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SUNNA 10 (loki/reader) (stephen strange/reader)

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4945 words

warnings: the after effects of mind violation; canon-typical violence. minor gore; depictions of wounded animals

AO3 MASTERPOST

With that, we see the world through Loki's eyes . . . .

Another step towards the shirking Midgardian.

The right side of my face relinquishes the sting for a long steady burn. Oh, I don’t blame her for the slap, not really, she’s shown a penchant for explosive bouts of emotion, but the unexpected pain makes the uncivilized part of my mind react murderously.

"I'm sorry," she says, hands out in apology. "I'm sorry for hitting you."

I actively reel in the desire to kill her. I am provoking her for more than one reason, I remind myself. I need her mad. “I am willing to admit, transfiguring into the sorcerer was perhaps a bit harsh-”

She stops backing away unexpectedly, and I almost collide with her.

Her shoulders draw back, face contorting with anger. “A bit harsh? A bit harsh!? Are men not taught manners in Asgard? God, why are you such a fucking tool?”

AO3

"You know nothing of my background, I think all Asgardians are tools in one way or another.” I match her energy, each one of us refusing to back down, glaring at each other. Good. “I apologize if I upset you, but it certainly wasn’t personal. All in the spirit of fun.”

“That wasn’t personal? If you upset me?”

"That is what I said."

She is genuinely flabbergasted. "God, you're such a-! What did I ever do to you?"

"What do you mean? I'm here! Against my will! Fixing your mess." I gesture around us. This I genuinely believe. This is not my mess.

She's waving her hands in the air in front of her. "Woah, woah, what? You're still half responsible bud! I need you to be like so for real right now, this is your mess." Right fingers tap on her left palm in beat with her words.

“If I caused you harm it was indirect, I'll admit that much culpability, but I have been practicing magic for longer than your bloodline has existed. There's never been a problem before.” It's true.

“Indirect?” She's almost nose to nose with me on the sloped ground.

"Yes, indirect. If you hadn't been enchanted, then my involvement wouldn't have resulted in this. The enchanter - that is where fault lies."

"Okay? You can't just go into people's heads like that!" She's infuriated. I can feel it, feel all her emotions, hear it in all her thoughts. So... so close.

"Huh. Why can't I? Tell me, I implore you." I know how to sound audibly arrogant. I know the affect that has on someone already frustrated.

"You don't really plan to listen, Loki. We met, and granted I was a little rude, but who just meets someone and then stages a whole shitty diversion just to break into their head? How entitled do you have to be to do that to a person?"

Mind magic is a complicated thing. While I'm in her head I'm bonded to her. When entering a truly fragile mind, it's necessary to bond the guest consciousness to the host, it makes it easier to read the connections and to heal broken bonds. It tricks her mind into thinking I am one and the same. My magic will linger on her for days afterwards, stopping her mind from rejecting the supplementing power.

Such a long time has it been since I have attempted to heal a mind... I have been quite unprepared, forgotten what it is to feel as another feels, hear what another thinks without escape.

It means I feel the throbbing of her pain. I don't like it.

"Do you really think that that's okay?”

I am forced to steel myself. There is a higher purpose to this. Her pain as long as I feel it is my pain, and it makes me want to bite like a wounded dog. I channel that feeling, as I have done so for a millennia - from lashing teeth to a single precise blade. "Sunna, I have met hundreds of thousands of peoples, in different realms and different places. Your kind are born and grow old in the blink of an eye to me. You are nothing to me. I care little for the vapid sensibilities of the common man, just as you cannot weep and wail over every insect killed in your presence because you will never be able to carry on. I am a god and you are a girl. Do you blame a gust of wind for blowing down a castle made of sand? No. No amount of tact could make such a truth easily digestible, and you simply will not be able to induce guilt in me for it."

"Fuck you."

Again, I don’t blame her for the punch. It is the risk you take with provocation. Her fist never makes contact with my face though, I am still quicker than she is, wrapping my fingers around the assailing wrist and holding it firmly in my hand. Unsuccessful attempts to wrench out of my grip were made, and it's harder to restrain her than it technically should be. Perfect. Sunna’s anger is making her stronger.

“So you just mess with people- what- because you can?”

“More or less."

She is preparing another strike.

"Time ever marcheth forth and when you live as long as I do you find entertainment wherever you can.”

I grab her other wrist as well, halting the right hook.

Genuine surprise weaves through the timbre of my voice, “your swings have good form. I refuse to believe that Strange taught you how to fight. That buffoon couldn’t throw a half-decent punch to save his life. Stop it, you’re going to strain a muscle."

She swears at me again.

Something in the air shifts, enough to pull my attention to our surroundings, only for a second but long enough that she pulls me off balance, forcing me to take a step forward. She uses the momentum to grind her heel down on the top of my foot. In real life, this wouldn't have hurt, wouldn’t have caused me to yelp in pain as I did. Every other form I take, I take with me the durability of an Asgardian.

“No matter what I do, what questions I ask, you spin into conspiracy theory, like trying to poison me against Stephen, I know what you're doing-"

"Acknowledging reality is not poisoning."

"You are actually crazy! Like I knew you dressed well, but the way you accessorize the tin foil hat - that's crazy. You wanna talk about bugs? Talk about animals? You’re like a fucking animal skulking around, lying and chipping away at my sanity piece-by-piece. You didn’t put this spell on me, fine, you didn’t intend to cause me harm? Fine! But you fucked up that spell, you fucked up my head, and everything would have been fine if you didn’t feel entitled to other people’s brains and business, so forgive me if I couldn’t give two shits if you did it directly or indirectly. You owe me a solution!”

There's a pregnant pause while she waits for me to say something, my foot tender and throbbing. “You think I dress well?”

Another shift in pressure. The memory around us fades away.

The night sky around gives way to masonry, mortar appearing before bricks, sprouting out of the ground like some bamboo made of only right-angles, the bricks grow in, strange rectangular fruit. The roof was the final thing to form, snapping on and blocking the newly risen sun.

Encased in the walls of the top of a stone clock tower, she shows Memory-Strange some magic she had learnt as a child, waving a hand through the bell that signaled the changing of the hour. A purple glow has washed over her features. It seemed to catch in the sorcerer’s eye.

“This is my mind,” the real her contended. “You do not get to act this way in here, this is my head.”

The walls of the tower crack and the ground jolts, shards of another scene loitering behind the set. She is almost there, unwittingly close to a breakthrough.

The automatic door to the local gelato shop slid open with a beep, complete with a welcome mat outside, with the words ‘ice to meet you!’ emblazoned in pink. The inside of the shop was almost empty, but she sat with Wong in one of the shop’s pastel tables, eating their gelato and talking.

“I don’t care what you do out there in the rest of the world but you don’t get to come here and laugh at my memories and torture me because you got bored. Get it together! I have no memories, Loki! My brain is so broken! My body could give out on me any second, everything hurts and my magic is gone. I’m scared, so you need to step up! I need you to step up. You owe me.” Color blooms high across her cheeks.

The gelato shop shudders, splintering away, thrusting us into an intoxicated New York city night.

The lights were too bright, so much so that they hurt her eyes. She could hear every sound around us, every hum of a motor vehicle, the rustle of trash being kicked on the sidewalk, and people speaking to each other in various tones all of which were so intrusive that they thudded against her skull but still she couldn’t make out a single word of conversation.

Ah, here we are. The underlayer.

Her pain transports me. Once when I was small, Odin took me out into the forest to hunt. I did not take to physical endeavors in the same way that my brother did and I was acutely aware of how this made me lesser than Thor. Still I was young, and was always chasing the ghost of approval that Odin gave occasionally - not enough to sustain me, but often enough that I was haunted with the need to make him proud of me. Desperate for more.

I did not rejoice in the killing of animals. More often than not it would do little more than to wash me with nausea, but that day we had laid a trap for a bear, a clamp with so much force that it would be able to restrain the beast long enough for Odin to kill it. We sat in wait until the sun set and rose and set and rose again, the time being of little burden to us.

We sat until a reindeer, antlers freshly shed, wandered near. He called for his kind, but there came no reply.

“He is lost,” Odin said.

So profoundly alone, just as I was.

Odin knew of the magic mother was teaching me, and had forced me to render us invisible to the forest, he had said he didn’t want me to be a distraction when the bear came. Through the lens of an adult as I now am, I can see that it was more important for him to model to me what he thought a great warrior should be, to stroke his own ego, because surely the reason I was such a disappointment is because I had not seen him kill personally. But this was no bear. This was a reindeer, lost and alone, and stepping awfully too close to the trap. For a moment I forgot about the spell and I moved to stop him, to chase him away.

“Halt,” it was a simple command from my father, and it was all that it took to freeze me in place.

The deer was going to step in the trap. “Please, father,” I could not drag my eyes from the beast, “we came to conquer a bear, not this. This is not worth our time,” my voice sounded more practical than I felt.

“Watch.”

The deer made only one misstep, and the teeth of the clamp reared up. This trap was made to subdue a creature much bigger and stronger than a reindeer, so the first sound to echo through the forest was the snapping of delicate bone. The second sound, a scream of agony.

I could not move. I was not allowed to. Odin insisted that I watch. If it were a bear caught, he would have charged in and killed the beast (not without show), but death would have been swifter than the slowly encroaching starvation and blood loss. The trapped animal moaned and cried out. Time passed, how much I did not know, but even now, a millennia later I can see the animals panic and terror shift into anger as though it were before my own eyes once again. Asgardian animals are often more conscious than their Midgardian counterparts and I swore I could see the moment that it decided to gnaw off it’s own limb, now broken in several more places from its wild thrashing. Blood pooled around it. After hours of suffering, it tore through its own sinew and muscle, the gore lashed between its teeth.

It was free... but only managed one shaking step before it collapsed. It had lost too much blood, exhausted and in shock. Even with the lengths it had gone to to free itself, it would die soon anyway. Finally, Odin sent in his wolves to end the deer’s life, and my eyes shut tight, so I could spare myself a fraction of the horror that I had been forced to see.

“Open your eyes and watch, boy.” Odin’s words echoed through my mind, and I am brought back to the scene in front of me, bright lights and loud noises, Sunna standing in front of me, the only respite from the calamity.

“Fine. I agree. I’ve behaved out of line, I apologize.”

She did a double-take, trying to figure out if I was being sincere. It was an expression I had seen on many faces over the years. "Why?" She asks.

I do not answer her.

We had broken through to the underlayer of her subconscious, to the memories she could not access by natural means, and it is represented by the New York cityscape stretching out in front of us.

I swept a hand out gesturing down the never-ending block. “When we first entered your mind, we could only access the memories closest to the surface, the ones we knew you to possess, solidified in your mind, untouched by the spell or by the actions of... unaware third parties. We now find ourselves in the deeper layer of the mind, so to speak. This layer is only accessible through a deep emotional outburst.”

"I guarantee that if you have let me know, I could have had a sufficient mental breakdown without all of that. So I'm still mad at you."

"It has to genuine, raw," I insist.

She rolls her eyes, and the expression is quite attractive on her.

“You're so cruel.” It wasn’t an accusation, more of a statement, without mirth.

She is not the first and would not be the last to tell me this.

“I would say it was unbecoming of a prince, but your reputation is built on cruelty. The old stories, the Battle of New York, the way you treat Stephen. Cruel. An apology doesn't hide it.”

“Did you hope to wound me with that comment?”

She swallows. “Yes.” It's honest.

Each memory we watch is framed with a kind of ease after that.

Nothing flows as it should in here. It is starting to become alarming.

Her mind should respond to her intuitively, but it does not. There are no full memories, only fragments left and distorted.

I can feel her frustration lap at me, threatening to boil over any minute.

For the second time I channel the häxeri, witchcraft. A gift from my dearest mother. The darkness flows as I hum. Let me find the threads of her core. Show me the damage. Show me the bonds broken that I may heal them.

Around us, pieces of her bedroom flow into place like smoke. It is a memory of me, the memory of me.

We watch as she snatches the laptop from my hands.

Suddenly I see her perspective of me, tinged with frustration and fear, as I loom over her. She is a reindeer nearing a trap.

Memory-Loki is forced into the armchair, but her powers are unrefined, and she's using anger as her motivator. A burst of green light knocks her to the floor, and in response she aims a surprisingly well placed kick at my legs, which knocks me down hard next to her. She'd hit her head on the ground, and the memory fabric itself became hazy.

One of my own memories flashes behind my eyes, of Thor killing his goats. A predator. An impending doom approaching a trapped animal.

She jolts as I remove my palm from her forehead. Nothing had appeared out of the ordinary. Sunna stormed out of the Sanctum, her phone shoved hastily in her pocket before getting as far away from me as fast as she could.

The real Sunna stands in front of me, and she regarded the scene in front of us blankly. “I used to remember this, like really clearly,” she chewed on the skin of her bottom lip, “so vividly in the hours after it happened. Out there, I mean. But it disappeared like a slow leak. The details are fuzzier. I still remember, but it feels like all of the memories I've got are so fuzzy now.”

I feel sick.

"So how is what you do different from what Gorron does?" she repeats the question.

The first time she asked escaped my attention. I turn my gaze towards her, hyper-aware of her presence here with me. Every mind is different but this mind is so peculiar. "Gorron looks at your physical brain," I clear my throat. "He can watch a memory via osmosis by pressing on the brain tissue, but nothing so deep as this. I am inside your mind right now."

There is something she is feeling that I can’t identify. "How does it compare to the last time you were in my mind?"

"It doesn't."

"Well, how do we fix it?"

“I don’t know yet,” I answer. It's honest. She didn't believe me I could see it in her face. She feels as though I am holding out on her.

"How do you decide which questions to answer and which ones to cryptically avoid?"

"I flip a coin in my head."

The scenery changes around us. The walls of the Sanctum morphed into a place I have never been.

She was writing furiously on a clipboard, taking very detailed notes of the exhibit in front of her. The dark violet of the museum uniform blazer compliments her well.

It took several long moments for her to notice Strange from where he watched her, his face a mix of emotions. Finally, and with much convincing, he approached, stilling a few feet away. “Excuse me…”

She turns, immediately erupting in a smile. “Hi! Did you need some help?”

It took him a few too many seconds to reply. “Uh, yeah. I- I was wondering if you could tell me where the entomology wing is?” He was nervous.

"Of course!" She rattled off some directions, but when the confused look on Strange's face doesn't clear she endeavored to just show him herself.

We followed them to the entomology unit, watching their very first interaction.

"Big fan of bugs are you?" Sunna strikes up a conversation effortlessly.

"Uh, I suppose. Are you?" He looks at her so intensely.

They arrive at their destination.

"No, afraid not. I can't stand them to be honest, but the exhibit is really cool, there's a lot of really passionate people working that one!"

Strange thanks her, but as she walks away he calls out to her, "actually, this is embarrassing, but I totally, uh, spaced out. I meant- the Babylonian exhibition?"

"Oh, well, that's alright, I'm actually heading that way." She gestures for him to follow. "What brings you there?"

"The art, I guess. Big fan."

"That's cool! I don't think it gets the recognition it deserves."

"Oh yeah, me neither. I don't know anything about it. Maybe you could start me off?"

The pair talked for hours, completely absorbed in each other's company, touring the museum. Their humors seemed to mesh, and they have a surprising amount in common, fiercely academic, competitive, intelligent. Not once did anyone come check on her, to find out why she wasn't doing her job. Nor did her coworkers so much as glance in her direction. Finally, Strange managed to detach himself from her side long enough to leave.

"What woman talks to a stranger for hours at work without attempting to end the conversation?" I ask, turning to face the real her. "What woman isn't uncomfortable with this level of attention? Presumably you have things to do, you can’t just spend all your time talking with patrons, especially not just one."

She didn't reply, too busy staring at herself.

If there wasn't a soft rise and fall of Sunna’s chest, one might have wondered if she had been instantly petrified. The light behind her eyes had vanished completely. She did not move, had not moved after Strange left, but the other people of the memory continue on about their business, walking through the Cultures of the World exhibit, ignoring her. It was as if she wasn’t there.

We both stare for a few moments, until the background noise of the museum fades and silence grows louder and louder.

"What’s going on? Why aren’t I moving?”

“I don’t know.”

The lights of the museum blink off one by one. The doors are locked and still she does not move.

As though caught on a breath of wind the memory is gone.

“What the hell was that?”

“Do you remember anything like that?” I ask.

“Well I remember meeting Stephen,” she puzzled, “but I specifically remember finishing work, because the whole time I was super distracted by the idea of visiting the Sanctum. The Bleeker Street occultist is kind of a local legend and I had a professional curiosity in Stephen's collection of antiques- anyway, my boss called me out for not putting an artefact back into storage properly.” She ran her hands through her hair. “Like I remember, I never forgot. It was really embarrassing. Could that memory that we just watched be wrong?”

"If your mind is missing a part of a memory, it may distort it. Fill in the gaps, so to speak. Minds naturally do that all the time. It's possible that as sick as you are, it is unable to fill in those gaps and this is what it looks like.

She's uneasy. I'm uneasy.

We continue our way down the block. New York is an ugly, smelly place, and this has translated well into her memory. Still, even to the untrained eye this was, at best, a copy of the city, even excluding the piercing nature of the lights and the chaos of noise. Things hid in the shadows here, intrusive thoughts, feelings that she could not accept - though I drew attention to neither.

Another memory forms, growing from the roots up. A vast field of yellow wheat stretching out as far as the eye can see. Buzzing of insects and the humming of machinery somewhere far off. A cerulean sky spread like drop of ink in water.

“I- I don’t remember this.” Sunna corrected, “It's not in my living memory. Could this be a memory that I lost?”

I speak the word for 'yes' in her language, but I do not know.

The Memory of Sunna is next to us. She was not perturbed by the plants, nor the hot sun on her skin. In the distance appeared a woman, walking through lines of wheat to get to her.

We observe in silence for the five or so minutes it takes the woman to arrive.

She had long curly, light hair that seemed to poof up as though it defied gravity. Her skin was dark and almost tinged blue, as though it was reflecting the cloudless sky. But it was her eyes that drew us in bright with false joy. When she opens her mouth to speak, her voice matches the woman that had visited Sunna in her dream, who had come to warn her and teach her.

Sunna and I exchange a glance.

“You don’t know me, but I know you,” the woman called.

“Who are you?” Memory-Sunna asks.

“A friendly observer,” her laugh was delicate. “But I would like to offer you some advice.”

“Which is?”

“Run. Get away and never look back, don’t come back.”

“Come back where?”

“Home.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The cloud-woman smiled, but it was only a mask over heartache. “And you won’t remember this when you wake. I can only hope that Strange will be able to extract this dream.”

“If I won’t remember, tell me your name.”

“Kuema.”

The field vanishes, giving way to the city again.

"Or I don't remember it because it was a dream and no one remembers their dreams."

"Some do." I can't help it, but I don't tell her, because Strange can ruin his life on his own. "We have a name that carries a lot of power. It must be her magic that brings your dreams to you. Sister signatures. She must get her power from the same place yours comes from."

“Is she behind all of this?”

“Perhaps, perhaps she is another pawn, much like yourself,” I ran my fingers through the tall stalks of wheat. “On the bright side, this will all be a great story for your memoirs."

She gives me a look and I feel the accompanying feeling, but I can't decipher it.

Another memory begins to form around us.

An apartment. It was small, and had too many coats of paint, but still the light switches have a spot where the grease from hands had rubbed through the unsightly beige. The apartment itself was quite messy. Clothes and takeout containers were spread across the room, the kitchen had a sink of dirty dishes and the open door leading to the bedroom framed an unmade bed and a cold cup of coffee left on the bedside table.

The most curious thing of all was that the apartment is empty. No matter the memory, Memory-Sunna had always been there. This mind is unstructured. It's unsettling.

"This is my old place," Sunna remarked. "I lived here until I moved to the Sanctum. Is there any sign of a signature?"

A wave of my hand and the room is engulfed in purple. The surprise caused her to take a step back, bumping into my chest.

She looked up at me, eyes wide and apologizes.

"It's nothing," I reply but neither of us move. I get the impression that she is too frightened to, like she can feel something I can't.

"I don't think this is real," she said. Confusion.

For a beat everything is silent.

Without warning, the apartment disappears like sand down a storm drain. Again we are plunged back into the city, but all of the fragments that had been hiding in the shadows were emitting a piercing screech. Our hands clamped over our respective ears, but it was no improvement.

"Make it stop-" but Sunna is cut off.

A monster, the color of ash burst through a building, coming straight towards us. I used the seconds before impact to shove her out of the way, but the four legged beast clipped my shoulder and sent me staggering. The creature smashed through the front window of an office and skids across the marble floor.

We run in the opposite direction.

"What the hell is that thing?" She yells over her shoulder.

"Whatever it is, it's in a bad mood." I rub my shoulder. Ouch.

There's an alleyway ahead, I push her down it, following closely behind.

The sound of breaking glass echoes behind us as the monster makes its way back outside.

"Can't you do something about it?" A squeak escaped her when the creature made its way down the too-small alley, powering through the brick like it was snow.

"It's your mind! I have limited powers here," I snap.

"Well, use your limited powers to kill it!"

"I could give it a try and just hope that you don't die when I do that."

We burst from the alley and into a forest, the smell of moss surrounding us.

The monster did not follow.

She doubles over, her hands on her knees while she catches her breath. "You said that none of this is real, so that thing can't hurt us. Right? Please tell me that's right?"

"Would you like to test you theory?" My shoulder aches. "It's real and it isn't. I'm not just trying to be enigmatic. We can definitely get hurt here."

"So if that thing dies, I might die. And if we die in here, we might die out there."

I nod sharply.

In the distance birds begin to cry. Trees are being uprooted. Something huge crushes through the flora.

Again we run, but the beast is on our tail too quickly. It roars are visceral and loud.

A tree falls, the shadow on us growing larger and larger.

I send a wave of seidr at it, throwing it backwards and onto the animal with a disturbing crunch.

Beside me, Sunna yelps in pain. I feel it. She can feel the monsters pain, so I really can't kill it.

The trees began to thin, turning into wisps of smoke.

Fire overtakes the environment.

Fire rages on, and so must our protagonist . . . .

AO3 MASTERPOST

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