Marvel One-Shots and Prompts

From Childish Need Be Born Sweet Pain

Created 3 December, 2021

Rating : Mature
For themes of insanity, mental illness, mentions of torture, indications of abuse,  insecurity, and misinterpretations of the concept of love.

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"Don't you understand that we need to be childish in order to understand? Only a child sees things with perfect clarity, because it hasn't developed all those filters which prevent us from seeing things we don't expect to see."

-Douglas Adams

The Mad Titan has known of need.

This much is clear.

A moment spent in his presence, anyone with half a brain would know this. Loki does. This much is certain. And for the uncertainties, the nights prove restless as he awaits further torment. There are no cells, nor prisons in the Sanctuary. No doors, windows, or rooms of any sort. One could spend hours gazing out into the abyss that surrounded the rock formation and still not see it all. The universe was vast, and hope for being found was next to nothing.

Still, on those restless nights, the passing of a fiery meteor or the occasional comet could instill the little spark and set it alight for a moment. Such sights used to come often. Now, with each passing day, or at least, what he assumes is one, the sights offer him less. Soon, there will be no more sparks to light the long-dying fire of the hope in his withering heart.

He finds himself alone with these troublesome thoughts many times, and strange as it may be to say, he is relieved when his tormentors come once more to break him. In a way, their cruelty always gave something to him they would never guess.

A sense of belonging.

A sense of worth.

It was sad, so terrible to have fallen so low, but each day, they would return, and he knows this. Every stroke of their whip proves their love, their need for him. If he weren't needed, he would have been discarded long ago.

So, when they come for him, he always fights. He loves to see the smirks upon their faces as they promise him pain. His facade was the terror and the agony he cried out in, but he was enchanted by the belonging he was awarded.

What a sickeningly beautiful gift the mad one has given him time and time again! What joy; what utter and despicable torment! He longs for the whip, he finds, just the same as he longs for water to quench his thirst, and for sustenance to end his famine. Was it so wrong to think pain sweet?

There was one.

It seemed to think so.

The lingering pain of his last torment had him in a state of utter bliss. The torture had been particularly brutal that day. The robed figure steps out of the shadows, yellowed eyes upon his flesh, eying the bloodied wounds, eying the way it continuously mars his ivory skin. What beauty had been was utterly destroyed. What a terror- oh! Yes! What a crime.

The six-fingered hand of the robed creature then finds its way to his face. It wanders the grime-ridden expanse of the angular plane of his cheek. Unfocused, claimed by his lust for more of the worthiness they had struck down upon him, he looks up, and meets the eyes of the one known as the Other.