Heavy Silence
Warning: This work goes into Bruce Banner's traumatic childhood. It includes themes such as depression, manipulation, child abuse, murder and more. Nothing of it is explicit but if these things are triggering for you, proceed with care or scroll further.
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It was friday afternoon and Bruce sat in Samson's office. Originally he wanted to cancel for today. He woke up with this tight feeling in his chest. The weight was pulling him down and he could just barely get out of bed. He skipped breakfast and only ate one grilled cheese for lunch.
Bruce didn't know what exactly caused him to act this way. He started to get better. He actually took care of himself, was going out and strengthend his relationships.
But life had to haunt him again. Like many times before. It might never end.
A few years ago, he might have tried to end it all. He made progress, but these kind of days are still there.
On these days, he can barely look into the mirror. The world doesn't feel real sometimes and he forgets what he has done five minutes ago.
Then he hides under the blankets. Never cries, because that is a sign of weakness and he can't be weak, ever.
On these days, he can hear his voice. It's scary. Not just because it is his voice but also because he feels like this little boy again. The little boy in Dayton, Ohio a lifetime ago. The little boy who had to choose between starving and getting hurt. The little boy who tried to hide himself, always unsuccessfully. The little boy who chose to remain silent. The little boy who couldn't protect himself.
The little boy who couldn't protect his mom.
Guilt was a strong emotion on these days. Even though he swore to himself he would never ever feel something again. Guess he can't even keep one promise...
When he feels these intense waves of guilt, there was always a voice which made it even worse. It reminded him of him but it is not exactly him. He sometimes thinks he is the devil's child then and he was right after all. But after a few minutes logic kicks in and tells him that surely the devil couldn't be worse than him. Whatever the reason for the voice's existence is, he found a way to haunt Bruce even after his death which was way to peaceful.
"Bruce, are you with me?"
Blink. Blink. Right. He was in the office. Not in his apartment. Or Dayton.
"Sorry, where were we?"
"We talked a bit about your day and what triggered the panic attack"
Triggered? No, he wasn't triggered. He was all alone today. He didn't go to an event or anything. It wasn't christmas either.
Then he remembered. The news website. "Alcoholic family father kills wife - the children are the only witnesses".
That was it. He did have a panic attack. How could have he forgotten it? He hates his memory issues.
"You read something which was a part of your own childhood. This must have been very distressing, especially when combined with the depressive mood you have been feeling today."
"The headline wasn't a part of my childhood. First, he wasn't a father, a father wouldn't do these horrible things he did to me. Second, I didn't have any siblings, any friends. Sure, there is Jen but she lived in L.A and I in Dayton. I was all alone."
"Let's look further into this."
He said too much. He didn't think before he spoke. It was impulsive. Why wanted Leonard talk about this with him anyway?! He knows the story. They discussed his loneliness often enough.
"Please not."
"Okay, then let me ask another question. Do you remember a period of time in which you felt safe? And I mean not just short moments, but years, months, weeks or days in a row."
Deep down he knew the answer. He still chose to remain silent. And this was an answer in itself.
Samson nodded. "Do you feel safe now?"
He knew the answer but chose to remain silent.
"Why don't you feel safe now?"
He knew the answer but didn't say it out loud. He couldn't. He wouldn't give him this satisfaction after his death.
But no matter how long he stayed silent, it didn't change the answer.
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Nights at the Circus: Part XVI
You decide to take a “sabbatical” from both the Avengers and Loki in order to lower your anxiety, but while your vacation gives you the time to clear your mind, some new arrivals at the Tower force you to return early. Meanwhile, of course Loki is missing the Hel out of you, at least until he realizes someone *else* might need him more...
SERIES MASTERLIST
Content Warning: masturbat!on; implications of torture (not detailed)
Word Count: 3k
Loki memorized your note after reading it only three times. Your handwriting was rough but legible, as if you could do better but was scribbling your thoughts down in a rush. After he was through with it, he burned it was a small spark of green.
He knew why you left, and that you weren’t intending to end your love affair without a lengthy discussion. Still, the fact that yet another important person in his life chose to walk out on him was bringing old insecurity to the surface, and now that Steve thought he was an enemy, and Thor thought he was a nut, he had no one to talk to at all.
Not that he really wanted to. All of his thoughts ran to you, where you were going, whether you’d be safe, and whether he wanted to take the risk and seek you out like he had before in Sokovia. After hours of wavering back and forth, he decided that using seidr was a big factor in your fight, so using it now would’ve made things worse.
Four days into your leave, Loki had yet to emerge from his bedroom. Depression reached even Frost Giant minds, and it was one of Loki’s own demons, though even Thor didn’t know this. On the fourth afternoon, he was in the shower, thinking on you and palming himself (although it was difficult to keep focus when his thoughts of you were constantly interrupted by ones of self-deprecation).
Two weeks, you had her. Then you had to go and blurt it all out for your own selfish reasons, and now you could lose her, Loki scolded himself as he stepped out of the shower. All he wanted was for everyone to know that you were his and he was yours.
Though he wouldn’t admit to it, Loki’s area of expertise was in the sexual side of things. He’d had enough lovers to start an army, but precious few of them held his romantic gaze after their clothes were back on. Maybe twice or three times on Asgard did he pledge romantic fidelity (here on Midgard the term was ‘going steady’) to one person. Most of the time, things would just fall apart on their own, or Loki was sent away, or hi partner decided there was too much complication in being the partner of a royal.
In the moment he attempted to come clean in front of Steve, all he was thinking of was himself and how he could finally get that patriotic gibbon off of his shoulder. Luckily, he took Loki’s words for mockery, and all was still hidden, but without you confirming his admission, Loki knew he had just received extra probationary terms: make any waves whatsoever and consider yourself headless.
He felt terrible when he realized that, basically, this was Steve’s fault. Steve and his hero complex, not to mentioned his one-sided crush on you. “Maybe the lout needs to fuck a woman and he’ll get off our backs,” Loki muttered to himself. “Has he ever been with anyone? One dancer in 1943 doesn’t exactly satisfy the loins after eighty years.”
Not that it mattered. What was done in the moment was done, and for whatever reasons either of them had, it was both Loki and Steve that had driven you off.
“Y/N, I hope you’re thinking on me as I am of you,” Loki whispered, walking back onto the bedroom thoughtlessly, dripping wet, naked, and fully erect.
In his mind, Loki wove a rich tapestry of sexual fantasy, most of them involving you squirming under his hips, bound and gagged and soaked between your legs. He couldn’t resist adding flames to your image. The other night, during your rooftop date, when you caused the ice on Loki’s arm to melt, he learned that the counteracting warmth from your skin felt like sweet, soft splendor on his frozen body. He wanted more of it.
“Firebird,” he mumbled under his breath as he laid down on his bed and took himself into his hand again, stroking himself firmly, closing his eyes to paint the more vivid picture of you, licking your lips, hungry for his cock.
The image of you began lowly moaning and cooing, calling Loki’s name desperately, making him move his hand up and down his shaft faster and faster. His orgasm was building in his loins, seconds from release, when a sudden, unexpected knock in the door stopped him in his tracks.
“Rudolph?” called Stark from the other side of the door. Loki quickly threw on a robe and went to answer.
“Hey, Bambi,” Stark said, a hint of urgency in his voice. “Congratulations, you’ve been granted temporary leave to use magic.”
Loki didn’t expect to hear this, and quickly brought his erection down as his first legal use of seidr (since using it to trap you the first time he’d met you at the circus), hoping Tony didn’t notice. “Oh? Is the world ending at last?”
Stark grunted. “Stop quipping, Joker, there’s no time,” he responded. “We’ve got two enhanced kids that were rescued from Hydra, and they’re not very easy to deal with. We need all magic on deck to handle them, Lokes. This is DEFCON-1.”
Loki nodded and sprung into action, quickly making some appropriate clothes appear on his body and following Stark downstairs to a place Loki knew well: the magic-proof containment cell he’d been imprisoned in after he’d committed his transgressions against the Earth. It had a similar design to the one he’d also seen the inside of in the aircraft carrier, only instead of releasing its captive into the air below, attempting to open it resulted in a lethal shocking. The room gave Loki a chill, but upon seeing who was within, all of his misgivings disappeared.
He knew her immediately as the witch in Sokovia who had rendered you under a spell that even he couldn’t recognize. She didn’t look so powerful now. Instead, she looked disheveled and sad, unable to do so much as produce a spark. The helplessness in her eyes pulled at Loki’s heartstrings, and he realized that no matter how well he could conceal his feelings or project images of contentment around him, he likely looked the same when he was in her place.
“All we know is her name is Wanda-something. She has a brother named Pietro. He’s a real Speedy Gonzales, so he’s being kept in another tank away from her. She seems to be able to produce big blasts of energy, and she tried to send me hallucinations as we crammed her in here. None of us feel like we can handle magic the way you can,” Stark explained. “Just know that once we get her handled, you turn back into Cinderella and the magic stops, got it?”
“So, my job is to guard her like a prisoner?” Loki asked.
“She is a prisoner,” Stark corrected him. “We’ve got a lot of work to do before we can trust her to lift a pencil without our permission.”
Loki sighed. Sometimes this place reminded him of a zoo, and now he was becoming one of the zookeepers, which felt wrong. He thought back to when he was in here before, as he was ‘deprogrammed’ by the UN. He felt his empathy take over his body, hurting him deep in his core.
He bit his lip. “You’re deprogramming them, then,” he said quietly, images of bright lights, interrogations, painful tests, and even worse mental games in the name of ‘safety’ flashing before his mind’s eye.
“Sad, but what else can we do? It’s a fact of life, Reindeer Games. Maybe if you tell her to cooperate with us, we won’t have to get too messy.”
Stark sighed and walked away, leaving Loki in front of the tank. He swallowed as Wanda looked up at him with a defiant scowl on her face, her teeth gritted and her eyes intense with anger. He shook his head and gently put his palm against the glass.
Don’t worry, little one. No one took care of me, but I will take care of you…
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The town you’d found a nice little beachside cabin to relax in was so small that you couldn’t recall its name. It only had a small grocery, a medical plaza, and a few small cafes dotting the main street. There wasn’t even a traffic light or a gas station. It reminded you of Willoughby from The Twilight Zone: idyllic, tiny, with the promise of stress relief so complete that you’d jump off a train to find it.
The cabin was owned by a retired couple, the Maxsons, who were sweet enough to visit you for a small time every day, asking if everything was to your liking. You always lied to them and said it was. Not that the place itself wasn’t adorable and peaceful, just as you’d wanted, but with your relationship with Loki in unstable territory, letting go entirely was nearly impossible.
Every night, after you were sure the Maxsons were asleep and unlikely to drop by, you stripped naked and went to swim in the ocean, letting the cold water quench your fiery thoughts. You floated about under the moon, which was just short of being full the night you arrived and was now fully formed four nights later, illuminating the sky. You had no need for any candles or lights. Of course, whenever you turned in for the evening, you masturbated furiously at the memories of your times rolling around with Loki, skin pressed against skin, his massive cock against your clit...
As you backstroked in the calm, still water, you wished Loki were swimming beside you. You could picture how his hair would spread out under the surface, a halo of black about his face, his wet, defined chest reflecting the blue glow of the moon.
The past few days had been wonderful for clearing your head, but you didn’t expect what else living in this tiny seaside hamlet did for you: showed you what life could have been like had you never come into your gift. During the days, you explored the town, found a few tiny shops you enjoyed browsing in, drank iced tea on the porch of your cabin and watched the sky turn indigo over the ocean horizon.
Had my parents not insisted I hide myself in the circus, would I have found a place like this?
You didn’t believe in alternate realities and multiverses, but perhaps if they were real, there was a universe where you lived here permanently, no Lokis or Steves or magic powers interrupting your day-to-day existence. Or, maybe there was one where you lived here with Loki, where the UN left him alone and trusted him with you, leaving the pair of you to have a simple but satisfying life.
The water enveloping your body now was helping your emotions turn steady, allowing your head to fully clear, making you see a fuller picture at last: if you love someone, it shouldn’t matter what else was going on around you, drama or otherwise.
Maybe I should be open about Loki with the others. He was right, Steve would finally get it through his thick head, you thought.
And Steve. Oh, Stevie Boy, what to do with him?
There was no doubt the man was sincere in his affection for you, but his naturally-alpha personality, while hidden behind a wall of old-school reverence for women, still meant he lacked a full understanding of the modern female, and in that lack of understanding came some inherent sexism that he still needed to work on.
Like the fact that he didn’t take ‘no’ for an answer the first time, even though he said he would, you said to yourself.
Still, you didn’t want to burn that bridge. Steve still had a lot to him that you liked and even admired: his self-sacrificing nature, his leadership skills, and while the man was clueless about many social cues, he was a pretty fun man to be around when he let down his tough exterior. I do still want to be his friend. Maybe he could be a brother to me in the way that my actual brothers never were.
Even so, getting to that point was either going to take a LOT of subtle mental maneuvering…or you could’ve affirmed Loki’s confession as legitimate and none of this conflict would have started in the first place.
No, don’t gaslight yourself, you reminded your brain. It was HIS choice to bound down the hall like a gorilla.
“HEY! Y/N!”
You began to hear the cried of Mrs. Maxson summoning you from the shore, which was odd at this hour.
“I’m skinny-dipping!” You warned, closing in on the shore but keeping everything below your collarbone concealed out of respect for the older woman.
“Y/N, you’ve got a call from New York! It sounds like it’s really important!”
Thus, with a single phone call, your vacation was ended. Damn, they really do own me, you thought sadly. Guess I’ll have to think of what I can say to Loki on the train back. I just hope he forgives me.
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Nick Fury and Bruce Banner were escorting you up to the containment chamber seven hours later, just as the sun was beginning to rise. You were barely awake from your semi-sleep on the Amtrak.
You kept looking around for Loki as you were taken back into the bowels of Avengers Tower. You couldn’t see him anywhere, but then again, or could you see anyone else: Steve, Nat, or Thor. As much as you wanted to ask Fury where your paramour was waiting, you knew that even if it wouldn’t have instantly outed you, there were more important things to worry about in the moment. Loki would have to wait.
“She was there in Sokovia a few weeks ago when we were there,” Bruce explained. “We found her and her brother trying to infiltrate us to get the scepter back. He’s not giving us too much trouble, he just asks for her all the time. She, on the other hand, ten times more willful than you were.”
You shrugged. You’d put up a fight when you were first ‘brought in,’ but you’d only spent one night in the tank, and in the morning your psychiatric evaluations proved that you were less of a threat and more just upset at your sudden lot.
“And how did you get them both contained?” you asked curiously.
“It wasn’t easy. In fact, we got the UN to lift Loki’s magic restrictions for one month,” said Fury.
Your heart skipped a beat. This was amazing news! Maybe once the UN saw that Loki was trustworthy, they’d let him keep his seidr, and that would be one less thing to stress over later, when you were planning to ride him raw to make up for the last four days of separation.
“So, if she was at the fight in Sokovia, how come I didn’t see her?” you asked.
“She seems to be able to inject hallucinations into our heads,” Bruce explained. “Did you happen to find yourself somewhere else for a second while you were there? Somewhere that didn’t feel right?”
You stopped in your tracks, your face going white, your blood running cold. Immediately, the image of the circus below you, Loki and Steve advancing on you atop the trapeze platform, getting ready to shove you over the edge while the crowd chanted excitedly for your death.
“I’d say from the looks of that, that’s a yes,” Fury said.
“I was on the North Tower, Stark had just left me to breech the barrier—”
“—yes?” asked Fury.
You shook your head, trying to dust the memory from your mind. “I don’t like her.”
Bruce chuckled. “I can understand that, but it doesn’t matter anyway, because—”
“—no, if she’s the one that showed me that horrible place,” your voice began to weaken with fear. “If she was the one who did that to me, I don’t want her around.”
“She’s got to stay here. She’s entirely too dangerous if she’s allowed to stay rogue,” Fury informed you.
“You weren’t the only one, just so your know,” Bruce added. “Stark swears he saw something too, although he won’t talk about it.”
You sighed and made a mental note to ask him about it later. Maybe putting your visions together would help you learn something important about this invader.
“She and her brother wanted the scepter?” you asked. “They are from Hydra, then?”
Fury nodded. “They have a history with attempting to collect and modify individuals. Steve had a companion die at their hands.”
You felt a pang of sympathy for him in the moment. Maybe that was why you didn’t seem to see him around. You’d suspected he’d be the one trying to run this whole operation.
“I still don’t like it,” you said quietly.
Fury nodded. “Yeah, well things are already looking up a little bit, thanks to Loki of all people.”
“Loki? What’s he done?” you asked, you ears perking up like a cat’s at the mention.
The three of you entered the large room containing the chamber. You could see the ragged, wretched girl sitting inside, her palm pressed against the glass in response to someone on the other side doing the same. They were muttering in hushed tones. Her conversation partner was Loki, kneeling down on the ground beside her, the glass separating them. He couldn’t hear you arriving, and thus, had no idea you clearly saw him devoting his attention to another.
You felt everything inside your core solidify and sink into your bowels. Your hair burst into blue flames. Well, Loki, it may have taken us four weeks to start something, but it took your four days to replace me! Clearly, he’d made the decision to move on without you, just as he’d made the decision to try and out you before.
Banner explained. “For some reason, she talks to him. I think they have a thing for each other. He hasn’t left her side since she arrived.”
You bit your lip. “Well, seeing as he clearly has it under control, I see no reason why you plucked me away from my respite, and I’ll be in my room setting things on fire!”
You stormed away just before Loki looked up, only seeing Fury and Banner looking perplexed in the doorway.
“Was it something I said?” asked Banner.
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