'What are you his nurse now?'
'One more word and I'll knock out what's left of your front teeth,' came the reply.
A laugh.
'It's cute, really,' the first speaker said in a condescending tone.
A rhythmic clang of metal. The hiss of a door sliding aside. Fading footsteps. One set of footsteps only.
Cognisant that there had been two people in the vicinity, Loki was careful to avoid moving. Whoever had remained behind didn't need to know he was awake just yet. Covertly, he tried to make sense of the situation. He lay on a stiff mattress, his heels resting on the edge. Thick fabric was draped over him. He longed to pull it off. It was as if he was bathed in heat and wherever the material touched his exposed skin, it left him itching. Coupled with the disinfectant-permeated air, he surmised he was in a medical facility.
As to the reason he was here, the clues were less than satisfactory. His head was a well of misery, everything inside his skull seemed inflamed and throbbing. The rest of his body ached in a more sedate manner. But these pains were the outcomes of whatever had transpired, not the causes.
Loki made a count of his limbs. Four. No obvious traumatic injuries either.
Not liking where this was going, Loki reached for his magic. A hundred needles bore into his skin. He gasped and jerked away to the comfort of the material world.
'Loki?' Nebula asked. 'Can you hear me?'
He sucked in a breath and with a groan, opened his eyes. He didn't see her in the initial blur, but once his eyes stopped watering and the floaters in the field of his vision lost their over-whelming gleam, he found her leaning against a wide set of cabinets at the back of the room.
Loki pulled the stifling blankets off him and paused. That single gesture alone seemed to cost him the bulk of the energy he possessed. 'Nebula, could you fill me in on what's happened for me to end up here?'
She cocked her head, then straightened up and moved a few feet closer until she was by his bed, but not so close as to suggest any sort of intimacy between them.
'Do you remember meeting my father?' she said. At Loki's nod, she went on, 'He wanted to verify your story. Do you remember that? Well, you reacted badly to the method he used. You collapsed a minute after. It's been about ten hours since.'
Loki suppressed the urge to dig through the memories of the previous day and check Nebula's story. Likely, any attempt to do so would only intensify the pain. Nor could he see why Nebula would tell him falsehoods about this.
He slid his hand over the side of the mattress and hunted for the control panel to the bed-frame. He doubted he had the strength to prop himself up for long, but he had enough grasp of his sensibilities to detest the indignity of attempting to converse while lying flat on his back. Nebula caught his hand and guided him to the right set of buttons.
'Thank you,' he said as he nudged the bed frame to lift him up into a seated position. 'So, now that your father pilfered through the contents of my head, do I still have a job?'
Nebula took a moment to form a reply. 'He hasn't said anything about that to me.'
He got the sense she was about to say something more, but Loki lacked the energy to think about Thanos and everything that entailed. He fiddled with the hem of the blanket. 'Doesn't matter. I expect I'll know one way or the other soon enough. Could you call over a medic? My head is throbbing so badly, I can't follow the trail of my own thoughts.'
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.'
'And if I press for them now?'
'I suppose,' Loki replied as he ran his hand through his sweat-coated hair, 'you have a right to know the tale if I'm to find employment within your ranks.'
'Then talk.'
If only it were so simple. More of the trial had come back to Loki since he had first regained consciousness, but he still retained only flashes of the memories Thanos had torn out of his head and nothing at all of the moment he had collapsed. How many memories that Thanos seen? What happened after he had collapsed? This type of interrogation typically required the subject to be conscious, but if anything could defy conventional laws, it was an infinity stone. The curated wall of memories he had built up might have collapsed after he lost consciousness and left the entire course of the future for Thanos to peruse.
It might well be that Thanos already knew everything and played a game here. He enjoyed games. Particularly when it came to catching people at the lowest and coaxing advantage out of their bared weaknesses.
Loki ran his thumb along the side of his leg. 'Surely you've seen everything in my mind already.'
'I've seen some of it, Loki, son of King Laufey of the Jotnar,' Thanos said with a slight chuckle. 'Discarded as a babe and offered a second chance by King Odin, the great enemy of your race. Yet life among the shining might of Asgard wasn't always so sweet.'
'In hindsight, it was a better life than one I would've had among my blood kin.'
'That must be a deep-seated conviction. You were ready to destroy Jotunheim for your brother.'
'A mistake,' Loki shot back. 'Saving my brother that is, not destroying Jotunheim. The Jotnar are vicious warmongers, who defile their dead and dispose of inconvenient children. They allowed my birth-father to lead them. My actions were nothing less than they deserved. As to my brother, he is an oaf and he'll always be an oaf. No better than the rest of the Asgardians, really. He seemed chastised after his imprisonment by the frost giants, but I could already see his old self re-emerging. A man cannot make as thorough a change as he is in need of.'
'And King Odin?
'I-I hardly know where to begin with him. He's the reason I got to live, but then he just –'
Loki bit into the inside of his cheek. He could only hope that the mess of words he had blurted out didn't directly contradict some memory Thanos had witnessed. Unfortunately, Thanos' expression provided him with no clues.
'Do all of these histrionics actually interest you?' Loki said. 'The Nine Realms seem so grand a place when you live there, but when you see the true scale of the universe, you get quite a different view.'
'You no longer wish to seize your birthright then?'
'I think soon enough my birthright will be nothing more than cosmic dust.' For the first time in a long time, Loki got the sense he surprised the Titan. He didn't savour the victory, however, and went on, 'It's a dark prediction, I know, but I genuinely think little good lies ahead. Something is wrong with Jotunheim as a planet; it's increasingly hostile to life.
'And the Asgardians? They are arrogant and complacent. Odin was an ambitious man in his younger days. He conquered planets, people say he once even sought the infinity stones. He gave up all that, happy to lounge around in his throne and listen the bards recount his ancient victories a thousand times over. My brother too would rest all on those laurels. Asgardian pride will lead them to ruin and there's nothing I can do about it. So be it then. I won't fight for a lost cause.'
'Is that so?' Smiling wryly, Thanos reached down and cupped Loki's chin. There was no controlling the impulse to pull away — only yesterday that same gesture had preceded his interrogation with the mind stone. But there was no escaping either. Thanos caught Loki's shoulder not a moment later. 'I hope you will find my fight is not a lost cause.'
'I-I believe it.'
'I know something of worlds that are determined to destroy themselves. My home-world is lost, but it may be that you and I will yet find a way to save yours, whether it be Jotunheim or Asgard,' Thanos said softly. From anyone else, those words might have sounded comforting.
Had he done it? It seemed so. Loki had caught that minute widening of Thanos' eyes at the mention of the infinity stones. Yet there was something more here. Thanos' demeanour had changed when he realised Loki had knowledge of the infinity stones the first time around too, but not quite like this. Loki supposed he might have sparked a sense of kinship with his sorry tale. He had heard rumours that the Mad Titan did possess an emotional range. Or this might be an attempt to bind Loki's loyalty to him.
It doesn't matter why. As long as I can persuade him to keep my head attached to the rest of me, I can work on making sure he ends up dead.
'Have you nothing to say, Loki?' Thanos asked.
'I'm not sure I have the words to convey my thoughts right now, my lord. If what you say is at all possible, then I'll do anything that you ask of me.' Loki let out a shuddering breath. 'I've heard it said that hope is the most valuable commodity in the universe. Right now, I really do believe that's true.'
Thanos smiled. It was an expression strangely reminiscent of that kitsch mural above the entrance to the Mess Hall. 'And I believe we understand each other better now,' he said as he released his grip on Loki's shoulder. 'Let's talk more soon. As it is, Nebula will berate me for over-taxing you when you are still recovering.'
'Thank you, my lord. I appreciate your concern, and Nebula's.'
When the door slid shut behind Thanos. Loki pulled the blanket around his shoulders and drew his knees up to his chest. He didn't know when it had started, but his whole body was shaking.