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Part III: Mending the pieces

Summary:

Loki has returned home convinced he has been Hela's son all is life, his memories of Frigga and Thor still dissociated from his consciousness. Will he remember and what will happen if he does? Will he forget his time with Thanos and Hela? Will Robin's and Loki's memories split or converge? Will the family dynamic change through therapy? How will Hela cope with her drug cravings and her terminal disease?

Read to find out.

Notes:

This is the fifth installment of a series and won't make any sense whatsoever without its predecessors.

Chapter 1: No more false memories

Chapter Text

December 24th, 2019



About three months after the incident

 

 

Loki, wait.

There is that accursed name again and, as soon as it has been spoken, the desert dreamscape he has been roaming around shifts and Robin finds himself in the jungle, staring into the piercing eyes of The Voice, who grabs him by the arm to hold him in place. He flinches because, even in dream, he knows that whatever The Voice wants, it’s urgent and significant and Robin doesn’t particularly enjoy the sensation of weighty urgency, which is a usually a harbinger of drama and doom in Loki’s case. Robin’s case.

Wait, what?

He panics and his heart beats faster, thumping wildly in his chest, flushing his cheeks hot. He jerks back and flees. The jungle grows hazy in the corners of his vision and then he’s back, but not in the desert, no, he’s in LA, running up a street, cars speeding by in a blur to his right, waves crashing onto the beach to his left side. He stops in front of a house he never saw before, a small Italian villa towering over the ocean, half-hidden behind majestic trees. He pauses, gasping at the sandstoned beauty in awe. Borson Odinson Fjörgyndottir residence, it says on an ornate brass plate.

Lokeeee!

Shit, Robin gasps and bolts again. He keeps running until the scenery shifts again and now he’s standing in front of a school building. Infinity High, it says here. Home of the Warriors. He sprints inside, trying to outrun The Voice, and finds himself directly on the stands of the football stadium—corridors and classrooms are for the waking world, tsk—surrounded by screeching students, parents, teachers, all of them faceless, like the players, a team of fuzzy blobs, except for one. He is tall, over six feet probably and musclier than an ancient Viking god, with a blond mane, an even tan and a smile so radiant it could cut through diamonds. He has this particular center-of-the-known-universe vibe to him that makes Robin feel small and insignificant, and he hurries on, glimpsing the name on the guy’s jersey nonetheless. Odinson.

Thor Odinson, thinks Robin and he wonders how he knows this because he doesn’t particularly like football—it’s a caveman-ish game that propagates toxic masculinity, glamorizing physical violence as an inherently male trait—but he does. He just knows that the guy on the field with the Teflon charisma who makes the whole crowd swoon is Thor Odinson. The quarterback.

Brother

What the hell?

No time for this. Robin finds a bathroom and slips inside, realizing too late that it’s already occupied by three guys. Their leader is black, with shaved hair on both sides and a crop of dreadlocks drifting down on the right, his dark eyes glinting with contempt, hatred even, bloodlust. Who said fags are allowed in the men’s room? snarls he and the others, insipid tag-alongs with no distinctive features or character traits, snicker. They remind him of Thanos’s henchmen; one shared brain cell but enough brawn between them to smash Robin into a bloody pulp.

Yikes.

That wasn’t the plan. Wake up or change the dream. Just focus. You can do it. Lucid dreaming. You’ve done it before. He can’t do it now. They attack him and shove him so violently that he stumbles backwards, tripping over his own feet and landing flat on his skinny ass with a loud and embarrassing thud. They move in, beat him up, insulting him in very imaginative ways—not—and then the leader—his name is Erik, isn’t it?—takes his clothes, forcing him to flee naked.

Loki!

That’s not my fucking name! That’s not my fucking school! That’s not my fucking life! Get the fuck out.

Just wait. Please.

NO!

Robin flees again, running through the corridors buck ass naked and, suddenly, all the people who were in the stadium before are inside the school and everyone is howling with derisive laughter but it doesn’t matter, no, he just has to reach the door at the end of this seemingly never-ending hallway, just a few more strides, a few more, you can do this, this is just a dream, it’s just a dream, you’ll wake up soon, and THERE are the push-doors and, FINALLY, thank the heavens, he’s finally outside …

Well, except that he’s not. He walked straight into a hospital room and he can see himself on the bed, no, wait, his body is lying on a steel table and the medical examiner is about to y-incision his chest and—

Loki, whimpers Leah, who suddenly stands right behind him, her black hair waving and whirling in a peculiar indoor breeze. She looks terrified, confused, her huge eyes pleading with him.

Robin jerks away. No more nightmares! No more false memories! No more!

JUST NO!!

He turns around and Leah is gone. In her stead stands the woman he saw in his dreams before and she stretches out her hand, squeezing his shoulder, smiling, and he panics because there’s that same urgency wafting off of her and why the fuck can’t he just wake up???


“Shshshshssh,” Frigga murmurs, squeezing Loki’s shoulder as he writhes beneath the covers, soft moans of agony escaping through his trembling lips, sweat pooling on his forehead. “You’re having a bad dream, honey. You’re safe. If you wake up, you’ll be safe, I promise.”

Loki cries out, then gasps, and then his eyes fly open. His beautiful green eyes, like two gleaming mirrors into a dark world of terror and confusion.

“Hey,” says Frigga as calmly as she can but, just as Thor—who took off to get his brother decent clothes and toiletries more than three hours ago—predicted, the moment Loki realizes he can’t sit up because the restraints are holding him down, his eyes widen. He draws a hectic breath and starts to squirm.

“I-I can’t,” he wails, tears welling into his eyes. “N-not today, I can’t, I’m … everything hurts. Please, not today.”

“You d-don’t have to do a-anything,” Frigga tries to shush him in a stammer, speaking around the lump rapidly growing in her throat. “You’re in the psychiatric intensive care unit, honey. You’re safe here. Whoever … Whatever happened to you before, they can’t … harm you here.”

Loki takes another deep, ragged breath and then he starts screaming. “Get off me!” He thrashes in his restraints, bony hips arching up and down, and Frigga inevitably thinks about the ligature marks, the rape kit, his injuries, and the images coming alive in her mind with disgusting clarity make her dry-heave as she tries to shush him even though there’s no shushing someone who’s having a flashback, no, she knows this but she’d be damned if she didn’t try to soothe him anyway.

“Get off!” Loki howls. “Leave me alone! Leave me alone! STAY AWAY FROM ME!”

A nurse clatters into the room, alarmed by her son’s screams. “He’s having a flashback,” Frigga grinds out. “Take off the restraints! Please!”

“I’ll get Dr. Wilson,” she says and she’s out of the door again before Frigga can even reply.

“Please, honey, you’re safe here,” Frigga tries, placing her hand on Loki’s head, trying to ground him, trying to remember everything Dr. van Dyne told her, everything she read. “You’re safe. You’re having a flashback. I know it feels real to you right now but you’re not there anymore. You’re home. You’re here, with me.” Her voice breaks and she wishes Thor were back already because, peculiarly enough, despite his temper, he’s so much better and calmer at this, but her eldest is taking his own sweet time and may she be damned for plunging straight back into old patterns!

“That’s good,” Dr. Wilson encourages her as he marches into the room. “You’re doing well, Miss Fjörgyndottir, but please try not to touch him. Being touched without permission might make him feel even more trapped.”

Frigga withdraws her hand. “I-I’m sorry.”

“It’s alright,” says Dr. Wilson. “Hey, Loki. Can you do me a favor? Can you maybe try to describe the room for me?”

“Stop,” Loki pants, his voice wavering. “Get off.”

“I’m not doing anything to you, Loki. Focus on my voice, alright? My voice comes from somewhere else than where you are right now, right? Focus on that. Focus on my voice.”

Loki almost chokes on the breath he’s trying to draw and Frigga feels as though she’ll implode because not touching him goes so very far against her primal instincts that she almost sees stars. It takes all she has to force herself to stay calm enough to take mental notes for the next time this is inevitably going to happen.

“That’s good. Breathe. Take a deep, slow breath, yes, that’s good,” Dr. Wilson continues when Loki tries to comply. “Take deep breaths and focus on my voice. In and out, in and out, yes, you’re doing fine. You’re doing great. Now, tell me what you see. Look around the room and tell me what you see.”

“Why?” Loki breathes, slowly emerging from the flashback.

“Why not?”

“Because it’s stupid,” Loki wheezes after a pause. “You aren’t blind, are you?”

Frigga’s heart swells because, despite the obvious distress he’s in, at least, he acts and speaks and looks like Loki again. Thank God for small favors.

Dr. Wilson smiles. “No. I was just trying to ground you.”

“No need.” Loki takes a few deep breaths and then his eyes travel the room as he’s slowly composing himself, as always trying to hide how much distress he is truly in. “Where am I?”

“You’re in the psychiatric intensive care unit,” Dr. Wilson explains.

Loki’s eyes go wide. “Psychiatric … why?”

“Because you self-harmed last night.”

“Now that was not the answer I was expecting.” Loki’s voice is still weak but he laughs anyway, a faint sound with a paper-thin echo of the despair that lies deep within him. “That revelation was rather anticlimactic, let me tell you.” He flashes the doctor one of his best ostensibly shy I-wouldn’t-harm-a-fly smiles he used to butter Frigga up all his life. “But I assure you there’s no danger of me harming myself presently, so would you mind taking off the restraints?” And out come the puppy eyes. “Please? They are rather uncomfortable.”

He appears calm, collected, reasonable even. If Frigga didn’t know him, she might even fall for the act.

“Can you promise me that you won’t try to bolt or hurt yourself again if I take them off?” Dr. Wilson asks. “These are for your own safety, you know.”

“Of course,” Loki grumbles. “You’re so considerate, aren’t you?” He snorts before he shatters Frigga’s hopes with four harmless little words which, spoken together, in this context, hurt far worse than a knife thrusted into her gut. “Where is my mother?”

Dr. Wilson’s jaw twitches slightly but that’s the only thing giving away his momentary surprise and Frigga fumes inwardly because he shouldn’t be this surprised after they told him about Loki’s condition. Apparently, being a PTSD specialist does not require possessing extensive knowledge about DID. “She’s, uh—”

“She’s in police custody,” Frigga cuts in on pure instinct and her heart begins to sink rapidly when it dawns on her just how nerve-rackingly complicated of a process her son’s recovery is going to be.

“She just got out of rehab.” Loki—Robin?—snorts, then cackles. “This woman is unbelievable. What did she do?”

“She neglected you,” Frigga treads carefully, asking Dr. Wilson for permission with a quick, prompting glance in his direction. He nods almost imperceptibly. “She let you stay with her ex-boyfriend, who very obviously physically abused you.”

“He didn’t,” Robin-Loki starts but then seems to think better of it. “We, uh, had an arrangement.”

“An arrangement?” Frigga blurts out before she can stop herself, her stomach filling with ice.

“Yeah.”

“What kind of arrangement?”

“That’s none of your business,” Robin-Loki informs her abruptly and his words nebulize her thoughts. It’s mind-boggling, really, that her son is right there but still so far gone that she can’t even reach him. “Who are you, anyway? You don’t look like a doctor.”

Frigga inhales deeply, gathering all her courage for the leap of faith she is about to take. “I’m a friend,” she settles on saying, feeling like a shameless liar but, then again, once this one sentence is out, more words follow and can’t even stop them because he obviously can’t handle the truth right now, can he, no, he doesn’t remember his childhood, doesn’t remember the comfort she gave him, doesn’t remember her love. “I knew your mother when she had you. I’m your guardian. I’m supposed to look after you in case anything happens to her.”

Robin-Loki looks doubtful but then he slowly nods.

“How is your head?” asks Dr. Wilson, taking control of the conversation again.

“My head? Fine, I guess?”

“You guess? Does it hurt? Do you have a headache or feel dizzy?”

“I’m sure the blood sample you took from me told you I was on drugs, so what do you want me to say to that, huh?” Anger flares up in his eyes and the resemblance to Hela is undeniable. “There’s no need to patronize me, okay?”

Listening to their conversation makes Frigga feel as if she’s sitting in a dentist chair and having her teeth pulled even though that sensation is nothing compared to how painful it is to listen to Loki’s utter cluelessness.

“I wasn’t trying to … You gave yourself a concussion,” Dr. Wilson elaborates. “You banged your head against the window multiple times. Your forehead needed seven stitches.”

“Looks like I’m getting more creative, huh?” Robin-Loki chuckles and it’s hard to remind herself that this isn’t her Loki because he acts so much like her Loki that Frigga is beginning to have serious doubts whether she’ll ever get to the bottom of his condition.

Dr. Wilson doesn’t laugh. “Do you remember why you did it?”

“You heard her, didn’t you? My mom was arrested,” her son says quietly and Frigga’s lips open by their own accord in response to how smoothly he’s weaving his reply with what little information he has just been given. He’d make Odin so proud on the stand. “I suppose that was a little upsetting for me. She’s been in rehab for months and I waited for her to get home and then she drives all the way through the Mojave with me and then she gets herself arrested on her first day of freedom? That’s bound to shake you up a little, doesn’t it? Because who knows what happens to me now, right? Or when I can go home?”

He’s deflecting as always and Dr. Wilson does take the bait. Kind of. “Listen, you won’t be able to go back home anytime soon,” he explains softly and shock washes over Robin-Loki. “Your biological mother has been arrested for child endangerment and the environment you spent the last few months in—”

“What are you talking about? She didn’t endanger me,” he huffs and then he starts thrashing again, his limbs rattling the restraints. “Untie me now! I want to go home!”

“I’m sorry, Loki, but—”

“MY NAME IS ROBIN!” His face is all bulging eyes and vibrating cheekbones now.

“Robin, of course.” Dr. Wilson breathes in to collect himself. “I’m afraid you won’t be going home any time soon. You’ll stay here with us until you are physically better and then we’ll transfer you to a facility specialized in the inpatient treatment of PTSD and dissociative disorders and, after that, we can talk about custody issues.”

“Says who?” growls Robin.

There is a pause. “Child Services.”

“What?” Robin gasps, his voice reduced to an incredulous whisper, his eyes widening again. “You got CPS involved? That’s fucking incredible! My mom checked herself into rehab when she got worse! She tried to get better, for me. You can’t do that to her or me! She didn’t do anything wrong! She was trying, for fuck’s sake! She … She didn’t let me stay with Thanos,” he gushes and the name sounds somewhat familiar to her even if Frigga can’t place it right now. “I went to him out of my own free will! You can’t …” His eyes harden. “I’m not gonna go to some shitty fucking asylum in fucking chains! I wanna talk to them. Now.”

“Are you sure?” asks Dr. Wilson, his eyebrows hiking up.

“Yes,” snaps Robin.

Now, this is going exceptionally well, isn’t it?


Fuck you.

A giant foul-mouthed fuck-you in big neon letters is all Hela’s mind can manage because she’s lying in another hospital bed, in another town, chained to her bed like a filthy criminal with actual fucking handcuffs this time, and has to listen to another doctor in blue scrubs rubbing her face into her stage-four fucking kidney disease.

“A few months or even weeks is optimistic,” he informs her with zero compassion after she told him what the other doctor said because she’s been arrested for child endangerment and doesn’t deserve an ounce of compassion even if she did the fucking right thing in the end. “I wouldn’t count on that. You need a transplant to live and you need it sooner rather than later.”

Fuck.

Fuck everything.

Hela Davis didn’t endure everything she endured only to die a miserable death now. There has to be a way. If she only wills it, she’ll survive, she thinks when the doctor finally takes his leave. She always did. She made it this far. She doesn’t have to waste away. She doesn’t have to—

And then Detective fucking Coulson strides into her hospital room with a dark-haired woman in tow after letting her stew for an eternity after she’d succumbed to another violent coughing fit in the police station the previous night, spewing her dissolving intestines all over the place until they had mercy on her and sent her to the hospital.

Not that a hospital is the place to be, far from it, but it’s still better than an interrogation room or a fucking jail cell.

“Miss Davis,” Coulson greets her. His face is an unreadable mask but there is a hint of hostility in his voice as he holds up her ID. “Or are you more comfortable with Miss Morrison?”

“Oh please,” Hela scoffs out of sheer reflex. “Don’t make it sound as if I’m living under a fake name or something. My ID is legit. I’ve committed my own share of offenses but living as Elena Morrison isn’t one of them.”

“Oh, I know. I could probably wallpaper my office with your rap sheet. Battery. Assault. Multiple DUIs. Cocaine possession. Prostitution. Vandalism. Disorderly conduct. Auto theft. Breaking and entering. Not to mention the—”

“Are you done?” Hela sighs. “I know what I did, okay? I was the one doing it and I really don’t see the point of you recapping my life for me. I’m neither demented nor stupid.”

“That’s good,” Coulson says. “Then you also know what you did to Loki?”

Something inside of her crumbles or maybe that’s just her kidney quitting. “I guess so.”

Coulson sends her a grim smile. “This is Maria Hill from Child Protective Services,” says he and Hela’s mood instantly darkens into the deepest black. “She is handling Loki’s case and will determine appropriate custody for him after he received psychiatric treatment.”

“I’m not,” Hela begins, not knowing what it is she actually wants to say. “I mean, I don’t want custody, if that’s what you’re thinking.” Okay, she kinda does, this is how much the kid has grown on her, but she’s no longer delusional. “I’m not gonna fight Frigga for custody.”

Maria Hill scribbles something onto an old-fashioned notepad as Coulson switches on a more technologically advanced recording app on an official-looking phone that hasn’t been in vogue yet the last time she got her sorry ass arrested. “Now that we got that out of the way, let’s start at the beginning, shall we? This is Detective Phil Coulson, interviewing Hela Davis on December 24th, 2019, eleven thirty a.m. Present in the room as an observer is Child Services investigator Maria Hill. Miss Davis, you have the right to remain—”

“How many times do I have to tell you that there’s no need to Mirandize me?” Hela cuts in. “I’ve been there before remember? Let’s just get this over with.”

“Do you want a lawyer?”

“Gosh, no.” She chuckles. “I hate lawyers.”

“Alright.” Coulson slaps on a smile that seems at least partly genuine. “Why don’t you start at the beginning?”

“I made an appointment in Vegas to get a second opinion on my cancer,” Hela starts, leaving out the part where her useless rat-faced LA doctor wouldn’t prescribe her anything stronger than oxy for the pain even though she begged for Dilaudid because Dilaudid works heroine-like wonders when you crush it and shoot it straight into your bloodstream, especially between the toes, that’s a very nice spot, the perfect spot actually, dammit, the contentment you feel after injecting dope there is probably the equivalent of the contentment a relaxed cat feels when you’re giving it a belly rub. She forces herself to focus. “I smoked a cig before going into the hospital and ran into Thor and, uh, we kinda—”

“I meant the very beginning,” Coulson interrupts. “Sixteen years ago.”

Hela’s heart sinks. “You mean when I … got pregnant?”

He nods. “Sure. Let’s start there.”

“My first thought was that I had to get rid of the baby,” Hela whispers and a cold shiver runs through her when she remembers the unspeakable terror submerging her in some filthy bathroom when she realized that the pregnancy test was actually fucking positive. It feels like a million years ago, it feels like yesterday. “There was no way I could have cared for it or anything. I knew that. I’m not dumb.”

Coulson nods.

“But my pimp, he had this one client with shit tons of cash who was turned on by pregnant bellies and I’m not even kidding, there’s a kink for everything and I literally mean everything. You can test me on that, if you want.” Another throat-and-chest-rupturing cough builds up inside her throat, making more blood well into her throat. Hela coughs and tries to soak up the blood with a tissue, using the hand that isn’t cuffed to her bed.

Coulson doesn’t even flinch, the bastard.

“Anyway,” says Hela after she wiped her mouth with her sleeve, resigning herself to the realization that she won’t possibly win that cop over in what little remains of her lifetime. “Whenever one of us got pregnant, we had to keep our baby. We tried not to get pregnant, of course, but you know how it is. You earn more if you’re providing your services without a cum catcher.” She chuckles out of sheer reflex. “Problem was I didn’t realize I actually was pregnant until a few weeks in and one of the girls snitched on me, so I really didn’t have a choice. And then I thought, hey, maybe that baby could be my ticket out of there, you know. I thought I could take us to a shelter or something after it’s born. I got off the drugs or tried to, anyway. I thought, ‘Once I have that baby, I’ll get help because I have a baby.’ People love babies. They usually try to protect ‘em.”

“Why didn’t you go to a shelter when you were still pregnant?” Hill asks.

“Because a pregnant whore is still a whore,” Hela mumbles bitterly and she feels the kind of coldness inside her heart that she tried to blanket with the next high when she was younger, always the next high, because the realization that nobody truly cared for her was too much to bear. The anger, the resentment, the despair, the bitterness, the longing, the longing most of all, was just too much to bear.

Even now, after more than sixteen years, it still is.

“I wanted to make sure there was an actual baby to hold that’d trigger people’s, you know, protective instincts,” Hela spits.

Coulson frowns at that for a moment before he asks, “And what then?”

“It was the actual worst nightmare when he came out,” Hela concedes because even if those people are fucking law enforcement, it does feel good to finally be able to unload the shit she’s been carrying around with her for so long onto someone. “He just screamed, like all the time.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s what babies do,” Coulson remarks pointedly. “My children did.”

“But he didn’t ever stop,” Hela gasps, all those painful memories that the drugs kept at bay for so long suddenly flooding her mind. She sees herself in some indistinct room, trying to shush that ungrateful, hysterical little bundle, and the whole thing has a really, really unwelcome psycho thriller feel to it. The minute Ri wrapped the kid up in some blanket, the minute she knew she hadn’t lost him, she pushed him out of her mind and recompensed herself with a line longer than the fucking wall of China for having endured the utter miseries of pregnancy. She doesn’t remember ever breastfeeding the kid. She doesn’t even remember feeding him anything at all. She’s the worst fucking person in the world. “I put him down, he cried. I picked him back up, he still cried. Someone fed him, Ri mostly, he cried. Ri rocked him, he cried. He never fucking shut up.”

“Who’s Ri?”

“Who do you think?” Hela bristles. “She was just another whore.”

Coulson sighs. “What then?”

What then indeed.

“Why didn’t you go to a shelter like you wanted to?” asks Hill.

Yes, why didn’t she? Isn’t that just the fucking question?