Unnecessary disclaimer: I'm back to beat up Loki again, who is still the property of Marvel, not me, but whatever. Sorry. It's just too easy.

Thor waited with the rest of the Avengers, ready to strike, watching as his brother gathered his strength to roll out of the smashed hole the Hulk had pounded him into. Loki looked up at them with a look of uncomprehending anger...and fear. "KILL ME, THOR!" he screamed. He made no effort at all to get up, merely raised a bloody arm to hurl a spell at them, a spell that fizzled out less than an inch from his trembling fingers.

"Loki, just stop!" Thor cried.

"Not until I'm dead," Loki answered, with another weak attempt at a magical burst.

"Okay, this is just getting pathetic," the Man of Iron said, lowering his arms. Loki stared at him, enraged. Tony shrugged. "What? I'm not going waste firepower and tear up my own property even more on a non-threat like you." Loki snarled and hurled a handful of gravel at him, which bounced off fairly harmlessly. Tony raised one eyebrow. "Ow," he offered.

"Don't antagonize him," Thor commanded, lowering Mjolnir and stepping forward. He knelt at his brother's side. "Loki?"

"Kill me," Loki whispered.

"Brother, I'm not going to-" Thor lurched out of the way as Loki stabbed at him with what Thor dearly hoped was the last of his hidden knives. He grabbed his brother's wrist with his free hand. "Brother-" A bolt of magic seared into his hand, and he cursed. Loki was completely feral, as Thor had never seen him before. He slammed his hand onto his brother's chest. "Loki, sleep," he shouted, pouring power into the command. It was the only Standard Spell he had ever managed to learn, and he certainly didn't use it very often, but it worked. Loki stopped struggling and fell back, senseless. Thor sighed, thinking. He heard his friends muttering behind him, but paid them no heed. What was he to do now? There was a slight movement under his hand, which Thor registered as probably his friends nudging Loki. Checking to see if he really was unconscious. Thor swallowed the lump in his throat. He couldn't just keep Loki asleep forever...

"Uh...Thor?" Thor grunted softly, acknowledging Hawkeye's address but in no mood to engage with the mortals at the moment. "Thor, is his leg supposed to fall off?"

"What?" He turned around to see all of his friends staring at Loki's left boot, which had rolled over away from his leg.

The Hulk was shrinking, turning rapidly back into a pale and panicked Dr. Banner. "Jesus, I broke him," he squeaked.

"It's not your fault," Lady Natasha said, rolling her eyes.

"And he deserved it," Tony commented.

"No, no, no, no..." Thor mumbled, grabbing the boot, which buckled at his touch with the soft whimper of fading magic. Everyone stopped and stared again at the boot dangling from Thor's suddenly numb fingers. It was empty. Thor dropped it and seized Loki's limp leg, yanking up the black fabric. A wave of nausea took him as he exposed the old, infected wound where Loki's leg ended just below the knee. The amputation was messy and obviously untreated. Jagged bones protruded from the stump, the surrounding muscle half torn away, the remnant swollen with inflammation. The skin was red and weepy but had already grown to cover the raw edges of the wound. It no longer bled.

"What the hell," Tony said, turning his face away in disgust.

"That's old," Natasha said in disbelief, rather unnecessarily in Thor's opinion. Heart pounding in his chest, turned back to his brother's face. His fingers burst easily through the mask; even Loki could not maintain a tactile illusion whilst unconscious. Loki's thin-featured face fell apart in a showering of green shards to reveal a sallow victim of starvation. Thor could see every one of his poor brother's facial bones.

"I thought he looked sick," Captain America said quietly. He had knelt on Loki's other side and was watching their fallen enemy worriedly. He looked up at Thor. "What does it mean?"

Thor shook his head. He had no idea how this could have happened. Resolutely, he passed a hand down his brother's body, unraveling the illusion Loki had wrapped around himself. His clothes almost fell apart at his touch. He felt something wet, and his face fell as he realized what it meant. Loki had been using his magic to literally hold himself together. And Thor had just undone the knots with a command and a touch of his hand. Swiftly, he tore open Loki's shirt, revealing another horrible old wound. But this one was bleeding, because his meddling had just reopened it. "Norns help us," he breathed. It looked like Loki had been gutted, ripped open from sternum to below his navel. A few large, sloppy, loose stitches held discolored muscles somewhat closed at the bottom of the wound, but not near enough, and a few had broken open. The fragile skin had been burned at some point and was bleeding again. And the wound smelled fetid. He looked up desperately at Steve, eyes watering. "What do I do?"

Steve's eyes widened. He gestured frantically. "You're the god, here, Thor! Can't you do something...magical?"

"No! I don't know how! Loki was always the one who..." He took a gasping breath. "I don't have the skill."

"Will those wounds actually kill him?" Natasha asked coldly from above.

"Well, duh," Tony yelled.

She waved an arm. "If that were you or me, Stark, it wouldn't be a question. But he's made it this far and managed to fight all of us to a standstill with his guts hanging out. So, is he actually going to die or not, Thor?"

Thor shuddered. "In time, yes, if things are left as they are. But it will be slow, maybe weeks, and agonizing..."

"Then we have time to see what we're dealing with," Steve said decisively.

"Stark has a medical research lab downstairs," Clint volunteered.

"I don't remember telling you about that," Tony muttered. Clint shrugged.

"I've got him, Thor. Lead the way, Barton," Steve ordered, lifting Loki up gracefully. Thor followed, watching his brother nervously for any change. Everyone trailed out of the wreckage after them.

Author's Note: this is a pretty short, brutal story, and I intend to publish it fairly rapidly, maybe updating multiple times a day even. It's basically done already. I was just taking a break from the other thing I'm working on, a Chronicles of Narnia fic centered on the Witch and the origins of the Stone Table... for whatever reason, it's just way easier to write Loki whump than craft a more carefully interwoven and hopefully meaningful story. Fair warning to people who don't actually like reading stories that feature a very unfortunate Loki (what are you doing here?), things really don't lighten up. He just hit bottom and stays there.