Utter Darkness

She rolled over and the bolt cutters knocked against her hip. She sat up with a cry of frustration, ripped the ribbon from her wrist, threw the bolt cutters, the ribbon, and unopened water bottle across the room. Her head was a mess, she had the migraine-like headache again, and now she didn’t even have a pleasant memory to drown it out. She felt numb. She wanted to cry, to scream, but nothing came. She stood and went to her bathroom to retrieve the painkillers that had become her regular habit during the past few weeks. She stared at the bottles in her cabinet. There was Tylenol, and then there was the bottle of Vicodin she had left over from her appendectomy two years ago.

Why the fuck not, she took four Vicodin and returned to her bed. It was only five a.m. She didn’t feel like ever sleeping again. She turned her alarm off, and wrapped her blankets around herself like a cocoon, her knees pulled up to her chin, arms wrapped around her shins, she rocked slightly as she allowed her mind to wander. She stared glassy eyes at the wall, and tried to think about anything but what happened.

“Hey kiddo, you okay?” She heard Tony’s voice from far away, as if she was underwater. She slowly turned her head in response, but everything seemed slightly out of focus.

She giggled, “Glasses,” she flopped over and fumbled for her glasses on her bedside table. Tony grumbled something, handed her glasses to her, and helped her sit back up. She clumsily put them on and looked around. “Hey, the Tony Stark is on my bed. I feel special.” She giggled again, and then she frowned. “Hey, you better behave or Pepper’s gonna kick your ass.”

“What’d you take kiddo?” He sounded serious; that was weird, Tony Stark never sounded serious.

She put on her best serious face, “I can be serious too,” she giggled. “Shit, sorry, Serious. I took a few Vicodin,” she leaned forward and whispered, “Why are we being serious?”

Tony shook his head, sighed heavily, and scrubbed at his face. “How many, Darcy, and how long ago did you take them?”

He was still serious; she was starting to get worried, and her buzz was beginning to wear off. When she spoke, her voice seemed very small. “I took four, at about five o’clock, why?”

“It’s almost nine; Jane was starting to get worried."

"She's probably just mad I wasn't there to make her coffee." Darcy grumbled.

Tony shook his head again, "JARVIS, inform Dr. Foster that Ms. Lewis is sick and will be unable to come to the lab today.”

“Yes sir. Dr. Foster is inquiring as to whether she is needed to help Ms. Lewis.”

“No, tell Dr. Foster that I’m going to get Ms. Lewis settled and I should be back up in the lab in about an hour.”

“Duly notified, is there anything else sir?” the AI politely asked.

“No, that’s all for now JARVIS.” Tony turned to Darcy, “Come on Kiddo, let’s get you up, and moving. Lots of water and moving around, that’s the only way to flush all that out. You’re gonna have a wicked headache when this is all over.”

“Damn, that’s why I took ‘em in the first place.” She grumbled as Tony hooked one of her arms over his shoulders and forced her to walk to her kitchen.

He deposited her roughly in one of her kitchen chairs, grabbed a water bottle from her fridge, and thrust it at her. “Drink this.” He ordered gruffly.

She scowled at him, but did what he told her to do. “What’s your problem, man?”

“Problem? Well you see my problem is I don’t like it when I can’t solve a problem. And you’re becoming a problem. Four Vicodin doesn’t necessarily qualify as an overdose, but you’re riding the line. So what’s your problem?” he turned the question back at her.

She took several long swallows of water. “I don’t want to talk about it.” She said sullenly.

He shook his head, “Not an option.”

She quickly chugged the rest of the water as the headache began to creep back. “I came back to my apartment last night and drank a little too much. I woke up with a hangover and thought the Vicodin would work better than regular old Tylenol.” She grimaced at the pain. “Look, I totally owe you for fixing everything with Jane and I promise I’ll be raring to go tomorrow, but that wicked headache you promised is kicking in and I don’t feel up to company anymore.”

He narrowed his eyes at her and cocked his head to the side like he was analyzing a difficult equation. After a while, he grabbed another water bottle from her fridge and handed it to her. “Okay, I’m going to take your word on this for now, but you’re not off the hook. I’ll be watching you.” He patted her roughly on the shoulder and left.

She spent the next few hours trying to do anything other than think about Him, or the fact that now Tony Stark was suspicious of her. Her headache raged, and she paced. She played around on the internet; she pulled out her exercise bike and did about twenty miles. She did everything she could to avoid it, but when she went back into her room to grab some clothes to change into after her shower, she saw the bolt cutters on the floor and she finally lost it.

Collapsing to the floor she clutched the bolt cutters to her chest and sobbed and cried until she was wrung out. He hadn’t lied to her but she felt betrayed anyways. It was her own stupid fault for falling for someone she barely knew; hell until last night she hadn’t even known his name.

She took a deep shuddering breath, and another, and another until the tears stopped and she felt mostly in control. She cracked her neck, rolled her shoulders, and sat up straighter. “Fuck this,” she hissed. “I am a strong independent woman and I don't do this overdramatic shit.” She flung the bolt cutters under her bed and stood up. She was a modern woman, with modern tools at her disposal. For the next few hours, she researched on the internet about sleep, how to avoid it, sleep cycles, dreams, REM sleep, and how long someone could go without sleep, before it affected their health.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

So it was three days later, surviving on coffee, Red Bull, and endless hours of pacing that she found herself hacking JARVIS, and breaking into Tony and Pepper’s suite. Pepper was in D.C. and Tony was down in the lab. She snuck into their ensuite bathroom, and rifled through Tony’s personal medicine cabinet. She hoped to find some Xanax or Valium. According to the internet, those two drugs were supposed to suppress REM sleep. ‘Big stupid mess,’ she thought. ‘Jackpot!’ Xanax, he had Xanax! She looked at the prescription date and the number of pills. It looked like he had gotten the prescription a while ago and wasn’t using it. She stuffed a dozen of the pills in her pocket, closed everything back up the way she found it, and snuck back to her apartment. She dumped the pills in the Tylenol bottle and hurried back up to the lab.

She wasn’t afraid of Him, but she wasn’t ready to talk to Him either.

Jane was so busy being brilliant that she hadn’t noticed anything different with Darcy but Darcy had found it increasingly difficult to hide her self-inflicted sleep deprivation from Tony’s ever-watchful eyes. She needed sleep but she wanted a guaranteed way to avoid Him.

She had thought a lot in the past few days. Would it have been different if she had known from the beginning that it was Him? She wasn’t completely sure. Three thousand years was a terrible punishment even for him. But it hadn’t really been that long; she was kinda unclear about that point. It hadn’t been and yet somehow it had been. So the punishment was mostly appropriate. But punishment was also meant to make the accused realize their culpability in their actions. There had been moments where he had seemed to regret his actions, but that last night he seemed almost to revel in what he had done. She wished she had let him tell her before she had released him. He’d gone Senor Psychopath with all that ‘Say My Name!’ crap. She just wasn’t sure which was the real him, the sarcastic, playful, lonely, slightly broken guy she had been getting to know, or the pompous egomaniacal villain that he’d been as she left. She heaved a heavy sigh, and stretched. Crap, Tony was watching her again. She plastered what she hoped looked like a genuine smile on her face and buried herself in her data entry.

Several long tiring hours later, she dragged herself back to her apartment. She took a long hot shower, and pulled on her slouchy pj’s. She was utterly exhausted; she’d gone almost ninety hours without sleep. She didn’t even bother with drying her hair she just took one of Tony’s Xanax, and prayed that she wouldn’t dream as she crawled into bed…

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

When she opened her eyes to find herself back in the void she nearly screamed in frustration. His back was to her and he seemed not to have noticed her appearance. Fine, she didn’t really want talk to him anyway. Something felt off though. She couldn’t move as easily, she felt heavy and sluggish, and when she looked down, she realized she was invisible. “Whoa.” She whispered and he turned. His eyes searched but he could not see her. “Darcy?” he questioned the air around him. He looked half-mad as he spun about looking for her. He pulled at his hair and his clothes as he mumbled to himself.

He looked terrible, gone was the arrogance, and anger. He was haggard, his clothes torn, and he looked as if he had been beaten. There were bruises on his face, and dried blood on the rips of his tunic. Had he well and truly lost his mind and done this to himself? He had said before that she was the only soul he had seen since his imprisonment. Even with all that had happened, she still longed to reach out to help him, to give him water, to bind his wounds. His face was pale and his eyes blood-shot.

“ODIN, ANSWER ME!” he screamed out suddenly, she clamped her hands over her mouth to keep from crying out. “You take her from me and now you allow The Other to torture me. How are you the benevolent one? I have done my penance! ALL-FATHER! You made me endure three millennia of darkness, all condensed in less than a year. Then you allowed me a bright hope, which you then ripped away! You lied to me! DAMN YOU!!” he trailed off muttering again. He curled in on himself, folding his long legs up to his body and resting his chin on his knees.

His voice was ragged and grating. He had been tortured, well that explained his appearance. She was so hurt and angry at the same time. He seemed upset that she was gone but he had pushed her away. Why? He seemed so bi-polar.

Suddenly he went still. He turned around, unfolding his long limbs in the process, facing her, and inhaled deeply. Her hair was still wet. She blanched, he could smell her hair. She wasn’t truly afraid of him but he was acting so erratic she wasn’t sure how he would act if he found her there, eavesdropping on him.

He muttered something and flipped his hands a bit but nothing happened. He looked around disappointed, and stared angrily at his hands. He flicked his wrist and a bright green flame erupted from his palm. He watched it for a moment and flicked his hand again, the flame disappeared, and a great blade of ice formed around his hand. He watched dispassionately as his hand and arm began to turn blue. He swung the great blade, turning and moving with the precision of a trained warrior. He moved swiftly cutting through the air around him fighting some pretend foe, like shadowboxing. He moved like a panther, his body was lithe and smooth. She watched as he worked and fought out his frustration.

What seemed like several hours later, he came to an abrupt stop. The ice blade disappeared as he hung limp. He breathed in great heaving pants; his body covered in a sheen of sweat, his lightweight tunic was soaked by it. His hair hung in his face, and it took every ounce of willpower she possessed not to reach out and brush it from his face.

He began mumbling again but this time she was close enough to hear. “I should have told her right away, but how could she love that?” He glared at the hand that was slowly returning to Aesir flesh. “I suppose it matters not, she’ll never return. Blue Jotun freak or the Asgardian who attempted to subjugate her people, either way I’m a monster.” He pushed his hair back and threw back his head. “Do you hear that All-Father? I’ve come to accept it. I cannot change it; I am a two-sided coin, the monster and the disgraced prince. And neither are worthy of her.” He shook his head and whispered so softly she could barely hear him, “I loved her, and even that was taken from me.”

Tears coursed down her cheeks and she was about to speak out when his eyes rolled back in his head and his whole body went stiff as a board. He fought against some unseen foe as his hands and feet pulled back in a mockery of the binding she had loosed him from.

He hissed as an unseen knife sliced through the flesh of his back. He shook his head as he grit his teeth. His head wrenched back as he flinched from some unseen blow to the face. Blood ran down his chin from his split lower lip. His voice was low and menacing as he spoke to the one who injured him. “You can no longer control me, that’s why,” he chuckled darkly.

He was quiet for a moment and then shook his head again. “I have no way to access it. I am imprisoned. I am of no further use to you.” He doubled over as something hit him in the solar plexus. “I have nothing left to give you,” he wheezed.

He straightened up a bit and glared hatefully at some unseen thing, “No,” he growled. “NO!” he shouted as he convulsed, in greater pain than she’d ever seen. She reached for him then, but her hand passed right through his body. The convulsions slowed and he seethed with rage. “If you lay one scaly finger on her, I’ll…” the rest of his statement was lost as the unseen one choked him.

She cried and began to pray to Odin himself; prayers that he would save his son, prayers that he wouldn’t let his son endure this torment any longer. Nothing seemed to happen. He struggled a bit longer and then the being released him. He took in great ragged gulps of air. His voice was hoarse and guttural, “You cannot touch her, she is gone, she is hidden from me, from you, and even if you could find her, she is protected. By the very one that destroyed your army.” He threw back his head and went stiff as the unseen knife sliced slowly through the flesh of his chest, not deep enough to do any real damage but enough to make him bleed.

He shook his head dejectedly, “I cannot give you what I do not have.” He seemed to have stopped fighting. Another cut slowly made its way across his abdomen.

She cried and screamed at the unseen force. She watched as his blood seeped through his tunic. Helpless and angry beyond belief she began whispering in his ear, unsure whether he could even hear her. “I love you Loki, Fight back. Don’t let the bastards hurt you. Use your magic, do whatever you have to, but don’t give in, keep fighting. Come on babe, you can do this. I believe in you. Fight Back. Please, we gotta work out this thing between us, but we can’t do that if you give up. I love you and I need you to come back to me!” She continued to whisper encouragements in his ear.

His body doubled again as he took and another blow to the stomach. A dark laugh rumbled through him and he growled. “Do your worst, I will never give you what you desire.” His head turned sharply as he took another hit to the face. Blood dripped from his nose. He grinned manically “You are not as great as you think you are.” His whole body moved as if shoved roughly.

Finally, his eyes cleared and he seemed to come out of whatever trance the unseen one had held him in. He shuddered a few times as if roused from sleep. He looked around longingly. She was certain he searched for her. He sighed heavily, slowly pulled his ruined tunic off, and tore the sleeves apart to create makeshift bandages. She wanted to speak to him, but she then she felt the familiar pull of wakefulness.

Notes