened – or if it’s just because he really doesn’t want to find out what’s on the end of their journey.
Even if it’s the latter, she cannot blame him – she doesn’t like being here either – so she lets it slide, this once.
There’s a set of heavy, metal gates, marking the entrance to the detention section. The gate rolls aside with a mechanical whirr, revealing another corridor behind.
It’s not overly huge, because it was never meant to be a prison, just a precaution for situations like the one they are currently in. There are just three cells, each divided from the hallway with a pane of glass. Each is just a rectangle of untreated concrete, with a sunken light panel in the ceiling, a metal shelf to serve as a cot, a toilet, and a sink. From looking at the plans, she knows the panel in the back wall is hiding a shower, too, but she would be fooled by how seamless it looks.
Stark stops in front of the first cell, unfurls his gauntlet, and taps away at the control panel. One section of the glass division slides aside.
“Your digs, your majesty,” he jeers.
Loki blinks and Stark rolls his eyes. “In,” he orders, and makes a move to grab Loki again. That’s enough of an incentive, apparently, and the god walks through the opening and looks around, taking in the cell. It’s bare, but it’s by design – there’s nothing inside that can be ripped, torn, or otherwise destroyed and used as a weapon.
Hopefully.
Loki flexes his fingers and turns back to them.
“Sit tight,” Stark mocks and taps the control panel again. The glass slides back, once again creating a seamless division, then darkens. It’s still translucent, but only from this side. Loki’s expression changes, from anticipation to… surprise, probably, or something along those lines. He walks closer to the division and narrows his eyes at what most likely is just his own reflection now.
“He’s putting a lot of effort into this,” Clint says.
“I’m not so sure if it’s a deception tactic,” Steve says, carefully. Natasha shouldn’t be surprised. He has been taking the whole process with a stone face of a trained soldier, but his bleeding heart was easily swayed.
“I’m not so sure either,” Bruce agrees.
“Oh, please,” Stark says. “This is Loki!”
“Amnesia could be a sign of brain damage. And he’s been unconscious and not breathing for hours. A human would–“
“Be dead,” Stark finishes.
“Ten times over.”
“That’s my point. He is provably alive and kicking, only conveniently forgetting the shit he has done? Am I the only one who finds that hard to believe?”
“No,” Natasha says, in unison with Clint.
“See? Our expert on human behavior agrees,” Stark says, gesturing at Natasha.
“He is not a human, Tony,” Bruce says, calmly. “We cannot measure him with the same metrics. We have no idea whether the Asgardian brains work the same way as ours. Besides, even for humans, it isn’t entirely unheard of for traumatic events to cause temporary memory loss. Usually not to that extent, but there are cases of people who forgot even the language they were speaking since birth.”
“Temporary? How long does that take to clear out?”
“Depends. In most cases, it goes away in a couple of hours, sometimes in a couple of days. But for some it never does. I’d have to read more into this to give you a more detailed answer.”
“I’m still saying he’s faking it,” Clint says.
“Perhaps. But we have to be careful with our judgments here. If he’s not, we might be doing irreparable damage to his psyche by disregarding it.”
“Irreparable damage like he has done to hundreds of people in New York? Tell the families of those who died that they need to be careful not to–“
“I get it, Tony,” Bruce sighs. “I really do. I’m angry as well. But we’re supposed to be the good guys, remember?”
“That’s why we stopped Fury from running inhumane experiments on him. That’s as far as my goodwill goes.”
“Tony…”
“I’m done here!” Stark exclaims and starts walking to the exit.
“Tony!”
“What?!” Stark whips around.
“The remote.”
Stark looks at the gizmo in his hand. “Right.”
With a push of a button, the cables restraining Loki’s limbs unclip and retract into the hidden compartments. That tears Loki’s attention from studying his own reflection in the glass. He rolls his shoulders and stares at his hands for a moment, then wanders further into the cell.
Stark walks to the panel again and activates the intercom. “Don’t fuck with our stuff, Loki. Just so you know, you’re being watched, so no stupid moves.”
Loki looks around warily – possibly searching for the cameras, but they are all outside of the cell, and unreachable for him – then lets out a breath, nods, and walks to the far corner of the room. He uses the support of the wall to slide down into a sitting position, draws his legs up, wraps his arms around himself, and rests his head on his knees.
“I think we’re all done here,” Stark says, after they’ve been watching their prisoner do absolutely nothing for a good couple of minutes. Now, that the situation seems fully under control, Stark’s anger ebbs down and he sounds simply tired.
There, Natasha can sympathize.
Bruce still hesitates, bestowing Loki with a long-suffering glare. “Yeah,” he says finally, and turns away from the cell. They all follow him upstairs.