The Man in the Iron Mask

I couldn’t believe what I was doing. I’d muttered those very words to myself just moments ago as I half jogged, half ran down the corridor, and then proceeded to stand in front of Loki’s door for a good five minutes. He’d probably heard me coming, but I didn’t care. I’d needed that time to collect my thoughts and ask myself, one last time, if I knew what I was doing. I felt like I was part of some kind of human rights organisation and this was our big plan. But there was only me in this organisation, and only one patient I felt the need to help. I knew that I wouldn’t have felt so strongly about it if it wasn’t important. I’d started working at the institution to help people in the first place… this was merely all I was doing. This was what I wanted with my life.

I unlocked his door and he was awake and ready to go as I’d asked him to be. I hadn’t felt much like waking him. He could be difficult in the mornings when I had to wake him, let alone in the middle of the night. His wide eyes met mine and he pressed his finger to my lips, which is when I realised just how loud I was breathing. I calmed myself down, and we continued.

I took him downstairs first, where we changed him into the staff uniform: a plain black shirt and pants. There had been a clean set in the cleaner’s room I’d seen earlier, and somehow I’d gathered that little piece of information just for this purpose without even realising it. I handed Loki my scarf which luckily was grey and not the pink one I took every other day. He wrapped it about himself to cover his mask, and then off we went to the main entrance. Just like that, walking side by side, we were out of there without a second glance. I didn’t look back as we continued to walk at as steady a pace as I could manage, which was helped as Loki wrapped his arm around my waist. He was just about holding me up as we got around the corner and could finally take a moment to breathe.

“Alright so, I’ve never done this before. Obviously. I’m hoping they won’t know I was the one that let you out, because several people have keys to your room and most of us were in tonight…” Loki tilted his head just slightly before he pulled from his pants a few pieces of paper he must have had stashed down there. I blushed as I handed him a pen, and looked away as he wrote. A part of me was terrified of what he might have to say.

They’ll know it was you.

“How?” I asked, now more worried than ever. I wondered if he’d put up much of a fight if I tried to get him back to his room.

I left my journal on my bed, page wide open. You seem to know what I wrote in there.

I wondered why he might have done that to the only person that was even remotely on his side. I hadn’t been thinking straight. This was such a big mistake.

I want you to come with me, and you have no other choice.

I wanted to be frustrated. I wanted to scream at him for being a jerk and cornering me into something that I wasn’t sure I could get out of, but my ears picked up at the sound of something that shouldn’t have been so familiar. I knew it from the drills.

“That’s the alarm. They know you’re out…” I started, and before I could finish Loki had grabbed me by the hand and was running for the woods. My first choice might have been the opposite main road to perhaps catch a cab, but I trusted that he knew what he was doing. I allowed myself to be dragged along until I was almost out of breath by the time he stopped. We continued to walk for hours and hours until eventually, I stopped counting the minutes and started to take the moment for what it was. It was a sort of adventure, I tried to tell myself. It might be fun, for a change of pace.

Loki stopped us in a denser part of the woods where I was sure I’d heard there were wolves living and as a result, I couldn’t sleep. Even when Loki came closer towards me to run his hands over the bottoms of my legs, I couldn’t be comforted. He could obviously sense I was terrified, and took it upon himself to sit a little closer. I wished his body had been warmer, but I wasn’t going to complain about the company. I tried to rest my head against his shoulder and close my eyes to find sleep. In the end, I wasn’t sure if I did or not.

---

Again, we were walking, but I wasn’t sure where we were to go. Loki had no idea where he was going, but I was sure that SHIELD would be right on our asses if we stopped. And so I let him lead us blindly about until finally, he let us rest.

“Where are we going to go?” I asked, but knew I was only talking to myself. “What are we going to do? How did I allow you to lead me into this mess?” Loki wasn’t even pretending to listen as he walked off a little while, appearing to be looking for something where there was nothing at all. He bent down after a little while of searching to pick up a rock the size of his hand, and I screamed as he crashed it into the side of his face.

“Are you trying to kill yourself!?” I yelled at him, going over to retrieve the rock and only being pushed gently away. He hit himself again, and with a closer view I could see he was belting the mask on his face. In agony, I watched as he beat himself stupid with the same rock for far too long and then suddenly, we heard a crack. My eyes shot back over to his face to see the mask pulled away from his face a little, and tears streaking down both of his pale cheeks. I got up off the ground where I’d sat myself to take a better look, and almost tripped backwards as I saw. The mask was almost surgically attached to his face, with thin metal bars sticking painfully into his cheeks still where he’d pulled it away from his skin for me to see. I didn’t know what else to do but to turn away and throw up the contents of my stomach, which wasn’t much at all, behind a tree as he continued to belt his face and pull it away from himself.

A hand gently placed itself on my back once the noise had stopped, and I heard a few sniffles from behind me. I went to turn around, but Loki held me in my place as he unravelled the scarf I’d stolen back from him from around my neck. Finally, he let me turn around, and I saw that he’d wrapped the lower half of his face with my scarf. I wanted to thank him for the gesture, but I couldn’t find any words once my eyes caught the mask now laying discarded on the ground and all the thin, metal bars that were protruding the main frame. Those had been in his face, where the skin had healed around them. I wanted to know how such a device was legal, let alone humane.

“I’m sorry they did this to you,” I managed to get out as a whisper. “Even you don’t deserve that kind of pain.” He didn’t reply, and I guessed because it was simply too painful to move his lips. I hoped he’d recover. I knew now that we’d need medication, and had an idea of where to head.

“There’s a hotel I stayed at a few times when I couldn’t pay my rent. They don’t ask many questions, and it’s not exactly comfortable. It’s probably the last place that SHIELD would come looking for us.”

Loki nodded his approval of my plans, and we started to walk in silence once more. I kept an eye on him as he occasionally squirmed and made the faintest sounds of pain, praying that he wouldn’t do something as inconvenient as collapse. Thankfully, we got to a road before he had that chance. Of course, I knew what would happen if we tried to thumb a ride off of someone with him looking as he did. I stopped him, and I tried to ignore that look in his eye as my hands went for his hair.

“We can’t have you recognised,” I explained, and he eased his glare. I ruffled his hair up and parted it to the side, then ran a great deal of it in front of his face. He looked simply as if he’d had a rough night, though the blood that stained my scarf would be a little harder to explain. I’d get around to it, though. I was already in too far to turn back.

We waited for what felt like forever on the side of the road until someone finally stopped for us. She was a little older than me with a concerned motherly look about her, and she asked far too many questions. She gave me and my “drunk, beaten friend” a lift to the hotel where I booked us a room. Loki went straight into the bathroom where he found a brand-less antiseptic and filled the sink with warm water. The door was closed in my face as I walked towards him to help, and so I figured he didn’t need it and probably didn’t want it. Instead, I found the bed and my eyes closed. I tried to forget about the trouble I was getting myself into. I tried to forget that Loki was a serial killer, and was but a closed door away from me. I tried to forget that I would be alone with him, and I did, and fell asleep still lying on top of the covers.