The archer returns
Rushing down to the medical area is Steve, Natasha, Tony, and reluctantly, Loki. He had told Natasha that he probably shouldn’t be near Barton. He was the one who put him under after all. To think that he had put someone else into the prison he so loathed was a cruel thought, especially when he had had such a bad experience with it. If Barton came out of his tesseract induced coma and saw the one who put him in it in the first place, how would he feel?
But after being assured that his presence is the most needed out of anyone, being the only one who knows anything about magic, he reluctantly gave up. However it still didn’t prepare him for the flinch that shudders it’s way down his body when he sees the man. Strapped down, thrashing like a fish out of water and obviously in pain is Barton. Next to him is Bruce, holding the sceptre and a gaggle of confused people in nurses scrubs talking nervously to Fury. They all go quiet when the remaining avengers rush in, eyes making their ways to Loki. Fury’s brows dip immediately.
“Why is he here! This is a highest clearing level thing!”
“Because we need him here!” Tony cocks an eyebrow and twists around to look at Loki, questioningly saying, “Him?” Loki nods in confirmation and Tony continues, pointing at Barton.
“Do the thing Loki.”
“What?”
“The thing!”
“What thing?”
“The.. the green! The green thing! The thing you were talking about earlier!”
“Why?”
“C’mon man work with me here!”
Loki looks to Fury, who’s still looking back at him like he had just announced he shit his pants and says, “May I?”
“By all means, do the green thing.”
Loki takes a deep breath and goes to stand behind the chair where Clint is gnashing his teeth and snarling like an animal, care workers parting in front of him like he’s poison. He plants his feet, centers himself, and places his hands on either side of Clint’s head, leaving a few inches of space for the energy to flow.
In goes another breath, and as he exhales he feels the practised flow of his seídr go with it. A green haze, misty and radiant snakes its way through his fingers and small tendrils of it reach out to touch Clint’s temples. As soon as they connect Fury can see Clint’s eyes go wide, green creeping in from the edges of them to take over the blue. Slowly, Clint’s thrashing dulls to more of a desperate flop, his motions less jerky but still there. At Tony’s side Fury leans over and half-whispers,
“How the hell is he doing that?”
“I’ll explain later…”
It seems as entranced by the show of strength as they all are, Loki is struggling a bit. A bead of sweat rolls down his forehead and across his cheek, his hands trembling from the effort of keeping an infinity stone’s power at bay.
“Sc-scuse me, but if you wouldn’t mind doing whatever you're going to do you a bit quicker? In fact you might want to do that n-” His sentence is stopped short by a particularly sharp jerk by Clint and he almost loses his balance. He rights himself, hair flipping back and bouncing against his neck.
“-ow!”
Natasha reacts quickly, yanking the sceptre from Bruce and gripping it tightly. She positions her hands at both ends of the sceptre while Fury is shoeing everyone non-avenger out of the room, and just as he closes the door behind them Natasha touches the sharp point of the sceptre to Barton’s chest, right in the middle.
Just like with Loki, there's a blast of blue energy that erupts from the point of contact, and Clint arches his back, the restraints the only thing keeping him in the chair. Blue entwines with green and pours out of his eyes in the form of light, shining around the room. This blast is smaller than the one from freeing Loki, but it’s still enough to push a few people back. Loki grips the edges of the chair, seídr never shutting off, and for a few seconds all anyone hears is a shrill ear piercing sound like the ringing one might get in their ears.
And then it stops, Clint slumps back down in the chair, and sight is once again something that all in the room have. As far as Loki is aware, Clint has been knocked out from the force of his body rejecting the mind control so vigorously. He releases a sigh of relief, he doesn’t want to deal with that mess at all. Especially now as he can barely even catch his breath from resisting the force of a literal infinity stone, which frankly he didn’t even know he could do, and holy hell how DID he just do that? In his confused daze he barely registers the doctors rushing back in to fix Clint up without the restriction of him resisting until Tony flicks him on the arm and points to the door, signalling that they should leave the room.
Loki is shuffled out of the room and into another, more office looking room where all of the rest of the Avengers plus Fury are waiting. They all kind of just stare at him, before Steve says,
“So… since when could you do THAT?”
“Are you talking about…?”
Tony adds helpfully,
“The green thing!”
“Uh… yeah, the green thing.”
“General object manipulation you mean. I’m not entirely sure. When your life is as shit as mine has been it’s hard to pinpoint achievements I thought were minor at the time. Although what happened back there shall stay with me for quite a while I think.”
Tony cocks his eyebrow.
“Why?”
“That was no easy feat, Stark. It’ll be a bit before I can perform, in your terms, “magic” like that again. In holding Barton still I held the will of an organism as old as time at bay. In fact, not only could I feel him, but every other infectee on Earth. When you dispelled the mind control on him, you dispelled it for everyone else as well through my seídr link. Never in my life have I believed myself capable of that. Not since… anyway I must have been storing seídr in the void they kept me in ofor a long enough time to produce that, because while I would not scoff at my own power it alone was not enough to fight off the Chitauri. If I had had that power back then? Let's just say we would not be having this conversation right here right now.”
There are barely any changes on Fury’s face, the man unreadable as ever, but he sounds rather exasperated when he speaks.
“So it’s been what, a week? A week and a half? Since we’ve apprehended you, you agreed to tell us everything about Asgard, foreign space cultures and yourself, and you… what just forgot to mention that you could immobilise any of us at a moment's notice?”
With a shrug Loki says, “Nobody asked.”
“Mother fucker!”
Loki is mildly offended. He had heard very many colourful curses throughout the universe, but the ones on Midgard are always so… vulgar? Most likely to offend? For what other place would someone on the street accuse you of having intercourse with your own mother? Surely not Asgard. Definitely not any other planet he’d been to before. Although, he thinks, it is rather refreshing to cuss someone out so thoroughly. He is assured by Fury that when all is a bit more calm, they will be having a talk about just what exactly he can do and the extent of his powers, but until such time he’s still to remain in the building and out of any trouble, specifically seídr wise. And when Fury stalks off, he’s suddenly surrounded by the Avengers, who are dead set on letting him know how absolutely, as Tony puts it, “rad” his show of power was.
“Can you teach me how to do that? I know I’m a bit overpowered already but that just looked so… so damn cool!”
Loki smiles back at Tony, unused to people complimenting him on his magical accomplishments. Natasha puts a hand on his shoulder, saying with a smirk,
“If Tony’s handing out compliments and willing to learn from another person, then you know it's cool. I wouldn’t mind learning a bit of that myself.” Loki turns to look her in the eyes, a bit surprised.
“You already have it.”
Natasha pauses.
“Have what?”
“Seídr. Or better yet, the capability to use it if you so wish. Tis rather unusual for a Midgardian, might I say.” Natasha's eyebrows crease.
“How do you know?”
Loki is tempted to say, how do you not? But instead he just holds out his hand for Natasha to take, like he’s offering a friendly greeting. She looks sceptical at best, but after a few seconds she takes his hand. Loki closes his eyes, and focuses on letting Natasha see as he does for a second. When his own eyes open, he can see hers go wide with wonder and amazement, a small amused “oh…” playing out on her lips.
He can guess from her reaction that her view has been opened to the energies around her, and he lets go of her hand as once someone's eye is opened to seídr it rarely closes again. She reaches out to touch a strand of Loki’s own green energy that floats around him, and shudders on contact, a floaty black mist reaching out from her palm to swirl and play around the others. She snatches her hand back and brings the other around with it, staring down at the curling vapour that moves almost with a purpose. Like it's alive.
“Excuse me, sorry, but what exactly is happening right now?”
Loki turns to Tony, extending the same hand, and Tony takes it. He can see the process repeat itself on Tony’s face as his head swivels around the room, catching glimpses of the auras he couldn’t see before. Tony’s own seídr glimmers a bright, hot rod red, less misty and more unsure. It makes swift, jerky movements around him but strong nonetheless, it seems to float in a kind of crown over his head when not in use. Unlike Natasha’s, which moves and bends with her, his stays in its place. Tony has never tapped into his seídr, but if he did it would be a sight to behold. Natasha must have at least felt it at some point, because hers responds to her motions and desires. He can tell by the way it surprised her to see it that she’s never used it the way he might, but the fact that it responds to her so fluidly means that it’s been that way for a while. Tony, fascinated by his own seídr smartly remarks,
“Holy shit!”
Loki just nods and chuckles, turning to Bruce and Steve.
“Would you two like to see what they're seeing?”
And after one eager yes from Bruce and a slightly more cautious yes from Steve, both are seeing the same stars as the other two. To Loki’s surprise, as he hadn’t really looked before now, both Bruce and Steve are both exhibiting about the same levels of control over their seídr as Natasha is. On further inspection Bruce excels in growing and shrinking his on command, and his dark green seídr seems to surround his whole body like a muscle suit, growing larger in the shape of a human and smaller to fit back around his body snuggly.
Steve’s seídr is about at the level Natasha’s is. It reacts to his movements and flares up with his emotions, but where Natasha can already reach out with hers if she tries, manipulating it with the poise of a ballet dancer and the gracefulness of a trained assassin, Steve cannot. What he CAN do, is form the beginnings of something about the length of a quarter of his forearm and about the same width as well when he shoves his arm forward a bit. In hindsight, given that it’s Captain America's tell tale icon, it’s probably a shield. Steve found out he could do this when Bruce, with his seídr expanded to its current full capacity, pat him on the back and sent him stumbling across the room.
In his surprise he stumbled a little too hard, thrusting his arm forward as he fell to catch himself. Lo and behold, the blue translucent seídr around him had congregated on his arm, forming the small makeshift shield. Again, Loki noticed the clear signs that it wasn’t practised, and it had no one to guide its growth, but the raw power of the person it belonged to just kept growing, and so it in return had done the same. The next hour is spent experimenting, testing out their new found powers and generally bombarding Loki with questions. He sits in a swivel chair, spinning slowly and smiling ear to ear, feeling like maybe, just maybe, it’s not so bad that this is the place he’s stuck with.
Out of the corner of his eyes he sees Tony walk over from the excited hero huddle.
“So.”
He says, smile becoming more muted.
“About Norway.”