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Chapter Text

Loki could feel energy buzzing through the air, humming on his skin. A familiar anticipation called to him. He would pull at the seams of the world, bend it to his will, through his cleverness and skill and - 

The machine in front him exploded. 

Dark smoke poured out of it, and Loki began to cough as it filled his lungs. “Fucking hell!” a voice called behind him. “Turn the damned thing off!”

Loki reached for the dial, turning it all the way down. The humming stopped, energy dissipating into air. 

The room was still filled with the hacking sound of coughing. He could feel pricking up and down his esophagus, as if he’d inhaled glass.

Loki cleared his throat as best he could. “I suppose we count that as a failure.”

“You suppose!?” the man next to him rasped angrily. “You could have killed us! I told you it wasn’t ready!”

“Yes, but I knew it was ready!” 

“Oh well, if the almighty Loki knew it was all set, that’s okay then. Never mind that you’ve filled the room with toxic smoke and we’ve wasted two weeks of work!”

Loki grit his teeth. “We’ll never find out what this object is if you persist with your ridiculous over caution.”

“We’ll never find out what it is if you blow up all the equipment either!”

“Gentlemen,” called a third voice from above. Loki looked up.

Through the smoke, Loki could see the voice’s owner standing on the catwalk. Phil Coulson, agent of SHIELD.

Loki’s boss. 

“What happened here?”

Leo Fitz, Loki’s frustrated colleague, huffed and crossed his arms. “What happened here is that SHIELD put a reckless amnesiac with no known scientific background on a highly sensitive project -”

“The object affected me directly,” Loki seethed. “I have every right to take part in testing-”

“Argue on your own time,” Coulson cut in. “But can I remind you that we’re dealing with highly sensitive materials here, and it’s probably best to keep explosions to a minimum?”

“You don’t have to remind me , sir,” Fitz snapped. “Some of us have the experience to know when something’s too dangerous to tamper with.” 

Loki did his best to suppress a glare.

Coulson just nodded, either blind or indifferent to the tension in the air. He looked at Loki expectantly for several moments. 

“Of course. No explosions,” Loki ground out eventually, rolling his eyes for good measure.

“Glad to hear it,” Coulson replied. “Where’s Simmons?”

“On her lunch break,” simpered Fitz.

“Have her do a medical workup on both of you as soon as she gets back. Exotic energy levels in the room are reading a bit high.”

Loki nodded, refusing to meet Fitz’s eyes.

“Oh, and gentlemen?” Coulson called again. “I also wanted to remind you that the monthly report is due today. Be sure to add this incident in.”

Loki bit down on a groan. This was shaping up to be a terrible day.

Though days here were terrible more often than not. Endlessly dull routines that looped over and over and over again, constantly repeating the same tests without progress, trapped in a dull facility in an endless desert with little to distract from the boredom. It was almost torture.

It was days like this where Loki most wished he could remember something else. 

Anything at all.

Chapter Text

“Honestly, are you trying to blow yourself up?” Simmons asked, carefully drawing blood from Loki’s forearm.

“The machine was ready!”

“Then why did it explode?!” Fitz yelled from the other side of the workroom. 

“He’s got a decent point there,” Simmons said as she withdrew the needle. 

Loki rolled his eyes. “You lack vision. Both of you.”

“You are so full of shit, it’s incredible,” Fitz ranted, glass crunching under his shoes. “The fact that SHIELD hired you still baffles me, you didn’t even have a resume, never mind a degree-”

“You know,” Simmons said as she used a light to examine Loki’s pupils. “I would think after all this time, you two would settle in with each other and learn to work in peace.”

“Well maybe if someone learned to stop blowing up the lab and respect the scientific method-”

“Oh yes, Fitz,” Loki said sarcastically, throwing up his hands in frustration. “ Do regale us with yet another lecture on the importance of the scientific method. I don’t think we’ve heard one for the past 20 minutes.”

Simmons put down her ophthalmoscope with a sharp snap. She moved directly into Loki’s field of vision, blocking his view of Fitz. 

“Loki, I have to finish this examination. Would you like to let me do that, or would you rather you develop some sort of unknown smoke-borne disease I don’t pick up on?”

He huffed, but stilled. They lapsed into uncomfortable silence as Simmons checked Loki’s reflexes and his blood pressure and his eardrums. He watched Fitz picking up broken pieces of metal across the lab, clearing the debris away from the 0-8-4 they were studying. 

Loki found himself staring at it, at the object of unknown origin. The bizarre stone seemed untouched as ever, the rough untranslatable runes carved into its side still standing out sharp against the smooth surface. 

He looked away. The object always unnerved him if he looked at it too long. 

Loki supposed that was to be expected. After all, it had stolen his memories. 

Still, it was almost as though he could feel it sometimes. Humming, buzzing under his skull. 

Fitz sighed from across the room. “Not a dent in the thing.”

Loki looked up sharply. “Really? The explosion didn’t affect it at all?”

His teammate shook his head. “If we want to cut into it and see if there’s something inside it, we’ll need to get permission to use better equipment.”

Simmons paused to take Loki’s temperature. “98.6 as always,” she muttered. 

Loki hummed and turned back to face Fitz. “Do you think we could get our hands on a high particle beam?”

“Likely not, since this facility's not built to house one.”

“Well there’s a thought,” Simmons said as she made notes in her pad. “Maybe we can get the project transferred to a different facility.” 

“What’s wrong, Simmons?” Loki replied. “You don’t love the dry rolling monotony of the Mojave Desert?”

“Well, I was actually hoping they’d send us only a few miles over to the Project Pegasus facility. You should hear the rumors about the 0-8-4 they have over there. They say it could revolutionize the entire field of engineering. I'd love to get a peek at it.”

“You know, I was up for that project,” Fitz mused. “But instead I had the incredible luck to be sent to work with one of the biggest prats in human history.”

“Love you too,” Loki said through his teeth.

The door slammed open. One of the guards stepped in, looking halfway murderous. 

“We all can hear you bickering through the soundproof glass,” the guard growled. “It’s distracting, in case you were curious.”

“We weren’t,” Loki said imperiously, hopping down from Simmon’s examination table. 

“I’m so sorry,” Simmons apologized earnestly. “I promise, we will all make an effort to keep it down.” She looked pointedly at Fitz and Loki in turn.

“Don’t make that promise for me,” Fitz responded. “If he keeps being a shit, I’ll keep yelling at him.” 

The guard, who Loki was fairly certain was called Rumlow, seemed unshaken. “I don’t care if there’s trouble here in Little Britain. Just give the rest of us peace and quiet.”

Loki sniffed. “I’m not British. I’m Norwegian.”

Fitz rolled his eyes. “You just assume you’re Norwegian because you happen to speak some Norwegian. Record your voice, listen to your own accent for a minute.”

“I don’t feel British. Besides, I’d hate to think the same country birthed both of us.”

“Trust me, it didn’t. You’re as English as it gets.”

Simmons looked mildly insulted. “Let’s not say anything we regret, Fitz.” 

But Fitz was on a roll. “Look at him. He probably went to some ridiculous school for braying posh types who set money on fire for fun.” 

The guard groaned, once more drawing the room’s attention. “Jesus, I don’t care about any of this. Just keep it down.” 

As he turned to go, Loki noticed the set of his shoulders, the curve of his back. 

The guard was angry, yes. But he might not be a bad person to get to know. Loki had been in a dry spell for about a month, and he was starting to get restless. Some mindless fun would be welcome.

The door clicked closed, and Fitz’s voice tore Loki away from pleasant thoughts.

“For the love of God, could you stop being horny in the middle of my workshop?” Fitz sniped. 

Loki rolled his eyes. “It’s our workshop, and I don’t know what you mean.”

“You’re practically drooling.”

“There’s nothing wrong with appreciating the human form-”

“I don’t think this is co-worker appropriate conversation,” Simmons said, blushing scarlet.

At this, Loki felt a twinge of guilt. He didn’t want to make the girl uncomfortable, he actually found her quite pleasant. 

“Are we finished?” he asked softly, changing topics. 

She nodded. “You and Fitz can switch out now. But we need to do an MRI tomorrow, just to be cautious.” 

Loki nodded and stretched a little. He crossed the lab, picking up a broom to finish the cleaning. 

“Oh and Loki?” Simmons called. “I thought you should know, Dr. Selvig’s back in town.”

For the first time that day, a genuine grin graced Loki’s face. “Erik’s back from Oslo? For how long?”

“I’m not sure, but he said he’d love to grab dinner with you if you had the chance.”

“Yes well, you know I’d never miss a meal with my favorite male colleague at SHIELD,” Loki said pointedly as Fitz passed him.  

The Scotsman scoffed. “He’s only your favorite because he’s the first person you saw when you woke up. You imprinted on him like a baby duck-”

“Can I tell Dr. Selvig when you’ll meet him?” Simmons cut in quickly. 

Loki glanced at the clock on the wall and sighed. “I have my weekly with Dr. Girard soon. Will you tell him I’ll see him after?”

Simmons nodded, and Loki smiled in return. He tried not to feel petty pleasure when Fitz stiffened at that response. 

Instead he turned back to the cleaning, sweeping up glass and metal. He tried to focus on Erik’s visit, on how good it would feel to see his mentor. 

Otherwise, it’d be too easy to keep staring at that clock on the wall and let dread overwhelm him.

Dr. Girard’s office was on nearly the other side of the facility. It took Loki ages to wind his way through the maze of hallways. He eventually made it to the right room. Unfortunately. 

For a long moment, Loki stood outside the door, his hand barely brushing the doorknob.

Officially the doctor was supposed to help bring Loki’s memories back. After he’d woken up two years prior next to the artifact with only a name on his lips, barely remembering how to tie his own shoes, SHIELD had oh so kindly provided him with a therapist. To help him conquer his amnesia and get his life back, they said. 

It was glaringly obvious SHIELD had underlying motives. The agency wanted to know how exactly the artifact had caused the memory loss, if the same thing would happen to other people, if it could be reversed. If it could be weaponized. 

He was also under no illusions that his memory loss was the only reason he was working at SHIELD at all. No agency in the world would typically allow someone with seemingly no experience, no listed education, no past whatsoever onto their scientific team. Loki knew he was essentially a test subject, and it was simply a happy accident that he had skill enough to conduct some of the tests. 

Yet when he was in the lab working with his team, working with some degree of control, Loki didn’t feel like a test subject. 

Or at least, he could ignore this factor of his reality.

But with Dr. Girard, Loki felt like he was being examined with a high power electron microscope. He felt like a particle accelerator was trying to tear bits of him away, stripping him down to the core of himself. 

He always was...strange afterward. Unsettled. Like a different him.

Especially after hypnosis sessions. Which he was scheduled for today. 

Loki sighed, swallowed down his lingering nerves. This was ridiculous. It was just therapy, millions of people all over the world did it. So could he. 

He took a breath, twisted the knob, and entered the room. 

Dr. Girard looked up at him as he entered, peering at his face from beneath her glasses, glancing down at some papers in her hands. “Have a seat please.”

He did as he was bid, settling himself in the leather chair across from her rather than the couch in the corner of the room. After a moment, the doctor looked up. 

“You look like you're feeling better.”

Loki scoffed a bit. “You are a terrible liar.”

“What makes you say that?”

“The project’s been keeping me up all hours. If anything, I likely look worse.”

“So you haven't been sleeping.” 

“Ah, you know how to listen and parrot back a patient’s words. Well done. Keep that up, you’ll have a long and fruitful career ahead of you.”

She didn’t rise to the bait. She never did. It was infuriating. 

Her tone was even as she responded. “Have you been sleeping?”

Loki looked down at his hands, one nail picking at loose skin on his palm. “Yes.”

“How much?”

“That’s not rele-”

“How much?”

Loki hesitated before answering. “Three or four hours a night. But that's entirely normal for me.”

“It shouldn't be normal, that's not enough sleep.”

“It’s not a problem. I feel fine.”

“Lack of sleep can have a cumulative effect.”

Loki grit his teeth. “Most SHIELD agents don’t get anywhere near a healthy eight hours.”

“In this room you’re not a SHIELD agent, you’re my patient.”

“Am I?”

She peered at him silently until he broke eye contact. 

Then, “Can you tell me why you aren’t sleeping? Are you still having strange dreams?”

“As I said, the project is keeping me up. And I retract my comment about you knowing how to listen.”

She shifted in her seat, leaned forward a touch. “Loki, in order for these sessions to be effective, you need to cooperate with me.”

“I’m quite aware,” he snapped. “But as I have clearly stated more than once now, lack of sleep is not unusual for me. Moreover, I have no earthly idea how quibbling about this will get me any closer to retrieving my lost memories, so can we please move on?”

She relented. “We’ll put a pin in it.”

“Thank the gods.”

She wrote something on her pad. “What makes you say that?”

“I was frustrated by this conversation.”

“I meant the phrasing. You say that often, ‘thank the gods.’ Why not ‘thank God’?”

Loki rolled his eyes up to the ceiling, glared at the tiny dents in the pressed styrofoam. “Are we just going to pick at meaningless expressions today?”

She put down her pad. “We don’t have to. We could proceed straight to the next part of the session if you’d like.”

Loki’s eyes cut over to the couch in the corner. He quickly looked away. 

“I think I’d rather return to talking about my lack of sleep.”

“Do you have anything new to say on that topic?”

“Not particularly.”

“Is there anything you would like to talk about before we proceed to the next part of the session?”

He ran a hand through his hair. It had gotten long over the past two years. “I suppose I don’t have anything new to report. Life’s pretty much the same. Work, eat, go home, try to sleep.”

“And do you have any sense there’s something else you should be doing?”

“No,” he answered honestly. He swallowed, trying to build up the courage for what he wanted to really say. “Can I ask you something?”

“You can ask me anything in this room, Loki. Everything you say is between us.”

“What, you don’t get wine with Coulson and laugh along to my session tapes?”

Again, she didn’t rise to the bait. “What did you want to ask me?”

He scratched at his palm, picking off a bit of dry skin. It fell to the gray carpet below. 

“I was wondering if we could potentially end my hypnosis treatments.”

For the first time in the session, Loki felt Dr. Girard tense. 

“Does hypnosis bother you?”

“I find it…” Loki hesitated, trying to find the right word. “Disturbing. I find it disturbing.”

“How so?”

“Does it matter ‘how so’? If I want to suspend the sessions, shouldn’t we be able to suspend them?”

“This is your treatment, we can proceed however you wish to.”

Something unspoken hung in the air. “But…” he said quietly. 

“I’m sorry?”

“You have some other thoughts on this, I can tell. So just say them. ‘We can proceed however you wish to, but- ’”

She gave him a sad half smile. “ But I think that suspending hypnosis might impede your progress. I think we’ve gotten a lot out of the last several sessions. I wouldn’t want to hold you back. No one at SHIELD would want you to hold yourself back.”

SHIELD wants you to do this. If you don’t continue, SHIELD will be disappointed. That was the clear subtext of her words. 

Who was he to deny SHIELD? They had given him a job, a place to live. Everyone he knew in the world worked here. Without SHIELD, Loki wasn’t even sure how he’d navigate his life.  

Loki could feel the jaws of a trap pressing down on him, teeth pressing into his back in the dark.

He sighed, and cut his eyes to the couch once more. “Fair enough,” he said, voice barely audible. “Let's begin.”

He lay back, feeling the rough fabric beneath him. His fingers played with a loose thread on a cushion. 

Dr. Girard had started a metronome, to relax him. He could hear it, ticking back and forth, back and forth, tick tock, tick tock. Lulling him away. 

“Imagine you’re laying back in the desert,” the doctor was saying. “Imagine it’s past sunset.”

Tick tick tick tick.

“The sky is getting darker. Stars are appearing. Stars and constellations and galaxies, shining above you.”

Tick tick tick tick.

“Look up at them. Feel them looking back at you. Seeing things. Knowing things.”

Tick tick tick tick.

“Now fall into them.”

And he did. 

He woke. He could feel himself vibrating, thrumming with some kind of tension he couldn’t name. He shook himself. 

“Well done today,” someone was saying above him. The voice buzzed in the air.

He looked at his palm, found bloody-nail shaped cuts there.

Words felt beyond him. His tongue belonged to someone else. 

A hand was on his shoulder, guiding him up to a seated position. 

He looked up at the face in front of him. It seemed impossible to make out the details in their features. 

“Are you alright to go?” the voice buzzed. 

He nodded, blood thick in his skull. He stood, took something from a hand placed in front of him. 

“Loki?”

Loki shook himself, tried to come back into his own mind. “Yes,” he managed, words hoarse.

“I asked if we could confirm the next appointment. Same time next week?”

He stared for a moment too long before answering. “Yes. Yes of course. Same time next week.”

There was a smile. Loki tried to meet it with his own, but he couldn’t help but think his own face felt hollow. 

“Have a good weekend Loki.”

“You too, Dr. Girard.” The words left his mouth automatically, almost without his own will. He’d done this dozens of times before, after all. 

And then Loki tried to gather the broken pieces of himself scattered about the office and walk back into the world. 

It took several more minutes of walking down concrete halls before Loki regained even a vague sense of himself. He still felt unsettled, like his brain had boiled in his skull. But he was enough of himself to remember who he was, what he was meant to be doing. 

Well, enough of the ‘himself’ from these past two years anyway. 

He looked down at his hands, ran a careful finger over the fingernail cuts on his left palm. He could hear Simmons in his head, telling him to put Neosporin on before he got some sort of infection. 

In his other hand was an old-fashioned small black tape. 

A session recording. A record of whatever he’d said under hypnosis. 

Dr. Girard always gave him these, always told him to listen to them in case they sparked some sort of memory. He always scoffed at the notion in front of her, told him his sleepy nonsensical ramblings would do nothing for his memory that living in the world could not. 

In private he listened to every single one. 

He passed a bathroom and quickly cut into it, carefully putting the tape in his pocket before throwing up in the sink. 

As his arms gripped the sides of the porcelain he looked up into the mirror. At the long dark hair hanging in his face, at the rumpled blue button down shirt, at the black frame glasses hanging crooked off his nose, at the trail of sick hanging from one side of his mouth. 

Is this who he was?

Loki sighed and stood straight. He turned on the sink to clear it, wiped the side of his mouth, pushed his hair back. 

He needed to get himself together. After all, Erik was here. And it wouldn’t do to be in a melancholy mood around Erik.

He hitched a ride with a guard driving a cart to the apartments on the edge of the compound. All on-site SHIELD agents lived here. The ones working on this project, the ones working on Project Pegasus, the ones working at a hundred different other classified little outposts in the Mojave desert. 

When the guard dropped him off, it had grown dark. As he drove away and the headlights faded, Loki found himself staring up at the stars. 

Away from the light pollution of the main buildings, the view was always staggering. It was almost overwhelming to stand here in the ancient light of the cosmos, the strange sadness still lingering in his mind.

Fall into them. 

What the hell was he doing here? In this place? They were all just clustered in a handful of ugly concrete buildings, cooking themselves in one of the hottest deserts on the planet, playing with things they couldn’t possibly begin to understan-

“Hei gutt!” called a familiar voice. “Kom deg opp på taket!”

He refocused his gaze from the sky to the roof. In the dark, he could make out Erik sitting up there, a telescope stretched out in front of him. 

For the first time in hours, Loki felt himself smiling. “Hva gjør du der oppe, gamle mann? Er du ikke redd du skal knekke hoften?”

“Stop with the ‘gamle mann’ nonsense and come up here! I brought a surprise for you!”

Loki grinned and walked over to the fire escape, pulling himself up. A few minutes of climbing later, he scrambled onto the roof and settled at Erik’s side. 

He laughed a little at the expression on his mentor’s face. “When I said ‘come up here,’” Erik said, “I assumed you’d go inside and take the elevator.“

“Impressed?” Loki teased, catching his breath a bit.

Erik smiled. “You climbed an apparatus meant to be climbed, that’s hardly impressive.”

“It’s better than you could do, gam-”

The elder man laughed and brought him in for a hug. Loki sank into it, feeling settled for the first time in a long while. 

“If you keep calling me ‘gamle mann,’” Erik chuckled, “I won’t give you that surprise.”

Loki pulled away, still smiling. “Well fine then, show me the surprise. I’ll see if I want it bad enough to stop the teasing.”

“Well then,” Erik said, drawing an envelope out of his inner jacket pocket. “I know you’ll want this, so I think I’ll be safe moving forward.”

Loki planned to bite off another sharp reply, but the sight of the envelope stole the breath from his mouth. 

He could see the little seal stamped in the corner. “Is that-”

“It is,” Erik said with a smile, handing it over.

Loki tore into the envelope, his hand closing on the little plastic card within. 

“Congratulations, Loki Erikson. You now officially exist as a permanent resident of the United States.”

And there it was, his name printed on the little card next to the photo he’d sent into USCIS nearly a year ago. 

“You know,” Erik was saying off to the side. “It’s a miracle they got this through immigration considering that you have no identification or birth certificate. And I’ve never seen a case expedited so fast.”

“The ridiculously influential secret agency we work for might have had something to do with it,” Loki replied, voice a little rough.

“Very likely. Would have been nice to be working for SHIELD during my own visa process.”

Loki kept staring at the card. This was a relief, this would make his life easier in innumerable ways. He’d be able to travel, start building credit, learn to drive. He’d be able to do all the little things that made life in this world so much easier. 

But looking at this card, a strange sorrow lingered. As if some mystery, some potential, had been lost. 

“I’m honored you know,” Erik said softly. “That based your last name on mine.”

Loki rubbed a hand on the back of his neck. “Well, after all you did to help me with the visa process, it felt like the least I could do.”

“Look at me boy.”

And so Loki looked up. Erik’s eyes were shining, the look in them impossibly fond. 

“It’s been good, Loki, having you here these past few years. After things fell apart with my old team, I was a bit of a mess. I know you say that I helped you, but you helped me too. And I just want you to know that...well...in the old-fashioned way the name implies…well I would be proud to call you a son.”

Loki’s heart clenched. He found himself struggling for words. “Thank you Erik,” he finally managed. “Thank you.”

Erik clapped him on the back, then pulled him into a second embrace. Loki let himself bask himself in it for a long moment before pulling away.

“I have to say though,” Erik continued. “The patronymic surname is horrendously antiquated.”

“After all those nice words, you show your true colors,” Loki gasped out with false shock. “So ungrateful.”

Erik laughed, and moved to squint back into his telescope. Loki settled back, laying on the roof, staring up at the stars. 

He spent a long moment staring into the universe as Erik fiddled with the dials next to him.  Loki breathed in the warm night silence for a long time.

“Tell me another story,” Loki said finally. “About my name.”

Erik huffed. “I don’t know why you like those old stories, most of them are fairly depressing.”

“I think they’re interesting.”

“You could read them on your own time, you know. They’re free online. Poetic Edda’s been public domain for at least 1000 years.”

Loki could feel the black tape from his therapy session in his pocket, pressing into his hip. He rolled a bit and looked up at his mentor. “I like the way you tell them.”

Erik smiled. “Fair enough. I can’t speak to your taste in storytellers, but let me come up with something.”

So Loki lay back and let the voice roll through him, carrying him away as he stared at the stars.

Loki Liesmith, in his arrogance and mischief, made a wager with the foes of Asgard. He sought to trick them, play them for his own ends, so that Loki might escape the wrath of the thunder god. 

But Loki wagered unwisely, bet something too precious. Bet his life, bet his head.

And when Loki lost his wager, the enemy would have happily hewn it off. 

But Loki’s tongue was quick. 

“You might have the head, but not the neck. I never bargained to give you my neck.”

And Loki thought he’d saved himself, thought his sharp wits had won the day. 

But the foes of Asgard demanded recompense, and Odin listened. Loki had strayed too far, his foolishness had courted war for all Aesir. 

Loki begged mercy. But Odin was King, not kin. 

Thus Odin let the enemies name their recompense, and even as they named it, the needle was there, piercing the skin, drawing dark blood. 

And so Loki’s lips were sewn shut, silencing him forevermore.