Chapter Text
‘Maybe this wasn’t the best idea ever.’
Darcy was standing just behind a door that would lead her into a high security infirmary room. One in Stark Tower that had been commandeered for SHIELD to keep certain people away from prying eyes.
She could go in if she wanted. That she’d gotten this far at all was down to her, well, stealing Erik Selvig’s security key-card. He was currently in a room further upstairs, sedated and feverish, recovering from the effects of being brainwashed… so it wasn’t like he needed it for anything. Darcy hadn’t really planned on it using. Okay, so maybe she’d had the idea to use it to find something to actually do and started poking around a few floors that were out of her clearance. Sitting in a conference room full of military cot beds watching all the other people of SHIELD and Stark Industries that couldn’t go home yet just wasn’t doing it for her.
The card had gained her access to every door she’d tried already. She wasn’t quite sure why a SHIELD security key was getting her into the bowels of Stark Industries but she wasn’t going to question what, so far, seemed like good luck.
But she hadn’t planned on getting quite so close to the eye of the storm. It was Thor’s fault. She’d heard the big guy’s voice booming from down a corridor, yelling at someone to keep still. She couldn’t really tell what he was doing through the little window, but she could hear rebukes and dismissals - “it cannot be so bad as that”, “you are making it worse!” - echoing forth. She’d not heard him so grouchy since he first dropped to Earth.
Even so, she’d missed him. Erik being confiscated by the Men in Black and Jane whisked away to some place in Norway had left Darcy a little stranded. While she’d been removed from the Bifrost site and brought to New York, she didn’t have anything to keep herself busy. Officially, she only worked for Jane, rather than SHIELD, so it wasn’t as if she could find anyone she knew to ‘assist’. She couldn’t even tidy anything like she did when Jane ran out of tasks for her. Maybe a shout-out from the God of Thunder would boost her ranking enough to not feel like excess baggage.
Well, that had been the hastily-thrown-together, half-baked plan. Now here she was peering through a little glass window, hand getting slowly burned by the enormous polystyrene cup of coffee she’d brought for Thor, wondering just where in the hell she was going with this. With an illicit key-card. Essentially, breaking in. Fraud, or something like that. The exploring where no-one was looking hadn’t felt this risky. But now there’d be a witness. What if Thor was angry with her? What if he didn’t want her around? She was going to end up getting arrested for this, for sure. Did SHIELD arrest people? Or did they just make them disappear?
‘Note to self: don’t find out.’
Her stomach turned to ice as she swiped the card to open the door.
‘This is you not finding out?’
“Uh… delivery for Odinsson?” Darcy pointed to the coffee and tried to ignore the squeak in her voice.
“Darcy!!” Thor’s tired face pricked up and into that endearing puppy-dog smile when his eyes found her. “Come forth! It is good to see you well.”
Thor didn’t get up but gestured for her to come further towards him. Darcy’s widening eyes were immediately drawn to the figure on the bed beside him. On his side and handcuffed to the bed, beaten to hell and looking like he was in a lot of pain, Loki, God of Mischief, stared into the middle distance. Her heart sped up at the sight of how tall he was and, although not quite the brick shit house his brother was, she realized just how perfectly unable she’d be to defend herself if he decided she was not welcome. The cuffs that held him looked fancy but the bed frame worryingly normal and she wondered if it was really sufficient.
“He will not harm you, Darcy. You have my word.” Her feet moved closer to Thor on the other side of the bed, although her eyes didn’t move from his suffering sibling. Sporting a black eye and a large bruise that constituted his ribcage, he seemed plagued by the same feverishness as Erik. He didn’t seem very aware and Darcy chastised herself for the pang of sympathy that wriggled inside her.
As if feeling her gaze upon him, Loki’s eyes, hazy and struggling to focus, darted towards her - only for a moment - before returning to a non-existent spot between him and the far wall.
The recognition - if you could call it that - but lack of reaction turned her stomach from ice to jelly and she finally looked down to what Thor was doing behind Loki’s back.
Thor was in the middle of trying to clean the worst of the blood and dirt from a series of gashes in his brother’s back, no doubt a result of his altercation with the Hulk. Oh, she’d heard. Very few people hadn’t. Unfortunately, all Thor was really succeeding in was spreading the stuff around and getting it all over himself as well. Darcy’s stomach churned but she couldn’t look away and numbly held out the cup for him to take.
“I…uh… brought your favourite.”
Following her line of sight, Thor smiled sheepishly and was reluctant to reach out to his friend with bloody hands. He dabbed a red-saturated washcloth hesitantly at a particularly gory wound. She guessed that maybe Asgardian medical practice was different from its Earthly counterpart; he didn’t seem all that confident in what he was doing. Loki grunted in pain and tried to arch away from the treatment, cursing his brother quite dramatically. He coughed wetly and the sympathy stopped wriggling and started hammering on the inside of her chest. She’d seen plenty of nurses and doctors zipping around upstairs when she’d visited Erik. But no-one down here. Thor was doing this because nobody else cared to. Not that Darcy could blame them, this was Loki’s own doing. But she knew what it was to be abandoned, when it mattered to no-one what happened to you. The last few days in SHIELD’s custody made sure of that.
“You wanna swap? You take the coffee and I’ll play nurse?”
“Do not concern yourself. What pain my brother feels is well-earned.” His longing look at her cup said something completely different.
“Seriously, dude, you look exhausted. I’ll take over.”
Thor opened his mouth to protest yet again when Loki looked back over his shoulder, his hands clanking the suspiciously hi-tech cuffs against the metal bed frame.
“By all means do. You cannot be worse than your predecessor.” Loki’s clipped tone was shaky and tinged with sickness and pain. She wondered just how long they’d been at this that the God of Mischief was willing to turn to little-mortal-her for relative relief.
“Brother-”
“Do not call me that.” Another wet-sounding cough. “I would rather bleed to death than have you continue.” And his head lolled back down onto the pillow, it too stained with blood and bits of Stark’s floor.
“If you would remain still, I could work all the faster and be done with this.” Clearly this was the argument they’d been having the entire time. Thor was trying to treat his brother’s injuries but Loki was in too much pain to appreciate it.
“Oookay. Thor, buddy. Here - coffee. Take it.” She mustered her best impression of confidence and reached down to his wrist, bringing his hand up to the cup. She tried to guide him up and out of his chair, hoping he’d let her. He certainly wouldn’t budge if he didn’t want to. But rise he did, taking the coffee from her and walking around to the other side of the bed to look Loki in the face.
Darcy picked up the stained washcloth as tentatively as possible and dropped it in the nearest garbage can. Trying to ignore the Thunder God watching her, her thoughts were rattled as she busied herself with gathering supplies.
‘Th-think on your feet, Darcy. Th-this is an infirmary, right? Bound to be a f-first-aid kit around here… someplace.’
A door just along the wall lead to a bathroom where she picked up some fresh towels and cloths. The cupboards, thankfully, contained bandages, gauze and all manner of medical-looking things she supposed Thor wouldn’t have thought to search for.
As she ran hot water into a bowl, she couldn’t help but overhear as Thor hissed a warning to his sibling.
“If you harm her, if you so much as speak ill to her, I shall make you regret it.”
“What reason have I to hurt the blasted creature?” Loki spat in return, “She is relieving me of your infernal ‘help’.”
If it were anybody else, Darcy might have been tempted to poke him extra-hard in the ribs for the referring to her as a creature of any description. This time, probably a bad idea. She supposed it ought to be a relief that Loki had no intentions of attacking her but it didn’t really calm her nerves.
‘He thinks I know what I’m doing. No pressure at all.’
Darcy cleared her throat as she brought the bowl of water through and sat in the previously vacated chair. Tucking one of the larger towels under her new patient, she noted the sheets would need changed too. But that would involve physically moving the God of Mischief.
‘Baby steps, Darce, baby steps.’
She desperately tried, in vain, to recall what she was meant to have learned at that First-Aid course in high school. It had looked good on college applications, which was all that mattered at the time. She began to wonder if she ought not to have spent the entire time ogling the instructor.
Deciding to start at the top and work her way down, she soaked and rung out a new washcloth and held it just above the top-most cut near the shoulder-blade. Recalling Loki’s reaction to his brother’s methods, Darcy found her heart fluttering faster in the realization that she didn’t want to hurt him. Again, she berated herself. This was the guy that caused an entire SHIELD station to collapse in on itself, invaded New York City and killed Agent iPod-Thief. But that didn’t seem to make much of a difference; her causing him pain wouldn’t undo any of that
“This’ll still sting.”
No answer meant she couldn’t stall any longer. She began to gently dab and wipe at the skin around the cut, tweezing out any sizable bits of glass or flooring or fabric she found. A little niggling voice in the back of her head told her several of these gashes ought to have stitches, but she really wasn’t prepared to McGyver her way through that one. Every now and then the muscles in Loki’s back would twitch and there’d be a sharp intake of breath but none of the damning words or agonizing gasps that had characterized Thor’s nursing shift.
Softly patting first section dry, and taping gauze over it, she wondered if he’d been given any medication at all. He wasn’t hooked up to an IV like Erik was, and there was nothing lying around to suggest there was anything for him. She was pretty sure this went against some part or other of the Geneva Convention. Not that Asgard had signed it, but the United States had. Any desire to point this out to someone was doused by the knowledge that Darcy Lewis had no voice here. In order to assuage her conscience, she’d have to do this herself.
‘Does ibuprofen work on Norse deities?’