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It was the sense of relief, Natasha thought. It had made them all giddy. Careless. It swept away the dust of crumbled masonry and the stink of scorched pylons and made the city sparkle—the sense of victory, the moment the bad guys all slumped to the ground as if at the flick of a switch. It made them invincible. They should have known better, all of them.
She could say that now, she could tell herself again and again, but she’d shrugged and gone along with it when Tony insisted, complaining that he wanted to try the stuff and they all deserved a break, a party, and everything else could just wait on them for a change. And she hadn’t given it another thought when Thor affixed the chain to the bend of a wickedly concertinaed light pole (or maybe she had. She’d thought it was fitting, seeing Loki tied to his own destruction, particularly now that he couldn’t snarl at them anymore or try to bargain and lie his way free. She’d smiled a little, nudged Barton in the ribs and followed the rest of them inside, admiring the lack of décor and feeling somewhat reassured by the kitchen smells that wafted past. And she’d felt a little hungry, all of a sudden.)
And maybe an hour later, they’d come back out. Hindsight tries to make her think she knew, that there was something in the air or some hush in the sky, but there was nothing.
“Helluva place for a nap,” someone (maybe Clint) had snorted. “Hey, you, Loki! Get up!”
But the figure hadn’t moved.
Natasha’s memory blurs there, because the next thing she recalls is Bruce kneeling in the dust, his hands hovering over the curled body.
“Oh God,” he said.
There was a little puddle of blood under Loki’s chin, trickling out from beneath the muzzle, and his eyes were open just enough to catch a glint of light and just enough to see that they were dull and empty, and his pallid skin was invaded with streaks of blue—bluer than ice—but it didn’t matter why or how strange it looked, only that he seemed frozen and his fingers were curled and stiff beside him, still bound together by the shackles.
Bruce tried to move him, feeling for a pulse, and Natasha watched the doctor’s hands in their steady motions, and she could hear his abortive murmurs. The sounds of prayers he didn’t remember how to use.
That was how she became aware of the silence, and she broke her gaze from the body on the ground to Thor, where he stood near.
He was ghostly pale. He looked like a man trapped in a nightmare.
She quickly looked away again. It was easier to watch the others, as they stumbled through the situation. The way Clint’s lip twitched as he fought a vicious smirk that she really couldn’t blame him for, and Steve’s grim stare into a distance that probably wasn’t even in the same century as them, and the way Tony suddenly wiped at his mouth with his hand, grimaced, did it again. There was no burst of awkward levity, though she’d almost expected it. Instead, he was watching the scene as if he meant to burn it into his mind, and Natasha looked down again just in time to see the blood overflowing from Loki’s open mouth at the compression, and Banner jolting backward, yanking his hands away from the bared sternum—when, how had he gotten Loki’s armor off? Or the muzzle?—and turning to look up at them all, eyes wide and haunted.
Shattered ribs. Collapsed lungs. Internal bleeding. Insidious and slow.
How long ago had Loki started to suffocate, his body too broken to heal? When had the pain grown too much to ignore? Had he clenched his teeth and fought it, or had he tried to call for help?—but the piece of metal wedged between his jaws, covering his mouth. No one could have heard.
How long had he been lying there lifeless?
And then… then the little details. The laceration across his nose, the bruises going dark now. His bloodied fingertips, the torn nails, the smears on the pavement.
*
Natasha remembered once, a long time ago, watching a man die from punctured lungs. The trick with the stiffened piano wire—and how his eyes bulged as he started to panic. It had just been a job, and he’d been a louse anyway, a trafficker, and she’d stayed in position as the wheezing grew and quickened and finally cut off, and then she’d gone home, had a glass of wine, forgot about it. It was part of the job. It was part of what she did, and she’d been there, silent and unmoved and careful, when the wheezing stopped. It hadn’t been like this.
It hadn’t been an accident.
There hadn’t been a group of people twenty feet away, oblivious, killing time, talking and eating and grinning at each other because they’d won, they’d survived, and for a few minutes… for a few minutes, nothing bad could possibly happen.
Her ears were ringing as Thor shook his head to stop the half-formed apology on Bruce’s lips, as he bent down beside the body.
She didn’t justify it, to herself or when she wrote her report. It was what it was.
New York was in ruins, and after the news got out that the war criminal Loki had died in custody, from wounds suffered in the battle… there were spontaneous street parties, the crowds’ cheering audible even in her apartment.
She’d watched the youtube video probably a hundred times. A grainy traffic camera, no sound—and that at least meant that nobody had actually stood there with a camera as the figure chained to the lightpole slumped over, twitching. She wasn’t sure if that made it better or worse.
She wrote in her report that the Avengers’ negligence had been a contributing factor in the death. She wanted to be surprised that no punitive measures were forthcoming; there were debriefings, conferences, layers and layers of reports. But no more than that.
No one had mentioned Thor since he’d departed, either, or wondered aloud if he’d be back.
She remembered him acting like the rest of them weren’t there, moving like a zombie as he broke away the shackles and let them fall with a clang. The chain remained, wrapped around the twist of metal, a few red drops drying sticky beneath it.
And then Thor picked up the corpse of his brother, the smear of blood bright across the cold white cheek, his hands clutching against black leather and thin limbs.
When he took the first step he almost stumbled, as if the weight were far more than he expected. The hammer swayed on his belt, and Loki’s hair waved at each motion, his head tilted back across Thor’s arm.
Natasha caught herself staring at his face.
She’d only ever seen him wearing the nasty little sneer that said he was better, quicker, smarter than you and that you would recognize it before long, or the brief, explosive hate twisting his features as he sprung his trap. But all that was gone now, and she barely recognized him. Now there was nothing. Worse than nothing, and she had seen her share of dead faces: sunken eyelids and bloodless lips, the slow bruising of temples and the dip of the throat. The bone grimace of slack features that somehow looked like pain.
She’d seen her share of dead faces, and not since she was ten had she looked away.
“I will bring him h—” Thor began. But then he seemed to come awake with a shaky breath, staring down at the figure in his arms.
He did not meet anyone’s eyes. When he continued it was a murmur. “When he fell, I wished for one more chance…”
She’d watched as he squared his shoulders, shifted the body, held it closer, eyes hollow.
“I must return his body to Asgard... inform our family of what has occurred.”
There’d been no goodbyes.
Nobody had said much after that, and after he left they’d gone back, saying nothing. That evening she’d written her report, and then she’d gone home. She poured out the wine the next morning, untouched.
Some nights Loki still grinned at her through the distorted reflection in the glass of the cage, and laughed, told her all the things that he would do—she didn’t bother to lie to herself. He was a villain. Shit happened.
But there was a new drop of red, and her ledger was dripping, just a little more than before.
***