A/N: I just came back from Thor and of course Loki was my favorite. I thought I'd try my hand at a story for him.

Enjoy,
coffee shop poet.

He won't be able to move, to wake. Not for a while.

She looks on him, studies the bruised planes of his face, the slack lips, the round unmoving eyes underneath the curtain of blackened socket, the pale mountains of cheeks that glisten as if with a snow-like pallor. He's like a portrait of a beautiful landscape, sloping, graceful, elegance in every feature. They have to rebuild the structure of him, back up from the shattered remains of what loveliness the car had destroyed. It'll be back in time; the wounds are not so severe. It's the head trauma that worries them.

But, somehow, she knows he'll pull through. It's a strange premonition, but she's not so sure she doesn't like it, doesn't want it to be true.

There had been something about him, something desperate, an air of tragedy in every line of sinew in his face. They rushed him down the hall, the man who brought him in shaking, blood on his hands and threading through his gray hair when he'd tried to wipe the nervousness out of his body by tearing it out against his hair. He came outta nowhere. I-I didn't mean to, nurse. I didn't mean to I-I swear.

I believe you, sir. Everything will be all right. She pauses in the midst of running with the gurney and breaks away from the collective rush. Smiling, she imparts some warmth to him, whatever she could spare. We'll take good care of him.

Nurse, please. He takes her hands into his, caressing the soft bones of them with the callused gloves of his palms. He pushes a crumpled paper into her grasp, the darkness in his expression almost wild with tremors and unspoken pleas. Please. Promise me you'll let me know how he is. That you'll call me. My son, he was with me. I can't…I can't tell him that I was the reason a man died today. He's smart, nurse. He'll know if I lie. He'll know. Please. Promise me.

Nurse! A voice came from down the hall, loud and harsh against the quietness of their exchange. We need your help down here!

Yes, doctor! She replies, and the messenger nods, disappearing back through the sliding door. Briefly, the letters ICU flash before her eyes, branding into her conscious brain, reminding her of the emergency at hand.

I promise. She looks down at the paper, the numbers of a cell phone printed in messy, hasty scrawl on the broken lines; then, she closes her fingers over the trembling of his, calming the earthquakes of doubt coursing through his system. You won't have to tell your son anything.

His mouth closes, breath silenced for a moment, and he nods his assent, releasing her from his vice grip. Feeling returns, circulating blood flooding the veins of her fingers. Don't worry, sir. He's in good hands. As a last means of comfort, she raises the paper still in her possession as she turns away from him. Wordlessly, she's telling him she won't forget, and he knows.

Now, it's late, and the rush of the life or death situation had crashed into an eerie afterbirth of the victorious hush. Only the cadenced beep indicating the slow, steady pace of a heartbeat pushing oxygen-filled blood through the still-functioning body filled the echoing white room.

Everything is white. The pressed sheets, the scratchy wool blanket bleached a bony blankness of color. Even the air feels sterile and monochrome, devoid of personality or human influence. Here, it's needles, it's saline drips, it's business. Save lives, only to spit them back out into the dangerous world that nearly took the very thing they strove so hard to salvage. It all seems a hopeless business to her, but if they don't do it, then who will take up a lost cause as bleak as theirs?

He can't hear her. He's deep underneath the woven tapestry of medicated dreams, morphine whispering to his system to feel no pain, but apathy of the nerves, and the doctor estimated he'd be lost to the world at least until the morning. Perfect time to clean him up, before he wakes, he'd said to her.

You got the gentlest hand in the ward, Naomi. He liked to assure her of her place in this unit, perhaps in this world. You take good care of him, all right?

Yes, sir. She'd said.

He'd gone on, though. He's a polite, caring kind of man, a rarity in their vastly indifferent species. It's about money and power and prestige with the rest of them.

But to him, it's about the people he gets to send home to families that would have been lost without the life he'd hoarded away from the probing skeleton-fingers of death. It's about them. Someday, perhaps, he will answer to the reaper for the souls he's stolen away from him, but for now, it's enough to keep going that he has a purpose in an aimless world.

Soon as he wakes, we'll try to figure out where he came from. He scratches something down on a clipboard, looking up at her, a reassuring hand on her shoulder to warm it, revive it, perhaps draw out the weariness from the rest of the body. But not until he's ready.

It's not my place to question, sir. I'll leave that to you.

How many hours have you been here? He'd questioned, benevolence clear as a bell in his every natural movement.

Twenty-four.

After you finish up with him, go home. You can check in on him tomorrow, when you return. Get some sleep. You need to save your strength so you can be strong for your patients.

The truth is, she doesn't want to go home. Not to the empty apartment, the coldness of her bare life outside of this hospital, the constant strive to find meaning within the four walls of her existence. She sits in diners at 3 am, air sticky with grease and throbbing with human life all around her, and all she can think of is…what if I have to see one of them on a gurney, the blood pouring into my hands, fingers grasping me as I battle for their lives.

It gets to the point where, finally, she's afraid to let herself be close enough to touch them and all she can think of is the blood and the pain and the prayers that she can feel in their skin. The potential is there. It's not worth the risk. She stays away, far away, where no one can find her in the anonymous skyline of crowds and clamor. It's safe here. It's safe.

She can feel the pain in his skin when she presses the sponge to the crust of red staining his pale, dreaming face. It thrums through her like a livewire. Not just the physical hurt, the tsunami waves of the ache they're fighting against, but the pangs of the heart too. She can't pinpoint the emotion, but it's there, written in his face, and she's past the point of wondering what it might be.

Maybe, when she first started here, wide-eyed with the bloated innocence of a child, it would have been all she thought about. Where did he come from? What tragedies must have befallen him for him to end up here? Is he alone, does he have family? Are they searching for him? God, she would be able to feel their anguish too. She couldn't handle that.

His skin is deathly cold, perhaps why it's so pale as it holds no true warmth. It almost feels like…frostbite. Like the sensation you get in your appendages when they can no longer fight the bitterness of cold and begin to give in to surrender. It prickles, stings almost, and on first touch she pulls away, gasping inaudibly.

He doesn't move. She doesn't expect him to and yet at the same time, strangely, she almost does. Who is he and why is he so cold and why was he wandering around in the middle of the road in the dead of night? It's all she can bring herself to consider. What brought him here? Why he is in her care and under the supervision of vacant white coats who wield their medicine like the gods wield their otherworld powers. How can a human being be so cold?

Underneath the misleading guise of sleep, he grows restless, a noise of protest rumbling deep within him somewhere. Like thunder through his tendons, it rattles him to the core, and she can feel it with her nerve endings in such close proximity to his.

"You'll be all right," she whispers to him, putting her hot skin against his winter-cold cheek. He stills, the contact calming the turbulent emotion, and falls back into the pleasant black respite. She replaces her organic touch with the textured wetness of a towel. "They'll take good care of you. I promise."

She's almost afraid to clean him, fearful of disturbing the fragile frayed unconsciousness he's under. Reason breaks through the baseless apprehension.

He needs to be cleaned up. The cuts could be infected. He won't wake. He's on a lot of morphine. If he hasn't been probed awake by all the needles they've stuck in him and all the hands on him then he certainly won't wake up for this.

As she works, she finds herself often drawn to his face, revisiting the sight of it over and over. There is something so elegant about the structure, even beneath the swollen tissue and the mismatched patches of black and blue and thick shells of dried blood. The arch of his nose regal, the roundness of his eyes almost reticent, wise, harboring a great and curious mind within the walls of his skull. His lips are small, as if they are often closed and hold behind them great unspoken thought, shrunken over time from little use. They are the kind of features you'd imagine in the face of a king. Or that of a god, if such beings existed.

But in the end, as she finishes her task, wiping the last of the blood from his body, all he is to her is another patient that she will never know. A name, perhaps, if they find out who he is. A number on his wristband that will go down in a permanent hospital record, another mark in the bedpost of the organized medical institution. In time, after he has gone, no one will remember him. No one will even think back to the regal nose or the curious mind, the curve of his eyes or the pursed look of his mouth. There will be no mark of his on this place. He will be but a ghost and he will, in the end, be gone.

The sponge ends up discarded in the waste bin, the water pail lying in wait on a silver, sterile tray behind her. His face is clear of the rusty color of spilled life; only the clear pale angles of his skin and the jutting bones beneath it are left behind. She touches his hand one last time.

"Goodnight. Sleep well," she murmurs, tilting her head to look at him. "I'll be back to check on you in the afternoon."

He doesn't answer. Not that she expected him to.