Chapter 24: The First Awakening
The smell reached her first. Not the antiseptic sting of the med-bay, but something deeper, woven into the sterile air. Old parchment, damp stone, and the ghost of greenwood smoke. It was a scent that didn’t belong, an anchor in a formless dark.
Sage opened her eyes.
The ceiling was a smooth, white expanse, softly illuminated. Her body felt like a distant, poorly tuned instrument. There was a profound emptiness at her core, a hollowed-out quiet where a roaring furnace had lived. She tried to move her fingers, to summon even a wisp of warmth to her palm. Nothing. A cold, dead feeling answered.
Panic, thin and sharp, pricked at her. She drew a deeper breath, and pain bloomed in her side, a bright, anchoring ache.
“I wouldn’t recommend that just yet.”
The voice came from her left, familiar in its cadence, altered in its timbre. It was quieter. She turned her head, a slow, stiff effort on the pillow.
Loki sat in a chair that seemed too small for his long frame. He was dressed in simple, dark clothing, not his armor, not his silks. His black hair was not slicked back but fell loosely, and shadows pooled under his eyes, making the green of them seem almost feverish. He held a book, its cover worn leather, but it lay open and forgotten on his knee. He was watching her with an expression she couldn’t name—a wariness that had nothing to do with threat.
“The medics,” he continued, his voice still that unfamiliar, low murmur, “are quite insistent on minimal agitation. They used many words. ‘Hemostasis’ was my favorite. It sounds like a forgotten god.”
She tried to speak. Her tongue was thick, her throat parched. A dry click was all that emerged.
He was moving before the sound faded, setting the book aside. He poured water from a pitcher into a plastic cup with a straw. He brought it to her, his hand steady. “Slowly.”
The straw met her lips. The water was cool, shocking in its simplicity. She took a small sip, then another, the moisture a balm. She pulled back, and he withdrew the cup.
“Where?” The word was a rasp.
“New York. Stark Tower. You are in what passes for a healing sanctum here. All wires and blinking lights. It’s dreadfully literal.”
The information settled. Safe. Not Sakaar. The Grandmaster’s obsidian walls were gone. The gilded cage was gone. The collar… Her hand twitched upward, instinctively seeking her throat. It met only smooth skin and the edge of a soft medical gown.
“It’s gone,” Loki said, his eyes tracking the movement. “Reduced to slag and sentiment. A fitting end.”
She let her hand fall back to the sheet. The relief was so profound it felt like a new wound. She looked at him again, really looked. She saw the fatigue etched into his face, the unnatural stillness of his posture. She saw the faint, rust-colored stains under his fingernails that even scrubbing hadn’t erased.
“You’re here,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
“The seating is appalling, and the catering is intermittent, but the view is occasionally interesting.” He leaned back, attempting the old, casual arrogance. It fell flat, cracking at the edges. He simply looked at her, and the pretense melted away. “Yes.”
The door hissed open with a soft pneumatic sigh. Bruce Banner entered, a tablet in hand, his glasses reflecting the soft light of the monitors. He stopped short, his face breaking into a warm, genuine smile. “Hey. Welcome back to the land of the conscious. How’s the side?”
“Present,” she managed, her voice gaining a little strength.
“Good. That’s good.” He moved to the monitors, scanning the data. “Everything looks stable. The cradle did its job. The internal repairs are solid.” His tone shifted, becoming gently professional. “Can you tell me your name?”
“Sage.”
“Do you know where you are?”
“A tower. New York.”
“Do you remember what happened?”
The white room seemed to darken at the edges. A flash of blue light, the searing, invasive cold, the feeling of something vital being severed and siphoned away. The metallic taste of blood in her mouth. She swallowed. “Enough.”
Bruce nodded, his expression kind. “That’s fine. You don’t need to dive into it. The physical trauma was significant, but you’re healing beautifully. The other… the magical attenuation… we’re monitoring. Helen Cho wants to run some non-invasive neural scans later, just to get a baseline.” He tapped his tablet. “I’ll let everyone know you’re awake. They’ve been… lurking.”
He left, and the room felt larger, emptier.
“They brought you gifts,” Loki said, nodding toward the side table. It held the pastel box of macarons, a glossy magazine about alpine hiking, a small, lumpy clay figurine that looked like a misshapen bird, and a sleek black dagger in a tooled leather sheath.
She stared at the collection. The normalcy of it was bewildering. “The dagger is from Natasha,” Loki supplied. “A ‘get-well-soon’ sentiment, Midgardian-style. The… abstract avian sculpture is from Barton’s children. He said it’s a phoenix. I believe it’s a threat.”
A weak laugh, barely more than an exhale, escaped her. It hurt her side. She winced.
“See? Agitation.” But there was a lightness in his eyes now, a faint glimmer of the old mischief.
The visits began in a slow, careful parade.
Steve came first, filling the doorway with his broad shoulders. He looked relieved, his hands clasped awkwardly in front of him. “Good to see you awake. You had us worried.” He spoke like he was addressing a troop, sincere and direct. “You need anything, you just say the word. Whole team’s at your disposal.”
“Thanks, Cap.”
“Get your strength back. We’ll talk about… everything else later.” He gave a firm nod and left, his mission apparent: confirm viability, offer support, retreat.
Tony arrived with more fanfare, pushing in a floating tray that held a garish, multi-colored smoothie. “The Banner Special. Packed with electrolytes, nanite-boosters, and absolutely zero taste. Drink up, it’s disgustingly healthy.” He perched on the edge of a cabinet. “So, the Grandmaster’s five-star hospitality. Rate it from one to ‘never again.’”
She looked at the smoothie. “The décor was lacking.”
Tony barked a laugh. “That’s my girl. Knew you were still in there.” His grin softened. “Seriously, firecracker. You scared the hell out of us. Don’t do it again. This tower’s boring without someone around to ignore all my brilliant safety protocols.”
Later, Natasha slipped in, silent as a shadow. She picked up the dagger from the table, spun it once in her hand, and placed it back, closer to Sage’s reach on the bedside tray. “Balance is off by three grams. I’ll fix it when you’re vertical.” Her sharp eyes took in every detail of Sage’s face. “The silence. Does it feel like a loss, or a respite?”
The question was so blunt, so accurate, it stole Sage’s breath. She considered. The emptiness was terrifying, a missing limb. But the constant, emotional roar that had accompanied her power her whole life… that was gone too. “Both,” she whispered.
Natasha nodded once. “Good to know.” She touched Sage’s shoulder, a brief, solid pressure, and was gone.
Clint hobbled in, plopping the misshapen clay phoenix directly into her hand. “Kids made it. They heard you got burned. Thought it was appropriate. It’s ugly, but it grows on you. Like a fungus.” He winked. “Told ’em you’d love it.”
She held the warm, lumpy clay. “It’s perfect.”
Peter Parker’s visit was a blur of whispered, excited words. “Oh man, you’re awake! That’s so awesome! How do you feel? Is the bed, like, calibrated? Mr. Stark has calibrated beds. Did you try the macarons? The pistachio ones are insane. I have notes on the possible magical-energy conduction properties of the cream filling, if you’re ever, you know, up for reviewing data…”
She let the stream of words wash over her, a comforting, normal sound. She managed a small smile. “I’ll try the pistachio.”
Bucky didn’t enter the room. He appeared at the view wall, raised his metal hand in a brief, almost shy greeting, and walked away.
Through it all, Loki remained. He didn’t always speak. He read his book. He stared out the window at the sprawling city. He argued quietly with a holographic interface about the room’s ambient temperature. But he was a constant, silent presence in the chair beside her.
The hardest part was the looking. She found she could meet Tony’s joking gaze, could handle Natasha’s assessing stare. But when Steve looked at her with that unwavering, honest concern, or when Bruce spoke with such gentle care, her eyes would drop to her hands, to the sheets. She felt small beneath their kindness, folded in on the hollow place inside her. She was a weapon that had been disarmed, a prize that had been broken open. Their pity, however well-intentioned, felt like salt in a wound she couldn’t even show them.
Loki never looked at her with pity. He watched her with a focused, calculating intensity, as if she were a complex equation that had suddenly changed its variables. When her gaze faltered under the others, she would find his, and in his emerald eyes there was only a challenging, familiar recognition. He saw the emptiness, and he did not look away from it.
On the second day of wakefulness, as evening tinted the skyline purple, she was propped up on pillows, listlessly poking at a bowl of broth. Loki was at the window, his back to her.
“They think I’m weak now,” she said, the words quiet but clear in the humming room.
He didn’t turn. “They are heroes. They are programmed to see vulnerability as a call to arms. It’s tedious, but predictable.”
“Is that what you see?”
He was silent for a long moment. Then he turned, leaning against the glass. “I see a fortress that has had its outer wall breached. The defenders are shaken. The banners are down.” He took a step toward the bed. “It does not make the fortress weak. It makes the next attack more interesting. It forces a reassessment of defenses.” He stopped by her bedside, looking down at her. “You are not the fire, Sage. You are the one who commands it. The fire is just a tool. A spectacular, volatile, occasionally useful tool. Its absence is… an inconvenience. Not a definition.”
She held his gaze, the hollow in her chest aching. “It doesn’t feel like an inconvenience. It feels like a amputation.”
“Then you learn to fight with one hand.” He said it simply, a statement of fact. “You are more than your magic. You always were. You just never had to prove it to yourself before.”
He reached out then, not to her hand, but to the untouched box of macarons. He opened it, selected a pale green one, and broke it neatly in half. He offered her half. “The Parker child claims this flavor is ‘insane.’ A compelling endorsement.”
She took the half. The sweetness exploded on her tongue, rich and complex. For a fleeting second, it was just a taste, just a moment, uncomplicated by loss or fear or memory.
He ate his own half, brushing crumbs from his fingers. “Tomorrow,” he said, “we begin.”
“Begin what?”
“Your reassessment.” A ghost of his old, sharp smile touched his lips. “The walls are still standing. The fortress remains. We start there.”
Outside, the city lights began to sparkle against the deepening blue. In the quiet room, with the taste of pistachio on her tongue and a god of mischief plotting her rehabilitation, Sage felt the first, faint stirring of something other than dread or shame. It was fragile, a single lit window in a dark keep.
But it was a light.
But it was a light.
The following morning, a different kind of heat began to simmer under her skin. It wasn’t magic. It was pure, undiluted frustration. The room’s gentle hum felt like a taunt. The careful concern in everyone’s voices grated. Loki’s words about fortresses echoed, but right now she just felt like a locked room.
She waited until the nursing AI completed its mid-morning vitals scan and glided out. Loki had been absent for an hour, likely drawn into some tedious council with Stark. The tower was quiet. This was her window.
Moving was a calculation of pain. Swinging her legs over the side of the bed sent a bright warning shot through her torso, a reminder of the recently-knit tissue. She breathed through it, the way she’d once breathed through channeling a wild surge of flame. She stood, her legs wobbly as a newborn foal, and shuffled to the closet. Her own clothes were gone, likely incinerated with Sakaar’s filth. She found a pair of soft black training leggings and a tank top, all Stark-tech fabric, neatly folded on a shelf. They fit, hanging loosely on her thinner frame.
The journey to the gym was a silent odyssey. She leaned against the cool wall of the corridor, each step a victory. The elevator ride was a cage of her own making. She emerged into the vast, empty training room, the mats smelling of clean sweat and ozone. Racks of weights, holographic combat drones, a sparring ring. It was a temple to physical control. Her control was gone, but her body, this aching vessel, was still here.
She started with stretches, feeling every pull and protest in her side. She moved through basic forms, a dancer’s rhythm she’d learned long before she could summon a spark. Her muscles remembered the patterns, even if they were slower, weaker. The hollow place inside yawned wider with each motion, a silence where power should have sung through her limbs.
“Didn’t figure you for a morning person.”
She didn’t startle. She’d heard the elevator. Sam Wilson walked in, a towel around his neck, sipping from a water bottle. He gave her an easy, appraising look. “Doctor’s clearance on this? Because I’m pretty sure ‘bed rest’ was the phrase.”
“I’m resting my mind,” she said, not stopping her movement, a slow, deliberate lateral sweep of her leg. “My body’s bored.”
Sam chuckled, setting his bottle down. “Uh-huh. Well, since you’re here and clearly ignoring medical advice, which, hey, team sport… want a moving target? Light drills. I’ll go slow.”
A part of her wanted to refuse. Another part, the roaring, furious part that hated the weakness, seized the offer. “Yes.”
They started in the center of the mat. Sam was all fluid, relaxed motion, holding his hands up in a casual guard. “Just movement. Follow my lead. Block, deflect. No power.”
For a few minutes, it worked. It was a conversation in motion. Step, block, shift. The pain receded to a background thrum, drowned out by focus. She saw an opening, a tiny lag in his reset, and her body reacted on old instinct. She snapped a jab toward his shoulder, faster than she’d thought herself capable.
Sam slid back, effortlessly letting the punch glance away. “Hey, alright! There’s some fire.” He grinned. “Okay, a little faster.”
The pace increased. He began to press, his advances still controlled but more insistent. Her breath came shorter. The hollow silence inside her wasn’t just quiet now; it was a screaming void. Every dodge felt clumsy. Every block felt like it took a year. She was fighting through mud.
Sam feinted high, then swept low for her legs. She jerked back, the abrupt motion sending a spike of white-hot pain through her side. She gasped.
“Okay, time out,” Sam said immediately, dropping his hands.
“No.” The word was sharp, brittle. She reset her stance, her breath ragged. “Again.”
He hesitated, then shrugged. “Your funeral. Last one.”
He came in again. This time, the world began to subtly fracture. The clean, bright lights of the gym seemed to strobe. The scent of the mat morphed, blending with a memory of ozone and expensive, cloying perfume. Sam’s friendly, focused face flickered at the edges of her vision.
His brown eyes seemed to lighten, becoming a piercing, amused blue. His dreadlocks seemed to elongate, to bleach into a platinum white, sweeping back from a high forehead. The casual red training shirt blurred, resolving into layers of lavish gold fabric.
It wasn’t Sam. It was him. The Grandmaster. Smiling that wide, endless smile, his eyes dancing with clinical curiosity as he watched her struggle, as he assessed his damaged property trying to function.
Panic, cold and total, flooded her veins, short-circuiting every thought. Her lungs locked. Her stance, her guard, every hard-won bit of focus evaporated.
She froze, utterly exposed.
Sam’s kick—a controlled, training-round torso kick meant to tap her ribs—connected with solid, unforgiving force.
A sick, wet crack sounded, a visceral punctuation to the silence in her head.
The pain was an atomic blast. It detonated in her side, erasing the hallucination, erasing the gym, erasing everything. There was no air. There was only a splintering, consuming agony that folded her in half. She dropped, her knees hitting the mat before her mind even registered the fall.
A high, thin whine escaped her, the only sound she could make.
“Oh, shit! Sage!” Sam’s voice was real again, full of horror. He was kneeling beside her instantly, his hands hovering. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, you just froze—I didn’t pull it enough—oh man.”
She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t breathe. She curled onto her uninjured side, arms wrapped around her middle, shaking violently. Each tremor was a new knife in the ruin of her rib. Tears leaked from her squeezed-shut eyes, not from the pain alone, but from the utter, humiliating totality of the failure.
The elevator door chimed open across the room.
Footsteps, quick and sharp, approached. Then they stopped. She didn’t need to look. She felt his presence like a temperature drop.
“What,” Loki’s voice cut through the gym’s air, low and dangerously calm, “is this?”
“She wanted to spar,” Sam said, his voice strained with guilt. “She froze. I didn’t mean to hit her that hard. I think something’s broken.”
Loki didn’t reply. She heard him kneel on the mat beside her. His hand, cool and certain, brushed the sweat-damp hair from her forehead. His other hand rested lightly on her shuddering back. He didn’t tell her it was okay. He didn’t tell her to get up.
He simply waited, a silent anchor in the storm of pain and shame, while Sam rushed to call for a medical team. The footsteps echoed, the distant voice crackled over a comm, and Sage lay broken on the mat, the faint light from the previous night thoroughly, utterly snuffed out.
The cold of the training mat seeped through the thin fabric of her tank top, a grounding counterpoint to the feverish agony in her side. Loki’s hand remained on her back, a steady, weightless pressure. She heard Sam’s anxious voice near the elevator, muttering, “They’re on the way, just hang on.”
“Don’t speak,” Loki murmured, his voice close to her ear. “Breathe. Just that. Out.”
She tried. Each inhalation was a shuddering negotiation with the splintered cage of her ribs. The world narrowed to the rhythm of pain. Footsteps, quicker this time, approached from the corridor.
Bruce Banner hurried in, a small medical kit in hand. He took in the scene: Sage curled on the floor, Loki kneeling beside her, Sam’s stricken face. His own expression tightened from concern into focused calm. “Okay. Let me see.”
He knelt, his movements efficient. “Sam, what happened?”
“Sparring. Light stuff. She just… blanked. Stopped moving. My kick connected full force. I heard a crack.”
Bruce’s fingers, gentle but probing, touched her side. She flinched, a harsh gasp tearing from her. “Yep. That’s a re-fracture. Probably the ninth rib, same area.” He looked at her face, pale and slick with sweat. “Sage? Can you look at me?”
She forced her eyes open. Meeting his gaze was a mountain to climb. She saw his professional assessment, his kindness, and beneath it, a flicker of pity. It was that flicker that made her stomach clench with a nausea that had nothing to do with pain.
“We need to get you back to the cradle,” Bruce said softly. “This is a significant setback. The original repair was delicate.”
A stretcher, guided by two automated drones, glided silently into the gym. The professionalism of it, the return to the patient role, was a final humiliation. She had left that room under her own power, however shaky. She would return as cargo.
“Let’s get you on here,” Bruce said, positioning the stretcher.
“I can—”
“You can’t,” Loki interrupted, his voice leaving no room for argument. His hands slid under her shoulders and knees. He lifted her, his strength absolute, his movement fluid to minimize jostling. The transfer from floor to stretcher was a blur of dizzying pain. She bit down on her lip until she tasted copper.
As he settled her onto the cushioned surface, his face was close to hers. His emerald eyes held no pity. They burned with a cold, ferocious intensity. “The fortress is not the wall,” he whispered, words for her alone. “Remember that.”
Then he stepped back, allowing Bruce and the drones to take over. Straps secured her. The stretcher lifted, hovering at waist height. The ceiling lights began to pass overhead in a smooth, nauseating parade.
She stared up, refusing to look at Sam’s guilty expression or Loki’s silent vigil. The journey to the med bay was a silent procession of defeat. Bruce walked beside her, his hand occasionally checking the pulse at her wrist.
“Muscle memory is a powerful thing,” he said conversationally, his tone deliberately light. “Sometimes the body reacts before the mind can catch up. It’s not your fault you froze.”
His kindness was a well-meaning dagger. It wasn’t Sam’s kick that had broken her. It was the phantom eyes of the Grandmaster, the ghost of that gilded cage reaching across the cosmos to remind her of her place. She had been so arrogant, thinking she could simply walk away from it.
The doors to the med bay hissed open. The familiar, sterile scent enveloped her. The dormant cradle glowed with standby light. Helen Cho was already there, her face a mask of professional disappointment.
“Back so soon?” Helen’s tone was dry, but her eyes were sharp as she assessed the readings now streaming from the stretcher. “Let’s get her into the cradle. I’ll need to re-scan the entire thoracic region.”
The transfer to the cold platform was mechanical. Bruce helped guide her. As her back touched the cool surface, she finally spoke, her voice a thin, shattered thing. “I’m sorry.”
Bruce paused, adjusting a sensor pad near her shoulder. “For what? Trying to move? Don’t be.”
“Not for that.” She swallowed, turning her head away from him, staring at the sleek metal wall. Shame was a hot, tight coil in her throat. “For this. For… being a lot of trouble. For wasting all your work. It was going fine. I was just… stupid.”
He was quiet for a moment. The only sounds were the clicks of the cradle’s arms locking into place. “Sage,” he said finally, his voice firm but not unkind. “You were tortured. Magically neutered. You’ve been conscious for less than forty-eight hours. What happened down there wasn’t stupidity. It’s called a traumatic trigger. It’s biology. It’s psychology. It is not a moral failing.”
He finished securing a strap and moved into her line of sight, forcing her to look at him. His eyes behind his glasses were earnest. “My work isn’t wasted. This,” he gestured to the cradle, “is just machinery. The work is you getting better. That isn’t a straight line. It’s messy. It has setbacks. This,” he tapped the display showing the rib fracture, “is a setback. It is not a failure.”
The cradle’s golden light activated, washing over her, a warm tingle starting at her injured side. The physical pain began to recede, nudged aside by a wave of artificial calm. But the shame remained, a colder, deeper ache.
“Get some rest,” Bruce said, his hand giving her forearm a brief, solid squeeze. “Let the tech do its job. We’ll try again tomorrow. A different way.”
He walked toward the observation gallery doors. He paused, looking back at her isolated form on the platform. “And for the record? You’re not trouble. You’re one of the team. Teams carry the weight. So stop apologizing for having some.”
The doors sighed shut behind him, leaving her alone with the humming machinery and the weight of his words. The gentle light of the cradle cocooned her broken body. But in the quiet dark behind her own eyes, the phantom of a platinum-haired man in gold just smiled, and the walls of her fortress felt terribly, unbearably thin.