Above All Shadows [Loki Timetravel fic - Completed]

28. At the Titan's Mercy

Whatever the medics gave him did little to improve Loki's headache, but it did leave him so drowsy he had to abandon all attempts to string words into a coherent sentence. Nebula let him be and he found a modicum of relief in dreamless sleep minutes later. When he woke up again, only the cold, off-white furniture kept watch over him.

Loki tilted up the top half of his bed. There were no windows in the room or so much as a clock, so there was no telling how long he had been asleep. He sensed it was a while. His limbs now felt like they had a spark of life in them once more and his skin bore imprints of the creases in his bed sheets.

In one corner of the room was a semi-opaque door that Loki guessed led to the washroom. It was all of four feet to that door. Loki needed to relieve himself and some water to wash the clammy sweat lingering on his skin would do him a great deal of good. Laboriously, he lifted off the blankets and swung his legs over the side of the bed.

At least I still possess four limbs after this encounter with him.

He sighed, then pushed himself off the bed, but didn't let go entirely lest his legs betray him. His vision spun. For several moments he stood frozen, waiting for his body to acclimatise itself to being upright again, then slowly he took his first, stumbling steps.

The main door hissed. Loki spun around to look at who had entered, but lost his balance halfway through. His feet tangled under him. Before he knew it, he was on the floor.

'You really don't look well,' Thanos said as he locked the door behind him. The ceiling in the room certainly wasn't low, but Thanos' head seemed to nearly scrape against it. Looking up at him from the ignominy of the floor, Thanos seemed no smaller than a mountain and not one Loki could ever hope to surmount.

Loki gulped down a breath and clambered back to his bed. 'What did you do to me?'

'I wanted to know more about you. It's curious. No one before has come out of the exercise looking half as wretched as you now do.'

Thanos still held the sceptre in his hand. No doubt, no matter Loki's physical or mental state, he was ready to use it again if he deemed it a necessity. Whatever Loki had to do, he had to avoid this. His collapse was his own work as much as that of the stone set within the sceptre. He had wielded the mind stone and he knew something of how it worked, so he had attempted to protect his memories from it. His magic had borne the brunt of that battle and when it succumbed, his physical body fell victim to the resulting whiplash. He didn't have the reserves to meet another intrusion into his mind.

Did that ploy even work in the first place?

He flopped back onto the mattress. There was no sense in wasting what little energy he could summon on something as perfunctory as standing when he was conversing with a madman nearly twice his height. 'Would you do me the courtesy of explaining what this sceptre is? I'm very keen not to go near such a thing ever again.'

'You've lost some of your courtesies since yesterday,' Thanos said pleasantly.

'I'm in too much pain for empty pleases and thank yous.'

Thanos glanced to the stone at the top of the sceptre. 'You ought to reconsider that. You were not quite honest when we last spoke. Or with my daughter. Isn't that right, Loki?'

'That's the name I answered to in my youth, yes. I chose another since. Surely I'm not the first person you've encountered who has chosen to break with the past and elected a new name for themselves? As to the rest of it, I don't enjoy dwelling on the past and you didn't press for details.'