Chapter Text
Phil Coulson rubbed his eyes tiredly and passed a hand over his slicked-back dark hair.
"I don't suppose there's any chance of coffee?" he asked.
"On it, boss," Clint Barton replied laconically.
Not that any amount of coffee was likely to do him much good, after being dragged out of bed and flown halfway across the country because a truck full of scientists in the New Mexico desert had hit some cape-wearing nut case carrying a blue guy.
Put baldly like that it sounded like a frat hazing gone awry, nothing to concern either Coulson or his employers, but the case had a few points of interest. For one thing, the cape-wearing guy had come out much the best in the collision with the truck, demolishing the front end and scaring the daylights out of one Dr. Jane Foster and her research associates.
For another, the blue guy had been pretty much cut to ribbons. And he hadn't been wearing body paint.
By the time Coulson's team arrived to close down the scene and do damage control, cape-wearing guy was in orderly's scrubs, gory clothes bagged, his hands bandaged. The blue guy was on a saline drip to try to ward off hypovolemic shock, since it was apparent that human blood wouldn't do him any good. Coulson left Barton to keep formerly-cape-wearing guy calm until he could be interrogated again, and went down the closed-off hall to look in on the alien, or maybe mutant, patient.
Probably they were both aliens, or maybe mutants, but only one of them looked it.
The blue guy had been rolled onto his less-injured side, was lying halfway curled up and obviously out of it, and it wasn't until he was next to the bed that Coulson realized the position was because his hands were cuffed behind his back.
"What's this about?" he asked the SHIELD doctor monitoring the drip. "He get violent?"
"He was wearing them when he came in, and nobody's been able to get them off. We had a hell of a time getting his clothes off him." Coulson looked disapproving, and the doctor gestured toward the figure in the bed. "If you want to try your luck, go ahead. He's got enough morphine in him to sedate a rhinoceros-- seems to have a very high tolerance-- so I doubt he'll even notice you. Just be careful how you touch him."
"I'm not in the habit of poking at stab wounds," Coulson replied dryly.
"It's not that. His skin seems to be corrosive, or something. One of the orderlies got quite a burn earlier."
"Noted," Coulson said, walked around the bed, and reached into an inside pocket.
As he did, the blue figure stirred.
~oOo~
Formerly-cape-wearing guy, wearing blue scrubs and looking dazed, was sitting in a small office across a desk from Barton. Coulson let himself in, nodded at Barton, and waited for him to leave before taking a seat himself.
"I'm Phil Coulson," he began. "I wonder if we could talk a little about what happened tonight." Formerly-cape-wearing guy didn't move, but his eyes cut upward to meet Coulson's for a second. "Can you tell me your name?" Coulson didn't normally do gentle, but he had a nice line in reassuringly businesslike, and most of the time people responded to it.
Formerly-cape-wearing guy-- who Coulson was only now realizing looked very young, a kid, probably not old enough to drink yet-- chewed his lower lip for a moment before replying, "Thor."
"Thor? Any last name, Thor?" No response, except maybe the blankness got deeper. "Family name, I mean." No response, and Coulson tried to think of another term Thor might understand better. "Patronymic?"
Long pause. More lip-chewing, and his eyes filled with tears. Then, "No," in a sort of choked whisper.
"Okay. Thor it is. I was just looking in on-- I understand he's your brother?"
"Yes," in the same strangled whisper. It sounded like he'd been screaming so hard he'd lost his voice. Thor looked up, blue eyes dazed, and asked, "He lives?"
"Yes," Coulson replied. "He regained consciousness, briefly, while I was taking off those handcuffs."
Thor stared. "You removed the shackles? How could you-- they were imbued with the powers of the Allfather, how could-- ?"
Coulson shrugged. "Used a lock pick. But the interesting thing is, after I took the cuffs off, he woke up for a second and kind of shivered-- and now he's not blue anymore. Is there anything we should know about that?" Thor looked away, a couple of tears sliding down his face. Coulson waited a moment, but Thor had nothing to contribute. Coulson opened a folder on the desk, containing the notes Barton had written up after the first round of questioning.
"Okay. You say your brother was attacked, and you rescued him, and you were escaping from someone and that's how you got here?" Nod. More tears. "And you don't know where you are?"
"Midgard," Thor murmured incomprehensibly. Again, he didn't seem inclined to elaborate, and after a while Coulson went on,
"Okay. Now, I'm sure what happened was very upsetting to you, but we need to know where you came from and how you got here." He hesitated, and this time it wasn't for tactical reasons. Looking at the slumped shoulders of the giant in front of him, Coulson said quietly, "Also… you told Agent Barton that you were protecting your brother. He's… really badly cut up. Whoever did this to him, it was a vicious attack." More silent tears. "You, on the other hand… you've got some burns on your hands, similar to the ones an orderly sustained handling your brother in… in his other skin. But the only other injuries you've got, apart from that, are on your right hand."
Thor looked up, locking eyes with Coulson, who was momentarily very conscious that Thor was big and the room was small.
And then he went on, "You've got a number of cuts on your hand. Cuts that are consistent with… when you stab someone, Thor, it's a messy thing, and sometimes you hit bone, and the knife jolts, so your hand can slide from the grip down onto the blade. That's a characteristic injury you see on a person who's stabbed someone, especially multiple times. The burn on your left hand… is consistent with the injury being sustained while your hand was wrapped around something. Like a throat, for instance.
"And your brother-- what's his name?"
"Loki," Thor breathed.
Coulson nodded. "Loki. Like I told you, Loki only woke up for a minute, and he didn't say anything before he passed out again. But while he was under, I'm told he did mumble a little." Coulson looked down at the folder again, and quoted the doctor's report of the patient's words: "No, Thor, please don't." He looked back up, into the eyes of the boy across the desk, who suddenly seemed very much smaller. Still in his most reassuringly businesslike voice, he asked,
"Are you sure there's nothing you'd like to tell me about what happened?"
~oOo~
It was maybe just a little creepy, how fast Loki healed once the shackles were off. By the middle of the next morning all but the worst of his wounds were nothing but faint pinkish scars on his pale skin. He was still weak from loss of blood, and still on the saline drip to keep his pressure up, but was reasonably alert.
"We're going to have to get them out of here soon, Boss," Barton commented, as they stood in the hall outside the room. Coulson made a noncommittal noise. "Kind of hard to keep two aliens under wraps in a place this small. And we really should find out what kind of powers they have, apart from the obvious."
"The obvious is interesting enough, at this point," Coulson agreed. "I'll want to talk to them about that. And about what happened to both of them."
Barton looked thoughtfully at Coulson. "Don't get emotionally involved, Boss."
Coulson gave him a hard look. "Don't be stupid. I just… I remember reading a story about members of the Hitler Youth having to kill their own pet dog to prove their loyalty to their leaders. That turned out to be an urban legend, but this really happened. With the kid's brother in the role of the dog, no less. How twisted is that?"
Barton scowled. "Just keep in mind, they've probably both been brainwashed like that all their lives, and that could make them dangerous in ways we can't even predict."
Coulson nodded in acknowledgement, took a sip of god-awful coffee, and looked toward the patient's room. "Has anyone debriefed him?" Barton shook his head. Coulson nodded, tossed his paper cup into the trash, and walked through the door.
Loki watched him, green eyes wary, flicking from Coulson to the IV pole to the closed window and then back to Coulson. Having some sympathy with Loki's probable state of mind, and also very little desire to get himself strangled with an IV line, Coulson didn't approach too closely. Instead, he pulled a visitor's chair to what, judging by his body language, Loki considered a safe distance, and sat down.
"Good morning," he said. Ordinarily, pleasantries weren't part of Coulson's repertoire, but he was willing to make exceptions for presumably scared and disoriented aliens who had just had a close brush with death. The fact Loki looked, if anything, even younger than Thor might have had some influence on his approach.
Loki, with a white-knuckled grip on the sheet covering him, did not reply.
"My name is Phil Coulson," Coulson went on. "You probably don't remember this, but I was in here last night just after you arrived. I took the shackles off your wrists." Loki blinked a little. "I also had a long conversation with your brother, Thor, about what happened to you." Loki did not react to that, either, and Coulson, for accuracy, amended, "About what he did to you."
"It was the Allfather's command," Loki mumbled, his voice just as hoarse and scratchy as Thor's.
"That's what he told me," Coulson agreed. "Something to do with proving his loyalty to your country, is that right?" Loki nodded, casting his eyes down in what might have been an effort to hide the tears brimming in them. Coulson considered waiting him out, but reminded himself this wasn't an interrogation and Loki wasn't a prisoner.
After a moment he said quietly, "There's a saying I read once: If I ever had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my brother, I hope I'd have the guts to betray my country." Loki looked up in evident confusion, and Coulson elaborated, "What was done to you-- we don't allow that kind of thing here. Your brother isn't going to be punished, because we don't have jurisdiction over your planet, but here, you're protected. Both of you." There was another pause. This time, Coulson let it stretch.
"It was my fault he failed," Loki mumbled. Which was not exactly what Coulson had been expecting, but he remembered Barton's word: brainwashed.
"What do you mean?" he prompted, after a moment.
"I… disgraced myself. I begged him-- " Loki broke off, fingers worrying at the edge of the sheet. "And then… I was not supposed to be able to, my magic should have been suppressed by those shackles, but… all my life I have worn this form. I was pleading with him, like a coward, like-- "
"I don't think you can be blamed for not wanting to be butchered by your own brother," Coulson interjected, before he could stop himself.
Loki winced. "I should have been… braver. But Father, and Mother, they had-- and I could not bear to die that way, at the hand of the only one left who had ever… so I called on the glamour I had thought was the truth, and made him see… the lie we had both believed. And he stopped." Loki scrubbed his knuckles against his mouth. "I do not know how I did that. The Allfather's magics should have-- "
Coulson leaned forward a little in his chair. "I think maybe you were stronger than your father expected." Pause. "And so was your brother."
For a long moment there was no sound in the room, except a few muffled sniffles from the kid in the bed. Then Coulson said, as kindly as he was able to,
"How about we find you something to wear, and something to eat? Would that be okay?" Loki looked up and nodded. Coulson smiled as kindly as he could manage.
"And-- your brother would like to see you."
~oOo~
Ordinarily, the last thing Coulson would have countenanced was to put a victim in the same room with his attacker, but these were exceptional circumstances, and by the next afternoon he thought it had to happen. Barton went looking for proper clothes for both boys and managed to outfit them in jeans, shirts, and boots that fit. Thor clearly felt very uncomfortable in the strange get-up, but Loki, who'd spent the past day naked except for a sheet, just seemed relieved to be decently covered and able to move around.
Coulson had no idea what either of them might want to eat, but they looked like teenagers so he figured they'd be ravenous and would probably like pizza. Barton was sent on pickup duty while Coulson walked Loki down to the conference room they'd commandeered for this meeting.
It did cross Coulson's mind that if this went south, he was likely to be the first casualty. But Thor hadn't shown any inclination to get violent toward his brother again, while Loki seemed to be blaming himself for being alive more than Thor for trying to kill him. He mentally shrugged, tapped on the conference room door, and called to Thor, "It's us."
Loki hung back behind him as they walked into the room, and on the other side of the room Thor fidgeted in his chair but stayed seated. Loki sat down in the chair Coulson indicated, hands clasped and worrying together in his lap.
For a long moment, neither boy spoke. Then Thor began, hesitantly, "Loki-- "
"I'm sorry," Loki burst out, hands clenched around each other. "Everything is ruined, all your-- everything, it's my fault, I should have-- I should not have-- I'm sorry-- "
Brainwashed, Coulson reminded himself, put a hand on the kid's shoulder, and was about to say something when Thor--
-- Well, when Thor erupted out of his chair and came flying around the table, which might have been frightening if he hadn't been weeping and making a sort of broken crooning noise at the same time. Loki jumped up to meet him, and the next thing Coulson knew the two boys were hugging each other and crying their eyes out.
"I am so sorry, brother," Thor wept. "For everything. For… hurting you, and… hurting you, and… It was not worth it. Nothing, not the throne or Father or Mother, none of it. Can you ever forgive me?"
There was a short pause, broken only by sobbing from both kids. Then, in a shaky little voice:
"I think so," Loki replied. Thor hugged him tighter.
Coulson pulled out a chair in the corner, and sat watching them and waiting for Barton to come back with the pizza.