narrative: loki Who: Loki (narrative) What: Doing a favor for a good buddy Where: Loki's current undisclosed location. When: Today. Warnings/Rating: None.
Mending had never been part of Loki's studies. There were healers for that, after all. He had devoted his energies to bending what was real and what was not, to conjuring and flash, not to the dirty solid realities of knitting flesh together and sparking nerve endings with fresh life. He could justify it a hundred different ways, but when it came down to it, the real dirty secret was that he had lacked a knack for it. His magic hadn't bent that way, and every task in that arena felt a chore. Perhaps he wasn't meant to fix things. Perhaps it wasn't in his nature to put back together again.
But when he put his mind to it, most anything lay within his grasp. So he told himself, at least, and he had survived this long. The man on the other end of his casually unwound puppet string was a mortal man indeed, despite all his distinctly strange power. It didn't fit with his conception of humanity, for so many of its number to have been elevated to the plane of higher beings. But oh, how fragile they still were, that a shard of metal could cut their legs out from under them.
While Loki did not have the power to revive the dead (well, sort of - no, not really) he could connect broken conduits to their source and make them run, and once he conceived of the act of healing that way it became much easier to channel the work of mending it. There were more props involved than his typical magic required - cold, dense metal from the heart of the star, a well-worn object that caught and fired power with a distinct sense of purpose, good for patching, good for melting down power and using it to plug holes. There were miles of dead, echoing nerves in his target, dumb to the commands of the brain at their head. He could see them in his mind, useless and silent. There spun an effigy of the subject of his ministrations, and he loathed such an inelegant solution, but there was nothing for it.
One by one, he stitched. He was careful, but he pulled the patches tight and watched them meld in like the man's own flesh. These connections were his. The thread belonged to him, and he would be able to make it dance whenever he liked.
Hours into the night, hours of knitting flesh into flesh. Dawn broke, and the star in his hands cooled. He dropped it to the floor and flexed stiff fingers, trembling.
Control. Yes, he still had that. Whatever toxin crawled beneath his skin, this was still his. It brought a smile to his lips, the first in what felt like an age, looking at his reddened palms.
They did all talk of reform, and what better way to start than giving a man back his legs?