Loki's Pain

Chapter Thirty-Nine- Changes Manifest

Ash slept thru the afternoon and well into the following morning, only waking up when Cat nudged him around eight. Bruce had called up to his apartment to ask Ash to return to the lab, only to find out that he had never made it back. Loki had suggested that he try calling over to Cat's office, since Ash frequently liked to nap on the couch, even as he asked about the tests. Bruce declined to answer, only thanking him for the suggestion before hanging up on him.

Once Cat had woke him up and informed him of Bruce's call, Ash rushed over to meet him, hoping for some answers while simultaneously fearing what they might be. His anxiety was thru the roof, and the cryptic nature of Bruce's summons only made things worse. So when he walked into the lab and saw the somber look on Bruce's face, Ash almost passed out in fear.

"Hop up on the table again, please?" Bruce asked calmly, "Then remove your shirt and lay back..."

Ash rushed to comply, taking a moment to position his tail as comfortably as possible first. When Bruce pulled over a new scanner and applied gel to his abdomen, he was both weirded out and confused. "What is this?" Ash asked, his awkwardness evident, "What are you looking for?"

"Earlier, I noticed a slight change in your body scan, this allows a closer look into the effected area..." He said, trying to calm Ash's fears a bit even as he formally confirmed his suspicion.

He eventually turned the display screen around, to show Ash what he had found, and did his best to explain.

"It seems that you are becoming hermaphroditic... You seem to have developed a functional womb and ovaries after you were rescued from Thanos. I didn't notice them before because they were small and underdeveloped until now, so I just mistook them for potentially vestigial organs due to your mutation. But I will warn you now, once these finish developing, you will develop the potential for pregnancy. I can already see the beginning development  of the vaginal canal, and externally, the labium....so that potential is not far off. You probably hadn't noticed it yet, since the labia is situated behind your scrotum ...honestly, I need to check that a bit more thoroughly, since it might lead to complications with pregnancy..." Bruce sounded mildly apologetic as he explained.

"H-how....why?....Who...." Ash was left confounded, his mind swimming from all of the implications, until he eventually focused on one, "The serum.... I forgot about it until now..."

"Serum?" Bruce asked, instantly focused, needing to know what he was referencing.

"Thanos....when he had me, he was running experiments...." Ash admitted, his voice soft with the guilt of not disclosing the knowledge sooner, "They injected me with something, I don't know what it was...or what it was supposed to do...but....why would it make me a hermaphrodite?"

"This....you should have told us about this!" Bruce exclaimed loudly, upset to have had such vital information withheld for so long. But seeing the sudden fright filling Ash's expression, he forced himself to a calm he didn't quite feel. "I'm sorry, Ash, I didn't mean to scare you. But this changes things some. You see, when I retested your DNA it showed some changes I couldn't explain. I compared it to the profile we had taken when you first arrived, and..." Bruce hesitated a bit, not sure exactly how to tell him what he'd found out, "Before, I couldn't explain the changes....now it makes more sense..."

"What?....What is it?" Ash asked, his entire body tense as he waited the long, agonizing seconds for Banner's response.

"I found both Asgardian and Jotun DNA had been added to your own...." Bruce finally stated, stunning Ash with the revelation, before he slowly began to blather on awkwardly, "In fact, the Jotun DNA is almost guaranteed to have been taken from Loki, ...and might explain the new organs. They have a higher percentage of functional hermaphrodites in their species from what I have learned. Loki himself has even been known to gender swap frequently when he shape shifts... O-or he did... before....from what Thor told me."