Try To Find The Other End Of The Yarn

Odin agreed to this whole plan much faster than Loki thought he would. There is a part of him that’s sure it’s because the Allfather doesn’t believe he’ll actually do it and is just waiting for him to fail and get sent back to his cell. Another, smaller part of him thinks it’s because Odin loves him and wants to give him a chance. He crushed that part of him as soon as it showed its face. One could not waterboard that information out of him.

He was kept in the same cell, though the voice insisted on calling it his room instead, as if a change in phrase would erase the material reality of the situation. He’s brought food three times a day, is visited by at least one person every day (Thor, typically) and the rest of the day seems to zone in and out of his awareness. Sometimes he hears the voice speak, and isn't sure if he's spoken back. By the time he thinks to try, he's not sure how long it's been.

Sometimes, he finds himself suddenly waking from nightmares, silent screams dying on his lips, and he doesn’t know when he fell asleep. On Asgard, Frigga assures he has potions to take for nightmares. There’s no way he would stoop so low as to request them here.

Occasionally Stark and Banner came in to question him about the limits and abilities of his seidr, how his ability to enter minds was connected to the scepter, how capable he was of coming in and out of someone undamaged. It's almost as though they don't trust him. (Loki is starting to think that mentally monologuing in sarcasm should be a warning sign for insanity.)

The soldier visits him once and they are both silent and still, watching each other. It stands stiffly, watching him through the hair hanging over its face. It leaves after a few hours, stalking out of the cell like an animal.

Exactly once, he was sure he heard the telltale shifting of a little bird in the vents above his room.

Either way, it took a week for anything new to happen. Thor came to bring him out of his cell, resting a hand on his shoulder when he feels he can get away with it and bringing him to a large door. He tells Loki that he would be there when they were done, but has been forbidden from entering the room unless it was an emergency (thank the Norns for that).

He steps inside, watching Thor’s face disappear behind the closing door, and turns to find himself in a very warm coloured room. Apparently Stark had set the room up to look comfortable and warm, but wasn’t entirely sure what ‘super serum’ed human tanks’ found comforting and didn’t want to guess wrong. There were a few soft chairs, pillows, a place to lie down and that was about it. The soldier is already there, lying down on an ugly looking brown couch, head laying in Roger’s lap.

“Here’s the deal!” Stark says, clapping his hands. He’s far too loud. “We’re in a rare sweet spot for Laika over here. Not too many people in a room, not too medical, not too cold, not too hot, y’know? And I would really like it to stay that way. That means all of us trying out best not to retraumatize the prisoner of war and Bucky-ball, try not to murder the rest of us.”

Stark pulls a chair up for him to sit beside the soldier, while he and Banner sit a bit aways, watching and writing down everything they do and say, as if the voice isn’t already recording them. The soldier doesn’t react to them at all outside of quick side eyes and grunts. It just lays beside Rogers, not quite leaning into his touch, but seeming to take some comfort in it.

For all the awful but true things he’d said before, he knew the soldier was at least slightly better than he was when he had been found. He didn’t know the whole story of course, Thor was the only one who told him these things and even he didn’t know all of it, but he knew enough. Thor hadn’t been allowed to bring Loki to the tower for months because they didn’t trust him around the still fragile soldier. Him being allowed around the thing in the first place said wonders about how bad it must have been in the beginning.

Not that Loki cared any for its wellbeing, of course. He just didn’t want to startle the thing and be strangled for his efforts.

“You ready, Buck?” Rogers spoke to it quietly, running a hand over its hair, without letting his fingers comb into it.

“As I’ll ever be,” it shrugs, and looks to Loki.

It looks him dead in the eyes, as if asking if he was ready as well. He knows very well it doesn’t really care, no one in the room has bothered to inquire about his own thoughts on this situation. Still, he nods. Whatever barbs he could have said would do nothing but make the rest of this session extremely uncomfortable.

The room is silent around them for a long moment before Loki realizes they're waiting for him to start.

“What am I meant to be doing here?” He asks, looking at Banner, "I wasn't exactly trained to do this."

“You can start by trying to call Dolly back out,” He says, and Loki can’t help but notice he’s much more confident then in any everyday conversation. “If that works, then you can help us talk to her, or enter the mind to try and see if she has a distinct headspace. If it doesn’t work, then you can go ahead and enter the mind and find her.”

“Of course, why didn’t I think of that,” Loki mumbles, but turns back to the soldier anyway. “Dolly? Could you come out, dear?”

He tries to speak the same way he had before, radiating an air of calm, confidence and care. He sees the soldier’s face shift slightly, his eyes seem to cloud over for a few seconds, but that’s it. They all wait to see if its face will clear into Dolly's heavy lidded smile, but no such luck.

“Nothing.” The soldier says what they were all thinking.

"Well, I suppose we'll have to do this the hard way."

Loki allows the Soldier to put in ear plugs before he reaches out to touch the soldier, something he very much never wanted to do again, placing gentle fingertips to its temples. To the thing’s credit, it doesn’t show any signs of discomfort, barely even blinks.

Slowly, carefully, Loki enters the Soldier’s mind.

As he had told Stark and Banner before, just because he had the ability to influence and enter minds, didn’t mean he was particularly experienced in it. He had done it only a few times during his attempt to take over Midgard, much preferring to control a subject and make it give him information then go in and look for it himself. Being inside another person so intimately, it made him uncomfortable.

Every mind is unique in some way, shaped quite literally by their experiences and traumas and joys alike. These all come together to form a sort of mind palace, a physical representation of one's innermost thoughts, feelings and mental health. He wasn’t exactly expecting a sprawling spring meadow when he entered the soldier’s mind, but the headspace he finds himself in is frankly concerning.

Nothing seems grounded in reality, even for something that is literally imaginary. The whole area is dark, the only light coming from beneath cracked, crooked doors scattered around the space and the occasional dim, hanging lightbulb. The walls seem to be closing in on him, yet impossibly far away, making Loki (and presumably the soldier) feel both claustrophobic and completely vulnerable.

As he steps through the room, he cringes at the feeling of trash and puddles underfoot. Some of these puddles were much much deeper than they appeared, catching him off guard not only because of the sudden, thick liquid reaching up to his knees, but because with these sinkholes came memories. Some were quiet, dark things, shreds of moments hiding in shadows, watching for a target or awaiting orders, but some were far more painful.

He felt the dull, fresh pain of wounds over his body, the soldier's body, and knew he was feeling the momentary respite between torture sessions. The moments between beatings or shocks or the snapping of bones where one's tormentors have to turn away to find a new implement or wash their hands or just stay back to watch you slump over in exhaustion. It was a familiar moment, the harsh drag of breath after perhaps hours of screaming.

"What's happening?"

Banner's voice breaks through his mind, and Loki realises that he’s still in the puddle, but the memory has long since ended. He doesn’t know how long he’d been standing there.

“Nothing. Just caught in a memory.”

Loki pulls himself up out of the puddle, not questioning how his pant legs seem completely dry once he’s free of it. Minds make no sense.

His eyes adjusted to the darkness eventually, and he could see small details that he didn't catch upon entering. There's furniture along the edges of the room, old wooden chairs and dusty couches that, strangely, felt old under his fingers. How exactly an item physically feels old, he can't understand. These may be remnants from the Soldier's first life.

"Your ma's old couch."

Loki hears Roger's voice, though the man obviously isn't talking to him.

The closer he looks, the more the room seems oddly put together. Certainly not anywhere close to healthy or ‘up to code’ so to speak, but there was at least some structure.

His eyes stop, focusing on nothing for a long moment as he stared into the dark. He didn’t know what it was he was expecting to see, not until a flickering form started to come together in front of him, becoming more solid as he focused. It never became truly solid, still fuzzy, half transparent and echoed around the edges, but he could make it out at least. The soldier, watching him.

It doesn't interact with him at all, simply following his movements.

“It might be out of focus because he’s currently conscious in the real world,” Banner says.

Loki doesn’t particularly care, he just hoped it wouldn’t touch him. He steps back, starting to move away from the figure when he sees it. The little thread sitting at the Soldier’s feet. Following it with his eyes, he saw the thread wind through the room and out of it, through what must be a hall. It was so dark, it would have blended in completely with the walls, no wonder he hadn’t noticed it. (Perhaps it hadn’t been there before at all?)

He looks back up to the Soldier, still watching him, eyes almost purposefully blank.

“I suppose I'm meant to follow this?” He asks, very wary and very tired.

The Soldier shifts his head to the side, silent.

Well, alright then.

Loki picks up the string, and begins to gather it in his hand, following it into the dark.

Even with his experience in world walking, Loki finds the second between total cold darkness to lit warmth intensely discomforting and unnatural. He shivers, turning around to see a proper door behind him, closed and locked where the dark hallway had been. However he’d gotten here, the Soldier’s mind didn’t see the need to connect the logic of it all. He takes a breath, feels the string dissolve in his grip, and turns back around to actually see where he was.

To be fair, this room is much more comforting than the one he had come from, if still a bit structurally unsound. It’s properly lit, at least. It seems like a mixture of a small, warm home and a hotel room. Given the speculation Loki had around Dolly’s creation, that’s not a good thing. If he could push away his general distrust and disgust over this entire situation, it was actually pretty cozy.

"Darling?"

A figure materializes before him, much like the soldier had, but much more solid and... round. A woman just a bit shorter than him, shapely in the way mothers often are, rounded out in the hips and chest. He felt distinctly uncomfortable having noticed this. She wore a soft looking A-line dress and apron, dusted with what he could only assume was flour. She looked like she had walked out of an old Midgardian print ad, so domestic it feels like nothing more than a fantasy. This was not the Soldier, he knew that for certain.

“How did you get here?” She asks, looking up at him with hooded green eyes, softly lined with brown liner.

Loki wonders, distantly, if she actually knows how to apply make up or if she just presumed it was how she always looked. Had the one (or ones) who created her dressed her for the part? Did they have to hold the Soldier down to apply the make up or use some code word to make him still and docile? Perhaps they called Dolly out first and she sat for them of her own facsimile of free will, patient and gracious of her “husband's” wishes.

“We don’t need the commentary, Ravenstag.”

Stark's voice breaks him from his thoughts, though he didn’t get the reference. It disturbs Loki greatly that he doesn’t notice himself speaking.

“Are you alright, darling?” Dolly is still in front of him, reaching out for his hand and placing her own to his cheek. “Do you have a fever, maybe?”

“No, no, it’s nothing,” Loki smiles, forcing himself not to show discomfort. At least in the mind, Dolly didn’t look like the Soldier, she’s a small thing, delicately tanned and light haired. Pleasant looking, really.

“I’m just glad you’re here!” She pulls him further into the room, and he has to consciously stop himself from stepping into the hazy stained areas of the carpet that he just knew would drop him into a memory. “Come sit! I’ll get you a drink! Maybe a snack?”

“Don’t worry yourself, dear,” He pats her hands, moving to the side. “I’d like to look around for a second, if you don’t mind.”

“Oh, uhm…” She looks at him uncertainly, eyes flitting around the room. “Go ahead, Darling! I’m sorry if the place is a bit of a mess.”

“It’s beautiful, Dolly.” Loki assures her, running his fingers over the furniture as he passed it by. The touch relays some feeling to him, something familiar but generic.

He subtly moves around the living area and the kitchen, peering into drawers and flicking on and off lights, allowing the memories to wash over him. Receiving a new dress, learning new recipes for her ‘husband’, being used for… marital duties. Relaying the last memory makes him shudder, as he’s sure the men on the other side had as well. Through every memory is a sense of comfort, warmness, and under it all, fear.

Loki couldn’t help looking back at Dolly, smiling to herself as she flitted around the home, setting out sandwiches and running into what he could only assume to be the bedroom to change into a new dress. He pities her. It’s not her fault she’s stuck like this. It wasn’t the Soldier’s fault either, though he still didn’t like the thing. They were both victims in this, destroyed and remolded into a facsimiles of people, playing roles. Before the Soldier regained some semblance of his consciousness, Loki was sure none of the roles inside of him were even aware they were broken.

The horror of it all, conceptually, turns his stomach.

Finally (finally) he finds what he was looking for. Stepping into the bedroom, he’s hit with a memory, consciousness fading in with the echoes of ‘sweet tea’ bringing her forward. He even got a good look at the man’s face as he said it, though if the other memories he’d seen were anything to go by, there were at least two. He shakes off the feeling of that man’s hands on him, and goes to sit with Dolly at her table.

The sandwiches are good, but he doesn’t know who would make bad imaginary sandwiches so that doesn’t really mean much. Dolly’s company is as… alright as he remembers. It’s not as awkward when she actually looks like a woman though. When she bat her eyelashes at him, or laughed lightly at his words and touched his arm, there was no feeling of hard metal to remind him of just what he was talking to.

“Remember your audience, please.”

Ah yes, of course, Banner. He rolls his eyes, and decided to just go for it.

“Dolly,” He asks, sweet as anything, “This is all truly delicious, but you wouldn’t happen to have something to drink would you?”

“Oh, of course!” She perks up, seeming happy to obey his every whim, “I’ve got water or lemonade or-”

“Perhaps, some sweet tea?”

She stops in her tracks, looking at him. She doesn’t seem bothered or expectant, so she might not even know it’s her trigger phrase.

“I’m sorry, what was that darling?” She asks, still smiling.

“I asked if you had sweet tea.”

It likely wouldn’t work to just say it from the inside, but with his body saying it as well, there must be some effect. Maybe another time they could experiment with pulling her out manually, perhaps by bringing her out of her rooms and into the main hall, but that would have to wait.

Thankfully for them both, He sees the air around her go hazy, her form fading out as she no doubt takes her place in the Soldier’s body. She doesn’t flicker like the Soldier figure he’d seen before had, she just disappeared.

With Dolly gone, the room around him felt no less warm and inviting, but emptier. She was a vital part of this place, it seemed. He would need to get back to his body soon, but he could spare the few seconds to peek about to a few more memories before he left.

*

“Welcome home, Dear!” Dolly smiled, reaching out her arms towards her husband. She’d just finished their food. There was no oven to use, so she’d pulled together a couple delicious chicken salads for them.

He’d only just walked in through the door, dropping a duffle on the ground beside it before looking up at her. She expected him to smile, to hold her, to tell her what a good wife she had been, cleaning up and cooking while he was gone, but no. He frowned at her, mumbling something like ‘soldier?’ before stomping up to grab her by her arms.

“What are you doing here?” He hissed at her, spittle hitting her face.

She was so confused. What did she do wrong? She was good, wasn’t she?

“I- you were gone when I woke up, so I cleaned up and made us foo-” She was cut off by a slap to the face.

“Are you stupid?” Her husband nearly yelled, knocking her all the way over. “Did you go out for this crap?”

“y-yes? There was nothing here, I just thought-”

“Shut up,” He stomped his foot beside her, scaring her enough to stop trying to talk. “Now I have to fucking deal with this-”

He left here there on the ground while he moved into the other room to make a call, yelling audible through the door. Dolly couldn’t help the tears falling.

She hadn’t done anything wrong. She just wanted to do something nice. Why was he so mad?

When he finally came back to grab her, pulling her off the floor, she hoped he would explain, but he just held her by the arms.

“Asset one! Asset one, asset one, asset on-”

He just kept yelling, every word making her eyes haze over, until she was gone.

*

Loki shudders as he walks back out the door and into the darkness. The thread he’d followed before isn’t there anymore, but he’s brought back to the main room before he can think about it. The Shadow of the Soldier is still there, watching him, but as before, say nothing. There’s something about that figure that makes him feel off kilter. Something in it’s face, perhaps.

Either way, he’s more than happy to make his way out of there. He actually misses the solid ground of Midgard.

Coming back into the real world is disorienting and strange, but the oppressive feeling of another's mind is lifted off of him. The thought of doing this again, let alone repeatedly put a sour taste in his mouth. Loki feels the time he was out of himself catch up to him, a twinge in his back and a throbbing headache meeting him the moment he opens his eyes. He needs a moment to gather himself again, but he’s not going to get it.

“Darling?”

after hearing the way she sounded him the headspace, hearing Dolly’s words in the Soldier’s voice was enough to get him to come back to himself a bit.

Loki picked up his head to see his hands were still on the Soldier’s face, though they had migrated down to cup his cheeks at some point during their session. He tried to pull his hands away, but Dolly was holding onto his wrists, keeping them together. She’s staring up at him, worried, and through all the disgust and instinctive rage at being held against his will, he’s confused.

Why would she be worried about him? Programming or not, she’s the one in an unfamiliar situation, surrounded by strange men in a strange place and time. She should be terrified for herself, not for a man she’s been forced to care about. It’s maddening to think about- this pitiful, disgusting woman.

“Are you alright, Loki?” Banner’s voice worms it’s way though his thoughts, bringing his attention back to the present.

He slowly moves his hands from Dolly’s face, her hands coming with him, and looks up to the others. He can’t read Rogers or Banner, not in a way that makes sense anyway, but he can tell what stark is thinking immediately. An alien curiosity, like being shown a new toy and wanting nothing more than to rip it apart and see how it works. It almost makes him self conscious, knowing that he could recognize that look on himself.

“I’m quite alright.” He breathed, eyes flicking to Dolly with a tight smile to reassure her. She doesn’t seem reassured.

“You should rest, dear,” She smiles, her heavy lidded eyes so much sadder than they were before. “Your friends here have some things to talk to me about.”

He tried to refuse, moving to stand and get away from her as subtly as he can, but his legs buckle under him. The concentration and power it takes to enter another's mind and root through their memories is far greater without an infinity stone to lean of, it seems. He barely manages to catch himself, but not before the Rogers moves to hold him up. He tried to snarl at the man, to let him go, but his vision is already fading to black.