Hidden Troubles

Chapter 16

"I don't care."

The voice jolted Loki from his memory just before vomit could crawl up his throat. He willed himself to remain limp and unresponsive on the bed, as if asleep, although his mind was too far from rest. The voice sounded familiar, and yet Loki couldn't picture a face to match the sound.

"I don't care if you got all beaten up. That you went through that Void thing and then got tortured."

Loki thought he saw a bow and arrow flit through his mind. The agent...the agent he enslaved. The name forgotten in the mists of his mind.

"You've done too much shit to this world for me to feel the least bit sympathetic to you."

He tasted it again.

do not open your mouth do not speak do not make a sound they will find you

"Whatever happened to you, whatever it was that they did to you for all this time, I hope they broke you."

The voice shook, as if it was unsure whether to believe what it was saying. For a moment Loki wanted to open his eyes. To see if they were truths or lies. But he was so tired.

"I hope they made you suffer, I hope they made you regret everything. I hope—I hope they made you ashamed. Because you deserve every single bit of it. You do. You do."

Like a child at prayer.

He tried to move his hand. It wouldn't even curl a finger. He wasn't sure what he would do if he could.

A sound of a slam, a click, and then silence. For a moment, he did not understand. Had the man left him? Alive? Unharmed?

He wished for nothing more than a means to an end, and yet he was never granted it.

Though he couldn't move so much as a finger, he could weep. And as a cascade of soft tears trickled up and down the contours of his face, the god of mischief wept, releasing the tumult of emotions that had been buried inside him for so long.

***

They'd inserted some sort of tube into Loki's nose. He knew not what it was, only that he was forbidden from touching it. Instead he lay awake, the bright sun having some restful sleep evade him. He buried himself in a pit of his thoughts, swam to the deepest, most tumultuous parts of its waters, drowned under the weight of-

"Loki?"

The light voice of the assassin forced him to swim rapidly towards the surface, and break out from the choppy waters of his mind.

"I hope I didn't wake you." He shook his head slightly.

Natasha walked over to his head, clutching some book in her hand. He slightly raised an eyebrow at her. You wish to read to me a petty fairytale? He'd been told enough of fairy tales.

"It's a play. Well, it's a play written in a book. They're quite famous plays."

Not to me they aren't, his confused peek towards the book seemed to say.

"Well, they're plays by someone called Shakespeare. He's a pretty famous playwright from the 16th Century. None of his ideas were ever original; he always stole his plots from someone else. But his writing is really good. I figured he was more your style- you and Thor sort of talk like the people in his plays."

A small smile filtered through his face, yet somehow that send a small spark of joy whizzing around in Natasha's stomach.

"I thought you'd want something more than just staring at the ceiling all day. And to be honest, I need something more than hearing the boys argue all the time, or Tony tell me about whatever new technological, revolutionary breakthrough he's trying to create. So...I thought I could come down and read to you?"