Chapter 23: The Ashen Vigil
The silence in the Grandmaster’s chamber was broken only by the ragged, wet sound of Sage trying to breathe. Loki’s hands, slick with her blood, pressed the wadded cloth hard against the wound in her side. The pressure was absolute, a desperate attempt to stanch a life that was seeping away between his fingers.
“We need to move. Now.” Bucky’s voice was a low, urgent vibration. He had already shrugged out of his outer tactical layer, leaving the dark under-suit. He bundled the thicker material, gently sliding it under Sage’s shoulders and head. “The comms are dead in here. That means the Grandmaster knows his toy box is breached. They’ll be coming.”
Loki didn’t look up. His entire world had narrowed to the faint pulse under his fingertips and the terrifying coolness of her skin. “She will not survive the shaft. The jostling…”
“She won’t survive if we stay here either.” Bucky’s metal hand closed carefully around Sage’s ankles. “We carry her together. You support her head and the wound. I’ll take the legs. We go slow and smooth. It’s the only play.”
There was no time for a better plan. Loki nodded, a sharp, brittle motion. He slid one arm under her shoulders, his other hand maintaining its brutal pressure on her side. Her head lolled against his chest, her dark hair sticking to the blood on his tunic. She made a small, pained sound as they lifted her, a whimper that was worse than any scream.
They moved back through the hole in the wall, a clumsy, three-bodied creature of blood and fear. The sterile white corridor felt like a mile long. Every shift, every fractional bounce as they hurried, made Loki’s jaw clench. He could feel the warmth of her blood soaking through the cloth, hot against his palm.
The service shaft yawned before them, a vertical gullet of grinding machinery. Bucky went first, climbing down backward, his metal arm gripping the magnetic rail with crushing force. “Lower her to me. Slow.”
Loki knelt, his muscles screaming with the strain of holding her steady. He eased her over the edge, his hands under her arms, until Bucky could cradle her legs and hips. The transfer was agonizing. A tremor went through Sage’s body. Her eyes, hazed with pain and shock, flickered open for a second, finding Loki’s face above her.
“...falling,” she whispered.
“No,” he said, the word raw. “I have you.”
They descended into the bowels of Sakaar, a slow-motion nightmare. The din of the riot was louder here, a cacophony of crashes, energy blasts, and roars that echoed up the metal shaft. Twice, Bucky had to stop, bracing them both against the wall as a tremor from some distant explosion shook the entire structure. Each time, Loki pressed his forehead against the cold metal, feeling Sage’s shallow breath against his neck, and waited for the world to stop shaking.
It took an eternity. When their boots finally hit the lower level grating, Loki’s arms were trembling with fatigue. The exit to the outer market alley was just ahead.
“Status!” Steve’s voice crackled to life in their ears, clear now that they were out of the suppression field’s residue. “We’ve lost visual. Report.”
“We have her,” Bucky gasped, adjusting his grip on Sage. “She’s critical. Massive blood loss, hypothermic. We need the Quinjet and a med-team yesterday.”
“We’re pinned at the primary landing zone,” Natasha cut in, her voice clipped between the sounds of repulsor fire. “Hulk’s… diversion is ongoing. Security is thicker than expected. Make for the secondary extraction point. Coordinates uploading. It’s a roof, two blocks east of your position. Less pretty, more exposed.”
“We’re moving,” Loki said, his voice hollow.
They burst into the alley. The market was a warzone. Smashed stalls burned, filling the air with acrid smoke. Scavengers darted through the chaos, and groups of the Grandmaster’s gold-armored guards clashed with rioters and what looked like a faction of rebellious slaves. A neon sign sputtered and died above them, raining sparks.
They kept to the shadows, moving as fast as they dared. Loki held Sage close, using his body to shield her from the debris and the glancing stares of the desperate. Her breathing had become a faint, wheezing pull. Her skin was the color of chalk.
“Almost there,” Bucky muttered, more to himself than anyone.
The building was a skeletal tower of rust and corroded piping. The service ladder was missing half its rungs. Bucky went up first, then leaned down, his metal arm extended. “Pass her up.”
Loki had to let go of the wound. He wrapped both arms around Sage, feeling the fresh, hot spill of blood immediately soak his side. He lifted. It was a brutal, ugly maneuver. Bucky grabbed her under the arms and hauled her onto the roof with a grunt of effort. Loki scrambled up after, his mind blank with a kind of frantic static.
The rooftop was a debris-strewn plateau under Sakaar’s sickly orange sky. And it was not empty.
The Hulk stood with his back to them, shoulders heaving, his green skin streaked with black soot and gold-colored hydraulic fluid. At his feet lay the twisted, sparking remains of a winged sentry drone. He was breathing in great, angry huffs, his fists still clenched.
Tony Stark hovered just out of swatting range, his repulsors humming. “Okay, big guy, show’s over. We gotta go. Time to let the other guy drive.”
Hulk turned. His face was a mask of primal rage, his eyes glowing with a deep, endless anger. He took a step toward Tony, a growl building in his chest.
Then his gaze swept past Iron Man and landed on the bundle in Bucky’s arms.
He stopped.
The growl died. The raging fire in his eyes flickered, confusion edging into the fury. He took another step, slower this time, his huge head tilting. He sniffed the air, catching the scent of blood and ozone and extinguished magic.
Loki instinctively moved between Hulk and Sage, a futile, instinctive gesture.
Hulk ignored him. He moved closer, his footsteps shaking the rooftop. He loomed over Bucky, who stood his ground, holding Sage tight. Hulk’s massive hand, capable of crushing stone, came up. He didn’t reach for her. He just hovered it near her head, as if feeling the unnatural cold radiating from her.
He saw the blood. He saw the ashen skin. He saw the brutal wound Loki’s hand was once again trying to cover.
A sound escaped the Hulk’s lips. Not a roar. It was a low, wounded rumble, a vibration of profound dismay. The anger drained from his posture, replaced by something that looked, impossibly, like grief. The green of his skin seemed to dull.
“Little witch,” he grunted, the words thick and gravelly. “Broke.”
The change didn’t happen all at once. It was a dissolution. The immense frame shuddered, shrinking in on itself. The verdant skin paled, fading to a sickly beige before resolving into the familiar, frail form of a man in shredded purple trousers. Bruce Banner collapsed to his knees on the rooftop, gasping, his glasses miraculously still perched on his nose. He stared, disoriented and shivering, at the woman bleeding out before him.
“Oh, no,” Bruce whispered, the scientist instantly overriding the beast. He scrambled forward on his knees. “Let me see. Put her down, gently.”
There was no time for relief. Steve and Natasha appeared at the roof access door, weapons drawn, covering the approach. “Quinjet’s inbound, thirty seconds!” Steve shouted. “What’s her status?”
Bruce’s hands, delicate and precise, were already probing, assessing. He pressed his ear to Sage’s chest, his face grim. “Pulse is thready, pressure’s in the basement. This wound… it’s traumatic. Perforating. She needs surgical intervention and blood, now. The cold… it’s systemic. It’s not just shock.” He looked up at Loki, his eyes sharp behind his lenses. “What did they do to her magic?”
“They caged it,” Loki said, his voice flat. “They cut it out of her.”
Bruce flinched as if struck. He nodded, a quick, professional motion burying the horror. “Okay. Okay. The jet’s med-bay can stabilize. We need to keep her warm. Someone give me a jacket.”
Natasha was already shucking her own, placing it over Sage’s torso. The thrum of the Quinjet’s engines grew deafening as it descended vertically, kicking up stinging grit. The rear ramp lowered with a hydraulic whine.
The next minutes were a blur of coordinated motion. Bucky and Steve carried Sage inside on a makeshift stretcher of their linked arms. Bruce sprinted ahead to power up the medical scanners and sterile field. Tony sealed the ramp, shouting to the cockpit where Clint, his leg in a temporary stabilizer, already had the engines screaming for orbit.
Loki stood frozen in the middle of the hold, covered in her blood, watching as Bruce and Natasha worked with frantic efficiency. They cut away the ruined cloth, applied sterile compresses and a pneumatic compression bandage to her side, started IV lines, and hooked her up to a chorus of beeping monitors. The jet banked sharply, pushing for the upper atmosphere and the relative safety of the void.
The sound of her heartbeat, translated into a thin, rapid electronic chirp, filled the space. It was the most terrible sound Loki had ever heard.
He finally moved, stumbling to the edge of the designated med-area. He watched the screens, the lines and numbers that meant nothing to him but conveyed everything. One displayed her core temperature, a number so low it flashed a warning blue.
Natasha glanced at him, then at the blood on his hands. “There’s a sink in the rear,” she said, not unkindly.
He didn’t move. He watched Bruce inject a clear fluid into her IV. “Raising her core temp, trying to counter the vasoconstriction,” Bruce murmured, more to himself than anyone. “Come on, Sage. Come back.”
Slowly, so slowly, the blue-tinted pallor of her skin began to soften. A faint, peach-like warmth crept back into her cheeks. It wasn’t her fire. It was borrowed heat, clinical and external. But it was something.
Her eyebrows drew together. A faint, pained line appeared between them. Her lips parted, and she drew in a deeper, clearer breath. The heartbeat on the monitor strengthened, settling into a less frantic rhythm.
A collective, unspoken exhale seemed to go through the jet.
Bruce sagged against a cabinet, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand. “She’s stabilizing. For now. The internal damage… we need a fully equipped OR. But she’s back from the ledge.”
Tony powered down his suit, stepping out of it with a weary sigh. He looked from Sage to Loki, who still hadn’t moved. “So,” Tony said, his tone attempting its usual lightness but falling short. “What’s the word from the guy who throws the parties? We leave a thank-you note?”
Steve walked over to a viewport, staring down at the receding, riot-torn landscape of Sakaar. “The Grandmaster won’t take this as a simple loss of inventory.”
“No,” Loki said, the first word he’d spoken since they boarded. His eyes were fixed on Sage’s face, on the slow, steady rise and fall of her chest under the thermal blanket. “He will take it as a personal insult. An overturned game board.” He finally looked away, meeting Steve’s gaze. His emerald eyes were dark, devoid of their usual glinting mischief. “He is a creature of obsession. He wanted her rarity. Now, he will want the story. The theft. The challenge. He will come for the prize. And for the thief.”
In the silence that followed, punctuated only by the hum of the jet and the beep of the monitor, Sage’s hand twitched on the gurney. Her fingers, pale and delicate, curled slightly.
Then her eyes opened.
They were glazed with drugs and exhaustion, but the blue of them was unmistakable, clearing as they focused with immense effort on the face above her. On Loki.
She didn’t speak. She just looked at him, through him, a silent, searching intensity in her gaze. Seeing the blood on his hands, on his clothes, seeing the raw, unfiltered something in his own expression that he had no hope of hiding.
A single tear escaped the corner of her eye, tracing a clean path through the grime on her temple. It was not a tear of pain, or fear. It was something far more devastating.
Then her eyelids fluttered shut again, her body surrendering to the sedatives and sheer exhaustion, pulling her under into a protective, healing sleep.
Loki reached out, his movement hesitant. With a fingertip, he brushed the tear from her skin. He stared at the moisture on his finger, a tangible proof of something he couldn’t name.
On the view screen, Sakaar dwindled to a fist-sized orb of garish color, and then to a distant, angry star. But the weight of it, the promise of a reckoning, followed them into the black.
The Quinjet’s hold was silent except for the mechanical symphony of the monitors. That relentless, rhythmic beep was the only thread tethering Loki to the present. He didn’t sit. He stood braced against a storage locker, a statue of gore and obsidian, his eyes never leaving the ashen profile on the gurney. The blood on his hands had dried to a crackling, rust-brown film.
Bruce finally sat back on a stool, his shoulders slumping. “Vitals are holding. The autosurgeon has sealed the major vascular damage. But the tissue trauma… the physiological cold…” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “It’s like she’s been frozen from the inside out. Her metabolism is barely idling.”
“Can you fix it?” Steve’s voice was low from the co-pilot’s seat.
“We can support her body. Helen Cho’s regeneration cradle can repair the physical damage.” Bruce looked at Loki, his expression grave. “The magic… that’s not my field. That’s a different kind of healing.”
Loki said nothing. The jet shuddered as it pierced Earth’s atmosphere, the viewports flashing orange with re-entry heat.
The landing in the Avengers Tower hangar was a smooth, anticlimactic whisper. Before the ramp fully lowered, a medical team from the Compound’s advanced trauma unit was already waiting, Helen Cho at their helm. Their efficient, quiet swarm transferred Sage from the jet’s bay to a floating medical bed in seconds.
Loki moved with them, a shadow attached to the procession.
“Whoa, hey.” One of the med-techs put a tentative hand up, blocking his path into the sterile elevator. “You can’t go in there like that. It’s a clean room.”
Loki’s gaze slid from Sage to the man. The tech paled, his hand dropping instantly. Helen Cho gave a small, sharp shake of her head to her subordinate, her eyes on Loki’s fractured expression. “Let him follow to decontamination. Then he can observe from the isolation gallery.”
They scrubbed him down in a harsh, chemical spray that stung his skin and stripped the blood away in pink rivulets. He was given a set of loose, gray medical scrubs. He emerged feeling flayed, anonymous, but his purpose was undiminished.
The observation gallery was a quiet, dark space overlooking the operating theater. The cradle hummed, its golden light weaving over Sage’s still form. Tubes and wires snaked from her. She looked submerged, tiny in the center of all that technology.
Loki took a seat in the front row. He did not move again for hours.
Tony found him there first, much later. The surgery was complete, the cradle silent. Sage lay in a recovery room, surrounded by quieter, gentler machines. Loki had simply moved to a chair beside her bed.
“Sentinel duty, huh?” Tony said, leaning against the doorframe. He held two mugs of coffee. He offered one. Loki didn’t react. Tony placed it on the side table anyway. “Cho says the physical repairs are textbook. Pretty amazing, really. Couple days and the scar will be barely a memory.” His flippant tone faltered as he looked at the bed. The woman there was so still. The vibrant, defiant fire-witch was gone, replaced by this fragile assemblage of pale skin and dark hair against white sheets. “She’s… small,” he finished, the words uncharacteristically soft.
Loki’s voice was rough from disuse. “They made her small.”
Tony nodded, a sharp jerk of his chin. He left without another word.
Steve visited next. He stood just inside the room for a long moment, his captain’s assessment failing to find a tactical solution for this. “She fought,” he said, as if affirming it to himself. “On Sakaar, when they took her. She fought hard.”
“It wasn’t enough,” Loki stated, watching the steady drip of a clear IV fluid into her arm.
“It never is,” Steve replied quietly. “Not alone.” He left a file on the table—initial after-action reports, security protocols for the Tower. It sat untouched.
Natasha came in the deep hours of the night. She didn’t speak. She checked the monitors with a professional eye, adjusted the flow of a pain-management drip by a fractional amount, and smoothed the blanket where it had rumpled. Her cool fingers brushed Sage’s wrist, checking a pulse she could see digitally. She met Loki’s eyes across the bed, a silent communication passing between them. She saw the hollows in his cheeks, the fever-bright fixity of his gaze. She gave a slight, almost imperceptible nod, and left.
Clint hobbled in on crutches the next morning. He whistled low. “Damn. They really did a number.” He awkwardly maneuvered to sit in the chair on the room’s other side. He was quiet for a beat. “You know, she threatened to melt my favorite arrow when we first met. Called it ‘tacky.’” A ghost of a smile touched his mouth. “I liked her immediately.” He stood, his crutch thumping softly. “Don’t let her get cold. She hates that.”
Bucky didn’t enter. He stood at the reinforced glass of the view wall, his metal arm hanging at his side. He looked in for a full five minutes, his face impassive. He remembered the freezing chamber, the helpless silence, the world reduced to waiting. He met Loki’s eyes through the glass, gave a single nod, and walked away.
Peter Parker’s visit was the most unnerving. He crept in, wide-eyed, holding a paper bag. “Mr. Stark said it was okay to… wow.” His words evaporated. He stared, his youthful face unable to mask his shock. The Sage he’d seen training in the gym months ago, conjuring spirals of harmless flame to illustrate thermal dynamics, was gone. This person seemed carved from marble. “Is she… will she wake up?”
“Yes.” The word was absolute, a vow sealed in the sterile air.
“I brought, uh, these.” Peter placed the bag on the table. It contained pastel-colored macarons from a bakery in Queens. “For when she does. She mentioned liking them once.” He lingered, shifting his weight. “Tell her… tell her Spider-Man says to get better. Fast. The city’s, uh, it’s boring without any rogue magic users causing minor, manageable havoc.”
Days bled together. Loki watched the slow, incremental signs of healing. The blue-tinged pallor fully receded. The terrifying cold that had radiated from her skin dissipated, leaving a normal, human warmth. The bruises faded from violent purples to sickly yellows and greens. The raw, sutured line on her torso, visible through her medical gown, knit itself into a thin, pink line under the cradle’s residual glow.
But she did not wake. Her magic, that deep-burning ember, remained dark. Scans showed no blockage, no foreign objects. It was a silence within her.
Helen Cho explained it as profound somatic and psychic trauma. “The body is healing. The mind, the spirit… that is on its own schedule. She has to find her way back.”
Loki took the words in. He dismissed them. He began to talk.
He spoke in a low, continuous murmur. He told her about the absurdities of the Tower, about Stark’s attempts to “jazz up” the medical wing with holographic fish. He described the pathetic quality of Midgardian rain compared to the tempests of Asgard. He recounted old, frivolous lies he’d told, tedious feasts he’d endured, the precise shade of gold on a vault he’d once emptied. He told her she was missing a truly spectacular argument between Thor and a sentient microwave.
He never spoke of Sakaar. He never spoke of the cell, or the collar, or the blood.
On the fifth day, near dusk, the door slid open again. Loki did not look up, expecting another silent vigil from Barnes or a clinical check from Romanoff.
A small, warm hand covered his where it rested on the bed rail.
He flinched, his head snapping around.
It was Sage’s hand. Her eyes were still closed, her breathing still deep and even. But her fingers had sought his, curling around them with a weak, undeniable pressure.
The contact was electric. It was not the crackling heat of her power. It was a simple, human anchor.
A tremor went through him. He turned his hand, carefully, so his palm met hers. He linked their fingers, his long, pale ones threading with her smaller, warmer ones. He held on, his breath catching in his throat.
Her eyebrows knit slightly, a faint, troubled line. Her lips parted. A sound, less than a whisper, escaped on an exhale. It was a single, shattered syllable, raw and fragile.
“...cold.”
Then her features smoothed again, her hand going slack in his, her consciousness retreating back into the depths. But the echo of the word hung in the room, and the warmth of her touch lingered on his skin.
Loki tightened his grip, gently, refusing to let go. He watched the steady rise and fall of her chest, and for the first time since the gilded cage on Sakaar, he felt the faint, tentative stirrings of something other than dread. It was fragile, a thread-thin filament in the dark.
But it was a beginning.