Talks of Threats
“Hello Little One.”
His smooth voice send an involuntary shiver down your spine as you crept closer, trying to keep your fear from rising in your throat as well as suppressing the curiosity to what he might be thinking. The glass cell in the middle of the room seemed to be the only thing that had been replaced after whatever wrecked havoc in these very walls—debris strewn around every single spec, but the jail in the middle looked good as new.
“Hi Alien-God.”
This sounded a lot more confident than you felt.
You caught him rolling his eyes, before standing up from where he was perched on a bench in the far corner of the glass cell, striding over to you with long, purposeful steps. He kept an obvious distance, you noted, stopping in the middle of his confinement. There was some sort of uncertainty dwelling inside of him, radiating far more forcefully than his demeanor let on; uncertainty only you could pick up.
“To what do I owe the honour of your presence?”
You flinched, feeling conflicted by the light sarcasm dripping from his voice, as well as by merely being in his general vicinity.
There was this weird part screaming at you to turn back around, fed by the knowledge that he tried to inflict genocide on your kind, almost eradicated an entire city and attempted to murder you. But there was also this other tiny, almost infinitesimal part that wished to stay, intrigued by his contradictory behavior, knowing deep down that you had seen more deeply inside of him than you probably should have.
You wondered if he knew.
“Uh, you, actually.” you said, uttering a more than just awkward laugh which sounded so terribly unconvincing you abruptly stopped to bite down on your tongue. He arched a dark eyebrow.
It looked almost comical, the way he was standing behind the glass; upright, black and green perhaps-leather-clad without any blemishes or scratches, hands neatly folded in front of him. Even his black hair was all sleek and styled again for some unknown reasons. Did they give him a hairbrush or what?
In contrast to him your hair was still disheveled, dirt and blood, sweat and grime still coating your face, your arms; cuts in your clothing from all the shards that had flung themselves into your body and into your flesh.
It felt embarrassing in a way.
You noted that he still carried the handcuffs around his wrists, connected with a chain that restricted their movements to barely a shoulder’s length apart—only the muzzle being gone from his mouth. Perhaps they should have kept that. All the while you were analyzing his posture and demeanor, his green eyes still pierced you with an expression that urged you to continue.
“Uhm, do you feel—“ you paused for a moment, stuttering as his confident appearance made you question your very own confidence, “—different maybe?”
There was a low chuckle echoing throughout the glass room, biting your ears with its malicious sound.
“Apart from being locked in a highly secure cell that is?”
The way he emphasized highly secure, laced with sarcasm and disdain made your skin crawl, tempting you to call for Thor—but you resisted the urge to do so and stood your ground.
“Yes,” you continued, pausing for a second as you fidgeted with your clothes, “Do you—do you feel like something is missing?”
“What are you referring to?”
His eyes had slightly narrowed and you refused to flinch under his penetrating gaze, deciding to focus on the confusion he felt rather than the mixture of resentment and indifference he attempted to portray.
That helped. A lot actually.
If he pretended to be confident, perhaps you could do the same.
“Memories, mostly. Do you feel anything missing? Any weird blackouts you can’t explain?”
For some reason he looked like he wasn’t going to answer this question—perhaps because he didn’t know himself—eyes directed at an object slightly to the side, general expression hard as steel.
“Listen,” you said, hand moving from your clothing to hold onto your arm, “I don’t want to do this, but I can get it out of you if I have to. I’d just prefer it if you...talked to me.”
A snort ripped itself out of his mouth while he raised his chin to glare you down. Not very princely.
“What do you—a mere mortal—believe you could possibly do to force me to comply?”
So he didn’t remember.
Apparently you took even more than you thought.
“Funny that you say that.” you scoffed, irritated at his lack of cooperation, slightly cheeky tone in your voice, because—honestly—what was the most he could do? Punch the glass?
“I don’t remember you standing much of a chance against me a couple of hours ago.”
His green eyes glared at you, piercing you with their fake superiority as slow, deliberate steps brought him closer to the glass panel separating you.
“I do not remember such a situation.”
You laughed, once again terribly forced and mostly out of desperation and fear—but you were not going to back down and instead leaned closer to the glass screen as well.
“Then this is just an example of what I can do.”
He leaned back a bit, taking in a deep breath through gritted teeth and all the while keeping his eyes focused on you.
“So tell me,” you said, feeling as if having gained the upper hand in your conversation, “What is the last thing you remember about the fight—right before the men in black arrived to clasp that muzzle over your mouth?”
His eyes narrowed even further, disgust edging to revulsion in his scowl as you made him recall that, no doubt humiliating event, inevitably hurting his apparently fragile pride.
“Do not be fooled into thinking that you have any kind of control over me, mortal.”
You gave a light shrug and closed your eyes, mentally calling upon what was left of your strength. So far you had never really needed to utilize your abilities much, which left them underdeveloped and frail, so much so that you surely couldn’t use them more than a few times a day.
Which is not to say that you had never used them before; you had certainly tested your limits—which you weren’t exactly proud of. After all it involved involuntary test subjects.
You just hadn’t used it much for personal gain. Morals prevailing and such.
In a gentle movement your hands wandered to your temples, merely to help direct your focus, as you unleashed your powers and entered his mind.
Just as you had expected, you were overwhelmed by agonizing amounts of pain as soon as you entered his consciousness. That dark, ebony place of his seemed like a black hole—devoid of any light or hope, happiness or joy. You knew for a fact, that yours was much brighter. White even.
It surprised you to even find yourself in such vacant space. Usually the memories were more easy to access, floating around for you to pick up like DVDs from a library. This unusual empty void most likely meant that he had a lot of things to hide, even from himself—something he didn’t want to know, wanted to forget.
But it could also mean that he—
—Some sort of disruption cut through your thoughts, almost throwing you out of his consciousness, something akin to a hard shove and you fought to stay, to focus.
Luckily, for this little experiment you wouldn’t need to delve deeper into his mind to reach his subconsciousness. The current place would gratefully be enough; the place of thoughts and very recent memories—recent enough to still be actively bustling around in the awareness—as well as a little...mind control. Such as telling someone to do something and making them believe it was their own decision which led them to it.
This was the stuff villains were made of and it scared you, which is why you refrained from doing it.
Strangely, you could still feel a disturbance, the alien-god violently struggling against your influence, despite being very clearly immensely weakened due to whatever you had pulled from his mind. In addition to that the feeling of burning to a crisp made it even more difficult to navigate through his messy mind—as if it wasn’t difficult enough without his intervention complicating the entire process.
You tried to make it quick, for you felt yourself growing weaker in tandem with him—knees starting to buckle under the stress and pressure.
Mind torn between giving in and continuing its search you luckily came across what you were looking for. He apparently remembered having some kind of disagreement with Iron Man on the Stark Tower, threatening him with his staff, scepter, before throwing him out of the window.
That at least explained, why the glass had been half broken even before you had arrived to smash it into even tinier pieces.
Your body gave a jolt and you forced your focus to return, albeit with obvious effort.
He vaguely remembered watching Stark as he caught himself, before his eyes fell on a silhouette dashing towards the air like a bullet aimed for his head. Too distracted by the previous encounter he raised his arm holding the scepter a little too late in an attempt to murder you, incapacitate you, before your body collided with his and dragged him to the ground.
Sight starting to blur he recalled clutching onto a knife in fury, panic.
Then everything turned an obvious shade of black and you noted the next thing to be him waking up on the tile floor of the Tower without any recollection of what happened between the two of you colliding and waking on the ground; you next to him heaving a breath.
As soon as you had seen what you needed, confirming your theory, you released him from your clutches. You gasped for oxygen as your hand grasped the fabric over your chest to try and calm your labored and ragged breathing, waiting for the raging fire within you to subside. This was definitely not normal—terrible exhaustion along with a headache at times, sure, but this kind of flaming agony had never been something to come with using your abilities.
He caught your eyes with difficulty, looking as beaten up and weary as you felt and you just knew that he had to see and feel everything you saw and felt too.
His feet almost stumbled as he took a step away from the glass, shaking, before composing himself and stepping closer once more, trying to look menacing while approaching but looking rather miserable at best. With glowering eyes he almost pressed his face flush against the glass.
“What have you done to me?”
“Just now or back then?” you tried for a weak smirk, but he forcefully punched the glass so vigorously that you feared it to crack, shutting you up in an instant while you gazed from his pale fist to his glowing eyes, watched a bead of sweat roll down his face in obvious pain and distress.
Oh. Don’t anger an alien. God. Thing.
Got it.
His mouth opened with an obvious strain, as if he had to force his voice to work, the words to leave his tongue,
“What are you planning to achieve by—“
Just in that moment your body decided to fail you, knees colliding with the cold floor in a harsh thud while your hands flew up to cover your mouth to force yourself and keep the bile down. Your gaze directed itself at the ground.
Think of something else, you chimed in your head, but the flames mingled with the smell of burning flesh, tearing skin and muscles, the sound of breaking bones, and not even the thundering footsteps echoing from down the hallway could quite rip you from these thoughts. Strong hands held onto you and lifted you from your crumbled up position, hoisting you into his arms.
“Brother,” Thor spoke, voice low and seemingly controlled, “What happened?”
Your sight was blurred with tears and agony so you simply closed your eyes, only listening to the words being said. The noises distracted you from the turmoil raging inside of you, senses gradually shutting down with every second passing.
“Honestly—I do not know.” you heard Loki say, hearing the pretended indifference even though he was undeniably in an enormous amount of pain as well; judging by how his voice broke in the middle of his sentence while you heard a light chatter of teeth, a waver of his words.
With your head flush against Thor’s chest you felt and heard him take in a sharp breath, trying to stay calm next to his brother’s need to play apathetic.
“You do know that this—‘mere mortal’—saved you, right?”
He had heard your conversation?
“I cannot quite say much about the origin of it yet, but apparently there was something inside of you. This child absorbed it to free you from its wicked grasp, do not dare being disrespectful.”
You wanted to protest and say that you were technically an adult—but at this moment, scooped up in the arms of a god and being half unconscious—you indeed felt like a child.
“I did not want to listen in on your conversation, I really didn’t,” Thor spoke, remorse heavily weighing down his words, “But I cannot trust you. You know that.”
An immense flood of sadness and sorrow fell over you, so heavily it almost drowned the pain you felt in its twisting and turning waves.
It wasn’t yours.
It was his brother’s, drifting all the way through the walls of his cell to you.
Your abilities were quite special, yes. But not even they were that powerful; Words, thoughts you could read across the distance. But without further concentration you shouldn’t be able to access someone’s consciousness and feelings, and you weren’t even focusing on—Oh.
The blue thing.
That’s what it was.
Your important revelation was interrupted as you writhed in the god’s arms, feeling his grip tighten, blood pumping in your ears so much you almost didn’t hear Loki’s surprisingly soft reply.
“A wise decision.”
There was a smile being carried over with his sentence, but it just didn’t match what you felt radiating from him.
Unnecessarily and almost impossibly contradictory.
An ice-cold fire. A panchromatic film in color.
That’s what it was.
Thor merely continued on, not having felt what you did and simply taking his statement for what it was supposed to be; useless commentary.
“Why did you not simply answer? I know that whatever happened in New York was not you, Loki. I have known you for centuries after all.”
You felt him heave a breath before continuing, voice a bit quieter than before.
“Who controlled you, brother?”
There was a pause and you felt how your body and mind slowly started to succumb to the darkness—it was easier to let go than hold onto a world of pain.
A quiet huff of air escaped Thor in a sigh.
“I will have you know that we will depart to Asgard soon, to have this condition checked. Human technology cannot compete with ours and this incident seems to be of otherworldly origins.”
You barely felt as your body grew limb.
...
“Brother—“
This wasn’t just a light sleep out of exhaustion.
“What?”
It was definitely different.
“Oh no.”