Eager Exchange of Earnest Questions
“Would you perhaps agree to answering a few of my questions?”
The table suddenly felt incredibly small, thin. As if there was nothing separating you from the stranger, who in reality sat quite a good couple of meters away from you. You nodded, but the distress in your features apparently seemed so palpable, the blonde opted to address the question lingering in your head, lingering in the very atmosphere of the control room before diving into just another interrogation.
“I have not known Fury for long, but know that he most likely understood your implication of being able to control minds. It was merely supposed to be a test—see whether he is capable of trusting you in telling the truth.”
He thought for a moment.
“I believe he merely covered up to not upset you any further—as you had already given your answer.”
Ah. Crap.
His eyes widened; apparently he saw the fear dripping from every bit of your expression, perhaps even heard your frantically hammering heart.
“But worry not!” he said, giving what was supposed to be a light laugh, but tore out of his throat like a roar, “You have stopped my brother, putting an end to his wicked schemes and I am hereby deeply indebted to you. From now on you will be placed under my protection.”
You swallowed the lump which had formed in your throat, the feeling of suffocating never quite leaving you, even after the silence had been broken, the blanket had been lifted.
How could he trust you like this?
No. You were too afraid to ask that.
“Brother?” you asked instead and spoke the words cautiously into the tense atmosphere, tilting your head lightly to the side.
“Oh,” he crossed his arms on the table, “My brother. The person who threatened the peace of your realm. The one currently residing in your dungeons.”
You got the gist.
“Oh, uh—wow.”
The blanket fell back down, grew heavier, thicker.
As if preparing itself for the coming winter.
“I, uh—“ you started to wind yourself through the quiet—the blanket once more, eyes darting from his kind looking eyes to pretty much everywhere else in the room, “Are you actually a god?”
He stayed still for another couple of seconds, before loud, booming laughter erupted from him—due to you abruptly and ungainly changing the subject. With a smile he decided to accept it, postponing his own questions to answer yours.
“Yes, that is indeed the case. Although your definition of a god is not quite what we truly are,” he said, starting to gesture with animated movements of his arms and hands, “Older cultures of your planet worship us as some, even though we are merely stronger and have longer lives. We are not invincible. We die, just like your kind does.”
Your mind thought it over, mouth slightly agape as you reflected on what you had learned, before accepting it with a slow nod to show your understanding.
“Now I would like to ask you a question of my own,” he began, leaning forward ever so slightly in his seat, serious expression grazing his face, “Do you mind explaining to me what exactly you did to my brother that made him so...docile?”
Your eyes darted to the far corner of the room, finding sudden interest in the dirt coated around some objects on the floor, in the couple of glass shards splayed one the ground hinting at an earlier fight.
“I, uh, used my abilities to enter his mind and—“ you tried to find the right words, starting to wave your hands in wild gestures as if trying to pull the thoughts you were looking for out of your head. But the situation seemed so ridiculous, so terribly ridiculous that your subconsciousness almost refused to even try.
After a short pause to collect yourself you continued, “I actually just meant to keep him in place until you guys arrive to solve the problem. I just thought that eliminating the leader might....shatter the morale or something. Convince these—alien-things—to leave.”
“Chitauri.” Thor added.
“Chitauri.” you repeated, trying your best to imitate his accent and pronunciation.
With a hesitant look to your left and right—as if making sure that no one else was listening—your voice dropped to a whisper. As if afraid of admitting what you had seen, the simple thing, the color blue you had noticed for nothing but a split second. Thinking back, basing all of your actions on it seemed too radical now. Too reckless.
“There was something,” you muttered, eyes narrowing slightly as another quick jolt of pain surged through you, forcing you to draw in a sharp breath, “—a blue swirl in his eyes.”
You noted that Thor leaned forward a bit more, shifting his weight to rest more on the table while you put your head in your hands, desperately rubbing your palms around your face to make the situation seem more grounded, more realistic.
“I felt it didn’t belong and—absorbed it.” you continued, “I think—I think it was manipulating his mind somehow.”
When you peeked through the gaps in between your fingers your eyes fell on Thor, whose expression was filled with terror and concern and you almost felt bad for deciding to tell him. But if someone deserved to know the truth about what happened, it was going to be him—being the alien-god’s brother and all.
What was his name again?
Loki?
A dry laugh—out of pure nervousness and a desire to fill the newly formed silence that is—escaped your throat, just as another flash of fire through your veins made you double over in your seat, a tear escaping your eye as you continued to try and ignore the pain.
“I don’t think my body knows what to do with it.”
It was but a quiet, hushed whisper and prompted Thor to stay quiet for a while. The while turned into what felt like minutes and you feared to have broken him, before he shook his head as if to clear his mind. Your hand tightly gripped onto the edge of the glass table in front of you, flames within you sparking up to a roaring fire and you squeezed your eyes shut and controlled your breathing as much as you possibly could—until the wave rolling over you faded back into nothingness.
“I—I don’t think doctors can help me...” you breathed, preparing yourself to sit up straight once more as you pushed yourself up using the table as a crutch. Thor was already looking at you, blond eyebrows furrowed and mouth in a straight line. You lightly tilted your head in confusion.
“This might sound—absurd,” he started, and wow did sentences like this never end particularly well, “But I could perhaps offer you to come with us to Asgard. Simply to have your condition inspected more properly that is.”
He moved his folded arms to instead tightly clasp his hands together.
“Like you implied, I doubt your doctors on Midgard would know how to tend to it.”
Whatever it was you expected, it wasn’t this.
“Wait what?” you began, mouth agape and eyes wide, “To another entire planet?”
The blond looked slightly distressed, mistaking your surprise as some form of rejection. He shifted in his seat to rethink his decision.
“It was merely an idea we could explore, you do not need to come.”
You shook your head so fiercely that it started spinning, almost completely managing to ignore the jolt flashing inside you and burning up your insides.
“No wait, that sounds fascinating!” you beamed up at him, light smile gracing your expression, “I was just very, very surprised, that’s all!”
The smile found its way back on his face and you gave a relieved sigh.
“Wonderful! I can only hope that we will find a method to ease your pain. After all you did truly help us. Without your interjection we might have taken a lot longer in ending this invasion, resulting in more casualties.”
You averted your eyes with a bright smile, not quite knowing how to handle praise and especially not the praise of some alien god. Clearing your throat, you tried to divert the attention to different matters.
“What even happened while I was, uh, out?” you asked and he let out a small chuckle, before briefing you with the past couple of hours; the battle, the reason behind it, namely an artifact called the Tesseract. Apparently you knocking out his brother had resulted in the heroic group being able to take the scepter without any further trouble, shutting down the opened portal looming in the sky with ease. He also mentioned that nuke bombs had been sent—and while one of them luckily got hindered in its arrival, the other one flew right into the alien’s spaceship and blew it to pieces. Only thanks to Metal Man.
—Iron Man.
Wow.
You would have been dead now, if it weren’t for his selfless act.
America?
You briefly wondered—mouth agape as if sitting at the dentist—just how much of this could be considered classified information, because you couldn’t even imagine the faces people back home would pull should you tell them about the nuke-bomb-thing.
Unthinkable.
A smile was still firmly etched into your face as you glanced up at Thor, until—with another jolt—your sight blurred and you felt that by now almost familiar feeling of being engulfed in flames, the fire boiling your insides returning. In the midst of your pain you caught glimpses of an unfamiliar place all around you, faces you both knew and didn’t know, but felt as if you knew them regardless; their names appearing inside your mind as if you had known them for centuries.
What?
A vision struck you.
Feelings of grief and dread, hatred and panic as you cowered over a figure crumbled on a flight of stairs; glimpses of an elderly man, eyepatch over his right eye as gold as the glistening stars in the night sky around you—Despite the inky abyss below entombing you as you fell backwards into the dark and infinite cosmos while faces looked after you in horror. You felt hopeless, utterly hopeless and at the same time so very full of apathy as you felt your own body floating through darkness before being swallowed whole by it.
A glance of a tall man flashed in front of your inner eye and your breath hitched in your very throat as he marched towards you. Your body trembled against whatever it was that restrained you in terror, agony surging like lightning through every fiber of your limp body as adrenaline coursed through your veins, everything screaming inside your mind in despair as you watched the stranger step closer—
You snapped out of it as you felt two hands placed firmly on your shoulders, shaking you gently but urgently while the vision faded, reverberation lingering for quite a while as his words didn’t quite manage to ring through the maze that was your head. One of your hands was clutching your stomach, you realized, the other yanking your hair.
Once your sight returned to normal, unpleasant blur vanishing, your eyes locked with the very concerned blue ones of Thor—who had rushed over to make sure you were alright.
With shaking hands you gripped onto his arms, trying to both reassure him that you were indeed okay, as well as steady yourself against the twist and pull of more or less unfamiliar memories.
Wait.
Memories?
Recognition wound its way through your trembling body as you realized what was going on. Apparently inexperience sucked more than you thought it would. You knew there was a chance something like this might happen—even though you had hoped that it simply wouldn’t. But when did you ever get what you wanted, really?
Did you take even more than what you had already seen?
And if you had them—did he not?
There was only one way to find out.
Your eyes filled with intense determination, so much so that the sudden change didn’t go unnoticed by the God of Thunder crouching in front of you.
“Do you think I could talk to your brother?”
Thor’s blond eyebrows shot up so quickly, you thought they might as well start floating away from his forehead, soaring into the sky like birds.
“What for?”
“Because of the, uh, mind control thing,” you said, letting go of your unintentionally firm grip on his arms and instead folding your hands in your lap, “I don’t do this very often—So I’d like to ask him some things.”
Your voice had started to grow more quiet towards the end, as you were rather unsure whether you actually wanted to talk to him. He did try to kill you after all—even though he didn’t get that far.
But these memories...
“Please?” you added, expression falling into a grimace.
Thor rose from his perched position to offer you a hand.
“No one told me you weren’t allowed to and in addition to that, I was also tasked with keeping both of you in check,” he began, “Which is to say, of course! I will accompany you.”
You cringed inwardly as Thor gently pulled you to your feet, starting to march—presumably—towards were his brother was being held.
“I wanted to go alone.”
Thor stopped, abruptly, turning to look at you with furrowed brows.
“Why?”
You swallowed, scratching the back of your neck as a way to divert the attention from your face to anywhere else.
“It’s just—“
You would never lie.
There was merely this thing inside you, these memories inside you and your curiosity to whether you took anything else from him. Apart from his—judging by his behavior after your earlier mind-interaction—unnecessary excessive pride perhaps.
“First I wanna say—I really appreciate everything you’re doing for me. Thank you for being so kind.” You bit your lip in thought before continuing.
“It all feels kinda awkward to me, talking about all of this. It’s like a really private thing to be that deep in someone’s mind. To know what they don’t even want to know themselves and—and I feel like this should stay as private as possible.”
Weird description, not a lie and not too detailed either. Well done.
Despite everything he nodded, as if understanding even your messy excuse for an explanation.
“Alright,” he spoke, carefully, as if thinking deeply before continuing, “But I must inform you that my brother...is not easy to be trusted. Too many have made that mistake and regretted it later on. I do not wish for you to be befallen by the same fate.”
You gave a slight nod, sorrowful smile appearing on your face as you read between the lines—behind who exactly he was referring to by too many, heart spilling out of every word he so thoughtfully spoke.
“I’ll remember, don’t worry. I’ll take care.”
Your smile turned into an almost mischievous smirk as you added on, “And if he misbehaves, I’ll just brainwash him.”
At first Thor seemed almost shocked, before recognizing it for what it was. A joke meant to ease his worries. He appreciated your concern and attempt at lifting his spirits, his frown turning into a smile.
With that said and done he led you to his brother’s seeming location, taking all sorts of twists and turns through hallways that all looked the same; white, silver and bland. If it wouldn’t be for the stray part of debris that is, the torn apart wall or the glass shards on the floor. You walked up a flight of stairs, then one down, left, right, then left again and another flight of stairs deeper into the very core of the facility.
Despite all of that mindless destruction it still looked too similar for you to safely find your way back out all alone and you couldn’t have been happier to know that Thor was with you.
After a while he gestured towards an entrance to your right, giving you a firm nod before assuring you that he will periodically check the cameras for any sign of trouble. With an almost uneasy but appreciative wave you followed the path through the final hallway, each small step making you feel slightly more nauseous than the last one.
A low voice echoed along the bare white walls before you could even see him.
“Hello Little One.”