Unfettered (Loki x Reader)

Prologue

The Trial Room tastes like decay. Each breath lays heavy across the tongue and clings to the back of the throat - stale and dry. An unnatural chill permeates the walls. The cold lays scratchy on your skin as a single electric lamp hangs like a noose, swaying above a gurney. On it lies the body of a man hidden beneath a sheet. You can't see his face, but you know it's a man. You can tell by the winged tips of the scuffed, patent-leather shoes that peek out from beneath the dirty sheet. It's always dirty. They never give them clean sheets.

"He's dead," you exhale, numb in your observation as you wring your hands together.

"Clean her hand," a man's voice barks, annoyed, from over your shoulder. "She's cut it open again."

The voice is one you don't recognize. But there are so many voices in this place that the anonymity of it does not come as a surprise. A gloved hand grabs yours at the bidding of the voice, pulling your hands apart and turning your left up and over as if in prayer. The crevices in your skin run a mottled red. A thin cut caused by your own nail-laced hand-wringing oozes blood into the fine lines, creating an intricate web of crimson streaks and swirls.

"Once she's clean, we begin again," the voice across the room commands. "Proceed."

You swallow nervously as hands on your shoulders push you closer to the body. "I-I said he's dead," you stammer, fingers twitching. "I can't do it."

"You will," he seethes. "The window of opportunity is small. But we both know it's there. Focus."

Exhaustion wracks your weak body. The man on the table marks the forty-sixth person you've read today. But only your first corpse in quite some time. At least this one won't fight back.

"Now!" he snaps.

Your heart lurches as the sheet is pulled back, revealing the horribly mangled face of what may have once been a handsome young man. His mess of strawberry blonde hair is sticky - stained in blood that has clotted and dried nearly black. Left hand trembling, you reach for his mutilated face and rest four fingertips gently along the curve of the man's brow as his broken nose prods the center of your scarred and bloodied palm. Your thumb curves around his skull to rest in the place his ear should be. As you hold him in your hand, your own blood smears across the man's freckles - oozing from the open cut.

He's still warm.

The realization has your stomach churning as ice floods your veins. How long has it been since his last breath? No more than an hour or two, surely.

"Focus," the man barks, impatient. "Use your Genetic Link."

Disobedience is not an option. So you swallow the bile in your throat and close your eyes. It takes a moment for your heart to slow, but as it does an unnatural warmth blooms in your cheeks and spreads down your neck. You lean into it, encouraging the sensation, beckoning it forth. As you call to it, the warmth quickly flashes white-hot. Your eyes fly open to find that the body of the man before you is now surrounded by a faint, silver halo of rapidly dying light. It grows fainter by the second.

"What do you see?" the voice snaps.

You close your eyes once more as images flash through your own head. Memories that aren't yours. Distant, dying thoughts. Fading feelings. Millions of living moments trapped in a rotating spiral being sucked further and further down each second that passes. You've seen this before. In the other dead you've been forced to read. It's not like the living, where each mind is as unique as the person themselves. Rather, in death, each mind looks the exact same - a devastating vortex of images and moments swirling around the others, shrinking in size until they just...disappear. Forever.